The Ninth Gate (1999)
Roman Polanski makes a return to Rosemary’s Baby territory in this work with Johnny Depp as a rare book collector on the trail of an occult tome. Polanski great a great sense of sinister forces surrounding Depp but the film reaches an unsatisfying ending
Mission to Mars (2000)
Brian De Palma makes a surprisingly good hard science film about a Mars landing expedition encountering alien artifacts
Harvey (1950)
Wonderfully charming classic with James Stewart who has an invisible 6’3″ rabbit companion. The film proves absolutely winning with its standing up in favour of the right to be eccentric
Shadow of Chikara (1977)
This is nominally a Western – one of the harsh and realistic ones made at the end of the 1970s – and quite a good one too. It comes with a real surprise ending that takes it over into fantasy
Frankenhooker (1990)
Frank Henenlotter of Basket Case fame modernises the Frankenstein where here Frankenstein creates a body out of parts from Time Square hookers. Amusing but eventually a film where the humour is too broad
Hook (1991)
Steven Spielberg’s long-planned live-action version of Peter Pan emerges as a sequel that asks the question “What would happen if Peter Pan grew up?” Unfortunately, the results are not one of Spielberg’s better films
Little Buddha (1993)
Bernardo Bertolucci directs a biopic of the Buddha, which is interspersed with a modern story where a Western boy learns that he is the reincarnation of an abbot
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
The first sequel to the 1931 Boris Karloff Frankenstein, which many prefer to the original. Director James Whale comes into his element and provides a whole other level of droll humour that the first film did not have
Mac and Me (1988)
A shameless and derivative copy of E.T., featuring one of the dopiest looking aliens ever designed for a film
The Birds (1963)
Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film inspired a series of Nature’s Revenge films throughout the 1970s. Expectedly, Hitchcock creates masterful set-pieces but the most effective thing the film does is to remove explanations creating a work of anxious uncertainty
Big (1988)
The most charming among the spate of bodyswap fantasies of the 80s. Tom Hanks was Academy Award nominated for his role as a boy who wakes up to find himself in a man’s body after making a wish
Rollover (1981)
Jane Fonda and Kris Kristofferson star in a big-budget banking thriller where the US faces economic collapses
What Planet Are You From? (2000)
A sex-changed version of My Stepmother is an Alien in which Garry Shandling is an alien come to Earth to breed with a woman. Despite being directed by Mike Nichols this is as lame as it sounds and stumbles through tired routines that were not even funny the first time around
Mikey (1992)
Routine psycho-thriller with Brian Bonsall as a child who murders his adopted families when they fail to meet his expectation. An amusing idea plays out with comic-bookish set-ups and a cliched plot
The Body Snatcher (1945)
One of the classic films of producer Val Lewton, a loose adaptation the historical story of the 19th Century body snatchers Burke and Hare. Robert Wise is on fine form as director and Boris Karloff gives one of his best performances.
Slaughter High (1986)
A cheap and very poorly made British variant on the slasher film with much unintentional laughter potential, including a 36 year-old Caroline Munro cast as a teenager
Pitch Black (2000)
A gripping and particularly well conceived planetary survival story. The film that launched Vin Diesel’s career and he has never been better than as the lethal, tight-lipped serial killer Riddick
Tenebrae (1982)
Another of Dario Argento’s giallo psycho-thrillers with all the stylistically wild and over-the-top deaths one expects as a horror writer finds people being murdered with pages from his books in their mouths
The Santa Clause (1994)
Popular film with Tim Allen as a regular family man who is forced to become Santa. Several sequels followed.
