This lushly produced fantasy has gained a loyal following since its release in 1985, and it gave a welcome boost to the careers of Matthew Broderick, Michelle Pfeiffer and Rutger Hauer. You have to ignore the overly aggressive music score by Andrew Powell, music director of the Alan Parsons Project (critic Pauline Kael aptly dubbed it "disco-medieval") and director Richard Donner's reckless allowance of anachronistic dialogue and uninspired storytelling, but there's a certain charm to the movie's combination of romance and heroism. Broderick plays a young thief who comes to the aid of tragic lovers Isabeau (Pfeiffer), who is cursed to become a hawk every day at sunrise and Navarre (Hauer) who turns into a wolf at sunset. The curse was cast by an evil sorcerer-bishop (John Wood), and as Broderick eludes the bishop's henchmen, Navarre struggles to conquer the villain, lift the curse and be reunited with his love in human form. The tragedy of this lovers' dilemma keeps the movie going, and Broderick is well cast as a young, medieval variation of Woody Allen. -Jeff Shannon.

Starting around Halloween 4, that masked nut Michael Myers stopped chasing his sister (played by Jamie Lee Curtis in the first and second films, as well as Halloween H20) and went after his niece. Now he's chasing her around again in part 5, but it's a lot of other people who die in the process. Donald Pleasence continues his mad-doctor bit from the earlier movies, Danielle Harris is the unfortunate relation, and Donald L. Shanks plays the monster. The film is an improvement on parts 2 and 4 (part 3 having nothing to do with Michael Myers), but it still amounts to routine slaughter with none of John Carpenter's stylistic brilliance from the original movie. -Tom Keogh, Amazon. com.

This box set collects From Dusk Till Dawn and its two lesser-known sequels, plus a wealth of associated material. None are horror classics, but taken as a trilogy the series offers above-average thrills and an interesting invented mythology. The original is a trashy but fun crime spree/vampire movie, directed by Robert Rodriguez, with Quentin Tarantino doing one job too many as producer, writer and co-star. The crime movie half is suspenseful and flavoursome and the left turn into horror begins wonderfully, but the script makes the mistake of getting rid of the flamboyant monster villains too quickly, replacing them with an orgy of rubbery Evil Dead II-style effects. It never gets boring, there's a terrific Tex-Mex-Gothic soundtrack and Rodriguez stages shoot-outs better than anyone not called John Woo. It was a big enough hit to warrant sequels made for the video market, shot back-to-back in South Africa (doubling for Texas and Mexico). From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money begins as another cowboy noir, with ex-con Robert Patrick playing cat and mouse with Texas Ranger Bo Hopkins. It segues into horror as heist man Duane Whitaker runs into a bat on the highway and proceeds to turn his gang into vampires who engage during a total eclipse in a Wild Bunch-style bank raid-cum-shootout. Switching genres and playing the prequel game, From Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman's Daughter is more distinctive. A cod-spaghetti Western, it takes a plot nugget from history as the aged Ambrose Bierce (Michael Parks, the Sheriff killed before the credits in the first film) tangles with vampires in Mexico in 1914 en route to his mythic disappearance. [+]

For Rosemary's Baby, his modern horror tale about Satanic worship and a pregnant woman's decline into madness, Roman Polanski moves from the traditional monolithic mansions of Gothic flicks to an apartment building in New York City. Based on Ira Levin's novel, the story concerns Rosemary (Mia Farrow) and Guy Woodhouse who find the apartment of their dreams in a luxurious complex in Manhattan. Soon after moving in and making friends with a group of elderly neighbours, Guy's career takes off and Rosemary discovers she is pregnant. Their happiness seems complete. But gradually Rosemary begins to sense that something is wrong with this baby, and slowly and surely her life begins to unravel. Polanski uses such subtle means to build up the sense of preternatural disquiet that initially you suspect Rosemary's prenatal paranoia to be a figment of her imagination. But the guilty parties and their demonic plan to make Rosemary the receptacle of their master's child are eventually revealed and, as Rosemary looses her grip on reality, she realises that no one can be trusted. The performances are excellent throughout; Farrow as the young wife is so fragile that you wonder how she made it unscathed to adulthood and John Cassavetes is horrifyingly duplicitous as her husband Guy. But the real star is Polanski's masterful direction. The mood is at the same time oppressive and hysterical with the mounting terror coming from the situation and gradually unravelling plot rather than any schlock horror moments. [+]

You'd expect the end of the world to be no day in the park, but in M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening, a day in the park is where the end begins. One otherwise peaceful summer morning, New Yorkers strolling in Central Park come to a halt in unison, then begin killing themselves by any means at hand. At a high-rise construction site a few blocks over, it's raining bodies as workers step off girders into space. And all the while, the city is so quiet you can hear the gentle breeze in the trees. That breeze carries a neurotoxin, and what or who put it there (terrorists?) is a question raised periodically as the film unfolds. But the question that really matters is how and whether anybody in the Middle Atlantic states is going to stay alive. The Happening is Shyamalan's best film since The Sixth Sense, partly because he avoids the kind of egregious misjudgment that derailed The Village and Lady in the Water, but mostly because the whole thing has been structured and imagined to keep faith with the point of view of regular, unheroic folks confronted with a mammoth crisis. Focal characters are a Philadelphia high-school science teacher (Mark Wahlberg, excellent), his wife (Zooey Deschanel) and math-teacher colleague (John Leguizamo), and the latter's little girl (Ashlyn Sanchez). Instinct says get out of the cities and move west; most of the film takes place in the delicately picturesque Pennsylvania countryside, with menace hovering somewhere in the haze. [+]

