Batman Unlimited: Animal Instincts (2015)
An animated Batman film that is essentially an extended commercial based on a line of toys wherein Batman fights super-villains that have an animal motif
The Batman vs. Dracula (2005)
A film spinoff from the animated The Batman tv series, this offers a great title match but proves a disappointment. Moreover, it has to twist comic-book canon to make the plot work
Batman vs Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2019)
An animated crossover where you cannot help but think that the two styles of either – a grim loner who lives in a dark milieu vs a team of manic teenagers spouting surfer speak – are only going to end up clashing
Batman vs. Two-Face (2017)
Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders, an animated homage to the 1960s Batman tv series reuniting Adam West and Burt Ward, was a quirky delight. This is a sequel in the same vein, although more a case of a joke that tires in the retelling
Bats (1999)
There has yet to be a decent killer bat movie. This redresses the balance somewhat by offering up CGI bat effects but otherwise falls prey to a cliche-ridden script
Battle Beneath the Earth (1967)
A British film that jumps into a full flight Reds Under the Bed hysteria concerning the discovery of Communist Chinese saboteurs building a vast network of tunnels beneath the USA
Battle Earth (2012)
Taking inspiration from Battle Los Angeles, this is another shakycam-shot war film but with the intriguing idea of being focused around human soldiers trapped behind alien enemy lines
Battle for Pandora (2022)
The Asylum’s mockbuster take on Avatar: The Way of Water, which ingeniously exploits the fact that Saturn has a moon called Pandora. The rest is a low-budget body snatchers film
Battle for Terra (2007)
Animated film that has a remarkable number of similarities to Avatar – even though it was released before. A simplistic variant of the same human colonists vs alien natives plot conducted with corner-cut CGI animation
Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973)
The fifth and final of the original Planet of the Apes films. After four well worthwhile entries up to this point, a tired air infects this production as it assembles the elements in a haphazard clutter
Battle Los Angeles (2011)
Essentially this is a big-budget alien invasion film like Independence Day having been reconceived as a gritty, shakycam-shot war movie along the lines of Saving Private Ryan
Battle of Los Angeles (2011)
This was The Asylum’s mockbuster take on Battle Los Angeles, a rehash of alien invasion cliches but with modestly more vigour than most of their efforts
Battle of the Stars (1978)
The success of Star Wars saw a host of copies made over the next few years. This was one of several low-budget Italian space opera knockoffs of this period, featuring invading aliens from Ganymede
Battle of the Worlds (1961)
Early 1960s Italian space opera from Antonio Margheriti about a rogue planet on a course towards Earth. Not nearly as interesting as it suggests it is going to be.
Battle Royale II: Requiem (2003)
This was the sequel to Battle Royale and ups the scale of the conflict but somewhere loses the gleeful fun of the original and strays off to become a war film
Battlefield Baseball (2003)
Japanese film clearly inspired by Battle Royale that has a wonderfully appealing premise where a high school baseball game that has been turned into a deathsport
Battlestar Galactica (1978)
The original Battlestar Galactica tv series was an incredibly blatant copy built on the success of Star Wars. This is the pilot, which aired on tv in the US but was released theatrically to theatres in other countries
Beanstalk (1994)
A low-budget children’s film produced by Charles Band, this modernises the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. A sense of humour often proves the film’s saving grace among the tattiness.
