Sometimes I am baffled to find myself a lone voice in a sea of shit.

Friends taken up with the mass-hypnosis of a new street-buzz about a film or TV show come to me and make me watch the damned thing, often resorting to the ocular constraints placed on Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange.

And I admit, I do sometimes have to be dragged to water before I drink. For instance, I avoided The Big Lebowski for a couple of years because it sounded like a lame and ersatz Chandler-noir; within one or two insistent showings by a friend I became a Lebowski evangelist.

Mostly I am a little less enthusiastic than they are. And then, sometimes, I am forced to question the very sanity of people I have respected for years.

A couple of examples:

Don’t Look Now (Nick Roeg, 1972) – My name is Martin, and I love Italy, horror films, Donald Sutherland and Nick Roeg. Why then is Nick Roeg’s most popular film such a dismal disappointment? It has the glory of Venice, fine acting and writing and a famous graphic sex scene now regarded as one of the most tender and non-exploitative ever filmed.

Trouble is, it’s a shaggy dog story: Sutherland and Julie Christie retreat to northern Italy to recover from their daughter’s accidental drowning, only to find themselves shadowed by a red-coated child who may or may not be their lost child. Investigating the pint-sized pursuer, it turns out to be an ugly dwarf that kills Sutherland with a knife. Credits.

Was this Roeg’s attempt to pull a 2001-style mindwarp on horror audiences, Kubrick-style? The key to creating that kind of intrigue is to litter the ground with clues and never wrap up the case, not to just insert a discontiguous dwarf with a cutlery fixation. There’s a sharp contrast between intrigue and bafflement.

E.T. (1982) – Another film I ought to love, since I love science-fiction, Carlo Rambaldi animatronics, spaceships aliens, the scores of John Williams, etc. To boot I am so sentimental about movies that I rigorously avoid classic Disney because I know from experience that I’ll blub and break the four cubic millimetres of cool I ever possessed.

However, Spielberg’s box-office behemoth left me totally cold. Yes, I did shed a tear, but in much the same way they do in Guantanamo Bay after the nutcrackers come out. I prefer to have my finer emotions coaxed out of me through good storytelling and narrative craft, rather than the swollen, overwhelming barrage of John Williams’s string-section, in one of his loudest but weakest scores. E.T. was an experience akin to being coerced when I wasn’t charmed enough to want to put out, and I continue to rate it as one of the most cynical films of the 80s.

I arrived at these movies on a red carpet of hyperbole – not the kind of marketing hype that PR companies hope will become infectious when the film still has bills to pay, but rather that species of post-mortem cultural cachet which is supposed to carry society’s final – and favourable – judgement on an artistic work.

Expectation and hype have a great deal to do with how you perceive movies, which is an argument against wearing down your friends at length by insisting how great Werewolf Chainsaw Addicts 4 is. In such cases, one can hardly fail to be disappointed.

I’m in the same position myself, having lent Simon (the founder of this site) the excellent Interstate 60 (Bob Gale, 2001) a year ago. He still hasn’t watched it, and I still go on about it to him, so whatever merits the film might have had in his eyes must inevitably now be diluted by too long a period of expectation and hype on my part.

Simon, in turn, has foisted his beloved Top Secret (1985) on Leesa from Forbidden Planet. Was the fact that she wasn’t impressed due to it not being her type of film, or was it because he presented it to her as a work that makes Battleship Potemkin an unimportant footnote in movie history by comparison?

I lent her Office Space (1999) on Wednesday, with high hopes. But how can anyone not love Office Space?

You see? We just can’t stop. Epiphany loves company - we need passengers for these journeys, and converts too - we need to proselytise, even if we defeat our own intentions in doing so.

Reverse expectation often works the other way as well; DoG is littered with articles (many of them written by me) about under-regarded films beloved of the writer concerned.

And then, what about films you want to love so badly that you support them in the face not only of all the evidence, but your own convictions? I waited nearly twenty years for Judge Dredd (1995) – I know, deep down, that it’s not a good film, but it kind of looks like one, so I sit and defend it like a black-eyed trailer-trash wife humming Tammy Wynette on Jerry Springer.

Dating sites and match-making friends can be an effective route to love, but in our hearts we would prefer to stumble across love through serendipity. So it is with the films that we love. There are few rarer pleasures available to the cinephile than stumbling across a forsaken gem in the shank of the night, a disregarded failure that repels either by reputation or by dint of its sheer obscurity; but which unexpectedly beguiles.

One such film for me was the little-known or regarded Paradise Alley (1978). Like Dredd, it features Stallone and Armand Assante, but in my heart I know it’s a better movie, telling a tale of down-at-heel brothers trying to have fun and get by in the Great Depression in New York. One key scene features a brawling bar where knucklehead punks too stupid or desperate to know better can take on the house Goliath in the hope of glory and cash. When, inevitably, the contenders are wrapped around their own collarbones by the big lunk, the bartender throws a switch and a huge neon sign flaps down from the roof of the bar, and it reads: ‘Another bum’.

Which image has remained with me since, particularly on the rare occasions that I do movie reviews, hoping, in the darkness of the cinema, that the sign won’t fall tonight and guide me to the exit.

Martin writes his (mostly) sci-fi column every Friday at Den Of Geek. Check out the complete list of his columns.