It’s rare that we ever come across a film that crosses two very different genres so seamlessly as the Finnish film Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale. Based on the series of shorts in which a Finnish shipping company explains the best and worst ways in dealing with renegade Santa Clauses, this story tells the tale of how that fictional company came to be.

Marketed as a horror, yet played as a Joe Dante-esque holiday adventure, Exports is able to both scare the crap out of you with hundreds of naked old men, as it is able to make you smile at the ridiculousness of hundreds of naked old men running through the snow.

If you’ve got the stomach for a film in subtitles, we recommend watching this one in its original tongue. Skip the dubs so you don’t get lost in some of the performances that make this playful horror film as fun as it is.

Some may consider the film to be a bit of a slow build for what is surely an epic and explosive ending, but if you relate with the two curious boys or any of the members of the search party then you will be along for every minute of the action here.

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Red State is a movie filmed straight from the first draft of the shooting script.

Right from the opening shot of a small town, the cuts of scenery are so quick the audience doesn’t even know what they’re supposed to be looking at. Eventually the camera settles on a mother driving her son to school. On the way they pass a group protesting the funeral of a recently murdered homosexual student. Director Kevin Smith finally lingers on a shot of one of the protest signs featuring the phrase “Anal Penetration” in big, bold letters. We see the sign a few times more before the boy gets to school.

When he does, he explains to his teacher (who doesn’t even seem to mind his tardiness) why he’s late, and she launches into some unbelievably clumsy exposition about the group’s leader, Pastor Abin Cooper (Michael Parks), a nut of a fundamentalist who’s universally despised around these parts and runs his own private Wacoville just outside of town. It’s also brought up at the murdered boy went to that very high school! Two things should immediately pop out: 1) If the kid went to that school, and was murdered two weeks ago, how on earth is it possible that none of his classmates knew him? And 2) If everyone already knows Abin Cooper, then why spend so much time explaining who he is, what he does, where he does it, why he does it…? The answer, of course, is to fill in the audience, but it’s done in such an amateurish way that you can’t believe it came from writer/director Kevin Smith, who’s not only made eight feature films, not only been writing professionally for nearly 20 years, but who’s also a man who prides himself on the quality of his writing.

And this is in the first three minutes.

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A couple years ago I named Christopher Young’s Drag Me To Hell as my favorite score of the year. It had all of the big, bold, bombastic sounds you think of with true gothic horror. What raised that score above its genre and made it stand alone as the best was its sense of fun. It very well could have been the theme music for the tea cups ride at Inferno-Disney.

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is a new horror film with a strong pedigree. It takes its cues from a more classical age of horror movies and the film’s score follow suite. The music sounds like it’s from another time and shares many of the trademarks of Young’s score. This is particularly evident with the opening title, which actually made me look at my iTunes to confirm I wasn’t listening to Drag Me To Hell.

Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders have put together a very consistent sounding soundtrack for this throwback horror flick, in fact I often went ten minutes without realizing the track had changed. This ends up being a double edged sword for the album, on one hand I like what the music is giving me, so consistency means it is all gravy.

However, after the strong opening, the album never really hooks you again. You pretty much have heard everything dynamic this score has to offer in the first few tracks.

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Good lord, has it already been over 10 years since the last Scream movie?  It’s hard to believe that Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven first turned the horror genre on its head way back in 1996 (Scream 3 came out in 2000).

That first Scream film felt fresh in the stale horror market, offering up a tale of teenagers being stalked and killed by the “Ghostface” killer. What was so fun about the series was that the kids being stalked were horror movie fanatics, thus they new the “rules” of the genre. The movie playfully skewered the very genre it was depicting. The film spawned two sequels featuring original heroine Sidney (Neve Campbell) reporter Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) and Deputy Dewey (David Arquette).

All three characters return in Scream 4, which takes place in Sidney’s hometown of Woodsboro. Sidney has authored a successful book about her ordeal, and has come home for a booksigning. No sooner does she arrive than the bodies starting stacking up. Like all the Scream movies, the film is essentially a whodunit.  This time Sidney’s Aunt (Mary McDonnell) and cousin Jill (Emma Roberts) get pulled into the fray, since Sidney is staying with them.

The film opens with a bunch of teenagers watching Stab 6 and 7 (based on the Woodsboro killings) and lamenting the state of Asian cinema and torture porn.

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Insidious was one film that was high on my list of priority to view at SXSW. Essentially a haunted house genre movie, the film is from writer Leigh Whannell and director James Wan, who previously worked together on Saw. No worries, this film is more carnival fun-house ride than house of horrors. I mean that in a good way.

Wan keeps the gore to a minimum, and the film is more campy than truly frightening. It’s still a darn fun ride, in the vein of Drag Me to Hell. The jump scares are plentiful, and had the audience squealing and screaming, but you won’t lie in bed at night pulling the covers up under your chin. It’s quickly forgotten as a fun diversion.

