Space Marines (1995)
Low-budget film that does quite a creditable job on the whole space marines theme
The Gnome-Mobile (1967)
One of the less remembered Disney live-action films starring the children from Mary Poppins who join their grandfather in a road journey caper to help a gnome
Lake of Dracula (1971)
The second in a trilogy of Japanese vampire films that came influenced by the Hammer Dracula films. This generates a reasonable degree of spooky eerieness.
Red Team (2000)
Serial killer thriller about an FBI team who realise they are hunting a killer who targets other serial killers
The Punisher (2004)
Amid the huge surge of Marvel Comics adaptations in the early 2000s, there came this version of The Punisher. Cast with Thomas Jane, the film is tepid and singularly lacking in the grim, dark avenging violence of the comic-book
Dawn of the Dead (2004)
Zack Snyder debuts with a remake of the cult George Romero film. While this has a bigger budget, it is missing is the satire and gore-drenched effects that made the original memorable. This inspired the mid-2000s zombie film revival
Pulse (1988)
Modest and underrated film where the electrics all around start conspiring against people with murderous intent
Legacy of Dracula: The Bloodthirsty Doll (1970)
The first of a trilogy of Japanese vampire films, although this does not feature Dracula despite the title and should be considered more of ghost story.
Color of Night (1994)
A blatant copy of Basic instinct with psychologist Bruce Willis getting involved with Jane March as his patients start being murdered. Much bare flesh but the film is killed by ludicrous plot twists
Scrooged (1988)
A modernised version of A Christmas Carol that seems to have been construed in the shadow of Ghostbusters right down to casting Bill Murray as Scrooge
The Creeping Terror (1964)
This is one of the all-time classic bad movies about a rampaging alien monster come to devour people. Filled with hilarious gaffes and ineptitudes, including the famous carpet monster
The Devil’s Manor (1896)
An early Georges Melies whimsy only a few minutes long in which The Devil appears and causes mischief
House of 1000 Corpses (2003)
Rob Zombie’s debut film was propelled into an infamy it didn’t deserve it was banned by its distributor. Zombie only slavishly rehashes The Texas Chain Saw Massacre with a constant posturing for shock effect that becomes tiresome
Hercules in the Center of the Earth (1961)
Known under a host of different titles, this is one of the better Italian Hercules films of the 1960s. The great Mario Bava adds vivid atmosphere. With Christopher Lee as the villain
Dollman Vs. the Demonic Toys (1993)
Full Moon production that offers the novelty of bringing together their Dollman and Demonic Toys franchises, although nearly a third of the film is comprised of recycled footage from said films
Immoral Tales (1974)
One of the key films from cult director Walerian Borowczyk, a quartet of exquisitely photographed and art directed erotic tales, including one about Countess Bathory
Repeat Performance (1947)
Unusual fantasy film where a woman is allowed to replay the last year again and tries to prevent it ending in her shooting her husband
Moonwalker (1988)
A collection of Michael Jackson short pieces, leading up to the 25 minute Smooth Criminal segment where he transforms into a godlike being. Fascinating in its bizarreness, largely a Michael Jackson ego trip
May (2002)
Almost unclassifiable work from Lucky McKee that plays out as a gonzo love and rejection story featuring an alienated Angela Bettis before an end that tips over into horror
The Maddening (1995)
Rather trashy thriller in which Mia Sara is imprisoned by backwoods couple Burt Reynolds and Angie Dickinson
The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
In another of his big budget disaster spectacles, Roland Emmerich embraces environmental concerns about Global Warming. Here he (unscientifically) imagines the abrupt onset of a new Ice Age worldwide
Cybertracker 2 (1995)
In this sequel to Cyber Tracker, Don ‘The Dragon’ Wilson is a police officer fighting a criminal mastermind who is attempting to replace world leaders with android duplicates
The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland (1999)
A rather slight film spinoff red-furred Elmo, the popular character from Sesame Street. A film designed for very young children.
Rat (2000)
Rather charming Steve Barron film in which Pete Postlethwaite turns into a rat. The delights are the perfect nonchalance in which everyone accepts the situation
Van Helsing (2004)
Stephen Sommers conducts a big-budget rehash of a 1940s Universal monster bash. A film so overloaded with CGI bombast and general overkill it becomes utterly absurd.
