In Waxwork a waxwork museum appears overnight in an American small town and sinister showman David Warner invites a group of typical teens to a midnight party. However, as expected, the place is home to nasty secrets, and the blundering kids find themselves transported via the exhibits into the presence of "the 18 most evil men in history". What this means is that the film gets to trot out gory vignettes featuring such horror staples as Count Dracula (played inaptly with designer stubble and a Clint croak by ex-Tarzan Miles O'Keefe), the Marquis de Sade, an anonymous werewolf with floppy bunny ears (John Rhys-Davies in human form) and the Mummy. Nerdy hero Zach Galligan appeals to wheelchair-bound monster fighter Patrick MacNee for help. Waxwork is strictly a film buff's movie-with Warner and MacNee turning in knowingly camp performances, and references to everything from Crimes of Passion to Little Shop of Horrors cluttering up its very straggly story line. It's not without ragged charms, though the tone veers between comic and sick (the de Sade scene, although inexplicit, features some lurid dialogue) more or less at random. The effects are likewise variable, and in any case rather fudged by direction, which frequently fails to point up the gags properly. It winds up with a scrappy Blazing Saddles-style fight between the forces of Good and a whole pack of monsters, and the budget runs out before the climactic burning-down-the-waxworks scene. The episodic approach echoes the old Amicus omnibus horrors (Dr Terror's House of Horrors, The House that Dripped Blood etc. ), and various cameos allow director Anthony Hickox to parody/emulate the styles of Hammer films, Night of the Living Dead and Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. [+]

In 1987, some 20 years after the original series had ended, Star Trek: The Next Generation was launched into a decade renowned for its materialistic greed, but also for its hesitant steps towards a more unified world order. Creator Gene Roddenberry revised his vision of humanity's future accordingly, shifting the Trek timeline 80 years on and reinventing the new Starship Enterprise as an Ark-like exploration vessel full of families, schools, soothing recreational facilities and a maternally pacifying computer voice (Roddenberry's wife, Majel Barrett). The Next Generation crew were not soldiers, but scientists and diplomats. Unlike the fiercely individualistic Captain Kirk, Patrick Stewart's patrician Captain Jean-Luc Picard was a model team leader: no matter how desperate the crisis, he ensured that everyone got to sit round the Conference Room table and talk it over. And in a true late-1980s touch, a key member of the Bridge crew was psychoanalyst Counsellor Troi, always on hand to discuss everyone's feelings. Season Two saw the welcome introduction of the cybernetic horror that was the Borg. Originally a powerful symbol of technological misuse in an otherwise technologically utopian universe, ultimately their hive-like existence served to reinforce the message that everyone would be much happier as a team player. Even renegade super-entity Q (John De Lancie) relied on Picard as much as his fellow god-like playmates; Data followed Pinocchio and Spock in a quest to discard what made him an individual; and there was even an episode that rationalised why all aliens basically looked alike (we're all one big family). Even the slogan change to "Where no one has gone before" acknowledges that there's no "one" in a team. But for all its earnest political correctness and an over-reliance on "technobabble", good stories played by an appealing ensemble cast were at the heart of the show's success. [+]

Andre Toulon's living puppets are back in Curse of the Puppet Master, this time in the possession of Dr. Magrew (George Peck), who runs a house of marvels and is experimenting to create the perfect being, without all the inner conflict and torment of humans. To do so, he recruits a talented young woodcarver named Tank (Josh Green). But Magrew's plans get complicated when his daughter (appealingly played by Emily Harrison) falls for the young man. Fans of the Puppet Master series will probably enjoy this sixth instalment. The three leads are well cast, the production design shows some imagination, and the script works-until the abrupt and nonsensical ending. The puppets also seem less animated than in previous films; nevertheless, they still manage to get their whacks in. Trivia factoid: director "Victoria Sloane" is one of several stage names used by David DeCoteau, who also directed instalments numbers three and seven in the series. -Geoff Miller, Amazon. com.

The Ring 2 sequel further complicates the urban myth of the original tale, adding a chilling back-story concerning the origins of Sadako, the long-haired, bug-eyed living dead girl who chills her victims like a video nasty. Shell-shocked by the sudden death of her boyfriend, Koichi, Mai Takano takes it upon herself to investigate the sinister videotape that purportedly kills those who watch it after exactly one week. But the police also want to question Takano concerning her proximity to another death, that of Koichi's former father-in-law, and the disappearance of his ex-wife, Reiko, the journalist who began investigating the video tape curse. Plagued by premonitions and visions, hounded by the police, Takano stumbles upon Yoichi, Reiko's son, who after viewing the videotape has acquired strange supernatural powers. Although now mute, Takano seems able to communicate with him and wins the frightened boy's confidence in order to involve him in scientific experiments carried out by Dr Ikuma, the aims of which are to break the curse of Sadako once and for all. Director Nakata stays true to the tone of his original, tightening the plot like a piano wire around the audience, and priming them for the inevitable next episode in the series. -Chris Campion.

In Bud the C. H. U. D. a couple of high-school kids loose the cadaver for the next day's science experiment, then hit on a plan to steal a body from the local hospital to replace it. Unfortunately what they don't know is that the hospital is home to a rather more sinister and dubious military trial, the sole remaining C. H. U. D (Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller), who has been cryogenically frozen after the experiment went horribly wrong. Unwittingly they thaw Bud the C. [+]

Almost the last of the millennial blip of disappointing Devil movies, Lost Souls is a scrambling of themes from The Omen, The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby. It is more serious and stylish than End of Days, Stigmata and Bless the Child, but stuck with a screenplay that manages to be just as ridiculous. Maya Larkin (Winona Ryder), a disturbingly intense young woman who was once exorcised of an evil spirit, puzzles out a numeric code scrawled by a possessed mathematician and leaps to the conclusion that true crime writer Peter Kelson (Ben Chaplin) is due to be transformed into the Antichrist on his upcoming 33rd birthday. The rational Kelson assumes Maya is a lunatic, but after an attempt is made on his life by a rogue priest he notices that the people around him are in a Satanic conspiracy and that his lifelong streak of good luck has been engineered at enormous cost by a cult of witches. As the dreaded birthday nears, Maya and Peter take drastic steps to avert the ascendancy of Evil. Ryder is wildly overqualified for the star role but at least manages to suggest an interesting mix of guile and fanaticism. There are a few good ideas (an apparition we take to be a phantom which turns out to be a real knife-wielding killer, Chaplin searching his own apartment to find evidence of Satanic protections everywhere), but ex-cinematographer Kaminski (Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan) concentrates so hard on bleaching images and grainy effects that he fails to do much with the lumpy storyline, the obligatory British ham (here, John Hurt) cast as a troubled priest, the too-obvious perfidy of the Mystery Satanist Villain, and more laugh-out-loud lines than Little Nicky. On the DVD: The film might not be a masterpiece, but it gets a fine package-good-looking widescreen transfer (it was directed by a cinematographer, after all), 20 minutes' worth of deleted or alternate scenes (including a snippet of Exorcist-like levitation in a flashback), several sound mixes (Dolby Digital, DTS 5. 1, Dolby Surround 2. 0) that allow you to appreciate the unusually layered and ominous soundtrack, a trailer, a full-length unapologetic commentary by Kaminski, cast notes and an eerie menu. [+]