Told over the course of a single Halloween night, the story follows a multitude of characters (teens, parents, several small kids and one angry old man) through four interweaving stories. At the center of it all is the diabolical Sam – a creepy kid who sports an iconic mask and delivers his own brand of havoc throughout. To say anything more would be criminal, but these classic anthology stories waste no time delivering the gory goods.

This is the kind of horror movie that reminds us why we fell in love with horror movies. It may not be high art, but Trick r’ Treat brings back a kind of purity that has long been absent from movie screens: The feeling of an old school monster mash best viewed in a theater full of cheering fans. Sure, we’ve seen plenty of spook house “rollercoasters” over the years, but even the best ones have had a degree of artificiality to them. Dougherty understands exactly what makes these movies tick and serves it all up with a series of perfectly timed laughs, shocks, twists and practical make-up FX gags.

On top of it all, Trick r’ Treat’s beautiful cinematography and score generates an atmosphere thick enough to insulate your house and, combined with stellar sets and costumes, brings All Hallow’s Eve to vivid life like never before. The cast is also of a much higher caliber for a film of this type with esteemed actors like Brian Cox, Anna Paquin, and Dylan Baker delivering crazed performances that are an absolute blast to watch. Dougherty’s clever script also deserves special props for its unrelenting and savage sense of humor (which definitely pushes the envelope by Hollywood standards).

When all is said and done, Trick ‘r Treat ranks alongside John Carpenter’s Halloween as traditional October viewing and I can’t imagine a single horror fan that won’t fall head over heels in love with it. There’s just one problem: Warner Bros doesn’t give a shit. For two years, the studio has refused to release this little gem, while it continues to crank out unwatchable bottom-of-the-barrel dreck like Return to House on Haunted Hill and Lost Boys: The Tribe. This is one of the biggest injustices to our beloved genre, and in a perfect world, Warner would be put on trial for crimes against cinema. Come what may, movie lovers finally have something worth getting excited about and it’s great to see that real talent can still slip through the cracks.

The concept couldn’t be more straightforward: Angela is a bubbly TV reporter shooting a documentary series on the late-night lives of firemen. Answering a routine rescue call to an apartment building, the crew find themselves in a world of shit when the would-be victim takes a meaty bite out of her rescuers. With cameras rolling, the crew and residents must find a way to survive the zombie outbreak when they find themselves quarantined inside the building by the trigger-happy military.

[REC] is directed by Filmax regulars Jaume (Darkness) Balageuro and Paco (Romasanta) Plaza, which automatically raised a few red flags. Both have produced visually stunning but utterly vapid movies that left me close to clawing my eyes out from boredom, and for the first act of this film, I wasn’t entirely won over. But by the time the end credits rolled, I found myself white-knuckled and gripping my seat from pure exhaustion. This is the kind of movie that is perfectly suited to the talents of these two filmmakers. [REC] isn’t so much a story as it is a ride, and what it lacks in substance, it more than makes up for in pure dripping style.

Balageuro and Plaza take their time to build the atmosphere around their location, then completely explode into a frenzied rollercoaster. Simply put, this experience feels like being trapped in a haunted maze, and there are images here that are the stuff of nightmares. It’s simple-minded, sure, but just when you’re ready to dismiss this one as another unoriginal zombie entry, the directors open the gates and unleash a whirlwind of chaos, claustrophobia, and jump-from-your-chair "Holy fuck!" moments. Natural performances and a lack of music only add to the realism that comes across even with lavish production values.

The final few minutes of this film are terrifying beyond words, leaving the viewer with no answered questions or quaint resolutions. Short and sweet, [REC] delivers a perfect fast-paced ride that will score big with horror fans everywhere despite its familiar elements. Just be sure to see it before the Hollywood-butchered remake.

