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.
12. The Door Trilogy (1988–96)
Each entry in the Door trilogy begins the same way: a woman stalked by an obsessive man, trapped in what seems like a standard home invasion thriller—until the film mutates into something far stranger. The first plays like Repulsion by way of Chantal Akerman, the second like analog horror filtered through David Lynch’s subconscious, and the third feels like Kiyoshi Kurosawa using the genre as a sketchbook for the ideas he’d later perfect in Cure and Pulse. It’s the kind of trilogy that shapeshifts so radically from one film to the next, the only real comparison is The Evil Dead—and the only reason you’ve probably never heard of it is that it’s been gathering dust in the corner of a Tokyo video shop since 1996.
Door 2: Tokyo Diary is a sequel in name only. The connective tissue between it and the original is barely there—both center on women struggling to survive the suffocating presence of men, but that’s where the similarities end. Where the first film is a paranoid, minimalist thriller in the When a Stranger Calls mold, Tokyo Diary dives headfirst into surrealism. It doesn’t want to startle you with jump scares or blood. It wants to unsettle you, to make you feel like you’re trapped inside someone else’s fever dream. The story follows a call girl whose encounters grow stranger and more dangerous until the line between fantasy and nightmare completely erodes.
Five years later, the series returned with Door III, following a weary saleswoman who becomes entangled with a potential client—imagine Harvey Weinstein crossed with David Cronenberg. Each film tells a distinct story, both narratively and stylistically, offering a completely different experience every time. In an era when most horror franchises cling desperately to formula, the Door trilogy deserves credit for having the guts—and the imagination—to reinvent itself with every installment.
11. Guzoo: The Thing Forsaken by God – Part I (1986)
Guzoo: The Thing Forsaken by God – Part I is one of those titles that tells you exactly what you’re in for and then somehow still feels more unhinged than advertised. A group of schoolgirls head to a secluded vacation house for a fun getaway. Poolside lounging, idle chatter, gossiping about boys. Beneath the house, however, lurks Guzoo—an ancient, abandoned, vaguely explained mass of hatred and rubber that has been “forsaken by God,” which is horror shorthand for we don’t need rules. Once Guzoo wakes up, the girls start getting chomped on in extremely bloody fashion. Guzoo itself is the star. This thing doesn’t walk, stalk, or chase. It oozes. It crawls through mirrors, seeps out of walls, and expands into whatever shape the effects team felt like building that afternoon.
There’s no stable form, no logic, just tentacles, slime, and the sense that gravity and anatomy have both resigned. When people talk about Japanese splatter being more about sensation than story, this is the textbook example. The pacing is deeply strange. Large chunks of the runtime are spent hanging out, talking, killing time—then suddenly someone is being attacked by a sentient pile of latex intestines. The violence arrives without warning and leaves just as quickly, like the film itself is bored with narrative but extremely invested in making sure you remember the monster exists. It’s messy, uneven, and honestly kind of hypnotic. It’s unfortunate that a second part never happened. I want more of the Thing Forsaken By God.
10. Abruptio (2023)
Evan Marlowe spent eight years trying to get this movie finished. From the time the script was written, the voice recording was done, and the post-production was complete, nearly a decade had passed. It took so long that technically it is Sid Haig’s last film (it came out in 2022, three years after he died) despite the fact that he recorded his lines back when he was making Bone Tomahawk. That’s a long time to work on a passion project, so regardless of its quality, Marlowe deserves respect for fighting that hard to see his vision come to fruition. He deserves even more respect for fighting for this. It would be one thing if the rock he was trying to push up the hill was important to him and he was the only one who could tell it. But no, this rock is a big ol’ boulder of batshit Insanity.
Every few years, a movie slithers out of nowhere that feels like it was smuggled in from another dimension—something too weird, too handmade, too wrong to have come from the same planet as Marvel movies or Netflix originals. Abruptio is one of those films. It’s a waking nightmare made entirely with life-sized puppets, and it’s so grotesque, inventive, and deeply unsettling that it feels like Jan Švankmajer directed a snuff version of Anomalisa. Les Hackel (James Marsters) wakes up to find a mysterious implant in the back of his neck and a cryptic message instructing him to commit unspeakable acts—or die.
