Every year, I tell myself I’ve finally run out of movies. Every year, cinema laughs in my face and hands me something I didn’t know existed, something half-buried, mislabeled, forgotten, or dismissed, and suddenly I’m spiraling down another rabbit hole at 2 a.m. 2025 was an awful year for me when it comes to watching anything, new or old. You have to go back over fifteen years since I saw this few films within a calendar year. There’s a reason I didn’t do my annual Year in Review this month, I literally didn’t see enough to make a compelling list.
So instead, I pivoted to the discoveries that stuck with me the longest. These aren’t canonized classics or Letterboxd darlings. These are movies I found: obscure VHS refugees, oddball international genre pieces, failed franchise starters, TV movies pretending to be theatrical features, animations that look like they were drawn during a fever, and horror films that either go too far or not far enough — which is often the same thing.
What ties these discoveries together isn’t quality in the traditional sense, but personality. Each one has a pulse. A reason to exist. A moment where you can feel a filmmaker, animator, or producer swinging for something — sometimes landing, sometimes hitting themselves in the face. I wrote about them because they demanded it, because silence felt like letting them disappear again. So this list isn’t a “best of.” It’s a survival log. A record of the movies that ambushed me in 2025 and refused to be ignored. The strange ones. The broken ones. The ones that made me ask, who was this even for? and then realize, unfortunately, the answer was me.
These are my 25 Greatest Film Discoveries of 2025.
25. Lies (1983)
If you were a film fan on the Internet in the late ’90s and early ’00s, odds are, there was no other movie marathon you wanted to attend more than Butt-Numb-A-Thon. It was Harry Knowles’ 24-hour birthday film festival, where he showed old movies and some insane debuts. Honestly, the number of advance screenings and celebrity appearances he was able to get is mind-blowing. While not as impressive as say Peter Jackson or Guillermo del Toro, Kim and Jim Wheat were regular attendees in the early days of the festival and would give q&a’s where they were very open about their work and how almost none of what they wrote ended up on the screen. It seems like all of their screenplays were changed drastically before they went into production. Which is a shame because they clearly know how to handle genre.
The Fly II is often dismissed as a cash-in, but it’s smarter, sadder, and more ethically thorny than it gets credit for. Ewoks: The Battle for Endor isn’t great but it does a good job of taking a small sliver of the Star Wars universe and turning it into a kid’s adventure. Silent Scream is a weird Psycho rip-off with a crazy stacked cast, After Midnight is a horror anthology with some fun ideas and A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master is one of the most entertaining of the franchise. With the exception of Pitch Black, they seem to have terrible luck with other people adapting their work.
Which is probably why they decided to make Lies themselves. They couldn’t chance letting someone else fuck up their best script and they were right not to trust anyone else. Lies is a thriller about a struggling actress (Ann Dusenberry) who accepts a high-paying job to play a rich heiress committed to an asylum, not knowing she’s really being set up as a surrogate for the real girl who’d been murdered. This movie has more twists and turns than the last ten Brian De Palma movies combined. It may sound like a boring, predictable plot but it is anything but. This is the textbook definition of a hidden gem.
24. Mirage (1990)
Imagine Duel, but swap out the insidious tanker truck stalking a lone man on endless highways for a hulking black truck terrorizing teens stranded in the middle of the desert. Same unknowable threat only now the wide-open road has been replaced by a sun-blasted nowhere, and the victims are young, vulnerable, and painfully exposed. That’s Mirage. It’s a film that’s admittedly pretty derivative, but since it’s essentially a slasher with a truck replacing the knife, its flaws are easy to forgive. There aren’t many entries in the “killer car” subgenre, and while this isn’t anywhere near the top of the heap, it gets enough right to justify the ride. You get nudity, a setting that isn’t recycled from a hundred other slashers, and a surprisingly capable final girl. The third act shifts into full stalk-and-slash mode, unfolding through a maze of rocky canyons, with a killer who is less a silent menace and more a persistently irritating presence. His nonstop, unhinged banter teeters between grating and oddly believable, which somehow works in the film’s favor. This is the kind of horror movie you recommend to the friend who swears they’ve seen everything—because chances are, this one will still be new to them.
