Italian director Ivan Zuccon takes a thoughtful approach to H.P. Lovecraft’s seminal short story “The Colour Out of Space” in COLOUR FROM THE DARK (now out on DVD from Vanguard), transplanting the story from America to rural Italy, 1943. Right at the center of “The Great War,” just as it seemed Europe would fall to the fascists and the Nazis, we are introduced to Pietro and Lucia, who live on an isolated farm with Lucia's younger sister, Alice.

Kudos to vault raider Michael Schlesinger and others at Sony Pictures Home Entertainment for digging up six lesser-known features from the fabled fright factory Hammer Films, out now on DVD for the first time in this above-average three-disc collection. Though best known for their Gothic horror reworkings—CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, HORROR OF DRACULA, THE MUMMY, CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF, et al.—the British studio (1935-1978) produced a wide variety of films, from ribald comedies to period swashbucklers.

“When he grins, birds fall off telephone lines,” says DOLAN’S CADILLAC hero Robinson (Wes Bentley) of his nemesis Jimmy Dolan, in narration not lifted from the Stephen King story on which the film is based. “When he looks at you a certain way, your prostate goes bad and your urine burns. The grass yellows up and dies where he spits… He has the name of a thousand demons.” But when we see this hellish fiend, he turns out to be…Christian Slater, who still can’t help looking like a kid playing dress-up when he dons the finery of this malevolent underworld figure.

BIGFOOT has just been released on DVD by Troma, but it wasn’t produced by the company—and might have wound up more fun if it had been. A Tromatized take on the legendary man-monster holds all kinds of amusing possibilities; perhaps he could invade the New Jersey Pine Barrens and get into a turf war with the Toxic Avenger (this Sasquatch’s growls even sound like Toxie’s). As it stands, BIGFOOT, which was made five years ago, would have to date back a few decades more to seem like a fresh take on this subgenre.

How can you go wrong with a campy, Gothic vampire soap opera that is composed almost entirely of hot, steamy guys who get naked at the drop of a hat? In the case of THE LAIR: The Complete Third Season, the answer is: You really can’t, at least not in this girl’s eyes.

Any pop-culture receptacle who hasn’t gone deaf or blind in the past four years is no stranger to the inexplicable cultural phenomenon known as the TWILIGHT Saga. Stephanie Meyer, the captain of this teenage girls’ attention-span-consuming cash cow, and her subsequently movie-directing cohorts and actors have taken the age-old story of Romeo and Juliet, mixed it with vampires and werewolves, given it an emo makeover and slapped it across bookstores, big screens, small screens, T-shirts, and every side of the Internet possible.

Along with leg warmers, the Golden Age of the slasher film died in the mid-1980s. Since then, there have been hundreds of uninspired films that took the established formula, added one or two very slight variations and burned our retinas with an inferior sense of déjà vu. Very few post-Golden Age slashers have stayed true to the formula while offering a fresh, smart take on the subgenre. It’s not an easy task, and unfortunately, SPIRIT CAMP is not one of those few. Its heart is in the right place, but it doesn’t have the guts.