Beast (2022)
A survival horror film where Idris Elba is on a trip to Africa only to be hunted by a rogue lion. Decently produced, this never works as well as you expect it would have
The Beast in the Cellar (1970)
Variant on the Mad Relative Locked in the Attic/Cellar film made as part of the British horror cycle. Unfortunately, this plods where it should have developed tension
Beast of Blood (1971)
Third of the Filipino-shot Blood Island films. This has a slow first half before getting to what we expect of a Filipino monster movie – an overacting mad scientist, a cheesy monster, schlocky gore and gratuitous toplessness
The Beast of the Yellow Night (1971)
One of the films from the heyday of the Filipino exploitation cinema fad. John Ashley makes a pact with the Devil,up in another man’s body and periodically turns into what is a werewolf in all but name
Beast of War (2025)
From the director of the Wyrmwood films, an Australian-made film about a group of soldiers during World War II who become stranded in a sea of sharks following a shipwreck
The Beast Within (2024)
This is a werewolf film with a difference. Everything comes with an ambiguity that is seen through the eyes of a young child trying to make sense of what is happening to her father
The Beastmaster (1982)
Don Coscarelli, director of the culty Phantasm, made this as part of the early 1980s sword and sorcery fad with Marc Singer as a muscular hero who has the ability to communicate with animals
Beauty and the Beast (1961)
Largely forgotten version of the fairytale that is too rudimentary and pedestrian to find much flight of fantasy compared to other classic versions
Beauty and the Beast (1987)
One of the cheap fairytale adaptations produced by Cannon Films. John Savage and Rebecca De Mornay star in the titles. One of the Cannon fairytales that emerges slightly better than the others
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)
After 36 years and several abortive attempts, Tim Burton, Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder reunite to make a sequel to Beetlejuice, but the essentials that fired up the young Burton now feel as they come by the numbers
Before I Fall (2017)
Essentially Groundhog Day for teenage girls as Zoey Deutch finds herself trapped in a timeloop living the same day at high school over and over. The film finds a reasonable emotional depth but some of Zoey’s concerns do seem just a little trivial
Before I Hang (1940)
Boris Karloff plays a mad scientist who creates an experimental formula to reverse aging and injects himself with it, only for it to turn into a split personalitied killer
Before I Wake (2016)
An overlooked Mike Flanagan film about a kid with the ability to bring his dreams to life, this reads like a cross between an A Nightmare on Elm Street copy and the Joe Dante Twilight Zone – The Movie episode
Before the Fire (2020)
Released in March 2020 just before the arrival of Covid-19, this makes an uncanny prediction about the US being affected by a nationwide pandemic
A Beginners Guide to Snuff (2016)
A comedy about two wannabe brothers who try to enter a horror movie competition by making their own snuff movie, only for everything to start going wrong
Beginning of the End (1957)
Giant grasshoppers invade Chicago – what’s not to like? A sterling example of the 1950s atomically enlarged insect film from Bert I. Gordon who found his calling make cheap giant animals/people films during this era.
Begotten (1990)
The first film from E. Elias Merhige, subsequent director of Shadow of the Vampire. An unfathomably strange film in the Eraserhead vein about gods disemboweling themselves, rebirthing and being beset upon by nomads.
Behemoth (2011)
A Syfy Channel film that is equal part disaster movie and monster movie. Formulaic but for the outlandishness of its premise – the disaster is caused by a giant mythological monster wrapped around the Earth
The Being (1983)
The first film from Jackie Kong, who made the hilarious Blood Diner, concerning a cheesily ridiculous atomic mutant monster loose in a small town
Believers (2007)
From The Blair Witch Project co-director Daniel Myrick, a film about two paramedics abducted into a crazed UFO cult who believe their delivery is coming
Beneath Still Waters (2005)
From prolific genre director/producer Brian Yuzna, a film about the drowned residents of a town that was flooded by a dam construction now emerging to exact vengeance on the living
Berkshire County (2014)
Canadian film about a babysitter being stalked by masked home invaders on Halloween night. Capably put together and generates an okay tension but this still seems to be recycling over-familiar genre tropes
The Bermuda Triangle (1978)
A film made to tap the 1970s fascination with the so-called Bermuda Triangle mystery with a name cast lost at sea on a ship as mysterious happenings start to occur
The Bermuda Triangle (1979)
A documentary that purports to examine the mystery of the so-called Bermuda Triangle but soon dives off into an hilarious series of claims involving UFOs, Atlantis, time warps and The Philadelphia Experiment
Bewitched (2005)
The hit 1960s sitcom is repackaged as a frothy Nora Ephron romcom that suffers from a fatal mismatching of a showboating Will Ferrell and a more subdued Nicole Kidman who do not seem to connect in any way as Darren and Samantha
The Beyond (1981)
One of the key films of cult Italian director Lucio Fulci, a gore-drenched but plotlessly incoherent mishmash about zombies emerging as the gates of Hell are opened
The Beyond (2017)
A highly ambitious film about a mysterious alien portal that appears in Earth orbit and the attempts to explore what is on the other side
Beyond Forgiveness (1994)
