Some thrillers are political, some are mysteries, and some are action thrillers. Some thrillers prop up television schedules, some are genre classics, and some thrillers are forgotten or lost on a streaming site. So, let’s look at some of these thrillers, some of which deserve more attention and a little more love.

1. Match Point (2005)

Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a keen tennis nut, marries Chloe (Emily Mortimer), a prim and good-natured English girl. Chris enjoys being a part of Emily’s wealthy family, and even though his marriage to Chloe is a sham, Chris stays with Emily as he wants the wealth and opportunity that Chloe’s family offers.

Chris is also having an affair with Nora (Scarlett Johansson), an aspiring American actress, who becomes pregnant. Believing that Chris will leave his wife for her, Nora becomes erratic, promising to tell Chloe of her husband’s sordid affair. To silence her and to continue on the gravy train with his sham marriage to Chloe, Chris murders Nora…and gets away with it.

Before Match Point, director Woody Allen rarely left the Manhattan shoreline of New York City. Filmed in 2004, Match Point began a new phase of Allen’s career, where the director would film a couple more flicks in London and even a few films in sunnier climes with Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Midnight in Paris.

Match Point begins with an effective voiceover, establishing the theme of fate and luck and the importance of chance in everyday life. It’s a bit of a slow burn leading to Nora’s murder, with many nods to Dostoevsky and observations on the class system and the nature of guilt. There are also some erotic sex scenes involving blindfolds, massage oils and tumbles in the grass, with Scarlett Johansson, fresh from Lost in Translation, offering up a star turn as the sexually charged Nora.

Anyone expecting Match Point to be another Manhattan would be disappointed, as Match Point is much more sombre and darker, much more like Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors from 1989. Although not the lover letter that Manhattan was for New York, Match Point offers a postcard view of London. Never top-tier Woody Allen; Match Point still has plenty to offer – an enjoyable, if not low-key thriller, from a master filmmaker.

2. The Invasion (2007)

There was Don Siegel’s classic black and white favourite from 1956, Phil Kaufman’s “Watergate version” in the 1970s, and let’s not forget Abel Ferrara’s underrated 1990s offering Body Snatchers. By now, we’d all know the story, you’d think.

Yet, in the mid-2000s came another film adaptation of Jack Finney’s classic novel, The Body Snatchers. This time, it’s just called The Invasion, with Hollywood star Nicole Kidman playing psychiatrist Carol Bennell, who must race against time to save her young son from an alien virus.

Unlike the other versions of the book, there are no large pods where “pod people” grow inside. This time, alien spores arrive on Earth when the spacecraft the spores are hitching a ride on explodes on re-entry, leaving debris scattered for miles.

Touching the debris from the crashed spacecraft can infect you with a flu-like plague that takes over a person’s DNA while they sleep. If that doesn’t get you, the vomit from those infected does the job just as well.

The Invasion had a troubled shoot, with different directors (including the Wachowski siblings), reshoots involving a different ending and the addition of action sequences to bump up the action quota. Work on the initial screenplay began with a political allegory regarding the September 11th attacks, overseas war and the then ongoing Bush Administration before shifting gears to a more by-the-numbers sci-fi shocker.

Veronica Cartwright, who had a memorable role in Philip Kaufman’s 1978 version, returns in a clever cameo. Daniel Craig fills in the required doctor friend/love interest role to Kidman’s brave psychiatrist. And Jeremy Northam is suitably sinister as Tucker Kaufman, the ex-husband of Kidman’s psychiatrist and one of the first people affected by the alien virus.

Somewhat strangely and predating COVID-19 by a dozen or so years, the flu-like symptoms linked to the infection – and the swift vaccine created by government scientists in The Invasion look creepily prescient when watching the film today. Concerning the film, this fourth adaptation could be better, relying too much on bog standard action scenes. Yet, despite its faults, it’s still an enjoyable film with some effective scares.

3. Femme Fatale (2002)

After the failure of Mission to Mars, Brian De Palma’s next project would take him to Paris, with De Palma tailoring his script to his new star, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, who was best known (and still is) for her role as the mutant shapeshifter Mystique in the original X-Men trilogy.

Lifting his title from the Femme Fatales of film noir, De Palma’s film begins in a bravura opening sequence at the Cannes Film Festival. There’s a diamond heist with the typical mix of spy cameras and close-ups of CCTV monitors. Veronica (Rie Rasmussen), a supermodel accompanying a film director (real-life director Régis Wargnier) at a film premier, gets erotically seduced by Laure (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) in a bathroom at the Palais du Cinema. Laure strips the diamond ensemble from Veronica’s body, stealing the diamonds and double-crossing the rest of her criminal gang.

While hiding in Paris, Laure gets mistaken for another woman, with Laure ultimately stealing the other woman’s identity. The film then skips seven years in the future, and we find Laure living under a new identity as “Lily”, the wife of an American ambassador to France. A photographer (Antonio Banderas) snaps Lilly’s picture, and as the image is plastered all over Paris, it’s not long before her old gang is hot on her trail, seeking revenge.

As you would hope from such a formidable thriller specialist, Femme Fatale is cram-packed with all the familiar tropes of Brian De Palma’s back catalogue: split screens, doubles, slow motion and split diopter shots.

On North by Northwest in the 1950s, screenwriter Ernest Lehman wanted to make “the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures.” With Femme Fatale, De Palma is doing the same – a Brian De Palma film to end all Brian De Palma films – as anyone with a passing familiarity with De Palma’s oeuvre will find in Femme Fatale, nods to former glories like Body Double and Blow Out.

The cast is pretty good, too, with De Palma regular Gregg Henry popping up and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos well cast as a “Hitchcock Blonde”. Femme Fatale is a film full of cinematic craftsmanship, leading the audience one way before pulling a couple of clever plot twists along the way – a fun and inventive thriller not to be missed.

4. Shiner (2000)

British director John Irvin has had a mixed career, mixing dumb action films like Raw Deal with more comedic fare like Widows’ Peak and A Month by the Lake. In the early noughties, at a time when there seemed to be an endless slew of British gangster films, Gangster No. 1, Sexy Beast, etc. Director John Irvin combined his gritty back catalogue and lighter comedic films to produce the gangster film Shiner.

Returning to his Get Carter roots, Michael Caine plays Billy “Shiner” Simpson, a small-time boxing promoter who wants to move to the big time.