Young couple Josh (Patrick Wilson) and Renai (Rose Byrne) have just moved into a big, creepy house with their three children. Josh is pretty oblivious to just how stressed out Renai is,  what with caring for three small children and settling into this huge house. You could even say she is (understandably) emotionally unstable.

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The whole exorcism theme has been to death in movies, and The Rite is one more reason it should be shelved for a while. No movie has been able to live up to the grand-daddy of them all, The Exorcist (1973).  The Rite doesn’t even try.  It’s an embarrassment to the genre.

The tale is based on the true story of Father Gary Thomas who serves as an official exorcist for the Diocese of San Jose. This is presumably the tale of how he came to be an exorcist, and it is dreadfully dull. Journalist Matt Baglio chronicled Thomas’s time in Rome in the book ”The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist”.  I’ve got to imagine the book was far more compelling than the movie.

Director Mikael Håfström (1408, Derailed) centers the movie around fictional character Michael Kovak (playing the role based on Thomas) and his crisis of faith, which he must quickly sort out before, you know, he is possessed by the devil. Flashbacks show that  Kovak was raised in the family mortuary, à la Six Feet Under. He has a tense relationship with his father (Rutger Hauer) and after his mother dies, he decides to flee the family business and attend seminary school.

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I shudder to think that I almost didn’t go see this film.  The press screening was early in the morning, it was a purported 2 and 1/2 hours long, it was subtitled, and I just didn’t know if I had the stamina that day, as I had four other films lined up.  It ends up that this is my favorite film of the entire festival, and I would go so far as to say it is a masterpiece on its own accord, not just within horror circles.

Director Kim Ji-Woon  has quickly differentiated himself from the pack of talented South Korean directors with exceptional genre films like A Tale of Two Sisters and The Good, the Bad, the Weird.  Here he ups his game with an epic tale featuring one of the most chilling serial killers I have ever seen in a film.

On a snowy night, beautiful Joo-Yun (Oh San-Ha) gets a flat tire on her way home, and is stranded by the side of the road.  A man approaches her vehicle and adamantly insists on helping her.  After she declines his offer of help, he savagely attacks her by breaking out the car window.  She is dragged from her car, leaving a trail of blood across the top of the crisp white snow.

The film wastes no time bringing on the horrific visuals, as poor Joo-Yun is systematically tortured and brutally killed in a nondescript building lined with plastic tarps. Her tormentor is Kyeong-Cheol ( Choi Min-sik), who we come to find out has murdered a lot of people.

The murderer has made the grave error of messing with the wrong woman, though.  She was engaged to federal agent Dae-hoon (Lee Byung-hun), who vows he will hunt down whoever butchered her, and exact a terrible revenge.

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Mother’s Day, directed by Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw II, III, IV), is loosely based on a horrific, true story that took place in Wichita, Kansas 10 years ago – as well as the 1980 Charles Kaufman film by the same name.  The setting changes from an ill-fated camping trip to a tale of home invasion in the remake – we meet the Koffin brothers when they return to their mother’s house after their attempt to rob a bank goes horribly wrong, leaving the youngest brother seriously injured from a gunshot wound.

Upon their arrival to their childhood home, they quickly discover that their mother is no longer living there (having lost her house to foreclosure) and end up crashing what will become The Worst Birthday Party Ever, which is being thrown by the new inhabitants, Beth and Daniel Sohapi.

The brothers hold the home-owner’s and their guests hostage – alternately beating them, threatening to rape them and robbing them of their money, belongings and dignity as they attempt to gain control of their situation.  It doesn’t take long for Mother (Rebecca De Mornay) and their little sister to arrive on the scene, at which point things swiftly make the shift from being merely terrifying to unfathomably shitty.

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Director Adam Green brought his patented flair for gore to Fantastic Fest with Hatchet II, the sequel to the well received Hatchet (2006.) The movie will be released in theaters unrated, the second October release to buck the trend and opt for no rating (the other being I Spit on Your Grave 2010, which also showed at the festival.)

Hatchet II has the distinction of being the first film that theater chain AMC will release and support in unrated form, through their independent program.  Dark Sky films is the distributor, and this marks the largest unrated release in major theaters in 25 years.  That’s  a huge development for horror, and for that reason alone, if you are a horror fan, you should support this movie by buying a ticket.

Although I personally adore Adam Green, and fully support his career, I found the hype for Hatchet perplexing.  I watched the film twice, just to see if I missed something, but I never found the movie to be very good.  The story behind Victor Crowley (played by Kane Hodder in both films) is interesting, but the secondary characters are grating, to say the least.

Fortunately most of those tourist types have been eliminated from the sequel, and the story has been stripped down to a bare bones slasher flick.  You get exactly what you expect, no more, no less.  It’s a good October release, and should satisfy those looking for a an old-school throwback to the films they grew up with, but don’t expect any new ground to be broken here.

Hatchet II literally picks up precisely where Hatchet left off.  Scream queen Danielle Harris steps into the role of Marybeth this time around. If you recall, she was the sole survivor of Victor Crowley’s bloodbath in Hatchet, and she flees to the safety of an isolated house occupied by a swamp dweller. All is fine and good until he actually finds out who she is, then he promptly kicks her out of his house.

