Virtual Sexuality (1999)
Essentially a frothy British romantic comedy version of Weird Science where a girl manifests the perfect guy. The VR aspect is no more than a trendy buzzword appropriated as explain-all
Virus (1999)
This has the novelty of a monster that is an evolving fusion of machinery and organics. While it is all directed with much noise and fury, it is ultimately no more than another copy of Alien
Visions (2015)
Another effort from the near-ubiquitous Blumhouse horror company. A film that teases many things – occult rituals, cultists after the pregnant heroine’s baby – that prove red herrings as it eventually telescopes down to a frustratingly ordinary explanation
The Visitor (2022)
Blumhouse production where Finn Jones moves to a small town and finds the portrait of the town’s founder is a ringer for him
Vivo (2021)
Animated film about a talking and singing monkey from Cuba that travels to the US on a quest
Viy (2014)
Russian-made adaptation of a classic horror story that takes place as an exquisitely stylised 19th Century Gothic fantasy world but is a head-scratchingly incoherent mishmash on a plotting level
Vlad the Impaler (1979)
Romanian-made film about the real-life historical tyrant Vlad Tepes who loaned his name to Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Vlad the Impaler (2000)
A film based on the historic tyrant that gave the world the name Dracula. This ends up being too sympathetic and loses all credibility when it tries to tie in vampire mythology
Voice from the Stone (2017)
Strongly reminiscent of The Innocents, Emilia Clarke from Game of Thrones plays a nanny arriving at an estate to tend a boy who claims to hear his dead mother’s voice in the stone walls.
The Void (2001)
Film where scientists creates an an atom-sized black hole that has the potential to destroy the Earth
Voodoo (1995)
A low-budget film where Corey Feldman is a university student who signs into an oddball fraternity only to find that it practices voodoo rites and he has signed away his soul
The Voyage Home: Star Trek IV (1986)
Fourth of the original Star Trek films jumps on board the popularity of time travel themes following Back to the Future to have the regulars time travel back to the present for a series of amiable, easy comic encounters
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961)
The film that inspired the popular tv series. As always with Irwin Allen, stolid dramatics, bad science and colourful spectacle
Voyage to the End of the Universe (1963)
Czech film from a Stanislaw Lem novel made from the height of the Soviet era depicting day-to-day life about a space mission to explore another planet
Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968)
Another Roger Corman film made up out of footage recycled from Russian SF films and pseudnonymously directed by a young Peter Bogdanovich in a rather silly plot about astronauts encountering dinosaur-worshipping women on Venus
Voyagers (2021)
The promising idea of a generation ship story, although you realise soon in that this has been conceived as no more than Lord of the Flies in space
WΔZ (2007)
Serial killer thriller that eventually emerges as I Spit on Your Grave reimagined as a police procedural. Much effort is made to portray a grim urban environment but little to engage as a thriller, although Selma Blair owns the show as the avenged woman in the latter third
The Wall (1998)
Film made to celebrate the millennium where a totalitarian government creates a wall that divides Belgium along linguistic lines
The Wandering Earth (2019)
Chinese attempt to make a Roland Emmerich-type mass destruction spectacle about the moving of the Earth. Much effects spectacle but the film suffers from plain absurd science
Wandering Rose (2014)
Neither of this film’s titles do it justice – Wandering Rose seems either about a girl who hitchhikes or is very promiscuous, while Demon Baby pushes it over into a devil pregnancy film. What we instead have is a film set in the Scottish Highlands that creates a great sense of dis-ease, even if it never fully delivers on it
War Between the Planets (1966)
One of the various Italian space operas of the 1960s from director Antonio Margheriti. This has a certain colourful ambition despite frequently being let down by cheap effects
War of the Colossal Beast (1958)
Bert I. Gordon makes a sequel to The Amazing Colossal Man. The film cheats where a good chunk of running time is padded with footage from the original
War of the Dead (2011)
The Nazi zombie film has enjoyed a revival in recent years, this is one entry in the genre from Finland made with a reasonable grit and realism
War of the Gargantuas (1966)
From Ishiro Honda, the creator of Godzilla, this bizarrely features two giant Frankenstein monsters battling it out. A fairly typical Japanese monster movie of its era featuring cheesily ridiculous rubber monsters, copious mass destruction and a largely irrelevant human element
War of the Worlds 2: The Next Wave (2008)
Sequel to The Asylum mockbuster version. Sequelising H.G. Wells is a daunting prospect and not too surprisingly this throws much of Wells out and creates its own film, which is undercut by a typical Asylum low budget
The War of the Worlds (2019)
BBC mini-series that sets out to restore the H.G. Wells novel to the era it was written. This it does, as well as restores many aspects that other films change. At the same time, it also introduces some radical changes that make it the most variant of the adaptations to date
