Tremors didn't actually break any new ground (even though its tunnelling worm monsters certainly did), but it revved up the classic monster-movie formulas of the 1950s with such energetic enthusiasm and humour that it made everything old seem new again. It's also got a cast full of enjoyable actors who clearly had a lot of fun making the film, and director Ron Underwood strikes just the right balance of comedy and terror as a band of small-town rednecks battles a lot of really nasty-looking giant worms. The special effects are great, the one-liners fly fast and furious between heroes Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward (and yes, that's country star Reba McEntire packin' awesome firepower), and it's all done with the kind of flair one rarely associates with goofy monster flicks like this. -Jeff Shannon, Amazon. com.

A low-rent horror flick from the early 1980s, Of Unknown Origin completely misses the mark in the scare stakes and instead comes across like a grisly, live-action version of Tom and Jerry. Our inept hero is the ambitious, house-proud executive Bart Hughes (Peter Weller), who is left alone by his wife and son to complete a business proposal only to discover that he is sharing his apartment with a mischievous giant rat. Unable to trap or poison his foe, Hughes quickly descends into nightmare-haunted madness and thus the stage is set for a suspenseless battle of wits that is less cat-and-mouse and more idiot-versus-rat. Finding an angry rodent swimming in your toilet might be a pretty unpleasant prospect, but cinematically speaking it's far from terrifying. Created using jerky point-of-view shots and creature effects that range from incongruous real-life footage to button-eyed glove puppets, the rat is an unthreatening villain, despite Weller's best efforts to react in abject horror when he finds the corners of his mail nibbled or his dry groceries spoiled. There are some unsuccessful attempts to make Hughes' plight more immediate to the audience by references to real-life rat problems-he visits a library to research his enemy and finds some disturbing photographs of rat-attack victims and subsequently ruins a dinner party with a genuinely unsettling rant about infestation and plagues-but it's difficult to feel sorry for him when he can't even muster the tenacity to track down a professional exterminator. By the time Weller gets caught in one of his own traps, you will probably be rooting for the rat anyway, and might take some pleasure from a ridiculous denouement in which, dressed in full battle-gear, he completely destroys his beloved apartment by clumsily chasing the elusive vermin with a nail-studded baseball bat. Gore Verbinski's genuinely hilarious Mousehunt did it with a lot more charm. On the DVD: Of Unknown Origin comes to DVD with a basic selection of extras. An entertaining commentary from Peter Weller and the likeable George P Cosmatos III does the film a lot of favours, even if their efforts to talk up its importance as an allegory for man's struggle against nature using comparisons with The Old Man and the Sea, Moby Dick, Alien and Jaws fail to convince. [+]

Lake Placid is total trash-and, as a result, pretty entertaining. Yet another entry in the horror sub-genre of giant animals running amok, the movie features a giant crocodile that has somehow found its way to an isolated lake in Maine. The absurdity of crocodiles in Maine sets the tone for the entire movie, which has no ambitions beyond mixing a little fright with a little humour (Curiously, this concoction was put together by David E Kelley, better known as the creator of TV's Ally McBeal and The Practice). Bridget Fonda plays a palaeontologist sent to investigate a large tooth; Bill Pullman is a fish and game warden just trying to keep the peace; Oliver Platt plays a loose-cannon mythology professor who swims with crocodiles for sport; and Brendan Gleeson is a local sheriff with a short temper and a big gun. Add a few gruesome dismemberments, Betty White as a cantankerous old broad who may have murdered her husband, and a cow hanging from a helicopter, and there you have it: Lake Placid. -Bret Fetzer, Amazon. com.

If Franz Kafka had been an animator and film director-oh, and a member of Monty Python's Flying Circus-this is the sort of outrageously dystopian satire one could easily imagine him making. However, Brazil was made by Terry Gilliam, who is all of the above except, of course, Franz Kafka. Be that as it may, Gilliam sure captures the paranoid-subversive spirit of Kafka's The Trial (along with his own Python animation) in this bureaucratic nightmare-comedy about a meek governmental clerk named Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) whose life is destroyed by a simple bug. Not a software bug, a real bug (no doubt related to Kafka's famous Metamorphosis insect) that gets smooshed in a printer and causes a typographical error unjustly identifying an innocent citizen, one Mr. Buttle, as suspected terrorist Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro). When Sam becomes enmeshed in unravelling this bureaucratic glitch, he himself winds up labelled as a miscreant. The movie presents such an unrelentingly imaginative and savage vision of 20th-century bureaucracy that it almost became a victim of small-minded studio management itself-until Gilliam surreptitiously screened his cut for the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, who named it the best movie of 1985 and virtually embarrassed Universal into releasing it. -Jim Emerson If Franz Kafka had been an animator and film director-oh, and a member of Monty Python's Flying Circus-Brazil is the sort of outrageously dystopian satire one could easily imagine him making. In fact it was made by Terry Gilliam, who is all of the above except, of course, Franz Kafka. Be that as it may, Gilliam captures the paranoid-subversive spirit of Kafka's The Trial (along with his own Python animation) in this bureaucratic nightmare-comedy about a meek government clerk named Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) whose life is destroyed by a simple bug. [+]

Hilarious, tacky black comedy from 1960 that may be the best film by B-picture master Roger Corman, other than Bucket of Blood, made about the same time with the same writer, Charles Griffith. Seymour (Jonathan Haze) is an assistant in a skid-row flower shop who's on the point of losing his job when the unusual plant he's developed turns the store into a major attraction. The only problem is that the plant needs human blood to live, all the while crying, "Feed me! FEED ME!" Luckily, Seymour causes a series of inadvertent deaths that more than make up for the food shortage. Jack Nicholson provides a comic sidebar as a masochistic nutter visiting a dentist's office. Giggling and wild-eyed from the same impulse that might lead others to read scandal sheets, he can be seen in the dentist's waiting room reading aloud from Pain magazine. Famous for having the shortest shooting schedule on record (two days and a night), The Little Shop of Horrors spawned an off-Broadway musical that was in turn made into a successful film in 1986, starring Rick Moranis and Steve Martin. It was in just this quick-shoot atmosphere that Corman nurtured the careers of many of America's most celebrated film directors; this little shop of honours included Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, and Jonathan Demme. -Jim Gay.