Inferno (1980)
Dario Argento’s sequel to Suspiria, the second film in his Third Mothers trilogy, and an even better work where Argento delights in beautifully artistic imagery almost free of any plot
Scream 3 (2000)
Wes Craven’s Scream was a witty parody/deconstruction of the 1980s slasher film but by the time of this third entry and the departure of screenwriter Kevin Williamson creativity seems to be flagging even though this has critic-proofed itself enough by calling itself a parody of a sequel
Gremlins (1984)
The film about malicious creatures that was the runaway box-office hit of 1984. Director Joe Dante runs amok like a schoolboy with a chemistry kit and gleefully trashes the wholesome innocence of producer Steven Spielberg’s E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial
Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965)
The first of Amicus’s horror anthologies. The stories are rehashes of five popular horror tropes, all united by Peter Cushing as the title doctor telling the fortunes of five passengers on a train carriage
The Sentinel (1977)
Michael Winner directs a film about a sinister apartment building but his typical crude and heavy-handed style fails to conjure anything remotely scary
Demon Seed (1977)
Adaptation of an early Dean R. Koontz novel about an A.I who imprisons a woman in her own home with the intention of impregnating her. A variant on Rosemary’s Baby conducted far more tastefully than you might think mashed up with some of the worst computer goes amok cliches
Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989)
The eighth of the Friday the 13th films that offers the novelty on the formula in taking a revived Jason to New York City. Actually, one of the better entries in the series, which plays his encounters with New York locals for some amusement
The Love Butcher (1975)
Splendidly lurid and schlocky psycho film 1970s style with Erik Stern having the time of his life and giving an amazingly demented performance in the title role(s)
The Masque of the Red Death (1964)
The seventh of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations and usually the best regarded. Vincent Price is at his most cruel and the film looks incredibly sumptuous thanks to a young Nicolas Roeg on camera
The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932)
Boris Karloff plays the super-villain Fu Manchu, giving a performance of calculating evil in a film of great pulp thrillers
Bells (1981)
Rather silly thriller in which Richard Chamberlain tries to track a madman who has discovered a means of transmitting explosions by telephone
The People Under the Stairs (1991)
Wes Craven in which a young thief breaks into a home where a crazed couple imprison children and have turned the house into a series of deathtraps
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
Night of the Big Heat (1967)
One of a trilogy of SF films made by Hammer director Terence Fisher during the mid-1960s, none of which have a very good reputation. This is an alien invasion film but Fisher fails to create the paranoid atmosphere of the better US counterparts of this period
Pacific Heights (1990)
Thriller in which landlords Matthew Modine and Melanie Griffith’s lives are terrorised by psychopathic tenant Michael Keaton
Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971)
Obvious but likeable attempt by Disney to replicate the success of Mary Poppins with Angela Lansbury as a good witch taking a group of children on a series of nonsense adventures
The Vanishing (1993)
Disastrous English-language remake of the brilliant Dutch thriller The Vanishing, which miscalculates everything including mangling the classic ending
Here Comes Mr Jordan (1941)
One of the original Hollywood afterlife of the 1940s light fantasy boom, twice remade, most notedly as Warren Beatty’s Heaven Can Wait. Amiable and likeable while avoiding any deeper issues
Mr Destiny (1990)
A variant on It’s a Wonderful Life where James Belushi gets to live the life he never did due to missing a key baseball homerun
Cape Fear (1962)
Classic psycho-thriller with Robert Mitchum (who was never better) as an ex-con determined to take revenge against lawyer Gregory Peck. Stark and superbly sustained psychological suspense
The Horror Show (1989)
Routine executed killer comes back from the electric chair film made to exploit the success of Wes Craven’s Shocker. In some places this was sold as another of the House films
Fallen (1998)
A smart and intelligent supernatural thriller with Denzel Washington as a detective fighting against a demon that can inhabit any person that it touches
Ghost in the Machine (1993)
Made in the aftermath of The Lawnmower Man, this utterly ridiculous film has a serial killer uploaded to the internet. Written by people who know nothing about computers and filled with absurdly over-the-top effects
The Flintstones (1994)
The first in what later became a fad for replicating cartoon tv series as big-budget live-action films, this does an exacting live-action version of the Hanna-Barbera series
Encino Man (1992)
An excruciatingly unfunny teen comedy with Brendan Fraser as a caveman who is unfrozen in the present-day. The film served to introduce Fraser and Pauly Shore, one of the most annoying figures to ever appear on screen
Eye of the Beholder (1999)
A strange thriller in the Basic Instinct-mold with surveillance expert Ewan McGregor obsessed with tracking serial killer Ashley Judd, while haunted by the imaginary companion of his daughter
Boxing Helena (1993)
David Lynch’s daughter Jennifer directs a film about a surgeon who abducts a woman and amputates her limbs to make her love him. A critical bomb, it is a not uninteresting work about woman’s desire handled with more taste than you would think
Beauty and the Beast (1987)
One of the cheap fairytale adaptations produced by Cannon Films. John Savage and Rebecca De Mornay star in one entry that emerges slightly better than the others
The Night Flier (1997)
Okay but nothing standout Stephen King adaptation with Miguel Ferrer as a tabloid journalist covering a series of killings before realising he is tracking a vampire
White Man’s Burden (1995)
Potent and effective take on race relations that imagines an alternate world where Blacks are a majority and white people live as a disadvantaged minority
Deliverance (1972)
Harrowing wilderness survival film from John Boorman about four men on a trip downriver that fall afoul of hillbillies. A classic that was highly influential on the formation of the Backwoods Brutality genre.
