We could start with the fact that January and February are generally considered “the dumping grounds,” where studios manage to unload their lamest flicks with very little in the way of fanfare. Or we could note that One Missed Call is YET ANOTHER American remake of a (very recent) Asian horror flick, and just start to dismiss the thing right there. OR we could simply point our arrows towards the “ugh, it’s PG-13″ target and, really, that’s pretty much all a horror fan has to hear these days. But with all these strikes (and more!) against the flick, I still walked into One Missed Call with a stupid sense of optimism — that maybe this was one of those very few J-horror/A-horror remake packages that actually had something to offer. (Like The Ring, for example, or the underrated Dark Water.) Alas, no. My early-year genre-fan hopefulness was crushed beneath wave after wave of cinematic ineptitude. Eric Valette’s One Missed Call starts out dry, goofy, and dull — and it somehow manages to get worse with each passing reel. More

When your $8 million movie grosses more than ten times that amount across the globe, the topic of “sequels” is going to come up. Such was the case surrounding Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, a freakishly fun (and admirably harsh) piece of sci-fi horror from one of the planet’s most consistently eclectic filmmakers. But while Mr. Boyle had other fish to fry, in a directorial sense, he and partners Andrew Macdonald (theproducer) and Alex Garland (the screenwriter) were not content to hand the series off to just anyone and rake in some easy residual checks. More

After years of seeing Ashley Judd as little more than a doe-eyed cutie-pie with limited acting skills, I (skeptically) sat down to watch her in William Friedkin’s “Bug.” Regarding the director, well, it’s tough to knock the man who gave us “The Exorcist,” “Sorcerer,” and “The French Connection,” but over the last several years his output has been more like “Jade,” “Blue Chips,” and “The Rules of Engagement” — so I can be forgiven for doling out some skepticism on that end, too. Well that’s why we actually sit down and give every new movie a fair shake: Because you never know when an actor or a director will deliver a nice surprise. As you can probably tell by this point, “Bug” is just such a surprise. More

If there were a whole list of movies about killer mutated sheep and the horrific things they do to people, Jonathan King’s “Black Sheep” would be the very best. But since it’s the only movie with this particular premise, let’s just call it a really funny, not very scary, enthusiastically gory, and surprisingly “lovely to look at” little import from the genre geeks in New Zealand. More

I was happy to sit down with Adam Green’s Hatchet in a quiet room with the volume cranked up, and here’s why: The last two times I saw Hatchet, I was sitting with some very enthusiastic film festival audiences — and I will admit that seeing a movie in that sort of situation can mask a film’s shortcomings or make its meager assets seem just a little more impressive. So my plan with Hatchet was to sit down and watch it like I’d re-watch Friday 2 or Freddy 3; re-watch-ability plays a big part in a horror flick’s reputation and shelf life. More

It’s just amazing how many things Rob Zombie gets wrong in his resoundingly pointless remake of John Carpenter’s Halloween. The original film could be used as a freakin’ textbook on how to craft a dark thriller that will toss an audience into a frenzy — but Zombie just sort of staggers drunkenly through the source material, pissing on some things and stuffing other material into his pocket for later. He starts out trying to forge a little new ground (by making the legendary killer’s family a bunch of vile scumbags) but his “creativity” sort of wears off at the mid-way point — at which time Mr. Zombie just steals everything he can from the original film and delivers nothing more than one of the stupidest remakes you’ll ever see. More

A movie based on a Stephen King novel about a haunted hotel? And the main character is a frustrated writer? And it’s all about latent horrors, undead specters, and the gradual unraveling of a man’s psyche? Heck, I’ve seen this movie before. It was called “The Shining,” and even though it deviates quite a lot from King’s original story, it’s still a pretty excellent… More

Monsters, demons, and knife-wielding psychos might make for a suitably creepy movie, but if you really want to be chilled to the bone, just turn on the evening news and witness something really horrifying: The evil that men do to one another for no good reason. One of the most infamous crimes in American history centers around the torture and murder of young Sylvia Likens in the late ’60s, but if you’ve never heard of this story, you can prepare yourself for two separate movies that tell the tale. More