Action film with Thomas Ian Griffith tracking the killers of his brother to Poland and uncovering an organ harvesting scheme run by Rutger Hauer
Beyond Loch Ness (2008)
This offers the novelty of a Loch Ness monster film that takes place in Canada! This is otherwise a routine monster of the era made for the Syfy Channel
Beyond the Gates (2016)
Horror film that has the interesting idea of paying homage to the 80s phenomenon of the video boardgame. A good idea given a so-so treatment
Beyond the Time Barrier (1960)
B budget film from Edgar G. Ulmer that was made quickly to exploit the success of George Pal’s The Time Machine concerning an Air Force pilot who is thrown through time into a mutant ruled future
Big and Hairy (1998)
Kid’s film that comes with a rather slight gimmick in which a Bigfoot is befriended and persuaded to join the high school basketball team
Big Ass Spider! (2013)
Giant spider film that seems to be aiming for the same gonzo territory the killer shark film has of recent. Instead we get an average B movie with some good effects and a line of comic banter that falls flat in the delivery
The Big Bang (1987)
French-Belgian adult animated film in the gonzo trippy vein of Ralph Bakshi and Bill Plympton – a visually madcap satire of science-fiction tropes and 1980s East-West tensions, full of wackily surreal visuals
The Big Bus (1976)
Intermittently amusing parody of the disaster movie set aboard an atomically-powered luxury bus where everything proceeds to go wrong. The better parody of the genre would have to wait for Airplane
Big Driver (2014)
Stephen King’s version of I Spit on Your Grave. What kills the film is the plot device that involves the heroine having imaginary conversations with dead bodies and her GPS
Big Fish (2003)
Tim Burton film where Albert Finney plays a habitual teller of tall tales whose son sets out to find the truth. Burton’s characteristic quirkiness seems buried by such a blandness you suspect he has been replaced by a clone of Ron Howard
Big Trouble (2002)
A flop comedy based on a Dave Barry novel about various characters trying to obtain a nuclear weapon. Despite a reasonable name cast, this becomes slapstick inanity in director Barry Sonnenfeld’s hands
Bigfoot (1970)
The public obsession with Bigfoot grew out of a piece of amateur film shot in 1967 purporting to show a Bigfoot in the world and led to a spate of films and throughout the 1970s. This has the distinction of being the first ever Bigfoot film
Bigfoot: The Lost Coast Tapes (2012)
This is a Found Footage film that features a film crew interviewing a crazy hermit who claims to have the carcass of a Bigfoot and naturally enough encountering the real thing
Biggles (1986)
Biggles, Captain W.E. Johns’ famous flying ace, appeared in a long-running series of boys books. In his big screen film outing. he has the ignominy of playing second fiddle to a young American hero in a Back to the Future copy
Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020)
The two time-travelling slackers are back after nearly thirty years and the film amusingly sees them having reached uneasy middle-age. But was the wait worth it?
Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991)
The sequel to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure where the first film’s humour gets lost amid repetition and blown up by a big-budget. William Sadler’s Death however proves a scene-stealer
Billion Dollar Brain (1967)
Third of the Harry Palmer spy films starring Michael Caine, which were made as a more grounded alternative to James Bond. Unfortunately, this has been placed in the hands of Ken Russell who overblows everything with a giddy eatravagance
Billy’s Holiday (1995)
Head-scratching Australian oddity in which a middle-aged man becomes possessed and suddenly able to sing with the voice of Billie Holliday
Bio-Cops (2000)
Hong Kong comedy with a police station under siege from zombies. The emphasis is more on comedy than the horror element
Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (2020)
The DC comic-book Birds of Prey is hijacked to become a vehicle for Harley Quinn, the breakout character from Suicide Squad. Margot Robbie gives the impression she has zero interest in making a film for comic-book fans
The Bishop’s Wife (1947)
A typical entry in the 1940s fad for light fantasy films in which Cary Grant plays an angel who comes down to Earth to assist poor overworked bishop David Niven
Black Box (2020)
Blumhouse film in which an initial plot about a man suffering amnesia undergoes a twist to become a body theft story
Black Butterfly (2017)
Antonio Banderas is a writer with a block, Jonathan Rhys Meyers a sinister stranger who moves in. Lots of tense psychological games between the two begin only for the film to almost immediately blow the premise
The Black Cauldron (1985)
Forgotten Disney animated film that was not a success at the time it came out. It seeks to tell an epic fantasy tale in the J.R.R. Tolkien vein but ends up falling too much in the shadow of Star Wars
Black Christmas (2006)
Another in the mid-2000s fad for 1970s remakes. This revives what has been cited as the first slasher film but throws most of the original out and turns the rest into a gore-drenched slasher film
The Black Demon (2023)
Another killer shark survival piece with a family trapped aboard an abandoned oil rig under attack by a megalodon shark that may be the embodiment of an Aztec god
Black Friday (1940)
A peculiar mixture of 1940s mad scientist and gangster film in which Boris Karloff transplants a mob boss’s brain into the body of a mild-mannered English professor
Black Friday (2021)
A horror comedy that goes the next logical step and turns Black Friday shoppers into a zombified horde. With Bruce Campbell as a store worker who steps into the fray
Black Glasses (2022)
