I wish I could say THE WARD is a return to form for John Carpenter. I grew up on his films, and HALLOWEEN, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, THE THING, and THEY LIVE are among my favourite flicks. Heck, I even have a soft spot for some of his outright flops, like MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN, and ESCAPE FROM L.A. While he hasn't made a good film in AT LEAST twelve years (VAMPIRES in '98, although most would list IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS as the last vintage Carpenter flick), I was psyched to hear Carpenter would once again be stepping behind the camera. Still, I had reservations about the tired sounding storyline (pretty girls being picked off one-by-one) which has been done to death (heck, he all but invented the genre!).

Directed and written by Reg Traviss, Psychosis is the definition of a horror film. No later than ten minutes in, we witness a serial killer shockingly attacking a group of youths. Near to the attack site, Sarah (Charisma Carpenter), a crime novelist has just relocated to the English countryside, along with her husband David (Paul Schulfor). From noises at night to sightings of non-existing people, Sarah becomes more and more insecure with the belief that someone is hiding in the woods. As the only one to witness such occurrences, the locals are confident that it’s just her imagination, but is it just a case of an overactive imagination, or is there a more sinister plot being carried out?

Quarantine is Saved By The Bell and Shaft and shoulder pads in women’s clothing. It’s Ross Perot briefly leading the 1992 Presidential Election and John Lennon’s bed-in for peace. It’s Hoovervilles, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, and Andy Warhol’s soup cans. Just as Bret Michaels screaming “Nothin’ But A Good Time” in black spandex pants obnoxiously illustrates exactly where popular music was in the 1980s, Quarantine oozes the macabre, ghoulish stench of 2008, this the foul year of our Lord. The camerawork is shaky. The glitz is non-existent. And the final product is remarkably average. This is what the horror genre has become. Your father’s scream queen in fuck-me-pumps has skipped town. Black guys no longer have the market cornered on early, unnecessary deaths. Bad puns are the new leprosy. The rules have changed, folks. There’s zombies to the left of you, viruses to the right, and here you are--stuck in the middle with Jennifer Carpenter and an axe of mediocrity.

Corin Nemec (Mansquito, SS Doomtrooper) co-stars alongside Charisma Carpenter (The Expendables, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) as TV ghost hunters that enter a reportedly haunted house that may prove to be the death of them in the SyFy Original "House of Bones" directed by Jeffery Scott Lando who also is responsible for the SyFy Original film "Goblin" which is the first and up until now only SyFy Original to receive a good review from The Liberal Dead, perhaps it's time to place Mr. Lando on my directors to watch radar.

A world-weary English teacher has to confront his demons when his comprehensive school comes under attack from a group of youths intent on spreading terror through-out the corridors.


Receiving his filmmaking education on low-budget titles such as Darkhunters (2004) and Forest of the Damned (2005), Brit director Johannes Roberts graduated from the ‘straight-to-DVD’ school in 2010 with his first theatrically-released feature F, a John Carpenter-inspired slasher set in a sprawling UK comprehensive school. Roberts takes the theme of decaying social standards and ‘Broken Britain’, throws in a little Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) and Halloween (1978), and delivers an interesting thriller that should appeal to fans of recent genre efforts such as Them (2006) and Eden Lake (2008).

In this gory (the special effects are especially well done) slice-n-dicer, the happiness and the sanity of a W.W.II vet is destroyed when he returns home and finds his girl in the arms of another at the town's annual dance.

Third of this week’s excellent bounty of genre potboilers is the cheap-as-chips Canadian thriller Pontypool, tight as a drum and the most inventive spin on a zombie-plague premise in years. The moaning hordes barely intrude, since the action is confined to a talk-radio station in small-town Ontario, where a maverick shock jock (Stephen McHattie) and his beleaguered producer (Lisa Houle) hear tell of the usual apocalypse outside: rioting, cannibalism, news of a virus

The most telling component of how misguided and laboriously mediocre Whiteout, the latest film from Gone in 60 Seconds director Dominic Sena, is can be found within the manner in which its heroine, United States Marshal Carrie Stetko, is introduced. The camera tracks the back of Stetko, played by the aesthetically immaculate Kate Beckinsale, through the winding corridors of her station at a research lab on Antarctica before she arrives at her personal quarters. Beckinsale then begins to slowly remove every layer of her clothing in preparation for a remarkably unnecessary shower sequence.