War of the Worlds: The Attack (2023)
The idea of H.G. Wells’ classic alien invasion novel rewritten with a Young Adult focus makes you cringe but the idea works in its own way
Warcraft (2016)
Adapted from the videogame, this is a third hand rehash of the basics of Tolkien. Secondly, it looks like a giant CGI cartoon where almost anything interesting about the world has been sidelined in favour of fantasy action
The Ward (2010)
John Carpenter returned to the director’s chair after more than a decade but failed to light the world on fire. Carpenter makes what you could call a ghost story version of Girl, Interrupted. The scares are tame and the film is hamstrung by an improbable M. Night Shyamalan twist ending
Warhead (1996)
Routine action film about the attempts to stop a rogue general who has hijacked a nuclear missile silo
Warhunt (2022)
A supernatural variant on Overlord where G.I.’s during WWII enter the Black Forest and encounter something supernatural
Warlock: The End of Innocence (1999)
Third and final of the Warlock films where Julian Sands is replaced by Bruce Payne
The Warrior and the Sorceress (1984)
One of the spate of sword and sorcery films that came out during this period, marginally better than most. The plot is a blatant copy of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo where a swordsman (David Carradine) sets two rival gang factions in a town against one another
Warriors of Virtue (1997)
Fantasy film set in a magical otherworld defended by martial arts wielding kangaroos
The Wasp Woman (1959)
Roger Corman cheapie clearly influenced by The Fly in which a woman becomes a creature after using a beauty product derived from wasp venom
Wasting Away (2007)
Horror comedy told from the perspective of four friends who are unaware they have been transformed into zombies. The contrast of their reactions with everybody else as they flee in terror is mildly amusing for awhile but this is essentially a one-gag film
The Watch (2012)
An uninspired comedy about a neighbourhood watch encountering alien invaders that falls somewhere between Ghostbusters and The ‘Burbs. The film’s virtues lie less in the weak premise than in the director allowing the stars to freely improvise with occasionally funny results
The Watcher (2000)
Serial killer thriller that is built around the stunt casting of Keanu Reeves as the killer
The Watcher in the Woods (1980)
Problem ridden Disney ghost story with a science-fiction rationalisation that never quite comes together on screen
Watchers (1988)
Dean R. Koontz adaptation in which Corey Haim adopts an unusually intelligent dog unaware it is part of a genetically engineered killing machine. Produced by Roger Corman who spun out a series of sequels.
Watermelon Man (1970)
From Melvin Van Peebles who made the first Blaxploitation film, a satire in which a white man wakes up to find he has turned black. This takes a savage bite out of race relations but ends up without teeth in being distracted by Godfrey Cambridge’s raucous loudmouth performance
Waterworld (1995)
The most expensive film ever made at the time, a Kevin Costner epic in which he is a lone mariner in a drowned world where survivors cling to shantytowns floating on the surface. Essentially a Mad Max film located on water.
The Wave (2019)
Justin Long goes on a bender and takes some drugs that bend reality and leave him moving through time. Sort of like a version of Scorsese’s After Hours that dives into drug culture, this wants to be edgy but ends up in surprisingly traditional places.
Wavelength (1983)
Modestly made alien contact film that came out not long after Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Way … Way Out (1966)
Comedy in which Jerry Lewis and Connie Stevens are forced to marry to go to The Moon. The sexual politics play out pretty embarrassingly today
We Are the Flesh (2016)
There are few films that you can accuse of crossing over taboo lines and keeping going without compromise. This Mexican film has been construed as a catalogue of depravities; on the other hand, the lack of even a nominal plot soon causes this to lapse into repetitive tedium
We Are Zombies (2023)
A zombie comedy from the Quebecois trio who were responsible for Turbo Kid, this takes place in a world where zombies are less a horde than an annoyance who have been relegated to the fringes of society
We Have a Ghost (2023)
Christopher Landon, director of Happy Death Day and Freaky, makes a comedy about a family who turn the ghost in their house into a viral sensation
We Summon the Darkness (2019)
A film that feels as though it is written by someone who is a fan of 80s heavy metal bands and was there during the day. This throws Satanic ritual sacrifice into the equation and rather enjoyably turns everything we think is going on on its head
The Weight of Water (2000)
One of Kathryn Bigelow’s less successful films, an adaptation of an Anita Shreve historical murder mystery that tells a story in two different time periods
Weird Science (1985)
John Hughes cornered a certain 80s market on teen angst with films like The Breakfast Club. He also made this head-scratching oddity in which two nerds create the perfect woman
Welcome to Blood City (1977)
Clearly influenced by the original Westworld, this is an interesting film about people waking up inside a computer-simulated Western town. Without realising it, this was the very first film to depict Virtual Reality
