What do you get when you combine two lethal alien species, three ancient civilizations and references to genre touchstones from Cube (1998) to The X-Files? Nothing more than a reductive spook show in which a bunch of puny humans get chased around by scary monsters.

A satellite owned by the Weyland Corporation relays astonishing information back to company headquarters: An undiscovered pyramid lies buried 2000 feet beneath the Antarctic ice, an ur-pyramid of incalculable age that combines Aztec, Egyptian and Cambodian characteristics. Sensing an opportunity to ensure his place in history, ailing billionaire Charles Bishop Weyland (Henriksen, Aliens’ benevolent android) quickly assembles a team of experts to examine the structure under his direction. They include a chemical engineer (Bremner), an archeologist (Bova), Alexa "Lex" Woods (Lathan), who specializes in leading scientific teams over ice-covered terrain, and assorted drilling experts and Weyland flunkies.

Despite meticulous planning, the expedition is full of surprises, the first of which greets them at base camp, an abandoned whaling station whose inhabitants vanished mysteriously in 1904. Someone has drilled a shaft directly to the pyramid without leaving behind a trace of equipment or personnel. Puzzled but eager to get on with the historical sleuthing, Lex takes a team below ground and into the astonishing structure, where they discover friezes and statues depicting strange monsters, a sacrificial chamber filled with skeletons whose ribs appear to have been mysteriously shattered from the inside and a sarcophagus containing some mysterious objects.

Surprise number two is that the pyramid is actually a giant maze that reconfigures itself at regular intervals, a la Cube. The third is that they’re not alone, though the title should have tipped off viewers before the opening credits began to roll: The place is crawling with both phallic-headed aliens and trophy-hunting Predators, who, it ensues, bred the aliens so they could hone their hunting skills.

(2005)
Directed by: Andrew Douglas.
Written by: Scott Kosar, based upon the screenplay by Sandor Stern, the book by Jay Anson and in part upon material supplied by George and Kathleen Lutz.
With: Ryan Reynolds, Melissa George, Philip Baker Hall, Jesse James, Chloe Grace Moretz, Jimmy Bennett, Rachel Nichols, Jimmy Bennett, Isabel Conner, Brendan Donaldson, Annabel Armour, Rich Komenich, Danny McCarthy, David Gee, Nancy Lollar, Jose Taitano.

“Houses don't kill people,” says the overly optimistic George Lutz (Reynolds) as he and his new wife, Kathy (George), take the plunge and buy an irresistibly underpriced house in Amityville, Long Island. “People kill people." Yes, a family of six was slaughtered there a year earlier, but money beats mojo… except that the rambling Dutch colonial at 112 Ocean Avenue has major bad mojo: Within days, the Lutz family — George, the widowed Kathy and her three children, Billy (James), Chelsea (Moretz) and Michael (Bennett) — is seriously spooked.

Chelsea finds a new friend in a little girl ghost named Jodie (Conner) and after the new baby-sitter (Nichols) spills the beans about the DeFeo murders to Billy and Michael, she has an experience in Chelsea's closet that's so terrifying she has to be taken away in an ambulance. George, tormented by unrelenting chills, bloodshot eyes and nightmares of murder, starts chopping firewood in the yard with alarming ferocity, clearly one whack away from going Lizzie Borden on his family. Even the relentlessly upbeat Kathy begins glimpsing disturbing shadows out of the corner of her eye; she asks a local priest (Hall) for help, but when he attempts to exorcise whatever force resides within in the house he's attacked by a swarm of flies and ordered out by a supernatural voice (cue the old Eddie Murphy routine about white folks who don’t know when to get out of the house) .

The real George Lutz publicly denounced this slick scare machine as "drivel" and "pure sophistry," but even if his protests were tainted by neither by his involvement with a rival Amityville project nor the aspersions cast on the Lutzes' tale ever since Jay Anson's 1977 book was published, the issue isn’t veracity. It’s that the rehash produced by Michael Bay and written by Scott Kolar, who also collaborated on the 2004 Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, is such a bore. Teir reworking of the1979 shocker cherry-picks the horror canon, lifting and recycling bits from films as diverse as The Shining (1979), Thirt13n Ghosts (2001) and various incarnations of The Ring: In the original book and movie, Jodie was a demonic pig rather than a malevolent, whey-faced child ghost.

While the new Amityville’s seriousness and R-rated brutality are a welcome change from the self-referential snark Scream (1996) unleashed on American horror movies, first-time feature director Andrew Douglas, whose advertising background is evident in every frame, brings lashings of style but no sense of real horror to the recycled script.

German writer-director Christian Alvart's serial killer thriller is unabashedly derivative, owing a substantial debt to The Silence of the Lambs (1991). But it's also hugely self-confident, undeniably stylish and puts its own bloody twist on the venerable tale of a killer and a cop locked in an uneasily symbiotic battle of wills.

The Berlin police respond to a series of calls complaining of screams from a neighboring apartment and catch serial murderer Gabriel Engel (Hennicke) red-handed — literally red-handed — as he uses the blood of latest victim, strapped to a gurney leaking his life into a can, to paint a crucifixion scene. Engel (yes, his name really is German for "angel") readily admits to a series of rape-murders, but refuses to supply the details ambitious Chief Commissioner Seiler (Hoenig) desperately wants.

Meanwhile, small-town cop Michael Martens (Mohring), a deeply religious man who's spent the last 18 months doggedly investigating the brutal murder of a local girl, Lucia Flieder (Bongard), and alienated his neighbors and much of his family in the process, sets out for Berlin to speak with Engel. He suspects — perhaps "hopes" is the better word — that Lucia may not have been killed by a local, but is instead one of Engel's many unnamed victims.

The sly, manipulative Engel seems take a perverse shine to Martens, agreeing to talk to him while insisting that he had nothing to do with Lucia's death. Seiler encourages Martens to play along — perhaps he can extract the details Seiler couldn't. But Engel is one step ahead of them both: His goal, it turns out, is nothing less than the poisoning of the pious Martens' soul: He coerces Martens into confessing his darkest sexual fantasies, undermines the faith that protects Martens from the day-to-day horror of police work and, worst of all, plays on Martens' deepest fear: that his adolescent son, Christian (Diekamp), who was Lucia's friend and has acted increasingly suspiciously since her death, might be a natural-born killer.

Bloody, perverse and occasionally very nasty, Alvart's tricky thriller has all the hallmarks of a cooly calculated professional calling card, and landed him a job directing the Renee Zellweger/Bradley Cooper thriller Case 39. Shot in 2006, Case 39 was still unreleased when his Alvart's next movie, the scifi-horror picture Pandorum (2009), opened.

Veteran director Frank Henenlotter's first film in 16 years is a lewd, rude tale of sex and the city, and it's a blast. "I was born with seven clitorises," says New York photographer Jennifer (Danielson) in the first shot of the first scene, and you can only wonder, where do you go from there? How about mutant babies, lustmorde, models in vagina-face masks and a shy, sweet-faced lad (Sneed) with a monster in his pants? And there's more, much more, but I'm not going to spoil all the outrages — some you'll just have to see for yourself.

Henenlotter exploded onto the horror/exploitation scene with the blackly comic, exuberantly bloody Basket Case (1982), a walk on New York's sleaze side with separated Siamese twins Duane and Belial, respectively a baby-faced milquetoast and a grotesquely deformed mass of angry, vengeful flesh.

His follow up, the mind-bending Brain Damage (1988), was an equally audacious mix of sex, drugs, brain eating and freaky sex, all courtesy of a telepathic parasite called Elmer (voiced by veteran horror host John Zacherle). Someone needs to package them with Bad Biology, because taken together the three films are some kind of twisted, hilarious, deeply disturbing, weird sex-death trip.

All three have a sky-high WTF factor, the gold standard to which I held grindhouse movies when they were actual grindhouses to see them in. WTF to the nth power doesn't always mean good in any conventional sense of the term, but it means that at some point (several each, in the case of the Henenlotter trilogy) my jaw drops and all I can think is "What the f**k?!?"

In 1927, a team of archeologists finds a tomb dedicated to the pagan god Pan. Team leader Niegel (Paladino) lays claim to a pre-Biblical board game entombed inside, which he takes home with him to Beacon's Island, Maine — infuriating Nicholas (Tyson), who underwrote the expedition, and wants what's his. But Niegel responds that he's hidden the game where no one will ever find it, and then kills Nicholas and himself.

Eighty years later, nine feckless friends arrive for a weekend of fun on the island, whose only resident is eccentric caretaker Pete (Patrick). Make that eight friends — Anton (Golubovich) and his wife Erica (Elise Avellan); Anton’s best friend, Josh (Mennell), and his fiancee, Renee (Electra Avellan), Erica’s twin sister; Trent (Howard) and his girlfriend Kathy (Harris); Rob (Walton), who got his sweet corporate gig through Trent but subsequently hop-scotched over his friend; and buxom, blonde, b-movie starlet Veronique (Monroe), whose relentless flirting has sometimes sorely tried the patience of her female friends — and one odd man out Rick (Duval), whose drinking, drugging and relentlessly irresponsible carousing has alienated half his old friends and left him on thin ice with the rest.

Naturally, they find the ornate, wicked-weird looking game and decide to play — it must be just like Monopoly, they figure, only way cooler looking. Needless to say, the game quickly does what it does, unleashing repressed desires, exposing the fault lines beneath apparently solid relationships and ripping the scabs off unhealed wounds. The result is, well, pandemonium.

Credit where it's due to director Bologna — the son of veteran actors Joseph Bologna and Renee Taylor — and screenwriter Clark: The Pan game is a novel touch in an otherwise standard-issue slasher movie. And there's something almost subversive about the casting. Yes, the actors are better looking than the average group of nine friends in their twenties… at least, nine friends in their twenties who aren't in the movie business. But the fact that a third were clearly not born in the US (Golubvich is from Russia, the Avellans — best known as Grindhouse's babysitter twins — are from Venezuela) and that where they came from has absolutely no bearing on their characters is, in its own way, as striking as seeing Night of the Living Dead’s Duane Jones in a role that wasn't written for black man. It's a casual acknowledgment that Americans come in many varieties. That they're all equally vulnerable to the Great God Pan's malevolent influence is also a given, though true to the much-mocked cliche, one of the black guys dies first. On the other hand, there's more than one — that, too, could be construed as progress of a sort within genre conventions.

Hailed as a giant step forward in digital animation, this eerily beautiful and stunningly gory vampire tale is a tantalizing fragment of a larger story, bits of which have played out in mangas, video games and novels.

Tokyo, 1966: The enigmatic Saya (voice of Kudoh), whose cynical bitterness belies her youthful appearance, is on a mission dictated by destiny: To hunt down and kill "chiropteans," blood-drinking demons whose true form — when they're not masquerading as ordinary human beings — From Dusk Till Dawn's leathery vampires.

Saya reports to the mysterious David (Romersa), and both are part of some covert operation called the Eternal Life Project. Precisely what that project is and how Saya comes by her extraordinary strength are never clarified, though David lets it slip that she's one of the "originals," who- or whatever they may be (a teasing clue is dropped at the film's conclusion). Saya's current assignment involves Yokota Airforce Base, an American military installation in Vietnam-era Japan, which has been plagued by a series of mysterious deaths that David recognizes as the work of vampires. David suspects they've disguised themselves as American teenagers, so Saya must pose as a high-school student and infiltrate the base high school. Though Saya is the story's focus, it's told primarily from the point of view of the school's plump, religious staff nurse (Nakamura), whose complacent worldview is shattered by her brush with Saya and the fiends.

Imagine a cross between Blade and TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, set it on a U.S. Air Force base in Vietnam-era Japan, and add elaborate action sequences choreographed by martial arts master Corey Yuen. That should give you some idea what to expect from Blood: The Last Vampire, an English-language stew of international genre influences, based on the 2000 anime, directed by French filmmaker Chris Nahon and written by Chris Chow, who was born in mainland China, raised in Hong Kong and educated in America.

I can think of only one other movie that combines 1930s gangsters and horror-movie monsters, and that's Lemora: A Child's Tale of the Supernatural (1973), one of my all time favorite horror films. So imagine my surprise when Bonnie & Clyde vs. Dracula, turned up on the NYCHFF roster. The even bigger surprise is what a witty, beautifully photographed (kudos to DP Todd Norris) and just plain weird movie it is.

Until the last act, two separate stories unfold simultaneously. In 1933, legendary Depression-era outlaws Bonnie Parker (Shepis) and Clyde Barrow (Haaga) hole up in a stifling, middle-of-nowhere roadhouse/brothel to plot their next robbery. In the other, Dr. Loveless (Lowman), a diseased loon in an Elephant-Man burlap mask, terrorizes his oddball sister/assistant Annabel (Jennifer Friend) and conducts his latest, greatest experiment: Resurrecting Dracula (Russell Friend) in his basement. The stories merge when the robbery goes wrong and seductive, blood-simple Bonnie is dispatched to fetch the doctor who lives in that big old house down the way.

Bonnie & Clyde vs. Dracula (a title whose tongue-in-cheek shout out to such cult cheapies as Billy the Kid vs. Dracula may do it more harm than good) is a bona fide triumph of filmmaking ingenuity over monetary limitations. Shot on DV in St. Joseph, Missouri, it never looks cheap or rushed; the Bonnie and Clyde sequences evoke a gritty sense of rural America in the hardscrabble '30s, while the Loveless sequences are filled with deliberate anachronisms and old-dark-house tropes. One world is rooted in historical fact, the other belongs to the timeless realm of dark fantasy.

The performances are surprisingly strong — Shepis (whose resume leans heavily to disposable, ultra-low budget fare, starting with her debut in 1996's Tromeo and Juliet) plays Bonnie as a natural-born psychopath a la Gun Crazy and Jennifer Friend's portrayal of Annabel as a kind of holy innocent is surprisingly affecting. Friend's script is much tighter and more pulled together than those of any number of multimillion-dollar genre films I've seen over the last few years. Even the effects by Jeffrey Sisson and Ryan Oliphant are astonishingly accomplished.

So put aside your natural skepticism and keep an eye out for Bonnie & Clyde vs. Dracula: It's one of the small gems that keep longtime horror buffs like me sifting through the slag.

