Best Mystery Movies of 1987

After tinkering with a box he bought while abroad, sexual deviant Frank inadvertently opens a portal to hell, where fetish-demons led by Pinhead tear his body apart. When Frank’s brother and his wife move into his house, a skeletal Frank appears to his sister-in-law and asks her to supply him with corpses for his regeneration.

A psychiatrist comes to the aid of a compulsive gambler and is led by a smooth-talking grifter into the shadowy but compelling world of stings, scams, and con men.

Federal agent Alexandra Barnes believes that Catherine Petersen is a serial killer who marries rich men and then murders them for their money. But since Catherine is seemingly a master of disguise and has multiple identities, Alexandra can't prove anything with conventional detective work. With no other option, she goes undercover, pursuing the same man as Catherine, and hoping that Catherine will slip up and reveal her true identity.

When Shaggy inherits an old Southern estate from an uncle, he and his sleuthing hounds take a road trip. But they don't even make it to the mansion before the haunting starts. Amid headless horsemen, walking skeletons, and a menacing butler, Scooby, Scrappy, and Shaggy get majorly spooked.

After the death of her husband, a mother takes her kids off to live with their grandparents in a huge, decrepit old mansion. However, the kids are kept hidden in a room just below the attic, visited only by their mother who becomes less and less concerned about them and their failing health, and more concerned about herself and the inheritence she plans to win back from her dying father.

Mary Morstan has received a pearl in the post every year since her father's disappearance. This leads Holmes and Watson to the truth about a secret pact between four convicts during the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

Mourning the accidental death of his wife and having just moved to New York with his young son, laconic police psychologist Cal Jamison is reluctantly drawn into a series of grisly, ritualistic murders involving the immolation of two youths.

Miss Marple receives a most interesting request from Mr. Jason Rafiel, with whom she'd struck an acquaintance some years before. He would like her to solve a crime but, does not tell her what it might be, who might have been involved or where it might have occurred. In fact, he can't be sure that a crime was committed at all. The only information she gets is a booking on a tour of stately homes and gardens so, along with her nephew and godson Lionel, she sets off to see what she can learn. When they reach the village of Abbey Ducis, it begins to make sense. Not only did Mr. Rafiel live in the area it is also where his son Michael was accused, though never convicted, of murdering his fiancée, Verity Hunt. Father and son were long estranged but Michael lives rough and has so ever since. There is also the apparent coincidence that another young woman, Nora Brent, went missing at the same time as Verity and was last being seen in Michael Rafiel's car...

Baltimore, Maryland. Sylvia sees a girl being attacked from her lover Terry's bedroom window. The assailant flees and his victim is saved. But that same night another girl is found murdered.

They're two best friends, a million miles from home. On an incredible adventure, beyond the boundaries of space and time. A fantasy about a lonely boy who is transferred from his dull life with his adoptive parents to the land where his real father is the king.

A fledgling actress is lured to a remote mansion for a screen-test, soon discovering she is actually a prisoner in the middle of a blackmail plot.

Two college students on a survival weekend in the wilderness cross paths with three desperate killers in what turns into a fight for life.

A short experimental cutup film by Jon Moritsugu.

One night, an unusual stranger in need (Malcolm McDowell) asks a woman living alone in a house in the woods if he can use her phone. It soon becomes clear that they're playing a strange mind game and that there's something very wrong about the woods.

A killer of Detroit clergy confesses to a priest, who turns sleuth because he cannot tell the police.

Jordan White, a publisher friend of Perry, is called to a hotel where a guest, famous horror writer David Hall, has cleared out the hotel for a weekend and has called his "friends" - an actress, a fortune-teller, David's private assistant and the two remaining staff at the hotel to discuss business. They have come to the hotel as all of them are going to sue David over his new book - "The Resort" which characters are obviously based on Jordan and the guests. A practical joker, David plays tricks on them until he is thrown from the high tower of the hotel where Susan Warrenfield, the manager and owner of the hotel sees the fall and then Jordan at the tower causing the police to arrest Jordan. While Perry and Della try to solve the main mystery, Paul tries to find out who is trying to scare Susan away from the hotel. Could it really be a ghost or a more earthy visitor?