Just thought I’d get that out there in a positive way right off the bat. Quarantine is the story of Angela Vidal (Carpenter), ace reporter, saddled with telling the riveting, true story of a random LA fire department, and YOU are along for the ride of your life through the POV of the cameraman. Through an exhaustive tour of the firehouse, we learn where they keep their boots, bunk down, and most importantly for Angela, how the pole works. Oh yes … she works the pole. For some reading this, you are already sold. Admit it.

Just when you thought you couldn’t handle any more dirty firehouse hijinks, the alarm sounds and the truck speeds off to aid the citizens of NY. As you’ve all seen in the trailer, commercials, and incessant sneak previews on just about every channel I’ve hit this week, the call is answered and chaos takes over. In no time flat, confusion turns to horror, and upon attempting to bring in back-up, our heroes find themselves sealed into the building at gunpoint. No cell phones, no cable, no motorcars … not a single luxury. Like Robinson Crusoe … with an undisclosed illness turning the rest of Gilligan’s crew into bloodthirsty creeps of course.

The rest of this movie plays like a very slow version of 28 Days Later without the cool music and a complete lack of intensity, wasted horror makeups we fly past on the wings of the almighty shakey cam, and throwaway performances from a group of actors, the bulk of whom I generally enjoy seeing in movies. Quarantine is hard to watch, and I don’t mean because it is horribly slow and uninteresting. It is physically hard to watch as the camera jumps around, zooms in and out quickly, and shifts from person to person as if it can’t find the spot it meant to focus on. To emphasize my point, in the last minutes of this film, I realized Dania Ramirez (the formerly evil hotty from “Heroes”) was in her underwear the entire time … and I didn’t even notice. This made me a little sad.

Because Quarantine has a single perspective, it is pointless to talk about cinematography. There does seem to be some attempt to play around with lighting, either via the spot mounted on the camera or rooms the characters flee into, but it only succeeded in adding to the confusion created by the camera movement. Less light, no matter how dramatic, means less understanding of what is going on in a space. When the action finally reached some semblance of momentum, I couldn’t even figure who was still alive. Without the ability to root for your favorite characters (whom we’ve only met for 3 minutes anyway), we are forced to constantly fall back to little Angela, whose antics in the firehouse were so high school cheerleader-esque, it was as if she was the bikini clad weather girl who made out with the lead anchor man for a shot at the occasional fluff piece. In my experience with horror films, and my own personal taste, that is the character you are most anticipating receiving a cruel and swift death. The film trudges on, rolling out conveniently timed scares you saw coming with ample time to lean over and tell a friend. Not a successful jump scare in the lot. In fact, there are no scares to be found throughout.

It hardly seems worth mentioning individual acting performances with all the information above at your disposal. Rade Serbedzija (AKA that cool Russian guy) mumbles in the background of scenes, hardly ever even visible. Greg Germann delivers one funny line and then becomes the guy who delivers plot information so ridiculously tied to his profession that it proves even more comical. Johnathon Schaech (AKA the pedophile stabby killer from Prom Night) wears a vintage 1980’s mustache and spits out forced lewd comments by the fistful. Let me just skip the rest and lay it to rest with Jennifer Carpenter (your reporter), who flails her arms, stares longingly into the camera with her best face of desperation, and appears to be hyperventilating for an hour straight. I’ll give her extra points for never passing out. To be fair to this cast, as I’ve said, I’ve seen most of them in far better work, acting on a completely different level. It’s as if they all knew they were performing in a B-movie gone horribly wrong and phoned it in.

An entire movie set in a sealed off, old school apartment building with terror around every corner should convey a severe sense of claustrophobia in every shot. Quarantine may as well have been filmed in a warehouse. This is just another missed opportunity that should never have been attempted in the first place. When high production values and superior special effects we are only allowed to look at for 2 seconds at a time are the only compliments I can muster, there is something seriously wrong. Having not seen REC, the Spanish original, I can’t go on to make comparisons or advise you to see the original, but I can only imagine it must be better than this. Sadly, this is not the worst horror film I’ve seen all year, but it is hardly worth your 10 bucks this weekend.