Richard Matheson's short story "Button, Button" is just the jumping off point for Richard Kelly's The Box, a convoluted moral thriller that gets off to a terrifically eerie start but collapses beneath the weight of its Big Ideas.

December 1976, Richmond, Virginia. The Lewises appear to be living the American dream: They're young and attractive; they have a lovely home and a bright, inquisitive teenaged son named Walter (Stone). Arthur (Marsden) works at NASA's Langley Research Center, where he helped design the cameras used in the Viking Mars missions, Norma (Diaz), teaches literature at the exclusive Libby Hill Academy. They're liked and admired by their family, neighbors and colleagues.

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Pin-up boys strip to their underwear and glower sexily in David DeCoteau's homoerotic horror film.

College freshmen Chris (Watkins) and Dan (Hammond) are assigned to room together, even though they're polar opposites: Chris is a hunky jock and Dan is a high-strung nerd. But once they get to know each other, they realize they have more in common than they initially thought; Chris, especially, is less confident and easy going than he appears, as well as less interested in the superficial perks of being a big man on campus. Dan and Chris are both attracted to fellow freshman Megan (Bruderman), but before any serious rivalry can develop Chris finds himself being pursued by AK, the hottest fraternity in town.

Led by the charismatic Devon (DeCoteau favorite Stryker), the AK frat boys are handsome, sharp-dressed and have the wildest parties ever. Naturally, they have a deep dark secret, namely that they're vampires, and they've recruited Chris because they need a human sacrifice, not a new pledge. Fortunately for Chris, Dan and Meagan aren't the kind of friends who'd let their pal fall prey to a cabal of bloodsuckers, even if he has been acting like a world-class jerk since he started hanging around with them.

Veteran exploitation director David DeCoteau ventured into new territory with this T&A horror picture with a twist — the flesh on parade belongs almost exclusively to the film's cast of handsome young men. Though DeCoteau's Rapid Hearts Pictures was ostensibly established to make horror movies for women, the appeal of this and other Rapid Heart productions is clearly geared to gay men. Stars Stryker and Watkins spend much of their time (barely) clad in skin-tight boxer briefs, pretending to be interested in some half-dressed woman when they're clearly into in each other. The homoeroticism is just subdued enough that you don't have to see it if you absolutely, positively don't want to, but you'd have to not want to really badly. Though the acting is nothing much to speak of, the film's production values are surprisingly high for a low-budget effort.

2008
Directed by: Bryce Olson.
Written by: Jackie Olson.
With: Jennifer Tilly, Judd Nelson, Jonathan Breck, Kira Verrastro, James Immekus, Jennifer Freeman, Andrew St. John, Diego J. Torres, Victoria Vande Vegte , Will Stiles and Lola Davidson.

Though optimistically described as a “horror comedy,” The Caretaker — a collaboration between the husband and wife team husband and wife team Bryce and Jackie Olson (he directed; she wrote and produced) — is just another bare-bones slasher movie.

In the inevitable teaser prologue, a spaced-out hiker looking for his connection stumbles into an apparently deserted house, located in the middle of an apparently abandoned grapefruit orchard. Within minutes, he’s dead at the hands of a shadowy figure armed with a fruit-picker pole.

Cut to three jerky guys working out and snickering about their plans to scare the bejesus out of some hot girls during that night’s Homecoming festivities, which happen to coincide with Halloween. The sort-of jock is Topher (St. John), Snail (Immekus, who was born in Crystal Lake — what are the odds?) is the one who’s supposed to smart and sensitive and the other one — the one with no distinguishing characteristics of which to speak except that he might be Latino — would be Ricky (Torres).

As Derrick the drug dealer (Stiles) — the guy that hiker was looking for — gets killed at the abandoned house with his slutty girlfriend (Davidson), the snickering boys are picked up by their limo driver (Breck) and collect snooty Sonya (Freeman), wide-eyed freshman Chloe (Vegte) and new-girl-in-town Ella (Verrastro), whose overprotective dad (Nelson) has warned her not to sneak away from the school dance for any hanky-panky. Busty teacher Miss Perry (Tilly) chimes in with her own warning that they’d better behave, all the while making thinly-veiled passes at Topher.

Naturally, they all sneak out at the first opportunity and have their driver take them to, yes, the supposedly abandoned house in the orchard. The boys intend to scare the pants off the girls by telling them the scary story of the caretaker, whose pathological jealous supposedly led him to imprison and murder his wife, and do God knows what to their baby. Scary! But not as scary as the real life loon who begins to stalk and kill them. Could it be the creepy limo driver? Crazy Miss Perry, whose life’s ambition is to become a tabloid celebrity by sleeping with an under-aged student? Or how about… well, there aren’t a whole lot of suspects crowding the horizon, and any longtime horror fan will figure out the Big Reveal long before it’s actually revealed.

The Bryces know their horror cliches but not what to do with them, other than the usual: Blandly attractive young cast systematically stalked and slaughtered by psycho; self-aware b-movie icon flaunting her trademark assets in a brief but memorable appearance; unrecognizable ‘80s star skulking through a dispiriting cameo as character who doesn’t even have a name; inventive but stupid weapon and MO… I mean, seriously, the killer scares his victims with a rolling grapefruit and kills them with a customized fruit picker? “Dumb” and “funny” aren’t the same thing.

In a word, The Caretaker is dull, which is no doubt why it took two years to make it to DVD. And life’s too short to sit through dull horror movies.

U.K. novelist Darren Shan's hugely popular, twelve-book series about an ordinary adolescent who discovers his extraordinary destiny at a macabre traveling show makes its first (and probably last) screen appearance in Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, a colossal bore of a teen fantasy movie.

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The kind of movie for which the term "Hard R" was coined, The Collector is a mean-spirited throwback to the nastiest, cruelest home-invasion movies of the '70s and '80s. And I mean that in the best possible way: If Bryan Bertino conceived The Strangers (2008) as a slick variation on gritty grindhouse flicks like Fight for Your Life, Death Weekend and The House on the Edge of the Park, Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton (they came into the Saw franchise with Saw IV and are still with it) actually set out to raise -- or should that be lower? -- the down-and-dirty bar. Suffice it to say that they succeeded admirably.

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Is it The Craft (1996) with hunky pretty boys? An anti-drug PSA in which high-school students struggle with the seductive allure of "using" (their powers, that is) vs. the price of addiction? A pilot for a supernatural teen soap opera that lost its way en route to the late, lamented WB network and wound up on movie screens? A live-action International Male catalog? Written by old exploitation hand J.S. Cardone and directed by Renny Harlin, this glossy, preposterous thriller is all these things and less.

Descended from the founding families of Ipswich, Massachusetts, whose 17th-century witch hunts rivaled Salem's, Caleb Danvers (Strait), Reid Garwin (Hemingway), Tyler Sims (soon-to-be Gossip Girl star Crawford) and Pogue Parry (Kitsch) seem to have it all: sky-high cheekbones, sculpted abs, fabulous wealth and the power to levitate, become invisible and blow past inconveniences such as locked doors and stalled engines with a blink of their spooky eyes. When they turn 18 — Caleb is first in line — they'll "ascend" into their mature powers, which are really, like, awesome.

The catch is that every time they use their gifts before the magic date, a little piece of them dies. Some of the chosen get hooked and pay the price — like Caleb's dad — while others keep the craving in line and employ magic only when it really counts. Reckless Reid appears to be on the road to trouble: He's always tapping his powers for petty reasons — eluding the cops ("Harry Potter can kiss my ass!" he gloats), cheating at pool and looking under girls' skirts — which is, frankly, exactly what the average teenage boy would do under the circumstances. But Reid is actually the least of the group's problems. Someone with magic mojo just like theirs is stirring up trouble, and the evidence points to transfer-student Chase Collins (Stan). But how did Chase get the power, and why is he being such a jerk, conjuring creepy apparitions and unleashing icky spider whammies?

Given that there was no need for a new Dawn of the Dead, first-time feature director Zack Snyder's "re-envisioning," from a screenplay by James Gunn, could be much worse. A buzzed-up gloss on the original, it's entertaining — if fundamentally shallow — and owes as much to 28 Days Later (2002) as it does to George Romero's 1978 cannibal-zombie classic.

ER nurse Ana (Polley) comes home from a 13-hour nursing shift to her home in a suburban Wisconsin development filled with neatly manicured lawns and friendly neighbors. She wakes up to a world turned upside-down: There's panic in the streets, fire in the sky and emergency services are too overwhelmed to respond. Ana narrowly escapes immediate danger, in the form of her newly zombified husband, only to find herself adrift in a world in which sprinting packs of reanimated corpses chase and drag down the hapless living like dogs on a hart.

Ana and four other survivors — street thug Andre (Phifer) and his hugely pregnant wife (Korobkina), police officer Kenneth (Rhames) and quietly pragmatic Michael (Weber) — take refuge in a shopping mall, where they form an uneasy alliance with security guards CJ (Kelly), Terry (Zegers) and Bart (Barry). As the situation outside degenerates and it becomes increasingly apparent that there's no help coming, the survivors jockey for control. They take in additional survivors, most so peripheral to the plot you never even learn their names, and Kenneth strikes up a poignant long-distance friendship with Andy (Bohne), who's camped out on a gun-shop roof a stone's throw from the mall.

Proper respect is paid the original Dawn: Cast member Gaylen Ross lends her name to a mall store, and Snyder gave cameos to Scott Reiniger, Ken Foree — who utters the immortal line, "When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth" — and Tom Savini (who also created the original's groundbreaking gory effects), who plays a variation on Night of the Living Dead's (1968) no-nonsense sheriff. True, Gunn's script strips away most of the original's dark humor, including its pervasive sly riff on the notion of consumption, and relationships take a backseat to action sequences. But Snyder directs action skillfully, the zombie hoards are as nasty as they ought to be and the ending is suitably downbeat. The issue of fast- vs. slow-moving zombies (sometimes cheekily referred to as "slombies") is a hot-button one among zombie-movie conoisseurs. Purists prefer the slow-burn horror of Romero's foot-draggers: Their geriatric shuffling makes them look manageable until the weight of their sheer, inexorable numbers sinks in. Sprinting zombies, an obscure footnote to the genre until 28 Days Later, may lack a certain grim gravity, but come with a bracing sense of urgency. Not surprisingly, Snyder opts for the latter — their galloping hunger is in sync with post millennial sensibilities.

Once upon a time, this story of sexy vampires terrorizing night-crawling Los Angelenos might have seemed decadent, if you were a 12-year-old boy sneaking a peak at late-night cable while your parents were safely asleep. Say, back in the early ‘80s, when producer-director-cheap-movie mogul Charles Band and his late, kinda-sorta lamented Empire Pictures were rocking the exploitation world. Some 25 years later, a little blood-spattered T&A just doesn’t cut it, and Decadent Evil just looks lame.

The minimal story, padded interminably to fill out a 70-minute running time, concerns a vampire bitch named Morella (Mayer) who wants to head up her own undead clan but must first drink the “primal blood” (too complicated and not worth explaining) of 10,000 victims. Originally from Europe, she now lives in an LA McMansion with proteges Sugar and Spyce (Michelle, Hennessee), who work at a strip club. Spyce (the bad one; you can tell because she has black hair) sometimes picks up victims at work, like the sleaze (Toussaint) who first bullies his reluctant girlfriend (Gilbert) into getting a lap dance and then leaps at Spyce’ invitation to join her for a threesome at home. Needless to say, the sexcapade doesn’t go the way he imagined. Sugar just wants to make sweet love with her none-too-bright boyfriend, Dex (Lennox), who has no idea his sweetie is a vampire. But they have to sneak around, ostensibly because she lives with her high-strung “sister;” the truth is that the Morella has forbidden her girls to date the living, for reasons the halfway astute viewer will have figured out long before the surprise revelation.

Could it have something to do with Marvin, the “homunculus” — some kind of a shrunken lizardy thing — Morella keeps in a birdcage? And where does pint-sized Van Helsing wannabe Ivan Burroughs (Fondacaro), who talks like a film-noir tough guy and has been hunting Morella for years, fit in? How will it all end? Or more to the point, when?

Decadent Evil brings together two of Bands’s favorite things, scantily clad girls and little monsters — remember, this is the guy whose extensive credits include movies about killer dolls and puppets, Gremlins knock-offs (Ghoulies), demonic toys, tiny dinosaurs, an itty-bitty alien cop (Dollman/em>) and even a gingerbread cookie possessed by a serial killer (The Gingerdead Man). “Charlie loves miniature things” Stuart Gordon (who made Dolls for Band) once observed with admirable understatement. And yet Decadent Evil is still really dull. The sexy vampire hijinks are vapid, the so-called humor is juvenile and there’s a whole lot of pointless dialogue dribbling from the mouths of actors who, with the exception of Fondacaro (who has a certain flair), can’t act at all.

Hidden behind a generic and instantly forgettable title lies a tight, genuinely scary made-for-TV thriller about a family haunted by the the death of a child.

Still grieving the recent loss of their eldest daughter, Jennifer (Cumming), Laura (Valerie Harper) and her husband, aerospace engineer Phillip (Weaver), have moved their surviving children, high-strung, 12-year-old Mary (Ignico) and nine-year-old prankster Kevin (Robins, of Poltergeist), from Los Angeles to Northern California in hopes of starting afresh. Phillip's new job and the change of venue hold out the promise that the unhappy past is behind them, though superstitious types might be given pause by the new house's number: 13666. And of course, Laura's cantankerous mother, Bernice (Gordon), no longer able to live on her own, is moving in with them.

Sure enough, it soon becomes apparent that the past hasn't stayed behind. Mary has a recurrance of the night terrors that tormented her after Jennifer's death and her bed mysteriously catches fire their first night in the new house. The culprit seems to be a frayed lamp cord, but Mary's insistence that she saw Jennifer under the bed sets everyone's nerves on edge.

