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.

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.

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.

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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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…?

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.

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.

"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."

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.

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.

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.