Taking Lives (2004)
Serial killer thriller with Angelina Jolie as an FBI profiler tracking a killer in Montreal and becoming involved with suspect Ethan Hawke. The plot falls apart in some shabby twists
Forbidden City Cop (1996)
Hilarious Stephen Chow directed/starring film where he plays an agent of the emperor in a series of gonzo exploits that go crazily over-the-top, including breaking the fourth wall
If the Shoe Fits (1990)
A modernised retelling of the Cinderella story that is set in the Paris fashion world starring with Jennifer Grey as a lowly seamstress falling for self-important fashion designer Rob Lowe
The Saint (1997)
Big screen revival of the famous playboy spy falls flat due to the miscasting of Val Kilmer in the title role where Kilmer’s attempts to adopt disguises and accents throughout becomes risible. The thriller plot is nothing to get excited about.
Willy McBean and His Magic Machine (1965)
Likeable puppet animated film about a time-travelling boy and his monkey companion
The Milagro Beanfield War (1988)
Charming, delightful venture into Magical Realism directed by Robert Redford as the angels step in to aid the impoverished residents of a New Mexico town
Teenage Caveman (1958)
Roger Corman film that sets out to exploit the teenage themed fad of the late 1950s, offering up a caveman drama that comes with a surprise SF twist
Hostile Intent (1997)
An oddity that seems to start as a film about IT espionage and then becomes a survival horror with a paintball team on a corporate retreat being hunted through the woods
Topper (1937)
A deliriously frothy screwball comedy starring Cary Grant and Constance Bennett as two socialites killed in a crash who then haunt the car’s new owner. Several sequels followed.
Willard (2003)
James Wong and Glen Morgan, the duo behind Final Destination, remake the 1971 film about a man and his rats. However, this is set in a stylised 1940s world with a caricatured performance from Crispin Glover that causes the film to lack any credibility
Twist of Fate (1998)
A convoluted courtroom thriller where District Attorney Mädchen Amick is forced to team up with serial killer Chris Mulkey
Full Metal Yakuza (1997)
An early work from Takashi Miike, an ultra-violent comic-book variant on RoboCop about a Yazkuza enforcer who is incarnated in a cyborg body and goes seeking revenge
Masters of the Universe (1987)
Live-action film based on the Mattel toy line and popular animated tv series. Given a Cannon Films budget, it emerges as a cheesily absurd Flash Gordon/Conan the Barbarian knockoff
Agent Cody 2 Banks: Destination London (2004)
A sequel to the teen spy comedy. This moves the action to England but amplifies everything else into inanely loud and noisy slapstick action
The Manhattan Project (1986)
Teen thriller where Christopher Collett decides to build an atomic bomb for the school science prize
The Tin Drum (1979)
Volker Schlondorff’s adaptation of Gunther Grass’s darkly funny book about a young boy in Nazi Germany who refuses to grow up
Quest for Fire (1981)
Beautifully shot directorial debut from Jean-Jacques Annaud that sets out to dispel all the cinematic cliches about cavemen and dinosaurs and offers up an anthropologically realistic prehistoric film
Hackers (1995)
Film that wants to be an expose of the lives of hackers but seems an absurd agglomeration of cliches that stumbles over its own feet trying to establish its counter-culture cool
Unforgettable (1996)
Thriller where Ray Liotta undergoes an experimental process to receive an injection of memories from his dead wife and from these sets out to try and solve her murder
Interstella 5555 (2003)
Dance music duo Daft Punk collaborate with anime directors to create an animated space opera based on their album Discovery about an intergalactic rock band and their fight to save the galaxy
Testament (1983)
Part of a cluster of strong strong and powerful depiction of the outbreak of nuclear war that came out in the mid-1980s. This avoids melodrama by staying focused on a family’s attempts to cope
Fear (1996)
Psycho-thriller with William Petersen trying to protect daughter Reese Witherspoonan from being ensnared by a charming, psychopathic boyfriend played by an unknown Mark Wahlberg
Strangeland (1998)
80s outrage rocker Dee Snider writes and stars in this horror film where he plays a freakish serial killer who is demonised by parents
Secret Window (2004)
Stephen King adaptation with Johnny Depp as a writer in a cabin in the woods harassed by mysterious stranger John Turturro. Screenwriter David Koepp directs a marvellously chill Turturro with lots of twisty surprises
Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed (2004)
Sequel to the live-action Scooby-Doo, this is at least a better film than its predecessor, being more polished in its slapstick and effects but still has no more ambition beyond being a silly no-brain film
Teen Wolf Too (1987)
Feeble sequel to the unexpected Michael J. Fox comedy hit where Jason Bateman plays his cousin who discovers his inner wolf as he heads to university
Short Circuit 2 (1988)
Sequel to the cute robot film pushes the cutsie elements to a nauseatingly anthropomorphished extreme, having it spout smartass colloquialisms and erasing even basic credibility
The Fifth Element (1997)
A big-budget space opera from Luc Besson. This offers a dazzlingly designed future but the plot is an inane hodgepodge of bad SF elements with a tone that flails between action and camp
Monster (2003)
Patty Jenkins and Charlize Theron combine forces on their portrait of female serial killer Aileen Wuornos. The result won Theron, who undergoes an amazing transformation, an Academy Award for Best Actress
Like Father, Like Son (1987)
An entry in the spate of 1980s bodyswap comedies with Dudley Moore and Kirk Cameron as father and son who swap bodies. Enjoyably silly with good performances from both.