Warlords (1988)
B-budget director offers up a copy of Mad Max 2 and peppers it with plentiful tongue-in-cheek exploitation elements stirred with undeniable vigour
I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957)
This was a it in its day, doing so by tapping the burgeoning teenage market who had just realised they were misunderstood thanks to James Dean. Not a particularly great film but it is one that carries a great deal of primal ferocity
The Tenth Victim (1965)
Satiric film set in a future where contestants hunt and kill one another on a tv show. The first film on the theme of human bloodsports later popularised by The Hunger Games and others
Body Double (1984)
Brian De Palma psycho-thriller that blatantly copies Hitchcock’s Vertigo with more than a few dashes of Rear Window. De Palma’s stylish moves collapse under the weight of an absurdly contrived plot
Supernova (2000)
The celebrated Walter Hill directs an Alien-inspired film about a mutated killer loose on a spaceship. This was a problem-ridden production that pans out far less interestingly than it promises to be
Macabre (1980)
The directorial debut of Mario Bava’s son Lamberto, a supposedly based on true life tale about a woman who keeps her late lover’s severed head in the fridge
Blade Runner (1982)
Ridley Scott’s film was not a success at the time but has since become regarded as a SF masterpiece, one of the defining screen treatments of android themes while the incredibly dense and detailed vision of the future was copied by dozens of subsequent films
Ratboy (1986)
Sondra Locke directs an odd little fable about a boy with rat-like features but the result never quite comes off
A Guy Named Joe (1943)
Classic 1940s afterlife fantasy with Spencer Tracy as a pilot killed in action who is sent back as a guardian angel. This works fantastically well due to a great character arc and a sharp Dalton Trumbo script
Moon 44 (1990)
Early Roland Emmerich film with Michael Paré investigating pirates targeting a mining moon. As usual with Emmerich, the focus is on action while neglecting the plausibility of the scenario
Haunted Summer (1988)
Another version of the events at the Villa Diodati in 1816 with Lord Byron, Mary Shelley et al. With the material in the script, this should have been a far more interesting film than the dull affair it is
The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)
A classic 1950s monster movie where an expedition up the Amazon discovers a Gill Man. Here an average story is propelled into the memorable by Jack Arnold’s moody direction. Two sequels followed.
Braindead (1992)
One of Peter Jackson’s early films, which is maybe the funniest zombie comedy ever made. This becomes a work of unparalleled genius in the glorious gore-drenched excesses it reaches for
Sleepy Hollow (1999)
Tim Burton adapts the classic Washington Irving ghost story, although throws most of it out, to make his own beautifully designed period piece spearheaded by another eccentric Johnny Depp performance
Cat’s Eye (1985)
An anthology of three Stephen King stories, this comes out with extremely variable results where what were originally a series of tight and mordant tales end up strangely overblown
Fantasia 2000 (1999)
Disney’s sequel to Fantasia comes weighted with a sense of its own self-importance -the first release of the new millennium. However, it fails to produce much that has the stature of the original
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
The ‘Burbs (1989)
Joe Dante black comedy about a neighbourhood where everybody becomes paranoid about the weird new people moved in. The film’s bite gets lots amid everything being pitched at a clumsily shrill level of hysteria
Darkman (1990)
Amid the early 1990s spate of dark superhero films, Sam Raimi created one of the few original screen superheroes with Darkman, essentially a superhero film where The Joker (by way of The Phantom of the Opera) is the hero of the piece
Dr Giggles (1992)
A darkly funny take on the slasher film with Larry Drake standing out in a memorable performance as the title mad doctor. This delivers more medical novelty deaths and bad puns than one believed possible
Groundhog Day (1993)
Winning comedy with Bill Murray trapped in a timeloop and forced to repeat the same day over. Murray is at a career-peak best and served by a great script. The surprise is how much the timeloop theme was copied by subsequent films
The Reluctant Astronaut (1967)
Most of the comics of the 1960s made a film dealing with the Space Race and here it is the turn of Don Knotts. Lots of bumbling slapstick ensues in this hardly inspiring entry
Flubber (1997)
Remake of Disney’s The Absent-Minded Professor where the charms of the original are buried under an excess of twee – where the professor now gets a cute robot assistant and the flubber becomes sentient and highly imitative
Nightwatch (1994)
Gripping Danish thriller in which morgue attendant Nicholaj Coster Waldau finds a serial killer is playing games with him. Filled with paranoia, sharp twists and lashings of black humour
The Reptile (1966)
Classic Hammer film in which Jacqueline Pearce turns into a snake creature. This seems to have been conceived as one of Hammer’s Dracula films but with snakes. It is given more than reasonable atmosphere by director John Gilling
The Prophet’s Game (1999)
Dennis Hopper plays a retired detective brought in to hunt a serial killer who targets victims via a campus game
Pokemon: The Power of One (1999)
The second of the animated films spun off around the Pokemon phenomenon and an altogether better film than its predecessor due to some imaginative animation
Magnolia (1999)
The third film from Paul Thomas Anderson, a series of occasionally interlinking stories and character sketches, featuring some great performances from name actors. Underlining everything is a fascination with the inexplicable and the works of Charles Fort
King Cobra (1999)
Film in which Erik Estrada and Pat Morita face a giant animatronic snake
The King and I (1999)
Animated remake of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. Now with the addition of fantasy elements.