23. Puppet Princess (2000)
OVAs were pure catnip for teenage boys craving extreme action, nudity, and arterial-level bloodshed. For the uninitiated, OVA stands for Original Video Animation, anime produced directly for the Japanese home video market. Some functioned as side stories or bonus episodes, others were one-off releases, but the real draw was freedom: without TV standards to worry about, the most aggressive titles pushed violence far beyond anything stateside audiences were seeing at the time. While Ninja Scroll (not technically an OVA, but absolutely part of the ecosystem) acted as the gateway drug, it also sent fans hunting for something just as savage. Had Puppet Princess arrived a little earlier—or hit a wider audience—it might have scratched that same itch.
The story centers on Princess Rangiku, the sole survivor of a massacre carried out by a warlord intent on stealing her father’s deadly mechanical creations. On the run, she’s left with only his karakuri puppets—brutal, weaponized constructs she controls like a mech, at the cost of leaving her own body completely defenseless. That vulnerability forces her into an uneasy alliance with a hardened, wandering ninja who acts as her protector as she marches toward revenge. What follows is a delirious mix of body horror, nudity, and so much blood that, if this were live action, they’d have to shoot it in black and white after running out of red dye on day one. It may clock in at just forty minutes, but Puppet Princess wastes none of them, delivering a concentrated blast of the excess that made OVAs legendary.
22. Coda (1987)
If Lucio Fulci had ever been hired to knock out a made-for-TV movie for Australian television, it probably would’ve looked a lot like Coda. The official IMDb and Letterboxd synopsis — “a masked maniac stalks and murders female university students” — makes it sound like a straight-up slasher, but that’s a bit of a bait and switch. Coda is very much a giallo, which is rare enough for Australia and even rarer for television. Rather than piling up bodies, the film unfolds as a deliberately paced mystery. Penny Cook plays a woman drawn into uncovering the truth after her friend is brutally attacked and nearly killed. When her ex-boyfriend (Patrick Frost) — the only witness to the crime — runs because other onlookers point the finger at him, he turns to her for help. From there, the story becomes less about carnage and more about suspicion, misdirection, and unraveling what really happened.
The influences are clear: Hitchcock’s tension and Carpenter’s Halloween are both in the DNA, but Coda still carves out an identity of its own. The synth score does a lot of heavy lifting, creating an eerie, pulsing mood, while the Australian locations are a major asset. They’re attractive, unfamiliar, and used to build memorable set pieces rather than just filling space. The chemistry between the lead and her friend — who tags along on the investigation simply because she has nothing better to do — is lively and charming, giving the film a welcome bounce. If you’re expecting the film to suddenly erupt into full-blown horror, that doesn’t really happen until the final third. But for anyone acclimated to giallo pacing, that’s not a flaw, it’s part of the appeal. Coda is another reminder that Australia remains fertile ground for horror discoveries, especially for genre fans who think they’ve already seen everything.
21. Battle Heater (1989)
Battle Heater feels like director Jôji Iida aggressively trying hard to pull off Nobuhiko Obayashi’s style and he gets pretty goddamn close. So many subplots are thrown at the viewer—some completely insane—that it sometimes feels like you’re barely holding on to the story, but that’s part of its shotgun-blast approach to chaos, which is exactly what makes it so charming. The film is about a possessed kotatsu (a low, wooden table frame covered by or heavy blanket, upon which a table top sits. Underneath is a heat source, usually an electric brazier) that terrorizes an apartment complex filled with weirdos, losers, and outcasts. There are tenants who are planning a double suicide. There is a couple trying to dispose of a corpse. There are punks acting like punks and love birds caught in a one sided triangle.
So much is going on that sometimes it forgets it’s supposed to be about a killer heater but again, that’s part of the charm. It has a kind of gonzo energy that makes you feel like you’re trapped inside a malfunctioning VHS tape. Every frame bursts with the kind of manic creativity you only find in late ‘80s Japanese genre cinema. The tone swings from broad comedy to splatter horror to deadpan social commentary, often within the same scene. It’s messy, overstuffed, and refuses to make sense, but that’s what makes it great. Like a live-action anime filtered through the sensibilities of a surrealist prankster, Battle Heater is a reminder that Japanese filmmakers of the era weren’t afraid to swing for the fences, even if they were aiming at a completely different ballpark.
