Rob Staeger

Early scenes overplay the shock of these phantasms, but just as you expect Geoghegan to crank up the effects, the film mixes in some subtler scares.

Ahearne deftly builds the suspense, raising the stakes before steering the story into surprising new directions. Despite its modern premise, B&B feels classic — a Hitchcockian nail-biter without a platinum blonde in sight.

With Stonehearst Asylum, director Brad Anderson doles out a vintage Halloween treat — a straightforward Poe adaptation of the sort that Vincent Price used to star in — and gives it a freshness and complexity that make it a delight.

Director Dennis Iliadis doesn't overdwell on the existentialism of the concept; he lets emotional beats strobe against the WTF experience of the temporal doubles, peppering the action with distinct images and events to make the repetition stand out.

Writer-directors Micah Wright and Jay Lender are kids'-cartoon vets and show a facility for comedy on a more human level here — as does the nimble cast, which ably handles the tonal shift from travel nightmare to actual nightmare.

The temptation for an easy score is one of a handful of shopworn plot elements in Anthony Onah’s debut feature The Price, yet the interaction of t

Realive’s greatest strength is that it takes its premise so seriously, engaging with its moral and spiritual questions.

Filmgoers who brave We Are the Flesh may regret seeing it. Forgetting it is another matter entirely.

Where most post-Shrek animated films are manic and all too eager to please, Rémi Chayé's deliberately paced Long Way North tells its story with clarity and an urgent calm.

He Never Died is a Tootsie Pop of a movie. It has the outer shell of Taken...but there's an altogether different treat in the center.

Bogliano is not a subtle director — check his sudden zooms on items of portent — but he painstakingly shows us Caro opening her mind to the possibility of supernatural evil, and he's careful not to tip his hand too soon as to whether it's real or imagined.

A concurrent plot involving Ava's family doesn't land quite as well, as it travels down some more familiar paths, but the twelve-step satire had me grinning like a fiend.

Cawthorne's performance underpins the resulting power fantasy with genuine emotion.

Overall, it's a strong sampler, with surprising variety.

Not quite a biopic, the film presents an overview of Ip's years in Hong Kong; Anthony Wong's dignified performance begins with the grandmaster almost fully formed.

The film is most successful when humanizing the people behind the objectification, with lives beyond the smut.

Not every gamble works: The girls' intrusive Bejeweled-like social-media game annoys at every turn, and the plot itself is murky. But #Horror mesmerizes nonetheless, filled with tension, cruelty, and can't-look-away style.

Bishop isn't afraid to leave the club behind, confidently expanding beyond the seedy premise to become a three-way chase among the bachelor party guys, the club management, and a ferocious supernatural force.

Fans will clamor for Wyrmwood 2; the brothers have the talent to aim higher.

Mell stages a climax that's thrilling and ridiculous in equal measure.

Vincent Guastini's makeup effects are the star here, a refreshing change from the inky CGI morphing of too much modern horror.

The anthology is a mixed stocking; if you reach inside, something's likely to grab you.

The film itself works best once most of the soldiers have been dispatched—too often in the first half, the constant running and discharging of firearms proves too similar to watching a first-person-shooter video game.

Kevin and Michael Goetz's direction emphasizes the remoteness of the setting. The howl of the desert wind and the unflagging hammer of the sun are the backdrop for every bad decision, lending them a plausibility they wouldn't have in comfort.

In Fear traffics in suspicion, ratcheting tension, and shocks — including a few really effective ones — more than in satisfying explanations.

The Lennon Report loses some steam in its second half as the immediacy of the operating theater dissipates in press conferences and obituary voiceovers. Even so, Profe does an admirable job walking us through the day's events, weaving together the accounts of people on the scene.

The drama plays out as expected — the ending, particularly, seems too pat — but offers several well-executed moments of tension along the way.

After a promising start, rote possession imagery eventually becomes the focus, culminating in a by-the-numbers ending.

Green seems to be asking: In the face of beasts whose scale and life cycles we can't begin to grasp, how can we allow our fellow human beings to be so unknowable?

The film is playful throughout... Unfortunately, the shoddy treatment of the film's sole LGBT character and a tendency to use people in wheelchairs as punchlines mar this otherwise delightful gruesome confection.

Director Jordan Rubin and the cast know the material is ridiculous, but calibrate the tone so that the dangers still feel dangerous.

The film suffers from a series of unsatisfying endings, but it's nonetheless refreshing to see a zombie movie with brains behind the camera instead of on the menu.

The feudal revenge drama sacrifices thrills in favor of moral reflection in the unspoiled French countryside, keeping most of its violence at arm's length.