Between the fire and Mary's increasingly disturbing behavior, the tensions that underlie the family's loving facade soon force their way to the surface. The kids squabble, Bernice taunts Phillip about his drinking and inability to earn a decent living and Laura feels caught between her mother and her husband. Phillip scotches Laura's suggestion that Mary needs therapy for fear that so much as a hint of mental illness in the family will sour his chances of succeeding in his new job, and no-one will talk about Jennifer or the way she died. Then Bernice suffers a fatal heart attack precipitated by the shock of finding Kevin's pet iguana, Ed, in her bedroom; Kevin swears both that he didn't let the lizard out and that Ed couldn't have escaped on his own.

Laura gradually becomes convinced that Mary, traumatized by her sister's death, is behind the grotesque accidents befalling her family. But could Laura be grasping at a rational, if unlikely, profoundly explanation — one that brands her only living daughter a sociopath — because she refuses to believe that Jennifer's unquiet spirit has returned to redress a terrible wrong?

Despite the inherent limitations of broadcast television movies, Ned Wynn's (son of veteran actor Keenan Wynn and older brother of screenwriter Tracy Keenan Wynn) original is unusually subtle and succeeds where many higher profile movies fail: Until Don't Go to Sleep's haunting final shot, enther the families troubles are psychological or supernatural until the film's final, unforgettable shot.

Sam Raimi's return to the flat-out, no holds-barred genre hijinks of his youth is a mixed blessing, at least to those of us who came of age in the shadow of The Evil Dead. Not that any of us begrudged Raimi his mainstream mega-success with the Spider-Man pictures or denied that A Simple Plan (1998) was one mother-trucker of a psychological thriller. But many of us secretly yearned for the uncomplicated thrills and chills of deadites and boomsticks. We felt cheap, but we just did. Drag Me To Hell is an all-screaming, all-damnation, all-time romp through the fires of Hell in which ambitious young loan officer Christine Brown (Lohman) back-burners her better impulses in hopes of a promotion, and in so doing mortally offends a proud but indigent gypsy hag whose hell-juice is no match for the sheer, unrelenting evil of the financial services industry.

Unlike David DeCoteau’s cheerfully voyeuristic erotic horror movies, which are all about cute, hunky werewolf/warlock/vampire-boys boys vogueing in their underpants, Patrick McGuinn and Andre Salas’ Eulogy for a Vampire is dead serious. Unfortunately, the more serious it tries to be, the camper it becomes.

Twenty-five years ago, Anthony (Hand) murdered the handsome fellow novitiate who broke off their fledgling affair in favor of more spiritual love, and hid his body in a trunk in the basement of the abbey where both hoped to spend their lives.

Now Abbott Anthony heads the cloistered order whose monks live simple lives devoted to prayers, chores, hot sex and more scheming, gossip and backbiting bitchery than any three snooty sororities combined. Gutted animal carcasses that have begun appearing on the abbey grounds, but the Abbott dismisses them as the work of naughty local schoolboys. Other members of the community aren’t so sure; Father Lars (the unfortunately named McWeeney) seems especially worried that something wicked is coming their way.

Could the wickedness be Sebastian (Tursi), a handsome drifter the monks take in after they discover him asleep on the grounds? The grateful Sebastian, who claims to have no memory of who he is or where he came from, attempts to repay their kindness by adopting the brothers’ simple way of life. But his hot body and air of mystery incite lust in every heart… except that of Abbot Arthur, who’s troubled by the nagging feeling that he’s met this young stranger before.

When various brothers begin looking peaked and acting strangely, Father Lars worries that there’s “some kind of flu going around,” but no one who’s ever seen a horror movie will take long to figure out that an is the vampire reincarnation of the Abbott's Arthur’s murdered love, or that he’s out to bring down the house of pious hypocrites, one broken vow at a time. So the movie lives on dies on how hot you find the various erotic sequences, which range from bucolic skinny dipping and frantic underwear sniffing to orgasmic flogging and fairly graphic soft-core grappling. But with hardcore porn available at the click of a mouse, it’s hard to imagine a substantial audience for such modest thrills, especially when you have to sit through long “dramatic” sequences to get to them.

None of the attractive hardbodies who dominate the cast can make a line like “I didn’t know monks had boyfriends or smoked” sound anything but petulantly hilarious, least of all doe-eyed Ruiz, who plays honest and open-hearted novitiate Rafael. But then again, who could?

1981
Directed by: Ken Wiederhorn.
Written by:Eric L. Bloom and Ron Kurz.
With: Lauren Tewes, Jennifer Jason Leigh, John DiSanti, Peter DuPre, Gwen Lewis, Kitty Lunn and Timothy Hawkins.

In her first feature film, the teenaged Jennifer Jason Leigh plays a blind, mute and deaf girl who becomes the target of a sex murderer. <.p>

Perky Miami anchorwoman Jane Harris (Tewes, of TV’s The Love Boat) is being pressured by her lawyer boyfriend, David (DuPre), to take their relationship to the next level. But she’s reluctant to move in with him because of her responsibility to her younger sister, Tracy (Leigh), who has been unable to hear, see or speak since she was kidnapped and abused by a pedophile. Tracy’s ordeal also explains why Jane is so emotionally invested in the hunt for a rapist/murderer who has strangled several local women after terrorizing them with obscene phone calls.

Jane becomes convinced that the culprit is her neighbor, Stanley Herbert (DeSanti): She saw him disposing of mysteriously stained clothing in the building’s parking garage, and his tires were clotted with wet dirt the night a couple was killed in a muddy area. But there’s no evidence to tie him to the crimes… at least, nothing that would hold up in court. So Jane begins to play a dangerous cat-and-mouse game with Herbert, hoping to draw him out into the open.

Simultaneously utterly preposterous and thoroughly sleazy, Eyes of a Stranger is situated firmly within the tradition of rape-revenge movies, which range from exploitation pictures like I Spit on Your Grave (1978) and Ms. 45 (1981) to foreign art shockers (1994’s Bandit Queen, 2000’s Baise Moi) and the 2002 Irreversible) to Hollywood’s big-budget Lipstick (1976). Stranger is efficiently directed by Ken Wiederhorn, but the lightweight Tewes is notably unconvincing as a reporter, even by regional TV standards, and the fact that the killer’s identity is revealed early on strips the story of any real suspense.

That said, the 19-year-old Leigh’s performance as traumatized yet resolutely functional Tracy is hypnotic; with only a handful of TV roles to her credit, she’s already mastered the art of immersing herself so completely in her role that she doesn’t even seem to be acting. Leigh alone makes Eyes of a Stranger worth a look, and in an ideal world the background glimpses of Wiederhorn’s aquatic Nazi-zombie picture, Shock Waves, would entice viewers to check it out: It’s a low-budget tunner.

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It's official: The Friday the 13th franchise has so worn out its welcome with me that I'm tempted to call this go-round "Friday the umpteenth" and be done with it. Director by Marcus Nispel, who made his name (such as it is) with the inexplicably successful Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) remake, and penned by the team responsible for Freddy vs. Jason (2003), it's gory, painfully predictable and dull beyond words.

Less a reboot than an alternate Friday the 13th Part II, it supposes that Jason raised himself in the woods after seeing his bughouse crazy mom decapitated by a spunky final girl almost 30 years ago. Of course, that Jason was a mentally challenged child who drowned in 1958 while neglectful camp counselors were making out in the boathouse, and his reconstitution was just a tortured way of getting around the fact that the original film wrote itself into a corner by making the killer Mrs. Voorhees, a woman haunted to madness by her little boy's death more than 20 years earlier. But canonical consistency has never been the strong suit of the Friday films and, frankly, nobody really cares. So anyway, five good-natured dopers lured by stories of a righteous pot farm, including one Whitney Miller (Righetti), make the mistake of camping in the vicinity of New Jersey's long-closed Camp Crystal Lake. Those local legends about shadowy killer Jason Voorhees are just bull, right?

Six weeks later, they're gone, baby, gone and another batch of hotties arrives for a lost weekend at the faux-rustic resort belonging to the family of poor-little-rich-schuck Trent (Van Winkle). The too-dumb-to-live victims… sorry, guests, include drunken slut Bree (Guill), comic-relief Asian guy Chewie (Yoo) and Trent's kinda, sorta girlfriend, level-headed Jenna (Panabaker, of TV's Shark), the only one with ambitions beyond getting laid and/or stoned. Which is, of course, why she winds up allying herself with world-class buzzkill Clay Miller (Padelecki, of TV's Supernatural), who's looking for his missing sister. While Jenna and Clay poke around, her feckless pals stay behind having sex, smoking dope and generally doing the dumbest possible things under the circumstances.

True disclosure: With the exception of the first, which had relative novelty on its side, the Friday films have always bored me in exactly the same way first-person shooter games do: Once the parameters are established, there are only a finite number of ways the story can go. Attention to detail is the only thing that distinguishes one from the other, and since Friday the 13th is shot in the house style of producer Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes division — dark, muddy and on a color spectrum that ranges from greenish grey to graying green — whatever visual details there might be are swallowed up by the pervasive murk. That leaves the story to stand on its own merits, and it doesn't: Coming up with a minor variation on Jason's adoption of the iconic hockey mask really doesn't justify sitting through an hour and a half of pro-forma running, screaming and slashing.

A streak of genius runs through Crank auteurs Mark Nevaldine and Brian Taylor's dystopian vision of a world in which virtual reality games are played with real people: In Gamer, the titular characters pull the strings of flesh-and-blood avatars who do their bidding, no matter how dangerous or perverse. In the end the Taylor and Nevaldine opt for the obvious, but let's give credit where credit is due: These lads touch a while lot of nerves before they retreat into generic cliches.

Fan favorite Kable (Gerard Butler) has made it through 27 rounds and is allowing himself to hope he just might be able to rescue his lovely wife (Amber Valletta) from the degradation of Society and reclaim their daughter, who's been adopted by decent people; But can Kable and his puppeteer, callow, filthy rich teen Simon Silverton (Logan Lerman, of TV's Jack & Bobby) really ace those three final rounds? Um, no... not unless they cheat, because everybody knows the deck is stacked, the dice are loaded and there's no winning unless you rewrite the rules.

Yes, Gamer lays on the bloody action from the get-go; and no, it's neither subtle nor refined. But it seethes with an unexpected contempt for the VR culture that encourages cosseted, asocial geeks to live vicariously through elaborate role-playing games and allows them to pretend that Facebook friends are real friends. Taylor and Neveldine are young enough to have grown up grooving on cyber-tarts eager to bare their boobies for fun/profit but old enough to feel a tiny bit soiled by the exchange. In short, Gamer seethes with self-loathing.

As to baroque flourishes like the musical number set to Cole Porter's "I've Got You Under My Skin," well, if the past is a foreign country, then so is the future. A pretty stunning one, to be honest.

This review first appeared in a slightly different form on AMCtv's SciFi Scanner site.

Less a remake than a wholesale re-imagining of the original Halloween II, directed by Rick Rosenthal and written by John Carpenter and Debra Hill, Rob Zombie's sequel to his reboot is driven by the kind of questions that plague every doom-haunted horror buff. It may be fun to groove on the kick-ass pluck of uber-final girls like Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie Strode, but when you really think about it, it's hard to imagine Laurie — or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre's Sally Hardesty or Scream's Sidney Barrows — ever forging a normal life from the bloody shreds left after her ordeal with a psychopath.

The body-count movie isn't dead, and your reaction to that news is the surest barometer of how much you'll enjoy Adam Green's stripped down, gore-spattered homage to "old school American horror."

College buddies Ben (Moore) and Marcus (Richmond) are in New Orleans for Mardi Gras, but while Marcus is all about drinking and hooking up, Ben is pining for the girlfriend who just dumped him for a jock. So he persuades Marcus to join him for a nighttime swamp tour that promises beaucoup thrills and chills.

Their fellow passengers are the classic cross-section of victims to be: “Actresses” Misty and Jenna (McNab, Fioreavanti), whose principal assets are seldom under wraps for long; director Doug (Murray), the notorious auteur behind the popular "Bayou Beaver" series; fat, old, know-it-all tourists Jim and Shannon Permatteo (Riehle, Darbo); and pretty-but-surly local Marybeth (Feldman), who has personal reasons for going on a tacky tourist attraction. The group is rounded out by guide Shawn (Shen), whose corny line of spooky patter is as dubious as his Nawlins accent.

Shawn soon sinks the boat, stranding them all in the sticks with legendary bogeyman Victor Crowley (stuntman and Friday the 13th regular Hodder), a deformed, hulking and all-too-real psychopath who murders the interlopers in supremely gory ways. Heads are twisted off, flesh shredded, jaws ripped from skulls and limbs from torsos as the ever-smaller band of survivors tries to find a way out of the swamp in one piece.

Made with the blessing of original Hills Have Eyes writer-director Wes Craven, French up-and-comer Alexandre (High Tension) Aja's full-bore do-over is a shockingly successful update of the seminal 1978 shocker.

It begins with the most mundane of situations: The no-fun family vacation. Bluff but loving dad "Big Bob" Carter (Levine), a retired police detective, has dragooned his long-suffering clan into a cross-country family vacation in his beloved Airstream trailer. No one wants to take a detour through the desert except Bob, not even his unflaggingly supportive wife, Ethel (Quinlan). Teens Brenda (de Ravin) and Bobby (Byrd) have zero interest in the sand-and-scrub scenic route, and married daughter Lynn (Shaw) and her nerdy husband, cell-phone salesman Doug (Stanford) — the butt of Big Bob's persistent macho needling — would rather be cruising along a nicely paved highway, especially since they're traveling with their newborn.

Still, everything might have been fine if the grizzled proprietor (Bower) of that ramshackle gas station hadn't caught Lynn poking around his back room. She was just retrieving one of the rambunctious family dogs and didn't notice the satchel filled with bloody loot. But she could have seen something, and Carter clan's fate is sealed. He sends them down a dusty, booby-trapped, dead-end road and straight into the arms of a mutated clan of cannibal desert dwellers, monstrous survivors of a mining community that refused relocation when the military appropriated their homes for atomic testing.

(2007)
Directed by: Dave Meyers.
Written by: Jake Wade Wall and Eric Bernt, based on the screenplay by Eric Red.
With: Sean Bean, Sophia Bush, Zachary Knighton, Neal McDonough, Kyle Davis, Skip O'Brien, Travis Schuldt and Danny Bolero.