Clocking it at only an hour in length with an additional ten minutes worth of slow crawling credits, The Gingerdead Man may be a streamlined horror movie with a story that’s often undercooked, but unlike some of Band’s recent productions, he doesn’t waste time using stock footage montages or other crap to pad out the running time to a somewhat respectable length. The flick is only an hour long but it’s an hours worth of non-stop fun. This is mindless entertainment at its finest.

Psychopath Millard Findlemeyer murders the father and brother of pretty young Sara Leigh (Yes, the heroine’s name is actually Sara Leigh!) during an attempted robbery and leaves her for dead. She survived to testify against him and Findlemeyer ends up frying in the electric chair. It turns out that Findlemeyer’s mother is an actual wicked witch who mixes her son’s ashes with come gingerbread dough and secretly delivers it to the Leigh family’s bakery. Just add a few drops of blood from the cut finger of another bakery employee and you got a recipe for terror. Sara uses the dough to bake a foot tall gingerbread man but instead the gingerbread man comes to life in the form of the Gingerdead Man, a vicious-looking, foul-mouthed, homicidal gingerbread man voiced by Gary Busey.

Folks, that right there is the main selling point of this movie. It’s basically the same premise as the original Child's Play only instead of a killer doll voiced by Brad Douriff we get a killer snack treat voiced by Gary Busey. Busey is one of those actors who is always a hoot whenever playing an over-the-top character (go back and rent Under Siege for some vintage Busey) and allowing him to go nuts as only he can but with his vocalizations coming out of the mouth of a gleefully sinister looking John Carl Bueschler creation is a thing of B-movie beauty. Busey’s dialogue as the Gingerdead Man basically consists of either vulgar taunts or bad puns. I’ll give you an example of the bad puns. Before lopping off the finger of a female character he lets out a one-liner along the lines of "Who likes ladyfingers?" Get it? Pretty dumb, huh? And yet it works. You know why it works? Because Gary Busey is snarling that line and his voice is coming out of the mouth of a foot-tall, pissed off looking gingerbread man!

Gary Busey is the man! He might be clinically insane in real life (possibly due in part to his much gossipe-about addictions) but Busey is still a great actor, especially when he’s playing someone not altogether there mentally, as evidenced by the surprisingly unsettling prologue (the only time Busey himself ever physically appears in the film) where he murders the heroine’s family members. His gravelly, sometimes cornpone voice is so distinct that it makes him a perfect choice for doing voiceover work for a character like the Gingerdead Man.

Busey’s manic energy must have been infectious because the rest of the cast is equally up to the task. Everyone is clearly aware that they’re in a campy horror flick and play their roles with equal amounts of enthusiasm whether without ever taking things too far over the top or winking at the audience.

Sara is played as a shy girl still traumatized by the murder of her father and brother yet determined to keep the family’s bakery going while take care of alcoholic mom, who has devolved into a habitual drunk to the point of standing outside the bakery with a bottle of Jack Daniels in one hand and a shotgun in the other that she uses to blast the sign of the rival franchise bakery that has just opened up across the street. Sara’s friends and co-workers include a very pretty Latina Alyssa Milano look-a-like and a wrestling obsessed moron who dreams of becoming a pro wrestler named "The Butcher Baker." If you think the idea of a wrestler using a gimmick persona based around being a badass pastry chef sounds astoundingly stupid then just wait until you hear how the Gingerdead Man himself reacts to it.

The owner of that rival franchise is a cowboy hat wearing weasel determined to buy out Sara’s bakery; and when Sara refuses, his southern fried Veruca Salt meets Paris Hilton daughter tries letting some rats loose in the bakery in hopes that the health department will shut them down. Her gun-toting delinquent boyfriend Amos joins her in her antics but he turns out to be an old childhood friend of Sara’s. This actually leads to some rather unlikely romantic flirtations and more bitchy rage from the rival owner’s daughter. There are moments in the film where Sara and Amos begin reminiscing and flirting with one another, seemingly forgetting that they’re trapped in a bakery and being stalked by a homicidal maniac back from the dead in the form of a walking, talking, stalking pastry.

