The first and most important thing to keep in mind when sitting down to watch Robin Hardy’s THE WICKER TREE is that it’s not a direct sequel to Hardy’s horror masterpiece THE WICKER MAN—not in story and certainly not in spirit. Better to think of TREE as the EVIL DEAD II to MAN’s EVIL DEAD—a sort of semi-remake that explicitly brings out the comedic elements that lay beneath the original’s surface.

The V word is mentioned once and early in MIDNIGHT SON, signaling that the movie isn’t trying to be a self-consciously subversive take on the much-traveled subgenre. Rather, this independent production (currently playing Montreal’s Fantasia festival) is a straightforward and well-told story of one young man’s attempts to deal with his unfortunate hunger for blood.

A LONELY PLACE TO DIE is about a small group of people caught up in a terrifying experience where they don’t know what’s coming next—and that’s the same experience, albeit a much safer one, that a hopefully much larger audience will have when watching it. Anyone reading this review has most likely seen more than their share of violent wilderness-survival thrillers, but this one makes the whole subgenre seem fresh and frightening again. 

Since the 1970s, the guiding influence for most horror anthology films, directly or indirectly, has been EC Comics or THE TWILIGHT ZONE, with the stories-within-the-movie often serving as setups to a punchline either gory or ironic. The superior new omnibus feature THE THEATRE BIZARRE, which reaches back further to the Grand Guignol for inspiration, is a little different; while its tales certainly sock you with bloody whammies at the end, most of them are as much about the journey as the destination. 

Can Kevin Smith direct a horror film? Well, I wouldn’t really qualify RED STATE (which served as the opening-night movie at this year’s Fantasia festival) as a fright flick per se, but the director of CLERKS and ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO most certainly has made a bold departure from his comedic cinema, and delivered an effectively disturbing and dramatic film with horrific elements that focuses on religious fundamentalism and extremism at its worst. Yes, folks, there’s another side to Smith as a director, a dark side­—and he successfully taps into it with RED STATE. And those looking for cameo appearances by Jay and Silent Bob will be in for a surprise…

I know this review might get me in hot water, but I am willing to take the heat: The last few HARRY POTTER films belong in the FANGORIA universe.

YAKUZA WEAPON the movie is kind of like its protagonist, Shozo Iwaki (Tak Sakaguchi). He’s a mob boss’ son who gets heavy artillery grafted onto him to blow people away, and the movie pieces together bits and influences from past movies to blow audiences away. It’s the most over-the-top entertaining film to come out of Japan’s Sushi Typhoon company since ALIEN VS. NINJA (with which it shares action director Yuji Shimomura).