A Nightmare on Elm Street III: The Dream Warriors (1987)
The point where Robert Englund’s Freddy went from a boogeyman into the equivalent of Wile E. Coyote, popping up like a malevolent jack-in-a-box to quip a one-liner and dispatch victims
Nightmare Sisters (1988)
An 80s Scream Queen film featuring Linnea Quigley, Brinke Stevens and Michelle Bauer as sorority girls who become possessed. From director David DeCoteau
A Nightmare Wakes (2020)
One of several films based on the famous writer’s workshop at Villa Diodati in 1816 and the meeting with Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and Dr Polidori that led to Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein
Night’s End (2022)
A film shot during Covid lockdown that creates a great sense of isolation with a man locked inside a possibly haunted apartment
Nightwing (1979)
Adaptation of a Martin Cruz Smith novel about an Indian reservation under attack by hordes of vampire bats. The Nature Amok theme suffers terrible effects and plays subordinate to a polemic about the state of the modern Indian
Nine Lives (2016)
Your mind struggles to process the premise of Nine Lives – where Kevin Spacey finds himself in the body of a cat. It seems a variation on the earlier Oh Heavenly Dog in which Chevy Chase was reincarnated as Benji. Some cute effects but what a lightweight effort for an actor of Spacey’s calibre
No Escape (1994)
Big-budget action film that essentially rewrites Papillon in SF terms. Martin Campbell has a good eye for widescreen action but the film is only drawn in cliches.
No Escape Room (2018)
Another in the fad for horror films about escape rooms we have had in the last few years, this concerns a possibly haunted venue and reaches an interestingly odd ending
No One Lives (2012)
This second English-language film from Japan’s Ryuhei Kitamura came with a good deal of promising advance buzz but upon being seen emerges as a strictly average psycho film that never offers anything outstanding in terms of twists or suspense, nor pushes its audience in any way
No Tell Motel (2013)
Horror film where a group of people end up at an abandoned motel where the secrets they have are turned back on them
The Noah (1975)
Experimental film about the last man left on Earth after a nuclear war who develops a series of imaginary companions
The Noah’s Ark Principle (1984)
Roland Emmerich’s first film, made while he was still a student, involving intrigue aboard a weather control station
Noah’s Shark (2021)
An entry in the gonzo killer shark film fad from Mark Polonia, this has some undeniable amusement to its title mash-up as a team go in search of Noah’s Ark, which somehow has killer sharks involved
Nocebo (2022)
Film that develops a Folk Horror vibe as Eva Green hires a nanny with mysterious healing powers. The horror version of Mary Poppins
Northfork (2003)
The Polish Brothers, two of the most underrated creative teams in the US today, make a rather puzzling film about angels that feels like muted Coen Brothers. The film is cool, measured, has often striking imagery but leaves you scratching your head trying to figure out what it is about
Nosferatu in Venice (1988)
Sequel to Nosferatu the Vampyre featuring a return performance from Klaus Kinski with the action (or lack thereof) relocated to Venice
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
Nostradamus (2000)
A batshit crazy film involving Nostradamus who is a present-day cop, a time travelling assassin trying to bring about the Biblical Apocalypse at The Millennium, plus alternate timelines and a psychic FBI agent
Nothing But the Night (1972)
The one and only film produced by Christopher Lee’s production company, this sets up an interesting premise about a mysterious orphanage but fails to quite make it work
Nothing But Trouble (1991)
The only film ever directed by Dan Aykroyd, a bizarre oddity that was a huge flop on its initial release. The film is a strange comedy set in an American Gothic junkyard town where even the smallest legal infractions are punished by death. Aykroyd can’t seem to decide it the tone is comedy or horror
Now You See Him, Now You Don’t (1972)
The second of Disney’s Dexter Reilly films with Kurt Russell as a teen genius who invents an invisibility formula
Nr. 10 (2021)
Alex van Warmerdam makes a very strange black comedy, so deadpan you are not sure if you are meant to be laughing or not
Nuoc 2030 (2014)
The novelty of the world’s first Vietnamese science-fiction film set in a future where many areas are underwater as a result of climate change. Much of this is a very dull film observing the day to day life of people affected but the SF elements intrude in occasionally interesting ways
The Nurse (1997)
Psycho-thriller with Lisa Zane as a nurse seeking vengeance for the death of her father
The Nutcracker and the Four Realms (2018)
Big, no-expense-spared Disney production of the fairytale. The film is stunning to look at it in terms of design and costuming but has a simplicity that leaves little for adults to engage with
The Objective (2008)
The co-director of The Blair Witch Project makes a film about soldiers lost in the desert encountering mysterious lights in the sky. Essentially Blair Witch but with lost soldiers facing UFO phenomena
The Oblong Box (1969)
