The Special (2020)
Film about a man who develops an obsession with a mysterious black box that gives him the best sex of his life
The Specials (2000)
An obscure parody about a team of inept and dysfunctional superheroes that was one of the earliest works from a then unknown James Gunn (who not only writes but stars as one of the superheroes)
Species (1995)
Slick and rather silly copy of Alien that conceptually cross-hatches it to emerge as essentially Basic Instinct with tentacles
Species III (2004)
The third of the Species films, which follows Sil’s daughter. Some okay makeup effects but the plotting gets fairly silly
Species: The Awakening (2007)
Fourth entry in the Species series where at least the series seems to have gravitated to the arena of the trashily absurd B movie it belongs
Spectre (2015)
The fourth Daniel Craig James Bond film welcomely resurrects one of the great nemeses from the series past – only to fall flat on its face. This is a Bond film severely hampered by a director unattuned to the classical elements of the series and the need to cripple everything by giving Bond backstory and character development
Spermula (1976)
Rather of an oddity – a French adult film about women from the future that in the aftermath of Star Wars was re-edited to become a film about alien women visitors come to kill off the human species via sex. Often directed with an artiness that proves far more than you expect
Spice World (1997)
The Spice Girls conduct their own version of The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, a largely plotless film with them clowning around. Including appearances from aliens.
Spider in the Attic (2021)
From incredibly prolific B-budget British producer/director Scott Jeffrey, a film about a radio broadcaster who ventures to the home of a scientist to find it overrun by genetically engineered spiders
Spider-Man Strikes Back (1979)
The 1970s Spider-Man tv series was a miserable failure at live-action superheroics, little more than a crime show with a costumed hero. This was the best of three theatrically released films edited from it with the plot of students building an atomic bomb has an undeniable real world credibility
Spiders (2000)
In a whole bunch of ways this – plausibility being a big one of them – is a bad film. On the other hand, it does boast an entertaining array of giant spiders all emerged from a space shuttle crash
Spiders on a Plane (2024)
From prolific producer Scott Chambers, a film that describes itself perfectly in the title. This follows the formula established by Snakes on a Plane and has regular and giant spiders amok on board a plane flight
The Spiral (1998)
The black sheep among the Japanese Ringu films. A sequel released the same time as the first film, this lacks the other’s uncanny atmosphere and was ignored
Spiral: From the Book of Saw (2021)
The Saw series is revived sort of, featuring the activities of a Jigsaw copycat, otherwise this offers up all the familiar essentials in all but name
The Spirit (1987)
Few people today have an idea of what a huge name comic-book creator Will Eisner was. This was an unsold tv pilot adaptation of Eisner’s most famous creation, the masked hero The Spirit. The pilot is not a very successful effort but at least it makes an effort to get many of the details and zany spirit of the comic right
Spirit (2001)
Banal ghost story mostly noted for starring a teenage Elisabeth Moss
The Spirit is Willing (1967)
Here gimmick master William Castle turns his attention away from the usual into making a light fantasy comedy about a family who buy a house inhabited by ghosts
The Spirit of 76 (1990)
Clearly an attempt to copy the success of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, this is a comedy with time travellers visiting the 1970s. Lots of 70s pop culture and faces without any of it being funny
Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds (1987)
The first film from Alex Proyas who once seemed a director of great promise with The Crow and Dark City, this seems to be trying to create a Mad Max post-apocalyptic film as a student art film
Spiritwalker (2020)
A conceptually intriguing cross between the bodyswap film and the South Korean gangster film
Split Infinity (1992)
Christian-made family film where a girl travels back in time to 1929 to help save the family farm
Split Second (1992)
A mishmash of Alien copy and supernatural serial killer film set in a drowned future London with a script that makes no real sense. The film’s buddy cop relationship starring Rutger Hauer does have its amusements.
