What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? sees a change of direction for Robert Aldrich's unofficial trilogy which all involve "ageing actresses" in macabre thrillers (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush. Hush, Sweet Charlotte). The busy Aldrich only produced What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice?, calling in TV director Lee H Katzin (a Mission: Impossible regular) to handle the megaphone. Aldrich also opted to shoot the film in pastel colours appropriate to the unusual Arizona desert setting rather than the gothic black and white of the earlier films. The film cast the less iconic Geraldine Page as the genteelly unpleasant Mrs Clare Marrable. Left apparently penniless by her departed husband, Mrs M opts to keep up appearances by hiring a succession of timid elderly housekeepers, bossing them around with well-spoken nastiness, duping them out of their life savings and, on the pretence of getting help with a midnight tree-planting program, lures them into their own graves, batters them to death and plants lovely pines over them. Page gets her own way with the meek likes of Mildred Dunnock, until the feistier, red-wigged R!uth Gordon applies for the job and gets down to amateur sleuthing. While Bette Davis and her partners went wildly over the top in previous films, Page and Gordon play more subtly, finding odd pathetic moments in between the monstrous, irony-laced horror stuff. [+]

Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is less an adaptation of Stephen King's best-selling horror novel than a complete re-imagining of it from the inside out. In King's book, the Overlook Hotel is a haunted place that takes possession of its off-season caretaker and provokes him to murderous rage against his wife and young son. Kubrick's film is an existential Road Runner cartoon (his steadicam scurrying through the hotel's labyrinthine hallways), in which the cavernously empty spaces inside the Overlook Hotel mirror the emptiness in the soul of the blocked writer settled in for a long winter's hibernation. As many have pointed out, King's protagonist goes mad, but Kubrick's Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) is Looney Tunes from the moment we meet him-all arching eyebrows and mischievous grin. (Both Nicholson and Shelley Duvall reach new levels of hysteria in their performances, driven to extremes by the director's fanatical demand s for take after take after take. ) The Shining is terrifying-but not in the way fans of the novel might expect. When it was redone as a TV mini-series (reportedly because of King's dissatisfaction with the Kubrick film), the famous topiary-animal attack (which was deemed impossible to film in 1980) was there-but the deeper horror was lost. Kubrick's The Shining gets under your skin and chills your bones; it stays with you, inhabits you, haunts you. And there's no place to hide. [+]

One of the most famous, most shocking and, for much of its existence, most elusive of cult films, Tod Browning's Freaks remains worthy of its dubious top billing by literary critic Leslie Fiedler as the greatest of all Freak movies. At the centre of the story are two circus midgets, Hans and Frieda (already well known in the 1930s through film and advertising appearances as Harry and Daisy Earles), whose marriage plans are blasted when Hans becomes the target of the aerialist Cleopatra's plot to marry him then kill him off for his money. During what is certainly one of the most notorious scenes in cult film history, the wedding party of freaks ritually embrace Cleopatra as one of us. Through her undisguised horror at this and her gruesome punishment by the freaks, the film bluntly confronts viewers about our awkwardness about different bodies while simultaneously stirring up fear and alarm in familiar horror-movie style. Better known for the Bela Lugosi version of Dracula (1931), Brownings showmanship was equally a product of the circus (he was himself an adolescent contortionist in a travelling show). His meshing of circus and cinema-two dangerous entertainments-produces Freaks' uniquely disquieting effect. Startled and indignant preview audiences forced the producers to add an explanatory foreword to the film but even this crackles with sensationalism as it veers between sideshow-style sympathy and fright warning. None the less, protests and local censorship ensued and the film never reached the mass audience for which it was made. Still, some of the real stars of the midway Ten-in-One shows of the 1920s and 30s (Johnny Eck, Daisy and Violet Hilton the Siamese twins, Prince Randian, the Hindu Living Torso) are showcased here as themselves and it is their undeniably real presence in what is otherwise familiar fictional terrain which is still so provocative. -Helen Stoddart.

