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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.