10 Best B-Movies Of The 1990s, Ranked
Noted examples include B-movies: low-budget films featuring genres such as horror, sci-fi, and action that are known for their campy quality and innovative concepts.
Smart directors such as Sam Raimi (the first Spider-Man movie) and Peter Jackson (all his films) turn B-movies into hit pop culture content with meager budgets and good creative talent.
Cube, Hardware, and Tremors are just three examples of the weird and diverse B-movie offerings in the 1990s, from horror to sci-fi.
The lowbrow B-movie is an endangered species in the modern world, and the 1990s was the last great decade for the genre. By ‘B-movie’, we mean any film with a derisory budget that squeezes entertainment out of cheap scares, action, monstrous gore, or sex appeal. Science fiction, horror, action, and martial arts movies are the breeding ground of these types of films that offer a cult niche audience with their unavoidable campy appeal. Though the 80s gave us some of the best B-movies, the 90s is a promising contender for some powerhouse movies.
B-movies such as these know how to exploit their easy pleasures without taking themselves too seriously, and know how to get tiny budgets to stretch all that much further than they have any right to. And of course, you need a talented young director (Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson) to really make minuscule production values go so much further than you’d think possible. Layer in some worthwhile (or woefully bad) acting, a clever gimmicky device or two, and a surprising pop culture resonance, and you can often get an end product that’s so much more than the sum of its underwhelming parts.
10 Cube
1997
A B-movie that, out of love for it, spawned a miniature series of sequels, Cube is a truly imaginative constraint film: a successful bottle movie that takes advantage of all its limitations. The film involves an assortment of strangers who are awakened inside a moving puzzle of cube-shaped rooms they can’t exit. They soon discover they share no memory of how they arrived there, and the facility is a deadly game of cat-and-mouse, forcing them to cooperate to survive its shifting traps, while they also keep an eye on one another so as not to be used as live human shields.
Cube is sailed along by its endlessly inventive premise, expanding slowly on the mystery of the purpose of the Cube with a satisfyingly stingy doling out of conclusions that the specificity of the sequels ruins. The gruesome flailing of humanity and other sentient beings against the changing rooms of the puzzlebox of torture chamber delivers a wide range of inventively graphic deaths as much as they are crushingly predictable. Cube doesn’t quite deliver on its concept the way some 90s B-movies did, but was popular enough to get a trio of films for good reason.
9 Hardware
1990
One of the few horror movies to feature a robot as the main villain, Hardware is terrifyingly atmospheric for a splatterfest, set in a plausible sci-fi setting. The plot takes place in some dystopian future where thin bands of humanity eke out a living in the hollowed-out halves of an advanced technology culture. A soldier gets his artist girlfriend an old robotic head as a gift to incorporate into a sculpture. When the head reactivates, it begins to build itself a body out of scraps, and chaos reigns in the couple’s small community of survivors.
Like Cube, Hardware usefully employs its busy, taut, claustrophobic setting, as a means to hint at a much bigger world than its screen is capable of showing – but Hardware does this better, and ultimately crafts a cybernetic killer that’s worth remembering, one whose savagery audiences will care about, for the most part, as a threat to its endearing cast. It feels more like a sleeper cult classic, as a result, than Cube’s growing, burning fuse.
8 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
1990
A big, family-friendly franchise isn’t generally what you’d associate B-movie with – but it’s hard to deny that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles isn’t one. From its low budget origins to its powerswilling, schlocky premise, the liveaction adaptation of the 80s comic-turned cartoon-turned cartoon-inspired franchise is a B-movie in all the ways that count. No wheel reinventing takes place here. The first 90s Turtles flick tells the origin story of the eponymous crime-fighting adolescent reptiles and their first fights with the evil ninja clan The Foot and their evil sensei, Shredder.
Though the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles went on to several further iterations, the radical echoes of their excessively cringe-worthy 90s models would go on to shape the largely kid-friendly franchise’s bizarrely enduring pop-cultural afterlife. The Turtles’ radical parlance, their street cred, their DIY, sweaty apartments and burlap sacks filled with hygienic waste, the 90s movie does its best work navigating the live-action adaptation of such a crazy conceit by way of gloriously devilish animatronic costumes. Corny as hell and totally cringeworthy in its own extremely dated way, the first of the 90s’ TMNT movies should be granted a certain level of kudos for how far out it managed to run with such an impossible assignment.
7 Tremors
1990
A B movie cheap enough in its conception to spawn five sequels, Tremors stands alone in creature feature history for prescience, bravado and panache. What happens when a tiny southwestern town is overrun by a burrowing horde of giant man-eating worms? (And we mean giant man-eating worms.) Only a local handyman armed with an uncanny knowledge of how to fight the burrowing horrors could save his quirky community, embodied here by Kevin Bacon as Val.
In its precise balancing act of horror and comedy, Tremors calls to mind the best of those 1950s creature features. Though its million-dollar budget and box-office stars put it at the higher end of the B-movie scale, the film is unashamedly grounded in the aesthetics and sensibilities of the genre. If Tremors errs on the side of scares and laughs, being sufficiently good at both but not amazing at either, the entire Tremors series is a testament to the fact that it wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for vocal fan demand.
6 El Mariachi
1992
If you didn’t know the director Robert Rodriguez’s movie history, you might assume Spy Kids and The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D were the sum of his cinephile bona fides, but one look at El Mariachi, a Spanish-language neo-Western in which high noon shootouts are as bloody as they are fun, might make you a believer. Shot with a largely amateur cast on a minuscule budget, the neophyte feature follows a troubled musician as he’s mistaken for a ruthless hired gun.
