As the non-existent regular readers of a wasted life know, "best of" is always relative at this blog as the films we give good reviews don't always show up in our end of the year round-up while films we trash do. This is because our choice is based less on quality than staying power: how often we think back upon a film, or the general feeling it stirs when we think about it again. Thus, a pretty lousy flick might make the list. (Are we talking to you, Dead Zone? Maybe, but not just.) To read our full, always overly verbose review of any given film, click on the linked titles.
And so, here they are, in no particular order (but for the tied duo, which we look at last): the "Ten Best" films that we here at a wasted life watched in 2025 that we bothered to write about. A lot of anti-classics this time around...
(Italy, 1964)
"Far from the best of the peplums, Hercules against the Moon Men, like most movies of the genre, has enough going for it that it remains fun and watchable even though you know you could do way, way, way better. Indeed, there is an obvious reason why this Alan Steel movie was so happily embraced for ridicule by Mystery Theatre 3000: it is hilariously bad."
(USA, 1945)
"Taking Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's tale The Adventure of the Five Orange Pips, scriptwriter Roy Chanslor (25 Aug 1899 – 16 Apr 1964), carved a tale that varies greatly from its source but does so effectively. [...] The House of Fear has an ever so slight body-counter vibe, as there is a steady stream of deaths throughout the film's running time, with all corpses disfigured to unrecognizability. And Holmes is once again, as in many entries of the series, oddly ineffectual at preventing the body count from growing. A grand total of seven, one could say [...]. The twist ending, in any event, truly surprises."*
* Also reviewed this year, but both a tad less effective than The House of Fear: [Sherlock Holmes and] The Woman in Green (USA, 1945) and Terror by Night (USA, 1946)...
* Also reviewed this year, but both a tad less effective than The House of Fear: [Sherlock Holmes and] The Woman in Green (USA, 1945) and Terror by Night (USA, 1946)...
(USA, 1974)
Art film horror! "Oh, baby! Baby you make me hot and bothered, the way you do the things you do... and Messiah of Evil, you do it good. We are on our knees, mouths agape, sweaty and quivering, in awe of what we see. Reputations are hard to live up to, but Messiah, you really do! You are an unstuffed D-Cup on a wonderfully lithe body or ten inches on a hairless and muscular one. Baby, your ten is a full ten of ten, and your cup runneth over! Whoever knew something so easy to get would be so good — Messiah is currently streetwalking on YouTube, and probably at your favorite streaming site as well."
(USA, 1988)
"To ask whether or not Elvira, Mistress of the Dark is a good movie pretty much misses the point: it is a well-made, low-budget, and ultra-eighties campy, intentionally 'bad' movie about a walking, talking goth Valley Girl who is virtually incapable of speaking in anything but innuendos or malapropisms. The movie is the character and the character is the movie, and the character is built to feel up be a bizarrely sexy Mae West figure. Definitely and intentionally more a comedy than a horror movie, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark is a bit too episodic in nature and the jokes tend to be more juvenile than intelligent, but the movie maintains a good-natured innocence even when 'off color'."
(Planet Texas, 1973)
"It is safe to say, for all the flaws that Don't Look in the Basement might have, it displays more filmic talent than is found in all of [Larry] Buchanan's films together, and unlike that Texan's movies, is not a movie to watch just for laughs. [Don't Look in the Basement] actually has (misshapen) balls."
(USA, 1972)
"An amazing movie, if you get down to it: this nature-gone-mad eco-horror movie not only evidences a notable lack of directorial talent, thespian ability and narrative skill, but is also oddly boring and padded and without any truly convincing action — BUT: it is also amazingly riveting and fun and watchable. It is truly a tangible example of dichotomy at work [...]."
(USA, 1976)
"A wonderfully cheap and nicely sleazy sexploitation anti-classic, Ilsa Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks is a low-rent variant of the traditional WIP film, but instead of a prison we have a sheikh's harem — the harem of nasty, paranoid and sex-obsessed El Sarif [...], who expands his harem by kidnapping beautiful women from the West. As the film opens, we see the delivery of his three latest additions (played by Uschi, [Colleen] Brennan, and [Derna] Wylde), flown in to the Arabian deserts (of Palm Springs, actually) by helicopter; the three Babes of Yesteryear subsequently spend most of the film naked but for the smallest of gold chastity belts."
(USA, 2022)
One for the guys! (And for those who dream of guys.) "Not to be mistaken David Cronenberg's Dead Zone (1983 / trailer), from so long ago that no one really remembers it. This Dead Zone [...] is, in all truth, pretty stupid in almost every way, but, oddly enough, also far more enjoyable than it has the right to be. Regional genre filmmaker Hank Braxtan [...] won't win any prizes for his overly direct and unadorned style, but he does a good job with his actors and manages to wrought the little he has into an oddly satisfying if overly familiar (and ultimately inane and forgettable) slab of virile action."
(France/Belgium, 2021)
"The Advent Calendar does deliver the goods as an attention-grabbing and captivating horror movie liberally dosed with moments of discombobulating terror. While not overly gory, the dark and bleak movie has its moments of blood and violence, both onscreen and off."
And the tie:
Mesa of Lost Women (USA, 1952/53)
&
Two films that are so utterly terrible, and so surreally memorable — more so than "enjoyable", in any event — in such the same ways that they truly deserve to be viewed as total equals. Watch them with someone you hate... or with a group of drunken and stoned Bad Movie fans...
(USA, 1952/53)
"A mind-blowing bad-film anti-classic on par if not 'worse' than anything Ed Wood Jr ever made, the overall anti-style of this pasted-together and unbelievably inept project often has the feel and aura of that anti-auteur's fingerprint, and not just because Wood Jr purloined this movie's outrageously annoying and surreal soundtrack for his own lesser disasterpiece, Jail Bait (1954), which also shares some faces and voices. [...] [A]n oddly disorienting and nonsensical non-narrative that defies every concept of narrative logic and continuity but offers prime examples of thespian and directorial and scriptwriting inability."
(USA, 1961)
"[...] The movie is a senseless train wreck that defies description and truly earns its reputation as one of the worst films ever made. [...] At a mere 53 minutes in length, The Beast of Yucca Flats is an unbearably long movie when watched alone. Not only is any scene that could have been conveyed in five seconds extended to what feels like five minutes, but the time in between every such scene is also padded with any padding possible, not to mention an inordinate amount of driving scenes of cars going and coming and parking and pulling away and driving and driving and driving."
