Santo in “Killers From Other Worlds” (1971)
In something like his 30th film and amid the tatty production values of a Edward D. Wood Jr film, El Santo fight mobsters who have employed alien monsters that look like giant ambulatory bean bags
Santo vs Dr Death (1973)
Another of the films featuring Santo, the Mexican masked wrestler superhero. In one of the duller entries, Santo here travels to Spain and is pitted against a mad scientist operating an artworks theft operation
Santo vs the Martians (1967)
In this rather shabby effort, Santo (in the sixteenth of his 52 films) takes on invaders from Mars whose entire plan seems to hang on the need to have to defeat Santo in the wrestling ring
The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973)
The eight of Hammer’s Dracula, the second-to-last they would make and the last featuring Christopher Lee. This follows on from the previous film Dracula A.D. 1972 in featuring Dracula in the present day and at least does more with the idea than that film did
Satan’s School for Girls (2000)
Remake of the classic tv movie with Shannen Doherty investigating her sister’s death among deviltry in a girl’s school
Saw 3D (2010)
Supposedly the final chapter of the Saw saga – where the sole novelty on offer is gore and body parts coming out the screen in 3D. This is conducted with a tired lack of effort that makes for tedium-inducing watching
Saw IV (2007)
Fourth of the Saw films, the third under Darren Lynn Bousman who has placed an increasing emphasis on torturous extremes at the expense of credible plotting
Scalps (1983)
Fred Olen Ray is one of the most prolific genre directors. This film about a cursed Indian graveyard was made earlier in his career. Olen Ray hasn’t exactly become a good filmmaker since but his subsequent films are at least made with a overall competence and a sense of humour, which this lacks
Scanners III: The Takeover (1992)
Second of the sequels to David Cronenberg’s Scanners, this features Liliana Komorowska who becomes crazed after taking a scan suppressant drug
Scary Movie (2000)
The first in a popular series of comedies, this spoofs the recent hits of Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer in the most vulgar and witless way possible
Scary Movie 3 (2003)
David Zucker takes over the reins of the franchise from the Wayans Brothers. With a lack of big scary movies in 2002 to parody, the film takes a scattershot approach, parodying any film at all
Scary MoVie (2013)
Just when you thought that this witless and unfunny series has died off, it drags itself out of mothballs for another outing. As with the other entries, it is a bunch of recent movies overrun with crude, moronic gags
Scooby-Doo (2002)
The live-action film version of the popular Hanna-Barbera animated tv series. Despite James Gunn on script, this is not very good, a one-dimensional, no-brain film trying to look like a one-dimensional, no-brain cartoon
The Scorch Trials (2015)
The Maze Runner was one of the better Young Adult films, creating an intriguing conceptual mystery; this sequel ignores all of that, even throws the book out and is essentially a jumble of random sf tropes that amount to no more than running, shooting and things exploding
Scorched Earth (2018)
This looked promising but is no more than an unoriginal rehash of the cliches of the Mad Max film – at heart a Western with only token effort made to rewrite the elements in SF terms – and no greater ambition beyond being cable filler
The Scorpion King 4: Quest for Power (2015)
Fourth entry in the eminently forgettable sword-and-sorcery series, this heads down into bad movie stakes by writing a series of grating quips over everything, while the action scenes exist in the realm of unbelievability that show that nobody is treating anything with the slightest seriousness
The Scorpion King: Rise of a Warrior (2008)
Prequel to The Scorpion King. Unfortunately director Russell Mulcahy allows his broad hand with comedy free reign and the plot is overrun by glib character banter and constant flip modern one-liners
Scream for Help (1984)
Often wrongly pegged as a slasher film, this is more of a 1940s psycho-thriller with slasher sensibilities. The notorious Michael Winner directs with typically crude and unsophisticated effect
Scream of the Banshee (2011)
An utterly formulaic Syfy Channel filler monster movie about the resurrection of a banshee. A film that is only based around the provision of effects-driven dispatches every few minutes
Scream VI (2023)
The sixth entry in a series that began as a smart and clever parody/deconstruction of the slasher film. Now this has become just another teen franchise film that has forgotten all the meta margin notes.