Operating in a world that Billy wishes to be a part of is American boxing promoter Frank Spedding (Martin Landau). So, chasing the big time and squaring off with Frank, Billy has his only son, Eddie “Golden Boy” Simpson (Matthew Marsden), fight the American champion Michael “Mikey” Peck (Derrick Harmon) in the ring.

Billy has all his money and his family’s future resting on his son Eddie winning the fight. Yet, Eddie loses the fight, and Billy’s world falls apart. Believing he was stitched up; Billy seeks revenge and his King Lear-style downfall; the desperation of a man whose past catches up with him is the most successful part of the film.

Other parts are less successful; the post- “Lock, Stock” dialogue is sometimes below par, sounding more like a gritty episode of The Bill. Yet, Billy’s downfall, his ruthless search for answers, is the film’s better half, and Caine’s masterful performance in Shiner shines.

A pre-stardom Andy Serkis is among the cast, too and just like American import Martin Landau has little to do, as Shiner belongs to screen icon Michael Caine. In the same year as Shiner, Caine had starred in the dire remake of Get Garter, where Sylvester Stallone, Caine, and Mickey Rourke may have sat around at lunch discussing how far their careers had fallen.

Caine makes up for that career nosedive in Shiner with a superb performance, punching above the average screenplay and tired gangster clichés. Shiner is no knockout thriller, but it’s a violent and raw gangster film with a winning performance by Michael Caine.

5. The International (2009)

Around the time of the release of The International in 2009, the buzz of star Clive Owen as a would-be Bond had cooled considerably. Yet, the talk of a potential contract as 007 led the actor to a string of beefy leading roles, including Inside Man, Children of Men and Shoot’ Em Up.

Even though the actor looked good in a tux as far back as Croupier, in The International, Owen doesn’t get to play Bond, but an Interpol agent obsessed with bringing a shady bank to justice, switching a tuxedo for a well-worn raincoat.

Along with an Assistant District Attorney (Naomi Watts) as a sidekick, Owen’s Louis Salinger investigates the International Bank of Business and Credit (IBBC) and its links to bankrolling world terrorism and money laundering – “a bank of choice for organised crime”.

The film begins promisingly in a rain-soaked Berlin train station, where Thomas Schumer (Ian Burfield), from the New York District Attorney’s office, meets a key witness with links to the IBBC in Luxemburg. No doubt, inspired by the actual Cold War assassination of Georgi Markov, where Markov was pricked by an umbrella loaded with poison, Schumer is dispatched in a similarly sneaky way.

Salinger, aware that Schumer was murdered, travels to IBBC headquarters in Luxemburg and begins to piece together the bank’s links to an illegal arms deal, with his investigation leading him to Milan, where there’s an impressive assassination sequence followed by an even better shootout sequence at the Guggenheim in New York.

Reminiscence of such 70s favourites as The French Connection, The International also draws paranoid inspiration from The Conversation, The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor. Much like those flicks of yesteryear, The International pits the villains as middle-aged men dressed in business suits. Released after the 2008 financial crisis, the depiction of shady bankers as the bad guys in The International was contemporary, perhaps even believable.

Clive Owen, with his 100-yard stare, barely cracking a smile throughout, is suitably paranoid, obsessed and determined.   Overall, The International is an intriguing espionage thriller with impressive set pieces and a fine cast.

The 1990s was an excellent time for thrillers, sometimes erotic: Basic Instinct, Wild Things, sometimes action-orientated: Breakdown, Mercury Rising, and sometimes forgotten…So, let’s look at ten thrillers from the 1990s that deserve a little more love.

1. Snake Eyes (1998)

Nicolas Cage plays a shady Atlantic City cop who must piece together murderous events in Brian De Palma’s highly stylised labyrinthine 90s thriller. It’s fight night in Atlantic City. Detective Rick Santoro (Nicolas Cage) is with his old friend, Commander Kevin Dunne (Gary Sinise), who is head of security in protecting the U.S. Secretary of Defence.

A boxing match begins between heavyweight champion Lincoln Tyler (Stan Shaw) and challenger Jose Pacifico (Ruiz Adam Flores). During the fight, Commander Dunne is distracted by a mysterious redhead and follows her away from the fight. Another woman, Julia Costello (Carla Gugino), dressed in a white suit with a platinum blonde wig, sits beside Rick and confronts the Secretary of Defence about a government cover-up. In a tour-de-force sequence, a gunshot rings out, and the Secretary of Defence is shot; Rick pulls Julia to safety, with her wig falling to the ground. There’s pandemonium in the arena as everyone runs for the exit, leaving Rick searching for the truth.

The film begins with one of those long Steadicam tracking shots that tell you that Brian De Palma is making a ‘Brian De Palma film.’ The opening shot follows Cages’ tainted Detective through the Atlantic City arena, revealing an inner world away from the storm brewing outside. He proclaims to his buddy Commander Dunne, “It’s my sewer… Everybody knows me…I was made for this sewer baby, and I am the king.” So, with this baseline in the real-time narrative of Snake Eyes, we witness the detective’s worldview change as he gets closer to the truth – and becomes a better man by the final reel.

De Palma utilises Kurosawa’s ‘Rashomon effect’ with a series of inventive flashbacks and points of view as Cage’s Rick Santoro puts the pieces back in De Palma’s jigsaw narrative. De Palma deploys all his film grammar arsenal – spectacular overhead tracking shots, complex Steadicam shots, swish-pans and split diopter compositions, culminating in a stylish, well-paced thriller from the modern master of suspense.

2. Extreme Measures (1996)

A patient arrives in the emergency room at a New York hospital; he’s bald, in his forties, naked and has convulsions. Dr Guy Luthan (Hugh Grant) examines the patient and learns he’s called Claude Minkins (Shaun Austin-Olsen); distressed, Claude tells Guy to go to “the room”. Unable to save him, let alone understand him, Claude dies, and when Guy goes looking for the autopsy report, he discovers that the patient’s records are missing and that Claude’s body has also disappeared.

Even though everyone writes Claude off as just another homeless guy who died, Guy becomes obsessed with finding the truth about him. Did he escape from another hospital? Why did his records disappear? And why does everyone want him to forget Claude and move on?

Guy finds himself going further down the rabbit hole; his boss warns him off, no one believes him and his career as a doctor lies in ruins as a couple of dodgy cops plant drugs in his apartment. Grant turns Cary Grant à la Hitchcock, becoming an innocent man wrongly accused, dodging bullets, and discovering a secret organisation where Dr. Lawrence Myrick (Gene Hackman) plays God—finding a hidden world where homeless people, healthy subjects that “won’t be missed”, can be used as test subjects.