One of the films seeking to exploit the fad for Edgar Allan Poe adaptations started by Roger Corman in the 1960s. This has nothing to do with the Poe story and mostly shuffles around the familiar elements of the cycle
Observance (2015)
A man surveilling a woman finds strange goings-on and becomes infected by something. This is essentially Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation played as a horror film; alas, while this does a fine job in the build-up, it lacks a third act that explains anything at all
Obsession (1976)
Brian De Palma with Paul Schrader on script make a homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo with Cliff Robertson wandering Venice believing he has found the reincarnation of his late wife
The Occupant (2020)
Spain’s Pastor Brothers have been rising genre name in the last few years. This is a psycho film concerning an unemployed man forced out of his apartment who returns to manipulate the life of the new tenant
The Occupant (2025)
A woman survives a helicopter crash and must make a harsh wilderness trek through the Caucasus Mountains before discovering that the helpful voice on the other end of the radio may be something not human
Octopussy (1983)
The thirteenth James Bond film. the fifth for Roger Moore. While the preceding entry had tried to trim back the cartoonish excesses of the Moore era, it is back to business as usual here. The film frequently feels divorced from the remotest shred of realism
Odysseus and the Isle of the Mists (2008)
Supposedly an adventure based on an untold story from The Odyssey, an entry among the fantasy adventure films made for cable filler in the 2000s
Ogre (2008)
A Syfy Channel film about the present-day discovery of a lost, still extant 19th Century village that has conducted a deal to preserve themselves by annually sacrificing someone to an ogre
Oh Heavenly Dog (1980)
A very lame comedy with Chevy Chase as a private detective working in London who is killed and is then reincarnated in the body of a dog (now played by superstar dog Benji)
Oily Maniac (1976)
Outrageously whacked Hong Kong film that prefigures The Toxic Avenger in having a downtrodden hero jump into a pool of oil and emerge as an avenging superhero made of oil. Crudely made and pitched, the film’s novelty all lies in the bizarreness of its title character
OK Connery (1967)
With the success of the James Bond films in the 1960s, someone had the idea of casting Sean Connery’s younger brother Neil in a spy film
The Old Guard (2020)
Huge Netflix hit adapted from a comic-book about a team of immortal mercenaries
Old Man (2022)
Lucky McKee, director of May and The Woman, makes a film about two men meeting at a cabin in the woods where secrets emerge amid psychological tensions between the two
The Omega Code (1999)
The Omen and imitators had been exploiting Biblical End Times prophecies for years but this is one that approaches it from a Christian perspective. The film also started a wave of serious faith-based films that employed name actors in order to carry them to crossover audiences
Omega Doom (1996)
Albert Pyun cheapie in which the plot of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo is relocated to a post-apocalyptic setting and cast with androids
The Omega Man (1971)
The second film version of I Am Legend, this rewrites the book’s vampires as mutants and abandons its mood of paranoia for a fantasy of hippie utopia and Charlton Heston in square-jawed action hero mode
The Omen (2006)
The classic 1976 Anti-Christ film is given the remake treatment. The production look slick but quickly disappears into forgettability
Ominous (2015)
Another of the films with sinister-sounding adjectives that sprung up in the wake of Insidious, this is a cut price copy of The Omen about a child resurrected from the dead who causes a series of deaths
Omni Loop (2024)
A timeloop film with a difference where Mary-Louise Parker takes pills that help her go back and relive the previous five days as she seeks to find ways to travel back even further
On the Nose (2001)
Irish-made comedy with Robbie Coltrane who has a Aborigine head in a jar that can predict horse races
Once Upon a Crime (2023)
A very strange Japanese-made blend of fairytale and detective story that takes place in the realm of fairytale where Little Red Riding Hood turns detective to solve a murder at Cinderella’s ball
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
One Cut of the Dead in Hollywood (2019)
One Cut of the Dead was one of the freshest and most hilariously original takes on the zombie film of recent. This is a sequel
One Point 0 (2004)
This travels into very similar places to Roman Polanski’s The Tenant – a paranoid tale about a man surrounded by very strange apartment neighbours. Apart from adding some reality blurring SF twists to the mix, this does little more than churn cliches
Open Season (2006)
Passable animated film from Sony Pictures Animation, although the story arcs too closely resemble every other animated film for it to have much in the way of notability
Operation Ganymede (1977)
A West German-made film where a space mission to Jupiter returns only for the crew to find the Earth deserted. This captures something of the original Planet of the Apes in its better moments
The Oracle (1953)
British quota quickie, a comedy about a man who discovers an oracle in a well that gives him tips on horse races
Orbiter 9 (2017)
