Features

Like Jessica you won't be too sure what's real in this tale of psychological fragility

"Jessica (Zohra Lampert) has recently returned from being institutionalized for six months to deal with some seriously paranoid delusions. Her husband buys a farmhouse in a small community hoping the fresh air and life away from New York will help the situation. Unfortunately a strange and seductive house guest and the echoing voices in her head saying 'Jessica, come with us Jessicaaaa' conspire to throw a gnarly old chisel in the cogs of her recovery."

"Things really take a turn for the worse when her new pet mole ('Look darling, it has no eyes, can we keep it please?') is beheaded by red-headed temptress Emily, who bears a striking resemblance to a woman who drowned in the lake behind the house in the 1800s. The film is beautifully shot and extremely trippy, with an excellent minimal score featuring some nice old analogue synths."

"Plus there is some of the least carbon-neutral use of pesticides I've ever seen, and a dead man driving a tractor."

Notorious Grindhouse horror classic lives up its title - not one for the fainthearted

"I've struggled with this choice of film and to be honest I keep taking it off my list, but then re-adding it. Certainly it has stained my memory in a profound and unpleasant way, but then it is the grandfather of all found footage style horror (The Blair Witch Project, [REC], V/H/S etc). I think sometimes you have to go to the potent and undiluted source of a genre to really understand it."

"The story line revolves around a New York anthropologist called Professor Harold Monroe who travels to the sweaty, inhospitable jungles of South America to find out what became of a film crew that disappeared two months before while filming a documentary about primitive cannibal tribes who inhabited the rain forest . He brings back the tapes to New York and has to edit them together for a large television corporation."

"This is some heavy going and I can't actually recommend watching this film. The scenes depicted on the found film canisters, hanging in the trees beside a bunch of half eaten corpses are gritty, barbaric and troublingly realistic. Animal lovers and Valentines stay well clear!"

Now there's a concept I can't get enough of: a man and his monkey

"From George A. Romero, the director of Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and principal architect of the whole Zombie phenomenon, Monkey Shines is a jewel in my home library of DVDs.

"An original trailer for the film describes ominously 'once there was a man, whose prison was a chair. The man had a monkey, they made the strangest pair...' There was an odd period in the heyday of VHS where sinister limericks were used to describe plot lines - bring it back I say."

"Anyway, the story revolves around a quadriplegic man who is given a trained monkey to help him with his paralysis. The monkey has been injected with some miracle genetic potion and is super-intelligent. At first the Monk-romance goes swimmingly until the little guy first gets a little bit over-protective and controlling, and then homicidal. Forget the bogus CGI in recent films like Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes, this is the all-time best supporting role performance by a primate ever!"

"I recently lent a copy of this to our babysitter and got a relatively muted response, but other friends have gone ape over it and are even planning Monkey Shines themed parties."

"Guillermo del Toro-produced Spanish horror proves kids in masks are super creepy

This is a real favorite of mine. After returning to her childhood home with her family, Laura (played by the gorgeous Belén Rueda) opens an orphanage for handicapped children and it doesn't take long before her son develops an intense relationship with a new imaginary friend."

"It's all extremely creepy and is one of those great films which plays on what you don't see, rather than anything explicit. The setting is amazing as the orphanage is a brief walk from the Spanish coastline, which reminded me of Castle Point on the East Coast of the North Island."

Redneck horror's alive and well in this tale of feuding bumpkins and back-country atrocities

"I love the spirit of independent films, in spite of budget constraints it seems the real upshot of making a movie because you want to is that you can pretty much do whatever you want. There is no watering-down this grotesque little chestnut, but it's one of those films that succeeds in being seriously funny whilst simultaneously being seriously repulsive."

Header is set in a small rural town in the dark depths of West Virginia. In these parts the mountain folk have their own laws and customs - if you steal one man's turnips and ruin his crops, well, expect his cousins to pay you an unwelcome visit. A young cop is on the trail of a string of murders in the area and is drawn into a spiral of drugs and inter-generational feuding."

"A bit like Cannibal Holocaust, you are left with a part of you wishing you had never seen this depraved little tale. But it's worth it just to hear the answer to the question 'Granpappy.... What's a Header ???? ' "