In director/co-writer J.T. Seaton’s feature debut GEORGE: A ZOMBIE INTERVENTION, friends and family gather to plan out and stage an intervention for the eponymous undead fellow. His addiction: eating people. In your typical Romero-esque zombie flick, the very notion of having such an intervention would be absurd, since those living dead hardly qualify as intelligent. But Seaton and writing partner Brad Hodson are clever guys, and the film lurking on Vicious Circle/Breaking Glass Pictures’ DVD is far smarter than the title would lead you to suspect.

Like the shadow of a decaying hand reaching out for me that I cannot run away from, Lucio Fulci’s most infamous and undying classic about the hungry dead, ZOMBIE, is once more before me on the autopsy table for a thorough dissection.  I suppose it is appropriate that once every couple of years, this particular film seemingly rises from the dead and forces me to take another in-depth look at it – yet somehow I’m always left with the feeling that what I think has been my ultimate review for the title in the latest technology du jour (from laserdisc to DVD and now Blu-Ray) turns out to be, in fact, my penultimate review.

Japanese cinematic horror fables have a rich history of sardonic worldviews, sexual and psychological overtones as well as feminist undertones. ONIBABA (1964) and KURONEKO (1968), two films directed by Kaneto Shindô (who, at 99 years old, is still writing and directing), fit very snugly into this category. The former has been available on DVD from Criterion for a few years now, while the latter makes its DVD and Blu-ray debut this week from the same company. Wait, did I mention the feline vampires?

For horror fans, news of a quality release of any good silent genre film should be cause for celebration, and there’s been much to celebrate in the last few years, with reconstructed and remastered reissues of NOSFERATU, FAUST, VAMPYR and METROPOLIS gracing retail inventories. Now the Criterion Collection has added yet another silent supernatural treat in the form of Victor Sjöström’s 1921 Swedish classic THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE.

Call him the maestro of the long-winded title, call him a genre chameleon, call him overambitious—just don’t call him a hack. Sergio Martino is a painter, not a butcher. And should you thumb through his portfolio of filmic giallo canvases for evidence, you’ll find some works more rambling and some more obscure, but none underline the essence of his sanguinary chic like TORSO, which has made its U.S. Blu-ray debut via Blue Underground.

He has given us a malformed, severed Siamese twin viciously mutilating the doctors who separated him from his brother, and oral sex unwittingly performed upon a brain-sucking parasite, but never let it be said that writer/director Frank Henenlotter doesn’t know when to hold back. “I never wanted this to be a gore film,” he says at the start of his commentary track on Synapse Films’ Blu-ray (coming November 8) of FRANKENHOOKER, in which a young self-styled scientist (James Lorinz) rebuilds his girlfriend (ravaged in a lawnmower accident) from parts of dead prostitutes who have exploded after smoking “super-crack.”

I do love grindhouse, so when a new double feature came across my desk I was more than willing to give it my full frontal attention. Mere seconds in I realized this would not be like any grindhouse film I’d ever seen. There was a little bit more hugging then I remember from other films of the sub-genre, for starters. This was because the disc I slipped in was adult distributor Adam & Eve’s GRINDHOUSE XXX, an action packed double feature starring Teagan Presley and Alexis Ford.