Marybeth seeks answers from New Orleans Voodoo shop owner/ghost tour operator Reverend Zombie, played by horror icon Tony Todd (Candyman.)  He’s sympathetic to her plight, and decides to accompany her into the swamp to retrieve the bodies of her father and brother. They assemble a ragtag group of people to track down Crowley.

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Harrowing is the word that keeps coming to mind every time I think about this nasty little Spanish thriller, also known as Secuestrados.   It’s a nail biter from the opening long-cut sequence to the shocking conclusion.

The film begins with a bloodied man in a business suit (with a white plastic bag tied over his head) desperately trying to catch a breath of air as he stumbles toward a road.  Since he can’t see, he walks right into oncoming traffic, and ends up on the hood of a car.

The horrified driver assists him in removing the bag, and the man pleads for the driver to call his house. He tries to warn his daughter not to let anyone in and to call the police. It’s too late, his daughter says, they are already there, and they have shot mom… The entire opening is filmed in one continuous take, and it is tense as hell.

Next up we see a (different) man and his family moving into their beautiful contemporary home.  Wife Marta (Ana Wagener) directs the moving crew on where to deliver boxes, and has planned a celebratory family night to settle into their posh new home. Daughter Isa (Manuela Vellés) has opted for a night out with her boyfriend instead.

Before the two can resolve their differences, their familial bickering is silenced by a trio of home invaders who forcefully and swiftly let it be known that they mean business. One takes off with dad Jaime (Fernando Cayo) in order to drain his bank account at the ATM.

That leaves Marta and Isa to fend for themselves against the terrifying thugs who brutalize and torment the women over the course of the evening.

The film takes place in real-time, and makes great use of split screen during some of the excruciating scenes. The rest of the scenes are shot as single uncut shots, so the audience gets to experience the sequence of events as the characters do. It’s a unique approach, particularly when coupled with the split screen.

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Exceptional writing, solid acting performances, and a refreshingly original premise elevate A Horrible Way To Die to the short list of must-sees from Fantastic Fest 2010. For a movie lover, there is nothing better than discovering a hidden gem in its pure state, before all the packaging and marketing sully the original vision.

Such was the case with this movie, which immediately emerged as one of my personal festival favorites. Writer Simon Barrett mines fresh territory in the serial killer genre by positing an intriguing premise; how would you move on with your life if your ex- boyfriend was a serial killer?

The story unfolds in a non-linear fashion, partially told in flashbacks. Sarah (played by Amy Seimetz) is a dental hygienist who is haunted by memories of her ex, who ended up being a Ted Bundy type serial killer. Understandably, she is crippled by self-doubt and insecurity because of her past, which makes a new relationship almost unthinkable. She regularly attends AA meetings.

Enter Kevin (Joe Swanberg), a sweetly awkward fellow addict who asks Sarah out. She tenuously accepts his invitation, and the two strike up a romance of sorts. Meanwhile, her ex escapes from prison during a routine transfer, and Sarah must come to grips with the fact that the man may be pursuing her. How will she share her dark secret with Kevin?

It’s a delicious spin on the whole serial killer sub-genre. The film slowly builds tension and lets us become familiar with the characters, so that when the twisty final act rolls around, it’s a real punch to the gut. Charismatic AJ Bowen (who also appeared in Hatchet 2, another Fantastic Fest movie) plays Sarah’s ex-boyfriend Garrick.

Like Mickey and Mallory in Natural Born Killers, Garrick has a rabid fan base that treats him like a celebrity. He gets fan mail and love letters when he is in prison and he has a facebook page and multiple websites dedicated to him.

It’s a chilling commentary on our current state of pop culture worship and our moral decline as a society. After all, we’ve already seen this type of behavior with Ted Bundy and multiple other serial killers; it’s hardly a far-fetched idea.

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Fantastic Fest 2010 was host to the first public screening of  I Spit on Your Grave: Unrated (2010.) The film is a remake of the shocking, iconic 1978 movie sometimes known as Day of the Woman.

A lot of people argue that there was no need to remake the film, which to this day is considered one of the most disturbing movies of all time.

So, does the update do the original justice? Quite simply, it does, and then some.

(Female) producer Lisa Hansen came out to introduce the film to the audience, and she also participated in a Q & A session following the film.

She indicated that over 100 cuts had been made to the movie to try to placate the MPAA, but finally distributor Anchor Bay threw in the towel and decided to release the movie as unrated. This is a ballsy movie nowadays, as many large chains won’t even book an unrated film, so that may be why you have a hard time finding the film in a theater near you. Kudos to Anchor Bay for sticking to their guns, and director Steven R. Monroe’s vision.

The premise of the movie has remained almost identical to the original. A fresh scrubbed writer type from the big city has sought out the peace and quiet of an isolated cabin in the woods, hoping to get a jump on writing her second novel.

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