Not only are all these people good actors, they play their roles with an infectious glee that should be studied by other actors planning to star in a low budget horror comedy. The characters may be flimsy on paper but the cast gives them tons of personality. They clearly had a blast making this film and it translates on-screen.

Sure, the plot does leave a ton of unanswered questions. Countless questions regarding Millard’s mother and her witchcraft ways is never explained in the slightest. It really is just an excuse to set-up him coming back as a killer cookie. For that matter, exactly how this foot tall killer cookie manages to rig booby traps and drag the bodies on unconscious characters into other rooms is never even hinted at. And you know what? I don’t care. You know why? Because it’s a movie about a vicious-looking, foul-mouthed, homicidal gingerbread man voiced by Gary Busey! Just the sight of the Gingerdead Man hurling profanity-laden taunts at a rat he attempts to pick a fight with makes this one a future B-movie classic.

One thing I found strange was that the film was made under Charles Band’s seemingly defunct Full Moon banner and not his new Wizard Entertainment. If this movie does mark Full Moon’s last gasp then one can definitely say they went out with a blast. The Gingerdead Man was so much fun that I almost find myself amazed to know that Charles Band directed it. After Decadent Evil, I’d pretty much written the guy off but now I’m left wondering if maybe there’s hope after all. Heck, I might even buy one of those Gingerdead Man action figures he’s producing. One thing is for certain, if Band plans to spin this into its own franchise he’d better make sure to have Busey back for the sequels because Gary Busey is the Gingerdead Man and there is no franchise without him.

Like any good snack treat The Gingerdead Man is non-nutritious, but it just tastes so damn good. The movie is utterly ridiculous, totally preposterous, unapologetically stupid, at times bordering on incoherent, and yet I enjoyed every last bite.

"Evil never tasted so good." Damn straight!

Watching Exterminator City is like watching some sort of Jess Franco meets Philip K. Dick meets Russ Meyer acid trip. It’s an ultra low budget, cyberpunk, slasher flick with very big breasted women and robot puppets. When I say puppets I'm talking about the kind of puppetry used to bring Crow T. Robot to life on "Mystery Science Theater 3000". We're talking the stick puppet heads with articulated mouths on top of clothed mannequin bodies with poseable arms sort of puppets.

The year is 2027. The place is the fictional Atro City. Neither of these facts are important. What matters is that robots now serve as everything from police officers to psychiatrists to televangelists to pest exterminators. It's probably a good thing the pest control officers are robotic because the pests they exterminate are all abnormally large - a few are outright mutants - but most are just really big toy bugs you could probably from the local zoo's gift shop.

There is a human population in this dark future but we never see any of them other than incredibly well endowed females. See those two guys on the box art right next to the title? I don't know where York Entertainment found them but I assure you that they aren't in this movie.

Now just as in Blade Runner, everyone zips around the dark cityscape in flying cars. Unlike Blade Runner, but much like "Thunderbirds Are Go!", these flying cars are clearly models on strings flying in front of faux buildings. Actually, they tend to quickly "whoosh" past the camera so fast you usually don't get the opportunity to marvel at the toy-like nature of the prop. You'll see them "whoosh" past the camera a lot – constantly – often serving as a buffer between scenes. By the end of the first half hour alone you may very well begin to experience motion sickness from all these split second flying car zipping past the camera buffers. I know I never want to see a model of a flying car whiz past a night time model cityscape ever again.

One particular pest exterminator robot (a skull-faced nightmare that looks like the head of a Terminator endoskeleton that's just a top hat away from being put behind the wheel of a hot rod) has gone haywire becoming a schizophrenic serial killer. It goes on a non-stop killing spree, zipping around the city in one of those flying cars on a string in search of victims. All of the victims share the common trait of being extremely buxom females that aren't the least bit shy.