Ju-on: The Grudge (2003)
Unsettlingly spooky Japanese ghost story from Takashi Shimizu that spawned a number of sequels, reboots and English-language remakes. This was the third of the films and superior to all that came after
The Cat in the Hat (2003)
Adaptation of the Dr Seuss book made following the success of Ron Howard’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas. The book is dragged down into noisy slapstick chaos, capped by a badly unrestrained Mike Myers as The Cat
The Butterfly Effect (2004)
This was dismissed at the time because of its star Ashton Kutcher but is a surprisingly good film in which Kutcher finds the ability to travel back in time and alter his past
The Ape Man (1943)
Poverty row cheapie with Bela Lugosi as a mad scientist transformed into an ape-man after an experiment gone wrong who goes out hunting victims for their spinal fluids with his pet gorilla
De Sade (1969)
A Marquis de Sade biopic that was problem ridden behind the scenes. The result is an incoherent mess on screen that feels as though it is being handled by several different directors, each with a different idea about what is happening
The President’s Analyst (1967)
Amid the mostly silly output of James Bond copies in the 1960s, this is one that comes with a sharp satiric bite in which president’s analyst James Coburn finds himself caught in the midst of a series of conspiracies
When the Wind Blows (1986)
Powerful and biting animated film from a Raymond Briggs book focused on an elderly couple and their wholly inadequate attempts to cope with the outbreak of nuclear war
Suspect Device (1995)
What seems a routine low-budget action film is propelled into the decidedly watchable by a bizarre Philip K. Dick-ian twist that comes mid-film
Strait-Jacket (1964)
William Castle psycho-thriller made to exploit the successes of both PsychoWhat Ever Happened to Baby Jane? with an axe-wielding Joan Crawford letting all stops go
In the Cut (2003)
Jane Campion makes one of the best post-Basic Instinct erotic thrillers with Meg Ryan as a teacher in New York caught between erotic awakening and a lurking killer
The Magus (1968)
Complex and often baffling film in which Michael Caine is on a Greek island where he placed at the centre of a series of enigmatic reality charades by Anthony Quinn
The Haunted Mansion (2003)
Lightweight film based around the Disney theme park attraction that becomes a Eddie Murphy comedy where he and his family enter a big old mansion that proves to be haunted
Eternal Revenge (1999)
A bland Canadian police procedural with detective Alexandra Paul investigating a woman who is killing the men who bullied and harassed her
Allegro Non Troppo (1976)
An Italian-made homage to/parody of Fantasia offering an anthology of animated tales. This is witty and more adult in tone, yet perfectly charming and delightful in its own way
The Kiss (1988)
Hilariously nonsensical horror film with Joanna Pacula as a sinister aunt. The plot throws in laughable novelty effects, including a killer cat, absurdly overwrought symbolism and some voodoo rationale
Prince of Darkness (1987)
One of the less successful, nevertheless underrated John Carpenter films where he pays tribute to Nigel Kneale in a conceptually mind-boggling mix of deviltry and quantum physics
Ms 45 (1981)
In his second film, Abel Ferrara turns the rape-revenge film on its head with a mute Zoe Tamerlis taking revenge on men after being raped
Pippi Longstocking (1997)
A likeable animated adaptation of Astrid Lindgren’s popular children’s character from the Canadian company Nelvana
Paycheck (2003)
This Philip K. Dick adaptation has a great premise – Ben Affleck is an engineer with a blanked memory blanked only to find he has left himself clues from the future of things that are starting to come true. Alas, this is reduced to an action vehicle in the hands of John Woo
Twilight’s Last Gleaming (1977)
Robert Aldrich makes a thriller in which rogue general Burt Lancaster hijacks a nuclear missile silo and demands the truth about the Vietnam War be released. A big muscular production that attained some controversy at the time
Spaceballs (1987)
Mel Brooks parodies the Star Wars films. As with most Brooks films, the humour is broad and scattershot but occasionally amusing
The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988)
One of Wes Craven’s best films. Loosely based on true-life book by botanist Wade Davis who set out to find the drug that creates zombies, Craven delves into Haitian voodoo in a striking blend of dream and horror
Equilibrium (2002)
While Kurt Wimmer’s film with Christian Bale as an enforcer in a dystopian future attained some acclaim when it came out, it feels like it is comprised of a collage of cliches borrowed from every other dystopian film
The Gruesome Twosome (1967)
One of the splatter films from the cult figure of Herschell Gordon Lewis, who made some terrible films whose only watchability was extreme gore. This concerns a wigmaker who scalps them victims and sells their hair as wigs.