Spooks Run Wild (1941)
The East Side Kids, a popular comedy group during the 1940s/50s, conduct a variant on the Old Dark House film featuring a sinisterly lurking Bela Lugosi … The East Side Kids’ films were made on impoverished budgets – this one of their better but still aimlessly circles around creaky and dated gags
The Spring (2000)
TV movie where Kyle MacLachlan comes across a town where the residents have discovered a Fountain of Youth
Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over (2003)
The third in the series is no longer even a Spy Kids film but a Virtual Reality videogame film. Robert Rodriguez has some fun creating the virtual worlds but the parody that the other films engaged in is missing
The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)
The tenth of the James Bond films, the third for Roger Moore. This determines to be spectacular in terms of international locales, effects and sets. It was also the point where the Moore Bond films started to become giant cartoon spectacles of the absurd
SSSSSSSS! (1973)
Throwback to the mad scientist film with modern makeup effects in which scientist Strother Martin injects Dirk Benedict with a serum that turns him into a snake man
The St. Francisville Experiment (2000)
A blatant copy of The Blair Witch Project with a group of people armed with video cameras investigating a haunted house
Stacy (2001)
A bizarre Japanese film about hordes of schoolgirl zombies
Stake Land II (2016)
Stake Land, set in a beautifully wintry post-holocaust world where vampires had taken over, one of the best films from Glass Eye Pix. This is a sequel that reunites most of the same elements from the original but fails to ignite them as memorably as the first film did
Stalked (1994)
Pierre David produced psycho-thriller where Maryam d’Abo is befriended by Jay Underwood who proves to be a stalker in a creepily effective performance
Stanley (1972)
From the 1970s Animals Attack genre, a blatant copy of Willard where a downtrodden man befriends rattlesnakes and uses them to take revenge
Star Trek (2009)
J.J. Abrams revives the Star Trek franchise by recasting it with younger faces and rewriting continuity. But in the appeal to a hipper, sexier vibe, it feels a long way from Gene Roddenberry’s creation – nowhere in evidence is the original’s concern with galactic politics and social issues of the day
Star Trek: Beyond (2016)
Gene Roddenbery created a tv series that was about boldly going, confronting different ways of life. The choice to hire the director of The Fast and the Furious films to helm the film made for the show’s 50th anniversary says how wrong-headed the reboot series has become – all about cool young leads and hurtling effects sequences
Star Trek: Generations (1994)
The first of the Star Trek: The Next Generation films is an odd affair that seems like a routine episode of the series that accidentally gained a big-screen budget. This crosses over with Classic Trek where William Shatner mugs his way through a grand old airing of Captain Kirk
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984)
Leonard Nimoy steps into the director’s chair of the third Star Trek film and his doing marks the shift of the films from intergalactic adventuring into the regulars engaged in a safe, easy set of adventures playing to fan audiences
Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013)
I had mixed feelings about J.J. Abrams’ reboot of Star Trek This time around the actors seem more at home in the characters and the plot works a good deal better (for the most part), while Abrams creates a hurtling effects spectacle that is the most action-oriented of the Trek films
Star Trek: Section 31 (2025)
A Star Trek film spun off around Michelle Yeoh and the secret service that appears in the modern revival series
Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)
The concluding chapter of the third trilogy of Star Wars films. After the critically divided The Last Jedi, J.J. Abrams opts for a return to the safety of familiarity and nostalgia
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999)
George Lucas’s return to the Star Wars series after a sixteen year absence and a build-up rivaled only by the Second Coming. Instead most audiences went away disappointed. Lucas has used the interim to push the technology to its heights but the story and characters are lacking
Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002)
The second of George Lucas’s Stars Wars prequels is no particular improvement. The romance is stiff and awkward, badly written while the effects sequences seem to be running out of new things to do and so just up the scale of what has happened before with so much going on it reaches a point of visual overload
Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983)
A disappointing end to George Lucas’s original Star Wars trilogy. The script lazily wraps up loose ends while sidelining the new characters introduced the last time, and the climax rehashes the climaxes of the two other films
Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008)
Theatrical spinoff from the Star Wars prequels, released to introduce the popular animated series. This shows it is time for George Lucas to move beyond recycling something that was successful three decades ago
Starship Apocalypse (2014)
Sequel to Starship Rising, a space opera that does some amazing things with effects on a next-to-no budget
Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation (2003)
Passable video-released Starship Troopers sequel the heads more in the direction of a body snatchers film. Directed by Phil Tippett
Starship Troopers: Traitor of Mars (2017)
The fifth of the films in the series begun with Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. The best of the series was the previous entry Starship Troopers: Invasion where they turned it over to anime director Shinji Aramaki. This is a sequel to that, although the same mix fails to work again
Stay Out of the Fucking Attic (2020)
A team of house movers find they are working for infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele who has an attic full of deformed mutations
Stealth (2005)
Action film about an artificially intelligent fighter plane that goes amok. Rob Cohen directs in all the cliches of the genre and the seeming need to have something spectacular happening every few minutes
The Steam Experiment (2009)
This offers one of the more original twists on the Saw set-up – Val Kilmer plays a professor who imprisons a group of people in a steam room slowly turning the temperature up as a protest against global warming.
