Stephen (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

I Was a Teenage Movie Maker collected all forty-one 16mm amateur movies made by Don Glut between 1953–69.

Anchor Bay’s Halloween: 25 Years of Terror was a two-disc tribute to the “slasher” movie franchise, featuring interviews with more than eighty celebrities, including John Carpenter, Jamie Lee Curtis, Clive Barker, Rob Zombie and many others.

Made without a grain of talent or humour, A. Susan Svehla’s dire Terror in the Tropics incorporated plenty of copyright-free footage of Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney, Jr into a distinctly amateur production about the reading of a will on eerie Fog Island. Many of the characters were named after old actors, and this even included dinosaur footage from the silent Lost World .

Fans of the old horror stars were much better served by The Witch’s Dungeon: 40 Years of Chills . Directed by Dennis Vincent and hosted by Zacherley the “Cool Ghoul”, the documentary traced the history of Cortlandt Hull’s Connecticut-based horror museum and the films and actors who inspired it with the help on-screen appearances by Christopher Lee, Sara Karloff, Ron Chaney, Bela Lugosi Jr, Dick Smith, Tom Savini, Caroline Munro, Forrest J Ackerman, Bob Burns, Ben Chapman, Ricou Browning and a host of others.

Written, produced and directed by Paul Davids, The Sci-Fi Boys was anothr feature-length documentary about many of the filmmakers and other creative people who were inspired and championed by Forrest J Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. Along with Ackerman himself, those interviewed included Rick Baker, Ray Bradbury, Bob Burns, Roger Corman, Donald F. Glut, Ray Harryhausen, Peter Jackson and John Landis.

In November, Forry Ackerman celebrated his 90th birthday with a party in Los Angeles. Among those attending were Ray Bradbury, Carla Laemmle, Anne Robinson, James Karen, Bobbi Bresse, George Clayton Johnson, David J. Skal, Peter Atkins and Dennis Etchison. Guests received a copy of Famous Monster of Filmland #90 , a fac-simile magazine of the original manuscript pages of FM #1.

Jonathan English’s mythological fantasy adventure Minotaur featured guest turns by Tony Todd, Rutger Hauer and an unrecognisable Ingrid Pitt and was released directly to the Sci Fi Channel.

Also from those purveyors of fine flicks, Yancy Butler starred in Basilisk: The Serpent King , a reanimated Dean Cain battled infectious giant beetles carrying a zombie virus in Dead and Deader , and Michael Pare witnessed the battle between Komodo vs. Cobra on a desert island.

Tom Skerritt turned up in the self-descriptive Mammoth , about an alien-possessed museum exhibit (no, really), while Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep (aka Deadly Water ), starring Victoria Pratt, Charlie O’Con-nell, Jack Scalia and a giant squid, won its title from an online publicity stunt. Spelunkers Christopher Atkins and Colm Meaney faced Romanian rock-eating rhinoceros beetles in Caved In: Prehistoric Terror .

Casper Van Dien and Lynda Carter found themselves up against some scary Latin American vampires in Slayer , and a prison guard (Jennifer Wiggins) battled a monster assassin working for the Russian mafia in Shapeshifter .

Room 6 was set in a creepy hospital and starred Jerry O’Connell, while Stacy Keach confronted evil ghosts on a deserted island penitentiary in Haunted Prison . Lance Henriksen encountered a big bloodthirsty backwoods creature in Abominable , and he reprised his role from the original film as a ghost in Pumpkinhead III: Ashes to Ashes (filmed back-to-back with a third sequel).

Tobe Hooper directed Mortuary , about an undertaker (Denise Crosby) who took over a creepy funeral home, and Emmanualle Vaugier’s special ops team blew flesh-eating zombies away in House of the Dead 2 . Meanwhile, psychic siblings Charisma Carpenter and Eric Mabius wanted revenge on the evil that destroyed their hometown twenty years earlier in Voodoo Moon .

A slumming Ben Cross’ mad Nazi scientist created a device that transformed a World War II German soldier into a monstrous killing machine in David Mores’ cheap and cheerful SS Doomtrooper .

A scientific expedition to an unknown world encountered hungry mutants in Savage Planet starring Sean Patrick Flanery, and Jason Connery was the fleet-footed superhero of the Sci Fi Channel’s Stan Lee’s Lightspeed , which was gone in a Flash.

Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King starred Alicia Witt, Julian Sands and Max Von Sydow and was shown in two parts on Sci Fi Channel.

Directed by Mick Garris and scripted by the author himself, Stephen King’s Desperation found a group of typical King characters trapped in the eponymous Nevada desert town controlled by a demonic spirit and Ron Perlman’s psychotic cop. Unfortunately, ABC-TV scheduled its three-hour “movie event” opposite the penultimate episode of that season’s American Idol , with predictable results.

Noah Wyle returned as nerdy bookworm Flynn Carsen, protecting the world’s most treasured supernatural artefacts, in Jonathan Frakes’ The Librarian: Return to King Solomon’s Mines on TNT. This time he teamed up with a spirited archaeologist (Gabrielle Anwar) to find a stolen scroll that was said to reveal the location of the legendary diamond mines.

Casper Van Dien’s roguish archaeologist and Leonor Varela’s museum curator tried to beat Malcolm McDowell’s secret Hellfire Council to a collection of Ancient Egyptian tablets with supernatural powers in Hallmark’s The Curse of King Tut’s Tomb .

A widow’s daughter claimed she was murdered in a former life in the Lifetime Movie Network’s Past Tense starring Paula Trickey, and Julie Delpy and Justin Theroux discovered that their new home came with its own 250-year-old ghost in the same network’s The Legend of Lucy Keyes , which was “based on a true story”.

Peter Krause played homicide detective Joe Miller, searching for his missing daughter (Elle Fanning) through a mysterious motel room that was a gateway in time and space, in the three-part Sci Fi mini-series The Lost Room . Miller soon found himself embroiled in a secret war over long-lost objects that possessed extraordinary powers that dated back to a fateful day in May 1961. Julianna Margulies, Dennis Christopher and Kevin Pollak also starred.

Daryl Hannah played an unlikely insectoid alien queen planning world domination in Robert Leiberman’s ludicrous mini-series Final Days of Planet Earth , also from the Sci Fi Channel.

Created by Stephen Gallagher, who soon left the project due to ubiquitous “creative differences”, Granada’s Eleventh Hour was shown as four self-contained TV movies based around the concept of “science-gone-wrong”. Patrick Stewart starred as government trouble-shooter Professor Ian Hood who, with his Special Branch minder Rachel Young (Ashley Jensen), investigated such things as a European cloning conspiracy, a flesh-eating virus, a formula to predict the weather and spring water that could apparently cure cancer.

Gallagher was also set to script a TV movie of Dracula before the BBC announced its own version, shown at Christmas. Writer Stewart Harcourt’s attempt to do something different with Bram Stoker’s much-filmed novel resulted in Marc Warren’s laughably effeminate Count and David Suchet’s clearly potty Abraham Van Helsing.

As Las Vegas, the Hoover Dam and Mount Rushmore were destroyed over two nights, the North American continent was split in two by a massive earthquake in NBC’s by-the-numbers sequel 10.5: Apocalypse , starring Kim Delaney, Dean Cain and a slumming Frank Langella.