As far as doomed family-vacation comedies went, I was forever torch as a young moviegoer between Chevy Chase in National Lampoon’s Vacation and John Candy in this 1985 flick, which tells pretty much the same plot (harried family man does his best to make sure his clan has a good time, with often disastrous results). If I lean more towards Candy here, it’s because he actually seemed like the benevolent guy he played, as opposed to Chevy, who had this sarcastic hipster thing going (sort of an I’m-too-cool-to- -play-a-nice-family-without-irony humor that is in itself quite funny). Anyhoo, the big guy plays a stressed-out air traffic controller who’s given some time off and decides to take the missus and the kids down to the beach. Of course, very little goes right. They move into the wrong condo (the right one at one point finds itself filled with beach bums), Dad falls asleep while sunbathing and wakes up red as a lobster, and then there’s the movie’s resident a-hole, a rich, obnoxious yachtsman played by Richard Crenna. It’s more of a “nice” comedy than a hilarious one (director Carl Reiner is usually quicker and raunchier), and formulaic as hell. On the plus side, there’s Rip Torn as a salty dog who runs a restaurant dressed like a pirate, kind of like the old captain from The Simpsons. Come to think of it, this often seems like a live-action episode of the show, with Candy particularly dandy as Homer Simpson.

1. Damian in The Omen (1976): Could it be… Satan?! Imagine a Very Special Jerry Springer Show episode called “My Son is the Antichrist but I Love Him Anyway,” and you get a fair idea of this (in)famous horror opus, directed by Richard Donner. Gregory Peck and Lee Remick play the not-so-proud parents of the little satanic spawn, who’s portrayed as a glowering, dark-haired tot whose mere presence radiates enough evil to affect the people around him. So other characters get hanged, impaled by spikes, or decapitated by runaway sheets of glass. The whole mess leads to Devil Jr. staring at us (or maybe at the sequels ahead) with not-quite-wholesome eyes. Hey, nobody said raising kids isn’t hell.

2. Esther in Orphan (2009): Well, this one should help bring down adoption rates. A couple (Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard) bring a nine-year-old Russian girl named Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) from the orphanage into their home, and some unusual things start to happen. Like nuns getting bludgeoned with hammers, or cars with deaf daughters in them careening out of control, treehouses bursting into flame… It gets to the point where Farmiga and her son are in the hospital while Sarsgaard tries to drown his depression at home with wine and the wicked orphan is in hoochie-mama, vamp dress, coming on to him. Since the movie was directed by the dude behind the House of Wax remake, at least some of the intention may have been comic. In any case, the skin crawls.

3. The kids in Battle Royale (2000): It’s bad news when your teacher is Takeshi Kitano. In this no-holds-barred futuristic satire, the Japanese government (having apparently decided that Lord of the Flies is a sound basis for the educational system) sets an entire class of ninth-graders loose on a deserted island and orders them to kill each other. No rules, just only-the-strong-survive ethics, leading what began as a field trip into a harrowing bloodfest. Director Kinji Fukasaku takes his daring concept into some pretty oh-no-he-didn’t-go-there-did-he areas, with juvenile combat bringing out the inner beast out of these students. And I thought my high-school was harsh! Keep an eye out for Chiaki Kuriyama, “Go Go” from Kill Bill: Vol. 1.

4. Linda Blair in The Exorcist (1973): What is it with kids and demons? Blair plays Reagan, the young girl whose body becomes a playground for a particularly vile spirit with a penchant for soup-spewing and colorful profanities. Okay, so it isn’t really the girl’s fault that she’s evil, but damn, she’s horrifying all the same, especially with director William Friedkin gleefully hurling every shock effect in the book into the viewer’s face. Blair was reportedly chosen out of a huge list of hopefuls. I wonder if the interview went along the lines of the one in Bruno. “So, does your child have any problem with projective vomit, foul words, masturbating with crucifixes or covering her body with sores?” “Well, as long as she gets famous…”

5. Macaulay Culkin in The Good Son (1993): Props to whoever saw Culkin in the Home Alone flicks and thought, “You know what, that boy isn’t cute, he’s scary” and decided to cast him as the smiling lil’ creep in this thriller. The tiny blond 12-year-old comes to stay with his uncle and aunt, but it’s not long before his cousin (Elijah Wood) starts to realize that his innocence is really just a mask worn by a budding psychopath. Animals are slaughtered (aren’t they always in these kinds of movies), traffic accidents are triggered, food is poisoned, F-bombs are dropped. Wood is by far the better actor of the two, but when it comes to just being a sinister, tow-headed runt, he just can’t compete with Culkin.