GalaxyQuest (1999)
An extremely funny parody of Star Trek that sends up both the show, the actors and the fandom. A very witty and knowing script that has definitely been written by fans
North (1994)
Likeable absurdist fable from Rob Reiner with Elijah Wood as a boy searching the world for perfect parents. With Bruce Willis as the Easter Bunny
The Green Mile (1999)
Frank Darabont had a big hit with the Stephen King adaptation The Shawshank Redemption. This, another King adaptation concerning a Death Row inmate with healing powers, seems an attempt to repeat the same
The Survivor (1981)
Australian-made adaptation of a James Herbert novel with Robert Powell as a airline pilot who is haunted following a crash. In the director’s chair, actor David Hemmings kills all atmosphere
Tromeo & Juliet (1996)
Made to coincide with the Leonardo DiCaprio Romeo and Juliet, this Troma offering sets out to conduct as many bad taste variations on Shakespeare as it can
Seizure (1974)
The first film from Oliver Stone and a head-scratching puzzle as a writer is haunted by various supernatural figures from out of his imagination
Bicentennial Man (1999)
Isaac Asimov may not have been the best science-fiction writer ever but his stories buzzed with challenging ideas. In the hands of Chris Columbus, one of Asimov’s robot stories is reduced to mawkish sentimentalism
Song of the South (1946)
Disney film that is difficult to see these days due to its controversial treatments of race issues. Controversies aside, this is undeniably likeable, in particular in its telling a series of tall tales and finding a folk vernacular
Stuart Little (1999)
Taking its its cue from the mix of animatronics and CGI in Babe, this is a live-action adaptation of the E.B. White book. A sweet and charming film about a family that adopts a little mouse boy that proved an unexpected hit
Trucks (1997)
Remake of the same Stephen King short story that formed the basis of Maximum Overdrive about trucks turning against humanity … Why remake a work that was poorly regarded first time around is a good question but this actually emerges as the better version
Sphere (1998)
Michael Crichton was hot property after the success of Jurassic Park but this was one flop. A by no means uninteresting film about a group of scientists in an underwater habitat making contact with an alien lifeform
The Faculty (1998)
Robert Rodriguez directs from a script by Scream writer Kevin Williamson. This wittily deconstructs the 1950s alien body snatchers film by way of The Breakfast Club
The Avengers (1998)
The Avengers was the height of 1960s chic. Amid the 90s/00s fad for big screen remakes of tv shows, this was a miscalculated disaster that gets everything about the original wrong from the casting to the droll humour
Breaking the Waves (1996)
Stunning, emotionally raw work from Lars von Trier with Emily Watson as a wife in a small religious community who is driven to extremes of masochistic self-sacrifice in the belief she is saving her husband’s life
Rabid (1977)
The fourth film from David Cronenberg, a clear (although by no means uninteresting) attempt to repeat the success of Shivers with Marilyn Chambers as a woman with a vampiric skin parasite that turns victims into maddened killers
Altered States (1980)
Ken Russell’s big studio-backed film about drug trips, the meaning of life and William Hurt reverting to a caveman is a glorious madcap and visually stunning work that reaches for the same cosmological grandeur that 2001: A Space Odyssey does
Being John Malkovich (1999)
Hilariously eccentric Spike Jonze-Charlie Kaufman collaboration in which John Cusack finds an office building that has a portal that takes someone through into actor John Malkovich’s head. The wacky spins that the script places on the idea are ingenious
Matthew Hopkins – Witchfinder General (1968)
Stark and effective film based on a true-life historical figure, this sets out to depict the barbarism of the 17th century witch hunts. Vincent Price plays seriously and the film is all the more effective as a result
Freaked (1993)
Wonderfully nonsensical film directed by/starring Alex Winter of Bill and Ted fame about the lives of a group of mutant freaks. Amazing makeup effects, a bizarre sense of humour and several well-known actors sending themselves up
Abbott and Costello Meet Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1953)
The third of Abbott and Costello’s comedic meet ups with the Famous Monsters – in this case a series of lowjinks as they encounter Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (played by Boris Karloff)