Perry must defend the husband of an old flame from a murder charge.

American Claire wakes up blood-soaked and bruised at the end of a runway in Spain. As she tries to account for her state, she has flashbacks from the past few days. She thinks she's killed someone, but isn't sure, and now she's wandering the Spanish streets without money or a clear memory.

Perry is sueing a gutter trash newspaper that is running a story about a love affair between him and Della. The editor also has "dirt" files on an Army General, his banker and other "clients". All of them make little-concealed verbal threats to him at a party but the person that hated him most is a female reporter who the editor had just fired from the paper for attempting to write a serious story. She threatens him and soon after the editor is found, floating in his pool, shot. The reporter is arrested for the crime and Perry, who has a personal stake in this matter, with the aid of Della and Paul set out to solve the mystery. But the other suspects just want the case over with and will go to any lengths to protect their pasts and their secrets

It is Stanley's birthday, but the party he is given is not quite what he expects.

After a psychopath murders a man who was on his way to a job as a deputy sheriff in a small California town, he assumes the deputy's identity and arrives in town to start his new 'job'. What he doesn't know is that the recently appointed sheriff and his mistress are plotting to murder her evil husband—and blame it on the new deputy.

Perry investigates the murder of a former madam and uncovers a multimillion dollar banking fraud in the process.

When framed for the murder of a sultry blonde, an underground cartoonist is drawn into a web of corruption, blackmail and deceit.

A congressional aide (Eric Stoltz) explores an old Louisiana mansion two kooky sisters (Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judith Ivey) run as a guest house.

Basements is the title for the omnibus film that brings together two plays by Harold Pinter - The Dumb Waiter and The Room - each, once again, set in a single location.

Writer, ex-con and 40-something bottle-baby Tim Madden, who is prone to black-outs, awakens from a two-week bender to discover a pool of blood in his car.

Caroline DuLac, a baroness and concert pianist, steals three jewel-encrusted Faberge eggs from a San Francisco museum. The eggs were demanded as ransom for her kidnapped fiancé. She boards a plane for the Latin American city of Ladera, as per instructions, and is met by Mike Chambers. Caroline first believes that Mike is one of the kidnappers, until a mysterious man in a trench-coat tries to kill her, and Mike comes to the rescue. They are then both captured by a band of Mexican bandits, who also may or may not be part of the scheme.

A second generation cameraman in Australia finds evidence that his father had filmed a nuclear test that allowed aboriginies to be exposed to and killed by radiation. He begins a search for a secret that if true, his government has already killed people to keep quiet.

Cassies Stuart leads the uncooperative Charles Dance into a world of misplaces government secrets, capalistic artists and bungling secret agents. Will the truth be out, or will the attempts of agents suppress the truth hidden within government propaganda films, classified as top secret by complete mistake, be successful. Or is it the mysterious medical records that are the true catch of the spies.

A private eye hired to kill a man's wife warns her instead and then finds both are impostors.

Mild-mannered mystery writer D. H. Mercer has become so immersed in his material that his creation, hard-boiled private eye Biff Deegan, constantly appears to him as a hallucination. Intent on getting rid of Biff, and replacing him with a more civilized detective, Mercer soon finds himself in a genuine mystery involving art fraud, murder, and a beautiful lady in peril.

After restaurateur Sam Wong dies in a telephone booth after making a call, law clerk Elaine Choi is tasked with executing his will. In order for the will to be valid, it needs to be signed by its recipients, but Choi finds that each of them are reluctant to do so.

When Father Joseph Hennessey visits the home of one of his parishioners to offer last rights,he becomes embroiled in a plot which ultimately shakes his faith to its very foundation. Intrigued by the dying man's mention of "Nim," and fascinated by the man's saintly demeanor, Father Joseph's curiosity is redoubled when a beautiful young woman enters his church to question the young priest about the deceased man. Father Joseph and the woman, whom he discovers to be the "Nim" in question, embark upon an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the man's death.

