Possibly the worst movie of the year (or perhaps even the decade) was Alessandro Capone’s Death Squad (aka 2047: Sights of Death), which was set in a repressive future and wasted the questionable talents of Danny Glover, Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen, Stephen Baldwin and Rutger Hauer.
Made on a budget of just £12,000 and mostly financed by John Herbert, the brother of late horror writer James Herbert, much of Warren Dudley’s The Cutting Room was filmed in the tunnels beneath Newhaven Fort, East Sussex.
A father and son were forced to squat in a haunted London council estate in Oliver Frampton’s feature debut The Forgotten, also released on DVD.
The Jurassic World Blu-ray set was not only in 3-D, but also came with two dinosaur figures.
The BBC boxed set Doctor Who: The 10 Christmas Specials included the mostly disappointing annual festive one-offs featuring both David Tennant and Matt Smith as the Doctor.
Stephen Taylor’s video documentary Jack Pierce: The Maker of Monsters was a profile of the Universal Studios make-up man who created some of the screen’s most iconic creatures.
Danny Trejo was amongst the passengers of a cruise ship menaced by a mutated predator in the Syfy TV movie 3-Headed Shark Attack, directed by Fred Olen Ray’s son Christopher, and the actor also found himself battling lava-filled zombies in The Burning Dead.
Steve Guttenberg, of all people, was the hero of Lavalantula, in which volcanic eruptions in Los Angeles released an army of gigantic, lava-breathing tarantulas. Ian Zierling had a cameo as his character from the Sharknado series.
Speaking of which, author George R.R. Martin was just one of the famous faces who met a bloody end in Syfy’s witless sequel Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! Once again directed by Anthony C. Ferrante and starring a game Ziering and a comatose Tara Reid, the pointless parade of “celebrity” cameos included appearances by Frankie Muniz, David Hasselhoff, Bo Derek, Lou Ferrigno, Lorenzo Lamas, Kim Richards, Jackie Collins, Tim Russ, Michael Bolten, Jerry Springer, Teller (but no Penn), Matt Lauer, Al Roker, Kathie Lee Gifford and many other people who apparently have no shame.
Four friends on vacation encountered infected sharks in Zombie Shark (aka Shark Island), while a giant Russian robot battled it out with a razor-tooth predator in the equally ludicrous Mega Shark vs. Kolossus.
Corin Nemec, Yancy Butler and Robert Englund all found themselves drowning in Lake Placid vs. Anaconda, and Martian Land was a disaster movie set on a colonised Mars in the distant future.
In Syfy’s Avengers Grimm, fairy tale-characters Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel and Red travelled through the Magic Mirror to the real world to rescue Snow White and destroy Rumpelstiltskin (Casper Van Dien) and his army of thralls.
Loosely based on a reportedly true story, Sky Living’s grim three-part mini-series The Enfield Haunting starred Timothy Spall as a real-life psychic investigator looking into apparent poltergeist activity in a drab North London suburban home in 1977. Juliet Stevenson, Matthew Macfadyen and young Eleanor Worthington-Cox provided solid support.
Also inspired by a real-life psychic investigator, along with Neil Spring’s novel The Ghost Hunters, ITV’s Harry Price: Ghost Hunter starred Rafe Spall as the titular debunker looking into an MP’s apparently haunted house in what could have been an impressive series pilot.
When a teenager (Hazel Doupe) was admitted to Great Ormond Street Hospital in London for life-saving surgery, she found herself transported to the world of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in the TV movie Peter & Wendy. The eclectic cast included Paloma Faith as Tinkerbell and Stanley Tucci as Captain Hook.
The Disney’s Channel’s Descendants was a teen musical about the offspring of such villains as Maleficent, the Evil Queen, Cruella de Vil and Jafar, while a new boy in town (Rahart Adams) pretended to be a vampire to impress the rest of his schoolmates in Nickelodeon’s Liar, Liar, Vampire.
The 1978 version wasn’t all that good, so why did NBC think we needed The Wiz Live!, featuring Queen Latifah, Mary J. Blige and David Alan Grier easin’ on down the yellow brick road to Oz?
More than any other time that I can remember, television is awash with genre shows on multiple channels and platforms.
