The only real problem with Stir of Echoes has nothing to do with the movie itself, but with unlucky coincidence. Adapted from a Richard Matheson novel, this film arrived around the same time as The Sixth Sense. Surface similarities made it suffer by cursory comparison and the competing film's phenomenal success. It's a pity, because this one features one of Kevin Bacon's best performances, in a psychological thriller that makes a lot more right moves than wrong ones. Bacon plays a blue-collar guy who laments his ordinary life, only to learn, when his sister-in-law (Ileanna Douglas) hypnotizes him, that he is a "receiver" capable of seeing spirits and split-second glimpses of past and future events. It's a torturous gift to have-especially since his friendly Chicago neighbourhood possesses a dark secret-and Bacon plays the role with an appropriate mixture of obsession and internalised torment. Similarity to The Sixth Sense applies only to the basic premise and the character of Bacon's young son. Otherwise, this is more of a hard-edged journey of self-discovery, marital crisis, and recovery, with Bacon's wife (played by the highly underrated Kathryn Erbe) involved in an underdeveloped sub-plot about a group of people who share Bacon's gift as paranormal "receivers". Furthering his career as a writer-director of intelligent thrillers, David Koepp makes a few mis-steps in pacing and thematic overkill, but overall Stir of Echoes is a sharp, sensitive thriller that unfolds to reveal a dramatically satisfying solution to its mystery. -Jeff Shannon, Amazon. [+]

Blood the Last Vampire brings a moody atmospheric quality all of its own to the Japanese animated film tradition. In a few short enigmatic scenes, we learn of the young girl Saya who is working for nameless government agencies and is sent, after one of her killings, to pose as a new pupil at an American school on an air force base. The Vietnam War is underway, but this does not concern her-she is involved with a far older war. All we ever find out is that she is not quite human, and that two of her schoolmates (and a whore in the mean streets adjacent to the base) are something yet again. Much of what ensues-gore and metamorphosis and nightmare chases-is all the more confusing for being seen through the eyes of a schoolteacher who never learns very much. This is a dreamlike film which does not have to make entirely literal sense, far more so than the creator's more famous Ghost in the Shell. It is also a memorable stage in the development of digitised animation. -Roz Kaveny.

While hardly a spiritual upgrade of the slasher film, this high-concept teen body-count thriller drops hints of The Sixth Sense into the smart-alec sensibility of Scream. Helmed by X Files veteran James Wong, who co-wrote the screenplay with long-time creative partner Glen Morgan, Final Destination is an often entertaining thriller marked by an unsettling sense of unease and scenes of eerie imagery. It suffers, however, from a schizophrenic tone and a frankly ludicrous premise. A high school Cassandra, Alex Browning (Devon Sawa of Idle Hands), wakes from a pre-flight nightmare and panics when he is convinced the plane is doomed. His ruckus bumps seven passengers from the Paris-bound plane, which immediately explodes into a fireball on takeoff, but fate hasn't finished with these lucky few and, one by one, death claims them. Wong brings such a funereal tone to these early scenes of survivor's guilt and inevitable doom that the already far-fetched film threatens to veer into unplanned absurdity. Thankfully, the tale loosens up with a playful morgue humour: one of the victims winds up the splattered punch line to a grim joke and elaborate Rube Goldbergesque chains of cause and effect become inspired spectacles of destruction. Final Destination is a pretty silly thriller when it takes itself seriously, and the filmmakers play fast and loose with their own rules of fate, but once they stick their tongues firmly in cheek, the film takes off with a screwy interpretation of the domino effect of doom. -Sean Axmaker On the DVD: A superb commentary from writer Jeffrey Reddick, director James Wong and producer Glen Morgan goes into great detail about the film's background. From the team's involvement with The X-Files through to the fight to keep their title "Flight 180", they're pretty candid about the movie's secrets (cameos and character names) and bringing "Death" to life. [+]

One movie-lover's nightmare is another's raucous joyride, and this special effects-laden horror comedy is bound to split both camps right down the middle. Michael J Fox plays a psychic investigator who can actually see ghosts, and lives with a trio of spirits who scare people to promote Fox's ghost-busting business. In a town infamous for serial killings, a new series of deaths prompts Fox to induce his own out-of-body experience so he can battle death in a spirit-plagued netherworld where evil reigns supreme-or something like that. So much happens in this chaotic film that you might feel like you're watching several movies at once-a slasher pic, a supernatural thriller, and a black comedy all rolled into one non-stop showcase for grisly makeup and a dozen varieties of special effects. It's an odd but wildly inventive film from New Zealand director Peter Jackson, who earned critical acclaim for his previous film Heavenly Creatures and would later create the ingenious pseudo-documentary Forgotten Silver. -Jeff Shannon, Amazon. com.

