Stephen Jones - Best New Horror #26

Having successfully re-booted the Marvel franchise in 2012 with the likeable Andrew Garfield in the title role, Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in 3-D was a complete dud, thanks to its bland villains Electro (an over-the-top Jamie Fox), Rhino (Paul Giamatti) and Green Goblin (Dane DeHaan).

Nobody really needed (or wanted) a $125 million Michael Bay-produced 3-D reboot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles , even if it featured Megan Fox as investigative TV reporter April O’Neil.

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For was a belated sequel to the 2005 movie, based on the stylised graphic novel and once again co-directed by creator Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez. The all-star cast included Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba, Josh Brolin, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Rosario Dawson, Bruce Willis, Eva Green, Powers Boothe and Lady Gaga.

Three unlikely companions (Michael C. Hall, Sam Shepard and Don Johnson) stumbled across a snuff film operation in Jim Mickle’s atmospheric Texas Gothic Cold in July , based on the novel by co-producer Joe R. Lansdale.

A trio of Nevada teenagers helped an alien go home in Earth to Echo , which borrowed from E.T. and other better children’s movies. This “found-footage” family film was originally made by Disney, who wisely sold it off to another distributor.

If you were eight years old, you might have found The LEGO Movie totally “awesome”, otherwise it was a tiresome 3-D adventure featuring CGI building block characters, including Batman (amusingly voiced by Will Arnett) and a few of the classic Universal monsters. It took more than $69 million during its opening weekend.

At least The Boxtrolls , based on the book Here Be Monsters! by Alan Snow, used 3-D stop-motion to create its dumpster-diving gremlins. It featured the voice of Ben Kingsley as the social-climbing villain in a cheese-obsessed town.

The live-action Paddington was based on Michael Bond’s series of children’s books about a marmalade-loving bear from Peru. Nicole Kidman and Hugh Bonneville starred alongside the titular CGI character (voiced by Ben Whishaw, who replaced Colin Firth).

Good children’s cartoon movies during the year included the 3-D Mr. Peabody & Sherman (based on the 1950s TV time-travel comedy), The Book of Life (produced by Guillermo del Toro), Big Hero 6 , The House of Magic , How to Train Your Dragon 2 and A Letter to Momo . Amongst the bad ones were a 3-D German-made Tarzan , the 3-D Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return , Tinker Bell and the Pirate Fairy and Tinker Bell and the Legend of the NeverBeast .

Despite respectable earners like The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 (2), Captain America: The Winter Soldier (3), The LEGO Movie (4), Transformers: Age of Extinction (5), Maleficient (6), X-Men: Days of Future Past (7), Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (8), The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (9) and Godzilla (10), all of which earned more than $200 million, the summer movie box-office in 2014 was disappointing compared the previous year (which had Iron Man 3 ), and overall receipts in the US and Canada were down by 5.3%. However, things picked up after the release of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy in August, which became the highest-grossing film of the year, taking almost $94 million on its opening weekend and going on to gross more than $330 million domestically.

In the UK, box-office receipts fell by 2.9%, the most significant drop since 1991, and it was widely considered that if it wasn’t for the end-of-year release of Paddington , things might have been much worse.

The 86th Academy Awards were presented on March 2 in Hollywood. Alfonso Cuarón won the Best Director Oscar for his SF movie Gravity , which also picked up the awards for Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing and Best Visual Effects. Spike Jonze received the Best Original Screenplay for Her , while Disney’s Frozen not only won the Oscar for Best Animated Film, but the film’s hugely annoying ‘Let it Go’ also won for Best Original Song.

The British Film Institute’s three-month “Sci-Fi: Days of Fear and Wonder” season previewed the new series of the BBC’s Doctor Who with a screening of the first episode at BFI Southbank in early August, attended by star Peter Capaldi and other cast and crew members. The festival featured more than 1,000 screenings of classic SF films and television at 200 locations across the country, including the British Museum, which hosted outdoor screenings of movies, including a newly-restored print of The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961).

Delayed by legal disputes for nearly a year before finally turning up on video, Odd Thomas was based on the novel by Dean Koontz and directed by Stephen Sommers. Anton Yelchin was the eponymous short-order cook who could see the invisible reapers threatening his town.

Directors Jen and Sylvia Soska followed up their cult favourite American Mary with See No Evil 2 , a belated video sequel to the 2006 movie, once again starring WWE wrestler Glenn “Kane” Jacobs as psychopath Jacob Goodnight.

Sean Astin and his party friends attempted to survive a flesh-eating virus on a Carribbean island in Cabin Fever: Patient Zero . The third in the series debuted on DVD and On Demand.

A group of friends visiting a forgotten mountain resort met a nasty end in the shot-in-Bulgaria Wrong Turn 6: Last Resort .

When Eric Roberts’ washed-up movie director attempted to revive his 1980s “slasher” trilogy as a reality TV show, the bodies soon started piling up in Camp Dread .

A couple documented the appearance of the titular mystery man in a wood full of totems and scarecrows in Karl Mueller’s backwoods horror Mr. Jones .

A busy Kevin Sorbo starred in the direct-to-DVD Survivor and One Shot (aka Sniper Elite ), both set on alien planets, and the self-explanatory Piranha Sharks .

Vinnie Jones’ local police detective and Christian Slater’s priest battled a demonic killer in Way of the Wicked , while Danny Glover starred in the “found footage” video release Day of the Mummy .

A group of live-action role-players accidentally conjured up a demon from Hell in the direct-to-DVD comedy Knights of Badassdom starring Ryan Kwanten, Steve Zahn, Summer Glau and Peter Dinklage.

H.P. Lovecraft’s The Thing on the Doorstep was filmed by director Tom Gliserman, starring David Bunce as Daniel Upton, and an elite team of mercenaries discovered genetically modified human/alien hybrids in a secret Soviet underground laboratory in Scintilla (aka The Hybrid ).

Earthquakes destroyed the West Coast in LA Apocalypse , while zombies did the same thing in Disaster LA .

Ignoring the comedy sequel that preceded it, Jaume Balagueró’s [REC]4: Apocalypse returned to its roots as Manuela Velasco’s TV reporter was rescued from the zombie-infested apartment of the first two films and transported to a research ship where, predictably, all did not go as planned.

Jesse Metcalfe and Virginia Madsen were amongst the inhabitants of a town infested by zombies in Dead Rising: Watchtower , based on the best-selling video game.

The French-made horror comedy Goal of the Dead combined zombies with soccer, while six friends found themselves facing a lake full of rabid rodents created by a toxic chemical spill in Jordan Rubin’s gory horror comedy Zombeavers , which was a great deal better than its title may have suggested.