Strong creature design is the sole calling card of Dog Soldiers, in which Scottish military men engaged in a training mission in the deep dark woods square off against a pack of tactical werewolves. In his feature debut, writer/director Neil Marshall (The Descent, Doomsday) falls back mainly on army squad clichés and rote conflicts, along…

A war satire woefully short on laughs, The Men Who Stare At Goats is about precisely nothing – other than stars desperately trying to energize humorless material – until its concluding moments, at which point it futilely attempts to make a statement about the need for innovative, non-violent dreamers in our current war-entrenched country. Directed…

Drenching itself in ‘70s and ‘80s stylings merely reinforces the fact that Whip It has been seen a hundred times before in slightly altered incarnations. Still, as a saga of rebellious youth achieving self-actualization, Drew Barrymore’s maiden behind-the-camera effort could be far worse, excessively prolonging its tale but injecting it with enough vivacious you-go-girl energy…

Nimród Antal’s sleek direction is the only thing of interest in Armored, a rote B-movie in which a heist goes wrong courtesy of one robber’s nagging conscience. Having just lost both his parents, which left him with a house the bank wants to repossess and a delinquent kid brother social services wants to snatch, armored…

Not a sequel so much as an elaborate do-over, Evil Dead II amps up the ghastly laughs to generally thrilling results. Though its characters aren’t, the film is distinctly aware of its predecessor, as evidenced by its blowing through an intro – in which Ash (Bruce Campbell) takes Annie (Sarah Berry) to a remote cabin,…

Neil Marshall deliberately avoids reinventing the wheel with Doomsday, a post-apocalyptic thriller that bluntly melds 28 Days Later, The Road Warrior, Robin Hood and the Flesh Fair sequence from A.I. That, for a time, this hodgepodge works at all is a testament to his no-nonsense approach to the material, which is played fast, cheap and…

Critically assessing Alien³ is inherently problematic, thanks to creative interference by Twentieth-Century Fox that so thoroughly frustrated director David Fincher, he continues to refuse to discuss (much less revisit) his feature debut. Yet while the theatrical cut is notable mainly for the abominable changes made to it by studio suits, the DVD “assembly cut” –…

“I ain’t got time to bleed,” Jesse “The Body” Ventura’s commando famously retorts in Predator, and likewise, John McTiernan’s 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle ain’t got time to waste on subtlety. The early, prolonged close-up of Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers’ steroidal biceps as the men clasp hands encapsulates this muscular sci-fi saga, about a special ops…

Given its superiority to countless modern horror trifles thrust into multiplexes, it would be difficult to fathom the straight-to-DVD route taken by The Midnight Meat Train (a token theatrical release in a few random markets doesn’t count) save for one considerable detail: its gore. Ryuhei Kitamura’s adaptation of Clive Barker’s short story is so thoroughly…