Perfect Creature imagines a world where vampires and humans peacefully co-exist. The result of a genetic mutation initiated by an ancient virus, the vampires are known as The Brothers. Superior in mind and body to their human counterparts, they are the custodians of genetic science and protect humanity from disease. In return for a dedication to preserving human life, The brothers ask humanity to share only one thing: their blood.

Halloween is one of the great modern horror films, but as a franchise its track record has been spotty at best, painfully bad at worst. Halloween H2O: Twenty Years Later, directed by horror vet Steve Miner (Friday the 13th parts 2 and 3, House), won't displace John Carpenter's original but it might help you forget the films in between. Miner certainly has: the film begins as if sequels 3 through 6 never happened. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis, reprising her role for the first time in almost two decades) faked her death and is now a single mom and headmistress of an exclusive California private school. She's also a secret alcoholic who lives in fear of her homicidal brother-bogeyman Michael Myers. Guess who decides to show up for a family reunion? The film begins with classic horror-movie exposition (the deserted college campus, Michael's escape, Laurie's waking nightmares) accomplished with some humour and style, but it's all set up for the second half, a driving roller coaster of stalk-and-slash thrills. There's little of the self-conscious genre referencing of Scream and at times the film is a little far-fetched-it is a slasher movie about a knife-wielding homicidal maniac who won't stay dead, after all-but Curtis transforms Laurie from a shrieking victim into an empowered, determined horror-movie heroine who's learned a thing or two from the previous films. Adam Arkin, Josh Hartnett, and TV cutie Michelle Williams (Dawson's Creek) co-star, and the script received uncredited polish from Scream writer Kevin Williamson; Curtis's mom, Janet Leigh, pops up in a cameo. -Sean Axmaker Effectively bypassing the largely rubbish slew of sequels, Halloween H20 picks up 20 years after the second movie, with Laurie Strode now hiding out as the head mistress of a posh boarding school in the California hills after faking her own death and changing her name. She is an emotionally traumatised alcoholic wreck, still struggling with the memories of her near fatal encounters with her psychotic brother Michael Myers years earlier, and so is over-protective of her 17-year-old son John. [+]

After 11 years in development hell and screenplay drafts by 13 different writers, the long-awaited smackdown of Freddy vs Jason finally arrived in cinemas in 2003. After making their respective debuts in Friday the 13th (1980) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), the hockey-masked killer Jason Voorhees (Ken Kirzinger, replacing long-time Jason performer Kane Hodder) and razor-gloved Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) square off in a slasher-franchise combo-deal that only their most devoted fans will appreciate; it turns out this is a lightweight match in which nobody wins. It's an average entry in the histories of these horror icons, comparable to half of their previous sequels, and Bride of Chucky director Ronny Yu satisfies purists with plenty of gushing blood and mayhem when Freddy recruits Jason to slice 'n' dice the ill-fated teens who've forgotten Freddy's once-formidable reign of terror. While it logically connects the gruesome legacies of Nightmare's Elm Street and Friday's Camp Crystal Lake, this horror hybrid is shockingly uninspired. It briefly peaks when Freddy gives the unconscious Jason a dream-world pummelling, but ultimately, their showdown's a letdown -Jeff Shannon.

Needless and unnecessary are two words that have little meaning in Hollywood, especially when you're talking sequels or remakes. Case in point: Black Christmas, the revisionist version of the 1974 horror thriller largely thought to be the proto-slasher movie (this was four years before the first Halloween installment). The original, from director Bob Clark, is still considered a masterpiece of tension, understatement, innovative camera perspective, economic efficiency (a polite way of saying "ultra-low budget"), and killing off pretty young girls in grisly ways without any cumbersome exposition regarding the psychopath's motives. This, by the way, from the same Bob Clark who would soon bring us the beloved Porky's franchise as well as Black Christmas's polar opposite, the sweetly nostalgic classic A Christmas Story. Anyway, as needless and unnecessary as this remake is, it certainly delivers the goods on 21st-century slasher conventions as the sorority sisters of Alpha Kappa are picked off during Christmas break in ever more gruesome fashion. There's nothing wrong with all of this, particularly for fans of impalements, crushed skulls, ripped-out eyeballs, and some good old-fashioned Christmas cookie cannibalism. Writer-director Glen Morgan, who earned his own credibility as co-creator of the Final Destination series and the interesting 2003 remake of Willard adds a few clever visual homages to the original along with the amped-up extreme gore. Clark's device (was he the first to use it?) of creepy, mouth-breathing phone calls from killer to victim remains intact and creepy. He also resurrects Andrea Martin, one of the then-unknown actor victims who, now famous, plays the prim housemother. Another addition, which may not be so welcome to purists of the genre, is a load of exposition and backstory for the killer. [+]