It’s the kind of plot that could’ve worked in live-action, but the choice to tell it with full-body latex puppets transforms it into something infinitely more disturbing. Every face looks wrong. Every movement is jerky, mechanical, and alien. Even when nothing horrifying is happening, you feel like you’re watching something you shouldn’t. The choice to make every character a human-sized puppet gives it a unique edge, but it is more than just a stylistic choice; it literally ties into the theme, which is: everyone is a puppet controlled by unseen masters. There’s a good chance you’ll hate Abruptio. It’s ugly by design, slow in places, and suffocatingly bleak. But if you’re drawn to the outer edges of horror—the weird, the tactile, the uncompromising—it’s a minor miracle. Abruptio is what happens when someone opens the door between horror and art and finds something unspeakable staring back.
9. Magic Cop (1990)
By 1990, Hong Kong cinema had fully accepted that hopping vampires, Taoist priests, and action-comedy chaos were not a phase but a lifestyle choice. Magic Cop arrives right in the middle of that beautiful mess, starring Lam Ching-ying as a lawman who solves crimes with equal parts police procedure and spiritual know-how. If you came here for logic, you are lost. If you came here to watch a deadpan professional apply exorcism rituals like standard operating procedure, you’re home. Lam plays Lin, a no-nonsense cop trained in Taoist magic, which in this universe is apparently just another certification you pick up along the way. He teams up with a Japanese policewoman investigating a series of ritualistic murders tied to dark sorcery.
What follows is a loose but enthusiastic blend of supernatural horror, slapstick comedy, and action set pieces, all stitched together with paper talismans, chanting, and the firm belief that bureaucracy can coexist with demon hunting. Director Ricky Lau, who also worked on several Mr. Vampire films, knows exactly how to balance tones. The horror elements are genuine enough—there are cult rituals, possessed bodies, and some surprisingly nasty imagery—but the comedy is always waiting to undercut the tension. The film never tries to scare you for long: it wants you entertained, amused, and slightly impressed by how smoothly it shifts gears. Is Magic Cop one of the high points of Hong Kong supernatural cinema? Not quite. The plot is thin, the pacing wobbles, and some jokes land harder than others. But it’s buoyed by charm, professionalism, and Lam Ching-ying’s unshakable presence.
8. Dinosaur Fights Against Cosmic Men (1969)
Here it is, folks: the most obscure movie I have ever laid eyes on. The previous record holder was The Twelve Animals (aka The Twelve Fairies), which had zero logs on IMDb when I first saw it—an exclusivity that has since been ruined by 85 other people catching up. But Dinosaurs Fight Against Cosmic Men makes that look downright mainstream. This thing was basically lost media almost from the moment it was released and has only very recently clawed its way back into existence.
From what I can gather, the film was stitched together from footage from the TV series Monster Prince, then topped off with an English dub that’s deliberately funny rather than accidentally so. And honestly, that choice does a lot of heavy lifting. Like the show, the story centers on a young boy named Takeru, who lives in the jungle with his giant pet dinosaur Nessie and uses said dinosaur to assist the Japanese military in battling evil monsters and assorted extraterrestrial weirdos. Takeru is alone after his family disappears in a plane crash, and much like Mowgli, he’s been adopted by the local wildlife—except instead of laid-back bears and stoic panthers, it’s dinosaurs. And they’re itching for a fight.
I won’t sugarcoat it: following the plot is nearly impossible. I had no idea what was happening from scene to scene, who anyone was, or who was supposed to be on which side at any given moment. But eventually, I stopped trying to make sense of it and just surrendered to the experience. Because the movie does deliver where it counts: loads of old-school, man-in-a-suit kaiju action. Once I accepted that the story was just connective tissue between dinosaur brawls, I had a much better time—and thankfully, the dinosaur fights keep coming.
