This terrifying adaptation of Stephen King's bestselling horror novel was directed by shock maestro Brian De Palma for maximum, no-holds-barred effect. Sissy Spacek stars as Carrie White, the beleaguered daughter of a religious kook (Piper Laurie) and a social outcast tormented by her cruel, insensitive classmates. When her rage turns into telekinetic powers, however, school's out in every sense of the word. De Palma's horrific climax in a school gym lingers forever in the memory, though the film is also built upon Spacek's remarkable performance and Piper Laurie's outlandishly creepy one. John Travolta has a small part as a thug, De Palma's future wife, Nancy Allen, is his girlfriend, and Amy Irving makes her screen debut as one of the girls giving Carrie a hard time. -Tom Keogh.

The granddaddy of giant monster movies, The Lost World was one of the most expensive movies ever made in 1925, costing more than a million dollars, and has remained one of the most influential. Every larger-than-life creature feature since-from King Kong to Godzilla and Jurassic Park-owes a debt to this original adventure fantasy based on Arthur Conan Doyle's novel. It's the story of a maverick scientist (Wallace Beery under a bushy beard) who finds a land that time forgot on a plateau deep within the South American jungles and comes back to London with a captured brontosaurus to prove it. His expedition includes Bessie Love, the daughter of an explorer who disappeared on the previous expedition, and big game hunter Lewis Stone. The ostensible stars of the picture are all upstaged by Willis O'Brien's dinosaurs, simple models brought to life with primitive stop-motion animation (the technique was soon to be perfected by O'Brien for King Kong). Hardly realistic by any measure, these pioneering special effects are still a sight to behold, especially the lumbering brontosaurus which receives the most care from O'Brien, both foraging in his jungle and rampaging through the streets of London. With the coming of talkies, The Lost World became obsolete: all known American prints were destroyed in favour of a sound remake (which became King Kong) and the film only survived in a severely truncated form (even the original negative was lost). For this release David Shepard meticulously "rebuilt" the film using material from eight different surviving prints from all over the world, cleaning and restoring along the way. The result is 50% longer than previously extant prints, still not complete but closer than any version since its 1925 debut. The difference is not merely in restored scenes but in a rediscovered sense of grace in scenes filled out to their original detail and pace. [+]

A prime candidate for cult status, Prophecy-the apocalyptic 1995 horror flick-belongs in the darker corners of comedy, offering a mixed blessing with some highlights worth savouring. Christopher Walken stars as the Angel Gabriel, who's really mad at God for allowing humans into heaven (because, you see, humans have souls and angels don't, and God plays favourites). Gabriel takes his anger out on the human race, coming to Earth to capture the soul of the most evil human alive in an effort to defeat the "good" angels that remain in God's good graces. One of the good angels (Eric Stoltz,) captures the evil soul before Walken does and transfers it into the body of a little girl. Are you with us so far? Don't worry if you're not, because writer-director Gregory Widen filled The Prophecy with so many wild ideas that he didn't bother to connect them to a coherent plot. Add Viggo Mortensen as the devil and Elias Koteas as a priest-turned-detective who's tracking Walken, and it's clear that Widen was attempting something ambitious here. He nearly succeeded, since The Prophecy jumpstarts its heaven-and-hell rivalry with enough action, humour and intelligence to make the movie sufficiently entertaining. It was enjoyable enough to entice Walken back for the sequel, so if you're into this kind of thing, this one's a cracker. -Jeff Shannon, Amazon. com.

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. [+]

Shadow of the Vampire is a film full of good ideas that are only partially developed. Clever, engaging, and boosted by the sublime casting of Willem Dafoe as Nosferatu "actor" Max Schreck, its premise is ripe with possibilities but the movie's too slight to register much impact: characters remain achingly underdeveloped and the whole lacks a sense of pace or structure. What's left, however, is enough for anyone to get their teeth into: the delightful performances from a sterling cast and director E Elias Merhige's affectionately tongue-in-cheek homage to a landmark of German silent cinema. John Malkovich is aptly loony as the eccentric director FW Murnau, whose passion in filming the 1922 classic Nosferatu leads to the extreme casting of Schreck as the vampire, a vision of evil who, in this movie's delightfully twisted imagination, actually is a vampire, sucking the blood of cast and crew members who've dismissed Schreck as an over-zealous method actor. As these on-set maladies and "accidents" continue, Schreck wields greater control over Murnau, who descends into a kind of obsessive art-for-art's-sake madness until diva co-star Greta Schroeder (Catherine McCormack, doing wonderful work) is served up as the actor's ultimate motivation. Merhige and his actors (including Cary Elwes, as intrepid cameraman Fritz Wagner) have great fun with this ghastly escapade, and the humour is kept delicately subtle to balance the movie's artistic aspirations. To that end, Dafoe is just right, his bald pate and gaunt features a perfect match for the mysterious Schreck, his grimace and talon-like fingers suggesting a human vulture on the prowl. Likewise, the re-creation of Nosferatu's expressionist style is both fanciful and brilliantly authentic. Too bad, then, that this movie suffers from a case of vampiric anaemia, with budgetary shortcomings apparently the cause of at least some of its shortcomings; if Shadow of the Vampire shared the depth and richness of, say, Ed Wood, it might have been a cult classic for the ages. -Jeff Shannon, Amazon. [+]