First-time feature director Dave Meyers' tedious remake of Robert Harmon and Eric Red's lean, mean nightmare machine, in which icily malevolent hitchhiker Rutger Hauer gives high-strung brat packer C. Thomas Howell and brittle Jennifer Jason Leigh a guided tour of Hell's highway, sticks close to the story but strips away the mythic allusions and subtle subtext that give the 1986 original its resonance.

The night is dark and stormy, the New Mexico road twisty and rain drenched, the college cuties tired and distracted when a man appears out of the gloom, silhouetted in the headlights of his disabled car. Sensitive Jim (Knighton, of TV's short-lived Life on a Stick) swerves and brakes and reaches for the door — the guy might be hurt. Savvy Grace (Bush, of TV's One Tree Hill) has a bad feeling about the situation and tells him to floor it; they can always call for roadside assistance later.

Of course, common sense and good decision making are the death of white-knuckle thrillers. So when the attractive young people stop at an isolated gas station and run into the mysterious motorist, Jim agrees to drive him to a nearby motel. It's only 15 miles north, and the stranger who calls himself John Ryder (Bean) is the quintessential good sport about them nearly running him down Only some paranoid wuss who's seen too many scary movies would find Ryder’s smile unnervingly wolfish or see a warning in his self-deprecating remark that he wouldn't give himself a lift. But before you can croon "there's a killer on the road," Ryder has made the opening move in a sadistic cat-and-mouse game that will leave a trail of gore-spattered corpses in Grace and Jim's wake, and convince the state police they've got a pair of natural born killers on their hands.

While screenwriters Wall and Bernt tweak Red's richly pulpy screenplay without improving it (notably by adding a shopworn gender switch), the film's real Achilles heel is the cast. Bean carves out his own modest variation on John Ryder-on-the-storm, but Bush and Knighton are so blandly forgettable it's hard to believe they're the protagonists, not nameless victims one and two.

Excuse me while I pick my jaw up from the floor. There are nastier "ero-guro" (erotic grotesque) movies than cult filmmaker Teruo Ishii's 1969 art-sleaze freak show out there, but it's hard to beat for sheer, mind-boggling weirdness. Ishii was mentored by Mikio Naruse (1905-1969), master of the delicately bleak melodrama, but you'd never know it from his filmography, a guided tour through boisterous and generally disreputable genres: kiddie sci-fi (Super Giant, 1957), martial arts, soft-core pinku eiga, ultra-violent biker and prison pictures (notably the mid’-60s Abashiri Prison series) and Edo-era "shogun sadism" (the late-‘60s Joys of Torture series).

Ishii’s starting point is the work of pulp writer Edogawa Rampo (1894-1965), real name Taro Hirai, whose pseudonym plays on a stereotypical Japanese pronunciation of “Edgar Allan Poe” and whose morbid tales of mystery and imagination seethe with baroque perversity — jut try to shake his deceptively low-key “The Human Armchair,” which is simultaneously more and less disturbing than the title suggests. Ishii and co-writer Masahiro Kakefuda strung together bits and pieces of several stories, including “The Twins” and “The Stroller in the Attic,” to create a sexadelic spin on H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau by way of Todd Browning’s Freaks.

It begins as apparently sane medical student Hirosuke Hitomi (Yoshida) flees the snake pit of an asylum to which he’s been mysteriously confined and starts poking into his murky past, of which he has only a handful of fleeting recollections. In a perverse echo of Cornel Woolrich’s I Married a Dead Man, Hirosuke’s life is changed by a chance encounter on a train, albeit at second hand — while reading the newspaper he happens on the obituary of wealthy, recently deceased Genzaburo Komodo, to whom he bears an uncanny resemblance. As it happens, Genzaburo was from the same coastal town Hirosuke believes may figure into his own foggy memories. Once there, he visits a blind, elderly masseuse tells him that she used to massage Genzaburo, who had a swastika-shaped scar on the sole of his foot exactly like his.

So Hirouke assumes Genzaburo’s identity, convincing the grieving Komodos that he was buried alive but managed to escape his premature grave. Hirosuke is welcomed into the Komodos’ luxurious coastal home (not to mention the bed of Genzaburo’s comely widow), and is quickly entangled in their family plots and rivalries, which culminate in the murder of his “wife.” He also learns that “his” father, Jogoro (Tatsumi Hijikata, co-creator of the Butoh school of dance), is supposedly building a theme park on an isolated island just visible from the shore. She he decides to go poking around, and once he meets the web-fingered Jogoro, things start getting seriously freaky. Freaky as in man-made freaks (I suspect there’s a copy of Horrors of Malformed Men in the library of Human Centipede writer/director Tom Six), writhing naked beauties of both sexes and bizarre family skeletons (hint: there’s a bit of Eyes Without a Face driving the bizarre goings on)! Plus avant-garde dancers, graveyard humor, twisted family melodrama and a romantic complication that only begins with falling for a woman Jogoro has made into a conjoined twin.

Though more outrageously grotesque films have been made in the wake of Horrors of Malformed Men — the aforementioned Human Centipede being only the most recent — I have never, ever seen anything that could match its combination of monstrosity and surreal beauty. But God, would I love to!

(2010)
Written and Directed by: Tom Six.
With: Dieter Laser , Ashley C. Williams, Ashlynn Yennie, Akihiro Kitamura, Peter Blankenstein and Andreas Leupold.

As if to compensate for the fact that the history of Dutch horror is a thin and generally undistinguished one, writer-director Tom Six’s The Human Centipede is a can-you-top-this freak show of the first order. That it’s beautifully paced and handsomely shot is really beside the point: Next to the macabre grotesquerie that is the “human centipede,” everything else fades into insignificance.

Lindsay (Williams) and Jenny (Yennie), a pair of American flibbertigibbets taking a road trip across Europe, meet a cute guy in Germany and are invited to a party at a disco called Bunker. As is inevitably the case, they get hopelessly lost and stranded by a flat in the kind of dark woods where unwary travelers meet bears and witches and pervy old guys who make lewd, crude remarks rather than helping out. Lindsay and Jenny eventually strike out in their high heels and disco duds, hoping to find a house from which they can call the police or the car rental company or someone who can ferry them back to civilization.

It seems they’ve found a safe harbor when they spot the sleek home of middle-aged Josef Heiter (Laser), even if he does bear an uncanny resemblance to the bastard offspring of Udo Kier and Christopher Walken: No one with such blandly tasteful furniture could be a chainsaw murderer, right? Right: Heiter is no backwoods cannibal. He’s a world famous surgeon, renowned for his work separating conjoined twins, and a world class loon driven by a perverse fantasy: To create a human centipede by surgically joining several individuals, mouth to ass. Which is exactly what he does: Lindsey plus Jenny plus a Japanese tourist named Katsuro (Kitamura) become the embodiment of Heiter’s monstrous dream.

Now where, you may ask, can The Human Centipede go from there? And that’s the rub: The film’s middle third is more than a little dull. Horrifying, but repetitive — once Heiter has unveiled his monstrous dream made flesh, the plot grinds to a halt. You have a good half hour before a pair of stolid but not as dumb as they seem policemen (Blankenstein, Leupold) turn up at the door, which you can spend constructing theoretical arguments about the imaginative legacy of Nazi medical experiments or wondering whether The Human Centipede is more or less horrifying than Flower of Flesh and Blood (1985), the Japanese movie that made Charlie Sheen to call the FBI and report that he’d stumbled onto a real, honest-to-God snuff movie.

There’s no much sense in talking about The Human Centipede in the contex of Dutch horror movies. Once you’ve accounted for George Sluizer’s brilliant The Vanishing (1988); Paul Verhoeven’s creepy The Fourth Man (1983); Rudolf van den Berg’s nutty The Johnsons (1992); and the collective works of hack Dick Maas, from killer-elevator movie The Lift to bad Santa pic Sint (2010), you’ve pretty much covered the waterfront.

Much better to look at it in the context of surgical horror, from the seminal Frankenstein (1931) to the sublime Eyes Without a Face (1960) and the blackly comic Re-Animator (1985). The Human Centipede is hard to top for sheer excess: Dr. Heiter’s experiments are definitely loonier than piecing together a man from charnel house scraps or performing full-face graft, a procedure that emigrated from horror-movie nightmare to mainstream medical reality in 2005. Is his “obscene doodling with human body parts” worse than, say, keeping your fiancee’s head alive in a pan while you find her a new body? Worse than grafting two heads onto one torso? I don’t know, but it’s definitely grosser.

In any event, Six is already working on the sequel, which he swears will top The Human Centipede. I’m inclined to take him at his word and issue this warning: If you think you may not be up for his brand of shock till you drop cinema, you’re not.

Writer-director Victor Salva's inevitable follow-up to the surprise success Jeepers Creepers (2001) picks up immediately after the events of the first film, in which a mysterious demon — the "Creeper" — emerges from its cyclical hibernation to devour unwary country folk.

The sequel opens on the Taggart family farm, where tow-headed Billy (Fleming), his father, Jack (Wise), and older brother, Jack Jr. (Edwards), are doing chores and bickering genially. The cornfield ripples, crows caw, scarecrows are silhouetted against the blue, blue sky. And then the bucolic idyll is brutally shattered by screams: Someone — or more properly, something — in a long, dark duster is loping through the corn, dragging the terrified Billy like a rag doll. The older Taggarts watch helplessly as the Creeper spreads its bat-like wings and takes to the air, clutching the doomed youngster in its scaly claws. Credit where credit is due: That is one hell-bound grabber of a lean and mean opening.

The second opening, which initiates the main story, is less compelling: A yellow bus filled with high school basketball players and their entourage rolls down the deserted East 9 Highway, radio abuzz with reports of a cache of bizarrely mutilated bodies discovered beneath a local house. The kids are oblivious, preoccupied with clichéd teen stuff — the game they just won, the arrogance of star player Scott Braddock (Nenninger), the sexual orientation of school reporter Izzy "is he or isn't he" Bohen (Schiffner) — until the bus grinds to a halt, stranding them in the rapidly darkening middle of nowhere. That's bad, but what's scary is the realization that the bus was deliberately crippled.

Enter the Creeper, wsho picks off the adults and toys with the teens, leering and clattering and apparently picking out the victims for whom it plans to return. Cheerleader Minxie (Aycox), who's been having convenient psychic dreams, shares what she knows about the Creeper's origins and intentions, and then it's Lord of the Flies time. The youngsters split up into the all-for-one/one-for-all group and the every-man-for-himself brigade, and the Creeper snacks on their tasty young flesh.

Veteran independent filmmaker Fessenden's quietly unnerving horror picture revolves around an eight-person oil-drilling advance crew stalked by some malevolent, unseen something that lurks in the unbearable whiteness of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Off limits for development until a recent congressional decision, the Wildlife Refuge's oil reserves are largely an unknown quantity: The only effort was ever made to assess the situation was back in 1986, when the Kick Corp sank a test well that was immediately sealed. Now mega-corporation North Industries has established a team in the area and charged gruff, macho company man Ed Pollack (Perlman) with clearing the way to move in heavy drilling equipment. This being the 21st century, the North Industry crew is accompanied by environmental expert James Hoffman (LeGros) and his assistant, Elliot Taylor (Harrold), who must assess the impact of the company's plans before construction can proceed.

Pollack and Hoffman clash immediately, and not just over their diametrically opposed points of view about wilderness development, the energy crisis and global warming: While Pollack was a away on a five-week trip to corporate headquarters, Hoffman hooked up with Pollack's girl, Abby (Britton). The atmosphere is already explosive when junior team member Maxwell (Gilford) disappears for several hours and returns traumatized by something he can't or won't describe. Isolated and spooked, the team members succumb to a sense of creeping anxiety that turns to paranoia and, inevitably, violence.

Beleaguered parents of the world, take heart: If Legion is to be believed, even God Almighty has His hands full with kids. And if He can't keep his squabbling children in line then really, how are you supposed to do better? Yes, that's irreverent, but we're talking about a movie that arms the studly, tattooed Michael with more machine guns than the Chechnyan army and pits him against trash-talking demon grannies, exploding corpses and an ice-cream seller who mutates into a spider-limbed acid nightmare -- all because some trampy, chain-smoking hash-slinger is carrying a bastard who's supposedly the last, best home of the human race. Reverence is so not the issue.

December 23, Los Angeles. As the street scum brawl, booze, screw and shoot up, a buff, heavily-inked stranger picks himself up off the mean streets and makes tracks for the shuttered Happy Toy Company, which traffics in more lucrative merchandise than squeaky Santas, if the hidden room crammed with machine guns is anything by which to judge. After painfully stitching up his bleeding shoulders -- the ones that can't help but conjure the shadow of giant wings -- the stranger kills a pair of cops, steals a police car and hits the road, lights sparking in his wake.

Written and Directed by: Jay Edwards.
With: Claire Bronson, Cynthia Evans, Mary Kraft, Jonathan Michael Green, Adrian Roberts, Christopher Hines and Bill Szymanski

Jay Edwards’ pastiche of low-budget, regional rock ‘n’ roll horror movies of the 1960s is clearly a labor of love, and genre fans of a certain age and/or temperament will appreciate his painstaking recreation of the look and sound of a bygone era.

1966, Florida: The Violas, an all-girl rock band doing an arduous DIY tour, break down in the isolated beach community of Merriville Island. Too broke to get their van fixed, groovy gals Theodora (Bronson), Jody (Evans) and Carol (Kraft) check into a local hotel and consider their options. What they don’t know is that Merriville Island has problems of its own: A terrified child has been found abandoned on the beach, a sheriff’s deputy is dead and there’s a hot-shot biologist (Green) in town trying to determine — on the hush-hush, of course — whether the culprit is bigfoot’s cracker cousin, the skunk ape.

