This week's eerie mo-cap rendering of the ghostly, dark Dickens morality tale 'A Christmas Carol' from director Robert Zemeckis is far from being the only yuletide movie where heartwarming ho-ho-hos are as likely as horrific moments. From Saint Nick battling Martians, Satan, takeover bids from misguided Halloween skeletons and alcoholism, to the holiest of holidays run amok with carolling, cackling little green monsters, suicidal family men, deranged slashers and WWF stars dispensing seasonal platitudes, we give you 10 grim stuffing stockers guaranteed to wish you a very scary Christmas. Pass the egg nog, the butcher knife and the animatronic reindeer...

John Hurt has been one of Britain's finest acting talents since his career began in the 60s, but it's his roles in films like Alien, Midnight Express and The Elephant Man -- to name a few -- which put him on the international map and for which he's best remembered. At the Dinard Festival of British Film last month to screen An Englishman in New York, a biopic of gay writer Quentin Crisp's time in the Big Apple, Hurt sat down with RT to talk about the film and his wider career, including Alien, Indiana Jones and his upcoming turn in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Did the Mayans really predict, all those centuries ago, that Earth would be visited by planetary apocalypse three years from now? It's open to interpretation -- Roland Emmerich has a gargantuan disaster movie to sell and even he admits the whole 2012 theory is just, "a nice hook for the audience." John Cusack, Thandie Newton, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Woody Harrelson and Danny Glover are a few of the stars swept up in Emmerich's latest cataclysmic shocker. Rotten Tomatoes meets the cast and director in Cancun, Mexico - close to the once-throbbing heart of Mayan civilisation -- for a 2012 fact-finding mission.

He's known as Captain Chaos and his productions are notoriously problematic. Brazil (1985) almost never saw the light of day when battles raged over final cut. On The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), Gilliam was almost fired when the budget spiraled out of control. He thought his career was over when The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2000) collapsed six days into shooting after flash floods and the lead actor's herniated disc brought everything to a standstill. But nothing compares to his latest film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, on which his friend and lead actor Heath Ledger was found dead half way through production in January 2008. Here Gilliam talks about fate, losing his friend and why filmmaking is so unreasonable.

24 star Carlos Bernard is one of the show's few fixtures. With all the double-crossings, cliff-hangers and back-stabbings, it's a wonder anyone has survived from the first season, but his character Tony Almeida was an integral part of the season just aired, the seventh in the show's run. All indications suggest that he'll be back in a big way for Day 8, set to kick off in January. The actor came to London this week to promote the DVD release of the show's seventh season - available on Blu-ray for the first time, and RT sat down with him to guage his five favourite films, talk about the show and do our best to learn all we could about Day 8. We failed spectacularly on the latter point, for he choose instead to invent an plot too implausible even by 24 standards, but read on for the rest...