We certainly don’t get a whole lot of horror films from Israel, so when one called Rabies (aka Kalevet) hit the festival circuit a few years ago I made sure to give it a bit of a spotlight. Fortunately for all involved the debut film from Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado was a dark and novel little treat, one that had no problem combing its own tone and attitude with some obvious inspirations from American horror films of the 1980s. Now the duo has returned with another devious delicacy. It’s called Big Bad Wolves, and it’s mainly about three men: a suspected killer of children, a detective on very thin ice, and a father who recently buried his young daughter without her head. More

The list of “high profile” horror film remakes is a long and colorful one indeed. One tends to think of these “reboots” as disposable at best, or (in most cases) complete worthless. But if you look a little more closely it seems that classics like The Thing, The Blob, The Fly, Dawn of the Dead, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers all inspired some damn good remakes. And that’s not even including the half-decent if not exactly spectacular remakes like Fright Night, My Bloody Valentine, Friday the 13th, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. More

The patently familiar new psycho thriller 6 Souls actually played film festivals back in 2010 under the title Shelter before collecting dust on a Weinstein shelf for a few years, only to pop up on VOD this week. In April of 2013. That’s not meant to imply that every genre title that suffers a long release delay is a generic, tiresome, and already outdated piece of low-end cable TV fodder, but in the case of 6 Souls (as well as the recent John Cusack flick The Factory) the plain truth is that it would have been a forgettable turkey three years ago. Today it’s just a three-year-old turkey with some mild curiosity value.

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A wise man (OK fine, it was me) once said that, as far as indie horror films are concerned, originality is frequently overrated. The seasoned genre expert has seen dozens of zombie films, haunted house horrors, and home invasion thrillers by now, and what separates the quality from the crap is not originality. It’s presentation. Of course it’s important to add at least a few new wrinkles if you’re going to tell a familiar tale, and the nifty little British import called In Fear manages to pull off the feat with crisp efficiency.  More

Well, here’s a nice switch. After a pair of sequels in which raunchy comedy and silly splatter were much more important than anything resembling a legitimate scare or creepy idea, everyone’s favorite killer doll is back with Curse of Chucky, a sixth chapter that clearly wants to be taken a bit more seriously. Or at least as seriously as one can take a movie in which a doll possessed by the soul of a serial killer stomps around a creepy old mansion and hacks people to bits. More