A Valentine Carol (2007)
Lifetime Channel Valentine’s Day movie that rewrites A Christmas Carol to have Emma Caulfield visited by the ghosts of relationships past, present and future
Valley of the Dragons (1961)
Among the 1950s/60s spate of Jules Verne films, this was an adaptation of one of Vernr’s lesser-known works Hector Servadac/Off on a Comet. That said, all the but the notion of people swept up on a comet is thrown out and the rest played as a prehistoric lost world adventure
Vampira (1974)
Dismissed at the time as a copy of Young Frankenstein even though it had been made earlier, this is a none too funny vampire comedy featuring David Niven as Dracula
The Vampire Happening (1971)
Freddie Francis was one of the finest stylists of the Anglo-horror cycle. Here he makes a comedy spoofing the vampire film that comes out feeling like Benny Hill routines running around a big castle
Vampirella (1996)
Disappointingly tatty rendering of the famous comic-book strip as a low-budget Roger Corman production. Vampirella is missing her distinctive costume and Talisa Soto comes nowhere near the comic-book character’s statuesque voluptuousness
Vampire’s Kiss (1988)
Bizarre comedy where Nicolas Cage is a literary agent who believes he is a vampire. Cage gives the most absurdly over-the-top performance ever put on film
Vampires: Los Muertos (2002)
Sequel to John Carpenter’s Vampires given over to his regular associate Tommy Lee Wallace, this looks tatty in trying to replicate the action sequences on a B-budget and with the script holes showing through
Varan the Unbelievable (1958)
Japanese monster movie from the same team that created the original Godzilla. The English-language version has simply kept the effects scenes and cut everything else, replacing it with scenes of the US military ordering the Japanese about
The Veil (2016)
This has a great premise – a camera crew revisiting the site of a cult mass suicide stir up the ghosts of the cult members – and a director who I always maintained had much untapped potential. Alas, the finished result seems to slip by his hands
Vengeance (1962)
The third film version of Curt Siodmak’s novel Donovan’s Brain, this abandons much of the book. Not a terribly interesting effort, mostly noted as the directorial debut of Anglo-horror regular Freddie Francis
Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021)
The first sequel to the passable Venom. Next to Batman & Robin, this could be a strong contender for the worst big-budget superhero film ever made
Venom: The Last Dance (2024)
The third of the Venom films, which has become one of the worst of the modern Marvel spinoffs. By this point any pretence that the films are taking themselves seriously has been long forgotten
Venomous (2001)
Low-budget director Fred Olen Ray makes a head-scratching crosshatch between a plague outbreak film and an Animals Amok film with a town being attacked by snakes infected with a deadly virus
Vice (2015)
Bruce Willis is the CEO of a corporation that provides customers with androids to use for whatever vices they want. Very similar to tv’s recent Westworld but has a script so boneheaded you can almost imagine it acted as an example for Westworld to do the exact opposite
Victor Frankenstein (2015)
An madcap new version of the Mary Shelley story where everything is turned up to an overwrought 11 on the dial. How more nutzoid can you get than a version where Igor the hunchback (a completely miscast Daniel Radcliffe) is the main character?
Vile (2011)
I’m tempted to make a comment about this being a film that offers its own critical summary in its title but this Saw wannabe is so tame it fails even that. Hard to believe a film with a premise about a group of people forced to torture one another could emerge so dramatically uninteresting
The Vindicator (1986)
Canadian film about a man rebuilt inside a cyborg body. What started as a Frankenstein film is turned into a copy of The Terminator
Violent Shit: The Movie (2015)
The original i>Violent Shit films were a series of plotless, gore-drenched German films of the 80-90s. This is a very loose Italian-made remake that is more about the activities of an occult serial killer. Not very well made but there are a lot of homages to classic giallo cinema
Virtual Girl (1998)
One of the numerous Virtual Reality films to come out in the mid-90s, this seems undecided whether it wants to be an SF or an erotic film
The Visitor (1979)
Head-scratchingly strange Italian film that seems made as a crosshatch of 1970s Devil Child films and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Makes no sense in terms of story but worth watching for the bizarreness of its imagery
Volcano (1997)
A disaster movie made early into the CGI era based around the ludicrous notion of an active volcano suddenly appearing in Los Angeles
Voodoo Black Exorcist (1974)
Essentially a 1940s mummy film with a voodoo priest resurrected in the present and stalking the reincarnation of his love. In English translation, this has been thrown together with a meaningless word salad title to appeal to the era’s fads for Blaxploitation and exorcism films
The Vulture (1967)