Folks, I cannot recall the last time I saw this much gratuitous nudity in a non-Cinemax After Dark film. The human side of the cast reads like a roll call of scream queens, porn starlets, and nude models. A few of the names include Julie Strain, Brinke Stevens, Teresa May, Cathy Barry, Zenova Braedon, Fembomb, Rhiannon, Lilith Stabbs, Jill Kelly, Syn Devil, Amy Lynn Best, Katarina Nikita, Lana Cox, Penny Lynn, Taylor Wayne, Persephone, Jacklyn Lick...I think there may have been more. I’ve never heard of most of them but the closing credits individually lists about 20 some odd personal websites where you can see more of the various women on display in yet further stages of undress. I believe there may have been three that didn’t actually get naked. And naked they do get! None of these ladies were hired for their acting talents, that’s for damn sure. Most of them can’t even convincingly do as little as look momentarily scared and scream their heads off without looking like the worst actresses in the world. Heck, one of the film’s jokes is Julie Strain’s character getting impaled with an Oscar. You know that had to be someone’s idea of a joke. These women exist solely to show off their very top heavy talents, and they do so whether by exercising in the nude or admiring their naked body in the mirror or listening to their walkman topless or reading a book in bed topless or, in one instance, walking in the front door and immediately stripping of her clothes and fondling herself. And then a psychopathic robot puppet savagely kills them (the actual slaying usually happens off-camera) leaving behind unrecognizable mounds of quivering meat corpses.

A hardboiled robot cop with a head that consists of little more than a disturbing set of bright red eyes, and dressed in a brown suit and tie like the most clichéd hard nosed cop, is in hot pursuit of the killing machine. It's partnered with a shady robot psychologist that knows more about what's might be behind the slaughter than its willing to admit. Making matters worse, as the tough talking cop tries to profile the serial killing cyborg, he begins going so far deep into the schizobot's damaged psyche that it too begins to drift into madness.

I use the term schizbot because all the while the serial killer robot is zipping around the city mutilating D-cups, it’s also experiencing surreal (let’s face it, nonsensical is the opportune word) hallucinations involving religious imagery, metaphysical conversations involving human-robot consciousness, and demonic puppets.

I know the concept of a serial killer that experiences religious themed hallucinations and a detective on the case that gets so far into the killer's head that their very own dark side begins to emerge may sound cliché, but I bet you've never seen it done with robot stick puppets before. I know a lot of that is done to be intentionally poking fun at this sort of film but it ends up being less laugh out loud funny and more outright bizarre.

In the end, Exterminator City is about three things: naked women getting killed by a robot serial killer experiencing strange delusions in between slayings, a robot cop and a robot psychologist on the case, and lots and lots of split second shots of a model car zipping past the camera.

Exterminator City is an uniquely morbid trainwreck of a movie and yet it's hard to find fault with that since the movie was obviously designed to be such. Is it a good movie? Is it a well made movie? Was I entertained? Even now I really could not tell you for certain. All I know is that I couldn't stop watching because despite the repetitive nature of the killings - brace yourself for the third act when they suddenly go into a overdrive - I was definitely curious to see where this film was going, or if it was going anywhere at all, and if it actually did get somewhere would it be somewhere I'd like to go, or, at the very least, someplace that made sitting through this film worthwhile. I'm still not sure since the finale just goes off the charts into weirdness. I can't say for certain if there really was any method to Clive Cohen's madness but there was definitely enough madness to keep me watching.

This is less a case of watching a movie as it is experiencing it. Just don’t write me any angry emails later on if you check the film out and hate it. I’ve given you sufficient warning.