Steel (1997)
Widely ridiculed adaptation of the DC Comics superhero featuring Shaquille O’Neal that slips down to a simplistic level of Saturday morning cartoons inanity
Steel Dawn (1987)
Patrick Swayze vehicle that uncreditedly relocates the Western Shane into a post-holocaust setting
Stepfather II (1989)
Sequel to the hit psycho-thriller. Terry O’Quinn is back and on fine form but this just repeats the original, bumps up the number of killings with extra gore to become no more than a B psycho film
The Stepford Wives (1975)
Ira Levin’s original novel wherein the men of a town replace their wives with subservient android duplicates seems to have its satiric point blunted when it comes to the film adaptation
The Stepford Wives (2004)
Frank Oz conducts a remake of The Stepford Wives, which becomes a broad comedy take on the gender wars in the modern world
Still Small Voices (2006)
TV movie in which Catherine Bell is a 911 operator who receives calls from a ghostly child
Stir of Echoes: The Awakening (2007)
Stir of Echoes was a spookily effective film. Alas in this sequel, we go from Kevin Bacon as a medium to Rob Lowe as a haunted Iraq War veteran amid a series of routine pop-up scares
Storage 24 (2012)
British effort that proves to be no more than another copy of Alien – set in a warehouse of storage lockers. The film never consists of anything beyond a crashingly ordinary regurgitation of the moves used by an endless number of Alien copies
Storm Warning (2007)
An Australian-made variant on the Backwoods Brutality cycle where a whitebread couple on a sailing trip are tortured by hicks. Nothing beyond the cliches or remarkable about this.
Storm Warriors (2009)
The Pang Brothers are some of the most exciting genre directors in the world. Here they take on the Wu Xia film and make a sequel to The Storm Riders that feels fuelled by too many viewings of 300
The Story of My Death (2013)
This film’s pitch line – Casanova meets Dracula – had me in the door in an instant, yet the film is a maddeningly dull one – slow, plotless with talky scenes that drag on for minutes at a time. The film has no interest in depicting Casanova the famous lover, while he and Dracula never even talk together
The Strange Case of Angelica (2010)
From the world’s oldest living director ( Manoel de Oliveira who turned 102 when this was released) comes a ghost story that remains soporifically dull and never seems to get started
The Strange Case of Doctor Rx (1942)
One of the mad scientist films of the era – or perhaps more correctly a murder mystery/comedy with an identity disorder. This features an amazing cast, including bad guy Lionel Atwill as a sinister doctor and Shemp Howard, of Three Stooges fame, as a comic-relief detective
Strange Holiday (1945)
Arch Oboler makes a film in which Claude Rains returns from a holiday to find a Nazi government has overtaken the USA
Strange Magic (2015)
George Lucas’s venture into animation was critically pilloried. It’s not bad, just no different from a formula film like Rise of the Guardians or Epic. From the man who made Star Wars, you had higher expectations
Strange New World (1975)
The third of the films based around Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s Genesis II concept where a cryogenic sleeper awakes in a post-apocalyptic world
The Strange Possession of Mrs. Oliver (1977)
An The Exorcist copy made as a tv movie – where The Exorcist shocked audiences with barf bag theatrics and obscenities, this merely has Karen Black shucking her staid fashion sense and buying a sexy red dress. Rather peculiarly, this becomes a possession story as women’s self-actualisation drama
Strange World (2022)
Disney’s 61st animated film. A lost world adventure that emerges as Fantastic Voyage by way of Avatar
The Strange World of Coffin Joe (1968)
Brazil’s Jose Mojica Marins became a cult figure for his Coffin Joe films; this is an anthology sold under the Coffin Joe banner. Without the Coffin Joe presence, all we have is a series of not very well directed pieces that linger on perversity, although the final segment does stand out memorably
Strangeland (1998)
80s outrage rocker Dee Snider writes and stars in this horror film where he plays a freakish serial killer who is demonised by parents
The Stranger (1973)
Essentially a tv movie version of the Gerry Anderson film Doppelganger in which an astronaut comes around to find he is on a Counter Earth. The premise, an alternate history of sorts, is nonsensical and even then the film abandons it soon in to become a variant on The Fugitive
The Stranger (2014)
Eli Roth produced film made in Chile, this concerns a mysterious stranger to town who turns out to be a vampire that is soon sought and hunted by everybody. A promising premise given a not terribly interesting handling
The Stranger (2022)
A British film about a mother and daughter who open a B&B only to be taken hostage by a mysterious stranger on the run from sinister forces
The Stranger Beside Me (2003)
True crime film based on a woman who was best friends with serial killer Ted Bundy
Stranger from Venus (1954)
