Dead Calm (1989)
Stunningly photographed yachtboard psycho-thriller with Nicole Kidman (in her first major film performance) and husband Sam Neill taken prisoner by a psycho Billy Zane. Produced by George Miller
The Day the World Ended (2001)
One of a series of films that borrow their titles from old 1950s films, this abandons any connection to the original end of the world film and concerns a boy who may be causing an alien monster to appear
Black Knight (2001)
An uncredited adaptation of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court with Martin Lawrence as a hip modern African-American man thrown back to Mediaeval times
Blindfold: Acts of Obsession (1993)
A Basic Instinct-inspired erotic thriller where Shannen Doherty gets into light bondage and attracts the attentions of a killer. A hypocritical film that is predicated on erotic tease then condemns it as disturbed behaviour
101 Dalmatians (1996)
This live-action remake of the classic Disney animated film benefits from Glenn Close chewing scenery in grand style as Cruella De Ville but the latter half essentially degenerates into no more than a series of Home Alone-styled slapstick violence scenes
Faraway, So Close! (1993)
Wim Wenders returns to angels in this sequel to Wings of Desire, along with most of the cast. Again Wenders delivers a work of haunting beauty about the angels invisibly looking in on humanity
The Item (1999)
An indie film about hitmen guarding an alien creature, this topples over with ridiculous effects and its affected attempts to be cool
Demon Pond (1979)
Forgotten Japanese film about a man searching for a friend finding a village where a bell must be struck to prevents creatures escaping from a pond. Beautiful, bizarre and quite unlike any fantasy film you have seen before
Dumbo (1941)
One of the classic films from Disney’s Golden Age, a beautiful piece of anthropomorphism in the tale of an ungainly elephant that flies with its oversized ears. Considered controversial in more recent years.
Wonder Man (1944)
Madcap screwball comedy with Danny Kaye required to pose as his dead twin brother who is then taken over by his ghost during a trial
Return to Pontianak (2001)
Singaporean film about tourists experienced haunted spirits in the jungle, this owes much to The Blair Witch Project
A Man Called Hero (1999)
Ambitious Wu Xia film set among Chinese immigrants to the US where director Andrew Lau takes to the fantastical action with some flair
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001)
The first of the Harry Potter films. The first is the weakest and lumbers due to being placed in the hands of the perpetually banal Chris Columbus who allows visual effects wow and simplistic emotional cues to dominate
The Transformers: The Movie (1986)
Animated theatrically released spinoff from the original Transformers tv series. The film mostly serves to highlight the considerable number of characters where to the uninitiated it is frequently difficult to tell one side from the next.
Fire in the Sky (1993)
Film based on a true-life claim about a supposed alien abduction. This probably won’t convince anybody who does not already believe but it is undeniably a well-made film, at its most striking when we go aboard the UFO
Dr Strangelove or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Stanley Kubrick decided the only way to make a film about nuclear war was to resort to black comedy. Aided by three sidesplitting performances from Peter Sellers, the result are mercilessly funny
The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)
Coen Brothers black comedy with Billy Bob Thornton as an anonymous barber in the 1940s on the receiving end of life’s cruelties as he becomes involved in a blackmail scheme and murder
Tomcat: Dangerous Desires (1993)
Poorly made psycho-sexual thriller where Richard Grieco becomes a predator after getting an injection of feline DNA
Shallow Hal (2001)
Farrelly Brothers comedy where Jack Black is hypnotised by Tony Robbins and 300 pound Gwyneth Paltrow as beautiful
Pocahontas (1995)
Disney bases an animated film on the historical character but warps the story considerably. It feels that this is a Disney animated film made more to adhere to Political Correctness than it is a good one
Made in Heaven (1987)
A quite magical film in which Timothy Hutton and Kelly McGillis fall in love in the afterlife and then try to find the each other after they are reborn into the world of the living
At the Earth’s Core (1976)
Second in the trilogy of Edgar Rice Burroughs adaptations starring Doug McClure. This opens with the fabulous invention of the drilling mole but the arrival at the earth’s core look cheap and tatty
Xchange (2000)
A modest and surprisingly well thought out SF film set in a future where swapping bodies is commonplace only for a man to find his original body has been stolen
Deadly Blessing (1981)
An early Wes Craven film about a series of killings among an Amish-like cult led by Ernest Borgnine. Craven’s eerie dream horrors sit alongside a confusing script
King Kong (1976)