The ninth series of the revived Doctor Who got off to a shaky start in September when the show lost more than two million viewers on BBC. It might have been down to the later broadcast time or the fact that Steve Moffat’s typically complicated plot was aimed at older fans who would have welcomed back the evil Davros (Julian Bleach), the Daleks, UNIT and Missy/The Master (the droll Michelle Gomez).
The mostly two-part stories that followed featured underwater ghosts (scripted by Toby Whithouse), alien mercenaries, Zygon rebels and a “found footage” space mystery (written by Mark Gatiss), before companion Clara (Jenna Coleman) was apparently killed off after three years, only to be snatched out of time in the extended series finale/reboot and flying off in a retro-styled TARDIS with Viking tomboy Ashildr/Me (Maisie Williams), a reluctant immortal created by Peter Capaldi’s damaged Doctor.
The enjoyable (for a change) Christmas Day special reunited the Doctor with Alex Kingston’s River Song in a fun romcom that also featured comedians Greg Davies and Matt Lucas.
Anna Maxwell Martin starred as glum church exorcist (“deliverance consultant”) Reverend Merrily Watkins, who attempted to keep her sulky teenage daughter Jane (Sally Messham) out of the clutches of a cult of upper-class Satanists, in Stephen Volk’s three-part adaptation of Phil Rickman’s novel Midwinter of the Spirit for ITV. David Threlfall turned up as Merrily’s even more downbeat mentor.
Martin also turned up as author Mary Shelley, along with Steven Berkoff’s William Blake, in ITV’s six-part serial The Frankenstein Chronicles. It starred Sean Bean as 19th century London policeman John Marlott investigating a series of macabre murders involving the stitched-together corpses of children dragged out of the River Thames and high society experiments to reanimate the dead.
The busy actress also turned up briefly as a housekeeper murdered in her bed in the BBC’s three-part adaptation of Agatha Christie’s classic mystery And Then There Were None. The atmospheric 1939-set thriller also featured Charles Dance, Sam Neill, Miranda Richardson, Toby Stephens and Aidan Turner amongst the potential murder victims invited to an old dark house on an isolated island off the Devon coast. Unfortunately, the production decided to reinstate the author’s nihilistic ending.
Bertie Carvel and Eddie Marsan portrayed the titular feuding 19th-century magicians in the BBC’s sumptuously produced seven-part adaptation of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, based on the best-selling 2004 novel by Susanna Clarke. Set in an alternate history where “practical magic” was restored to England during the Napoleonic wars, Marc Warren played the menacing “Gentleman” from the fairy kingdom.
Loosely based on the Vertigo comics title, The CW’s fifteen-episode iZombie starred Rose McIver as likeable medical student Liv Moore (get it?), who was turned into a zombie during a wild party on a boat. Her job at the Seattle Coroner’s Office not only allowed her to feed her hunger for brains, but also to use her meals’ memories to help Detective Clive Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin) solve crimes.
The terrific supporting cast included Rahul Kohli as Liv’s boss, who helped keep her secret, and David Anders as the criminal zombie Blaine who exploited the reanimated dead’s need for fresh sustenance. Unfortunately, the show’s sophomore season failed to move the plot along.
Drugged-out Johnny Depp-lookalike teen Nick (Frank Dillane) and his dysfunctional Los Angeles family found themselves caught up in the early stages of the zombie apocalypse in the first season of AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead, which was an equally talky prequel/companion to the same network’s lumbering The Walking Dead. Following the apparently shocking death of series regular Glenn (Steven Yeun) at the end of that show’s fifth season, the sixth series was once again set around the walled-off community of Alexandria, as Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and the other survivors were menaced by both the humans and zombies outside.
With nowhere near the budget of The Walking Dead, the second season of Syfy’s Z Nation was still a lot more fun as everybody started hunting the duplicitous Murphy (Keith Allan) and the team discovered “Z-weed”—a potent strain of marijuana grown in zombie compost.
However, much more groovy than both was Starz’s ten-episode Ash vs Evil Dead, which brought back Bruce Campbell’s dim-witted hero and teamed him up with a couple of quirky young sidekicks (Ray Santiago and Dana DeLorenzo) to battle the demonic “deadites” in the most gory manner imaginable. Original co-creator Sam Raimi was an executive producer and directed the first episode, and Lucy Lawless turned up as the show’s recurring villain.
Featuring a mysterious visitor (Laurent Lucas), the even worse father (Michaël Abiteboul) of cannibal serial killer Serge, and an undead baby trying to fight its way out of the womb, the second eight-part season of the French TV series The Returned was set six months after the Season 1 finale, when the town flooded and the dead disappeared into the mountains.
