Edited by P.N. Elrod (pictured), famed author of the VAMPIRE FILES series, DARK AND STORMY KNIGHTS (St. Martin’s Press) is a collection of nine horror/supernatural tales focusing on the modern-day warriors who keep humanity safe from the nightmarish monsters lurking in the shadows. But don’t let the title lead you to expect the long-haired, bare-chested “knights in shining armor” from your grandmother’s romance novels.

The third installment of DC/Vertigo’s five-part I, ZOMBIE finds our favorite undead detective and her motley crew of misfit comrades getting closer and closer to solving the mystery of “Dead Fred.” However, for a story arc over halfway complete, this has barely given us something resembling a clue as to where it’s all of headed.

Simon Rumley is one hell of a filmmaker. He doesn’t make easy films, and his stories aren’t neatly confined to a genre, but they certainly are horrific and they’ll most definitely stay with you late into the night. His last foray into cinema, THE LIVING & THE DEAD was a sort of Gothic, English manor tragedy infused with Lynchian madness about a mentally retarded young man’s inability to take care of his terminally ill mother and the deteriorating consequences. For his latest feature, he’s turned his eye to America in the ominously titled RED WHITE & BLUE, and the results are just as heartbreaking. The movie screens at Montreal’s Fantasia film festival on July 21 with Rumley and cast attending.

A SERBIAN FILM, playing Friday, July 16 and Monday, July 19 at Montreal’s Fantasia film festival as part of the Subversive Serbia series, is one of those rare movies I can’t quantify with a rating (thus no skulls at the end of this review). Even as a die-hard horror fan, I found parts of the film too much to stomach—especially in the last half-hour, which left me feeling that director/co-writer Srdjan Spasojevic was indulging in grotesque shock-provocation for its own sake. And yet I can’t deny the power and the skill with which he spins the bulk of his story.

If it’s twisted you want, look no further than first-time Australian director Sean Byrne’s deeply damaged, dark and horrifying John-Hughes- goes-to-hell shocker THE LOVED ONES, which screens at Montreal’s Fantasia film festival on July 26. The film takes the sweaty-palmed teen romance/melodrama and completely drags its screaming carcass across the bloody coals, taking few prisoners with its explicit cruelty but never sacrificing its deft character arcs or broad sense of black comedy.

It’s never a good sign when a movie begins with opening text to provide viewers with some backstory—and also has a narrator speaking the words. Isn’t that sort of redundant? That’s the inauspicious start to EYEBORGS (out on DVD and Blu-ray from Image Entertainment), a potentially interesting SF take on the war on terror that features impressive low-budget visual FX but is ultimately bogged down by a stagnant script, unnecessarily long and sluggish exposition scenes and a somber tone that works against its Syfy creature-feature premise.

A rubber-suited-monster franchise is an unlikely place for a sequel to improve on its original, but that’s what happens with GAMERA VS. BARUGON. And Shout! Factory’s new DVD finally allows its qualities to stand out for American viewers, following the cropped and dubbed version released to television by Sandy Frank Productions in the ’80s and ’90s and, before that, the cropped, dubbed and edited cut syndicated in the ’60s and ’70s by AIP-TV as WAR OF THE MONSTERS.