Screams of a Winter Night (1979)
Obscure horror anthology from the great era of regional drive-in cinema. The stories lose any potential due to incredibly dreary direction
Seattle Super Storm (2012)
Another formulaic Syfy Channel B-budget disaster film. The film’s sole distinction is a more outlandish premise than usual – where the storm appears initially to be caused by a UFO that has been shot down
The Second Best Science Fiction Film Ever Made (2009)
Amateur production that seems like a version of the X-Men crossbred with The Amazing Race. Not very good on most counts
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947)
A light whimsical short story about a daydreamer is turned into a bloated and ponderous vehicle for the musical and comedy set-pieces of the perpetually wet-eared Danny Kaye
The Secret Village (2013)
A low-budget film about a journalist’s modern-day investigation into a secret village located near Salem, Massachusetts that results in paranoia and suspicious treatment by the locals
Seedpeople (1992)
Full Moon Entertainment produce a cheapo B-budget copy of Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Seeds of Destruction (2011)
Cheap Syfy Channel CGI disaster spectacle about runaway plant roots – from the Garden of Eden, no less – growing to endanger the entire planet. Utterly formulaic and seeming to consist of no more than canned pieces of cliche action
Self/less (2015)
Tarsem Singh is one of the most extraordinary visual stylists at work today. The disappointment here is that he has abandoned this to make a regular chase and shootout film that any other director could have. What we get is an uncredited rehash of the Rock Hudson film Seconds stripped down to an action film
The Sender (1997)
Action film with Michael Madsen and a mystery alien woman fighting a government coverup of UFOs to retrieve his abducted daughter
Sensation (1994)
Kari Wuhrer stars in a tawdry erotic thriller as an art student who gains clairvoyant abilities and gets caught up in solving a murder
Senseless (1998)
Comedy vehicle for Marlon Wayans in which he becomes a test subject for a sense-heightening drug. Marlon’s natural comic energy far exceeds the slightness of the premise
The Sentinel (1977)
Michael Winner directs a film about a sinister apartment building but his typical crude and heavy-handed style fails to conjure anything remotely scary
Serenity (2019)
Not to be confused with the Joss Whedon film, this starts out seeming like a weepy romantic drama before pulling one of the most absurd M. Night Shyamaalan-esque conceptual twists ever put on screen on us
Serpent’s Lair (1995)
A supernatural version of Fatal Attraction where Jeff Fahey is lured into an affair with a neighbour who is a succubus
Severed Ties (1992)
Film with a mad scientist creating an army of disembodied arms, this could have been a demented classic but just emerges as cheap
Sexcula (1974)
While this Canadian obscurity gives the appearance of being a 70s sex vampire film, it is in fact an X-rated Frankenstein spoof. While the film is not without its moment of complete dementia (mostly involving sex scenes with a gorilla), it eventually fragments into narrative incomprehensibility
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978)
A real what-were-they-thinking turkey where someone had the idea of turning the Beatles’ album into a disco-era film starring The Bee Gees … In trying to contrive a plot around the songs and their surreally psychedelic lyrics, the film frequently makes no sense
The Shack (2017)
This comes with a fantastic conceptual hook “Man is invited to a meeting with God at a hut in the woods”. Alas, what we get is no more than a work of faith-based cinema that drowns in its feelgood Christianity Lite sentiments and appeal to Middle American wholesomeness
Shadow People (2016)
Husband and wife find their new home in the countryside to be haunted. A ghost story that is not up to much before what has become one of the biggest cliche endings in the book
Shadow Play (1986)
Very obscure independently-made ghost story – and justly so … It seems more interested in being a vague, incredibly pretentious woman’s psychodrama than it ever is in the usual ghost story stuff of spooking and scaring an audience
The Shaft (2001)
The English-language remake of the Dutch film The Lift about a killer elevator. Starring a then unknown Naomi Watts in a role that would probably embarrass her now
Shark Attack 3: Megalodon (2002)
John Barrowman fights a giant prehistoric shark in a film that gained a certain reputation as a Bad Movie
Shark Week (2012)
Killer shark film from The Asylum in a plot where a druglord forces people to fight various sharks – sort of Survivor but with sharks instead of elimination rounds
Sharknado 5: Global Swarming (2017)
By this point, the Sharknado series has gone from an amusingly tongue-in-cheek original to a series that is widely signalling that it is not taking anything that happens remotely seriously
Sharknado: The 4th Awakens (2016)
The bad movie hit of Sharknado was a surprise to everyone and spawned sequels. By this point, creativity appears to have dried up – essentially, the Sharknado series has jumped the shark
Sharktopus (2010)
Amid the fad for deliberately absurd killer shark films viz Sharknado, this surely takes the prize for ridiculousness of conception and delivery – a hybrid creature with the head of a shark and the tentacles of an octopus. I defy you not to burst into laughter at some of the scenes (*)
Sharktopus vs Pteracuda (2014)