Playing against type, Hugh Grant plays a convincing doctor who ponders the American healthcare culture and medical ethics. Hackman, as a Dr. Frankenstein-styled humanitarian, has little to do besides confronting the good doctor on moral principles: “If you could cure cancer by killing one person, wouldn’t you have to do that?

Extreme Measures raises some thought-provoking questions on how far a doctor should go if he can cure paralysis, help patients with spinal injuries and change lives. With assured direction by Michael Apted (Gorky Park), it hasn’t got the wham-bam explosions of contemporary thrillers like Chain Reaction or Ransom, settling for a more calculated pace, with the medical dilemma of doctors playing Gods at the centre of the action.

Based on Michael Palmer’s 1991 novel, Extreme Measures was Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley’s first foray into film production with their company Simian, and the result is an entertaining thriller which is much better than it should be.

3. Rear Window (1998)

A woman driving at night crashes into another car, leaving her dead. An effective zoom shot reveals the person in the other vehicle as we are transported to a rehabilitation centre and meet Jason Kemp (Christopher Reeve). A former architect, Jason survives the crash but must live the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

We see Jason’s new life in a fancy apartment equipped with voice-activated computers and light sensors in the elevator. Living his life as a person with quadriplegia, Jason spends most of his days staring out the window at his neighbours. Luckily, everyone has their blinds and curtains open, and Jason has free access to the private worlds of his neighbours: the love affairs, the sexual encounters, the relationship problems.

Jason steps up his voyeuristic obsession with the neighbours, installing cameras and proclaiming himself a “citizen voyeur”. His primary focus is the relationship problems between Julian and Ilene Thorpe (Ritchie Coster, Allison Mackie); having already reported the husband’s spousal abuse to the police, Jason now believes that the husband has murdered his wife and seemingly replaced his wife with another woman.

Jason calls in Detective Charlie Moore (Robert Forster), who naturally doesn’t believe him. So, Jason turns into Ironside, convincing a work colleague, Claudia (Daryl Hannah), to search Thorpe’s apartment and finally discover the truth.

Unsurprisingly, this 1998 T.V. movie never gets near the level of Hitchcock’s 1954 masterpiece. But then, only a few thrillers have. Starring Christopher Reeve, his first film since his devasting fall in 1995 left him paralysed from the shoulders down. This small but ambitious thriller works for the most part, with some nice interplay between Reeve and Daryl Hannah and some excellent use of shadows and jump scares.

Although never reaching the heights of Hitchcock’s ‘pure cinema’ in the original fifties classic, Reeve’s performance is where this television adaptation hangs its cinematic hat. It’s a masterful performance by Reeve, with director Jeff Bleckner offering up enough shocks along the way – a lost film in many ways due to its more famous namesake, but well worth checking out, if only for a notable performance by Christopher Reeve in his final lead role.

4. The Maddening (1995)

Smackdown in the middle between a career nadir with Cop and a Half and a career-high with Boogie Nights, Burt Reynolds made the crazy thriller The Maddening.

A massive star in the 1970s with Hooper, Smokey and the Bandit, etc., by the time he made The Maddening in the 1990s, Reynolds was in direct-to-VHS territory and cast as a disturbed kidnapper in a forgotten 90s shocker.

Mia Sara plays Cassie, a devoted mother who feels let down by her husband, David (Brian Wimmer), believing he spends too much time away from his family. On the open road with her young daughter Samantha (Kayla Buglewicz), Cassie has a spot of car trouble and who else, but a deranged Burt Reynolds offers to help. They head back to dear old Burt’s house so Burt can supposedly work on the car.

Once there, Angie Dickinson appears as Burt’s equally deranged wife, who shares their home with their daughter, Jill (Candace Hutson). As Burt’s disturbed wife believes Cassie and Samantha are her sister and niece, the screw gets turned, and the madness in The Maddening becomes even more perverted and dark.

Directed by Danny Huston, the son of legendary director John Huston, The Maddening is tonally all over the place, much like the performances. Despite this, even though it’s pretty much by the numbers, there are some disturbing scenes and imagery, mostly involving rape and a baby being suffocated, with Reynolds uttering the line “no more pain. You’re going to heaven.”

You’ll notice how I have yet to have much use for the character names of Burt Reynolds and Angie Dickinson. That’s because you spend much of the film thinking, why are these two fine actors in such a strange film? They had nothing to prove. Perhaps there were no more B.L. Stryker movies on the horizon or no proposed revival of Police Woman. Whatever the case, The Maddening is a strange, odd film – partly horrific and partly ludicrous- a film nevertheless to look out for.

5. Twilight (1998)

Paul Newman plays Harry, a retired private eye who lives on the grounds of an estate owned by his old friends Jack (Gene Hackman) and Catherine Ames (Susan Sarandon). A pre-title sequence tells us that Harry is working in Mexico, retrieving Jack and Catherine’s runway daughter, Mel (Reese Witherspoon), who is south of the border shacked up with a sleazy boyfriend (Liev Schreiber).

On his way home with Mel, Harry is accidentally shot in the thigh during an altercation, with the action then moving forward two years and changing location to Los Angeles. Over a game of cards, Jack, dying of cancer, asks Harry for one last favour, leading Harry down a path littered with dead bodies and double-crosses, with the plot never leaving the milieu of a small group of friends.

Released in the wake of L.A. Confidential and Kiss the Girls, director Robert Benton approaches Twilight differently- this isn’t a sweeping tale of police corruption or a police detective chasing down a killer. It’s a smaller, even gentler take on the detective genre, with the plot’s mechanics driven around the cast’s advanced age, as Twilight is a subtle character study peppered with old-age feelings of regret and deceit.

The narrative focuses on the strained relationships between the characters, and any gunplay and bits of action are punctuated before the film moves on to another more subtle, low-key moment between one of the characters.

It’s by no means dull; it’s just a film which has set its time at the pace of its cast. And that’s the central reason to watch Twilight: the cast—the leading trio of Newman, Hackman and Sarandon. Newman perfectly plays a washed-up private eye turned bagman for his wealthy friends, a nuanced and memorable performance with real star power.

Gene Hackman and Susan Sarandon are just as good, and like Newman, both play characters with their best days behind them. Stockard Channing, James Garner and Reese Witherspoon pop up, offering solid performances, with the film never straying from its sombre and haunting setting. Twilight a hazy, mature crime film with a stellar cast – is a thriller with hidden depths, well worth checking out.

