I heard rumors about a French horror film that was too intense to be released in American theaters. After finding out that the duo responsible for this film, Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury, were set to work on the upcoming Hellraiser remake, and reading some very positive reviews, I could not resist the opportunity to attend a limited screening of Inside (À l'intérieur). After the first 30 minutes or so, I feared that I had let my expectations get too high. By the end of the final frame of the movie, I knew that I could not have been more wrong. This is undoubtedly one of the best horror films that I have ever seen.

In one tragic moment during the middle of her pregnancy, our heroine Sarah is involved in a deadly two car collision. She and her unborn child survived. The love of her life and father of her child did not. 5 months later, the now widowed Sarah is spending Christmas alone. It will be her last night alone as she will be going in to the hospital to have labor induced the next day. Only we will soon find out… Sarah is not alone.

Shutter is about a young newlywed couple that is haunted by a ghost. The young man is a professional photographer and he gets a job to do a photo shoot in Japan. The couple appear to run over a woman while driving around in Japan, but the body never does turn up. Afterwards, they start to see strange occurrences and images in the massive amounts of photographs that the two are taking while on their trip. Eventually, the spirit manifests itself into more than just photo irregularities and tries to kill the couple and their friends. Will they figure out the ghost’s terrible secret before it’s too late? This, my friends, is Shutter.

Like William Wallace had an uncanny ability to detect a trap before it was revealed, WL Paynecraft has an equally uncanny ability to detect a shitfest from merely viewing the trailer. This movie was no exception. The trailer looked like crap and had the same marketing trappings that Hollywood has used countless times before to lure unsuspecting 13-year-old girls to go watch this movie. I would never have watched this movie to begin with, since viewing this uninspiring trailer. However, it was Saturday night, the Mrs. and I were wanting to go watch a movie, and there was an awesomely bad selection of crap on at the theater otherwise. It was this, The Other Bolyn Girl, or Bunny in Easterland or some shit. This had to do. I didn’t even know this was a remake, though I should have known.

Take a 50’s monster movie, move it into the present day and add a bunch of gizmos and guns and you’ve got the basics for Daemon.

Jeff Lehane is a retired black ops specialist perfectly content to live the rest of his life away from most people. When he is asked to help guard a rap star he initially refuses but is lured back in once he learns his ex-wife is running the show. After she is killed during an assassination attempt he makes it his business to find her killer, especially once he learns something has broken into the morgue to chew up her body. The story then follows Lehane and his team as they learn that this isn’t a typical hit but something far more otherworldly and evil.

I’ve read quite a few Harry Shannon stories and one thing he does really well is the flawed hero. Harry manages to make guys with honor, brains, and ass kicking ability without writing the same character over and over or so goody-goody Gary Stuish you want something large and pointy to fall on them.

The Colossus is the world’s largest offshore drilling rig. Standing seven stories above water, the rig is able to drill thousands of feet into the ocean’s core. The Nexecon Corporation has sent The Colossus to the artic for it’s first strike and a camera crew has been sent along with the staff to cover the rig’s initial mission. But deep in the ocean’s depths the crew finds something more than oil, they find a section of ocean hidden and untouched for millions of years and they have also found something very, very hungry.

Megalodon is a straight-to-video release horror movie dealing with a sixty foot, prehistoric shark, it’s nothing new, nothing unpredictable and nothing remarkable, but it does try and it does it’s best with a very low budget.

Evil company, blah blah blah, terrorized work crew, blah blah blah, one guy who warns everyone else, blah blah blah, really big shark, blah blah, blah, bad effects and acting.

Cloverfield
I Am Legend
Hatchet
The Mist
Saw IV
Shutter
Daemon
Doomed
Dracula III
One Missed Call
Fair Haired Child
Severance
AVP:R
Ju-On 2
Black Sheep
Silence of the Lambs
Clown
Wishing Stairs
Night of the Living Dorks
HeartSick
5ive Girls
Fido
Judge Dredd vs Aliens
Zodiac
Are You Scared?
Magic
The Washingtonians

If you’re the inventor of the modern zombie movie, how do you up the ante in a genre you helped create? Well, if you’re George Romero, you evolve the concept by stripping it back down to its genesis. Call it “Land of the Dead Unplugged”, if you will.

The movie begins with a group of college film students and their professor on location for a mummy movie that is the project of one of bunch. While he has written and is directing a horror film, his dream is to be a documentary film-maker. So when news of the outbreak reaches them while filming, our director, Jason, remains behind the camera so that he can record for posterity “the night when everything changed”. The other students, while somewhat stereotypical (the beauty, the geek, the rich kid), are all solid characters that add different dimensions to the story. Jason’s girlfriend, Debbie, serves as Romero’s social commentator, more than once posing the question, “What, it isn’t real if you don’t get it on tape?”

Three tales of urban horror are about to unfold homies, so sit back, blaze one and let the hound of hell himself, Snoop Doggy Dog lead you through the dark and into the light in Snoop Dogg’s Hood of Horror.

Like Creepshow, Tales from the Darkside, and Twilight Zone: The Movie, Hood of Horror takes a few short segments and wraps them together into one movie. But the questions is does the Dogg have any bite in his second horror outing or is it mostly bark? Well, read on to find out.

Hood of Horror starts with a pretty nifty animation style opening and then after a brief opening by our host, the Dogg, we head into our first short entitled “Crossed Out.”

A group of college kids investigate a local cult gone wrong for their class project. Before Google is even engaged one of them dies mysteriously. The others continue on. Duh.

So there are pretty much two types of bad movies. There are bad movies that are so bad they’re good and you can get some kind of enjoyment out of them. Then there are movies that are so bad you would rather be watching Barbie’s Mariposa with your kid in the next room for the third time that day. Guess which one this is?

One irritating thing that I shouldn’t let affect my opinion of the movie but can’t help myself? The “Property of Maverick Entertainment Group, Inc.” typed in freaking 48 point type I had to watch the entire movie through. I get why its there but when I couldn’t tell what was going on half the time you might want to consider making that declaration slightly more unobtrusive.

Deep in the woods of West Virginia a small production crew is shooting the pilot episode for a new reality show called “The Apocalypse“, which pits contestants against one another to see who the ultimate survivor is. But as the contestants and crew soon learn, this reality show is about to become more real than they could every imagine for hidden deep in the woods is a family that has survived longer than anyone else and they have survived robbing, killing and eating anyone who comes into their neck of the woods. Once again, deep in the Appalachian wilderness, someone has made a wrong turn and this time it heads straight into a dead end!

I wasn’t a huge fan of Wrong Turn when it came out a few years ago and I have to admit I wasn’t that thrilled when I heard they were making a direct to video sequel, but I found this sequel to be not only better than the first film, but a hell of a lot more fun as well.