What a combo! Tobe Hooper, the director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, teamed up with family-orientated producer Steven Spielberg to make Poltergeist. The film is about a haunted suburban tract home in a development very much like the one in Arizona in which Spielberg was raised. (Because it came out the same summer as Spielberg's E. T. , it was tempting to see both movies as representing Spielberg's ambivalent feelings about childhood in suburbia. One was a fantasy, the other a nightmare. ) Spielberg also co-wrote the screenplay, which taps into primal, childlike fears of monsters under the bed, monsters in the closet, sinister clown faces, and all manner of things that go bump in the night. At first, some of the odd happenings in the house are kind of funny and amusing, but they grow gradually creepier until the film climaxes in a terrifying special-effects extravaganza when five-year-old Carole Anne (Heather O'Rourke) is kidnapped by the spooks and held hostage in another dimension. Though not nearly as frightening as Hooper's earlier magnum opus, or A Nightmare on Elm Street, which came along two years later, Poltergeist is one of the smartest and most entertaining horror pictures of its time. -Jim Emerson.

The 2003 version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre adheres to the pure-and-simple slasher-movie formula: introduce a gaggle of sexy young people, make vague gestures to distinguish them-Jessica Biel wants to get married and doesn't like pot, so she's our moral compass-then start hacking them to pieces one by one. The visual palette includes grimy crucified dolls, fly-specked pig carcasses, body parts floating in murky jars, a tobacco-chewing redneck sheriff and many slender beams of sunlight cutting through dank, dusty interiors. The camera lovingly photographs Biel's tank-topped bosom and sculpted abs as she's running in terror from a bloated, chainsaw-wielding, human-skin-wearing maniac. This remake lacks the macabre comedy of the original; it's all about the nauseating sensation of waiting for something to jump out of the dark. -Bret Fetzer.

A "Light Universe" and a "Dark Zone" keep good and bad apart for the characters of Lexx, even though it's often hard to tell the difference between the two in this offbeat and unique sci-fi show that seems to delight in its own nastiness. The show's Canadian creators, "Supreme Beans" Paul Donovan, Lex Gigeroff and Jeffrey Hirschfield intended every episode to be, in their words, "a nasty adventure". With flashes of nudity and surgical gore, and a collection of extreme hairstyles and accents, the overall look is often akin to a sci-fi Eurotrash. Event Horizon and The Fifth Element seem to have taken something from the show, and despite a whole team of designers it in turn owes something to David Lynch's Dune. Aboard the stolen 10-kilometre-long spaceship Lexx (designed to look like a dragonfly) are the "Dirty Three-and-a-Half": insufferable coward Stanley H Tweedle (Brian Downey), the Edward Scissorhands clone and 2000 years-dead Kai (Michael McManus), decapitated and lovestruck robot head 790 (voiced by writer Hirschfield) and the skimpily dressed Zev (19-year-old Eva Habermann). It's with the last of these characters that the show generated its main audience and proved itself totally indifferent to regular boundaries of TV formatting. After four 90 minute long movies (really just an extended pilot), it took time for a financial commitment to secure a second season. Then Habermann took on other work, leaving the show without its central babe allure. The creators' answer was to kill off Zev and then immediately resurrect her as Xev (Xenia Seeberg) in a manner far more inventive than Dr Who or even Dallas! A disregard both for genre conventions and good taste makes the show a constant series of surprises: by the time of the third season, the expression "anything goes" had long passed being understatement. On this tape: The jam-packed pilot presents so many dizzyingly original ideas it's hard keeping up with how unique both its universes are. [+]

Despite all the pot-smoking in Idle Hands, the message here seems to be that too many bong hits will take you on a one-way trip to the devil's playground. That's what happens to Anton (Devon Sawa), a wasted teen who's so perpetually zonked on weed that he doesn't notice his parents have been slaughtered by an evil force that then possesses Anton's right hand, taking on a wildly homicidal life of its own after Anton chops it off with a butcher knife. The first victims are Anton's pals Mick (teen-movie stalwart Seth Green), who gets a beer bottle embedded in his skull, and Pnub (Elden Henson), whose head is lopped off by a rotary saw blade, and later reattached with a barbecue fork and duct tape. (Did we mention that Mick and Pnub turn into undead jokesters? It's that kind of movie. ) This unoriginal idea is little more than an excuse for gross-out effects and easy one-liners, and then Vivica A. Fox appears as the demon-buster who knows how to kill the hand once and for all. It's fun to a point, and certain to be a popular Halloween hit with its intended teenage audience, but you can't help wishing this movie had tried harder to be something more than a collection of crude and gory gags. -Jeff Shannon, Amazon. com.