The 1980s was an excellent time for thrillers; Blow Out, Gorky Park, Frantic, the list goes on and on. We all know them, and some of us love them. But some films, although just as good, can get left behind.

Due to little or no exposure on streaming sites or never getting that fancy Blu-ray release, some movies can get lost on YouTube, sometimes popping up in the wee small hours, helping to fill up a television schedule. So, let’s begin by looking at ten thrillers, all from the 1980s, some more famous than others, but all deserving a little more exposure and a little more love.

1. The Jigsaw Man (1983)

Directed by Bond director Terence Young, The Jigsaw Man marks the onscreen reunion of Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier from more than ten years earlier in Sleuth, where both actors received Academy Award nominations. Although there is little chance of Academy Award nominations here, The Jigsaw Man still has something to offer – I’m just wondering what it is.

It’s the Cold War, and after some nifty plastic surgery, Michael Caine’s Soviet defector returns to England to play a tense cat-and-mouse game with British spymasters. Okay, the plot may be your average Cold War thriller. Yet, the onscreen presence of Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier, supported by a stream of British acting talent, including Susan George, Robert Powell and Charles Gray, keeps The Jigsaw Man ticking over.

Loosely, based on the Cambridge Five, The Jigsaw Man is neither John le Carré, James Bond, nor Harry Palmer. There is a car chase, some shootouts, albeit brief and plenty of Cold War shenanigans. It plays like a TV movie with too many plot threads and a director past his best, with some scenes appearing rushed and poorly lit.

The Jigsaw Man offers up a retirement home for actors who couldn’t find bit parts on Minder or Tales of the Unexpected, as director Terence Young litters the film with past collaborators Vladek Sheybal, Anthony Dawson and Sabine Sun. Yet just the sight of Michael Caine lurking around a church, pocketing some hidden microfilm, gladdens the heart. His Russian and American accents are also fun, as Caine helps dignify the familiar dialogue and sequences.

The Jigsaw Man had a troubled shoot, where the production ran out of money, and the film probably could have done with a memorable set piece. However, these shortcomings are what make The Jigsaw Man so appealing. It’s no Ipcress File, but it has a good cast, a decent story and a strangeness, a puzzle of why it even exists.

2. Target (1985)

Gene Hackman reunites with director Arthur Penn in this excellent spy thriller from 1985. Hackman plays Walter Lloyd and seemingly leads a simple life, working in a lumber business in Dallas, Texas.

Walter and his son Chris (Matt Dillon) have a strained relationship, with Chris, a college dropout and race-car driver, believing his Dad to be a dull old oaf. A generation gap narrative continues for about fifteen minutes as father and son go fishing as mom Donna (Gayle Hunnicutt) heads off to Europe on holiday.

Suddenly, the story steps up a gear when Walter gets a phone call in the middle of the night, informing him that his wife has gone missing whilst on holiday. Father and son decide to travel to Paris to find Mom, and soon Chris finds out that his mum was kidnapped, and that dear old Dad speaks fluent French, is ex-CIA, has a different identity and knows how to handle a gun.

Via an effective car chase, the pair travel to Hamburg, where Walter (or Duke as he was formerly known) becomes a mixture of George Smiley and Jason Bourne. There’s another car chase in Hamburg, a better one, as Walter dodges bullets and meets an old flame (Victoria Fyodorova) and an old Colonel (Richard Münch), with the Cold War plot unfolding, revealing double agents and secret code names.

Target is a compelling Cold War thriller with Gene Hackman grounding the plot in reality with a believable performance. Matt Dillion, a teen heartthrob in 1985, offers a solid performance as a kid who slowly learns that his Dad is James Bond with a receding hairline.

Although not the box office smash it needed to be for director Arthur Penn, after the failure of Four Friends in 1981. Target is a top-notch thriller, with a great score by Michael Small, who had scored such seminal seventies thrillers as The Parallax View and Marathon Man—all in all, a fast-paced thriller that undoubtedly hits the target.

3. North Sea Hijack (1980)

By the late 1970s, Roger Moore had starred in four Bond films and several potboilers like Gold, Shout at the Devil, and The Wild Geese. Partnering up for a second time with Wild Geese director Andrew V. McLaglen, Moore starred in the ambitious thriller North Sea Hijack (also known as ffolkes), in which he gave one of his best performances as Rufus Excalibur ffolkes, a whisky-drinking counter-terrorism specialist with a love for cats.

The plot concerns ffolkes and his crack team trying to stop a group of bad guys and their plan to blow up oil rigs in the North Sea. The main bad guy, Kramer, is played by Anthony Perkins, who adds a steely and captivating presence. Moore, sporting a full beard, has some great dialogue and witty exchanges with Jennifer Hilary and James Mason. Mason, a massive star on both sides of the Atlantic since the late 1940s, plays Admiral Sir Francis Brinsden, who, as well as giving the film a bit of gravitas, becomes Moore’s sparring partner in a war of words.

The story bounces between the crew of the stolen ship and the discussions between the British government on when to involve ffolkes and his team in resolving the situation, with ffolkes suggesting that “Kramer and his odious colleagues will be dead or disabled” before any bombs went off.

North Sea Hijack is a tense thriller, perhaps dated in parts, but a terrific film, nonetheless. Andrew V. McLaglen was best known as an action director, typically featuring an ageing John Wayne in a string of cowboy films. Yet North Sea Hijack is surprisingly short on action sequences, with McLaglen successfully relying on suspense, solid performances and a convincing plot, all slowly ticking towards a crowd-pleasing finale.

4. Thompson’s Last Run (1986)

It’s the mid-1980s, and screen icon Robert Mitchum has a lead role in a low-key thriller. Okay, this is straight to television fare, but it’s Mitchum as a safe cracker on the run from a lawman (Wilford Brimley); what’s not to like?

Mitchum is John Thompson, a career criminal who has spent much of his life behind bars. Thompson gets a visitor, his niece Louise (Kathleen York), who is desperate for her Uncle to become a much closer family member. Yet, Louise learns that Thompson will remain in prison for life due to the “habitual criminal act,” and her dream of a happy family is short-lived.

Wilford Brimley is Red Haines, a soon-to-be-retired lawman, an old friend and adversary of Thompson’s who asks his superiors for one last job. Red’s job is to transport his old friend to another prison, and the story moves along at a leisurely pace as both men reminisce about their shared history, lived on both sides of the law.

Thompson’s niece Louise -re-enters the story, and the film steps up the pace as the gun-toting Louise forces her Uncle John to make a run for it, with the old lawman promising, “I’ll be coming for ye.”

