Piglet (2025)
Another of the horror versions of children’s stories, this has a in-name-only connection to Winnie-the-Pooh’s Piglet and is otherwise a variant on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre about a growth-hormone enhanced killer
Pippi Longstocking (1969)
First of a series of Swedish-made live-action films based on Astrid Lindgren’s anarchic child heroine
Piranha (1995)
The 1978 Piranha is remade as a cable tv movie but has excised all the humour and witty genre in-referencing of the original
Piranhaconda (2012)
Amid the spate of deliberately ridiculous monster movies of the 2010s, we have also seen a fad for absurd hybrid creatures. In actuality, the piranhaconda is just a giant snake – and served by some incredibly bad effects in this negligible effort from B-budget hack Jim Wynorski
The Pit & the Pendulum (2009)
Another of David De Coteau’s cheap homoerotic horror films. This has almost no connection to Edgar Allan Poe’s story about a man tied up beneath a descending pendulum and is instead an absurd psycho-sexual film about a series of hypnotism murders in a big mansion
The Plague (1992)
An incredibly dull version of Albert Camus’s novel about a city infected by plague. Camus wrote the original as an allegory for the Nazi occupation of France but this talks itself to death
Play Dead (2022)
Bailee Madison takes a drug that fakes death and wakes up at the morgue – only to discover that coroner Jerry O’Connell is running an organ harvesting operation
Please Don’t Feed the Children (2024)
Steven Spielberg’s daughter Destry makes her directorial debut with a confused mix of an imprisonment thriller and a zombie film, albeit a zombie film that only produces a single zombie
Pokemon The First Movie: Mewtwo Strikes Back (1998)
The first film spun off from the popular Pokemon phenomenon and animated series, this is largely incomprehensible to anyone who is not familiar with the series
Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986)
Sequel to Poltergeist that without Tobe Hopper in the director’s seat is an unimaginative by-the-numbers effort
The Poltergeist of Borley Forest (2013)
A film that sat on the shelf and was then retitled to capitalise on the release of the Poltergeist remake despite featuring no poltergeists … A routine run through the well and truly worn modern ghost story cliches with no originality and little atmosphere
The Possessed (1977)
This was a copy of The Exorcist made for tv. Unable to replicate that film’s gross-out effects, all that we get is a girl’s boarding school beset by supernatural fires. An amazing cast line-up, including an unknown Harrison Ford as a teacher having an affair with a pupil before getting set on fire
Possessed By the Night (1994)
B-budget dircetor Fred Olen Ray has taken the plot of Gremlins and thrown it together with one of his sofctore erotic films in which a mind-controlling goblin creature forces people to have sex
Possession (1981)
Bafflingly surreal film from Andrzej Zulawski in which Isabelle Adjani gives birth to a tentacled monster in a subway. Nobody has any idea what the film is about but it has become a cult work since
The Possession (2012)
Based on the urban legend surrounding a dybbuk box that turned up on an EBay auction, although the film throws this out to conduct an utterly generic possession story. Despite the novelty of drawing on Judaic mythology, the film still trades in the same tired cliches as the Christian exorcism film
Power Rangers (2017)
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers with its ridiculous rubber monsters and dementedly over-the-top acting as one of the key pop culture phenomena of the 1990s. The question is what audience do producers possibly think that there might be for a dark and gritty cinematic reboot?
