Rob Staeger

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.