Mutants:
I'll often look for an 'angle' to 'get into' a movie review. Trust me people; this stuff only looks easy! So, even though Mutants is such an inept movie that no matter the angle from which it's observed there's really nothing positive to say about it, I'm still going to find a positive entrance into this review. Since Mutants headlines (not stars) steely-faced genre vet Michael Ironside, we'll nominate this review as a Michael Ironside appreciation effort.

Aside from the presence of the badass dyspeptic one, Mutants has less than zero going for it. Plot-wise, I suppose the old 'evil sugar company' trying to turn the beloved sweetener into something "more addictive than cocaine and caffeine combined" can be forgiven. Of course those business-crazy knuckleheads keep getting the formula wrong as they test it on human abductees. The lucky ones turn into zombie-type...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Ghost Month is an honest effort at a supernatural thriller that never quite hits the sweet spot. It looks quite good, with an often dramatic visual style, and with impressive special effects, but all in the service of a muddled story that rarely provides more than a moment or two of tension.

The film involves a young lady, Alyssa (Marina Resa) who gets a housekeeping job at an isolated house in the desert to try to get away from her obsessive ex-boyfriend. Her employer is Miss Wu (Shirley To), whose father was an expatriate Chinese architect who designed the home in which they live. Miss Wu and her Aunt Chen (Akiko Shima) are devout followers of the old Chinese folk ways, and perform rituals to appease the spirits wandering the earth. Alyssa has arrived, it seems, at the beginning of ghost month, the thirty days of the year in which the spirits of the dead come up from hel...Read the entire review

The Movie:

ATTENTION! ATTENTION! North American Motion Pictures, the distributor of Ghosts of Goldfield on home video, would like you to know that this cheap 2006 production stars someone who was in the cast of Twilight. His name is Kellan Lutz, and the distributor would also like you to know that he appeared in the recent redux of Prom Night.

These facts are reiterated no less than four different times on the DVD cover art; the front has Lutz's name and his Twilight credit above the title along with a quote from Stuart Alson of Independent Film Quarterly about Lutz, while the back reprints said quote (!!!), with the films ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

To be honest, there are only two things that are important in Carnivorous, a horrid Z-grade concoction that has recently seen the home video light of day thanks to North American Motion Pictures. One, rapper DMX is in it. The cover art makes a big deal about his involvement - though he's hardly the star of the film. Two, a giant, poorly-animated, voodoo-fueled snake with an alligator's head is the cause of all the mayhem in this movie. And while Carnivorous is trashy to the nth degree, it does deliver on both counts, and fans of schlock should t...Read the entire review

The Product:
With remakes a'plenty and a true dearth of originality, one could argue that the horror film is (once again) on its last legs. Of course, the moment we critics complain about such things, something new and unusual like Asian fright films or torture porn comes along and restocks the fright fuel tanks - at least, temporarily. Still, it seems that over the last few years the genre has been stuck in an endless cycle of revamps, reimaginings, and retardation. So when something like Dark Reel comes along, it's hard to know what to say. On the one side, it's a typical killer on the loose title, a masked madman (or woman) with an unhealthy vendetta and a means of murdering those who wronged him/her. On the other hand, what director Josh Eisenstadt tries to do here is truly novel. He wants to build a believable movie, one motivated by plot, people, and a particular sense of humor ...Read the entire review