A mysterious, pilotless plane carries scientist Rex Reason to a colony of America's best and brightest minds. They have been kidnapped by a dying alien race, the Metalunians, to repair their defence shield before their enemies destroy their world completely, and are to be found toiling under their spying eyes and futuristic security cameras (two-way TVs that dominate every room). Jeff Morrow, under a raised forehead, bronze tan, and snow-white hair, philosophises as Exeter, the thoughtful Metalunian torn between his duty and his morals as he forces the plucky humans to labour in his race's defence. The moody mystery of the first half turns to pure pulp adventure when the humans are transported across the galaxy to the battle-scarred world of Metaluna, under the threatening watch of a monstrous bug-eyed monster with a giant brain for a head and massive claws for hands. There is a genuine sense of wonder to Joseph Newman's intergalactic adventure, one of the most ambitious science fiction films of the 1950s. The story is simple space opera, but the futuristic designs of glass and metal, the marvellous alien makeup, and grand-standing special effects invest the film with a Technicolor splendour. Faith Domergue co-stars as a nuclear physicist and Gilligan's Island's Russell Johnson makes his first professorial appearance as a scientist. Science-fiction auteur Jack Arnold was an unbilled co-director. -Sean Axmaker.

Let's face it - to many people, vampirism isn't all the horror it's made out to be, it's just an alternative lifestyle! You drink a bit of blood and get to live ten times longer than anyone else. Nothing to it. At least that's what Jeremy Capello thinks when he gets a little deeper than the average love-bite from a hot date. Before he knows it, his reflection in the bathroom mirror has vanished; he can't stand the smell of garlic; and he's developed an overwhelming passion for raw steak. Things don't seem to bad until a crazed vampire-hunter stars chasing him.

Comparisons to The Blair Witch Project are inevitable for the inventive, satirical The Last Broadcast, a chilling and funny mockumentary by filmmakers Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler. Besides being made and coming to prominence around the same time (though without a Blair Witch-style marketing juggernaut), The Last Broadcast also details the doomed travails of some amateur filmmakers as they track a mysterious, murderous legend in a dark forest. Hmmm, sound familiar? Actually, The Last Broadcast takes a different tack on this premise, one more media-savvy than Blair Witch. Turns out that this is the latest instalment of the X-Files-ish public access show Fact or Fiction, and its goofy hosts (Avalos and Weiler themselves) plan on doing a live broadcast from deep in the New Jersey woods on their ongoing quest for the Bigfoot-like Jersey Devil. Teaming up with two Internet-based fans, they plunge themselves and their equipment into the wintry woods; only one man, the creepy psychic Jim (Jim Seward), returns, and is promptly convicted of the murders of the other three. While it does boast footage made by the "dead" filmmakers, The Last Broadcast is more formally structured as a documentary, complete with officious, muckraking host (David Leigh) and much behind-the-scenes footage. We are let in on the backgrounds of the victims, the 911 phone calls, the murder trial, the inconsistencies the prosecution overlooked and the painstaking work of reconstructing the film stock, which may unlock the mystery of the true killer. Filmed entirely with digital cameras and assembled on digital systems for a mind-boggling $900, The Last Broadcast boasts a great look and a sharp, satiric eye for sending up the media-Avalos and Weiler are in calm command of their medium and message. The film does take a sharp turn that could either enrage or amaze viewers enraptured by what's preceded, but it's a minor quibble at best. And unlike The Blair Witch Project, The Last Broadcast does answer all the mysterious questions it raises. [+]

A major box office hit in the Far East, Hideo Nakada's Ring is a subtly creepy Japanese ghost story with an urban legend theme, based on a series of popular teen-appeal novels by Susuki Koji. Far less showy than even the restrained chills of The Blair Witch Project or The Sixth Sense, Ring has nevertheless become a mainstream blockbuster and has already been followed by Ring 2 and the prequel Ring 0. A Hollywood remake is in the works. Investigating the inexplicable, near-simultaneous deaths of her young niece and three teenage friends, reporter Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima) learns of a story about a supernaturally cursed video-tape circulating among school kids. As soon as anyone has watched the tape, allegedly recorded by mistake from a dead TV channel, the telephone rings and the viewer has exactly a week to live. Those doomed are invisibly marked, but their images are distorted if photographed. Inevitably, Asakawa gets hold of the tape and watches it. The enigmatic collage of images include a coy woman combing her hair in a mirror, an old newspaper headline about a volcanic eruption, a hooded figure ranting, people crawling and a rural well. When the phone rings (a memorably exaggerated effect), Asakawa is convinced that the curse is active and calls in her scientist ex-husband Ryuji (Hiroyuki Sanada) to help. He watches a copy of the video a day after Asakawa is exposed and willingly submits himself to the curse. [+]