Quint

A wacky, hallucinatory take on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In his first film role, William Hurt plays Professor Jessup, who uses psychedelics and sensory deprivation in an isolation tank to try to enter a more primitive state of consciousness and find answers to questions about human origins and our evolutionary past imprinted in our genes. His obsessive quest to know the unknowable and to find out what was at the beginning of everything and what our function is in the universe, increasingly disconnects him from reality and his loved ones. The psychic transformations are soon followed physical ones, and a trippy ride begins that gives even the last act of Kubrick's A Space Odyssey a run for its money. The film jumps between impassioned pseudo-scientific and quasi-philosophical discussions, unfolding at breakneck speed (hats off to the actors), and breathtaking trippy visuals, replete with stunning optical and sound effects. Altered States is exactly the kind of film that teeters on the edge of masterpiece and utter bullshit. Either way, it's an unforgettable sensory experience, especially when seen on a big screen with a proper sound system.

The comedic tone of the first two episodes was replaced by an attempt at a serious love story inspired by “Romeo and Juliet” (he's alive, she's a zombie), but mostly it’s filled with sick gore effects. Lovers of perverse visual orgies will appreciate the creativity with which the living dead are deformed here (the shot-up body, held together only by bolts of a mounted iron structure, or the decoratively needle and shrapnel-riddled protagonist, who tries to appease her appetite for human brains with her own pain). Their repulsive appearance, pitiful screams and insatiable hunger will not make you feel fear, but rather disgust and, at times, perhaps even pity. Actually, it's a kind of zombie BDSM film with a subtle flavour of romance, reflecting the 90s subculture of young people with a penchant for piercings and Marilyn Manson's music.

One of those sequels that essentially remakes its predecessor, only adding more action and effects. Why not? But the original had more oomph.

Before Peter Jackson had success with Bad Taste and Braindead, Dan O'Bannon managed to successfully combine a splatter film with a black comedy. He too was not hindered by a low budget and managed to bring to the screen an astonishing ensemble of comic-book-styled zombies in various forms (a shrunken old woman with no lower half, a naked punk, an animated collection of dead butterflies, dismembered dogs, and a walking skeleton covered in tar). Quite an entertaining punk zombie film, reflecting on the 80s death metal era and the nuclear scare of the time. The zombies here, contrary to previous conventions, are quite fast, relatively intelligent and they talk (“Send more cops”).

After the unfortunate drowning of their daughter, a British couple go to Venice for work and try to forget the tragic event. But a series of mysterious events constantly remind them of their child's death. A hypnotic ghost story without ghosts, with an amazing kaleidoscope of fragmented visions and unsettling hints of escalating menace in the dark corners of Venice's alleys. The film, like Venice, is a labyrinth with dead ends, where there is no direct path to answers. It is a horror film about grief and the inscrutable hand of fate that gradually leads the protagonist to disaster. To properly appreciate Nicolas Roeg's masterpiece, you'll have to see it at least once more.

Zombie Nazis crawl out of the sea and drag the visitors of a remote exotic island underwater. Despite its absurd premise, the film abstains from cheap shock effects in favour of slowly building atmosphere. It surprisingly successfully uses water as a setting for horror, and like Jaws, manages to evoke a sense of unease about what may lurk beneath the surface. The horror here is not the zombie Nazis, but the water in which the characters die (even on land, where there are pools and aquariums). But the film can't sustain the unsettling atmosphere until the end, and eventually runs out of breath.

The film version of the long-running British sci-fi series Doctor Who doesn't stick to the established mythology of the show at all and goes its own way. This time the Doctor is not an eccentric alien, but a kindly grandfatherly inventor. The reworked widescreen version from studio Amicus is more family-friendly, but still manages to entertain with a decent dose of infantile fun with tongue-in-cheek humour and a wacky production design that plunges you into a childish world where all you have to do is pull a single lever in a time machine and you’ll find yourself in a world of blinking, pepper-mill-shaped robots that shout at you in metallic voices, “Exterminate! Exterminate!”.

Screaming for your life that's the only way to keep your fear from getting the best of you, and in case the titular monster didn't send chills down the spines of viewers at the time, at least the buzzers built into the cinema seats disarmed them. Along with 3D glasses and flying skeletons, this was one of the other devices William Castle used to experiment with the boundaries of cinema. But the film entertains even without the interactive experience of the time. The outwardly silly premise is actually a pretty clever metaphor for the horror genre as a whole. The idea of something alien growing inside our bodies certainly brings to mind the later Alien. However, this is not an attack by an outside force, but an attack by a raging psyche from within that you can only defend against by screaming. On the other hand, it's still a ridiculous B-movie that's guaranteed to entertain with just the sight of the actors quivering with utter seriousness in front of a large rubber centipede on a string.

Raimi's colorful hyperkinetic imagery and Elfman's thunderous orgasmic score make Darkman one of the most "comic book" movies ever, which is interesting since it's not based on a comic book at all (the comic came later, though it's not well known).

It's surprising that the renowned visual effects specialist Douglas Trumbull (Space Odyssey, the first Star Trek film) chose such an intimate, melancholic and minimalist film that doesn't rely on VFX for his directorial debut. A forgotten sci-fi film about a gardener who tries to save the space greenhouses containing Earth's last greenery, it may strike some as naive environmental agitprop and others as a warning against eco-terrorists, but it’s actually more morally complex. The protagonist cares for Earth's last greenery at great moral and personal cost, but he also upsets the balance of his own ecosystem with his reckless behaviour (when he accidentally knocks down and damages one of the little robots in his rover). Bruce Dern is, for most of the time, the only actor in the film who can pull it off with ease on his own. The eye-catching production design is certainly worth mentioning, and has clearly influenced a number of more recent, better known sci-fi films.