No matter how many sequels they've made or how big a hit it was in 1980, it's difficult to view the first Friday the 13th as anything but a quickie designed to cram in as many elements from horror movies that had been hits in the late 1970s-most obviously, Halloween and Carrie-while adding as little as possible to the formula. Director Sean S Cunningham has an archetypal plot at his disposal as a group of attractive, shallow teenagers out in the woods to reopen a once-cursed summer camp are murdered in manners designed to show off Tom Savini's gore effects. Kevin Bacon, killed early (arrow through the throat), is the only player who went on to have a career, and he hardly stands out from the strip-Monopoly-playing, goon-acting meat-on-the-hoof teens who fall prey to the mostly unseen murderer. That it's not a total write-off is down to a few neatly edited bits of classical suspense and, two decades on, a simmering nostalgia for a world of bouffant-haired bubbleheads in short shorts (and that's just the guys) observed by edgy subjective camera as the music hisses "kill kill kill". On the DVD: Friday the 13th may be the least worthy of all horror "classics", but it's still nice to have an edition that (unlike earlier video releases) offers a 16x9-enhanced 1. 85:1 restored image and a healthy dose of extras. The hard-sell trailer gives away most of the big scares, and so should be sampled after the film. The making of the movie is covered by a 20-minute "Return to Crystal Lake" featurette and a commentary track with input from many of the creatives (Cunningham, composer Harry Manfredini, stars Adrienne King and Betsy Palmer, writer Victor Miller). Some anecdotes get repeated, but there's a lot of solid background material. -Kim Newman.

Inspired by Chris Marker's acclaimed short film La Jetée, 12 Monkeys combines intricate, intelligent storytelling with the uniquely imaginative vision of director Terry Gilliam. The story opens in the wintry wasteland of the year 2035, where a virulent plague has forced humans to live in a squalid, oppressively regimented underground. Bruce Willis plays a societal outcast who is given the opportunity to erase his criminal record by "volunteering" to time-travel into the past to obtain a pure sample of the deadly virus that will help future scientists to develop a cure. But in bouncing from 1918 to the early and mid-1990s, he undergoes an ordeal that forces him to question his own perceptions of reality. Caught between the dangers of the past and the devastation of the future, he encounters a psychiatrist (Madeleine Stowe) who is initially convinced he's insane, and a wacky mental patient (Brad Pitt in a twitchy Oscar-nominated role) with links to a radical group that may have unleashed the deadly virus. Equal parts mystery, tragedy, psychological thriller, and apocalyptic drama, 12 Monkeys ranks as one of the best science fiction films of the 1990s, boosted by Gilliam's visual ingenuity and one of the finest performances of Willis's career. -Jeff Shannon.

Disc 1: Film with commentary by Director Paul WS Anderson and Producer Jeremy Bolt. Disc 2: 5 Part documentary : The Making of Event Horizon. Deleated & extended scenes. The unflimed rescue scene storyboard montage with director's commentary. Conceptual art montage with director's comments. The Point Of No Return featurette.

Most horror movies establish an atmosphere of normality, which they gradually rupture with spooky or creepy or stomach-churning images. The Amityville Horror-a remake of the 1979 movie about a possessed house that torments the family that moves into it-tosses normality out the window in the first five minutes, unleashing a nonstop barrage of unsettling camera angles, decaying wood and stained wallpaper, half-glimpsed shadows in motion, fast edits of grotesque ghosts, and dozens of other horror-movie devices. Whether you like the movie will depend on whether you like feeling slightly nauseated and cut off from any semblance of reality-for many people, that's why they go to horror movies. Others won't be able to suspend disbelief that anyone but an actor would spend the time necessary to develop Ryan Reynold's insanely buff physique, prominently displayed as he runs around wearing nothing but a pair of loose-fitting pajama bottoms. In addition to Reynolds, the movie also features Philip Baker Hall and Melissa George. -Bret Fetzer, Amazon. com.

In Scary Movie we visit BA Corpse High School, where all the pupils are visibly in their late 20s and a masked madman (or two) is on the loose, slaughtering self-involved, pop-culture-obsessed kids while trying to get to virginal heroine Cindy Campbell (Anna Faris). The gang are still guilt-ridden over their semi-accidental killing of a fisherman last Halloween, while at least one has been driven homicidally mad by the cancellation of the Wayans Brothers television show. An old vaudeville motto has it that you can't kid a kidder, and the makers of this would have done well to remember MAD Magazine didn't run a satire of Airplane!. The obvious flaw in the canny plan to satirise Wes Craven's Scream films is that they were already comedies, playing as many self-referential tricks as anything from the Naked Gun team but with the added bonus of actual scary scenes. The joke about ageing starlets pretending to be high school kids was done in Scream 3, for instance, and Scary Movie keeps sending up scenes that were funnier "straight" and only really gets a good satirical victim when it turns to the somewhat sillier I Know What You Did Last Summer franchise. Director Keenen Ivory Wayans and his writing-acting brothers Marlon and Shawn show no real interest in the genre they're taking pot-shots at, suggesting that the point here was to lampoon something hot rather than (as in the best spoofs) growing from a mixture of affection and contempt. The only way Scary Movie can get a reaction is going for gross: heads skewered by dildos, slashed-out breast implants, tiny dick gags, a torrential gush of sperm washing the heroine against the ceiling, relentless fag jokes (a DVD-ROM "Gaydar" feature even enumerates these) and a lot of old Cheech and Chong marijuana routines. About one in 10 of the jokes crack a grudging smile, with riffs on recognisable bits from The Matrix and The Usual Suspects, and a nicely nasty irrelevant aside that makes fun of both Titanic and Amistad. The best moment is a "scenes we've always wanted to see" scene in which an obnoxious cinemagoer is murdered by an entire audience for talking on her mobile phone during Shakespeare in Love. On the DVD: the DVD is letterboxed to 2. [+]