7. Possessed (1983) & Possessed II (1984)
1983 holds the record for the year with the most fucked up, insane supernatural horror movies. The Boxer’s Omen, Seeding of a Ghost, Devil Fetus and Possessed all came out within 12 months of each other. Either that was what audiences wanted at the time or all of those directors made a bet to see which one of them could make the wildest movie involving a ghost. Making the screenwriters take massive amounts of drugs before they wrote their screenplays was also part of the bet. The Boxer’s Omen would prove to be the winner of that bet, with Possessed probably coming in dead last. That isn’t to say it’s bad; it just can’t compete with the big dogs. Those movies push “what the fuck am I watching” to new heights, while this is a bit more conventional. It’s literally Poltergeist, The Exorcist, and The Entity thrown into a blender, and then that concoction is poured over a standard police procedure. It’s good, but its sequel is far superior.
A follow-up in name only to the previous one, Possessed II ditches continuity for chaos. It opens with a haunting, ends with an exorcism, and in between, it feels like reality keeps tripping over itself. The film follows a detective investigating a string of bizarre deaths that seem to circle back to a single cursed woman, but good luck trying to track the logic—this isn’t a mystery so much as a mind fuck given cinematic form. This movie throws so much at the viewer, even Raimi would tell it to calm the fuck down. Like so many Category III-adjacent horror films of the era, it’s a mix of the sacred and profane—priests versus demons, sex versus damnation, the living versus the guilt they can’t bury. But what makes Possessed II hit harder than its contemporaries is the amount of crazy it throws at you.
While others at the time focused on the extreme, this only cares about the non-stop gags it has planned. There are so many demons, so many unrelated murders committed by said demons, so many weird hauntings, you will forget half of what you just watched because it’s impossible to remember it all. There was definitely something in the air in Hong Kong horror from the early ’80s—a kind of manic, electric weirdness that feels like the filmmakers were all chasing a nightmare they half-remembered. Possessed II is the purest form of that energy: part exorcism film, part supernatural noir, and part cosmic fever dream about guilt, ghosts, and the cruel weight of karma. It isn’t polished. It isn’t coherent. But it doesn’t need to be. It just needs to be entertaining and it succeeds—and then some.
6. The Three Musketeers (1973) & The Four Musketeers (1974)
Shot as one long production and then split into two films (a move that literally created laws to prevent this from ever happening again), these movies feel less like “prestige adaptations” and more like a gang of talented actors having a blast while accidentally redefining the modern swashbuckler. This is Alexandre Dumas filtered through Lester’s anarchic sensibility. Sword fights are messy, people trip over furniture, chickens wander through the frame, and heroes get tired. Michael York’s d’Artagnan isn’t a polished legend so much as an eager kid who is the definition of “on sight” when it comes to Count de Rochefort. Oliver Reed’s Athos is all wounded masculinity and barely suppressed rage, Richard Chamberlain’s Aramis is smooth and sly, and Frank Finlay’s Porthos is gloriously larger than life. Then you’ve got Faye Dunaway leaning hard into the icy cruelty of Milady de Winter, a performance that understands villainy as theater, and Charlton Heston chewing the scenery as Richelieu in that very specific Heston way. Oh, and Christopher Lee owns the role of Rochefort so definitively that every version after is a straight copy.
What really sets these films apart from other Musketeers adaptations is the tone. Lester’s films sit in a sweet spot where adventure and comedy coexist without canceling each other out. You can see its fingerprints (and sometimes literally reused action set pieces) in everything from the Pirates of the Caribbean films to Shanghai Knights. I wrote these off forever because of its infamous production issues and the fact that Richard Lester, the man who added unnecessary bullshit into Superman II and made the unwatchable Superman III, directed it, but goddamn, these things are fun. I finally understand why the old man who made A Hard Day’s Night was tapped to reshoot Superman II. After these, I would’ve given him every comic book movie.
5. Guinea Pig: Devil Woman Doctor (1986)
The VHS era was the last time a film could be infamous for violence. Not just because of the content within the movie itself, some of which was so morally reprehensible that they were literally banned, but because of the tactile nature of the VHS tape itself. There’s something seedy about a VHS tape. Something about the look of it, the sound of it rewinding or the association you make at the sight of one with the fact that you know deep in your heart, many awful, unspeakable atrocities have been shot with a film camera. The very act of putting a VHS tape into your player and pushing play made every movie just 15% more real. That’s why we all believed the Faces of Death films were authentic and why only the most hardcore of horror fans searched out the Guinea Pig films.