Meanwhile, a ten-episode remake of the first French series aired on A&E Network under the same title, as the inhabitants of a small Pacific Northwest town had to deal with the dead mysteriously returning. It lasted just the one season.
ABC’s Resurrection wrapped up its increasingly confusing second and final season, as a virus spread amongst the living and the returned dead.
Having exhausted Tom Perrotta’s source novel in Season 1, the second series of HBO’s The Leftovers had a reboot and relocated Justin Theroux’s retired cop and Christopher Eccleston’s reverend from New York to the small Texas town of Miracle, where other mysteries awaited them.
Instead of the vampire apocalypse of New York City we expected at the end of the previous series, the second season of FX’s The Strain, based on the trio of novels by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan, offered up more of the same as Corey Stoll’s increasingly unhinged hero and his bickering allies tried to stop the plans of the Master and his creepy strigoi.
Del Toro himself directed the terrific prologue to the season opener that confirmed what we had always suspected about the Master’s identity, while Mexican actor Joaquín Cosio joined the cast as former masked wrestling hero “The Silver Angel”.
The second season of El Rey’s From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series was set three months after the lawless Gecko Brothers (D.J Cotrona and Zane Holtz) freed Santánico Pandemonium (Eliza González) from the Titty Twister bar, as they began exacting revenge on everybody.
Having lost its female star (Nina Dobrev), the seventh season of The CW’s The Vampire Diaries soldiered on with its vampire soap opera plots, while over on the third season of companion show The Originals, the New Orleans vampires discovered that poachers were killing werewolves in the bayou.
Set in a boarding school, the Danish vampire series Heartless ran for just eight episodes.
While Dean (Jensen Ackles) continued to come to terms with the Mark of Cain, Crowley’s (Mark Sheppard) scheming mother Rowena (Ruth Connell, stealing every scene) attempted to usurp her son’s position in Hell in The CW’s Supernatural, which was still going strong after eleven seasons.
After it was revealed that Thomas Jefferson (Steven Weber) still lived on as a hologram and was guarded by zombie monsters, Fox’s Sleepy Hollow jumped forward six months for Season 3. Abbie (Nicole Beharie) was now an FBI agent, while Ichabod (Tom Mison) teamed up with Jenny (Lyndie Greenwood) and Joe (Zach Appelman) to battle Pandora (Shannyn Sossamon) and her demon lover (Peter Mensah).
The Halloween episode of the same network’s appallingly twee Bones was a crossover episode with Sleepy Hollow that left the two stars of the latter show looking suitably embarrassed.
Based on the Vertigo comics series, the title character in Fox’s thirteen-part Lucifer (British actor Tom Ellis, being louche and annoying) decided to take a vacation from Hell and teamed up with an LAPD detective (the sulky-looking Lauren German) to solve crimes. Unfortunately, the first season was not nearly as entertaining as it should have been.
NBC’s Grimm really picked up as it headed towards the end of its fourth season, as Captain Renard (Sasha Roiz) was possessed by the spirit of Jack the Ripper, Juliette (Bitsie Tulloch) turned into an evil hexenbeast, and Adalind (the wonderful Claire Coffee) discovered that she was accidentally pregnant with Nick’s baby. It all wrapped up with the shocking deaths of two major characters before the show underwent a reboot. It returned at Halloween with Nick (David Giuntoli) having to deal with becoming a father.
Charlie Higson’s ten-part steampunk version of Jekyll and Hyde may have been a bit too strong for its intended teatime audience after 800 complaints from viewers that the opening episode was too scary. Tom Bateman played Dr. Jekyll’s personality-fluid grandson in 1930s London, who had to contend with, amongst other adversaries, Spring-Heeled Jack, a female vampire, an incubus, Richard E. Grant’s head of MIO (Military Intelligence Other) and the dastardly Captain Dance (Enzo Cilenti) from the evil Tenebrae organisation.
After an episode was pulled following the Paris shootings, television watchdog Ofcom agreed that the show broke the rules “requiring children to be protected from unsuitable material by appropriate scheduling”, and ITV unfortunately cancelled the series.
