I don’t really consider horror within sci-fi to be the same as what people generally consider horror. Alien and The Thing definitely have elements that you could argue make them horror, but they are firmly in the sci-fi camp for me. I don’t think that scary sci-fi is horror. It’s scary sci-fi.
I mean, it sounds like you like most but dislike puerile audacity. I can very much get behind that. And it’s ggnerally consider the Centipede movies aren’t good save for the mad scientists actor in the first movie swinging for the fences.
That’s Dieter Laser, an intensely strange actor whom one suspects was like that in real life as well. He was magnificent as the arch-villain Mantrid in the series Lexx.
I really hated how that one trope was done for the sake of it at the end of Leviathan. They just had to let token black guy Ernie Hudson die at the end, didn’t they?