Their infamy is what kept me away from them for 40 years. All I heard about them was the fact that they were torture porn and that’s exactly what the first two are. The first is literally nothing but a kidnapped woman being aggressively more abused until it’s basically nothing more than an audition tape a teenager made to get into a prestigious SFX school. The second one is the same but more extreme. That first starts with slaps across the face; this one starts with a blade. But at least you can see the torturer, and it’s a dude in a samurai costume, so that’s something. But then the third one shifts radically to an actual comedy. There are actors and a plot and it has real jokes. An asshole salary man, pissed off at everyone and everything, tries to commit suicide but realizes after he’s already cut himself multiple times, he’s seemingly immortal.
How he decides to use these new superpowers is a bit head-scratching but it does end in an entertaining punchline. And then the fourth happened. The whiplash I received from the quality of the first (which I consider legitimately pointless), to the absolute fun I had with the fourth one, would absolutely kill a man with a thinner neck. The first two and Mermaid in a Manhole are so infamous that no one talks about Android of Notre Dame or Guinea Pig: Devil Woman Doctor, the fourth one. Which is why I had zero idea that this franchise produced a legit horror comedy anthology movie.
Each vignette presents a new “patient,” a new scenario, and a new excuse to push practical effects artists to their absolute limits. One segment focuses on surgical torture, another leans into grotesque sexual power games, while others feel like demented punchlines built entirely around how far a human body can be pushed before it stops resembling one. It’s splatter humor crossed with body humor mixed with gross-out gags. Not all of it works but I loved that it was doing something new with each gag. Guinea Pig: Devil Woman Doctor won’t be for everyone but I had a blast with this one.
4. Angel Dust (1994)
Angel Dust feels like the greatest film Kiyoshi Kurosawa never made. It shares the same tone, visual language, and creeping sense of dread as Cure—that mix of beauty and rot, hopelessness and quiet menace—but it actually beat Kurosawa to the punch by three years. No one ever cites Gakuryū Ishii (formerly Sogo Ishii) as an influence on their work since he’s such a singular filmmaker (Burst City and Crazy Thunder Road are one-of-a-kind slices of punk rock insanity), but he clearly helped define the new look of Japanese thrillers that still persists today.
The film follows Setsuko Suma (Kaho Minami), a criminal psychologist investigating a series of seemingly random murders committed on crowded subway cars. Each killing is methodical, emotionless, and happens like clockwork — a nightmare synced to the rhythm of public transportation. But as Setsuko digs deeper, the investigation becomes less about catching a killer and more about dissecting her own fractured psyche, especially when an old lover, now a cult deprogrammer, re-enters her orbit. Angel Dust is a psychological horror film disguised as a police procedural, but it operates on dream logic — like if The Silence of the Lambs were directed by Satoshi Kon.
3. The Rare Blue Apes of Cannibal Isle (1975)
Based on the title of this film alone, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was an exploitation cheapie. This is not a cannibal film. This is not a mondo freakshow. This is, somehow, a regional, low-budget children’s fantasy-adventure-musical made by a lunatic. The film is about a young boy who runs away from home with his pet duck and ends up on an island inhabited by the titular blue apes—gentle, human-sized creatures who are less “Planet of the Apes” and more “local theater troupe with face paint and goodwill.” The “Cannibal Isle” part? A blatant rug pull. There are no guts, no roasting pits, no Deodato shenanigans. Instead, the apes are under threat from a group of rubbery, low-energy villains usually referred to as the Swampies, who look like they escaped from a rejected Sid and Marty Krofft pitch.
The Rare Blue Apes of Cannibal Isle is painfully amateur but weirdly charming. I saw a still of it (a pic of the titular blue apes) and was so immediately interested in whatever the fuck this was that I bought the Lost Picture Show box set from Vinegar Syndrome for 80 dollars because it was included. A month later, it popped up on Tubi. I regret nothing. This is the type of rarity I love. The kind I don’t recommend (because odds are, you will not like this movie)—but the kind I’ll never forget. I also know that I will spend the rest of my life explaining that no, the blue apes don’t eat anyone to the brave few I think are willing to roll the dice on this one.