Welcome to Marwen (2018)
Robert Zemeckis of Back to the Future and Forrest Gump fame makes a film of the true-life story of Mark Hogancamp who recovered from a brutal assault by building a fantasy village of dolls. The results are bizarre where Zemeckis seems more interested in making a Sucker Punch-like fantasy where the dolls come to life
Wer (2013)
From the director of The Devil Inside comes a werewolf film that wants to convince us it might not be a werewolf and a Found Footage film that is only pretending to be a Found Footage film. The result is a crappily photographed film that takes a long time to ever unleash its werewolf
We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story (1993)
Juvenile animated film from Amblin Entertainment concerning dinosaurs whose intelligence is raised to human level and they are let loose in the present-day
Weredeer (2022)
Exactly as the title suggests, a film in which a girl is transformed into a weredeer after a bite from a deer. Surprisingly enough, the film plays itself seriously
A Werewolf Boy (2012)
Despite the title, this South Korean film is less a werewolf story than it is a love story about a feral child. The film seems overburdened by the need to pitch the film to the teen demographic and play the violins and heartstrings as a Twilight wannabe
Werewolf in a Womens Prison (2006)
This is exactly what it sounds like – a blend of werewolf film and the women in prison exploitation genre with expectedly lurid and entertaining focus. A film that makes no pretence it is being serious, which actually becomes its redeeming quality
The Werewolf of Woodstock (1975)
Another bizarre werewolf movie title collusion from the 1970s era that produced such as Werewolves on Wheels and The Boy Who Cried Werewolf. The film is never quite up to making the notion of hippies vs werewolves work with the amusement of its title
The Werewolf vs the Vampire Woman (1971)
The third of Spanish star Paul Naschy’s films about the werewolf Waldemar Daninsky. This becomes a crossover where Daninsky meets up to fight Countess Bathory
Werewolf Woman (1976)
A classic from 70s Euro trash cinema. The title is misleading as this is not about a female werewolf but more akin to Cat People about a disturbed woman who thinks she has turned into a werewolf at the thought of sex
We’ve Forgotten More Than We Ever Knew (2016)
Cryptic film about a couple wandering a post-apocalyptic terrain who discover an untouched and still working apartment tower. Less a work of SF than one of baffling surrealism
What Happened to Monday (2017)
From Tommy Wirkola, director of Dead Snow and Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, a film where Noomi Rapace plays seven identical sisters hiding their existence in an overpopulated dystopian future, A film where neither the scenario nor the central characters end up convincing in any way
What to Do With the Dead Kaiju? (2022)
An amusing take on the Japanese Monster Movie that takes place in the aftermath of a monster battle as various government agencies debate what do with the carcass of a giant monster lying in the countryside
What Women Want (2011)
Chinese remake of the romcom where Mel Gibson was suddenly able to hear women’s thoughts. A second time over, the premise seems slight while the film crucially fails to create much passion between its two stars
Wheels of Terror (1990)
A blatant copy of Steven Spielberg’s Duel in which school bus driver Joanna Cassidy pursues a muscle car with never-seen driver who has abducted her daughter. Two-thirds of the film is taken up by an extended car chase scene where the stunt people seem to be having a field day
When a Killer Calls (2006)
One of The Asylum’s first mockbusters, designed to popularise on the remake of When a Stranger Calls
When Michael Calls (1972)
TV movie that comes with a great opening hook – a family receive phone calls from a brother who died 15 years earlier
When Night Falls (2007)
New Zealand-made horror film about two nurses being stalked at a remote hopsital
When Pigs Fly (1993)
Peculiar film where Alfred Molina is the landlord of a pub who is visited by two ghosts appearing out of a rocking chair
When the Whales Came (1989)
This is what might result if Greenpeace were allowed to take over the BBC arts division. Nicely made but not necessarily a great period drama about a whale curse
The Whispering (1995)
Unremarkable and largely forgotten video release with former teen heartthrob Leif Garrett investigating appears of a mysterious figure that encourages people to suicide
Whispers (1990)
Dean R. Koontz adaptation in which Victoria Tennant kills an attacker only for him to be found alive again and return to attack her, involving her in a complex web involving Satanism, vampirism and twins
White (2011)
Another South Korean copy of Ring with haunted pop songs instead of tv broadcasts. This offers interesting insight into the K-pop phenomenon but nothing particularly standout in the way of scares
White Dog (1982)
A controversial film at the time it came out where Kristy MacNichol adopts a stray dog she accidentally runs down only to find it has been trained by racists to kill African-Americans
The White King (2016)
An acclaimed semi-autobiographical novel about a childhood growing up under Soviet rule is filmed translated to a near-future dystopian setting