6. The kids in Village of the Damned (1960): If this one still plays incredibly twisted today, I wonder how it must have seemed to 1960 audiences. Everybody in a small, quiet English village suddenly falls unconscious one day; nine months later, every woman is giving birth at the same time to children who aren’t very innocent. In fact, the kids all sport the same platinum hair, glowing eyes, and knack for reading minds and forcing people they don’t much care for to kill themselves. George Sanders tries to figure out the reason: Alien visitors? Atomic residue? In any case, if you thought one terrifying child actor was bad, imagine having to deal with a whole classroom full of them. My heart goes out to teachers everywhere.

7. Patty McCormick in The Bad Seed (1956): Next to some of the hellions in this list, Rhoda the original problem child seems almost quaint by comparison. Quaint, that is, until she kills you for taking away her penmanship medal or for not appreciating her curtsies. This adaptation of the Broadway hit is not a very good movie; it’s stagy, high-pitched, and at times unintentionally amusing when it should have been scary. Still, the beaming, pigtailed terror carries a creepy edge, even if the movie changes the original ending to include both an act of divine punishment and a ridiculous end-of-credits spanking that must have had viewers even back in 1956 rolling their eyes at each other.

8. The baby in It’s Alive (1974): Larry Cohen is one of the most underrated mavericks of 1970s horror, always spiking his low-budget projects with bold, subversive ideas. In this cult hit, he envisions the next generation of kids as a failed experiment that’s born with an alien head, huge fangs, claws, and an insatiable hunger for blood. Daddy (John P. Ryan) goes after Junior with a loaded revolver and plenty of paternal issues. While Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby is the high-class monster-infant classic, Cohen’s project is cruder but just as powerful, ditching glossy production values and big stars for a straight-to-the-jugular force. Don’t miss the sequels, which get increasingly campy but never abandon the original’s familial subversion.

9. The brood in The Brood (1979): Director David Cronenberg said he was inspired by his divorce during the making of this oh-that’s-just-wrong grossout classic. Would you trust a psychiatrist played by Oliver Reed? Unfortunately for them, the characters in the movie do and play into the not-so-good doctor’s experimental techniques about turning anger, frustration and assorted other bad vibes into bodily mutations. That’s bad news for sensitive but clueless Art Hindle, whose troubled wife (an unforgettable Samantha Eggar) has channeled her energies into a pack of deformed children who attack kindergarten teachers with hammers. If there’s a gorier demonstration of maternal love than Eggar’s “birth” scene, then I’d rather not see it.

10. Bill Mumy in the “It’s a Good Life” episode of The Twilight Zone (1961): Before becoming a regular in such TV shows as Disneyland and Lost in Space, Mumy played a kid who drives his family up the wall with his strange mental powers. Modern viewers probably know this Twilight Zone gem from the spoof The Simpsons did in one of their Halloween specials, but the original has an enduring creepiness that’s still worth tracking down.

The 10th Victim (Blue Underground): It’s impossible for me to dislike any movie that has the uber-hot Ursula Andress shooting bullets out of her bra at the hunter who’s chasing her around some futuristic city. Hmm, do you think Mike Myers watched this one before writing Austin Powers? The story follows Andress and Marcello Mastroianni (both with matching golden hair) as they stalk each other in a world where The Most Dangerous Game has become a way of life. It’s a lot of fun, very satirical and trippy and very Sixties in its views of the relationships between the sexes and between society and consumerism. The director, Elio Petri, is known for his more serious political thrillers (like Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion and The Working Class Goes to Heaven), so it’s no accident that you have plenty of food for thought to go along with your sexy, James Bond-type thrills.

Bad Lieutenant (Lions Gate): How low can a man go? Director Abel Ferrara and his leading man, Harvey Keitel, find out in this brilliant but very uncomfortable 1992 portrait of a New York police detective’s wallow in depravity and search for redemption. The nameless protagonist mauls suspects, snorts cocaine moments after dropping his daughters off at school, loses money on bets with criminals, molests a couple of young women, gets piss-drunk in orgies with other junkies… Anyway, he’s bad dude. But a chance for spiritual salvation comes when he starts investigating the rape of a nun, and all his Catholic guilt rises to the top (and then over the top) during a special cameo by Jesus Christ. NC-17 all the way, from gory crime scenes to lingering shooting-up sequences to the full-frontal view of the lieutenant’s, um, pistol. Keitel gives a depth-plumbing performance matched by Ferrara’s own fearless direction. An unforgettable experience, but you may want to have a hot bath ready for afterwards.