20. 976-Evil II (1992)
976-EVIL II is one of those sequels that shows up late, uninvited, and somehow ends up being the most fun person at the party. Coming three years after Robert Englund’s original 976-EVIL — a film that’s very much a product of late ’80s Satanic Panic sleaze — this follow-up feels like a weird hybrid of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Shocker that has nothing to do with the last one nor does it do anything with the core concept (hell has a number that if you call, will give you powers) but somehow, this weird Frankenstein movie of random ideas still works. This time, instead of a bullied nerd who goes kill crazy after getting satanic powers from dialing the evil number, it’s a teacher named Mr. Grubeck (René Assa) who uses them to kill young women.
How he knows about the number or why he wants to kill women is never explained and even more bizarrely, he gets caught and captured within the first five minutes of the movie. He’s in a jail cell for almost the entire runtime but can dream walk, which allows him to go anywhere and do anything when he’s asleep. He’s targeting witnesses, prosecutors and the friends of Robin (Debbie James), the latest young woman he has his eyes on. This is a sequel that understands escalation doesn’t just mean more blood — it means bigger swings. For a Jim Wynorski movie, it’s kind of incredible how many explosions and fun set pieces there are.
There’s a scene where Mr. Grubeck possesses a television and sucks a victim inside, where they have to survive a mash-up of It’s a Wonderful Life and Night of the Living Dead, which is pulled off so well, it’s worth the price of admission alone. What really makes 976-EVIL II pop is its willingness to be dumb in the best way. It’s bright, brisk, and packed with effects that feel designed to be enjoyed rather than feared. This is VHS-era horror doing exactly what it should: entertaining teenagers, confusing parents, and accidentally aging into cult status. Which raises the obvious question — why on earth didn’t this turn into a full-blown franchise? The concept is endlessly expandable, the sequel proves tonal flexibility is possible, and the phone-number gimmick is practically begging for more sequels, spin-offs, or at least one truly deranged third entry. Instead, the line went dead. Horror history is littered with missed opportunities, but 976-EVIL II stands as one of the most baffling. Hell was calling… and nobody picked up.
19. Afraid of the Dark (1991)
Afraid of the Dark might be the best film ever made about how terrifying a child’s mind can be—especially when it’s starting to unravel. It is a coming-of-age nightmare with an ingenious midpoint twist. A young boy named Lucas (James Fox) is convinced a serial killer is stalking blind women around his neighborhood. His mother and all her friends are blind, so he spends his days guiding them everywhere they go—always by their side, even in the moments when they die. He personally witnesses two of them get brutally murdered, like he has front row seats to the newest Fulci movie. Or did he? At the halfway point, it is revealed that nothing we had just witnessed happened.
There is no killer, the people in his life aren’t blind, and all the men on the outskirts of the frame aren’t all creeps. The movie is actually about a young man’s fear of going blind and how that is affecting his mental state. He is slowly losing his grip on reality and starts committing heinous acts because his mind is warped. When he takes off his glasses, reality is distorted and he behaves accordingly. It makes sense within his broken view of things but for everyone else, he’s a ticking time bomb waiting to become Dahmer. The first half is a bloody paranoid fairy tale and the second is a quiet tragedy about blindness—literal and metaphorical that takes a hard left into the horrors of mental degradation.
18. Bubble Bath (1979)
Bubble Bath (Habfürdő) is what happens when a socialist-era animation studio drops acid and then asks some extremely pointed questions about marriage and whether adulthood is just one long compromise you learn to deal with. Directed by György Kovásznai, this Hungarian animated musical looks like it was designed by someone who actively hates still images and musicals that aren’t non-stop songs. There is not a single second of this film that isn’t moving. If you think Quasi at the Quackadero is too much at just ten minutes, this movie might make your eyes bleed. The film is a love triangle (of sorts) between Zsolt, his soon-to-be wife and the woman he actually wants to be with. This might sound like the setup for a dour relationship drama, but Bubble Bath is anything but.