It’s hard to hate a movie that wears its retro heart so prominently on its sleeve, no matter how thin its affectionate laughs. I mean, forget that writer-director Edwards is editor and producer of Cartoon Network’s annoying hipster hit Aqua Teen Hunger Force: The guy named both the Violas and their cooler-than-cool lead singer for his grandma, Theodora Viola Safford. He, like Psycho Beach Party's Charles Busch, clearly harbors serious love for the bottom-of-the-barrel likes of Horror of Party Beach (1964) and The Beach Girls and the Monster (1965). And Edwards assembled a soundtrack by The Woggles, The Vendettas, The Fleshtones and, especially, Catfight! Their catchy “Stomp! Shout! Scream!” provided the film’s original title; “Syphilis” underscores its most bizarrely poignant moment and “Go Go Gorilla” just makes you want to shake it like an ape. Speaking of which, the skunk ape is a genuine rural legend, a hairy, smelly biped said to haunt the swampy Everglades.

If only Monster Beach Party A-Go Go weren’t so strained, slight and awkwardly unfunny. It’s tough to spoof movies whose very nature is cheap, silly and ephemeral; we mostly remember the ones that accidentally capture some soon-to-be-famous performer or fledgling pop-culture phenomenon. How many dollar-bin copies of Curse of the Living Corpse and Muscle Beach Party have been bought for a glimpse of an impossibly young Roy Scheider or “Little” Stevie Wonder gamely paying his dues? But you can no more manufacture serendipity than you can engineer a cult classic

As is the case with so many post Halloween (1978) slasher films, there isn't much to My Bloody Valentine: The acting is pretty terrible, the build up takes forever and the stalking scenes are by-the-numbers. Here's what it has going for it: A great title, a surprisingly authentic sense of place and the killer miner, with his creepy gas-mask and that great big pickaxe.

1981, Valentine Bluffs: Mining town Valentine Bluffs, pop 3785, is preparing for its first Valentine's Day shindig in 20 years, and the young folks are totally jazzed — they're too young to remember why Valentine Bluffs treats February 14th as just another day. But the old timers are worried — they'll never forget remember the 1961 cave-in, the six bodies and the lone survivor, Harry Warden (Cowper), gnawing on a human arm. Or what Harry did exactly one year later: He dressed up in his gas mask and jumpsuit and took a pickaxe to the supervisors who skipped before their shifts ended so they could get to the Union Hall early, then stuffed their hearts into candy boxes with notes warning against ever holding another Valentine's Day dance. Sure, Harry is safely locked away in Eastfield Asylum. But why tempt fate? Then there's Mayor Hanniger's (Reynolds) son, T.J. (Kelman), who lit out for California to pursue some pipe dream and just blew back into town. His old girlfriend, Sarah (Hallier), is now dating local hotshot Axel (Affleck), but there's a spark between Sarah and T.J. that's bound to stir up trouble.

And then Chief Jake Newby (Francks) receives a valentine's candy box with a bloody heart inside. The mayor cancels the dance, Newby tries to find out what's going on with Warden and the kids decide to throw a secret party down in the mine. Can you say, "cue the running and screaming?"

Quentin Tarantino has declared My Bloody Valentine his favorite slasher movie (in the pages of Entertainment Weekly, no less), but I can't say I share his enthusiasm. The locations have an authentic blue-collar feel (it was shot in Sydney Mines, Nova Scotia, where the last working mine had shut down a mere five years earlier), and it was impressively violent for its time; even before Lionsgate's 2009 DVD, which restored nearly ten minutes of footage distributor Paramount cut from the US release print, the death-by-dryer scene was just nasty. But overall I find My Bloody Valentine formulaic and more than a little dull — give me the delirious excesses of Euro-horror over the reductive linearity of slasher movies any day!

And bloody is the operative word: Directed by Patrick Lussier, who actually made a pretty good movie out of the unpromising White Noise 2, this remake of the notorious 1981 slasher film is briskly paced and extravagantly gory.

February 14, 1999: The town of Harmony is thrust into unwanted prominence by a headline-ready mine accident and its gruesome aftermath. As residents prepare to celebrate Valentine's Day, Tom Hanniger (Ackles, of TV's Supernatural), whose family owns the mine that singlehandedly drives Harmony's economy, makes a rookie mistake that causes a cave-in. Five men die and the sixth, Harry Warden (Walters), is taken Harmony Memorial Hospital in a coma. Rumors that Warden murdered the others to ensure his own survival are vindicated when he wakes up and systematically murders the hospital staff, mutilating the corpses and scrawling bizarre Valentine's-related messages in their blood.

Warden then heads for the mine, where a carefree pack of young people — including Tom, soulmate Sarah Mercer (King) and their friends, Axel Palmer (Kerr) and Irene (Rue) — are having a party. By the time Warden is done, most of them are dead, and Tom is moments from being impaled on Warden's pickaxe when Sheriff Burke (Atkins) arrives and shoots to kill. Warden escapes but is presumed dead after a second tunnel collapse; Tom, blood-spattered and thoroughly traumatized, gets the hell out of town rather than endure the venomous whispers and dark glances of longtime friends and neighbors who blame him for the whole tragic affair.

Ten years later, Tom returns to Harmony: His father is dead and he's selling the mine — all he has to do is sign off and the deed is done. Unfortunately, the meeting has been postponed a few days, forcing Tom to stay in a town where everyone, from his father's longtime right hand, Ben Foley (Tighe), to former classmates, holds him in some degree of contempt. He finds Sarah married to Axel, who's now Sheriff Palmer, and Irene transformed into a self-destructive party girl who thinks nothing of striding bare-ass naked through a no-tell motel parking lot to give some loutish lover a piece of her mind. And when someone starts painting the town red with a pickaxe, Tom finds himself the number-one suspect.

A Franken-fright flick cobbled together from chunks of Battlestar Galactica, The Descent, Serenity, Cube, Resident Evil, Event Horizon and, of course, Alien, German director Christian Alvart's Pandorum is an efficient scare machine as long as you can ignore the naked contrivances required to keep the cogs turning.

The year: 2174. Having overpopulated the Earth, mankind builds a massive ark called Elysium and points it toward a distant planet called Tanis that appears miraculously fit for human habitation. Its precious cargo: 60,000 soldiers, scientists and regular folks, most of whom will dream away the flight in hypersleep tubes while rotating skeleton crews keep the Elysium on course and running.

Fast-forwarding now, Corp. Bower (Foster) and Lt. Payton (Quaid) wake up with their skin peeling off in ghastly white strips, their memories riddled with holes and their heads full of questions. Where are they? How long have they been asleep? Why is it so damned dark? How come the door to their hypersleep chamber is locked tight and scarred with scratches? Why do the ship's systems keep coming on with a nerve-jangling jolt, then shutting down again? And where's Cooper, the missing third member of their team, who's neither in his sleep tube nor anywhere in the sealed room? For that matter, where is everybody. Continue reading review.

Like The Blair Witch Project, to which Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity was inevitably compared, this ultra-low-budget, low-tech horror movie is long on atmosphere and short on special effects. And that’s a good thing. It isn’t always true that what you don’t see is scarier than what you do, but neither is the reverse: Take a look at any installment in the as the just-won’t-die Final Destination series if you need proof.

Newly installed in a sleekly non-descript San Diego townhouse (Peli’s own), engaged-to-be-engaged Katie (Featherson) and Micah (Sloat), are so ordinary you’d like to slap them, if they weren’t so ordinary that it would hardly be worth the effort. Except for one little thing… after a series of odd occurances — inexplicable noises, glass that shatters for no apparent reason and, creepiest by far, Micah’s discovery of a photo in the attic he hardly knew was there… a photo of little Katie in front of her childhood home — Katie confesses that she’s been dogged since childhood by things that go bump in the night.

Practical Micah is simultaneously incredulous and kind of annoyed that his girlfriend waited so long to let on that she’s some kind of world-class flake. But he’s a doer, so he does something: He sets up a video camera in their bedroom. Even on fast forward, a few dozen excruciating hours of nocturnal tedium — like Andy Warhol’s 1963 Sleep, minus the dubious glamor of the trendy and the doomed — ought to bring Katie back to her senses.

Inevitably, it does the exact opposite: Katie becomes increasingly high strung and Micah catches her heebie jeebies. Yes, most of the footage is exactly what he expected. And then the bedroom door abruptly opens and closes itself, the bed sheets ripple unnaturally, as though something were moving underneath, or an inexplicable shadow scuttles across the wall. Not to mention Katie’s deeply unsettling behavior: What could possess someone get out of bed in the middle of the night and then stand, motionless, for hours, watching her sleeping partner?

A software developer with no previous filmmaking experience, Peli somehow found a direct lie to the dread that lies just beneath the veneer of humdrum rituals and responsibilities. The trigger was moving from a city apartment to a suburban development: Peli lay awake listening to “creaks and knocks” he’d never noticed beneath the white noise of traffic, sirens and voices drifting up from the sidewalk, down through the ceiling and in through the shared walls. Paranormal Activity is all about dread. I heard something: Who or what waits behind the door, at the bottom of the stairs, on the patio just beyond the sliding glass doors? Most horror movies eventually turn on the lights and send the night terrors back to hell, but Paranormal Activity (again, like The Blair Witch Project), never does.

Made in seven days for less than $20,000, Paranormal Activity was spotted at a film festival and might well have been bought by DreamWorks as big-budget remake fodder, had Stephen Spielberg not taken it home and scared the bejabbers out of himself. With Spielberg in its corner, Paranormal Activity crept into a handful of theaters two years later. Within weeks it was kicking Saw VI’s ass at the box office, spawning stories about terrified moviegoers fainting, fleeing theaters and vomiting in lobbies (the same stories I heard about The Exorcist back when I was in high school) and feeding paranoid rumors that it was all real.

And you know what — who cares? Paranormal Activity is one spooky little piece of moviemaking, the kind of thing that keeps lifelong horror fans trudging to overpriced theaters and renting overhyped DVDs: It’s a campfire story for the cyber generation, a bogey tale wrapped in time codes and misplaced faith in the power of technology to banish ghosties, ghoulies and long-leggedy beasties. Good Lord, deliver us! But not yet.

David DeCoteau and Matthew Jason Walsh's twisty tale of bad behavior among the dirty sexy money crowd is a throwback to b-movie erotic thrillers of the 1980s, complete with faded star -- '80s golden girl Susan Anton -- and attractive young things who know they look terrific in their underwear.

Spoiled little rich bitch Daphne Hendron (Kelly Albanese) resents having to share her late daddy's oil millions with her hated stepmother, hard-drinking '80s TV star Sandra Newell (Susan Anton). But otherwise she's got everything an amoral thrill seeker could want: A smoking body, the means to party hard and often and a circle of like-minded friends. Daphne and pals Charlotte (Carrie Southworth), Miles (Tom Sandoval) and Omar (Blake Hood) get their kicks by playing bisexual head games with ordinary folk, spicing up the action with jaded wagers. Daphne finally meets her match in medical student Nick Benedict (Kyle Jordan), who sees right through her manipulative moves and rebuffs her repeated advances. Never one to take defeat graciously, Daphne enlists her friends in a scheme to get to Nick by way of his fiancee, down-to-Earth nurse Heather (Candace Moon). Miles hooks her, and the others reel Heather into their decadent lifestyle, allowing Daphne to play reformed bad girl: She only tells Nick about Heather's romp on the wild side because she's worried about Heather and wants to help Nick rescue her before the poor thing gets in over her head.

The wary Nick doesn't buy Daphne's change of heart, but Heather genuinely is in trouble. She suffers an alcohol-induced stroke during a wild party and is rushed to the hospital, clinging to life. Or is she…?

The third installment in the Alien/Predator crossover series, this two-fisted action picture pits a motley crew of hard-bitten humans against a posse of Predators — muscle-bound extraterrestrials with snaky dreadlocks and an insatiable lust for hunting.

At its core, Predators resembles nothing so much as The Most Dangerous Game crossed with the Twilight Zone episode in which a hobo, a soldier, a ballet dancer, a clown and a bagpipe player awake to find themselves trapped in a vast metal cylinder, unable to remember who they are, let alone how or why they they’ve been imprisoned. Except with nasty aliens and a lot of fancy firepower.

It begins in the middle of a doozy of a bad-dream scene: A man opens his eyes and realizes he’s falling, no, plummeting towards certain death on the ground below. Except that he has a parachute — why didn’t he know that? — that opens at the last minute, allowing him to drift gently into the heart of a steaming jungle. Royce (Brody) quickly comes across seven others who arrived the same way. Isabelle (Braga) is an Israeli sniper and Nikolai (former mixed martial artist Taktarov) is a Russian soldier plucked from Chechnya. Cuchillo and Hanzo (Trejo, Changchien) are, respectively, a drug-cartel enforcer and a yakuza — professional bad guys. Mombasa (Ali) is a revolutionary from Sierra Leone; Stans (Goggins, of TV’s The Shield) is a serial sex murderer and Royce eventually lets on that he’s a mercenary. Which leaves only Edwin (Grace), the wild card: He’s just a geeky, mild-mannered doctor — a baffled lamb surrounded by wolves. And they’re the good news. The bad news is the Predators, alien hunters looking to bag themselves some human trophies.

And that’s about it for plot — it’s hard to imagine that it took two separate screenwriting teams to craft what is essentially a series of minimalist variations on the theme of attack-fall back-regroup while gasping WTF? On the plus side, Predators doesn’t mess about: No sooner have the mismatched humans introduced themselves than the Predators sic the dogs on them, the word “dogs” being used in its loosest sense. And Isabelle’s terse confession that there may be a connection between their current predicament and the fate of a special ops team in Paraguay almost a quarter of a century earlier neatly ties Predators to its source: 1987’s Predator, which pitted two future governors (Arnold Schwarzeneggar and Jesse “The Body” Ventura) and Rocky regular Carl Weathers against a big-game hunter from space.

But in the end Predators is the same-old same-old: Man meets monster, man flees monster, man beats monster… until next time.

Quarantine is a respectable, if uninspired, adaptation of Spanish filmmakers Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza's [REC], a Blair Witch-style variation on zombie movie cliches that might seem fresher had it not opened after veteran George Romero's grimly pared-down Diary of the Dead.