Steven and Laura Harding, along with their kids David and Mary, have moved to the quiet community of Stepford. Steven joins the men's club, which is still assimilating their wives into robots. This time, they have begun to turn their out of control teens into robots as well. Once they are assimilated, they are obedient, homework loving, big band dancing droids. Laura, David, and Mary stumble onto this mystery, and they must avoid Steven's plans to turn them into robots.

At night, baby-face Laura dresses up as a vamp and lets random guys at bars pick her up, just to drug and rob them later. But then someone starts stalking her, and a person close to her is killed.

Six girls are on their way to Las Vegas to sing in a TV competition, but when their car breaks down, their only choice is to walk to a town they see in the distance. Little do they know that this ghost town is the hideout of a gang of drug dealing bikers. The bikers hold the girls captive, and only one man can save them.

A psychologist takes a group of patients into the desert for unorthodox therapy only for them to be picked off by an unseen maniac.

Azaria Chamberlain was not killed by a dingo but saved and raised by said dingos. She is raised in an incestuous dingo environment and travels back to Sydney transformed as the second coming... a new messiah for a new age.

Frank Dowling has to solve the mystery of a young man who is obsessed with finding his natural parents.

Two high school students, one with terminal cancer the other with no direction in life, come to terms with themselves and each other.

In a parody of the TV show "Moonlighting," a pair of sleuths from the New Poon agency try to find out "who done it" in a case of infidelity.

The Haunting of Barney Palmer is a fantasy film for children about a young boy who is haunted by his great uncle. Young Barney fears that he has inherited the Scholar family curse; a suite of 80s-era effects ramp up the supernatural suspense. The film was a co-production between PBS (United States) and Wellington's Gibson Group, which resulted in Ned Beatty (Deliverance, Network) being cast. It was written by Margaret Mahy, based on her Carnegie Award-winning novel The Haunting, and an early fruitful collaboration between her and director Yvonne Mackay.

A cab driver gets mixed up with a fare he picks up who turns out to be a porno star, and she claims she has proof that the people she is working for are producing snuff films. Her claims seem to be validated when the cabbie notices suspicious looking people following them.

A powerfully tense remake of the Alfred Hitchcock classic, this British production of SUSPICION boasts a dynamic cast, making it a worthy descendent of the original.

A woman who hasn't seen her father in 18 years, learns of his death and goes to his estate in France to carry out his wishes. She then learns that her father was a thief who after getting caught and going to prison and upon his release was approached by an insurance company, who wanted him to use his talents in helping them recover some valuables that had been stolen, which became his new job. Now that he is gone, he wants her to continue his work.

Members of a family succumb to the hypnotic spell of the Shaman as he searches for the one to inherit his powers.Only Paul is able to resist these forces of evil.However his desperate struggles lead him to oppose his best friend,the appointed successor.

A man goes to speak with a gigolo and is promptly beaten for his trouble. Soon afterward, his wife is told that he burned to death in a car wreck and is shown the body...and that's when she starts seeing strange men at the corner of her vision, while her friend does all she can to convince her she's going insane!

A group of vagabonds happen to loot a man of ethics and on their way to their hideout take asylum (forcibly) in a house owned by a pregnant woman and her husband. They unintentionally kill the woman's husband and run away. After many years the killers have become big wheels of the society and are now into vulgar display of wealth characterized by frequent high-profile parties and events. However, little do they know that a hideously deformed monster is lurking around them and in the nearby woods seeking revenge for their sins. The killers start dying mysterious deaths at the hands of the monster. Who is this monster and will the remaining ones survive?

Refined actress Lauren Ames finally has a chance to study with the great theatre professor Stanislav Korzenowski. Sandy Brozinsky, a brash, loud actress, decides through happenstance to also study with Korzenowski. The two women end up dating the same man (who turns out to be a double agent) and follow him across the country to force him to choose between them.