Spanish film about a lone girl on a space mission who has never met another human being and her sudden awakening to the real nature of her world. To say more is to give the film’s on big surprise away. Alas after revealing this, the film seems at a loss what to do next
The Order of the Black Eagle (1987)
A low-budget spy/action film with entertainingly bizarre elements including a cryogenically frozen Hitler and the hero going into action accompanied by a baboon
Orphan (2009)
Another variant on the evil child film featuring a maliciously psychopathic Isabelle Fuhrman
The Orphan Killer (2011)
Modern-day run through of the slasher film with the heroine pursued through a school by an axe-wielding maniac. This leaps into the basics with a real brutality and wades in buckets of gore
Orphans and Angels (2003)
New Zealand made film about a woman who falls under the influence of a sinister stranger who plies her with drugs
Oƨombie (2012)
This surely takes the cake amid the fad for wacky zombie films in which Osama bin Laden is resurrected as a zombie. Imagine a mash-up between Zero Dark Thirty and a zombie film
OtherLife (2017)
Australian SF film about the development of a set of eyedrops that allow the recipient to experience a set of preprogrammed virtual memories. The film does nothing with the idea beyond rehashing Total Recall-like reality games
Otis (2008)
Film about a big overweight psycho who abducts girls and makes them enact a fantasy of being a cheerleader. Produced by one of the directors of The Blair Witch Project
Otto; or, Up With Dead People (2008)
Bruce LaBruce made the world’s first gay pornographic zombie film with L.A. Zombie. This was an earlier trial run, less a porn film and more down around the level of a student art film
Ouija (2014)
Blumhouse horror film based around the Parker Brothers boardgame. Modern multiplex horror films don’t come more generic than this. On the other hand, you cannot deny that debuting director Stiles White creates some occasionally quite spooky moments, it’s just that the rest of the show comes entirely by the numbers
The Ouija Exorcism (2015)
Another title jumping on the fad for ouija board films we’ve had since Blumhouse’s Ouija series, this concerning an ouija board that has a malevolent spirit trapped inside it. Routine tension by the numbers – possessed people with glowing eyes are just not that scary
Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016)
Blumhouse’s Ouija didn’t get many good reviews but they proceeded with a prequel here. This is automatically the better film from the outset by employing Mike Flanagan, behind amazing works like Absentia, Hush and The Haunting of Hill House, as director, even if it comes out as one of Flanagan’s lesser works
Out of Darkness (2022)
A film that follows a group of cavepeople who set out on a journey to find a new land to only to be hunted by mysterious unknown, possibly supernatural threat
Outlaw (2007)
British vigilante film that strains at issues of social relevance but only ends up parroting Death Wish cliches
Outpost: Black Sun (2012)
Outpost was a solid and reasonably effective rehashing of the Nazi zombie theme; this was the first of two sequels. The first had a formula that seems difficult to mess up but this does – it’s over half the film before we get zombies after which we get Just the Same As Before and little more
Outpost III: Rise of the Spetsnaz (2013)
Outpost was a modestly effective Nazi zombie film. This was the second of two sequels, a prequel that goes back to depict the original Nazi experiments
Overlord (2018)
J.J. Abrams’ produced film about soldiers encountering Nazi mad science experiments during WWII. Despite a decent budget thrown at it, this was a box-office failure. It may be that in a genre where we have gravitated to films about Nazi zombies and Nazi moonbases, this was just too tame
Ow (2014)
This begins fantastically well – the appearance of a mysterious alien object that paralyses everybody who looks upon it – only to take a major nosedive in its second act where we promptly realise that the filmmakers didn’t have a clue where to take the story after that
The Owners (2020)
Maisie Williams and an aging Sylvester McCoy in a film about house burglars who break in to a home to discover sinister things afoot
The Oxbow Cure (2013)
Canadian film about a woman alone in a cabin that has a set-up that seems to be heading in the direction of an effective horror film about cabin fever and/or paranoia – only for things to then get completely baffling as to what is happening
Oxygen (1999)
An abduction thriller that draws much influence from The Silence of the Lambs with Adrien Brody as a smooth criminal genius manipulating his interrogator
Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018)
Pacific Rim wasn’t Guillermo Del Toro’s best film but it was a fun attempt to imagine giant Japanese mecha robots battling giant monsters. This is a sequel but without Del Toro it is reduced to no more than one of Michael Bay’s Transformers films
Painted Skin (1992)
A Hong Kong supernatural fantasy that has been made as a copy of the ground-changing A Chinese Ghost Story. The last film directed the legendary King Hu, the man who created the Wu Xia film
Pajama Party (1964)
One of the popular Beach Party comedies of the 1960s. Tommy Kirk turns up as a bumbling Martian to romance Annette Funicello