Fast & Furious (Universal): I’m still trying to figure out the appeal of the Fast and the Furious franchise. Can’t just be the fast automobiles, otherwise folks would just stay at home and watch NASCAR. Can it be the campy, quasi-post-modern trashiness of the whole thing, or maybe the muscular knowingness of star Vin Dielsel? Whatever the reason, they keep churning them out. Diesel returns, along with original cast members Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez and Jordana Brewster, for this fourth installment, which sends the gang back to Los Angeles for more bouts of car dueling, CGI stunts, and bad dialogue. The video-game was far livelier.

Repulsion (Criterion): In his first movie away from his native Poland, Roman Polanski creates one of the most disturbing films ever with this 1965 account of a young woman’s disintegrating sanity in London. Catherine Deneuve is remarkable as the protagonist, an almost autistic loner whose troubled mind starts to crumble when she’s left alone in an apartment. Polanski is a master at using cinematic techniques to explore claustrophobic states of mind, and he goes to town on Deneuve’s growing panic, using enormous cracks on the wall, skinned rabbits, putrid potatoes and hallucinatory corridors full of grabbing hands to visualize her increasing madness. Even after all these years, it’s quite a creepy-crawly tour de force.

Torso (Blue Underground): I love those bloody, sleazy ‘70s Italian thrillers (the “giallo”), but this one, directed by Sergio Martino, is too slow and with not enough gore for my taste. But do check out the hilarious theatrical trailer, in which the narrator keeps going on and on about the “psychosexual mind,” and tell me it wasn’t the model for those fake trailers in Grindhouse.

Tetro is great. Really addictive, great Russian music, good for the reflexes, and… Okay, fine, that’s Tetris. Couldn’t resist. But Tetro, Francis Ford Coppola’s new movie, is really good, too, and certainly a huge improvement over his last one, the incomprehensible Youth Without Youth (2007). The story, which deals with artistry and family, feels very close to the heart of the maker of The Godfather, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now. It’s lovingly shot in impressionistic black-and-white (with some choice interludes in color), and very passionate. There is, however, one ginormous stumbling block for me, and its name is Vincent Gallo. Yep, he plays Tetro the moody genius, the once-promising playwright who ditches his rich family to get away from the shadow of his monstrously domineering father (the much-missed Klaus Maria Brandauer) and takes root in Buenos Aires. His adoring younger brother (Alden Ehrenreich) drops by to visit him, stays with the reluctant Tetro (who wants nothing more to do with family and is happy living with the neighborhood’s other picaresque would-be artists) and his wife (Maribel Verdu). All well and good, but whenever the story is about to turn really poignant and emotionally gripping, there’s bug-eyed Gallo, glowering at the camera narcissistically like the prodigious auteur that he thinks he is. Brotherly warmth is not his force, to put it kindly. Still, even with Gallo taking up so much screen time and space, Tetro remains a modest gem, full of life and exploratory spirits. And somebody get me a copy of The Tales of Hoffman, pronto!

You gotta love (or hate) any decade in which a dwarf in a rubbery duck suit is put forth as the hero in a wannabe blockbuster. Where to begin with this legendary 1986 turkey? How about the pre-credits sequence, in which we meet our feathery, pint-sized hero, an ill-tempered humanoid duck who’s shanghaied from his home planet and sent to Earth? (I think I speak for a generation when I say naked duck boobies is one of those things that, once seen, cannot be unseen.) Howard isn’t happy to be stranded in our world, though he stays with rocker-chick Lea Thompson, so things can’t be that bad! I had a huge crush on Thompson when I saw this as a kid, but I must admit that the bliss of seeing her in her panties was substantially dented by the fact that she’s coming on to a duck alien. (In the too-much-information department, we get a peek into Howard’s wallet and find a condom. Oookaaay.) Then there’s young, gangling Tim Robbins as the wacky nerd-scientist who tries to figure out what brought Howard here (it’s painful to see Robbins taking Rick Moranis’ sloppy seconds, but hey, everybody has to start somewhere) and Jeffrey “The Ferris Bueller Principal” Jones as a government agent who gets possessed by an evil alien. Howard the Duck is the sort of disaster you watch in awe, gripped by curiosity about what new way the movie will go wrong next. Willard Huyck directed it, though I remember seeing executive producer George Lucas’s name plastered all over the posters. Maybe the studio thought that kids who swallowed Star Wars will swallow anything.