The infamous miscalculated Dino de Laurentiis remake of King Kong where the stop-motion is replaced by Rick Baker in an ape suit, while the fairytale romance is replaced by Jessica Lange as a flower child who cracks jokes
Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1992)
Shinya Tsukamoto makes a better budgeted sequel to his breakthrough hit. The first film was a masterpiece of guerilla filmmaking but the same frenzied fetishism is missing here
The Trial (1962)
Orson Welles’s adaptation of the Frank Kafka novel about a man caught in a nightmare bureaucracy is one of the most visually stunning black-and-white films ever shot
Monsters, Inc. (2001)
This was the fourth animated film from Pixar and is a winning and delightful Maurice Sendakian tale about the monsters in the closet and their friendship with a young girl
Power Rangers: The Movie (1995)
Film spinoff from the Mighty Morphin Powers Rangers tv series that became a fad in the 90s. All the same rubber monsters and shrieking over-the-top acting is preserved intact
The Car (1977)
Someone seems to have had the idea of combining Steven Spielberg’s killer truck film Duel with The Exorcist to produce an absurdly entertaining film about a possessed car
The One (2001)
Promising idea of an alternate world-hopping film from James Wong, this spends too much time copying moves from The Matrix and lets most of its possibilities pass by
Contaminated Man (2000)
Thriller with Peter Weller as an aging man who is infected with a bio-agent that causes anyone he comes in contact with to bodily melt down within a matter of seconds
The Net (1995)
Film that tried to jump aboard the newly arrived paradigm of the internet but is mostly a cliched thriller about Sandra Bullock trying to recover her erased identity
Bones (2001)
Blaxploitation homage designed as a vehicle for Snoop Dogg. Essentially a version of A Nightmare on Elm Street with Snoop as a pimp come back to haunt those who killed him
Thir13en Ghosts (2001)
After the success of their remake of House on Haunted Hill, Dark Castle Entertainment remade another William Castle film here, expanding it with a full arsenal of visual and makeup effects
Donnie Darko (2001)
A thoroughly overrated cult classic. A baffling mixture of precognition, time travel, sinister talking bunnies and 1980s satire. What this doesn’t do is ever fall together into a coherent explanation about what is going on
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)
The sixth James Bond film where Sean Connery was replaced by Australian model George Lazenby who had never acted before. Lazenby is a disliked Bond but that tends does stand in the way of the fact that this is a fine character-driven Bond film with some of the best action sequences of the series
Nostradamus (1994)
Biopic of the so-called prophet Nostradamus, although this seems more interested in depicting him as a progressive thinker of his era than as a prophet. Directed by Roger Christian who next went on to make Battlefield Earth
Creator (1985)
Biochemistry professor Peter O’Toole tries to clone his late wife. A sublime film that has a way over-the-top eccentricity and sparkles with an exuberance of life
K-PAX (2001)
Kevin Spacey is a mysterious patient in a psychiatric institution who makes possibly true claims to be an alien. An uncredited ripoff of the far superior Man Facing Southeast
Waking Life (2001)
A unique and very original animated film from Richard Linklater where a character wanders through a dream, encountering various people and their different philosophical outlooks
From Hell (2001)
Disappointing attempt, based on a Alan Moore graphic novel, to depict the Jack the Ripper killings. The film feels over-produced and slides off the cliff by throwing its weight behind one of the more ludicrous and implausible Ripper theories
Mulholland Dr. (2001)
David Lynch work of Hollywood noir in which novice actress Naomi Watts (in the role that made her name) is drawn into a surreal idenity blurring mystery. As always with Lynch, this baffling, weird and mesmerising
Dr Hackenstein (1988)
An excruciatingly bad mad scientist film about a scientist tying to find a body to reattach his wife’s head. This treads only where Re-Animator went before. Much of this feels like it should have been played as a comedy
How to Make a Monster (2001)
Horror movie about computer game designers dealing with a motion-capture suit that has gained life and is trying to kill them. This has nothing in common with the 1950s film beyond the title
DNA (1997)
Another variant on Alien – a monster movie with Mark Dacascos as a doctor facing a genetically engineered insect monster in the jungles of Borneo
Defending Your Life (1991)
Albert Brooks directed/starring comedy in which he plays a man in the afterlife on trial, required to defend the dull and ordinary life he led, at the same time as he begins a romance with Meryl Streep
Communion (1976)
A psycho-thriller that has gained a modest cult reputation. This comes seeped in Catholic guilt and director Alfred Sole delivers twists and turns with a fine hand. Featuring a young Brooke Shields in her film debut.
