If you love old B-movies, you can’t miss Shout Factory’s line of “Roger Corman’s Cult Classics” DVD collections. Horror, fantasy, science fiction, grindhouse- all are represented in these neat 3- and 4-film multi-packs.

The Vampires, Mummies, and Monsters collection is kind of a B-movie potluck. The four films on two discs created over a span of 17 years have incredibly different looks, tones, and yes, monsters.

As technology gets smaller and cheaper, making films is getting easier and easier. But in a market lousy with low-budget indies, it’s not always easy to score well known actors. This wasn’t a problem for Mark Vadik.

The writer/director of Cyrus: Mind of a Serial Killer somehow managed to wrangle several seasoned actors for parts of various size, including Brian Krause (Charmed), Danielle Harris (multiple Halloween films), Doug Jones (Hellboy), and the irreplaceable Lance Henriksen. As you watch the film, the obvious question that comes to mind is, How?

Cyrus is a frame story in which TV journalist Maria Sanchez, looking for fodder for her tabloid news show, interviews a man who claims to know the identity of a local serial killer. He tells her and her cameraman the sad tale of Cyrus, a former soldier who, when his marriage and business fell apart, turned to murder and cannibalism.

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.

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.

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.