The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939): Everybody seems to love this classic fantasy, but can people imagine how utterly bizarre this might have seemed back then? I mean, a house crushes a witch and an army of dwarves shows up to celebrate, the Scarecrow gets at one point torn apart (hay everywhere, like severed limbs) and then set on fire, and the Wicked Witch of the West melts before your very eyes. That’s not even mentioning the flocks of flying monkeys, or the terrifying sight of Bert Lahr with stuffed cheeks and a bow on his mane (in close-up!). No wonder the little ones in the audience started believing that “there’s no place like home.” With World War II just on the horizon, you gotta start indoctrinating isolationism early!

Return to Oz (Walter Murch, 1985): Because, you know, the original wasn’t creepy enough. So who needs happy endings? Dorothy has returned to Kansas from Oz, and she’s deeply disturbed by what she saw there. So Auntie Em puts her in a mental hospital (!). She escapes and again goes somewhere over the rainbow, only this time her friends include a talking chicken, a Jack-o-lantern pumpkin-creature, and a metallic clock-man. Oh yeah, and the Wheelers are just about the freakiest things ever! Imagine The Neverending Story, The Dark Crystal and all those early ‘80s puppet creepfests rolled into one, and you have Return to Oz.

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (Mel Stuart, 1971): Not the recent Tim Burton remake, which, though it has Johnny Depp grinning while decked in Michael Jackson’s clothes, isn’t nearly as disturbing as the original. Children are invited into the titular Chocolate Factory only to be dumped into vats of bubbling brown liquid, blown into huge balloon, and tossed into an abyss. All while the Oompa-Loompas do their little dance. Just in case Gene Wilder’s slightly deranged look as Willy Wonka doesn’t clinch it, there’s the infamous “tunnel boat sequence” to remind you this fable is set in the ‘70s, baby! It takes some doing to add more creepiness to a story by Creep King Roald Dahl.

Dumbo (Ben Sharpsteen, 1941): It’s a tight race for which Disney movie is the most disturbing of them all. Bambi, with its sniffling animal-voices and maternal assassination? Pinocchio, with its helplessly growing noses and children-turning-into-donkeys visions? We’ll go with this classic, which combines all of the greatest traumas Uncle Walt ever unleashed upon an audience of kids. So imagine: You’re born with huge ears, everybody makes fun of you, your mother is taken away before your very eyes, your only friend is a circus mouse, you’re painted like a clown, and mocked by jive-talking crows. And then you get drunk, and the most alarming procession of psychedelic elephants parades before your eyes. You know, The Exorcist only wished it was half as horrifying.

The Polar Express (Robert Zemeckis, 2004): This Christmas chestnut was hailed by some as a new advance in movie magic, with its CGI-reshaping of human beings. It’s a revolution, all right; the only problem is that the glassy-eyed, store-front mannequins that director Robert Zemeckis uses to people his Yuletide yarn are scary as all get out. There’s something eerily jerky about the way they move and act, so that it doesn’t matter that it’s Tom Hanks pantomiming three or four characters, they all look like skeletons with a layer of congealed rubbery goo over their bones. A dream? More like a nightmare. Personally, I was more pleasurably disturbed by Zemeckis when he was sneaking in cartoon nudies in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Song of the South (Harve Foster, 1946): Racism is, sadly, not an alien feature to older cartoons. (Just check out the stereotyped “darkies” that fill many of the early Loony Tunes hits. Heck, Bugs Bunny himself used to wear blackface.) Since Disney liked pushing animation to the next level, it outdid them, too, with this half-cartoon, half-live-action ode to Uncle Tomisms which makes Gone With the Wind look boldly progressive by comparison. Blacks here are happy, lazy and nostalgic for the good ole times (of slavery?), practically overgrown children. And, as if that wasn’t enough, there’s Brer Rabbit being thrown into a pit of spiky plants. Who knew Disney had so much nightmare fuel in him?

The Witches (Nicolas Roeg, 1990): Roald Dahl territory again. This time, it’s courtesy of Nicolas Roeg, no stranger to freakiness (Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth). What he’s doing directing a children’s movie is anybody’s guess, though he does capture the Dahl flavor, meaning that this will keep kids up at night imagining being turned into rats. That’s right, children here are turned into rats by a coven of witches led by Anjelica Huston. The climax finds the boys turning the tables onto the hags, turning them into really disturbing, rodent-like animatronics, with Mr. Bean himself delivering the fatal blow (with a meat cleaver) into the screeching rat version of Huston.