Precious Find (1996)
Very cheap-looking attempt to essentially relocate a gold prospectors adventure into outer space
Prehysteria! (1993)
In the aftermath of the success of Jurassic Park, Albert and Charles Band quickly responded with this children’s dinosaur film that contains some of the most pitiful effects in any film of this era
Prehysteria! 3 (1995)
The third and probably the best of the children’s dinosaur films from Charles Band where the pitiful effects are at least compensated for by an eccentric sense of humour
Premonition (1972)
The first film from the acclaimed Alan Rudolph, a hippie era nightmare where smoking marijuana causes people to have disturbing visions of sinister figures
Prey (2019)
Franck Khalfoun, a former Alexandre Aja associate, who has made the quite reasonable likes of P2 and the remake of Maniac, directs a desert island survival story where the jungle lurks with horrors
Prey for the Devil (2022)
Daniel Stamm, the director who made the standout
Prince Valiant (1997)
The classic comic-strip receives a disastrous film adaption where director Anthony Hickox plays everything for campy silliness
Pro Wrestlers vs Zombies (2014)
The zombie film of the 2010s has become marked by a search for the most bizarre and incongruous title/conceptual mash-ups. True to its promise, the film pits several WWE wrestlers up against zombies, alas the creativity begins and ends with the mild amusement of the title concept
Project: ALF (1996)
A tv movie revival of the hit 1980s tv sitcom ALF. Looking back it’s hard to wonder what ever seemed funny about the show at the time
Project: Shadowchaser (1992)
Completely ridiculous mix of The Terminator and Die Hard where, for no clear reason, an android terrorist decides to take hostages in an office building and the FBI’s only hope is a cryogenically unfrozen football player
Prom Night (1980)
Entry amid the 1980s slasher fad featuring Jamie Lee Curtis. A fairly dreary effort that comes with much disco dancing footage
Proteus (1995)
Shabby copy of Alien with shipwreck survivors facing a genetically engineered monster on an oil rig
Proximity (2020)
Cheaply made and frequently unintentionally hilarious variant on UFO conspiracies that wheels out all the usual cliches – alien implants, the Men in Black, recovered memories etc
Psychic Experiment (2010)
A film overstuffed with mad ideas and genre cameos about psychic experiments that have unleashed a series of other-dimensional entities
The Psychotronic Man (1979)
A film about psychic powers. The one distinction the film has is that its name inspired Michael Weldon in the creation of the psychotronic film cult. The actual film proves a major letdown
Puss in Boots (1987)
Another of the cheaply made fairytale adaptations from Cannon Films with the bizarre casting of Christopher Walken as Puss in Boots
Pussy Kills (2017)
Another woman seeks vengeance film, sort of a female version of The Crow where the heroine wears PVC catsuit, fishnets and cat ears. A film made with a cod-grindhouse aesthetic hoping to get by on a certain trash movie sensibility
Quantum Apocalypse (2010)
Another cheap Syfy Channel end of the world film. So cheap that the catastrophe mostly ends up being talked about rather than depicted, while the rest of the show runs by disaster movie cliches
Quarantine LA (2013)
Zombie film with a party of survivors trying to make it through a zombie-infested L.A. to safety
Queen of the Damned (2002)
Film adaptation of the third of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, this reduces Lestat to no more than a posturing teenage bad boy and Rice’s languidly romanticised vampires to a laughably pretentious Goth music video
Quintet (1979)
The great Robert Altman’s most frustrating film set around an enigmatic dice game in a frozen future
Racing Stripes (2005)
Schizoid film – on one level a National Velvet-like story in which Hayden Panettiere trains a zebra to enter a horse race; another in which the animals and insects crack one-liners and make poop and pee jokes
Raging Angels (1994)
Christian film in which Sean Patrick Flanery is a recovering rock musician who fights to rescue his girlfriend from the clutches of a music promoter who is the Ant-Christ
Rainbow (1995)
A directorial outing from actor Bob Hoskins where a kid travels up a rainbow but his doing up sets nature in a heavy-handed environmentalist message
Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealer (1985)
Slight but colourful animated film for the very young based on the popular series of Hallmark cards and Mattel toys about a magical horse
Raise the Titanic (1980)
Massively ambitious Clive Cussler adaptation about the attempts to raise the wreck of the Titanic, which became one of the most over-budgeted flops of its day. The actual raising of the Titanic looks utterly magnificent but the rest of the film remains sunken amid murky underwater photography that looks like children’s toys shot in a bathtub
Rapture-Palooza (2013)
There is irresistible appeal to the idea of a comedy that conducts a spoof of the Biblical Rapture. Despite a script from one of the Bill and Ted writers, this emerges as a remarkably unfunny film that consists of about an hour of Craig Robinson delivering crude sexual innuendos
Rat Man (1988)
An Italian exploitation film about models in the Caribbean being hunted by a vicious rat-monkey hybrid. Some occasionally gory deaths but not much happens
Rattlers (1976)
An entry in the 1970s Animals Attack cycle about a small desert town under attack by rattlesnakes
Raven’s Hollow (2022)
Film that features a young Edgar Allan Poe fighting a supernatural menace known as The Raven
Rawhead Rex (1986)
Early Clive Barker adaptation made just prior to his gaining fame with Hellraiser about a the revival of a monstrous pagan pagan that suffers from shabby treatment and a rubbery monster
The Reckoning (2020)
A few years ago, Neil Marshall seemed a major genre director on the rise with The Descent. Here he returns with a film about the historic witch persecutions
Red Dawn (1984)
Ridiculous red-blooded, flag-waving film in which the Soviets invade the USA and a group of high-school teenagers maintain a lone guerilla campaign
