Jack Arnold's horror classic The Creature from the Black Lagoon spawned not one but two iconic images: the web-footed humanoid gill-man with a hankering for women and the leggy, luscious Julia Adams, the object of his desire, swimming the lagoon in a luminous white bathing suit. Not since King Kong has the "beauty and the beast" theme been portrayed in such sexually charged (though ...

Manufacturer: Universal Studios
Starring: Richard Carlson, Julie Adams, Richard Denning, Antonio Moreno, Nestor Paiva
Directed By: Jack Arnold

It's nonstop thrills when George Clooney (THE PERFECT STORM, THREE KINGS) and Quentin Tarantino (PULP FICTION) star as the Gecko brothers -- two dangerous outlaws on a wild crime spree! After kidnapping a father (Harvey Keitel -- U-571) and his two kids (including Juliette Lewis -- NATURAL BORN KILLERS), the Geckos head south to a seedy Mexican bar to hide out in safety. But when they face the ...

Manufacturer: Dimension Home Video
Starring: Harvey Keitel, George Clooney, Juliette Lewis, Quentin Tarantino, Ernest Liu
Directed By: Robert Rodriguez

George Romero's 1978 follow-up to his classic Night of the Living Dead is quite terrifying and gory (those zombies do like the taste of living flesh). But in its own way, it is just as comically satiric as the first film in its take on contemporary values. This time, we follow the fortunes of four people who lock themselves inside a shopping mall to get away from the marauding dead and who ...

Manufacturer: Starz / Anchor Bay
Starring: James A. Baffico, Fred Baker (II), Ted Bank, David Crawford, Jesse Del Gre

The peculiar genius of schlock-king Roger Corman is in full bloom with this extremely gory, pointedly offensive homage to 1950s monster movies (with a generous helping of Alien thrown in for good measure), in which a legion of mutated salmon-men terrorize a small town in their search for unwilling female companionship. (Potential viewers should be warned that this movie goes to great lengths to ...

Manufacturer: New Concorde
Starring: Doug McClure, Ann Turkel, Vic Morrow, Cindy Weintraub, Anthony Pena
Directed By: Barbara Peters, Jimmy T. Murakami

Private eye Rafe Guttman (Dennis Miller) is hired by repressed, born-again Katherine (Erika Eleniak) to find her missing bad-boy brother. The trail leads him to a whorehouse run by a thousand-year-old vampire (Angie Everhart) and secretly backed by Katherine's boss, televangelist Jimmy Current (Chris Sarandon, wonderfully insincere and smarmy). Not for the squeamish or the easily offended (but ...

Manufacturer: Universal Studios
Starring: Dennis Miller, Erika Eleniak, Angie Everhart, John Kassir, Chris Sarandon
Directed By: Gilbert Adler

John Frankenheimer updates the mutant-monster films of the 1950s with a modern environmental twist in this well-meaning but cliché-ridden late-'70s horror film. Robert Foxworth is so earnest it hurts as a rabble-rousing ghetto doctor who packs up his pregnant wife (Talia Shire) and heads out to the Maine woods to investigate claims of environmental pollution. That's the least of his concerns when ...

Manufacturer: Paramount Home Video
Starring: Talia Shire, Robert Foxworth, Armand Assante, Richard Dysart, Victoria Racimo
Directed By: John Frankenheimer

Sometimes a movie achieves such legendary status that it can't quite live up to its reputation. Plan 9 from Outer Space is not one of these movies. It is just as magnificently terrible as you've heard. Plan 9 is the story of space aliens who try to conquer the Earth through resurrection of the dead. Psychic Criswell narrates ("Future events such as these will affect you in the ...

Manufacturer: Rhino / Wea
Starring: Carl Anthony, Bill Ash, John Breckinridge, Conrad Brooks, David De Mering

We can hardly imagine how shocking this film was when it first broke into the film scene in 1968. There's never been anything quite like it again, though there have been numerous pale imitations. Part of the terror lies in the fact that it is shot in such a raw and unadorned fashion that it feels like a home movie, and is all the more authentic because of that. It draws us into its world ...

Manufacturer: Starz / Anchor Bay
Starring: Bill 'Chilly Billy' Cardille, Charles Craig (II), Frank Doak, Marilyn Eastman, Jack Givens

Manufacturer: Troma
Starring: David Broadnax, Rita Jenrette, Tom Cantrell, Diane Clayre Holub, George Peters
Directed By: John N. Carter

Phil Tucker's Robot Monster has rightfully earned a place in the pantheon of bad movies over the years, and for good reason--it makes anything done by Ed Wood look like an Orson Welles masterpiece. Picture, if you will, a gorilla in a diving helmet (the Ro-Man) who wipes out all of the Earth's population except for one family (the Hu-Mans), whom he terrorizes through the rest of the ...

Manufacturer: Englewood Entertainment
Starring: George Nader, Gregory Moffett, Claudia Barrett, Selena Royle, John Mylong
Directed By: Phil Tucker