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This is a potentially fun but ultimately frustrating attempt to craft a low-budget monster movie. Things get off to a good start with a moody credits sequence set in a cave, with some kind of electronic sensor displaying the outline of a long-dormant creature re-awakening. Out on a lonely highway, a trucker is startled by the [...]

This is another disappointing entry in the 2007 After Dark Horrorfest. Like TOOTH AND NAIL, it feels like a throwback to an earlier era of low-budget exploitation film-making. In this case, we get a group of young people heading to an isolated area for the weekend, but instead of a single silent killer lurking in the woods [...]

Of the After Dark Horrorfest’s 2007 crop of “8 Films to Die For,” THE DEATHS OF IAN STONE has the most intriguing premise: One night after blowing a big game, high-school hockey player Ian Stone (Mike Vogel) is assaulted by a mysterious assailant and dragged onto a set of train tracks for a sudden-impact death [...]

A laudable attempt at atmosphere and a handful of creepy moments are not enough to redeem this muddled mess, one of the “8 Films to Die For” in the 2007 After Dark Horrorfest. Unlike most of its brethren in the fest, CRAZY EIGHTS has a few familiar names and faces in the cast: Dina Meyer, [...]

This is a laughably bad post-apocalyptic thriller that was inexplicably included as one of the “8 Films to Die For” in the 2007 edition of the After Dark Horrorfest. Apart from the overall low-quality of the threadbare production, one has to wonder why After Dark Films would stretch the definition of “horror” to include a [...]

This horror film set in Manhattan, told from the point of view of a bunch of working class stiffs, is half-brilliant and half-okay. The dingy lighting and shaky camera work, combined with a solid script and convincing performances, create an almost documentary feel that lures the audience into the dark situation and sets them up [...]

One of the “8 Films to Die For” in the 2007 edition of the After Dark Horrorfest, BORDERLAND is a tense, bloody thriller that raises questions about how we define the horror genre. In essence, this is a story about three gringos who go south of the border for a weekend in Mexico, only to run [...]

This low-budget, shot-on-digital horror film is an ambitious attempt to put familiar genre elements to good use. Writer-director Rolfe Kanefsky has a reputation for spoofery, but here he plays the horror relatively straight; there is humor, but it emerges mostly in the playful way he manipulates audience expectations, introducing plot threads that seem to lead [...]

PENNY DREADFUL takes its title from a Victorian form of literature that often wallowed in melodramatic excess and prolonged action (because writers were paid a penny a word and dragged everything out in order to make as much money as possible). Screenwriters Diane Doniol-Valcroze and Arthur Flam felt it suited their story because it features [...]

PENNY DREADFUL is an enjoyable combination of psycho-thriller and slasher horror, which somehow achieves a slick, Hollywood-calibre visual style in spite of its modest budget. The film is not afraid to deliver gruesome horror, but it also dwells on the suspense, offering a tense situation featuring a vulnerable character trapped in a terrible predicament guaranteed [...]

There is a tradition of great ghost stories dating back to Sheridan LeFanue and M.R. James, in which hapless human characters are targeted for haunting after having committed transgressions that are slight or, sometimes, even non-existent. The supernatural stands in for the vagaries of fate, the ruthless indifference of random chance, or an arbitrary sense [...]