Entry in the gonzo killer shark film (viz Sharknado et al), sequel to the earlier Sharktopus Though produced by veteran B movie producer Roger Corman, these Sharktopus films are some of the shittiest in the gonzo killer shark fad, featuring way below sub par effects and missing the sense of humour
Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023)
Shazam! was one of the more enjoyable DCEU superhero offerings, placing a light-hearted spin on the superheroics. This is the sequel
She Will (2021)
A Folk Horror film where aging Alice Krige becomes rejuvenated and discovers the ability to enact vengeance against her abusers from the woods
She Wolf Rising (2016)
There is a good idea for a film in here somewhere where a fan joins Scream Queen Tiffany Shepis playing a Scream Queen tracking down the print of her werewolf movie before finding she is a real werewolf. But the presentation is an utterly confused mishmash
Shelter (2010)
This starts out was as a film about multiple personality disorder with several scenes that catch your attention before it drifts into a muddle of confused supernatural themes
Shocker (1989)
Wes Craven’s attempt to top his A Nightmare on Elm Street and the phenomenon that Freddy Krueger subsequently became was this remarkably silly film with Mitch Pileggi as a serial killer returned from the electric chair
Shrek Forever After (2010)
The fourth of the Shrek films. By this point, the freshness and originality of the first film has been buried under animated film formula, while the plot is a tired rehash of It’s a Wonderful Life
The Shrine (2010)
A piece of filler horror that is utterly generic in every respect about travelers entering a sinister East European village where the locals are up to no good
Shutter (2008)
An English-language remake of a Thai horror film about haunted photographs. Another by-the-numbers remake that is a pale shadow of its original
Siesta (1987)
This directorial debut for Mary Lambert is a stylish but empty-headed erotic mystery that eventually settles for a fantastical twist ending
The Silence (2019)
This was dismissed as a copy of a A Quiet Place and had an almost identical plot about survivors sheltering from creatures that attack the smallest sound. In actuality, this was based on a book that predates A Quiet Place
The Silencers (1966)
The first and probably the least worst in a series of James Bond copycat films starring Dean Martin as agent Matt Helm. Martin plays the part as a tipsy lounge lizard and the film comes stuffed with excruciating double entendres
The Silent Flute (1978)
Bizarre Bruce Lee conceived conceived martial arts film, a bizarre allegorical work of philosophy steeped in inscrutable Zen epigrams
Silent Hill: Revelation (2012)
Dull and unimaginative Silent Hill sequel that only revisits what went before. The first film had an uncanny otherworldly atmosphere but the sequel reduces everything to no more than pop-up Clive Barker
Simply Irresistible (1999)
Very silly romantic comedy in a Magical Realist vein where Sarah Michelle Gellar gains magical cooking abilities. Like Water for Chocolate did this better.
The Singing Detective (2003)
Disastrous Hollywood version of Dennis Potter’s classic tv mini-series where a hospitalised Robert Downey jr fantasises a dream world of 1940s film noir
Single Santa Seeks Mrs. Claus (2004)
Mawkishly sentimental Christmas tv movie with Steve Guttenberg as Santa’s son who needs to find a wife before he can take over the role. So cliched and written to expectation that it lacks any conflict
Singularity (2017)
John Cusack as a super-villain unleashing an army of giant robots against humanity – what’s not to like? Well maybe the entire film, which fails to leave no Machines Amok cliche unturned. Cusack gives a performance through gritted teeth no doubt at the atrocious dialogue he has to utter
Sir Henry at Rawlinson End (1980)
Surreal and plotless British film based on a radio show about the happenings around a country mansion
Sisters (2006)
Disappointing remake of Brian De Palma’s 1973 Siamese twins psycho-thriller that changes many elements and crucially lacks De Palma’s stylistic showmanship
The Sixth Man (1997)
Exceedingly lightweight effort about Marlon Wayans’ ghost brother aiding their basketball team, which proves as predictable as one expects
Skinwalkers (2006)
A big-budget revival of the werewolf film set amongst warring werewolf clans of bikers. Produced by Stan Winston and with an interesting cast line-up
Slapstick of Another Kind (1982)
Another failed attempt to film the works of Kurt Vonnegut where Vonnegut’s ironic pessimism ends up as witless slapstick chaos on screen
Slayers (2022)
A group of social media influencers fall prey to a vampire and are required to call on the help of grizzled vampire hunter Thomas Jane
The Sleeper (2012)
Not to be confused with the Woody Allen film, this is a modern slasher film that pays homage to its 1980s counterparts – in particular, the sorority house slasher as a maniac who deep-breathes down the phone stalks assorted co-eds. Unexceptional in all regards
Sleeping Beauties (2017)
A softcore erotic version of the popular fairytale. Largely the film gets the fairytale over and done with in the first eight minutes and thereafter focuses on the erotic tumblings of Beauty awakened in the present-day
Slumber Party Massacre II (1987)
The Slumber Party Massacre was an mundane and unmemorable slasher entry; this is a nonsensical sequel that tries to turn it into a copy of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Contains some of the bizarrely ridiculous scenes to ever take part in any slasher film of the era
Smurfs and the Magic Flute (1976)
Animated film based on the original Belgian Smurfs comics made prior to the hit of the Hanna-Barbera series.