Thompson and Louise get on the road, with Thompson coming to terms with his life as a fugitive from justice. While Red is not exactly in hot pursuit, Thompson has time for a spot of fishing, and the film returns to its leisurely pace as the pair turn to robbery and family dilemmas.

It’s hardly The Getaway, but Thompson’s Last Run is a slow burn, with a typically charismatic performance by Robert Mitchum. Robert Mitchum’s career by the 1980s had chugged along nicely with a string of television spots and character roles in TV movies before Martin Scorsese plucked Mitchum from the television schedules for an extended cameo in his remake of Cape Fear. Yet, in Thompson’s Last Run, much like his role in the earlier TV movie A Killer in the Family, Mitchum proved he was still a formidable presence onscreen.

Let’s face it: Mitchum is excellent with his bit part in Scrooged and good value in War and Remembrance if you can stick to the protracted running time. But in the twilight days of his career, with Thompson’s Last Run, Mitchum, once more in a leading role, proves he’s still the coolest anti-hero in cinema.

5. Tightrope (1984)

It’s New Orleans, and a killer in town enjoys murdering sex workers in the neon-lit French Quarter of New Orleans. Clint Eastwood is Wes Block, a police detective, in another cop film that will please most Dirty Harry fans with its suspense, sex and violence. Yet, Eastwoods’ Wes Block is no Harry Callahan. Wes Block is a family man with two devoted daughters, but he’s also a cop who enjoys the same erotic side of town as the killer, as each time another dead body turns up, it’s clear that Block knows each victim intimately.

With the mud-wrestling women and kinky sex scenes, director Richard Tuggle not only ties sex and violence together in Tightrope, but in Eastwoods’ introduction into the film, Tuggle connects Eastwood’s homicide detective with the killer with a simple ‘match shot’ of a pair of shoes. The film pulls cop and killer together, as a criminal psychologist tells Wes, “There’s a darkness inside all of us…Some have it under control. Others act it out; the rest of us try to walk a tightrope between the two.” While juxtaposing Block’s cosy homelife with his daughters (one of which is Eastwood’s actual daughter, Alison Eastwood), Block enters the seedy underbelly of New Orleans while interviewing sex workers and wrestling with his own sexual obsessions.

It’s a dangerous psychological tightrope where Block must walk the fine line between his sexual demons and his life as a police detective and father. Geneviève Bujold plays Beryl Thibodeaux, who runs a rape crisis centre and challenges Block’s thought processes and notions about women. In a way, she becomes Block’s moral compass and confidant as Block grows concerned about how “close” the killer is getting to him.

Released a few years before Hollywood spewed out 9½ Weeks and Fatal Attraction, Tightrope offers an erotic thriller with an engaging performance by Clint Eastwood, exploring his onscreen masculinity as an icon in American cinema.

In Tightrope, everything you expect from this type of thriller materialises. Does his two daughters become in danger when the killer gets too close? Check. Does Block’s relationship with Beryl melt some of Block’s hard exterior? Check. Does Block catch the killer? Well, that would be telling.

It is relatively safe to assume that the term cult film sits under a broad umbrella of ‘so bad they’re good’ monster movies, low budget horror, comedy misfires, and many more genres and subgenres of cinema.

So, let’s begin by looking at ten cult films, mainly from the 20th century, some of which are perhaps more famous or accomplished than others. Some of these films may have more lavish production values than others, while others may have been lifted from the bargain bin by a stellar cast or a prized best seller. Whatever the case, all of the films listed are worth revisiting.

1. Overlord (1975)

Director Stuart Cooper spent over 3,000 hours reviewing newsreel footage in the film archive at the Imperial War Museum before he and his co-author Christopher Hudson wrote their screenplay for this British war film from 1975.

Essentially, Overlord is two films. The central narrative is the personal story of Tom (Brian Stirner), a quiet young man called up to join the war effort, who begins his assault training, meets other more confident soldiers and prepares for the D-Day invasion. Acting as a hook to hang some suspense on, a premonition of a soldier falling in the dirt recurs throughout the narrative, along with some surreal imagery involving Tom and a young woman he meets in a bar. The other part of the film is archival footage depicting the world that Tom inhabits. This is a mixture of remarkable British and German newsreel footage, which cinematographer John Alcott seamlessly splices together with the contemporary live-action footage of Tom. Alcott shot the live-action footage of Tom with a newly found German lens from the 1930s, which Alcott fixed and mounted onto his camera, giving the crisp black and white footage a different quality and tone.

Overlord is a remarkable film, a quasi-docufiction championed by no less than The Imperial War Museum and the Ministry of Defence. Indeed, The Imperial War Museum helped design sets and costumes for the film, helping to lend the film a sense of authenticity. Overall, Overlord is a perfect combination of startling documentary footage and a mournful and intimate portrayal of a soldier’s life in World War Two.

2. Clockwise (1986)

John Cleese reins in his Basil Fawlty persona for this quiet and quintessentially English comedy. Cleese plays school headmaster Brian Stimpson, so obsessed with time and punctuality that Stimpson runs his school and entire life with clockwork precision. Stimpson is invited to a headmasters’ conference in Norwich, where Stimpson is the first headmaster from a comprehensive school to chair this all-important annual conference.

En route to the conference, Stimpson misses his train and accepts a lift from a mouthy schoolgirl (Sharon Maiden). Misunderstandings and farcical situations escalate and swallow up the narrative as Stimpson’s long-suffering wife Gwenda (Alison Steadman), the police and the schoolgirl’s confused parents chase Stimpson to Norwich. Most of the humour found in Clockwise derives from screenwriter Michael Frayn’s choice to make Stimpson, at first glance, supercilious and obsessive over timekeeping. Yet, Frayn also allows Stimpson to have a heart, his primary motivation being to make his school and its pupils proud.

On its original release, some of the more quaint and colloquial English humour failed to find an international audience, which Cleese would remedy in his next film by importing American stars and adding a much brasher style of comedy into A Fish Called Wanda. Yet, with its gentle characterisations and cosy middle England sensibilities, Clockwise has much to offer; British stalwarts Penelope Wilton, Geoffrey Palmer, and Sheila Keith all help prop up the cast. The gentle humour woven throughout the many comical situations and the observations on class help position Clockwise as an overlooked cult classic.