The Water Babies (1978)
Part live-action, part animated adaptation of a classic Victorian children’s story about an urchin who discovers a secret world underwater
The Heroic Trio II: Executioners (1993)
A disappointing sequel to the madcap Hong Kong superheroines film. This reunites the principal cast members but seems to miss all the fun of its predecessor
Firefox (1982)
Clint Eastwood directs/stars in a standout thriller about the theft of a hi-tech fighter plane from inside the Soviet Union. The USSR is shown with paranoid effect and there is an exhilarating climax with the plane in flight
Brewster McCloud (1971)
One of the most eccentric and strangest films in the oeuvre of Robert Altman in which Bud Cort set out to build a set of wings to fly, amid aid from angels and lots of bird symbolism
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1961)
Famous short film adaptation of an Ambrose Bierce short story that patented the twist ending in which someone discovers that have been dead all along
The Magician (1958)
Ingmar Bergman film about a travelling magic show. Bergman is fascinated with the power that illusionists hold and what happens behind the mask. A spellbinding film that is more haunted that most genre films
Big Fish (2003)
Tim Burton film where Albert Finney plays a habitual teller of tall tales whose son sets out to find the truth. Burton’s characteristic quirkiness seems buried by such a blandness you suspect he has been replaced by a clone of Ron Howard
The Last Unicorn (1982)
Beautiful and underrated animated fantasy film about an apprentice magician who protects the last unicorn. This has a maturity that most animated fantasy lacks
Perfect Strangers (2003)
Very strange New Zealand-made film that starts out seeming to be an abduction thriller and then turns into an even stranger ghost story that we cannot be sure is happening or all in the heroine’s imagination
Devil Doll (1964)
This British film is one of the better works on the theme of the malevolent ventriloquist’s dummy with a life of its own. Made with some modest effect.
Wrong Turn (2003)
Passable effort that copies that basics of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre with a group of stranded teens running afoul of an in-bred family
Fantastic Planet (1973)
The first film from French animator Rene Laloux, a trippily surreal vision and one of the few portraits of a genuinely alien world on film
Vice Versa (1988)
One of a spate of bodyswap comedies in the mid-1980s where father and son Judge Reinhold and Fred Savage end up swapping bodies
The Thief and the Cobbler (1994)
Legendary animated masterpiece from Richard Williams that was butchered in release. Williams’ animation is visually extraordinary
Gothika (2003)
Halle Berry is a psychiatrist who comes around to find she has been incarcerated in her own asylum only to then find it is haunted. An improbably contrived set up with some jumps
Mars (1996)
Action film with police officer Olivier Gruner investigating a murder on Mars. For a film that claims such a definitive title – that it is about the planet Mars – this lets all opportunities slip through its hands
Meatballs Part II (1984)
No-one is pretending that the Bill Murray summer camp comedy Meatballs was a masterpiece but it looks a work of art in comparison to this unfunny sequel, which also throw in a stiff E.T. lookalike
Josh Kirby … Time Warrior! Journey to the Magic Cavern (1996)
The fifth of the Josh Kirby juvenile adventures where the young time-travelling hero sets out on a quest to the Magic Cavern to find the Shroom People
Clockstoppers (2002)
A one idea film about a device that can stop time. In the directorial hands of Star Trek: The Next Generation actor Jonathan Frakes, this is given a juvenile focus where the device serves no more ends than a series of slapstick pratfalls
Pufnstuf (1970)
Mind-spinning film spinoff of the tv series H.R. Pufnstuf, this plays out like The Wizard of Oz on hallucinogens
The Swarm (1978)
Irwin Allen had great success in the 1970s with his disaster movies but this killer bee saga with a cast of big name stars uttering ridiculous dialogue and shabby effects proved a bomb that spelt the death knell for the genre