Possibly the most conceptually demented film to come out of the 1960s-70s Anglo-horror cycle – one part The Fly, one part a witch’s retribution film about a man who transforms into a vulture creature after teleporting into his ancestor’s grave whereupon he is driven to enact a centuries old curse
Wait, Wait, Don’t Kill Me (2020)
Film about a virus that causes people to become dehydrated and turn into zombies
Walking With Dinosaurs (2013)
Walking With Dinosaurs was an amazing documentary series that recreated prehistoric life with CGI animation. By contrast. the film spinoff is a cutsie animated film with talking dinosaurs. It is a film that is killed by the decision to let the dinosaurs talk with smartass one-liners and contemporary in-jokes
War of the Worlds (2025)
An adaptation of H.G. Wells’ classic alien invasion novel modernised into the era of mass data surveillance, social media and Amazon delivery drivers. Shot in the Screenlife process where the film screen becomes a computer screen
WarGames: The Dead Code (2006)
WarGames was a thriller that was way ahead of its time; this sequel is no more than video fodder exploiting recognition factor that reduces the original to hacker movie cliches in a technically ill-informed and incoherent plot
Warlock: The Armageddon (1993)
Julian Sands returns in a sequel to Warlock where the frequently unserious effects of director Anthony Hickox turn it into a silly comic-book of a film
Warlord 3000 (1993)
Shabbily made copy of Mad Max 2 that plays out with minimal action
Warning from Space (1956)
The first Japanese entry in the great alien invader fad of the 1950s. Nothing great but it does boast the awesomeness of starfish-shaped aliens
The Watch (2020)
Mini-series based on the works of Terry Pratchett that feels as though it is made, designed and cast by people who haven’t even read the books
Watchers II (1990)
The first of three sequels to the Dean R. Koontz adaptation about an intelligent dog, although for each sequel producer Roger Corman has just remade the book
Waxwork II: Lost in Time (1992)
Sequel to Anthony Hickox’s Waxwork, which ups the number of horror homages but suffers a low budget
Wedlock (1991)
SF action where Rutger Hauer is sentenced with a collar that will explode if he moves 100 yards apart from Mimi Rogers
Weekend (1967)
Jean-Luc Godard’s classic of the French New Wave where a couple’s journey into the countryside for the weekend becomes increasingly more surreal and anarchic
Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior (2006)
Disney Channel film where a modern teenager finds she is the reincarnation of a martial arts warrior
Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory (1961)
Despite one of the great exploitation titles of all time, this collapses into a dreary dullness the moment one actually sits down to watch it
Werewolves of the Third Reich (2017)
I was hooked into watching the film from the sensationalism from the title but this is a disappointment due to the attempts to provide World War II setting and werewolf transformation effects on a low budget
What Men Want (2019)
A gender-swapped remake of What Women Want in which Taraji P. Henson gets the ability to read men’s thoughts. Henson displays no talent for comedy and this is a spectacularly unfunny film
What Planet Are You From? (2000)
A sex-changed version of My Stepmother is an Alien in which Garry Shandling is an alien come to Earth to breed with a woman. Despite being directed by Mike Nichols this is as lame as it sounds and stumbles through tired routines that were not even funny the first time around
When the Bough Breaks (2016)
A throwback to the 1980s/90s psycho-thriller that came out after Fatal Attraction featuring a surrogate mother who develops a stalkerish fixation on a husband. The crucial difference is that this is played with an all-Black cast but in a way that sends out weirdly uncomfortable racial messages
White Noise: The Light (2007)
A sSequel in name only to White Noise, this is a very silly film with Nathan Fillion returning from a near-death experience able to see the auras of those about to die
Wild Wild West (1999)
The big screen remake of the 1960s Western/spy mashup tv series is transformed into an overblown and painfully unfunny Will Smith vehicle that loudly signals it is taking none of itself seriously
Wired (1989)
Flop and muchly hated biopic of John Belushi that turns his life into a bad farce. Included here for the presence of an angel that guides Belushi through his life
Wishmaster: The Prophecy Fulfilled (2002)
The fourth and final of the Wishmaster films, which by this point had become cheap and tattily made affairs that are pale shadows of the original
The Witches of Oz (2011)
Sequel/modernisation (it is confusing what) to The Wizard of Oz relocated in New York. This tv mini-series may be the cheapest work ever served up bearing the Oz name and flounders amid the shabbiness of its effects and utter lack of magic its director conjures
The Woman in Black: Angel of Death (2014)
A sequel to the 2012 ghost story from the revived Hammer Films, this adds precisely nothing to the original, has nothing to say and nothing in its directorial arsenal that is not a tiresomely over-cliched jump – you just ask, why was this film even made?