3. Dog Soldiers (2002)

Over twenty years had passed since Hammer last offered up anything remotely horrific, and the horror genre got a new lease of life Stateside with The Blair Witch Project, not to mention the Scream franchise and its many derivative knock-offs. However, the beginning of the 21st century saw the resurrection of British horror. Dog Soldiers concentrates less on interesting characterisation and focuses all its efforts on jump scares and some well-judged black humour. Tapping into the lad culture of the period, and at the same time revisiting a tried and tested sub-genre of classic horror, a group of soldiers on manoeuvres in the Scottish Highlands gets attacked by a family of werewolves.

After meeting a mysterious woman (Emma Cleasby), the group make a run for it and find refuge in a remote cottage in the middle of nowhere. The framework of trapping your protagonists inside a house as evil lurks outside, demanding to get inside, is a time-tested trope of horror cinema. Resembling the very best in horror cinema (Evil Dead, Straw Dogs, The Night of the Living Dead), the ensuing siege of soldiers versus werewolves is as violent as it is funny. Director Neil Marshall, who had been trying to get the film made since the mid-1990s, ditches the drama of the original Wolfman of the 1940s and pushes Dog Soldiers into Aliens territory as seven-foot lycanthropes besiege a tiny cottage while macho soldiers fight for their lives. Undoubtedly, Dog Soldiers is a certified cult classic of British cinema, bolstered with a fine cast and impressive visual effects.

4. House of the Long Shadows (1983)

Director Pete Walker, who carved out a career as a horror specialist in the 1970s with such films as House of Whipcord, Frightmare and House of Mortal Sin, was responsible for bringing together four titans of horror cinema. Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and John Carradine were all brought together in a genre of horror even older than they were – that of the old dark house.

Based on the novel Seven Keys to Baldpate by Earl Derr Biggers, House of the Long Shadows begins with some nonsense about a smug young author called Kenneth Magee (Desi Arnaz, Jr.), who makes a bet that he can write a book about love and “human passions” within twenty-four hours. Needing somewhere totally isolated and with a bit of atmosphere, Magee heads to an old country house in Wales. Magee finds a typical old dark house, complete with wall to wall thunder and lighting and the introduction of Carradine, Cushing, Price and Lee.

In one sense, you could look at House of the Long Shadows as a horror tribute film to the horror stars of yesteryear. Yet you could also view the film as a horror parody, perhaps in the way Neil Simon’s Murder by Death poked fun at the murder mystery genre. This might have worked if House of the Long Shadows had one memorable joke in its entire running time. Whatever the case, House of the Long Shadows is an odd film. In the early 80s era of Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees, how strange, yet glorious, to see four past masters of horror cinema, all together for the first and only time.

5. The House that Dripped Blood (1971)

Another anthology film from Amicus, with a screenplay by Robert Bloch. Celebrated as the author of Psycho, Bloch crafts a horror jukebox of vampires, voodoo and wax museums, all set within the four walls of The House That Dripped Blood.

Due to the episodic nature of the anthology film, Amicus Productions would hire prominent film stars for short periods of filming. With this third anthology film, producers Milton Subotsky and Max J. Rosenberg struck gold by employing a trio of horror icons. Christopher Lee, who would soon price himself out of the horror genre with a career move to more international fare, is in top form here in one of the best stories, as a father mysteriously terrified of his seven-year-old daughter. In a sombre and moving performance, Peter Cushing plays a lonely art lover who finds a lost love in a wax museum. And in a final more comedic segment, the voluptuous Ingrid Pitt is suitably cast as a vampire, along with Jon Pertwee, fresh from his first season as the third Doctor Who.

Before falling out of favour with audience expectations and American investment in the mid-1970s, Amicus produced a string of anthologies and horror films during the 1960s and into the 1970s. Among these, The House That Dripped Blood stands firm as an example of classic British horror, tame by today’s standards of screen violence but assured in devilish storytelling by H.P. Lovecraft devotee Robert Bloch, and rich in art direction by Amicus regular Tony Curtis.

The science fiction genre has provided constant wonder and excitement since the early days of cinema when George Méliès flew rockets to the moon. The genre ranges from a time when the fanciful science of invisible men and homemade monsters thrilled audiences, to the paranoia-induced UFO movies of the 1950s, the stillness of space in the seventies with Silent Running, and the sci-fi action of Arnie in The Running Man.

The following list is a strange mix of cult films, sci-fi classics and forgivable flops. The list contains movies that offer a disturbing vista of futuristic dystopias, imaginative special effects, mysterious wormholes, and dangerous trips to Mars.

1. Megaforce (1982)

Looking like he has just walked off the set of Xanadu, Barry Bostwick (of Rocky Horror fame) is Ace Hunter, leader of Megaforce, a “phantom army of super-elite fighting men”. Between the explosions and endless chases, there’s a threadbare plot involving the peaceful country of Sardun and the danger of invasion from a neighbouring country, led by bad guy Guerera (Henry Silva), who drives around in a big tank. Searching for help, Major Zara (Persis Khambatta) and General Byrne-White (Edward Mulhare) hire Megaforce to come to the rescue.

The Megaforce army of spandex-clad soldiers, led by Barry Gibb lookalike Ace Hunter, ride around in rocket-firing motorbikes while spouting dialogue such as “the good guys always win, even in the 80s”. The screenplay also forces a sickly romantic alliance between Ace and Major Zara, leading to a skydiving sequence that unfortunately echoes Carry on Emmannuelle four years earlier. Unintentionally hilarious, Megaforce certainly has its tongue planted firmly in its cheek throughout, with the cast list reading like a B-movie hall of fame; Henry Silva, Persis Khambatta, Michael Beck and Barry Bostwick, all of whom never fail to entertain.

Unsurprisingly, with a back catalogue including Smokey and the Bandit and The Cannonball Run, former stuntman turned filmmaker Hal Needham allows Megaforce to have as many bike and vehicle chases as humanly possible. Although ripe for parody (if that was even necessary), Megaforce is so categorically silly, it’s hard not to enjoy the flying motorbikes, idiotic dialogue and sub-A-Team violence.

2. Mission to Mars (2000)

After spending nearly three decades utilising the film grammar of Alfred Hitchcock in a mixed bag of cult classics (Sisters, Dressed to Kill, Body Double) and prize-sized turkeys (Phantom Of The Paradise), director Brian De Palma delved into the world of science fiction with the much-maligned Mission to Mars.

It is 2020, and on the surface of Mars a group of astronauts encounters an intense burst of energy, leaving three astronauts dead and one stranded on the planet’s surface. A rescue mission led by Woody Blake (Tim Robbins) and Jim McConnell (Gary Sinise) is swiftly set up, with the rescue team ultimately finding more on Mars than their stranded astronaut.