Instead, Kovásznai turns romantic melodrama into a neon-colored, jazz-inflected meltdown where characters sing their neuroses directly at the audience. Visually, it’s insane. The animation constantly mutates—characters stretch, dissolve, snap into abstract shapes—like the film itself can’t stand still long enough to pretend reality is real. Styles clash on purpose, pop art rubs elbows with sketchy line work, and realism is treated like an afterthought. It feels less like a movie and more like a visual argument set to funk and jazz music. And that music? Infectious. Catchy. Bitter as hell. Everyone is singing, but no one is happy. It’s an assault on the senses that you’ll either love or hate immediately.
17. Night of the Scarecrow (1995)
For five minutes in the early ’90s, Jeff Burr was the go-to director for direct-to-video sequels of famous horror films. He made The Stepfather II, Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings, and Puppet Master 4 and 5. He was the king of making moderately enjoyable but ultimately disposable late-night rental cheese. Which is probably why Night of the Scarecrow has remained undiscovered for so long. The movie opens by going hard on the backstory. A desperate farming town strikes a deal with a warlock to save their crops. The corn flourishes, but the man behind the magic turns out to be a predator who corrupts the town just as much as he saves it.
Rather than own up to their mistake, the townspeople drugged him, crucified him in the field, burned him alive, and buried his remains beneath the soil. They hide his spell book, stick a scarecrow on top of the grave, and collectively decide this problem has been handled forever. Years later, the Goodman family plans to sell off the land for development, and during a night of drunk stupidity, the warlock’s burial site is disturbed. His spirit returns and animates the scarecrow, which begins picking off the descendants of the people who murdered him.
Oh, and those descendants? A murderers’ row of “that guy” actors. Stephen Root, Bruce Glover, Gary Lockwood, Dirk Blocker, and a pre-fame John Hawkes all pop up in this. Based on that premise, you would naturally assume this would feel more akin to Pumpkinhead, but it’s actually closer to A Nightmare on Elm Street. The scarecrow doesn’t use dream shenanigans to kill anyone, but he does throw out Freddy Krueger-esque puns like he’s a professional pitcher. The movie isn’t great, but it’s definitely the best thing Burr made and has all the elements for a cult classic once the horror community realizes it exists.
16. We’re Going to Eat You (1980)
Before Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain, before Peking Opera Blues, before he changed the face of Hong Kong cinema with A Better Tomorrow and the entire heroic bloodshed movement it inspired. Before all of that, Tsui Hark made We’re Going to Eat You — a movie that’s part kung fu movie and part cannibal comedy that wobbles between Looney Tunes slapstick and Cannibal Holocaust sleaze. A complete outlier within his work in every way, Hark never made anything as zany, as action-packed, or as brutal ever again. This has a Jackie Chan action comedy tone but with the brutal violence of an Eli Roth horror. The tonal shifts are whiplash-inducing, but that’s why it works. A secret agent (named Agent 999, because why not) tracks a wanted criminal to a remote island. The island’s residents?
A cannibal cult that lures travelers for dinner. And not as guests. What follows is a Lucio Fulci movie with the manic energy of a Shaw Brothers action flick. The film never really settles on what it wants to be. One minute you’ve got bone-crunching martial arts choreography and the next, you’re watching a broad farce with Benny Hill–style chase music. It’s an exploitation film made by a genius who hadn’t quite learned to control his powers yet. A schizophrenic satire on corruption and the absurdity of authority, but mostly, it’s a kung fu cannibal comedy that’s as strange as it sounds.
15. The Assassination Bureau (1969)
The Assassination Bureau is a film that can’t decide if it wants to be a political satire, a caper, or a romantic adventure, so it shrugs and becomes all three. Oliver Reed plays the head of a secret organization that kills people for ethical reasons (yes, really), strutting through the film with that trademark Reed mix of menace and mischief. Noted film critic Drew McWeeny affectionately refers to Reed as “the dainty ape,” and that couldn’t be more on the money. He’s brutish or delightful, depending on the role, and is brilliant at playing both. Here, he’s having a fantastic time, and honestly, so are we. Opposite him is Diana Rigg, weaponizing her Avengers-era cool as a reporter who discovers the organization and hires Reed, who will take any job for the right price, to assassinate himself since she finds the whole endeavor deplorable.