Red Dawn (2012)
The idea of remaking John Milus’s ridiculous 1984 survivalist fantasy about a Communist invasion of the USA maybe counts as one of the most absurdly unnecessary of all remakes. The film laughably tries to deal with the absence of a Soviet Union by creating a boogeyman out of North Korea
Red Sonja (1985)
A disappointing adaptation of Robert E. Howard’s warrior woman character. This is beautifully designed but suffers from a non-acting Brigitte Nielsen in the title role and an insulting need to water the toughness of the character down
Red: Werewolf Hunter (2010)
Syfy Channel film that seems to offer the intriguing premise of a Modernised Little Red Riding Hood but only deals with this in the vaguest ways. Otherwise this is a standard werewolf film and contains maybe the crappiest CGI wolf transformation scenes ever
Reign of Chaos (2021)
Low-budget film that takes an ambitious conceptual grasp in its story of deities and daughters of goddesses warring in the ruins of civilisation
Remote Control (1988)
A film that comes with a lame premise about aliens distributing a video of a 1950s SF film that turns people into mind-controlled killers all as prelude to an invasion
Renfield (2023)
Twilight fairly much killed the vampire film. This is the first of two big-budget offerings of 2023 that aims to turn that around
Repo Chick (2009)
Alex Cox sequelizes his off-the-wall cult hit Repo Man but only turns it into an amateurish, meandering effort that is only trying to be wacky and cultish
Repo: The Genetic Opera (2008)
Saw series director Darren Lynn Bousman conducts a futuristic Gothic rock opera. A film of constant posturings where Bousman demonstrates remarkably little affinity for either music or sf … a musical that feels made by people who are tone deaf
Repossessed (1990)
This wants to conduct an Airplane styled parody of The Exorcist to which extent it conducts the coup of casting a grown-up Linda Blair
The Requin (2022)
Survival horror film where Alicia Silverstone and husband are stranded in shark-infested waters when a freak storm washes their beachside cabin out to sea
Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)
Four films in and clear evidence that the Resident Evil series needs to be retired. This consists of tediously borrowed action moves now presented in 3D and a plot of random dead ends that make little sense
Restoration (2016)
A film directed by actor Zack Ward – his best known role was probably as Postal Dude in Uwe Boll’s Postal. Not a terribly interesting film – it starts as a ghost story before this proves to be a red herring and then meanders around without much direction
Return from Witch Mountain (1978)
Sequel to Disney’s Escape to Witch Mountain with the psi-powered alien kids up against a villainous Christopher Lee and Bette Davis
The Return of Jafar (1994)
A weak video-released spinoff of Disney’s Aladdin that began Disney’s habit throughout the 90s/00s of generating cheap sequels to their animated classics
Return of the Killer Tomatoes! (1988)
The first of the sequels to Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. Featuring the first screen appearance of George Clooney.
Return to House on Haunted Hill (2007)
Cheaply made sequel to the remake of House on Haunted Hill that turns it into a teen film dominated by gore set-pieces
The Returning (1990)
A New Zealand-made ghost story that hardly seems to have been seen by anybody. The film shuffles around cliches from 1970s ghost story tv movies but only dissembles them into an embarrassingly silly film where very little of substance is directed with a ludicrously overwrought intensity
Revenge of the Blood Beast (1965)
The first film from Witchfinder General director Michael Reeves. A blatant copy of Mario Bava’s i>Black Sunday that is done in by its cheapness, a lack of anything interesting happening and mismatched comedy elements
Revolt of the Zombies (1936)
From the brothers who made the classic White Zombie, a similar film about an expedition to Cambodia to find the secret of creating zombies
Richie Rich (1994)
From the producers of The Matrix, an adaptation of the classic comic-book about a lonely rich kid now made as a vehicle for Macaulay Culkin
Ricochet (1991)
This rehashes Cape Fear, remade by Martin Scorsese the same year, with Denzel Washington as an upstanding lawyer whose life is torn apart by vengeful ex-con John Lithgow. A frequently ludicrous script is made worse by Russell Mulcahy’s overwrought direction
The Rift (1990)
A cheap submarine adventure/underwater monster encounter from Spanish director Juan Pique Simon that was intended as a copy of James Cameron’s The Abyss
Rim of the World (2019)
McG, one of the more empty-headed of modern mainstream directors, makes a big effects-heavy, Young Adult alien invasion film, a genre that has never enjoyed any success. To no surprise, this did not either
Ring of Terror (1962)
Obscure B movie about a med student who has no sense of fear until he must take anatomy class
The Ring Two (2005)
Sequel to The Ring, the English-language remake of Ringu. The filmmakers have returned to the source and brought in original director Hideo Nakata only to produce one of the most disappointing of all the Ringu/Ring films
Rings (2017)
The question you ask going in is after seven Japanese films and a tv series, a Korean film and two previous English-language films, what is left for filmmakers to wring out a third American The Ring film? The answer seems to be not much – just a rehash of the basics for the 18-25 crowd
Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie (2022)
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are resurrected in a new animated film that feels like a watered-down fix designed for Ritalin-deprived youth
Ritual (2002)
This was intended as the third of the Tales from the Crypt films. A remake of the classic voodoo film I Walked With a Zombie, from Val Lewton, a producer who specialised in psychological ambiguity where we could not be certain if the supernatural was real. All of this is lost in the hands of bad movie director Avi Nesher.