Dario Argento makes a highly anticipated return to the director’s chair after a decade’s silence, once again revisiting the giallo film, but the results are a major letdown
The Black Hole (1979)
Disney’s attempt to join the post-Star Wars SF boom proved a flop that flounders in bad writing and ponderous pretensions. On the other hand, it is almost worth watching for the stunning design and effects
Black Knight (2001)
An uncredited adaptation of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court with Martin Lawrence as a hip modern African-American man thrown back to Mediaeval times
Black Magic Woman (1991)
Essentially Fatal Attraction with voodoo in which Mark Hamill engages in an affair with Apollonia and breaks it off only to find a voodoo curse has been placed on him
Black Moon (1975)
Louis Malle’s one and only venture into the French New Wave – a baffling work set around social collapse as a young girl wanders a farmhouse encountering unicorns, talking animals and various surreal happenings
Black Mountain Side (2014)
Another copy of The Thing where a team of archaeologists in the frozen north unearth an object being 20,000 years old from a barrow that proceed to affect the team and cause mass insanity
Black Noon (1971)
Classic tv movie that is one of the earliest horror/Westerns hybrids where Roy Thinnes plays a preacher who ends up in town only to find he cannot leave amid mysterious goings-on
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)
The MCU’s sequel to Black Panther. This offers the peculiarity of a work in which the superhero of the title never actually appears and is instead set around his absence following the death of Chadwick Boseman
The Black Rider: Revelation Road (2014)
The third Revelation Road film, this offers the bizarre novelty of a faith-based Mad Max copy with divinely inspired action hero David A.R. White cruising the post-apocalyptic wastelands in the aftermath of The Rapture
Black Road (2016)
Near future set science-fiction noir as a cyborg-enhanced hero is drawn in to conduct an investigation on behalf of a morally ambiguous femme fatale. Despite a reasonable effort made, this is a little too low key
Black Rock (2012)
Wilderness survival horror in the same vein as Deliverance but with a Chick Flick spin. This starts promisingly but director/star Katie Aselton fails to push the survival scenes for anything dramatic
Black Scorpion (1995)
Following Michelle Pfeiffer’s turn as Cat Woman in Batman Returns, this was a copycat from Roger Corman in which Joan Severance becomes a black vinyl clad superheroine exacting justice
Black Scorpion: Ground Zero (1996)
The second of the low-budget Roger Corman produced films made for cable featuring Joan Severance as a black vinyl-clad masked superheroine
The Black Sleep (1956)
The very last gasp of the 1930s/40s mad scientist film, a swansong that brings together an amazing cast from the era including Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr, John Carradine, Basil Rathbone and Tor Johnson. Slightly better produced than most of the era’s cheapies
Black Thunder (1998)
Low-budget action film that blatantly rehshes the plot of Firefox with Michael Dudikoff as a pilot recruited to go into enemy territory and steal back a hi-tech plane
Black Water: Abyss (2020)
The Australian-made Black Water was a gripping thriller about three people in a tree being menaced by a crocodile in the water below. This is a sequel with a further group trapped in a cave and menaced by a killer crocodile
Black Water Vampire (2014)
A Found Footage vampire film. This only follows where The Blair Witch Project went before, while the long build-up to the revelation of its creature proves a damp fizzle
Blackbeard’s Ghost (1968)
Disney live-action comedy with Peter Ustinov as the ghost of a resurrected pirate who comes to the aid of an ailing collage track team
Blackenstein (1973)
Blacula was a big Blaxploitation hit and was quickly followed by this Blaxploitation take on the Frankenstein film. While others that followed did great things, this only seems a quickie designed to jump aboard the fad
Blackwater Valley Exorcism (2006)
In the aftermath of the huge success of The Exorcism of Emily Rose, this was another supposedly true account of an exorcism. Made on a low-budget, this fails to surmount the cliches of The Exorcist
Blacula (1972)
A hit among the Blaxploitation fad of the 1970s, this has the novelty of casting a vampire film with African-American actor William Marshall. A whole series of Blaxploitation takes on horror themes followed.
Blair Witch (2016)
The Blair Witch Project was genuinely innovative. It is a surprise that we never saw a string of sequels. Adam Wingard finally does here but at a time when the Found Footage genre feels played out of moves
The Blancheville Monster (1963)
One of the entries from the Italian Gothic cycle featuring a big decaying castle, lurking disfigured figures, sinister hypnotists and moodily atmospheric black-and-white photography
Blank (2022)
A film about a writer who retreats to a fully automated smarthome in order to complete a novel only to end up imprisoned by a malfunctioning A.I.
Blankman (1994)
One of the original superheroes with no powers comedies, a not particularly funny variant based on a Saturday Night Live sketch. Written by and starring Damon Wayans.
Blast from the Past (1999)
A comedy with the amusing premise where Brendan Fraser is raised in a nuclear fallout shelter since the Cuban Missile Crisis and emerges into the present for the first time, mistaking it for a post-apocalyptic world
Blasted (2022)
Norwegian comedy where two friends who were a champion laser tag duo in their teens are now in adult life where they are forced to pair back up to fight off alien invaders