Ambitious Angela Vidal (Carpenter, of TV's Dexter), who hosts a local Los Angeles TV show called "Night Shift," and her camerman (Harris) are doing a follow-around with firefighters Jake (Hernandez) and Fletcher (Schaech). For an increasingly restless while, it looks as though all Angela and Scott are going to take away from thwewir long night out is a lot of footage of station house hijinks: Crude sexual jokes, testosterone-driven games of basketball and handball and less-than-arresting glimpses into how firefighters kill time between calls. And then the siren goes off, and Jake, Fletcher, Scott and Angela are screaming down the late-night streets in search of a reclusive old women whom neighbors claim has been shrieking like a banshee from behind her apartment's closed door.

The police are already on the scene, the lobby is filled with restless tenants, and seer horror awaits in the rambling, ill-kempt apartment of Ms. Espinoza (veteran stuntwoman Jeannie Epper). In a matter of minutes, prorties switch from reswcuing a sad, isolated elderly woman to figuring out how she managed to tear out a cop's throat with her teeth and hurl a firfighter from a stairwell, reducing him to a puddle of broken flesh and protruding bones. Calls for help go unanswered, and the building's fron doors have been locked from the outside; effprts to find another way out are met by gun-wielding soldiers. One by one, the terrified tenants realize that they have no cable TV, internet access or phone service — they're cut off from the world, which has been made to believe they've been exacuated, and left to the slavering mervies of some super-rabies bug. The government has quarantined them with extreme prejudice in the name of the greater good.

Directed by John Erick Dowdle and co-written with his brother, Drew, Quarantine exudes a air of desperation, even if it's repetitive and could have done without then 10-odd minutes they added to the lean, mean original screenplay. The Dowdles came to Quarantine by way of the first-person serial killer picture The Poughkeepsie Tapes, which has never been released either because it's an unwatchable, amateurish rehash of worn-out psycho clichés or because it's a bone-chilling, killer's-eye-view chronicle of the darkest depths to which human beings can sink.

For filmmakers like Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza, sequels are a devil’s bargain:

They can cash in on a cult hit — in this case, the lean, mean [REC] (2007) — but at the expense of playing by the rule of “the same only different” and risking their on-the-edge cred. They also forfeit the element of surprise, which helped give [REC] its punch — especially in the US, where it went straight to DVD (and only after it had been remade as Quarantine). [REC] 2 doesn’t entirely dodge the compromises inherent in genre sequels, but it does take the story in an unexpected yet thoroughly justified direction.

The film opens with [REC]’s kickass final shot, in which Angela Vidal (Velasco), the bubbly host of a low-rent, local TV show called “While You’re Sleeping” who charged into ground zero of a zombie-plague outbreak in hopes of scoring like, a really cool scoop, is abruptly hauled off by her heels into the darkness.

And then it’s time to meet the new victims, starting with a team of foul-mouthed SWATs equipped with state-of-the-art helmet cameras: As in [REC], everything is “you-are-there” footage shot as events unfold in a handsomely shabby Barcelona apartment building that’s been quarantined by the Ministry of Health: Really, truly no-fooling-around quarantined, as in power and phone lines have been cut off, signal blockers installed and steel panels put up over the doors and windows. Helicopters hover over the roof and the streets are thick with conspicuously armed soldiers and cops.

The SWAT team arrives moments after Vidal’s disappearance and are escorted the curious crowd clustered around the police perimeter (including the poor schmuck who was out getting medicine for his feverish daughter when all hell broke loose in [REC]) to receive their marching orders. Their mission is to accompany health-ministry honcho Dr. Owen (Mellor) as he tries to determine the precise nature of the virus with which they’re dealing. Everyone answers to Owen, and only he can give the order that will let them back out — the security software is calibrated to the unique cadences of his voice.

The lobby is a shambles: There are pools of gore on the floor and stairs, and a pair of bloody handcuffs hangs from a railing. But where are the cops, the firemen, the TV people and the tenants... what the hell is going on? Hell turns out to be the operative word: Owen isn’t from the Ministry of Health and it’s not a virus turning ordinary people into screaming berserkers. Owen is a priest and the “infection” is an outbreak of demonic possession, triggered by a top-secret Vatican-backed attempt to fuse religion and science gone very, very wrong. Suffice it to say that despite their paramilitary training, briefing and heavy artillery, the SWAT team have no easier a time of it than the unwitting and ill-equipped first responders.

Part of [REC]’s appeal is its ambiguity, which harks back to Night of the Living Dead: I mean, who really believes that radiation shed by a retuning Venus probe caused the zombie apocalypse? [REC] 2’s Exorcist-inspired path represents an audacious departure from the pandemic-centric model that dominates 21st-centrury zombie movies, but in the end it doesn’t add up to much: Demons, viral mutation, Kiss Me Deadly’s great whatzit — what’s the diff? [REC] 2’s

In any event, [REC] 2’s ending paves the way for a third film in which the possession bug becomes an epidemic, and it will be interesting to see what the filmmakers can do with that much-mined scenario.

Argentine director/cowriter Adrian Garcia Bogliano's self-conscious throwback to the kind of gritty black-and-white gore films that used to play drive-in theaters and urban grind houses is a short, sharp shocker that gets surprising mileage out of the oldest formula in the book of the dead.

Two teenagers, high-strung Theda (Siritto), who's plagued by nightmares of a masked man and a mutilated woman, and student Elena (Kroucco), meet on a bus en route to isolated, small-town San Ramon, where they're supposed to catch a train to Trinidad. When they disembark, they meet three other girls — flighty Ruth (Vera), aspiring filmmaker Silvia (Mujica) and punky Lydia (Witemburg) — all with the same itinerary. The town is almost deserted because everyone's at Wednesday-afternoon church services, so they make a quick stop at the local general store and walk to the train station, catching a glimpse of creepy preacher Horacio (Ponce) conducting an exorcism as they pass the church.

An unwelcome surprise awaits them: The train came through early, and they're stranded in this unsettling backwater until tomorrow morning. Fortunately, brothers Nestor (Rolf Garcia Puga) and Maxi (Santiago) operate a bed-and-breakfast in the rambling house they inherited from their mother, and the stationmaster (Ponce) suggests the girls stay there. Dinner is an uncomfortable affair; they're joined by Horacio, who shares his draconian notions of guilt and retribution with the young women, and when they return to their rooms, they're all spooked by strange noises and menacing shadows. And then the screaming starts: Someone hacks Silvia to death, and the other four scramble to find a way out after realizing that the windows are bricked up and all the doors are locked from the outside.

If your idea of fun involves zombies, monstrous physical transformations and alien slugs bent on world domination, look no further than writer and first-time director James Gunn's gleeful homage to all things gross and horrible actually makes good on the "horror comedy" label by being both flat-out creepy and darkly funny.

Little Wheelsy, who-knows-where, is the kind of town where nothing ever happens until something spectacularly awful does. Like, say, the fiery arrival of a meteor bearing some greasy, gelatinous extraterrestrial life form whose nature demands that it eat and breed in the most repellent possible ways. Its path crosses that of wealthy local businessman Grant Grant (Rooker), who's out in the woods flirting with local tart Brenda Gutierrez (James), who's far more receptive to his advances than his trophy wife, Starla (Banks). Faster than you can say "ooooh, nasty," the interstellar Jell-o has infected Grant with its not-of-this-earth DNA, rapidly mutating him into some kind of squidlike, flesh-gobbling horror.

The Grant-thing finds an unfortunate host — Brenda — to incubate an army of alien slugs that worm their way into the friendly townsfolk in the most revolting ways possible and transform them into acid-spitting, hive-minded zombies. Standing between Grant-thing's army of grossness and the world: Gutsy Starla, unflappable Sheriff Bill Pardy (Firefly and Serenity's Fillion), who's loved Starla since they were kids, and plucky teen Kylie Strutemyer (Saulnier), whose disgustingly close encounter with the slugs has given her some useful insights into what they want and how they plan to get it. "Well now, that is some fucked up shit," remarks Pardy, which just about sums matters up.

Throw a strong cast at a genre mishmash that includes ancient prophecies, shape-shifting and Native-American folklore and the result is this offbeat, action-oriented werewolf picture.

As a red moon lights the night sky, Alpha "skinwalker" Varek (Behr, oif TV's Roswell), his comely bitch, Sonja (Malthe), belligerent Zo (Kim Coates) and mute, scarred Grenier (Johnston) set out to find the boy who is somehow the key to curing lycanthropy.

The child, Tim (Knight), lives in small-town Huguenot with his widowed mother, Katherine (Carter); her in-laws, including brother-in-law Jonas (Canadian actor Koteas); Jonas' mother (Gordon) and his nubile daughter, Rachel (Mitra). Katherine has no idea that 12-year-old Tim is anything but a regular kid withasthma and bad, bad dreams, but the rest of the family, along with everyone else in town, knows exactly who he is, because they're all skinwalkers too.

As in The Howling (1981), the movie's shape-shifting community is divided along philosophical lines: The bad skinwalkers embrace their beastliness while the good skinwalkers live for the hope of a cure and lock themselves up when the moon is full. Katherine's extended family is sworn to protect Tim, whose powers — whatever they may be — will manifest themselves the day he turns 13. With Tim's birthday fast approaching, Varek and his fellow werewolves on wheels are determined to make sure that never happens, and they've just discovered where Tim lives.

Directed by special effects artist Jim Isaac, Skinwalkers adds little to the annals of werewolf lore. But it's briskly paced and features a couple of clever twists on genre conventions before getting bogged down in a lengthy fight sequence during which the lupine adversaries resolve their diametrically opposed ideologies by fang and claw.

1978
Written and Directed by: John Carpenter.
With: Lauren Hutton, David Birney, Adrienne Barbeau, Charles Cypers, Grainger Hines, George Skaff and James Murtaugh.

Fleeing a love affair gone bad in New York, TV producer Leigh Michaels (Hutton) finds a directing job at local Los Angeles station KJHC and treats herself to an apartment in Arkham Tower, a high-rise with wall-to-wall widows in every room. She quickly finds a best friend in lesbian co-worker Sophie (Barbeau, whom Carpenter married shortly after) and a nice new boyfriend in Paul Winkless (Birney).

Leigh also acquires a stalker, who torments her with creepy phone calls and suggestive gifts disguised as promotional materials from “Excursions Unlimited” travel agency. And he’s watching her, day and night: He must live in the building across the street. Lack of sleep turns Leigh into a high-strung wreck, but the police say they can’t do anything because the caller hasn’t done anything yet. Even Paul’s personal appeal to his friend Detective Hunt (Cyphers) doesn’t stop the harassment: The stalker sets up an innocent man and slyly begins making Leigh look like a crazy woman.

Shot in ten days as “High Rise” and made between Assault on Precinct 13 and Halloween, Someone’s Watching Me! plays on the still-timely urban fear of persecution by a malevolent stranger who knows exactly how to manipulate everything from cutting-edge surveillance technology to subtle social biases against “hysterical” women with “overactive imaginations.”

1970s supermodel Hutton gives a surprisingly quirky performance as Leigh, a wary beauty whose offbeat sense of humor makes her seem a little nutty long before her stalker’s apparent omniscience starts looking like delusionary paranoia. Carpenter’s debt to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window is apparent without being oppressive, and the stalker’s identity coolly defies genre expectations.

(2009)
Directed by: Stewart Hendler.

Written by: Josh Stolberg and Peter Goldfinger, based on the original screenplay Seven Sisters, by Mark Rosman.
With: Leah Pipes, Rumer Willis, Jamie Chung, Margo Harshman Audrina Patridge, Matt O'Leary, Julian Morris, Caroline D'Amore and Carrie Fisher.

Welcome to Skank Ho sorority, the pride of No-Name University, in the middle of Anywheresville, USA! In keeping with the proud tradition of the Greek system, you and your sisters will make connections, form lasting friendships and help one another learn skills that will stand you in good stead throughout your lives, including how to make a drunken spectacle of yourself at parties, shower in full make up, screw your shrink for prescription meds, bare your boobs at every opportunity, humiliate lesser girls and cover up mistakes that might tarnish your bright future. Like, say, the grotesque death of a dear friend during a mean-spirited prank.

A moody psychological thriller co-directed by Adam Green and actor/co-writer/executive producer Joel David Moore, this independent feature favors rubber-reality ambiguity over easy shocks and overt gore.

But Amber’s bubbly exterior lies lightly over a deep well of loneliness and insecurity; while she helps Mason emerge from self-imposed isolation, she also stirs up dark emotions and memories that might be better left alone. Is the jazz-obsessed Mason a serial killer who sketches women as a prelude to murder, or simply a lost soul whose mind is seething with violent fantasies upon which he would never act?

2010
Directed by: Vincenzo Natali.

Written by: Vincenzo Natali, Antoinette Terry Bryant and Douglas Taylor.

With:Sarah Polley, Adrian Brody, Delphine Chaneac, Brandon McGibbon, Simona Maicanescu, David Hewlett and Abigail Chu.

Veteran TV director Nelson McCormick's The Stepfather is a serviceable remake of the 1987 thriller about a would-be family man whose dreams are repeatedly crushed by willful women and wayward children who just won't act right.

Carefully scrubbed of all but the most sanitized violence in the name of securing a PG-13 rating, the movie begins as Grady Edwards (Walsh, of TV's Nip/Tuc) meticulously alters his appearance before gathering his luggage and leaving the suburban Salt Lake City home where a woman and three children lie dead among the festive Christmas decorations and never-to-be unwrapped packages.

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"There's a killer on the road/his brain is squirming like a toad…" Forty-six years after the Doors wrote "Riders on the Storm" and fifteen years after writer-director Jennifer Lynch — yes, David Lynch's daughter — made her directing debut with the polarizing Boxing Helena, Lynch returned to filmmaking with this twisty tale of sex-murder, lies and videotape.

Does it break any new ground? No. But Surveillance is a taut, nihilistic exercise in heartland desolation, and unlike most films whose success is predicated on an 11th-hour twist, it plays 100% fair with the audience: The truth is out there from the beginning, if you're willing to see it.

