Junk (1999)

The rise of the J-horror industry earlier this century was a natural reaction to the stagnation of progressive stagnation of Western horror over the course of the 1990s. But an unavoidable consequence of the rush to ransack Asia’s cinematic riches is the lionisation of films that simply don’t deserve the scrutiny. Atsushi Muroga’s 1999 effort, Junk, is one of the most widely available Japanese zombie movies in Britain; but those searching for something more taxing than the Resident Evil movies will be disappointed by not only how bad it is, but also by how little it has in common with its fellow countrymen. Read more

Revolt of the Zombies (1936)

It is astonishing that the people behind one of the best films I’ve ever seen could also be responsible for one of the worst. After discovering the gem that is White Zombie I had high expectations of the Halerpin brothers’ follow-on, Revolt of the Zombies. Everything about it feels wrong, from the plot and pacing right through to the editing and casting. Though it was made four years after White Zombie it feels the more anachronistic of the two, and the Halperins seem to have forgotten everything that made their earlier offering the enduring classic that it is today. Read more

Scared to Death (1947)

Though billed as a ‘Lugosi’ movie, William Christy Cabanne’s ‘Scared to Death’ makes very little use of its only valuable asset and suffers badly for it. Actually, that’s not quite fair as even Bela couldn’t be expected to do much with this terrible little film. Read more

The Amazing Transparent Man (1960)

There’s no getting around the fact that this is a bad film. It uses its meagre resources badly, manages to wring any entertainment out of what is a naturally engaging premise and draws together a cast of pretty ropey actors. It’s a real shame too, as there are one or two points in ‘The Amazing Transparent Man’ where you can detect faint hints of the larger story the producers were trying to tell but came nowhere near to doing justice. Read more

The Terror (1963)

If you’ve ever finished an exam twenty minutes or so before the end of the time allotted you might be familiar with the anxiety of not knowing whether it is a good or a bad sign. Did you read all of the questions properly? Have you answered the question itself and avoided the trap of reeling out a pre-prepared body of knowledge which is only tangentially linked to the topic you’re being tested on? If so then you can probably sympathise with Roger Corman, who finished filming his 1963 classic The Raven a whole two days in advance. This being Corman he didn’t use his remaining time to mull over his original movie but decided instead to make an entirely new film (that’s right, in 48 hours) which utilised The Raven’s sets and its star actor, Boris Karloff, who was contractually tied to the director from the initial project. Read more

Zombie Flesh Eaters 2 (aka Zombi 3) (1988)

The boom in low budget Italian horror that occurred during the 70s and 80s didn’t exactly produce a vast number of classics, but at least in Lucio Fulci it yielded a director of considerable originality and visual flair. Fulci made his horror debut with the 1979 classic Zombie Flesh Eaters, inauspiciously released in Europe under the title Zombi 2 and posited as an unofficial sequel to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (European title: Zombi). On paper this may scream “cash-in”, but in practice, although bearing little or no relation to Romero’s film, Flesh Eaters is a pacey and stylish film, paying homage to the ‘voodoo zombie’ films of the 1930s whilst adding buckets of beautifully framed gore and dismemberment. Fulci subsequently directed another three zombie movies, developing his own rather baffling mythology around the undead. The stories verged on the incomprehensible, but Fulci’s inventive direction means they have at least some worth. Read more