SHADOW WALKERS

Okay, so we've all been here before.  From the dim old days of Captain America all the way up to "28 Days Later", we've been watching as various government programs try to genetically design the latest and greatest superhuman killing machines.  Only occasionally does it actually work.  "Shadow Walkers" will be one more hashmark in the huge column labeled "Really Bad Ideas".  Yet another monstrously bloated government initiative (weighing out at eighty-eight billion dollars by the end), "Shadow Walkers" looks to turn people into ravenous snarling bloodthirsty superhuman beasties from hell, but at the same time, leave their brains intact enough to take orders from wildly weaker human beings.  As though you needed me to tell you, Something Goes Wrong and the monsters are let out of their cages, tearing hell out of the research facility's staff.

BEHIND THE MASK: THE RISE OF LESLIE VERNON

Every so often, something comes along that makes me wonder how it managed to only go to video.  Something that, while I'm glad to see it on shelves, really makes me shake my head in bafflement as I wonder how something so good got passed up for theatrical release.  BEHIND THE MASK: THE RISE OF LESLIE VERNON is one such film.  And what's behind this mask is a documentary profiling the next great icon of evil in the making, Leslie Vernon. This part alone makes it a unique, shining gem on the video store shelves--the documentary portion of BEHIND THE MASK does no less than a brilliant job of deconstructing all those legendary slasher movie staples.  Ever wonder why a door always seems to close behind slasher movie protagonists?  BEHIND THE MASK will explain it.  How the killers always seem to manage to escape fates that should be their deaths? Even how they always seem to catch up to their prey so readily even though they never move faster than a brisk walk?  All of these questions are answered, in a fashion that's actually believable.

OPEN WATER 2: ADRIFT

Feeling happy?  Downright gleeful?  Like someone reached down and tickled the very depths of your soul?  Want to fix that? Because if you've been feeling entirely too happy for entirely too long, OPEN WATER 2: ADRIFT is guaranteed to make you look twice at that bottle of bleach in the cabinet.  OPEN WATER 2: ADRIFT", you see, is "based on true events".  After watching it, I couldn't help but wonder why they'd want to admit that these "true events" had even taken place, let alone announce to the world just how monumentally stupid they were, even in part.

CURSE OF THE ZODIAC

Suddenly, I feel much like the falling bowl of petunias in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".  I'm staring at the box for CURSE OF THE ZODIAC, and all I can think is:  "Oh no, not again."  And the reason I'm feeling like a quasi-sentient bowl of petunias is because, once again, I'm talking about yet another film from horror's very own short bus, Ulli Lommel.  I confess, I had some hope this time around.  This is the story of the most notorious serial killer in United States' history that hasn't been caught yet!  For all we know, the Zodiac Killer is living right next door to any one of us, just waiting for his next psychological brain fart to lead to all our deaths!  Maybe, just maybe, the sheer suspense of knowing that Zodiac may still be out there and reading this right now might mean that even Ulli Lommel couldn't screw this up too badly!

ED GEIN: THE BUTCHER OF PLAINFIELD

If you should be wandering your video store aisles, and you see a movie box assert that its contents are, in fact, "too terrifying for theatres", you can be reasonably certain that they are not.  Like that schmuck at the bar who won't stop screaming about how great his job is and how cool his car is and how amazing his girlfriend is, he likely has none of the above, and is quite possibly living in his mom's basement.  This spectacularly roundabout metaphor is actually a solid descriptor for ED GEIN: THE BUTCHER OF PLAINFIELD.  Of course, as the box will cite repeatedly, Ed Gein was the philosophical model behind the great cinematic killers--Leatherface, Norman Bates, and Buffalo Bill--but watching Ed go through this movie is like watching bad summer stock theatre with enough gore to offend most of the Church Ladies' Muffin Auxiliary, this newest serial killer dramatization will fail to impress on nearly every level.

DRIVE-THRU

DRIVE THRU is going to be one of the best cases of grand theft movie you've ever seen.  In the scenic and wholly boring, at least to its teenage denizens, Orange County suburbia of Blanca Carne (White Meat!  Ha!), something's going very wrong for some of those teenage denizens.  Namely, they're getting killed. And in an extremely messy, horror-movie-style fashion with loads of dismemberment, lacerations, and blunt force trauma like no tomorrow. Behind the killings is the mascot for the local burger chain, Hella Burger.