In the wake of a brutal home invasion that left a local man dead and his wife missing, FBI agents Elizabeth Anderson and Sam Hallaway (Ormond and Pullman) are called to a New Mexico police station to tease the truth out of two witnesses who had the misfortune to cross paths with a pair of serial killers: Smart-mouthed, compulsive liar Bobbi (James), a meth addict, and eight-year-old Stephanie (Simpkins), who lost her entire family to the murdering sociopaths. Both encountered the thrill killers on a desolate back road, but their stories don't mesh and the testimony of trigger-happy cop Jim Conrad (Stewart), who lost his partner (co-screenwriter Harper) in the melee, further muddies the waters.

Armed with state-of-the-art video technology, Anderson and Hallaway must look past the self-serving lies and half truths to determine exactly what happened on that lonesome highway…

Lynch's second film is a nasty little piece of work that benefits from top-notch performances across the board, from veterans Ormond and Pullman to child actress Simpkins. There's nothing new here: The opening sequence will remind horror buffs of films ranging from Michael Mann's Manhunter (1986) to 2007's The Strangers, and the he-said/she-said disjunction between what happened (as seen in flashbacks) and what the various compromised witnesses claim transpired is the stuff of countless brain-bending thrillers.

But what the hey: It's a twisty-turny diversion, handsomely photographed and driven by a soundtrack that includes the Violent Femmes' lacerating "Add It Up." I don't know whether you're familiar with Quentin Tarantino's notion that when a movie uses a pop song to perfection it owns it, but I venture to say that Surveillance owns "Add It Up."

Romero’s sixth …of the Dead movie is a slight, self-aware fable in which a pair of feuding families, a quartet of AWOL National Guardsmen and a mess o’ ravenous zombies mix it up on an isolated Atlantic-coast island.

Romero knows zombies: His game changing Night of the Living Dead (1968) transformed the walking dead from minor-league monsters to genre power players. The proof is in the numbers: Fewer than three dozen zombie movies made in the 36 years between the eerie Bela Lugosi vehicle White Zombie (1932), based on the book by adventurer William Sebring that introduced the average American to Haitian voodoo folklore, and Romero’s micro-budget shocker. Literally hundreds have been made in the four decades since Night of the Living Dead first stunned jaded grind house audiences into uneasy silence.

Romero’s 2008 Diary of the Dead was a bold and polarizing reboot of his own zombie mythos for a wired world in which 24/7 connectivity makes short work of the fog of misinformation and official secrecy that once handicapped confused, panicky survivors.

The bitter joke is that this time around anyone with a laptop and a modem knows exactly what’s going on, but they still don’t have much of an edge against the undead: Zombies may be slow, none-too-bright and generally all messed up, but they just just keep coming, and there are more of them every day.

Survival of the Dead is less a sequel to Diary of the Dead than a companion piece: It takes a minor character — rogue National Guardsman "Nicotine" Crockett (Van Sprang), briefly seen in Diary robbing a terrified band of college-age film students trying to document the undead holocaust while running home to mommy and daddy — and spins off a parallel tale of chaos, zombie gut munching and all-around bad behavior.

This story begins on Plum Island, a pretty little chunk of land just off the Delaware coast. It's home to the feuding O’Flynn and Muldoon families, who brought their grievances over from the old country and nurtured them as carefully as they have their colorful brogues. When the dead start rising up and chowing down on the living, the Muldoons and the O’Flynns find themselves with one more thing to fight about. Patrick, the patriarch of clan O’Flynn (Welsh) is all for remembering the departed as they were while dealing firmly with what are. His Muldoon counterpart , Seamus (Fitzpatrick), regards the cannibal dead as unfortunate black sheep, a la drunken reprobate Uncle Pat: They may be sorely misguided, but they’re family, and that’s that. So the Muldoons chain up their dead and try to teach them the error of their flesh-eating ways, while the O’Flynns consign them firmly to their graves. Righteous practicality notwithstanding, Patrick O’Flynn loses the first battle of Plum Island’s personal zombie war — even his own daughter, Janet (Munoe), sides with the Muldoons — and is banished to the mainland with a handful of loyal companions.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Pennsylvania, four disenchanted National Guardsmen have had enough of risking their asses for a hidebound military establishment that can’t wrap its collective head around the idea that waging conventional war on the undead just doesn’t work. So Sergeant Crockett and his crew — Kenny (Woolfe), Tomboy (Karkanis) and Francisco (DiMatteo) — go feral: If they’re smart and careful, they should be able to amass a nice nest egg by the time someone figures out how bomb the zombies back to the stone age.

After hijacking a cash-rammed armored car, Crockett and company pick up a computer-savvy kid (Bostick, who had a small but unrelated role in Land of the Dead) who turns them onto a viral video of O’Flynn singing the praises of Plum Island. It sounds like a good place to hole up until things get back to normal, especially since O’Flynn fails to mention that it’s occupied by a clan of possessive backwoods types with guns and has a wee bit of a zombie problem.

Beneath the self-consciously colorful Hatfields-vs-McCoys stuff, Survival of the Dead is a cynical variation on Dawn of the Dead (1978)… in fact, it’s the grim, despairing Dawn played as a shaggy dog tale. Which is fair enough: If anyone has earned the right to trifle with the cannibal dead, it’s the guy who unleashed them on us in the first place. But that having been said, Survival of the Dead is at heart a trifle with a none-too-subtle moral: It’s no coincidence that the compromised safe haven over which its various factions squabble and die is called “Plum Island,” just like the notorious disease-research facility that serves as a bitter joke in The Silence of the Lambs (1990).

Survival's Plum Island is a poisoned paradise where everyone is trapped in the past: The captive dead shuffle through mindless rituals that mimic things they did when they were alive, and the living steal, scheme and betray each other, as though the old world order were going to return any minute and the guys with the most stuff win. Romero is prone to work a metaphor until it screams, and his Vietnam-era sensibilities are never far from the surface. Which isn’t to say they’re outdated, only that younger fans tend to like their horror with more snark and less political consciousness raising. But kudos to the grand old man of the dead for reclaiming what’s his, on his own non-negotiable terms.

Korean writer-director Kim Ji-woon's psychological skin-crawler painstakingly parses the traumas that bind a widower, his teen daughters, both recently released from a mental institution, and his high-strung second wife in a suffocating web of guilt, suspicion and fear. The American remake, The Uninvited (2009), pales by comparison.

Teenaged Bae Su-mi (Im) and her younger sister, Su-yeon (Moon), return home with their father, Mu-hyun (Kim), after an absence no-one seems to dare discuss. Though spacious and located in a handsome wooded area near a lake, the house is also gloomy and subtly unwelcoming, from the oppressive, dark wood beams and floors to the wallpaper that writhes with busy, vaguely suggestive patterns. As to the atmosphere, suffice it to say that it's fraught. Mu-hyun is withdrawn and taciturn; he seems to have no idea what to say to his daughters and sleeps in his study rather than with his pretty wife, Yun-ju (Yeom). Brittle Yun-ju appears perpetually on the brink of a nervous breakdown and alternates between showering the girls with saccharine affection and treating them with icy disdain that carries a hint of potential violence. She seems to single out the tremulous Su-yeon, who creeps around like a little mouse and barely says a word to anyone but her sister. Su-mi, by contrast, seethes with barely suppressed rage that's directed equally at her father and Yun-ju; she's always spoiling for a fight, especially if she thinks Su-yeon is being persecuted. Yun-ju hosts a "welcome home" dinner party for the sisters, which they pointedly boycott; the only guests are Yun-ju's brother and his meek, wide-eyed wife. As Yun-ju recounts macabre childhood recollections in a voice ragged with hysteria, her brother claims to have no memory of the incidents and her sister-in-law suffers some kind of epileptic fit.

The first theatrical feature spun off from the popular HBO series Tales From the Crypt, loosely based on the notorious EC horror comics of the 1950s, Demon Knight is a live-action cartoon that's equal parts gore and smart alecky humor.

After a pun-laden introduction by the animatronic Crypt Keeper (voice of Kassir), the story revolves around a New Mexico boarding house/brothel housed in a deconsecrated church staffed by demonic hookers. Two men — Brayker (Sadler) and the Collector (Zane) — stumble onto the premises after surviving a horrific car crash; it quickly becomes apparent that they're actually supernatural adversaries locked in an eternal struggle for a key containing the blood of Jesus Christ. The brothel's various residents and clients are sucked into their conflict by the Collector's ability to tap into their darkest fears and desires.

Transylmania, which reunites the creative team and principal cast (and characters) of National Lampoon Presents Dorm Daze and Dorm Daze 2, is a better horror spoof than all the installments in the Scary Movie franchise combined. Granted, that's a sign of how low the bar has been set for contemporary movie parodies, since Transylmania is vulgar, juvenile, gross and not particularly funny. But it at least tells a story rooted in bona fide horror movie cliches rather than stringing together a random series of witless pop-culture gags.

There’s no middle ground with the Twilight saga: You either surrender to Stephenie Meyer’s swoony tale of forbidden love, squeaky-clean teen style, or you just don’t get it.

When we last saw Bella Swan (Stewart), the teen beauty who insists on seeing herself as an ugly duckling, and her dreamy vampire boyfriend, Edward Cullen (Pattinson), they had weathered both a major relationship crisis and a run-in with the vampire world’s sinister elite, the Volturi, who decreed that their romance could end one of two ways. Bella could die and become a vampire or she could just plain die. Harsh, but that's the Volturi — not to mention that they were probably pissed as hell at having to use their centuries of experience to adjudicate a complicate teen romance (even if Edward is 109 years old, which, come to think of it, makes his relationship with 17-year-old Bella more than a little creepy... and that's the kind of thing you find yourself thinking about if you just don't get it).

As Eclipse — based on the third of four novels by Stephenie Meyer — begins, Bella and Edward are working out the details of her transformation. Edward will change her shortly after graduation (why the younger Cullens repeatedly subject themselves to the ordeal of high school is a mystery) and wants to get married at the same time; Bella, however, is more comfortable with becoming a blood-drinking ghoul than a bride, having been traumatized by her parents’ divorce. The movie’s theme, reiterated often and obviously, has been established: Life is about choices and consequences.

And complications, of which there are many for Bella to mope and brood and sulk about: Bella’s dad (Burke) dislikes Edward (if only he knew the louche-looking boyfriend, afraid of what he might do in the throes of vampire passion, is the reason Bella remains a virgin), and her best friend since childhood, studly Native-American shape-shifter Jacob (Lautner), is in a world-class sulk, Bella apparently being the only person in the Pacific Northwest who doesn’t know he’s been crushing on her for years. And Edward’s adopted sister, Alice (Greene), is having visions of feral vamp Victoria (Howard) up to no good: Could she be behind a rash of vicious murders and disappearances in nearby Seattle, and can the werewolves and vampires put aside their centuries-old enmity to protect Bella?

Director David Slade, picking up where Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight) and Chris Weitz (New Moon) left off, has a short but thoroughly apropos resume, consisting of the straight-up vampire bloodbath 30 Days of Night (2007) and art-house shocker Hard Candy (2006), about a coltish adolescent’s double-edged flirtation with a suave sexual predator. Were Eclipse not the third part of a golden juggernaut yoked to its PG-13 rating, he might have given it a dangerous edge. But Meyer’s sensibility, brilliantly attuned to the contradictory inner lives of tweens enraptured by fairy-tale romance but skittish about the power of raw, visceral lust, trumps all: Edward is sexy yet soulful, an artfully neutered object of desire, while Jacob’s inner beast is firmly leashed and nobody is getting any.

Eclipse has a certain sense of humor that Twilight and New Moon lacked: Confronted for the umpteenth time by Jacob’s artfully toned abs, Edward snarls, “Doesn’t he own a shirt?” But the disconnect between message and material is often unintentionally hilarious; witness the scene in which cold-blooded Edward must let Jacob rescue Bella from hypothermia by crawling into her sleeping bag. It should crackle with perverse erotic tension, but it’s a hoot and a half instead: No sex please, we’re sensitive.

Thematic gaffes aside, the CGI werewolves continue to be a huge liability; even allowing for the special-effects truism that flashy monsters are easy and house cats are hard (because everyone knows exactly what cats look like, from the pebbly texture of their noses to the way their fur thins at the base of their ears), the wolves are illusion-shatteringly fake. And the entire hair department should be fired on the basis of Cullen patriarch Peter Facinelli’s brassy blond locks alone: It’s not nitpicking if a character’s hair is less plausible than the love triangle between a werewolf, a vampire and a moody teen.

This review originally appeared in different form in Film Journal International

The Twilight Saga: New Moon hits the ground running, secure in the knowledge that Twi-hard fans are in the house and don't need to be brought up to speed.

It's moody high school senior Bella Swan's (Stewart) 18th birthday, and she's in a funk. Where other girls would be kicking up their heels at having achieved legal majority, Bella is torturing herself with dreams in which she's a withered old hag, standing hand in hand with her preternaturally beautiful boyfriend, Edward (Pattinson). After all, she's a now officially a whole year older than he is. In Bella's defense, a morbid preoccupation with aging comes with dating a 109-year-old vampire who's forever 17, the age at which her beloved Edward died and was reborn into undeath.

But the worst is yet to come: At a party thrown by Edward's "family" of good vampires (good as in, they refrain from drinking human blood) — parents Carlisle and Esme Cullen (Facinelli, Reaser), siblings Alice (Greene), Emmett (Lutz), Rosalie (Reed) and Jasper (Rathbone) — Bella cuts her finger and triggers a brief flare-up of Jasper's perilously suppressed blood lust. It's over in a moment, but Edward sees the writing on the wall: As long as Bella hangs with vampires, she's in mortal danger. Since he's not willing to bear the responsibility of making her into a monster, Edward instead opts to break her heart.

It's time for the Cullens to move on anyway — if the locals haven't yet noticed that Carlisle looks at least a decade younger than he claims to be, they soon will. And even if they chalk up his youthful appearance to spectacularly good genes, they're going to have to start wondering why their teens are maturing into solid adults while his remain willowy and dewy-skinned adolescents. With Edward gone, Bella sulks and rages, eventually emerging from her funk to renew her childhood friendship with Jacob (Taylor Lautner), a member of Washington state's indigenous Quileute tribe. Any adult would see in an instant that Jacob is smitten with Bella. Her bone-headed obliviousness -- to Jacob's "more than friends" longings and to the fact that he's a werewolf -- is just another sign of her voluptuous anguish.