Snakes on a Train (2006)
The first of The Asylum’s mockbusters intended as a soundalike copy of Snakes on a Plane, this ends up defeated by low-budget and one of the most absurd premises of any film in recent memory
Snapshot (1979)
Trashy Australian psycho-stalker film set in the world of fashion modelling that was bizarrely passed off as a copy of Halloween in the US
Snow White and the Three Stooges (1961)
The Three Stooges are transplanted into a retelling of the fairytale, although their slapstick inanity feels drowned out amid the maudlin banality and Cinemascope spectacle
Sole Survivor (1983)
Film about premonition of an airline disaster and the survivor being haunted in the aftermath. Not dissimilar to the James Herbert adaptation The Survivor, this goes in predictable directions while never being entirely clear what is happening
Solitaire for 2 (1995)
A romantic comedy in which Amanda Pays has a curse that gives her the ability to read thoughts
Sometimes They Come Back … Again (1996)
Sequel to the Stephen King adapted film about hoodlums resurrected from the dead, this descends into an incredible silliness. Featuring a teenage Hillary Swank
Somnus (2016)
This low-budget British effort seems to be making a good start as a film that deals with space travel realistically only to bog down in one of the most incomprehensible plots one has ever sat through
Son of the Mask (2005)
Sequel to the Jim Carrey starring The Mask with Jamie Kennedy taking over in a film that was regarded as one of the worst sequels of all time
Sorceress (1995)
Jim Wynorski is a B-budget director whose films feature women with massively oversized breasts. Beyond epic-sized mammaries, this softcore tale about housewives engaged in witchcraft that makes no sense on a plot level
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
Space Zombie Bingo!!! (1993)
Part of the late 80s/early 90s fad for deliberately bad SF films, this has plentiful references to Plan 9 from Outer Space but little that is funny
Spaced Invaders (1990)
Well produced but otherwise unfunny comedy about a group of bumbling Martian invaders who turn up on Halloween, following a rebroadcast of the Orson Welles War of the Worlds radio show
Spacemaster X-7 (1958)
Cheap 1950s SF film about alien spores brought back from Mars and the hunt for a housewife who inadvertently spreads them
Spasms (1983)
A 1980s film that was sold around a single air bladder makeup effects scene where a man swells up and explodes from a snakebite. That and the entirely risible premise of Oliver Reed as a billionaire who has a psychic link with a giant snake
Species II (1998)
Sequel to Species that this time offers up the male of the species. The film feels put together as an exercise in makeup effects but their physiological absurdity causes the film to topple into silliness
The Spectre of Edgar Allan Poe (1974)
An obscure item among the fad for Edgar Allan Poe films during the 1960s, this threadbare production features Poe himself investigating sinister happenings at an asylum
Spider-Man (1977)
The first big screen incarnation of the Marvel Comics character, the theatrically released pilot for a dreary tv series starring Nicholas Hammond that stripped Spider-Man down to being no more than a superpowered detective in a tv cop show
The Spiral Staircase (1975)
A remake of the classic film noir psycho-thriller. Now the story is conducted in colour and with a name star cast but misses all the atmosphere the original had by a wide mile
Spy Kids: All the Time in the World (2011)
A series that reached its maximum level of cuteness two films ago is dragged out for another pointless entry that nobody was asking for. Robert Rodriguez delivers shabby juvenile slapstick
The Spy Next Door (2010)
The further slide downwards of Jackie Chan’s career after being discovered by Hollywood. Here he is a spy left to look after a group of kids with excruciatingly unfunny results
Stairs (2019)
Soldiers are trapped climbing an endless set of stairs in a timeloop that forces them to revisit a battlefield atrocity
The Stand (1994)
The Stand is regarded as Stephen King’s best novel, an epic that depicts the final showdown between good and evil in the aftermath of civilisation. The mini-series adaptation was alas placed into the ham fists of one of King’s worst adapters. Mick Garris
The Stand (2020-2021)
The Stand is in my opinion Stephen King’s greatest book. The question is whether this new mini-series version will improve on the laughably failed 1994 version
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)
William Shatner tries to emulate the success had by Leonard Nimoy in directing a Star Trek film but falls on his face, badly overstressing the comedy elements and delivering the worst of the Classic Trek films
Starship (1984)
A planetary adventure from the director of Battlefield Earth. I waited 35 years to find a copy of this – it looked incredibly promising when I saw production artwork back in the 1980s
Starship Troopers (1997)
Travesty of Robert Heinlein’s classic SF novel from Paul Verhoeven. Heinlein’s philosophical argument for militarism is junked in favour of blackly comic mindless violence