1984, and Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ is sweeping the world, including in a small ramshackle village in New Zealand. There, living with his grandmother, a younger brother and several cousins, we meet Boy. He’s about nine or ten years old, I’d guess. His younger brother, Rocky, is six and thinks he has super-powers. Boy has no such illusions about himself, but instead invents (and truly believes) fanciful stories about his absent father who is either a master carpenter, a decorated soldier, a deep sea treasure diver, captain of a rugby team or knockout-punch boxer, depending on which day it is. He has a friend called Dallas, who has two sisters, Dynasty and Falcon Crest.
Boy’s grandmother is called away to attend a funeral, leaving Boy (James Rolleston) to look after the rest of the family until his father arrives. The father, you may not be surprised to know, is none of those things listed above. Instead, he’s a small-time criminal recently released from jail. On his last job he managed to at least bury some cash in a field near the house and has now returned to get it, and to see his kids for the first time in years.

Dwayne Johnson, a.k.a. The Rock, is back to his old ass-kicking ways in the new action thriller Faster, an old school revenge flick of the hard-boiled 1970s variety. Johnson plays a man simply called Driver, a former getaway driver who has just been released after doing 10 hard years in prison. Driver has one need, one simple but deadly motivation: to find the sons of bitches whose treachery landed him behind bars and killed his brother.

Mercenary John Seeger (Steven Seagal) is the best in the business. John and his crew are battling some soldiers on the French-controlled Galmoral Island in Southern Africa as they're trying to hold the French Ambassador (Rudiger Eberle) and his family hostage while there's a coup going on.

Dario Argento’s newest film, the aptly named Giallo, isn’t the saving grace his fans are expecting, yet it isn’t the abomination his fans were expecting. If anything, it’s a much stronger film than his recent films, in terms of plotting, but as a giallo film it doesn’t offer up much new from a genre fans have grown accustomed too after 35 years. So? Fans have been really critical of Argento in the recent later stage of his career, more so than they have against Romero and even Carpenter. Immediately, they shrug off a new film, proclaiming it’ll be no classic like Deep Red or Suspiria. But does a new Argento film need to be a classic each and every time? Have horror fans become that short-tempered and spoiled? I think so.

John Cold is an ex-CIA agent working as a mercenary. He's hired by James Donovan to break his arms-dealing brother Michael out of prison.

After the successful break the Donovans hire John to help sell the parts for a small nuclear bomb to Nicholi, the leader of a Chechen terrorist group. They're plan is to to blow up Los Angeles in retaliation for the CIA killing the group's previous leader.

After a serial killer named Red John murdered Patrick Janes wife and daughter, Jane dedicated his life to hunting down and killing Red John. To that end he gave up his lucrative pretense of being a psychic and joined the California Bureau of Investigation (CBI) as a consultant to the team responsible for investigating the Red John case, led by Senior Agent Teresa Lisbon. Using Janes exceptional gift for observation and his mentalist tricks, the team is able to close an unprecedented number of cases, but Janes unconventional and often outright illegal methods also bring much censure down on Lisbons head, making his assistance both a blessing and a curse. Meanwhile, the hunt for Red John continues...

When John Klein, a Washington Post journalist, and his wife Mary finally find the house of their dreams, they just cant believe their luck. On the way back from the bargain, Mary nearly runs over a caped, winged figure, jerks the wheel and skids into the sidewalk. She hits her head badly, and dies in the hospital a little later. John, completely devastated, soon finds some sketches his wife made after the accident. They all show a winged creature, yet there is no angel resemblance at all. Two years later, John all of a sudden finds himself one night in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. He has no idea how he has journeyed the 400 miles in less than two hours. In the small town, local cop Connie struggles with many sightings of a mothlike creature taller than a man being reported, while John believes that an explanation for his wifes fate can be found. The deeper John digs, the clearer the mothmans purpose arises - only to leave his life in immediate danger, as it seems.