Spriggan (1998)
Katsuhiro Otomo overseen anime about the discovery of Noah’s Ark, an alien artifact that gives a child vast psychic powers in a swathe of destruction not dissimilar to Akira
Defcon-4 (1985)
A breath of originality in a decade overrun with Mad Max copies, a clever and original little film in which the crew of a space station return to Earth after the nuclear holocaust
Dante’s Inferno (1935)
Dante Aligheri’s famous poem is dragged down to a tatty morality play with Spencer Tracy as a carnival barker running an Inferno exhibit. The film is worth watching for its stunning hallucinatory vision of Hell
Earth vs. the Spider (2001)
One of a spate of remakes of old AIP titles conducted in 2001, this spins the original giant spider amok film out into a superhero-gone-wrong take on Spider-Man
The American Astronaut (2001)
Genre-bending film that mixes B movie space opera cliches with rock’n’roll and a David Lynch-ian sense of surrealism. Interesting but the film left me scratching my head trying to get a handle on it
She Creature (2001)
Taking only the name of the 1950s B movie, this is otherwise a horror film about an imprisoned mermaid creature that wields a sinister threat. This works with a modest effectiveness
Joy Ride (2001)
Teens on a road trip play a practical joke using an old CB radio but prank a psychopathic truck driver. A film where director John Dahl delivers the goods with considerable style
Spider Baby or, the Maddest Story Ever Told (1968)
Obscure film that has developed a certain cult following concerning a murderous family. This plays out like a non-comedy version of the Addams Family and has an undeniable ghoulish atmosphere
Starship Invasions (1977)
Christopher Lee called this his worst film. Contrarily it is a ridiculously entertaining effort about a war between telepathic aliens in UFOs from beneath the Bermuda Triangle.
Vampire Hunter D (2000)
Yoshiaki Kawajiri, director of Ninja Scroll and Wicked City, steps in to make a sequel(?)/reboot(?) to the cult 1985 anime with visually enthralling regard
Jaws 2 (1978)
The best of the mostly worthless Jaws sequels. With a bigger budget, the shark attacks are more spectacular but there is nothing akin to the sustained suspense of the first film’s extended climax
Dr Cyclops (1940)
From the people behind King Kong, a film in which a mad scientist shrinks a group of people to a few inches tall. Some excellent effects for the era, making this one of the best films on the theme of miniaturisation
The Devil’s Rain (1975)
Big-budget Satanism film that came out during the mid-70s occult film fad, this promptly collapses into a bad movie through many unintentionally absurd touches and a nonsensical screenplay
Hearts in Atlantis (2001)
Another in the spate of serious Stephen King adaptations that seeks to avoid the horror label. Although psychic powers do feature, this is more of a wistful 1960s Coming of Age story
Dr Phibes Rises Again (1972)
Sequel to The Abominable Dr Phibes that brings back Vincent Price and seeks to replicate the same droll campy humour as before but with more mixed results this time
The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)
Woody Allen comedy in which mousy housewife Mia Farrow is the fan of a film whereupon lead character Jeff Daniels steps out into the real world to romance her
Dead Creatures (2001)
The second of British director Andrew Parkinson’s remarkable kitchen sink zombie films about people trying to deal with ordinary life while transforming
Cure (1997)
The film that brought Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa to attention. Set around a series of hypnotism murders, this is, as with Kurosawa’s films, cryptic and frequently inexplicable but has an undeniable uncanniness
Tell Me Something (1999)
Essentially a South Korean version of Se7en with police tracking a killer dumping severed body parts around the city, all of which lead to a mystery woman
The Glass House (2001)
A modest and reasonably effective psycho-thriller about a brother and sister who are adopted after the death of their parents only to find their step-parents have sinister intent
Diary of a Madman (1963)
Vincent Price is an upstanding 19th Century magistrate who is possessed by a spirit known as The Horla. An interesting treatment of possession themes made prior to The Exorcist
Conceiving Ada (1997)
Rather muddled film that seems to want to be a biopic of Ada Byron but ends up with her (as played by Tilda Swinton) recreated in cyberspace
Cold Harvest (1998)
This is a competent but unremarkable action movie variation on the Mad Max film set in the aftermath of a plague as Gary Daniels must guide a group with an immunity through the wastelands
Space Cruiser Yamato (1977)
Anime film spun off from a popular Japanese tv series. Despite crude animation, this has a colourful vigour and taps the same space opera vein as Star Wars, which came only three months earlier
Timescape (1992)
A directorial debut for screenwriter David Twohy who went on to Pitch Black, among other works. Jeff Daniels plays an ordinary man who realises that guests at his hotel are travelers from the future come to witness a disaster. A strong and intelligent maturation of time travel themes
The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)
One of the Coen Brothers’ strangest films – imagine a homage to a 1940s Howard Hawks film conducted on giant oversized sets like something out of Brazil with a blacker-than-black sense of humour and angels in the mix
Soul Survivors (2001)
This is essentially The Sixth Sense rehashed as a teen horror film and conducted without any finesse – here you can see the twist ending coming miles in advance
Mission Galactica: The Cylon Attack (1979)
Episodes of the original Battlestar Galactica tv series that were recut and screened theatrically for international audiences
Cherry 2000 (1987)
Overlooked work of considerable charms, this mashes the setting of Mad Max 2 and the plot of The African Queen with a sense of oddball humour. The show is stolen by Melanie Griffith as a tough wasteland tracker
Condorman (1981)
One of the flops from Disney’s live-action heyday with Michael Crawford as a comic-book artist who gets to bring his inventions to life after being thrust into a spy caper
City of Pirates (1983)
Surrealist film from Raul Ruiz that proves a tedious, drawn-out ramble through disconnected images and non-sequiturs
Psycho Beach Party (2000)
Based on an off-Broadway play, this is a drag parody of the beach party movie. It does dig into the squeaky clean image of the genre but never seems a particularly funny parody
The Mad Magician (1954)
Vincent Price had success as the mad waxworks curator in the 3D horror House of Wax. This cheap copycat casts Price as a mad stage magician and is also served up in 3D
Carousel (1956)
A Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that has gained a classic status. On the other hand, it doesn’t resonate so well today in its story about the redemption of a wife-beater.