A British-made ripoff of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Slow, plodding and talky without the action ever seeming to move beyond the confines of a country pub
The Stranger Game (2006)
Routine psycho-thriller where Mimi Rogers’ home is invaded by psycho babysitter David Orth
A Stranger is Watching (1982)
The film that Sean S. Cunningham went on to direct after the huge hit of Friday the 13th. Though sold as a horror film, this is more of a kidnap thriller
The Stranger Within (1974)
TV movie with a script from Richard Matheson in which Barbara Eden becomes mysteriously pregnant. The film seems to be a copy of Rosemary’s Baby before it is suddenly turns into an alien impregnation film
The Strangers: Chapter 3 (2026)
The concluding chapter in a desultory trilogy of films based on the eerie home invasion classic The Strangers. The surprise is that this ends up being the best of the three films
Strangers Online (2010)
Passable attempt to return to the heyday of the 1990s erotic thriller. Made on the cheap side, this does an okay job of covering the basics until an improbable denouement
The Strangers: Prey At Night (2018)
The Strangers has been cited as one of the best horror films of the 2000s. This sequel emerges as a by-the-numbers entry that plays out no differently than a generic teen slasher film
Stream (2024)
Horror film with a substantial cast of genre veterans where Jeffrey Combs imprisons guests in a hotel and livestreams as a group of killers compete to rack up the most creative kill
Stree (2018)
An Indian horror film about a folk tale of a witch spirit the Stree, this was a popular success that was then built out into an Indian version of The Conjuring Universe
Street Fighter (1994)
Based on the popular videogame, you cannot complain that this is exactly what you expect – wall-to-wall action, comic-book heroes and villains. The complaint might be that the action is never particularly enervated and the film lacks anything beyond that
Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (2009)
Sequel to the 1994 Street Fighter film based on the videogame, this provides the wall-to-wall action that the first film needed but falls down with a wimpily miscast heroine
Streets (1990)
Gritty urban drama with Christina Applegate as a teenage runaway on the mean streets of L.A. harassed by a psycho cop
Striking Distance (1993)
Action thriller with Bruce Willis as a river patrol detective hunting a serial killer
Strip Nude for Your Killer (1975)
A giallo film about a masked man killing models. This comes with an attention-grabbing title that proves more sensational than most of what happens in the film
Stripped (2013)
A Found Footage film where a group on a party weekend to Las Vegas call a brothel that promises to do anything – only to enter into full Hostel territory
Stripped to Kill (1987)
The very first film with the plot of a woman cop going undercover in a strip club. The police procedural plot and psycho element takes a very clear backseat to the stripper set-pieces, some of which are imaginatively staged. On the plus side, the film is directed by a woman
Stuck (2007)
Stuart Gordon, the cult director of Re-Animator, makes a film based on a bizarre true incident where a woman ran a homeless man down and drove home with him still impacted through the windshield of her car
Stuff (1999)
Canadian-made black comedy about a ring that can revive the dead
Subferatu (2020)
Comedy about a shipwrecked crew that are rescued by a German U-boat that is carrying a vampire on board
Sublime (2007)
Horror film in which Tom Cavanagh goes into hospital for a routine procedure only to emerge with his leg amputated amid increasingly more surreal things happening around the hospital
Submerged (2005)
Steven Seagal submarine action where he tackles a terrorist who has perfected mind control techniques
Subspecies (1991)
The first in a series of vampire films from Charles Band and Full Moon Productions. Several sequels followed.
Suburban Gothic (2014)
From the director of Excision, another film that satirically digs its claws into middle-class values but there is the feeling we have seen all of this before and the film fails to provide anything funny. Added to this is a barely scary ghost plot the film occasionally remembers to get back to
Sucker Punch (2011)
Bizarrely uncategorisable film from Zack Snyder that seems a mix of Girl, Interrupted and Inception
Sufferrosa (2011)
Billed as the world’s first interactive film, although it falls well short of what one expected. his involves film noir homage, mad scientists and sinister rejuvenation institutes but lacks any real narrative, just feels like a series of random information pop-ups and flickering MTV graphics
Suicide Club (2002)
Japanese horror film that launched the name of Shion Sono and is attention grabbing but proves an unfathomable mix of mass suicides, mysterious websites that predict deaths and a pop band seemingly controlling it all
Suicide Squad (2016)
This team-up of C-list DC super-villains proved a surprise hit. The script is all over the place but Margot Robbie owns the screen as the gleefully insane Kewpie Doll gone wrong Harley Quinn