Though Hammer Films ceased theatrical production in the mid-1970s, the TV series Hammer House of Horror afforded the studio a last hurrah in 1980. Though it uses original scripts rather than adaptations of published stories, the series feels like an update of Hammer's earlier Journey to the Unknown, with a mix of contemporary settings, predictable twist endings, mock-gruesome horror, mild sex, familiar TV faces and sly camp that puts it on the shelf somewhere between Nigel Kneale's Beasts and Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected. The shows are variously directed by Hammer regulars Don Sharp (Kiss of the Vampire), Peter Sasdy (Countess Dracula), Robert Young (Vampire Circus) and Alan Gibson (Dracula AD 1972). -Kim Newman Volume Two Episodes: "The Mark of Satan", "Witching Time", "Visitors from the Grave". A box set is also available.

"The Gathering", the feature-length pilot episode for Babylon 5, still ranks amongst the best of introductions to any TV science fiction show. In 1993 there was just nothing else to compare with its wall-to-wall CGI effects backed up by eye-popping architectural and interior production design, costumes, alien make-up and hairstyles. A couple of flat performances let down an otherwise intriguingly cast ensemble, but these problems would vanish in the series. Here, character introduction and development was refreshingly left to fend for itself within an elaborate narrative structure that kicked-off several plot threads at once. Creator Michael Straczynski ambitiously starts proceedings with a multi-layered mystery concerned with the nature and destiny of the soul. Political shenanigans, trigger-happy action stereotypes and wavering physics linger in the viewer's memory, but the tantalising tale told by smooth Commander Sinclair (Michael O'Hare) about the "hole in his mind" makes the strongest impression. Considering how convoluted the show's mysteries would become, "The Gathering" remains an essential starting point. On the DVD: Babylon 5: The Gathering is presented here in its 1998 Special Edition version. However, nowhere on the packaging is this stated. In fact, the back-cover credits are incorrect: apart from anything else, this version features a new score by Christopher Franke and not Stewart Copeland's original. [+]

This screen adaptation of Flowers in the Attic, Virginia Andrews' classic teen novel of adolescent torment and forbidden love, shies away from what made the book so hugely popular, namely the incestuous sex between the two older children, Cathy (Kristy Swanson) and Chris (Jeb Stuart Adams). When the father of four beautiful blond children is suddenly killed, their mother (Victoria Tennant) takes them to the family home she fled 17 years earlier. Their fierce and frightening grandmother (Louise Fletcher) locks them in an upstairs room, from which the only escape is into the cluttered and cobwebbed attic. The children's isolation gets more and more extreme as their mother abandons them, finally even slowly poisoning them to gain her father's inheritance. The movie insinuates but does not make explicit incestuous longing in all directions: Cathy's father brings her special presents before he dies, Chris scrubs Cathy's back in the tub, Chris has a noticeably stronger attachment to their mother than Cathy does-not to mention that the grandmother whips the half-naked mother in front of the grandfather. Fletcher brings a bit of bite to her role, and the movie occasionally rises to absurdly lurid zest. -Bret Fetzer, Amazon. com.

Outside of devoted cult audiences, many Americans have yet to discover the extremely stylish, relentlessly terrifying Italian horror genre, or the films of its talented virtuoso, Dario Argento. Suspiria, part one of a still-uncompleted trilogy (the luminously empty Inferno was the second), is considered his masterpiece by Argento devotees but also doubles as a perfect starting point for those unfamiliar with the director or his genre. The convoluted plot follows an American dancer (Jessica Harper) from her arrival at a European ballet school to her discovery that it's actually a witches coven; but, really, don't worry about that too much. Argento makes narrative subservient to technique, preferring instead to assault the senses and nervous system with mood, atmosphere, illusory gore, garish set production, a menacing camera, and perhaps the creepiest score ever created for a movie. It's essentially a series of effectively unsettling set pieces-a raging storm that Harper should have taken for an omen, and a blind man attacked by his own dog are just two examples-strung together on a skeleton structure. But once you've seen it, you'll never forget it. -Dave McCoy.