The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (Roy Rowland, 1953): Man, the 1950s were weird. This wacky-ass fantasy sends Tommy Rettig into an alternate world that looks like Arabian Nights on crack, where he’s chased by thugs and forced to play a giant piano for his professor, Dr. T. (not to be confused with Mr. T., who’s a pussycat when compared to the bizarrely fey Hans Conried). There are rollerskating villains joined at the beard, Mom looks like dominatrix, dungeons are full of painted dancers who break into big, ornately choreographed gay numbers, and everything ends with a nuclear explosion. And three little words: “The Elevator Song.”

Coraline (Henry Selick, 2009): I still remember mothers dragging their kids out of this one, complaining about the “darkness.” Well, I dig this one, but I can’t play them: There’s some spooky, heady stuff here. First of all, the passageway young Coraline takes from one world into the next looks like a pulsating intestine. Second, you get to see grimacing ghostly faces trapped inside a mirror. And third, the way Other Mother turns into a hunchback-tarantula is downright terrifying. And let’s not even get into the sewed-on buttons and mouths, or the old, rotund neighbors and their risqué showgirl number.

Moonwalker (Jerry Kramer, 1988): Michael Jackson as a “nice” gangster who tries to save the children of the world from drugs sent by evil Joe Pesci. By dancing and turning into a car and a spaceship and… Sometimes words fail us. Just watch.

Watchmen (Warner Bros.): When the basis for a movie is as highly respected as Alan Moore’s acclaimed graphic novel, and there are legions of fans looking over your shoulder to make sure every detail is included, you almost want to congratulate a movie for just not cracking under the pressure. But there’s plenty to praise in this long, compressed but visually stimulating action epic. The characters are vividly sketched: there’s the godlike sadness of Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), the sexy sweetness of Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman), the ferociousness of Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley, in an exceptional performance). And the film has a vibrant and witty style that’s a big step up from director Zack Snyder’s last movie, the dreadful 300. It may not reach the heights of the graphic novel when it tries to explore the differences between human beings and superheroes, but it’s worth checking out just for the opening credits sequence, which puts Bob Dylan’s classic tune “The Times, They Are A-Changin’” to splendid use.

Coraline (Universal): I usually avoid kids’ movies, but I have a real fondness for kids’ movies that aren’t really for kids. The Wizard of Oz, The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, The Witches, Tim Burton’s entire filmography… the list goes on. This one, an adaptation of the Neil Gaiman book directed by Henry (The Nightmare Before Christmas) Selick, surely deserves to be added to that list. Told in old-school stop-motion, it follows the young heroine of the title (voiced by Dakota Fanning), a bored little girl who’s stuck in her new home with busy parents and nothing to do until she finds a secret passageway into an alternate world. Here, everything is phenomenally bright and fun, parents cater to your every need, and cats talk. There’s a catch, however, when her alternate-mom reveals her true, dark reasons for spoiling the visitor. Very Roald Dahl-ish, which means it’s disturbing in the best possible way. It might be too intense for little kids, but I’m all for them watching this instead of, say, Pokemon.

The Great Buck Howard (Magnolia): God bless John Malkovich. His intensity is so recognizable that by now he can no longer just disappear into a role (I’m always watching and thinking, “hey that’s John Malkovich”), but he’s such a fascinating presence that it doesn’t matter. Plus, he picks interesting movies, like this unfairly forgotten comedy-drama that deals fondly with magic and celebrity and popular taste. Naturally, he plays the Great Buck Howard, once a very famous mentalist whose star (if not his pompousness) has faded. Enter a brash young law-school dropout (Colin Hanks), who takes it upon himself to restore Howard to the limelight. It’s not deep as far as satires go, but it’s a sleeper that certainly deserves a second chance on DVD. The supporting cast includes Tom Hanks, Steve Zahn, and the yummy Emily Blunt.

2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (Criterion): Two lesser known 1966 movies from Jean-Luc Godard, arguably the greatest living director, are coming out this week from Criterion. I still have to check out Made in U.S.A. (which hasn’t been available in this country for more than forty years!), but this one is a multi-leveled masterpiece. Based on a report about the high number of middle-class prostitutes in Paris (who need money not for basic needs but for their bourgeois amenities), it charts the adventures of a housewife (Marina Vlady) who starts bringing in men into her apartment in the afternoon for some extra cash. I’ve seen it a few times, and I’m still finding new things about it. Don’t miss the ménage a trois involving airplane baggage carriers, and, of course, the legendary cup-of-expresso-as-universe shot.

Midnight Express (Sony): On Blu-Ray. Brad Davis gets caught and sent to a brutal Turkish prison, and director Alan Parker lingers promiscuously over every nasty detail. Not exactly a movie that makes the world a better place.