Annal:2005 Saturn Award for Best Horror Film
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Saturn Award in the year 2005. For a ranked list of films, try an honor roll:
- Saturn Award for Best Horror Film
- Horror films
- Horror directors
- Speculative Fiction films
- Speculative Fiction directors.
- 2005 Saturn-Horror winner
- Score: 10.55
British horror/comedy Shaun of the Dead is a scream in all senses of the word. Brain-hungry zombies shamble through the streets of London, but all unambitious electronics salesman Shaun (Simon Pegg) cares about is his girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield), who just dumped him. With the help of his slacker roommate Ed (Nick Frost), Shaun fights his way across town to rescue Liz, but the petty concerns of life keep getting in the way: When they’re trying to use vinyl records to decapitate a pair of zombies, Shaun and Ed bicker about which bands deserve…
- 2005 Saturn-Horror nominee
- Score: 6.55
The final battle begins and the trinity comes to an end! Blade is back and his enemies have grown in number since they resurrected their king, Dracula. Together with a new group of vampire hunters, called the Nightstalkers, led by Whistler’s strong but beautiful daughter Abigail and the wise-cracking Hannibal, they must finally defeat the vampires or face inevitable extinction.
- 2005 Saturn-Horror nominee
- Score: 6.55
Are you ready to get down with the sickness? Movie logic dictates that you shouldn’t remake a classic, but Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead defies that logic and comes up a winner. You could argue that George A. Romero’s 1978 original was sacred ground for horror buffs, but it was a low-budget classic, and Snyder’s action-packed upgrade benefits from the same manic pacing that energized Romero’s continuing zombie saga. Romero’s indictment of mega-mall commercialism is lost (it’s arguably outmoded anyway), so Snyder and screenwriter James Gunn…
- 2005 Saturn-Horror nominee
- Score: 6.55
It’s not the scary hit that The Ring was in 2002, but The Grudge makes a similarly convincing case for American remakes of popular Japanese horror films. Barely a year passed between the release of Takashi Shimizu’s creepy ghost story Ju-On: The Grudge and the production of this American remake, set in Tokyo and starring Sarah Michelle Gellar in her first post-Buffy horror film. About the only significant difference between the two films is the importing of a mostly-American cast (including Bill Pullman, Clea DuVall and Grace…
- 2005 Saturn-Horror nominee
- Score: 6.55
Saw opens with a gruesome scenario: Two men are chained to the walls of a grimy bathroom with a bloody corpse lying on the floor between them. Tape recordings tell them that one of the men has to kill the other, or his wife and child will die. The corpse is holding a gun in one hand, but it’s out of reach…but whoever has locked these two up has thoughtfully provided a hacksaw that can’t cut through the heavy chain, but might cut through a little flesh and bone. From there, Saw jumps back and forth as the two men slowly unravel how they know each…
- 2005 Saturn-Horror nominee
- Score: 6.55
Shot on digital video with a pair of unknown actors (Blanchard Ryan and Daniel Travis) who tread water for most of the film’s brisk 79-minute running time, Open Water is a fact-based exercise in primal fear that will scare the socks off anyone who dreads death from the deep, but it’s familiar stuff if you’ve ever watched “Shark Week” on the Discovery Channel (which is mentioned in writer-director Chris Kentis’s economical screenplay). If you can’t accept that a trendy young couple could be accidentally abandoned during an open-sea diving excursion (but…
- 2005 Saturn-Horror nominee
- Score: 6.55
Like a roller coaster ready to fly off its rails, Van Helsing rockets to maximum velocity and never slows down. Having earned blockbuster clout with The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, writer-director Stephen Sommers once again plunders Universal’s monster vault and pulls out all the stops for this mammoth $148-million action-adventure-horror-comedy, which opens (sans credits) with a terrific black-and-white prologue that pays homage to the Universal horror classics that inspired it. The plot pits legendary vampire hunter Van Helsing…
