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.
Following an online campaign to build a potential audience, the independent Canadian movie Wolf Cop starred Leo Fafard as alcoholic street cop Lou Garou, who was transformed into an avenging werewolf during a strange ritual in the woods.
Who would ever have guessed a town called Lupine Ridge would be inhabited by werewolves? That turned out to be the case in actor/screenwriter David Hayter’s Wolves, which featured Stephen McHattie and Jason Momoa in the cast.
Filmed in Wales, the embarrassingly awful Extinction: Jurassic Predators involved a group of researchers in the Amazon rainforest being attacked by an unconvincing dinosaur.
Leprechaun: Origins was a disappointing re-boot of the popular 1990s series, while Australian producer Antony I. Ginnane remade both his original 1978 film as Patrick: Evil Awakens and his 1982 movie Turkey Shoot.
Kino Classics released a new version of the creaky murder mystery The Death Kiss (1932), starring Bela Lugosi and David Manners, on Blu-ray and DVD. The archival 35mm restoration included original hand-tinted sequences.
Long before there was Stephen King’s Under the Dome there was Arch Oboler’s The Bubble (1966), which Kino reissued in a newly restored “Space-Vision 3-D” version on Blu-ray.
The four-disc Blu-ray boxset The Vincent Price Collection II from Shout! Factory featured a mixed bag of titles, including The House on Haunted Hill, The Return of the Fly, The Raven (1963), The Comedy of Terrors, The Tomb of Ligeia, The Last Man on Earth and Dr. Phibes Rises Again, along with trailers, new featurettes and commentaries, and a 32-page booklet by David Del Valle.
Odeon Entertainment’s welcome digitally remastered release of Michael Reeves’ The Sorcerers (1967) included amongst its extras an interview with Johnny Mains (who also wrote the insert booklet) about John Burke’s neglected involvement in the film, a documentary about Reeves, and the cult director’s short film Intrusion.