The Day of the Dolphin (1973)
George C. Scott is a marine biologist who has taught dolphins to speak but faces the military want to take his research. A serious work that all hinges on whether one is willing to accept the idea of dolphins talking in squawky voices
Bride of Re-Animator (1990)
Sequel to the cult splatter hit of Re-Animator, directed by the original’s producer Brian Yuzna. Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott and David Gale are back. This has some amazing effects work but lacks the first film’s outrageous black humour
The Laughing Policeman (1973)
A gritty US-made adaptation of a Swedish thriller with Walter Matthau and Bruce Dern as detectives investigating a machine-gun murder spree aboard a bus
Thomas in Love (2000)
Belgian film shot in the first person about an extreme agoraphobic who seeks to cultivate relationships with other people online
Count Yorga, Vampire (1970)
One of the better efforts among a spate of attempts to modernise the vampire that came out the 1970s. Robert Quarry gives a witty, urbane performance in the title role. A sequel followed.
Wicked Stepmother (1989)
The worst film from the usually great Larry Cohen, an unfunny comedy in which a household is taken over by a witch. Bette Davis quit soon into shooting and is replaced partway through by Barbara Carrera
Jeepers Creepers (2001)
Creepy film about a brother and sister who are pursued on a road journey by a supernatural creature that drives a truck. This became a word of mouth hit and was followed by several sequels
Sleeper (1973)
An hilarious Woody Allen film in which he plays a contemporary man cryogenically unthawed in the 22nd century. This satirisises SF cliches and contains some side-slitting comedy sequences
I Walked with a Zombie (1943)
One of the key films from the legendary Val Lewton, this exploits a topical interest in voodoo. As with Lewton’s films, this sits in an ambiguous place that leaves the actuality of the supernatural uncertain
Maniac Cop II (1990)
Standout sequel to Maniac Cop, the best of the series, where Larry Cohen turns in a remarkable script and William Lustig delivers incredible action sequences
Demons (1985)
Italian horror directed by Lamberto Bava and produced by Dario Argento, an Evil Dead-inspired work about the possessed dead taking over a cinema, all conducted with a ferocious enthusiasm
The Temp (1993)
A Fatal Attraction copycat in which executive Timothy Hutton finds that seductive temp secretary Lara Flynn Boyle is killing off all rivals at his firm. This has the reputation as a Golden Turkey classic.
Invasion of the Bee Girls (1973)
From on an early script by Star Trek director Nicholas Meyer, this is an entertainingly tongue-in-cheek effort where women use a serum to turn into deadly bee creatures
Track 29 (1988)
This collaboration between Nicolas Roeg and Dennis Potter results in a mind-boggling blurring of dream, reality, symbolism and sexual obsession. A name cast are allowed their heads and go wild
The Devil-Doll (1936)
Tod Browning film in which Lionel Barrymore is an escaped convict who disguises himself as an old woman where he takes revenge using people shrunken to the size of dolls
Dragonslayer (1981)
An overlooked fantasy film. Although the spirit of Star Wars stands over it, it offers a dark and gritty vision of the Middle Ages and soars with a full flight of fantasy with some stunning dragon effects
Ghosts of Mars (2001)
John Carpenter returns to cinema screens amid the 2000-1 spate of Mars movies. Despite promise, this ends up being not much more than his early film Assault on Precinct 13 relocated on Mars
The Beast in the Cellar (1970)
Variant on the Mad Relative Locked in the Attic/Cellar film made as part of the British horror cycle. Unfortunately, this plods where it should have developed tension