You'd never know Twilight and New Moon had different directors (Chris Weitz replaced Catherine Hardwicke), and that's a good thing: The authorial voice belongs to novelist Stephenie Meyer, and in both movies the book-to-screenplay changes amount to little more than tweaks. What matters is casting and the tone, both of which are eminently true to Meyer's vision.

That said, New Moon has the feel of a placeholder — most of the supporting characters get shockingly short shrift, starting with clan Cullen; if you didn't come in knowing their complex relationships and back stories, you won't figure them out from New Moon. Michael Sheen, who made his werewolf bones in the Underworld series, has a fine old time playing Aro, the self-consciously supercilious upholder of traditional monster values, but Dakota Fanning is conspicuously underused as the deceptively fresh-faced Jane, who appears destined for bigger and badder things somewhere down the moonlit line.

Worse, the CGI werewolves are a flat-out disaster; no matter how much care went into researching the lay of lupine fur and the ripple of predatory muscle, they look profoundly fake, without substance or menace. Suspension of disbelief is a prerequisite for all supernatural tales, but misapplied CGI is a big time illusion-buster. Mock Twilight's sparkly vampire-skin effects all you want: At least there's real flesh under the glitter. New Moon's faux wolves are deal breakers for all but the Twi-hards who, like Bella, have mastered the art of willing themselves to see only what they want to see.

This review originally appeared o AMCtv's Horror Hacker website.

Len Wiseman's revisionist horror tale is so clotted with back story that its central Romeo and Juliet-style tale of the romance between a warrior vampire and a reluctant werewolf never has a chance to breathe. Set in an alternate world in which vampires walk among us, armed to the teeth and locked in a 600-year war with the lycans (short for lycanthropes — werewolves — but which has the misfortune to sound like "lichens," one of several indications that the screenplay was penned by writers who don't have much feel for language), the film is all look and no bite. It is, however, steeped in recent horror lore and features liberal borrowings from The Howling (1981), Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, Marvel's Blade comics and various role-playing games.

Sleek, black-clad Selene (Beckinsale) is a "death dealer," a vampire trained to hunt down and kill lycans. She takes her marching orders from Kraven (Brolly), current head of the vampire clan founded by Viktor (Nighy); Kraven's authority is rooted in the fact that he killed Lucian (Sheen, of Frost/Nixon and The Queen), the lycan whose transgressions started a centuries-old blood feud. Selene neither likes nor trusts Kraven, and she is concerned about a flurry of lycan activity that seems to be focused on a mere mortal named Michael Corvin (Speedman). It seems especially inauspicious given that the vampires are gathering for an awakening ceremony, after which clan control will be handed to an elder roused from hundreds of years of hibernation. Against Kraven's orders, Selene investigates matters and winds up rescuing Michael from the lycans, though she's too late to stop him being bitten.

The third Underworld is a prequel that dissects the origin of the ancient rivalry between vampires and werewolves, which is rooted in the fact that both trace their bloodlines to 16th-century plague-survivor Alexander Corvinus, whose blood spawned two kinds of immortals: The decadent, arrogant vampires and the primitive, downtrodden wolfmen they enslaved.

For centuries, the vampires had the upper hand: Led by the imperious Viktor (Nighy), they enslaved the bestial lycans — savage, vaguely humanish wolves who lacked the ability to shape shift (which begs the question, "what makes them lycanthropes?" but never mind that for now) — and made them an unwilling army of janissaries: literal watch dogs who lived and died to protect their masters as they slept during daylight hours.

And then came Lucian: Uber-vampire Viktor (Nighy) found him, the 100% human-looking spawn of a lycan bitch, in a fetid dungeon and made the fateful decision to spare the infant's life. Viktor used Lucian's blood to create a generation of true, shape-shifting lycanthropes blessed with human intelligence but kept from assuming lupine form by cruel collars. Boot-to-the-throat governance being the perilous proposition it is, the grown Lucian (Sheen, who spends half the film half naked and obviously logged some serious gym time), Viktor's emasculated lapdog, inevitably rebels, first testing the boundaries through a forbidden, erotically charged liaison with Viktor's wayward daughter, Sonja (Mitra) — who happens to look uncannily like Death Dealer Selene (Kate Beckinsale, conspicuously absent from Rise of the Lycans), who, centuries later, will be the agent of Viktor's destruction — and then embraces his destiny as the alpha dog who incites his fellow wolf men to all-out rebellion.

Think of Underworld: Rise of the Lycans as Spartacus with Sheen as the Thracian rebel and Nighy as Roman politician Crassus, crossed with Romeo and Juliet. Underworld: Rise of the Lycans is nothing if not forthright about its (barely) subtext, from pallid uber-WASP Viktor telling the subservient Lucian that he's "a credit to his race" to Lucian's impassioned appeal to both Lycans and human chattel.

Written and Directed by: Marquette Williams.
With: Nicholas Endres, Michael Reddy, Anthony Nickerson, Martez Howard, Elina Burgos and Judy Jean Kwon.

Cleveland-born writer-director Marquette Williams’ uneven independent feature uses thriller clichés to explore an ambitious story about sexual abuse, institutional corruption, ineffectual social-service oversight and the price of revenge.

A blandly tidy Cleveland house becomes a hive of activity as police dispassionately collect and log forensic evidence — blood, bullet casings, overturned furniture — that adds up to a map of dark and disturbing events.

Sometime earlier: Middle-aged Sam Hickle (Reddy) and his considerably younger Vietnamese wife, Doris (Endres), are starting an ordinary day when the extraordinary shatters their middle-class complacency: A masked man with a gun (Nickerson) invades their home, binding and brutalizing the couple as their foster children — African-American adolescent Jeffrey Green (Howard) and mixed-race Anne Pearl (Burgos), who looks to be six or seven — cower in their room. The intruder gradually reveals that he’s looking for Doris’ estranged twin brother, tattooed tweaker Donnie Minh, and doesn’t believe for a moment that they have no idea where Donnie is.

The intruder’s relentless interrogation gradually reveals, via a series of fragmented flashbacks, the ugly truth behind the blandly ordinary facade. The Hickles’ apparently unremarkable existence conceals a domestic hell of abuse, betrayal, sexual exploitation and despair.

Williams’ debut feature takes on a slew of disturbing topics, including online sex rings, child abuse and the ease with which dedicated predators can elude official supervision. It’s unfortunate that his grasp exceeds his reach by a considerable margin: The flashback structure is awkward rather than enigmatic, the performances range from effectively unpolished to distractingly amateurish, Doris and Donnie are defined largely by cultural tropes that verge on offensive stereotypes and any attentive viewer will see the big twist coming long before the climactic reveal. But to his credit, Marquette never stoops to eroticizing violence or celebrating vengeance: A sense of stark, everyday horror underlies Unspeakable’s increasingly appalling revelations.

Patrick Lussier's in-name-only, direct-to-DVD sequel to 2005's White Noise is a surprisingly effective psychological thriller driven by Lussier's assured direction and star Nathan (Firefly) Fillion's affecting portrayal of a family man cruelly robbed of his family.

In one blood-spattered moment, commercial designer Abe Dale (Fillion) loses everything that made his life worth living. As he's enjoying a casual anniversary breakfast at a local diner with his wife and small son (Cross, Ballard), a mad man with a gun calmly walks up to their table, kills Dale's family and then turns the gun on himself. Dale spends the next several months trying to numb his grief and guilt with alcohol and prescription pills, but nothing helps. He loses interest in his work, withdraws from his friends — including longtime business partner, Marty Bloom (Holmes) — and sinks into a spiraling depression that culminates in attempted suicide.

Hauled back from the brink of death by a dedicated ER team, led by Dr. Karros (MacDonald), Dale begins to see an aura around certain people, and soon realizes that they all die shortly after. Karros happens to be versed in EVP &mdeash; communication with the dead via the white noise generated by electronic devices — and tells Dale that people who've survived near-death experiences seem especially receptive to such messages. Haunted by his inability to save the people he loved most, Dale tries to compensate by rescuing strangers whose fates he alone can see. Dale's efforts are successful: He alters the destinies of several people, one of whom turns out to be widowed nurse Sherry Clarke (Battlestar Galactica's Sackhoff), who looked after Dale during his hospitalization. United by their respective losses, they embark on a tentative relationship. Then Dale makes a shattering discovery: The man who killed his wife and child was neither a total stranger nor a deranged street person. Henry Caine (Fairbrass), a model citizen until he survived his own near-death experience, crossed paths with Dale's family three days before the murders. What Dale discovers about Caine's efforts to thwart fate puts everything he himself has done into a horrifying new light.

Here's a dilemma: Your movie stars Underworld's sexy Kate Beckinsale (yay!), but it's set in frigid Antarctica, where the dress code runs to multiple layers of sweaters, scarves, thermal vests and lumpy parkas (boo!). What to do? If you're smart, you follow the action-packed, 50-years-earlier prologue, involving trigger-happy Russians and a spectacular plane crash, with a sequence in which Beckinsale strips off her layers of gear and takes a steamy shower. OK, is everybody happy? Now, to business.

Continue Reading Whiteout

Set in Finnish Lapland, this odd mix of folk tale, anthropological fantasy and horror story received both a Golden Globe Award and a prize at the Cannes Film Festival for the best "Mythical Film."

In a silent prologue accompanied by a traditional "sounding song," a pregnant woman makes her way through the snow and bitter winds to an isolated Sami village and dies immediately after giving birth to a daughter. The child's descendents will all be tainted with the "curse of the midnight sun."

In the present day, bold, spirited Pirita (co-writer Kuosmanen, filmmaker Blomberg's wife) shows off her skills in a sled race, winning the heart of Aslak (Nissila). Aslak asks for and receives her hand in marriage, but Pirita soon tires of her new husband's aloofness and long absences as he grazes the tribe's vast reindeer herd in far-flung fields. She appeals to shaman Tsalkku-Nilla (Lehesmaa) for a spell that will keep Aslak close, nothing the sage hasn't done dozens — if not hundreds — of times before for neglected brides. He advises her to sacrifice the doe Aslak gave her as a pet and mix its blood with earth from the reindeer graveyard.

But Pirita carries the midnight sun curse, and the spell goes powerfully awry; she becomes an irresistible siren with the power to transform herself into a vicious white reindeer and kill any hunter brash enough to follow her into the deep tundra. The villagers grow increasingly frightened as one man after another is lured to his death, and rumors run rife that the legendary white reindeer is responsible. Pirita, meanwhile, is horrified at what she has become — more so because she's newly pregnant — and terrified that she may kill Aslak.

Much delayed and dogged, if you will, by dark rumors of reshoots and escalating speculation that it was shaping up to be greater disaster than Van Helsing (2004), Universal Pictures’ last high-profile attempt to leverage its legendary classic-horror library for the modern marketplace, The Wolfman is a pleasant surprise simply by virtue as awful as you might expect. It’s a handsomely mounted throwback to Hammer’s gothic frightfests — the action is even pushed back to fifty years before that of the iconic Lon Chaney Jr. Wolf Man (1941), which was set in the then-present day — that wears its R rating proudly and ignores current fashions in love-struck monsters trapped in gloomy-doom romances with misunderstood teenagers. Say what you will about Del Toro’s Lawrence Talbot: He may be tormented, but he’s no dreamy emo boy; when he broods, the sky darkens.

1891, Blackmoor, England: Estranged from his father and haunted by memories of his mother’s brutal murder, acclaimed actor Lawrence Talbot hasn’t been home since he was a child. But a letter from his younger brother Ben’s fiancée, Gwen Conliffe (Blunt), compels his return: Ben is missing and she fears the worst. Lawrence’s father, larger-than-life big-game hunter Sir John (Hopkins), greets him with practiced scorn &emdash “the prodigal son returns,” drawls Sir John, leaving no doubt that fatted calf is not on tonight’s menu &emdash; and bad news: Ben’s mutilated corpse has been pulled from a ditch somewhere on the rambling, half-wild Talbot estate.

The locals blame the gypsies, who set up camp with their dogs, ragged children and performing bear shortly before Ben disappeared. The gypsies murmur darkly amongst themselves and Scotland Yard’s notorious Inspector Abberline (Weaving), the man who failed to catch Jack the Ripper, has been dispatched from London to investigate. Lawrence, driven by the inchoate conviction that Ben’s death and his own inner demons are connected to dark Talbot-family secret, begins to make his own inquiries, which are met by the locals with a mix of obsequious courtesy and ill-concealed suspicion. He may be Blackmoor-born, but young Lawrence was sent to an insane asylum after his mother’s death, then fobbed off on American relatives — he’s as good as a stranger, and Backmoor isn’t the kind of place that welcomes strangers.

And that’s before Lawrence is viciously savaged by some huge animal while poking around the gypsy encampment, sustaining injuries that should by all rights have killed him. His miraculous — some might say unnatural — recovery smacks of devilishness.

Is The Wolfman scary? No. Does it acknowledge and respect classic werewolf-movie traditions? That would be a big yes, right down to Rick Baker’s decision to use as his inspiration Jack Pierce’s two-legged, modestly-muzzled wolf man make-up as his inspiration — Rick Baker, the guy who almost single-handedly changed the face of cinematic lycanthropy with An American Werewolf in London (1981). It’s sweet, in a geeky kind of way, a bow to a genre pioneer by a fanboy big enough to do whatever he damned well pleases. But the look is totally old-fashioned and unlikely to make horror fans under the age of fifty howl with delight… snotty derision, more like it.

Hopkins has his usually high old time playing the imperious Sir John, who sweeps around his gloomy manor house in a tiger-trimmed dressing gown, trailed by a Sikh retainer (Malik) and a snarling hound. The swarthy Del Toro was born to play a wolfish man (if not Hopkins’ son, raven-haired mother notwithstanding), and the supporting cast suitably colorful. The trouble is that there’s really no point: Screenwriters Walker and Self are clever, but for all the new trappings — making Lawrence an actor, whom we first glimpse performing Hamlet; some hellish asylum scenes; and adding Abberline to the mix — this Wolfman is ultimately thin beer in a handsome glass.