Opinion is mixed as to whether Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is a worthy successor to Tobe Hooper's seminal slasher flick. The story picks up 14 years after the events of the first film, which have long since passed into local legend. On a relentless search for the maniacs who murdered his wheelchair-bound nephew Franklin, Lieutenant "Lefty" Enright (Dennis Hopper) is drawn to the scene of a brutal roadside killing in Red River, Texas. He soon forms an alliance with Stretch (Caroline Williams), a feisty female radio DJ who inadvertently broadcasts the chainsaw murder of two drunken frat boys live on her late-night phone-in request show. At Lefty's request she replays the tape on air and soon after receives a terrifying visit from two deranged fans, Leatherface and Chop Top, who are intent on killing her. Stretch escapes, and together with Lefty follows the trail of the gruesome twosome into the bowels of the deserted San Jacinto historical theme park, which hides a Leatherface house of horrors. In contrast to the chilling, snuff movie scenario of the original, Hooper whoops it up with this 1986 sequel brimming with gruesome humour, without welching on the thrills. Writer LM Kit Carson (Paris, Texas) reworks Leatherface into a tragic, almost naïve figure trapped beneath a horrific façade and fleshes out his thoroughly dysfunctional family with the introduction of baby brother ChopTop-a steel-plated Vietnam vet. Leatherface's old man (now called Drayton Sawyer) and Grandpa are carried over from the first film. Dennis Hopper is clean cut but dead-eyed in a typically manic performance as the cowboy detective driven by revenge-think of an embryonic Frank Booth from Blue Velvet with a fetish for power tools. [+]

To define the 1988 fantasy flick Paperhouse as a mere horror film would be an injustice-although this intelligent and thought-provoking British film is certainly scary in parts. In exploring the world of dreams, director Bernard Rose (Candyman) offers a far more elegant exposition of the subject than the Nightmare on Elm Street school of horror. Based on the novel Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr, Paperhouse offers a believable cause for its intensified dreamworld: Anna (Charlotte Burke) falls ill with glandular fever-a fever which will blur her understanding of reality and dreams. It is clear from the start that Anna has an overzealous imagination, holding onto her childhood games while her best friend becomes more interested in boys. Before her descent into illness Anna draws the Paperhouse of the title, and it is this house that dominates her dream world. Although the acting is rather hammy and the scenes set in reality are tedious, the true beauty of the film comes from Production Designer Gemma Jackson and Cinematographer Mike Southon, whose talents emerge in the dream sequences. Clearly taking inspiration from the Surrealist movement, Jackson recreates a chilling version of Anna's drawing of the house, full of dark shadows and terrifying noises, that perhaps has more in common with Jan Svankmajer's macabre adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Alice than the innocent childhood offerings of Disney. Ultimately Paperhouse is an exploration of the traumatic transition into adulthood of a young girl on the cusp of her teenage years: at the start of the film Anna "hates boys", but by the end she is sharing her first kiss with Mark, her playmate in the dream world. On the DVD With a 1. 66:1 ratio format and Dolby Digital sound the stylistic brilliance of this movie is much easier to see and enjoy than in its previous incarnations on television and video. [+]

The second season of Farscape expands upon and develops the characters introduced in the ambitious first season. John Crichton's new nemesis is the deadly Scorpius, replacing Crais who has taken the living ship Moya's offspring on a voyage into the unknown. Moya's regular crew-Aeryn, Zhaan, Chiana, D'Argo and Rygel-remain as divided and suspicious of each other as ever, yet somehow manage to pull together at times of crisis. The writers continue to exploit the show's gift for surprising as well as emotionally convincing character development, while the CGI effects, prosthetics and state-of-the-art puppetry-courtesy of Jim Henson's Creature Shop-continue to make Farscape the most original-looking sci-fi show on TV. The witty scripts, peppered with post-modern pop culture references and in-jokes, are also a breath of fresh air. The result is episodic TV sci-fi that continually pushes at the accepted boundaries of the genre. -Mark Walker.