The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit (1998)
Stuart (Re-Animator) Gordon adapts a Ray Bradbury play about five men who buy a suit that has magical properties. Bradbury is a great writer but this drowns in overripe dialogue, bad racial caricatures and Gordon’s typically over-the-top propensities
Wound (2010)
The always interesting David Blyth returns to screens with what feels like an amateur remake of Nicolas Roeg’s Track 29 that becomes a confused and plotless mishmash of hallucinations, random BDSM scenarios and shock effects
A Wounded Fawn (2022)
This starts with a woman going on a date with a man she does not realise is a serial killer, before things go off at a very strange tangent
The Wraith (1986)
An unknown Charlie Sheen stars in a film about teens haunted an avenging ghost car. An uncredited copy of Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter
The Wrath of Becky (2023)
Becky was a modest effort with Lulu Wilson as a thirteen year-old violently fighting off home invaders. This is a sequel with her up against white supremacists
Wrecker (2015)
I have to search my memory to think of another film that is so openly plagiaristic – this is almost a scene-for-scene remake of Steven Spielberg’s Duel about a man facing a killer truck on a highway. This misses the subtlety of the original so widely you could run a highway through it
A Wrinkle in Time (2018)
High-profile adaptation of the classic children’s work by Madeline L’Engle that has been entirely wrenched out of shape by its director to become a heavy-handed message about diversity. It is SF made by people who think the genre is just eye candy and absurdly over-the-top costumes
Wrong Turn 2: Dead End (2007)
A sequel that has been arranged for the sole purpose of serving up a series of gory dispatch set-pieces every few minutes
Wyvern Hill (2021)
Low-budget British film about a mysterious killer lurking in the house
The X Files: I Want to Believe (2008)
The second theatrical spinoff from The X Files, a dismally dull entry where one wonders how the people who created one of the great tv shows of the 1990s got it all wrong
X-Ray (1982)
An early Cannon Films offering among the 80s slasher fad premised around a hospital setting and seeing the phenomenally well-stacked former Playmate Barbi Benton undressed. Most of the paper thin plot seems to have been made up on set and the direction is ridiculously overwrought
Xanadu (1980)
Bizarre disco fantasy that could have only been conceived out of 80s cocaine madness. Olivia Newton-John is a Greek muse come to Earth to inspire the building of a roller disco. Frequently cited as a bad movie classic, this has mind-boggling scenes that have to be seen to be believed
The Yesterday Machine (1963)
A complete obscurity that has only been brought to public attention during the YouTube era – not that it has been obscure without justifiable reason. Don’t be hooked by the intriguing premise of Nazis building time machines, this is painfully dull in every regard
Yeti: A Love Story (2006)
Troma film about a group of trampers attacked by a Yeti only for one of the group to discover gay love with the Yeti
Yogi Bear (2010)
The live-action adaptation of the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoon series is a film construed entirely around slapstick sequences that never requires you to engage your brain in any way
Yongary, Monster from the Deep (1967)
South Korean copy of the Japanese Godzilla films and a painfully cheap effort on all counts
Yor, The Hunter from the Future (1983)
Italian cheapie that has become regarded as a bad movie classic. This starts out as a Conan the Barbarian ripoff before, in a twist lifted from Teenage Caveman, we learn we are in a post-apocalyptic future
Your Highness (2011)
The epic fantasy quest film is well due a parody, unfortunately this majorly unfunny effort written by its leading man Danny McBride only makes a beeline for the witless and vulgar
Zapped! (1982)
A psychic powers film like Carrie having been reduced to the crass high school comedy of something like Porky’s
Zardoz (1974)
Most science-fiction films lack worthy ideas, this is one that contrarily suffers from too many and collapses under the weight of its pretensions to profundity
Zebra Lounge (2001)
An erotic thriller where a couple are stalked by psychopathic couple after venturing into the swingers scene, this comes with a ridiculously high-handed condemnatory moralism
The Zodiac (2005)
Not the David Fincher film but an earlier work based on the Zodiac Killer. Unlike Fincher, this stays to the facts and doesn’t indulge theories about the identity of the killer
Zoe (2018)
Films about androids and artificial intelligence have taken off in the 2010s. This comes produced by Ridley Scott who made Blade Runner, the defining classic on the theme; on the other hand, it ends up in the hands of a director who specialises in relationship dramas
Zoltan … Hound of Dracula (1978)
aka Dracula’s Dog. Most people who hear the title think this is a joke but this is a real film and one that takes a ridiculous premise – the idea of Dracula’s dog – surprisingly seriously
Zombie Nation (2004)
Not to be confused with tv’s Z Nation, this for a time ranked on the IMDB’s Worst Films of All-Time list . It’s been called the Worst Zombie Film Ever made, although I’d suggest other contenders
Zombie Town (2023)
An adaptation of an R.L. Stine book, a work of safe anodyne horror about zombies trapped inside a film made by director Dan Aykroyd getting loose and overrunning a town
Zombie Women of Satan (2009)
A WTF am I watching film where a performing freakshow troupe led by Pervo the Clown are pursued around a farm by topless zombie women
Zombiechrist (2010)
Bill Zebub is a micro-budgeted filmmaker who contends to be the most offensive filmmaker of all time. Yes, the film features a zombie Jesus who spends his time violating women who parade in a state of undress
Zookeeper (2011)
Animals in a zoo offer schmuck zoo keeper Kevin James romantic advice based on their mating behaviours. The premise runs out of steam soon in, the rest is an irritating smartass CGI talking animals comedy