Who Killed Doc Robbin (1948)
Typical Old Dark House comedy of the 1940s, which has been welded to the formula of the Our Gang comedies with a bunch of kids engaged in a comedic antics in a scary mansion peopled by apes, dead bodies and a sinister scientist
Wicked City (1993)
Live-action version of a manga that was previously made as an anime. This Hong Kong-made version is the lesser, lacking the perverse sexual imagery of the anime. It does feature the wildly fantastical action scenes typical to HK fantasy of this era but this has been conducted on a low-budget and looks rubbery (*)
Wicked: For Good (2025)
The second half of the film adaptation of the musical Wicked. This essentially operates as Wizard of Oz fanfiction and substantially wrenches the characters and backstories from the 1939 film out of shape to write its own story
Wicked: Part 1 (2024)
The first half of a two-part adaptation of the hit Broadway musical that is a prequel to The Wizard of Oz, showing The Wicked Witch’s origin story
Wifelike (2022)
This is like a version of The Stepford Wives updated to the era of Ex Machina and the modern A.I./android film
The Wild, Wild Planet (1965)
One of the cheap Italian space operas of the 1960s from Antonio Margheriti. This has a certain colourful absurdity amid the mostly dull happenings and B-budget effects
Willard (2003)
James Wong and Glen Morgan, the duo behind Final Destination, remake the 1971 film about a man and his rats. However, this is set in a stylised 1940s world with a caricatured performance from Crispin Glover that causes the film to lack any credibility
Willow (1988)
Outside of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films, not much else that George Lucas has made has been a success. This Ron Howard-directed epic fantasy proved to be a big flop where Howard’s lightweight touch fails to make a one-dimensional plot fly
Willy’s Wonderland (2021)
A horror film premised around Nicolas Cage beating the crap out of a series of possessed animatronic robots, a fairly blatant copy of the Five Nights at Freddy’s videogame
Winchester (2018)
Winchester House with its eccentric designs and strange history is reputedly one of America’s most haunted locales. From Australia’s Spierig Brothers who made the likes of Daybreakers and Predestination, this attempts to tell its story but emerges as far less than it could have been
Wing Commander (1999)
Star Wars meets Top Gun – a concept it is surprising no one has thought of before – but alas this film adaptation of the popular videogame only regurgitates the cliches of either film
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey (2023)
Yes, someone made a horror version of the much loved children’s character. Imagine The Texas Chain Saw Massacre where Leatherface has been replaced by Winnie-the-Pooh
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey II (2024)
Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey offered a horror version of the much loved children’s character. This is more of the same with a bigger budget
Winter’s Tale (2014)
Akiva Goldsman, a screenwriter who has laid a trail of devastation through the genre, attempts to film a classic fantasy novel that has aptly described as unfilmable, resulting in a curtailed story that works in individual scenes but is mostly a spawling patchwork of fantasy elements and a romance that never seems to spark
Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies (1999)
The first of the sequels to Wishmaster and better than the ones that would follow, although still not a patch on the imaginative makeup effects in the original
Witchboard 2 (1993)
Way back before Blumhouse’s Ouija and the subsequent cheap ouija-titled films, there was the 80s horror Witchboard, which proved popular enough that it produced two sequels starting with this
Witchboard (2024)
A remake of the 1980s horror Witchboard. The original was just a VHS release and here is given a better budgeted workover, but disappears among a host of ouija-titled films of recent years
Witchcraft (1964)
Entry in the Anglo-horror cycle with a resurrected witch and an imported Lon Chaney Jr presiding over deviltry in a sleepy English village
Witchery (1988)
Italian horror film featuring David Hasselhoff and Linda Blair that has little going for it bar some imaginatively gruesome deaths
The Witches (2020)
Robert Zemeckis’s remake of the Roald Dahl story and Nicolas Roeg film proves a head-scratching effort that misfires on almost every cue
Witchslayer Gretl (2012)
A low-budget film that prefigures the big-budget Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters in turning the fairytale brother and sister into witchslayers in a generic fantasy adventure plot
Within the Rock (1996)
Low-budget Alien copy directed by makeup effects artist Gary J. Tunnicliffe with a plot that prefigures Armageddon as drillers uncover an alien nasty on an asteroid
Without Warning (1980)
One of the first copies of Alien, this essentially acts as a slasher movie but with an alien instead of a hockey-masked killer. It also manages to predict the essentials of Predator in many ways. A B-movie but the cast list makes for eye-opening reading today
The Wiz (1978)
Musical modernisation of The Wizard of Oz relocated in New York City with an All-Black cast. Despite a clear budget arrayed, the film lumbers and never much comes to life