The Movie:
Ground Zero is yet another new zombie movie, with limited locations to help keep costs down. While it has a potentially interesting setup and some great blood and gore effects, overall it comes off as a bit of a disappointment.

Jairus and Greer (Mike Langer and Sahna Foley) are a pair of professional cleaners. They quickly and discretely dispose of corpses, no questions asked. One of their best clients is Mr. Johnson (David Candland), operative for NatTech, some kind of genetic research company that apparently needs a lot of bodies disappeared. Jairus and Greer are called up for a big job. They need to clean up a number of bodies stored in an abandoned warehouse, and quickly because the warehouse will be swarming with workman later in the day.

What the cleaners don't know is that one of the bodies belongs to Darius (Brian Sheets), an eco-terrorist who has injected hims...Read the entire review

The Product:
Indie horror runs in cycles. One year, everyone's going zombie. The next, it's sly societal serial killer time. Whether its bare-backing onto torture porn, wallowing in the worthless romance of the vampire, or delving deep into the demonic, cinematic scares just can't seem to stop cannibalizing themselves. Even more concerning, hoary old terror cliches - say, the evil that lives next door - have also been done to death. Apparently, inspiration can't derive from individual invention. It must come from some already established conceit, cooped and then cold-cocked by the fledgling filmmaker. Take the latest repackaging of previous Shock-O-Rama titles: The Suburban Psycho Collection. Not only do we get four novice scarefests of varying degrees of accomplishment, but all are a variation on the theme of innocent victims trapped in a web of slice and dice intrigue - with one wei...Read the entire review

The Product:
Four years ago, smack dab in the middle of this critic's proposed career choice as a wannabe film writer extraordinaire, he had the (unfortunate) task of taking on Greg Lamberson's much ballyhooed blood feast Slime City. Paired with the appalling Naked Fear, this Troma-like take on gore, bile, and anything pustule and putrid made for a nice retro reminder of the glory days of a Saturday night sleepover with your bong-endowed buddies. As we stated back then, Slime stands as an F/X laden boil bursting with all manner of inner ickiness. It swims in glop and wades in gunk. The final fight scene between our heroine and the bad guy is a gut stabbing, snot spewing, head splitting and brain broaching near masterwork. It does single handedly save the film. But when paired with three other lamentable Lamberson efforts (including Fear) as part of the oddly named...Read the entire review

Slime City Grindhouse Collection:
Just a couple years after the last Slime City Special Edition comes this new, four-films-on-two-DVDs Grindhouse Collection. Packed with extras, this set should be the go-to for Slime City fans, but if you've already got the 2006 release, you'll need to carefully judge your need for a bunch of additional middling extras and two other Lamberson flicks.

Slime City:
Lensed in the waning days of grindhouse glory and not released until 1988, Slime City missed the boat in more ways than one. But for all its low-budget prurient passion, the feature has a lot going for it: it's put together with a level of skill and professionalism missing from most DIY gorefests. Still, reserving most splatter for final moments (thus less gory than some might hope) Slime City spends a lot of time on semi-coherent plot and romance, never really finding its proper tone. Ro...Read the entire review

The Product:
We critics have said it several times by now, but it still bears repeating - instead of turning cinema into a marketplace of fresh and full formed ideas - the digital revolution has twisted the artform into a quagmire of competing redundancies and efforts of suspect quality. For every valuable work by outsider artists, there are hundreds of half-baked hackworks that can barely stand on their own subject matter. Naturally, the single element that separates the moviemaking men from the befuddled boys is aptitude. Many wannabe filmmakers couldn't find talent if their local 7-11 sold it in cans right next to the nachos and Vault-flavored Slurpees. Richard Griffin has the kind of motion picture acumen to overcome the technological limits of working beyond the mainstream. Necroville, Seepage, and Feeding the Masses proved this. Now comes his latest, Splatter Di...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Shock-O-Rama Cinema has doubled up a couple of movies that have very little to do with one another and teamed them up with the sensationalist title of the Psycho Horror Double Feature! While the first film isn't a horror movie at all, it does at least have 'psycho' in the title and the second film actually is a legitimate horror film, so it all sort of works out in the end. Regardless, here's a look:

Psycho Kickboxer - The Dark Angel:

Ever heard of Curtis Bush? Unless you're into the wide world of competitive kickboxing (he's a five time world champion), the answer is probably a resounding 'nope.' At any rate, Mr. Bush stars in this film from the directorial team of David Haycox and Mardy South where he plays a kickboxer (go figure) named Alex Hunter. He's just asked his girlfriend to marry him after a romantic weekend at the beach and things are loo...Read the entire review

The Product:
Borrowing a line from one Charles Dickens, 2008 is the best of time, and the worst of times, for the homemade moviemaker. On the plus side are the advances in technology and access to same. In just a few short years, cameras and software have gone so far down in price that even the most amateur auteurs have been given the chance to express themselves in a manner more polished and professional than ever before. The negative part of this equation remains the tenuous state of digital distribution. Niche companies are closing at a record clip, while big wig entities like Lionsgate are larding the marketplace with as much subpar product as possible. The result is a kind of collective consumer nonchalance. Where once the independent and outsider arena was growing, it seems destined to get shoved aside for more mediocre mainstream fare. And that's a shame, since movies like the horror ...Read the entire review

Think equal parts Fincher's Panic Room and Hitchcock's Rear Window on a pennies-between-the-cushions budget, and you've got Dave Campfield's close quartered creepout, Dark Chamber. Though it wears its budget constraints on its sleeve for all to see, the core material involving surveillance and cult-tied murder comes pretty close to surmounting its monetary hindrances. It's a taut, engaging little sliver of voyeuristic chaos that infuses believable technological elements into its paranoia.


The Film:

After several years away and completely fed up with his mother's drug abuse, Justin (Eric Conley) has departed to stay with his police detective father (David Rigg). When he returns to his place, he discovers that the upstairs rooms have been cleaned out and used for three apartment units. Each of these units encase three bizarre tenants: a couple with monet...Read the entire review

The Product:
Not every old fashioned fright flick needs reinvention. While it may seem viable thanks to today's CGI-reliant creativity, a giant animal epic like Food of the Gods would still be silly. Similarly, alien invasions need to turn up the terror less they look like outtakes from The X-Files. Oversized human horrors would never work today. They would have to be played for laughs or, some manner of Incredible Shrinking Woman satire. Sitting right in the center of the incapable of recreation dynamic is the aquatic creature feature. Jaws more or less settled the sea's scariness once and for all, with updated takes like Leviathan and Deepstar Six proving the power in Spielberg's subtle, suspenseful vision. So a lampoon of the lamprey is about all one can hope for, and in the case of outsider auteur Richard Griffin, this appears to be his approach. ...Read the entire review

The Movie

"E.I. Independent Cinema" puts out movies under banners like Seduction Cinema and Shock-O-Rama. I'd seen a decent amount of these flicks before deciding, meh, I'd seen pretty much all they had to offer. One can only sit through so many movies like Erotic Survivor 2 and Mummy Raider before the stuff starts to run together. So when I cracked open the case on Brett Piper's Shock-O-Rama, I was expecting yet another plotless jiggle-fest.

But then I remembered an enjoyably cheesy B-flick called Arachnia, which Piper also directed, so I figured this new one might have some old-school genre-style goofiness. And I wasn't wrong.

The exceedingly low-budget Shock-O-Rama is an anthology-type sci-fi/horror compilation that's equal parts Stephen King, George Romero, and William Castle. Movie fans who are able to appreciate an inexpensive yet affectionate nod t...Read the entire review