SNAKES ON A TRAIN

So what we have here plotwise is some mother...well, let's just call it snakes on a train. You knew that was inevitable, folks, so suck it up. For reasons that can only be described as baffling, a woman under a Mayan curse is currently the hatching ground for a whole bunch of snakes. About a thousand if the DVD menu can be trusted.  Not that we really have any idea why this woman is cursed to be a rattler condo--all the dialogue we get for the first five and a half minutes is in Spanish. And there are no subtitles. Or closed captioning. So unless you speak Spanish, forget about having any kind of clue what's going on until about the six minute mark, and even then, you're still not going to have much of a clue.

SATANIC

Posted by guest reviewer Steve Anderson.

Let us all agree to support the careers of Jeffrey Combs, recent horror legend, and Angus Scrimm, much earlier horror legend. These two have been almost universally good in all their appearances.  I had once thought that Lance Henriksen was the only one who could be counted on for quality work no matter what movie he was sunk into, but you can comfortably add Jeffrey Combs and Angus Scrimm to that list.  Combs and Scrimm are two very good reasons to watch SATANIC.

BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP

Posted by Guest Reviewer Steve Anderson.

H.P. Lovecraft movies are generally a good bet.  There really are only a handful of them, and most of them turned out well. There are the great Jeffrey Combs performances of the RE-ANIMATOR series, the romp that was FROM BEYOND, and even NECRONOMICON, which had its pluses.  Let's be charitable about things and not bring up DAGON.  And those of you bringing up CTHULHU MANSION, hey now, that wasn’t really that bad.  Especially when you stack it up against DAGON. But at any rate, BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP is going to prove to be somewhere in between the polar extremes of RE-ANIMATOR and DAGON.

ROMASANTA: THE WEREWOLF HUNTER

ROMASANTA: THE WEREWOLF HUNTER (also known as THE LEGEND OF ROMASANTA) is an odd piece of work.  It left me at a bit of a loss for words.  I mean, it’s not a badly made movie. But it’s not particularly entertaining either.  Still, there’s something about it that got under my skin and left an impression.  Ostensibly based on true events that occurred in Spain in the mid-1800s (in fact, some have told me they are “well known” in Spain), this movie is in some ways more of a psychological examination of a serial killer than the supernatural shlock fest you’d think from the title.  After I got past being mislead, I found myself intrigued…

CRY_WOLF

Let me save you some time: CRY_WOLF is a tired re-tread of SCREAM meets I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, only with even less talented actors, a less convincing plot, and…wait for it…Jon Bon Jovi in a pivotal role.   You read that correctly. Director Jeff Wadlow apparently had very little budget to work with, so he did his best.  And to be fair, the direction isn’t actually all that bad considering.  But man, oh man, the screenplay…the screenplay…just horrible. Perhaps I’m sensitized to it as an aspiring screenwriter, but there were moments I wanted to yell at the screen the writing was so awful. 

STRAIGHT INTO DARKNESS

Posted by guest reviewer Steve Anderson

Quite possibly the best World War II film ever released is now sitting on your video store shelves. And Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks had absolutely nothing to do with it. Though, if they’re seeing this, they likely wish they did.
So what we have here is another in a long string of WWII films, some fantastic, and some pretty lousy. In this case, two soldiers, Losey and Deming, desert their platoon during the last days of the war and as they’re being escorted by derisive military police back to the front lines (or possibly a firing squad), they find themselves struggling across Germany in a bid for survival. Along their way, they run into a band of orphans who have, apparently, been trained as surprisingly vicious killing machines.