One could say that this type of arrogance is sewing the seeds of our own destruction, and if stories like the one told in The Ruins are any clue, then we may be a bit too far out on the branch for our own safety. Based on the best-selling novel by Scott Smith, the film tells the story of two couples enjoying the last days of their vacation. When given the opportunity to travel out to the middle of nowhere to see some ancient ruins no one knows about, with people they hardly even know, they accept. Upon arrival they discover an odd clearing, in the middle of which is a huge Mayan pyramid smothered in vines. Their awe is abruptly cut short as the group is attacked by several panicked local villagers, who kill one of the men the kids are travelling with. Chased onto the pyramid, they soon come to realize that they are not allowed to leave the site and that something very deadly stalks them all.

In the novel none of the characters come across as very compelling; there isn't anything very interesting about the central players in the film, either. Jeff, played by Jonathan Tucker, is the gung-ho one with the itch to do something out of the ordinary. His girlfriend, Amy (Malone), really doesn't want to do anything but vegetate by the pool. Jena Malone gets the unfortunate role of whiney, slightly irritating Amy. The other couple, Eric and Stacy, seem a bit closer and better off than Jeff and Amy, but this may be on the surface only. Shawn Ashmore and Laura Ramsey are perfectly forgettable in their parts, to a point. Any real fault found with The Ruins could be in its uninteresting central characters. The actors do a good enough job with the parts, but there's just not a lot to do with them. Again, this is "to a point" until ... things start to happen.

The main reason to watch The Ruins is not for the internal struggles or any emotional story arcs of the characters involved. No, the reason to go see The Ruins is because it's a monster movie. These kids stumble into a diabolical death trap and find themselves coming up against something so icky, so disgusting, that the trivial personal stuff falls by the wayside in light of it all. We watch in awe as this hellish situation grows and the horror behind it blossoms out in ways that one would never expect. The problem is that this "thing" is cunning, adaptive and deceptive; it is intelligent.

You may be reading this thinking you know what it is that waits within The Ruins. Your guess may be right; yet, I must caution you. This story takes a benign presence and mutates it into an insatiable force that refuses to be reckoned with. The terror that waits within The Ruins is out to do one thing: destroy us. It wants to eat us, and eat us it shall. I watched as the screen was splattered with ghastly, grisly images of human meat; blood, bone, and sinew snap on the screen. At times you almost expect it to splatter across the lens of the camera. The violence is brief, but when it hits, it's as jarring and brutal as I have ever seen. That is when I see these young actors ripen in their performance. With each slash, cut, or gouge we feel their pain; they look and act afraid. I can't imagine what it would be like to smash off a man's leg with a rock, let alone pretend to do it and act the part. These kids make you feel like you are right there, experiencing it with them. I have to admit, for as uninteresting as I found them to begin with, they kind of grew on me.

A lot of credit has to be given to Carter Smith for his choreographing this dance of death. Carter knows how to hold a camera still and let us linger on things. His landscapes are wide. Beaches are blue upon blue, and the jungles are thick and detailed. All of this sits in stark contrast to the images of pain and agony, for which it seems Carter likes to be up close and personal. In the end this juxtaposition pays off well. We get the sense of being in the middle of nowhere, way off the map, but the claustrophobia is there even with the wide open sky above. Trapped is trapped, no matter where you are. He also doesn't shy away from gore and the gristle. When it comes to blood, Carter puts the petal to the metal and doesn't let up.

A few small changes from the book did nothing to keep me from enjoying the film. A bit of careful pruning of some shoddier CGI moments would have made a couple of key "gotcha!" moments a bit better. Personally, I could care less about the quality of characters in a film like this, and any deficit they suffer from comes from the source material itself. Where The Ruins ultimately triumphs is in its grisly moments of desperation. Rarely in movies are we treated to such ferocity, where the killer and the will to survive by its victims are equal to one another.

The Ruins is a great twist on the old favorite monster movie genre. It has enough shock and gore to appease the fans, and at the same time I guess it could be used as a cautionary tale with regard to human hubris. We assume too much and go places that we are not supposed to, even when we are told not to. The best thing to do, in that sort of situation, is to leaf well enough alone.