Charting meta-horror terrain nine years before Scream would make it ubiquitous, Fright Night celebrates genre clichés even as it exposes them as such. In anonymous Small Town, U.S.A., teenage scary-movie buff Charley (William Ragsdale) turns away from his frigid girlfriend Amy (Amanda Bearse) at the moment she’s about to spread her legs so that he…

Wes Craven’s My Soul to Take opens promisingly, with a husband going mysteriously schizo – or is he actually possessed? – with a knife featuring “Vengeance” etched on its blade. After a frenzied murder spree ends with the serial killer, dubbed “The Riverton Ripper,” disappearing into the night, Craven’s story (the first one he’s penned…

Yet another faux-verité action-horror effort that manages to be clever without being actually terrifying or thrilling, Trollhunter offers up the tale – culled from “found footage” – of three student filmmakers who, while investigating a series of strange bear killings in Norway, discover that the true cause of these incidents is the country’s suddenly out-of-control…

Israel’s first horror film, Rabies turns a caustic eye toward its citizenry, all of whom – through circumstances that lead to fatal miscommunications, selfishness, exposed secrets and exploited fears and hang-ups – prove comfortable veering from sociable to sinister. Opening on Tali (Liat Harlev) awakening to find herself in a narrow trap dug in the…

A reverential ode to Kubrick, Argento, Cronenberg, Altered States, John Carpenter synth scores, ‘70s sci-fi and ‘80s fantasy, and mind-boggling, hyper-stylized madness, Beyond the Black Rainbow simultaneously pays homage while blazing its own uniquely insane trail. Director Panos Cosmatos (son of Rambo: First Blood Part II and Tombstone helmer George P. Cosmatos) holds little back…

The shadowy demon is back in Paranormal Activity 2, and this time, IT WANTS THE BABY! Unfortunately, the good ol’ child-in-peril gimmick is the only new thing offered by Tod Williams’ follow-up to Oren Peli’s 2007 hit. Primarily taking place in the two months prior to the first film’s events, this sequel charts the supernatural…

Frank Miller’s nasty wit occasionally offsets typical sequel redundancy in Robocop 2, a needless follow-up that rehashes the satiric and character-based concerns of its superior predecessor. Directed by Irvin Kershner (The Empire Strikes Back), the film revolves around the efforts of Robocop (Peter Weller) to squash the spread of new designer drug Nuke, which is…

As slow as molasses and just as exciting, The Mechanic wants to be a Jean-Pierre Melville film, but instead proves merely a sluggish marriage of affected existentialism and brute violence. Director Michael Winner’s methodical pacing, casual references to masculine “codes,” and two scenes involving martial arts – not to mention his story’s focus on a…

A glossy, tawdry thriller that barely scratches the surface of its upstairs-downstairs dynamics, The Housemaid – a flamboyantly melodramatic remake of Kim Ki-young’s 1960 film of the same name – charts a household thrown into turmoil after the hiring of a new maid. That woman, Eun-yi (Secret Sunshine’s Jeon Do-yeon), is first spied blowing bubblegum…

Ghosts of Mars, John Carpenter’s much-maligned last feature (to date), may have fake-looking exterior sets and some one-liners that should have never left the word processer, but with propulsive momentum and surprisingly deft aesthetics, it’s a rather sturdy modernized mash-up of Assault on Precinct 13 and Escape from New York. In the distant future, Mars…