He is immediately delighted by the contact and uses it to purge the organization of killers that bend the code to their own needs. They kill him or he kills them and the hunt begins. This is a deeply flawed movie. The tone wobbles, the pacing drags in spots, and the third act ditches the premise entirely and turns into more of a James Bond caper where Reed has to stop the organization, now led by Telly Savalas (who is also having a blast), from bombing London by way of a zeppelin. But despite its flaws, there’s something irresistible about its elaborate assassination schemes, old-world globetrotting, and the way it treats murder like a gentleman’s hobby. Reed and Rigg have a genuine spark, selling a romance that feels like two intellectuals trying to out-smug each other while the world explodes politely in the background. As much as I liked it, I couldn’t help but wonder how much better it would be if Wes Anderson remade it.
14. Legend of the Eight Samurai (1983)
Directed by the legendary Kinji Fukasaku (who did so much more than Battle Royale), Legend of the Eight Samurai is an epic fantasy about a princess (Hiroko Yakushimaru) who is hunted by an evil queen, an army of monsters, and fate itself. Her only hope lies in eight samurai, each marked by a glowing bead representing a virtue like Loyalty or Devotion, which is almost identical to the plot of the director’s previous film Message From Space, except this one doesn’t have an actor slumming it for booze money ala Vic Morrow. The film moves at a breathless pace, barely stopping to explain itself, which is exactly why it works. It wants you to focus on the fun elements, not get bogged down in the overly convoluted backstory. Visually, it’s a candy store of early-’80s Japanese spectacle. Matte paintings, colored smoke, laser-like light effects, giant sets that look one hard cough away from collapse—it’s all gloriously tactile.
You can feel the ambition in every frame, even when the effects wobble, or the monsters look like they wandered in from a haunted kabuki theater. Instead of diminishing the experience, that handmade quality gives the film its charm. This is fantasy as pageantry, not realism. Is it messy? Absolutely. Most of the eight samurai aren’t even given a backstory, let alone motivation, emotional beats are rushed, and the runtime feels both too long and not long enough. But Legend of the Eight Samurai is powered by momentum and imagination, not narrative elegance. It’s a film that believes in adventure with its whole heart, even when it occasionally trips over its own ambition. But even when it’s at its worst, it’s still leagues better than whatever fantasy tripe was getting made in America around that time.
13. Bakeneko: A Vengeful Spirit (1968)
Bakeneko: A Vengeful Spirit, like all films within the ghost cat subgenre, begins with betrayal. A power-hungry retainer murders his lord and attempts to claim the lord’s wife as his own. She refuses, choosing death over humiliation, and drowns herself in a swamp alongside her beloved cat. The swamp then becomes cursed, the injustice unhealed, and the cat’s spirit—fused with grief and rage—waits for revenge. Years later, history starts repeating itself. The same man sets his sights on another woman, and once again desire, entitlement, and violence rear their heads. This time, the spirit of the drowned woman and her cat reemerge through the bakeneko curse to correct what never should have happened in the first place. What follows isn’t chaos, but retribution. Visually, the film is pure late-60s atmosphere.
Shot in stark black and white, it leans into shadow, fog, and negative space to create an eerie ambience. While never scary, the film is surprisingly graphic for its day. The ghost cat has a penchant for decapitations, as do the paranoid villains of the movie. Since the ghost cat can hop into female bodies, anything with a vagina within a 500-foot radius of the main baddie’s sword is at risk of getting its head cut off. What makes Bakeneko: A Vengeful Spirit linger is how seriously it treats vengeance. This isn’t a morality tale where forgiveness saves the day. The film is clear-eyed about the cost of abuse of power and uninterested in absolution. The curse exists because justice never arrived when it mattered. The supernatural doesn’t disrupt the social order—it exposes how broken it already was.
Part II
Have you discovered any of these movies yet? Will you be checking them out now? Tell me down in the comments.