The Pale Door (2020)
Weird Western where a group of outlaws on the run end up in a town of witches
Pan (2015)
Ostensibly a Peter Pan prequel and origin story, this is a massively over-produced turkey – colossally scaled effects set-pieces, everything obtrusively arranged to pop out at us in 3D – that seems to completely miss the innocent charms that the original story had
Pandorica (2016)
This comes with a premise that holds interest – it many years after the collapse of civlisation where three youth are taken into the woods on a rite of passage only to encounter someone from another tribe fleeing with an object that makes the possessor a god – a handgun
Panic in Year Zero! (1962)
A film about the outbreak of nuclear war directed by actor Ray Milland. What takes you aback is the naked liberatarian fantasy that Milland engages in, arguing in favour of a brutal ruthlessness in the name of survival
Paradise Hills (2019)
Nacho Vigalondo scripted film that seems like a mix between a girls’ boarding school story and an SF film like The Island, all directed with amazingly over-ornamented costuming and design scheme not seen on screen since at least The Cell
Parallel World Love Story (2019)
Japanese film that has overtones of Sliding Doors as a man finds he leads two different parallel lives
Paranoid (2000)
Psycho-thriller in which Jessica Alba finds herself drugged and then held a captive prisoner by Iain Glen
Paranormal Activity 4 (2012)
The Paranormal Activity series has had a better run than most horror franchises up until now but the cracks are starting to show through here. This feels like it is straining to find some new way to do the familiar moves but fails to provide anything unexpected or original
Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin (2021)
Blumhouse resurrects the Paranormal Activity series for another outing about an investigation into the secrets of an Amish cult
Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (2015)
For supposedly the Paranormal Activity series final entry, this offer the novelty of the first Found Footage film in 3D – a gimmick that signals the series is out of fresh ideas. Moreover, the series’ look via watching security cameras has been de-emphasised in favour of another CGI driven ghost story
Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (2014)
Less another sequel than a spinoff of the Paranormal Activity series, this takes place with Latino characters and in a whole different culture and socio-economic strata. While this gives the series a face change, everything else it feels like the shuffling of a well-worn deck of plot cards
Paranormal Asylum (2013)
Loosely set around the legend of Typhoid Mary with ghostbusters investigating an abandoned asylum. One of a host of films that automatically relegate themselves to B movies by borrowing the prefix ‘Paranormal’, this sits between the amateurish and occasionally interesting
Parasomnia (2008)
William Malone, the director of House on Haunted Hill remake, makes an interestingly different film about a girl who has spent most of her life asleep being pursued by a genius killer who invades her dreams
Parents (1989)
Bizarre black comedy directed by actor Bob Balaban that takes place in a paranoid parody of 1950s normalcy about a boy who believes his parents are cannibals
Party Bus to Hell (2017)
A party bus is stranded in the desert and surrounded by Satanists. At least this is a film that you cannot complain delivers exactly what it promises – plentiful toplessness, gore and cheesy creature effects
Party Hard, Die Young (2018)
From the director of Attack of the Lederehosen Zombies, a slasher film set at a rave event
Passengers (2008)
Well-cast, nicely made film that seems to be setting out as a supernatural variant on Fearless, which had Jeff Bridges as a reinvigorated plane crash survivor, only to fall apart in a groan-worthy twist ending that has become tediously overused in recent years
Passion of Mind (2000)
This has the intriguing idea of two Demi Moore’s living on either side of the world, each dreaming that they are the other but the premise pans out as no more than a routine Chick Flick
The Passion of the Christ (2004)
Mel Gibson wants to give us a film that shows Jesus’s suffering leading up to the Crucifixion but has taken it to such an extreme that he has actually created a Torture Porn film that gives the Saw and Hostel franchises a run for their money
Past Perfect (1996)
SF action film with Eric Roberts as a future cop travelling through time trying to stop kids before they become criminals
Patient Zero (2012)
This comes with a good premise – people must escape from a biological containment facility after the release of a virus that turns the infected homicidal. Essentially a low-budget version of The Crazies, this is a film that would have been improved by a studio budget
Paws (1997)
Australian-made children’s film about a kid who creates a computer program so his dog can talk where it then becomes voiced by Billy Connolly
Pay the Ghost (2015)
Nicolas Cage has never had a good relationship with the horror genre – remember The Wicker Man and Vampire’s Kiss? This gives all impression it was designed for the 50c bargain bins, in which Nic tries to save his missing son in what amounts to a supernatural version of Taken