A disturbed Los Angeles police detective (Wes Bentley) hunting the “Ten Commandments Killer” found himself sharing the rundown art deco Hotel Cortez with vampires, ghosts, serial killers and deceased silent movie stars, all ruled over by Lady Gaga’s blood-drinking Countess, in the better-than-usual fifth season of FX’s American Horror Story, which was appropriately subtitled Hotel.
From the creators of American Horror Story and Glee, Fox’s silly spoof on slasher films, the thirteen-episode Scream Queens, was often quite funny, mostly due to Jamie Lee Curtis’ over-the-top performance as the promiscuous Dean of a campus where a group of sorority sisters were being gruesomely murdered by a number of serial killers in Red Devil costumes.
In the third and final season of the increasingly bonkers Da Vinci’s Demons on Starz!, Leo (Tom Riley) and his friends once again encountered Paul Rhys’ brutal Vlad the Impaler.
A detective (Moa Gammel) looking for her missing daughter discovered that a creature in the forest was taking children from her hometown in the Swedish-made Jordskott, and three people from different centuries were recruited by the eponymous secret agency to travel through time and prevent changes to history in the Spanish series El Ministerio del Tiempo.
The second series of BBC2’s Inside No. 9 featured creators Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith in another six offbeat half-hour tales set behind doors with that number, including one about 17th century witches and a finale involving a creepy séance. Guest stars included Michele Dotrice, Jane Horrocks, Sheridan Smith, Alison Steadman and David Warner.
During the improved second season of Sky/Showtime’s Penny Dreadful, the league of extraordinary monsters found themselves up against Helen McCrory’s Madame Kali and her coven of shape-changing witches.
Despite Joe Dante directing an episode of the second season of WGN America’s Salem, the show remained more of a romantic history lesson. At least someone had some fun naming each episode title after an established genre work.
Catherine Bell recreated her role of Cassie Nightingale from the seven previous TV movies for the eight-part Hallmark series Good Witch and the holiday special Good Witch Halloween.
When British backpacker Kyle (Joe Layton) and his friend “Budgie” (Theo Barklem-Biggs) travelled to the Cook Islands in the South Pacific for a vacation, they drank a hallucinogenic ritual drink and became involved in a supernatural murder mystery in the BBC’s eight-part Tatau (which means “tattoo” in Maori).
The fifth and final season of Syfy’s Lost Girl kicked off with the surprise death of Bo’s sidekick Kenzi (Ksenia Solo), and Famke Janssen returned as the monstrous matriarch in the third and final season of Netflix’s Hemlock Grove, executive produced by Eli Roth.
The fifth season of MTV’s in
creasingly dark Teen Wolf saw its cast of young characters preparing to graduate from high school while also having to deal with a deadly new shape-shifter and the menace of the Frankenstein-like Dread Doctors.
Laura Vandervoort’s Elena and her werewolf Pack teamed up with a coven of witches to battle a greater magical menace in the second season of Syfy’s Bitten, based on Kelly Armstrong’s “Women of the Otherworld” series, and Vincent and Cat revealed their relationship to the world and moved in together on the third season of The CW’s Beauty and the Beast. However, when their wedding was ruined, the couple worked together to prevent Liam (Jason Gedrick) from revealing Vincent’s secret.
When Hollywood actor Paul Rudd was killed by a werewolf, the mayor of a strange backwoods-town-with-a-secret hired Jon Glaser’s titular character to track it down in The Cartoon Network/Adult Swim’s very silly five-part comedy series Neon Joe: Werewolf Hunter.
Sarah Alexander’s judge found she could communicate with the ghosts of her husband (John Hannah), her lover (Nicholas Burns) and the local vicar (Jo Joyner) in the three-part comedy series Marley’s Ghosts, broadcast on Gold.
In Fox’s ten-part “limited” series Wayward Pines, Matt Dillon’s secret service agent and his family found themselves in the eponymous Twin Peaks-like town, with no idea how they got there. Unfortunately, it was soon revealed that they were two thousand years into the future and that the rest of the world was populated by cannibalistic mutants. Carla Gugino and Toby Jones also starred, while M. Night Shyamalan was one of the show’s executive producers.
A series of brutal murders committed in the strange Arctic Circle community of the title involved polar bears, a graveyard of mammoths, cannibalism, and a science fiction twist in Sky Atlantic’s eleven-part Fortitude. The ensemble cast included Sofie Gråbøl, Stanley Tucci, Michael Gambon and Christopher Eccleston.
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