After the release of Mission to Mars in early 2000, De Palma left the studio system behind him to ply his trade in Europe, where he focused on smaller film projects for the next twenty years. De Palma leaves behind an enjoyable slice of sci-fi, with his trademark mix of stylish camera movements and visual flourishes.

Unlike the more action-orientated Red Planet, released the same year, Mission to Mars offers some lofty ideas regarding the human race and its place in the universe. Okay, the ideas and themes threaded through the screenplay fall a bit short. But aided by a beautiful score by Ennio Morricone and some solid performances by Gary Sinise, Don Cheadle, and Connie Nielsen, Mission to Mars still takes you on a journey of brave explorers, enduring friendships, and the mysteries of an unexplored universe.

3. Outland (1981)

By the early 1980s, Sean Connery’s career was lost somewhere between his earlier leading-man career of James Bond in the 1960s, and his much later father-figure roles in Highlander, The Name of the Rose, and quite literally playing a father in an Indiana Jones sequel.

After a few recent misjudged attempts at playing a more mature leading man in The First Great Train Journey, Meteor and Cuba, Connery fits the bill in Outland as a police marshall with more integrity than friends. Assisted with a great-looking hairpiece and some designer stubble, Connery is perfectly cast as a police marshall who stands in the way of a narcotics ring in a mining colony on Jupiter’s third moon.

Outland deliberately channels Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon as it is based on the same premise but this time set in outer space. It’s also worth considering that Outland feels as if it may belong in the same cinematic universe of Ridley Scott’s Alien, released two years earlier. Outland’s cold, industrial set design, weary blue-collar workers, and excellent music score by Alien composer Jerry Goldsmith only help strengthen this fanboy theory.

If not viewed as an unofficial companion piece to Alien, Outland is a perfect example of Sean Connery in transition from leading man to older statesman of Hollywood. Brought to the screen by the underrated journeyman director Peter Hyams, Outland is a slow-burning sci-fi classic, with brilliant use of Steadicam and some cool, if dated, special effects.

4. Lifeforce (1985)

Brought to the screen by Poltergeist director Tobe Hooper and written by Alien writer Dan O’Bannon, Lifeforce is a cult favourite that still manages to entertain nearly forty years after its release. Based on the novel The Space Vampires by British writer Colin Wilson, the crew of the space shuttle Churchill is approaching Halley’s Comet and finds a vast spaceship filled with dead bat-like creatures. Also on board the strange ship are three humanoid bodies, one of which is female. The humanoids are brought back to Earth, with the female humanoid strolling around naked, sucking the life force from anyone that tries to stop her.

Lifeforce was part of a trio of turkeys that director Tobe Hooper produced for the Cannon Group in the mid-1980s. The other two were the dreadful remake of Invaders from Mars and the misjudged sequel to Hoopers’ Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Scorned by critics and ignored by the public, Lifeforce could have been something exceptional; imagine if Hammer or Amicus had an insane budget and a plush music score by Henry Mancini.

Well, unfortunately, the reality is something decidedly barmy but perfect for a dull weekend at home. The performances, particularly from Spooks actor Peter Firth and Irish actor Frank Finlay, are pretty solid throughout. Most of the optical effects are still impressive, and the destruction of London, while echoing Hammers Quatermass and the Pit twenty years earlier, is well realised.

5. Saturn 3 (1980)

Produced around the same time, Raise the Titanic sunk Lew Grade’s hopes of being a successful movie mogul. Saturn 3 features a grizzled Kirk Douglas and a post-Charlie’s Angels Farrah Fawcett as May to December couple Adam and Alex. The two lovebirds live happily on a small space research station near Saturn, helping to find food for a hungry and overcrowded Earth.

The film kicks things off proper with a nod or a direct lift from Star Wars, as a giant spaceship flies overhead in which a psychotic villain called Captain Benson (Harvey Keitel) kills Captain James, taking his place en route to Adam and Alex.

Once there, Captain Benson takes a fancy to Alex and an awkward love triangle develops as Benson becomes Baron Frankenstein in space and builds a giant monster-style robot.

Singing in the Rain director Stanley Donen would not be anyone’s first choice to direct a sci-fi epic in space. Indeed, production designer John Barry, who had made his name in a series of seminal seventies classics (A Clockwork Orange, Star Wars, Superman), had developed the original concept for Saturn 3, with Stanley Donen originally on board as a producer.

However, shortly after filming commenced, Barry was replaced and Donen took the project in a different direction. Saturn 3 is a goofy sci-fi film with more plot holes than black holes, saddled with a dubbed Harvey Keitel, a lovesick robot, and a naked Kirk Douglas.

Some thrillers are brilliant examples of cinematic technique and narrative structure. Some have a twist in their tail or a narrative hook to catch your attention. Others are sometimes forgotten, taken off television schedules, left on the self, or lost among the more famous titles on Netflix. Some thrillers get a raw deal with their distribution and are only found at the bottom of the bargain bin at your local store, while others simply get forgotten as the thriller genre moves ever forward. Bearing this in mind, let’s take a look at some of the films that may have fallen off the radar or gotten lost on their way, and deserve a bit more attention.

1. Road Games (1981)

Essentially Rear Window on wheels, Road Games is another Hitchcock-inspired thriller from Australian director Richard Franklin. Along with his pet dingo, Quid (Stacey Keach), a tired and weary truck driver, travels across Australia with a truckload of pork. Travelling along the Nullarbor Plain, Quid plays along on a harmonica to Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, quotes Geoffrey Chaucer, and creates his little world inside the cab of his truck.

In Road Games, Quid looks out of his Panavision-shaped windscreen, just as Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window snooped and spied on Miss Torso, Miss Lonelyhearts, and Lars Thorwald. Quid spies his own set of characters; Captain Careful, Benny Balls, and Sneezy Rider, among many others, and it’s not long before Quid begins to suspect that one of his fellow travellers is guilty of murder.

Sean Connery was initially sought for the role of Quid before director Richard Franklin saw the huge price tag that came along with the ex- 007. Franklin drafted American actor Stacy Keach as a replacement, who immediately loved the Hitchcockian script by Everett De Roche.

Australian actress Lisa Peers was originally cast as the imaginatively named “Hitch”, an attractive hitchhiker Quid picks up on the road, before the stateside distributor vetoed the idea for the sake of cast insurance and bagged scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis.