El Mariachi used its sun-bleached location to good effect in its beautiful, sweeping camerawork and adrenalin-filled firefights (which earned every nickel of its global box-office take), and the guitar case weapon is pure Rodriguez schtick. For a director as unapologetically campy as Rodriguez, miraculously, he squeezes every ounce of talent from his untested actors to paint a hugely entertaining Boy’s Own adventure of romance and double-crossing. Even when the budget and the inexperience of its director mean that El Mariachi’s final product is covered in thousands of tiny cracks, it’s hard not to end up liking it.
5 Ricki-Oh: The Story Of Ricky
1991
Probably the goriest martial arts movie ever made, Ricki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (1991) is a gloriously ludicrous B-movie that has to be seen to be believed. The plot – if we can call it that – concerns an impossibly super-strong former thug, Ricky, who is sent to a lethal super-jail for avenging his girlfriend’s murder, and who his struck down in a bloody series of assassination attempts by various factions in the prison, who he takes out one-by-one.
The horrendous deaths of Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky alone are enough to take it to the B-movie hall-of-fame, with realism discarded as Ricky rips, crushes and snaps his opponents in ever more creative ways. The simple joy of Ricky’s overpowered strength, which tears his entire prison apart before surviving the audacious threats thrown against, including a late, last ditch addition of a literal inhuman rage monster, is hard to resist. Sure, the English dub, the nonsensical plot and the sheer brutality of the film will occasionally jump out to remind you it’s a B-movie, unforgivably near the ‘so good it’s bad’ sphere, but, as a B-movie, it’s hard to top.
4 From Dusk Till Dawn
1996
While he did not direct it, the cards of the reprehensible pulp action auteur Quentin Tarantino are dealt so blatantly through From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) that he wrote and starred in it. The George Clooney vehicle seems at first like a routine ‘crime on the run’ through the American Southwest – two crooks on the lam, their screw-up getaway, a hapless family taken hostage – then 40 minutes in it suddenly flips to a vampire movie as the bunch are trapped in a vicious vampiric strip bar.
It’s still a gem of horror, action and comedy – a B-movie in spirit and realization right down to its core, from the adorably cheap vampire costumes to the outright hilarious weaponry on display (including a codpiece-mounted revolver), and the film is aware of everything it’s doing and invested in being as ghoulishly fun an action romp as possible. While From Dusk Till Dawn never quite reaches the heights of the following B-movies, it’s hindered somewhat by some of its more dubious sexual content, including one of the more egregious examples of Tarantino’s fetish for feet.
3 Night Of The Living Dead
1990
It’s no accident that zombies and B-movies go together like rotting hands in a grave. The 1990 version of Night of the Living Dead – a remake of the original zombie classic Night of the Living Dead (1968), produced and directed by George A Romero – is a case in point. It’s basically the same scenario: as a zombie epidemic takes over the American landscape, a ragtag group of seven survivors hole up in a remote farmhouse to wait out the slow and inexorable advance of the living dead.
Unlike other modern remakes, however, Night of the Living Dead stays remarkably faithful to the original, more a modernised update of the 1968 film with 90s special effects gloriousness – and with its characters more strongly drawn, fleshing out the relationships and themes only alluded to in the original. For all that Night of the Living Dead has come to mean as a zombie movie classic, it itself stands on the shoulders of giants – and doesn’t rely on its own ideas anywhere near enough to be one of the B-movie greats.
2 Army Of Darkness
1992
Custom image by Ryan Northrup
The film that follows the original Evil Dead, and is itself a direct sequel to Sam Raimi’s cult remake of the original, Evil Dead 2, Army of Darkness is a film that bolts Ash Williams and the Deadites into a whole new world. A direct sequel to the previous film, Army of Darkness starts with Ash being flung through a portal that spits him out in the middle of the middle ages. He now has to deal with time-displaced medieval folks as a time-displaced, modern day survivor. Things get worse. The Deadites are positively prolific in this age, and Ash has to launch a resistance against the ensuing Army of Darkness.
Beyond making Evil Dead creative in a way it hadn’t been before – taking the series into the far-out world, far beyond the cabin in the woods – Army of Darkness has the honour of widening the scope of what was and maybe still is possible in not just the franchise, but B-horror as a whole. Blended with just as much obviously fake blood and viscera as the first two films, Army of Darkness’ violence does get, at least a little, sillier. It becomes almost cartoonish in its violence, rising to very nearly Tom and Jerry levels of borderline slapstick that have never really been matched. Had it not been for a competing zombie movie that year, Army of Darkness could have pretty easily had the strongest claim to being the best B-movie of the 1990s.
1 Braindead
1992
Today, of course, Peter Jackson is synonymous with his astonishing work on the Lord of the Rings movies. Tolkien fans of a certain generation are often surprised to hear that he got his start by writing what might very well be the most viciously violent zombie movie ever made, a film that has come to rule the kingdom of 90s B-movies as king. Enter Braindead, marketed in North America as Dead Alive, the story of a young, lovesick boy’s fruitless attempts to protect his undead mother from the epidemic of the walking dead that has beset her after the bite of an unidentified creature.
Braindead is the gold standard of B-movie gore, rife with zombie maulings that are so cartoonishly unrealistic they’d seem comical if not for the grim joy of watching shitty people get eaten in a way that’s perpetually palpable. The humour and performances are both shockingly right on for a film where so much is taking place and yet there’s never a doubt that we’re watching what’s happening — Braindead wades through its buckets of blood like it’s second nature, making the carnage real in a way that seems impossible for anything this silly but somehow works. While Evil Dead II put Jackson on the map, it is Braindead that gets the last laugh — I don’t see any of the B-movies of the ’90s reaching the elevated heights of this wondrous picture.