Riverworld (2003)
The first adaptation of Philip Jose Farmer’s series of novels where every person who ever lived is resurrected on an alien planet is given an abysmal treatment as a tv movie that ditches and rewrites major aspects of the books
Riverworld (2010)
The second tv mini-series of Philip Jose Farmer’s classic SF novels trashes the books just as badly as the first attempt. The premise and characters are indifferently rewritten, while the show is churned out by a director with a tatty indifference to what he is making
RoboCop 3 (1993)
The third Robocop film killed the series off with a disastrous decision to go for a PG rating and pair Robocop with a cute kid
Rock-a-Doodle (1991)
The worst of Don Bluth’s animated films in which a young boy is sent on a quest to find a rooster that does Elvis impersonations
RocketMan (1997)
Unfunny comedy in which Harland Williams plays a bumbling idiot who is recruited to take part in a NASA Mars landing mission. Slapstick inanity results.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again (2016)
Nothing indicates how miscalculated this remake is than the fact it has been placed in the hands of the director of the High School Musicals and sundry Disney Channel fodder
A Room to Die For (2017)
London couple find the perfect room to rent in the home of a very strange aging husband and wife. What starts out seeming an oddball comedy gradually slides over into horror movie territory but in truth this is not a very well made film on all fronts
Rootwood (2018)
A copy of The Blair Witch Project with a trio of filmmakers trekking into the woods with cameras in search of The Wood Devil
Rosemary’s Baby (2014)
Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby was a classic film that popularised the modern interest in occult and deviltry on film; this sad remake is something that only parrots the cliches that have set in in the ensuing 46 years and clumsily mishandles all of Polanski’s comically edgy paranoia
Rottweiler (1983)
Straggler in the 1970s Animal Amok genre about a small South Carolina town under attack by killer dogs. This was done better elsewhere by films like The Pack and i>Cujo. Made in short-lived 3D fad so we get dog snouts poking out the screen
RPG (2013)
A Hunger Games wannabe with elderly people forced to eliminate one another while inhabiting young avatar bodies inside a virtual simulation. It is a long time since I have encountered a film where the fundamental premise makes no sense whatsoever when you look at it logically
The Rugrats Movie (1998)
The first film spinoff of the popular animated tv series Rugrats about infants observing the adult world
S. Darko (2009)
This is a wholly unnecessary sequel to Donnie Darko, featuring the same bafflingly inexplicable time-blurring things happening to his sister but without the same culty weirdness
Sacrilege (2020)
Folk Horror is a term that has emerged as a distinct genre of its own in recent years; this is a B-budgeted attempt to join the bandwagon
Sadako 3D (2012)
The original Ring was a classic, an eerie ghost story that was a success that spawned a series of copies right around the Asian region. Here the Ring cycle has been rebooted in a heavy letdown that abandons all of the creepy atmospherics of the original for a series of pop-up CGI effects
Sadisterotica (1969)
A film from cult exploitation director Jesus Franco that combines a masked thief and a killer artist plot but emerges tawdrily, not to mention has nothing whatsoever to do with the suggestive title
Safe Haven (2013)
Weepie romantic chick flick adapted from a Nicholas Sparks novel, included here for a fantastic twist ending. Sparks has stolen much of his plot from Stephen King’s Rose Madder. Even as such, wife-beating as the backdrop to a romance casts a distasteful shadow over the exercise
Saga of the Phoenix (1990)
Sequel to the madcap Hong Kong fantasy Peacock King with Gloria Yip as a hell demon trying to adjust to living on Earth, which then turns into a comedy variant on Gremlins
St Agatha (2018)
Saw series director Darren Lynn Bousman makes a film set at a convent for unwed mothers in the 1950s. Is there any chance this might be a work about institutional cruelty or the plight of unwed mothers in the era? Hardly, all it really is is Bousman inflicting a series of tortures on the girls
San Andreas (2015)
As the spectacle of mass destruction goes, you could hardly get more epic in scale than this. On the other hand, as someone whose hometown was obliterated by an earthquake in 2011, I find it offensive that such devastation is arranged for our enjoyment while the suffering and even the idea that anybody has been killed has been edited out
Santa and Sons & Daughter! (2005)
Painful Christmas movie where Santa’s daughter takes on an evil miser
The Santa Clause (1994)
Popular film with Tim Allen as a regular family man who is forced to become Santa. Several sequels followed.
The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause (2006)
Third of the Santa Clause films starring Tim Allen as Santa where his reality is upended by the evil Jack Frost