Director Richard Franklin was a true devotee of Hitchcock and had ushered the great man down to speak to his classmates when Franklin was at film school in America. Unsurprisingly, in Road Games, Franklin adds a lot of Hitchcock’s film grammar to the mix, and what’s left is a standout thriller with a terrific central performance from Stacy Keach. Championed for years by no less than Quentin Tarantino, Road Games, without any doubt, needs to be more widely seen and re-evaluated.

2. Obsession (1949)

Some may feel that Edward Dmytryk’s Obsession may need a shot of adrenaline to get going, but this polite, sophisticated story of a would-be murderer who wants to do away with one of his wife’s lovers has a lot to offer. The would-be murderer is Robert Newton, soon to cement his legacy as the definitive onscreen pirate in Disney’s Treasure Island. Here, Newton plays Dr Clive Riordan, a well-to-do London doctor who has grown tired of the extramarital affairs conducted by his wife, Storm (Sally Gray). Future Star Wars actor Phil Brown plays Bill Kronin, Storm’s new loverboy, who unexpectedly goes missing the day after being held at gunpoint by Dr Riordan.

To no one’s surprise, Storm assumes her husband has something to do with Bill’s disappearance and calls in Scotland Yard to investigate. Naunton Wayne plays Superintendent Finsbury, and we get a kind of early version of television’s Lieutenant Columbo. It’s all very English and civilised, which contrasts with Dr Riordan’s dastardly plan to kidnap Bill, hide him in a secret room, and dissolve his body in a bath full of acid.

Director Edward Dmytryk, who had run to England to escape the House Un-American Activities Committee, depicts the bombed-out streets of post-war London in an assured film noir style. Screenwriter Alec Coppel, who would go on to script Hitchcock’s Vertigo a decade later, adapted his own book, ‘A Man About a Dog’, awarding Newton and Naunton Wayne the lion’s share of his best dialogue. Released as the more suitably titled The Hidden Room in the United States, Obsession is a lot of fun and deserves a broader audience.

3. The Odessa File (1974)

Based on the novel by Frederick Forsyth, The Odessa File is a thriller set in the 1960s about Nazi-hunting journalist Peter Miller (Jon Voight). The assassination of John F. Kennedy hangs in the background as Miller, with the help of a diary from a Jewish holocaust survivor, learns about Nazi war criminal Eduard Roschman. Obsessed, Miller begins his own investigation and learns of a secret organisation of ex-SS officers operating in post-war Europe. During Miller’s investigation into Nazi war crimes and this new, secret organisation called Odessa, Israeli agents convince Miller to go undercover and become a member of Odessa to learn more about Eduard Roschman, the “Butcher of Riga”.

There is, of course, some truth to Odessa being a real organisation, although in reality it was a much larger organisation involving more than former SS officers. The film uses real-life characters such as Eduard Roschman and Simon Wiesenthal and historical events to help bring the narrative to life. This helps to move the narrative along, as Miller, going deep undercover within the world of Odessa, is decked out with a new disguise and a head full of Nazi trivia.

After the great success of The Day of the Jackal, another Frederick Forsyth novel was ripe for big-screen treatment. The Odessa File certainly matches its predecessor in pacing and detailed storytelling, as well as benefiting from a well-staged fight and clever casting decisions. Directed by British stalwart Ronald Neame, combined with solid performances and generous use of location filming, The Odessa File is an impressive thriller supported by an intense performance by Jon Voight and a kooky music score by theatre impresario Andrew Lloyd Webber.

4. The Naked Face (1984)

Produced by cult producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, The Naked Face came along just as Roger Moore’s 007 days were winding down. Moore had already tried to shake off his suave, debonair image twice before with cult favourite, The Man Who Haunted Himself, and 70s potboiler, North Sea Hijack. The Naked Face allowed Moore a third roll of the dice as he moved even further away from his 007 antics, this time playing a lonely, widowed, Chicago-based psychiatrist who accidentally gets mixed up in murder as well as the mob.

Based on a bestseller of the same name by Sidney Sheldon, The Naked Face provides a bombastic performance by Rod Steiger. With a career born out of the Actors Studio in the post-war years, Steiger’s proclivity to make use of the Method leads to a performance that is out of step with the rest of the film. Wearing an ill-fitting wig, Steiger plays a Chicago cop who screams most of his dialogue. On the other hand, 70s film favourite Elliott Gould, who had sparred so memorably with Moore in Escape to Athena five years earlier, offers a splendid performance as the more subdued Detective Angeli.

Moore suggested that his friend Bryan Forbes could direct the film, with Forbes allowing Moore ample screen time to stretch his acting chops. Forbes had a string of successful films behind him (Whistle Down the Wind, Séance on a Wet Afternoon, The Stepford Wives), and The Naked Face should have been another fine addition. The Naked Face is a solid thriller with all the twists and turns one expects from the genre, offering audiences a chance to see where Moore’s career may have gone post-James Bond if The Naked Face had been a greater success.

5. Hell Is a City (1960)

Hell Is a City is an underrated cult classic of British cinema. After a decade of Kenneth More, Richard Todd and Dirk Bogarde, by the end of the 1950s, British cinema had a new crop of film stars. Stanley Baker was one of them, a fresher, more complex, more working-class star for the 1960s.

Hell Is a City plays like a mash-up of film noir and bold British melodrama, depicting a snapshot of post-war industrial Manchester. A brutal, violent thriller, it echoes the then prominent kitchen sink drama.

Filmed nearly entirely on location in Manchester, Hell Is a City features Stanley Baker as Harry Martineau, a weary but determined police detective dedicated to his job. Martineau is convinced that Don Starling (John Crawford), a dangerous, escaped convict, will return to Manchester to collect the loot from a previous crime. The story builds momentum as an unplanned murder of a young woman alerts Martineau that Starling is in the vicinity, with Martineau closing in on Starling and his criminal cronies.

Based on a novel by Maurice Proctor, Hell Is a City is a stylish thriller produced by horror specialists Hammer Films and directed by the vastly undervalued genre director, Val Guest. Lead actor Stanley Baker is in top form as the dogged detective, and John Crawford, if you forgive his accent, is excellent as Starling, the escaped convict, who murders, rapes, and beats his way out of trouble.

The film is sprinkled with first-rate actors, such as Donald Pleasence, Vanda Godsell, and a young Billie Whitelaw as a bookie’s wife, with Whitelaw bagging herself a British Academy Award for best newcomer. Hell Is a City is a surprisingly violent thriller, which allows the audience a brief flashback of the north of England in transition from its industrial past to a more modern Manchester on the cusp of change.