Kim Newman

Despite lashings of bright red gore and the obvious enthusiasm of its gibbering hordes, Redcon-1 is a hard slog. Nearly two hours of grunts vs zombies feels punitive.

Blood Wars is tragically bereft of the pulp verve this nonsense needs to be tolerable.

Zombie’s filmmaking career began with inventive pop videos for his band White Zombie and he can still frame an interesting shot or layer in an unusual and affecting snatch of music, but after six features he still can’t come up with a fresh story, write characters with more depth than their make-up or direct stalking scenes that are suspenseful or moments of gory violence that are shocking.

Worse than being buried alive in an actual pyramid, if mercifully less time-consuming.

Lacking a single honest laugh, this is shoddy by comparison with the other Scary Movie sequels… which throws it in a pit with Transylmania, Breaking Wind and Stan Helsing.

Just no.

A clunky, lumbering sequel that, like its masked protagonist, has no redeeming features.

Another reason to avoid films endorsed by the US military, this is sub-propaganda tosh that inadvertently plays like Hot Shots: Part Trois.

The first film had its moment of charm, and the cast were good enough to overcome the downright stupidity of the storyline, but this is simply a dreary bore that takes advantage of a terrific cast by moving them about on the screen without giving them anything to do. One long yawn.

It plays a lot like a Porky's holiday comedy for the first half, and then the seagoing killer fish learn to fly and big rubber toothy things terrorise the survivors.

One of the problems is that King usually writes about cliche subjects so well that you don’t notice the hackneyed aspects of his books, and so when all the character detail, precise backgrounding and elaborate plot setting-up mechanisms are pruned away, all you get is a dumb TV movie with characters doing insanely stupid things to prolong the agony.

Bottom-rung dreck.

Depressing and trivial.

Brilliantly terrible or terribly terrible depending on your viewpoint.

Another soulless, pointless rip-off, this doodles around the plot parameters of John Carpenter's Halloween movies with only Pleasence, who died during production, and Carpenter's theme tune as links to the series' beginnings.

A needless threequel. Note to director: avoid 'rise of the' titles.

Safe when it's ripping genre jokes word for word, this pallid pastiche never goes for the jugular, the heart, or any other part of the audience, for that matter. It breezes by like the tamest of ghosts, almost unnoticeable.

All-in-all a fairly unpleasant experience for most audiences.

Significantly worse than the rest of the series, this film is one of the worst flops in recent cinema.

Hogan proved himself a better actor when pretending that American wrestling is a real sport, and the production team that brought you the Mannequin movies can add another excruciating dud to their CV.

It's incredible that a film could be so closely patterned on Carpenter's still-thrilling original movie and yet be so stupid, unscary and plodding as Halloween 4 is.

Don't bother.

A toothless, tedious farce which deserves to sink without a trace.

This hastily-produced sequel ignores the dreamstalking premise that had made A Nightmare on Elm Street successful and reverts to the overfamiliar possession story.

Worse than Scary Movies 1 through 3… And they were terrible.

A disjointed mish-M.A.S.H. of cliched comedy and misplaced observational wit.