Just like a thorough horror fan will return to the gory stuff after enjoying a quiet psycho-thriller or a suspenseful tale of simple survival, our pal Adam Green has returned to the sub-genre he loves so much: the slasher flick. The versatile genre freak started out with Hatchet before getting a little more sedate with Spiral and Frozen … and now he’s back with a follow-up that loves nothing more than simple gags, numerous horror-friendly in-jokes, and a handful of colorful characters who do little more than stand around waiting to be demolished in shockingly outrageous ways. More

Let’s just point to the elephant in the room right now and get it over with. Yes, the 2008 Swedish horror film Let the Right One In is sort of what you’d call an “instant classic.” I (and dozens of my festival colleagues) adored the film during its film festival run, the rest of the critics were equally enthusiastic when it hit the local arthouses, and the intrepid movie-lovers who (god love ‘em) have no issue with subtitles also seems blown away by the quietly disturbing tale of “young” friendship and vampirism. More

Back when most of my friends were geeking out over their Mike Schmidt baseball cards or Spider-Man comic books, I was cataloging my own list of favorites. Sure, me and all my neighborhood friends loved baseball, comic books, and video games, but I’m pretty sure I was the only one who knew that Cujo and Cat’s Eye were directed by the same guy; that the guy who directed Red Dawn also did Conan the Barbarian; and that Joe Dante was the man to thank forPiranha, The Howling, Gremlins, Explorers, and Innerspace. Obviously none of my pals really cared about this stuff, which is why they’re all bankers and doctors whereas I’m a film critic and, um, the manager of a movie blog. More

Here’s a list of things you’ll definitely experience if you buy a ticket to Alexandre Aja’s remake of Joe Dante’s Piranha, Piranha 3D.

1. Some intermittently effective 3D trickery that I certainly won’t miss when the DVD hits the shelves.

2. Tons of gory scenes in which prehistoric, ravenous fish chew on shrieking people, most of whom have it coming for being A) obnoxious, B) selfish, or C) really, really hot.

3. A broad and welcome sense of humor that’s certainly not as subtle as the wit found in the original film, but definitely helps to keep the cheesiness of the new version afloat.

4. An affable ensemble of familiar actors who are well aware of the kind of film they’re making.

5. Lots of bare breasts, sort of like the bare breasts that used to run rampant through drive-in-style B-grade monster movies, only … well … larger. It is 2010 after all. More

It begins in standard enough fashion: Two young, pretty, obnoxious women get lost on their way to a party, only to stumble upon an isolated house belonging to a certifiable lunatic. That sums up the first 20-some minutes of Tom Six’s The Human Centipede, but once we get that familiar fare out of the way … we’re treated to one of the strangest, creepiest, and most adamantly disturbing ideas in many a moon. Where most horror films would be content to dole out simple scares or gross dollops of gore, The Human Centipede wants to give you about an hour of sustained discomfort. Perhaps “unease” would be a better description, because despite its rather off-putting premise, The Human Centipede is a shockingly confident mixture of David Cronenberg and Peter Greenaway. And while I doubt I’ll be seeing it again any time soon, it also stands as one of the most uniquely memorable horror films in quite some time. More

Despite what the cynics say, there are many different reasons why someone(s) would want to remake a horror film like Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street:

1. Easy money, because the script is already done — and there’s always a few nickels to wring out of nostalgia and “name recognition.”

2. You love a classic film and you have a new idea on how to build from it. (See: John Carpenter’s The Thing.)

3. Easy money.

4. An original film may have a cool concept but feels hopelessly outdated today. (See: David Cronenberg’s The Fly.)

5. The money thing again.

6. A horror classic is so iconic, you simply have to do your own bad-ass riff on it. (See: Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead.)

7. Huge piles of … you get the point. More

I’m a big fan of the “what would YOU do?” thriller; the kind that asks how you’d react to A) being left in the ocean with hungry sharks, B) being trapped in a phone booth by a mad sniper, or C) being accidentally abandoned while riding a ski-lift high above a frigid mountain. Oh, you haven’t heard that last one yet? Yep, that’s the premise of the nifty new thriller Frozen from writer/director Adam Green (Hatchet). More

It’s a lazy technique … but it also works. I’m talking about the “movie X meets movie Y” style of cinematic analysis, and it’s how I plan to open my review of Michael and Peter Spierig’s Daybreakers: “It’s Gattaca meets Near Dark … sorta.” If I were one of those genre-lovin’ Australian Spierig boys, I’d choose to take that as a compliment. And as the guy who just wrote those words, I’d say “Yup, that’s how it was meant.” More