Restaging the 1978 Jonestown massacre for a present-day suspense movie is by most definitions tasteless, although The Sacrament infuses the past with ghoulish immediacy.

Unfortunately, Dinosaur 13 never manages to display the story's many complex parts in a way that enables viewers to grasp the whole beast.

As a suspense film, Dementia is solid but unremarkable, even considering its ugly snarl of an ending. But hidden underneath, the film has all the elements for a compelling, sharp-edged family drama.

The gun-control message is so rote that it’s of secondary interest to the film’s ambitious structure.

Undead fare has to break new ground to stand out from the ravenous crowd, something What We Become never attempts. What might have been the best zombie movie of 2004 can't help looking a little sickly in 2016.

Director Mitchell Altieri helms the thriller with a sure hand.

Much of Carnage Park is merely a sun-bleached desert creepshow, a murky soup of a murderer toying with his victims simply because he's cra-a-azy.

There isn’t much marijuana use in Jonathan Berman’s documentary Calling All Earthlings, but its elliptical, ramshackle structure could make one question the merits of legalization.

Ghoul rewards attention for much of its running time with subtle scares and growing unease, before squandering it in a shaky chase through twisted corridors that goes nowhere unexpected.

The resulting creep show has some frantic action scenes, but never quite enough spring in its step.

Eventually succumbs to the weight of plot contrivance.

Weightless as a bag of crisps, this matinee fare offers more laughs than scares. Its longest-lasting contribution, however, might be the cheery earworm of a fight song that plays over the end credits, infectious as a zombie bite.

Psychotic! is best when it leavens the terror with comedy, slipping moments of ridiculousness into horror tropes.

The cast, led by Dan Ewing, Temuera Morrison, and Stephany Jacobsen, delivers sturdy character work, and the action is clear and well-executed, but none of it ventures beyond well-trod ground.

If you're in the bag for werewolves (or have a thing for hairy dudes smoking distinctive pipes), Wolves is a beckoning howl in the night. As an action movie, however, it's surprisingly tame.

Fewer cops and more full-tilt vampire batshittery might not have resulted in a more coherent movie, necessarily, but almost certainly would've made for a more captivating one.

This watered-down throwback to The Wicker Man never really heats up.

Not much substance is buried beneath the irritating style.

The comedy preaches tolerance... But using hate crimes—even cartoonified ones—as a source of humor is troubling, and the mincing stereotypes on display bring to mind a little kid pointing and shouting, "Homo! Homo!"

At no point does this film strive to be more than a second-rate version of what it is: a halfhearted attempt to make some scratch while pretending the devil exists. Some trick.

The climactic interrogation wraps up neatly and just in time, much more like a story "based on actual events" than the events themselves.

Catch Hell suffers from both a drowsy start and a dragging ending.

Under the direction of Phillip Guzman, the whole affair plods along in by-the-numbers fashion, and the characters are all types, displaying little evidence of interior lives.

What could have been a wordless slog is inventive and even buoyant, as Molly crosses the baked Nevada landscape. And then, like a dog turd lurking in the middle of a jelly doughnut, a needless, brutal rape scene poisons the whole experience.

There's no payoff to the paranoia.

The scenery looks just fine, however; it's the performances and dialogue that wobble and creak.

Mysteries of the characters' pasts are revealed, but Dushku and Crawford are so bland that their secrets barely registered to begin with.

This sequel comes off as both sillier and crueler than the original, mixing sight gags and labored puns with a vicious assault on a sex-ed teacher, and, well, "duck rape."

The plot develops confidently (if unsurprisingly), abetted by coincidence and shoddy police work, but it's the tone that grates.

Naturally, not everything is what it seems; there are a couple of necessary untruths even in this plot synopsis. But the part where it seems like some excellent actors have been roped into propping up a hopelessly by-the-numbers horror movie? That’s totally on the level.

What begins as revolting and off the rails peters out into a weak-sauce final payoff presented as an intervention-themed reality show, so tired and quaintly stupid it no longer offends.

Conversations meander and fizzle; characters repeat themselves, speaking in banalities and clichés.

The film's clumsy script elicits groans, but it's the plot that infuriates.

Haunted houses come in many shapes and sizes, and the title location in Abandoned Mine is the only fresh coat of paint this one gets.

Thanks to the shakiest of shaky-cams, you don't know whether to wince or lose your lunch.

Ultimately, these feral pooches pose no danger that couldn't be solved by staying inside, boarding the windows, and barricading the doors. It's not a bad approach to the film itself.

Slipshod in every way, The Final Project can't even be bothered to show the important stuff.

Any sensible person would gun it right out of the theater.