2. Love Massacre (1981)
Love Massacre is what happens when the Hong Kong New Wave accidentally wanders into a slasher movie and never finds its way out. It begins as a melancholy drama, the kind of story that could’ve easily aired on late-night television—a woman caught in a quiet emotional tug-of-war between two men. One is kind and patient, the sort of man she could build a safe, quiet life with. The other is handsome but haunted, spiraling into grief over his sister’s suicide, a wound that festers beneath the film’s soft, romantic exterior. For over an hour, the movie seems content to stay in that register—a hazy, color-soaked love story about people quietly unraveling.
And then the bottom drops out.
Without warning, the film mutates. The tender melancholy of the first half fractures into a nightmare of obsession and violence, as if someone spliced a romantic melodrama with The Toolbox Murders. The shift is so abrupt and jarring it feels like the director just went through a painful breakup during the making of it and had some shit he needed to work through. The final act—when the title’s promise of “massacre” finally arrives—is pure, unrelenting carnage. The violence comes in waves, brutal and chaotic, more akin to Ted Bundy’s real-life sorority rampage than to the stylized set pieces of typical Hong Kong thrillers. Once the killing starts, it doesn’t let up until every trace of tenderness has been painted over in red.
Director Patrick Tam—who would go on to mentor Wong Kar-Wai—shoots Love Massacre like he’s directing a perfume commercial. His camera drifts through rooms like a ghost, lingering on faces too long, letting silence thicken until it becomes unbearable. His use of color is especially striking: every shade of red feels like a scream trapped in glass. You can see the seeds of Wong Kar-Wai’s visual poetry here—the obsession with texture, the longing embedded in every frame—but where Wong finds romance in loneliness, Tam finds despair. Love Massacre is a film that seduces you with beauty only to leave you bleeding by the end. What begins as a story of love and grief curdles into a portrait of madness so sudden and violent it feels like an emotional ambush.
1. Interface (2021)
I don’t rate movies on Letterboxd because I’m not a fan of the five-star system. I much prefer a ranking list order of S-F. I find five stars limiting. I think there are movies that transcend great or even perfect. The absolute cream of the crop that also changed the landscape of cinema or pop culture in some significant way. That’s an S-tier movie to me. That’s the highest grade I can give a film, but the highest compliment I can give to one is, “I have never seen any other film like this.” Interface isn’t an S-tier movie, but it’s a movie I recommend with more passion than an S-tier movie. This is a vibe check masterpiece. This is one of those hip pocket films you use to check if your friend is cool or not.
Interface is one of those films where the description “hard to explain” is beyond an understatement. Let’s start with the animation, because that’s the hook. The film looks like it was animated inside a malfunctioning brain. Sometimes it looks like MS Paint. Sometimes it looks weirdly painterly and elegant. Sometimes it looks like a cursed Newgrounds animation that achieved enlightenment. It’s simultaneously hard to look at but also impossible to look away from. Now the plot, such as it exists. There’s a man named Henryk. And there’s a shapeshifting entity named Mischief that decides to take him on a journey. He’s a long, noodle-bodied, vaguely octopus-like entity with a grin that suggests both cosmic wisdom and the desire to ruin your afternoon.
Mischief is less a character than a force. Once it enters Henryk’s life, reality stops pretending it was ever solid in the first place. From there, Interface becomes a loose series of encounters: strange beings, abstract spaces, philosophical detours, and moments that feel like metaphors that haven’t decided what they’re metaphors for. Something about WWII. Something about secret government programs. It gets very confusing, very fast. Someone out there has probably made a 40-minute video on YouTube explaining the whole thing, but I like living in the confusion it puts me into. Interface feels less like a film and more like a transmission. Something beamed in from a place where narrative rules don’t matter as much as vibes, shapes, and uncomfortable questions about reality. You don’t leave it knowing what happened—but you leave it knowing you experienced something. And that’s why I consume art, to feel something.
Part I
Have you discovered any of these movies yet? Will you be checking them out now? Tell me down in the comments.
