Horror Squad, Horror Movies, News, Trailers, and More

How's this for a Fate Worse Than Death! -- having your likeness manipulated after your death in order to shill for some satellite TV? And being forced to co-star with David Spade even AFTER your demise? Truly chilling.

Between the release of Where the Wild Things Are last weekend and the (alleged) re-release of Rob Zombie's Halloween 2 next weekend, I suppose that it's only appropriate that we came across this bit from G4's Attack of the Show this weekend, wondering what it might look like if the rocker-turned-auteur re-imagined the sh*t out of Maurice Sendak's classic childhood book instead of Spike Jonze. Watch and see....

Alright, there's going to be spoilers from the get-go, but if you're a good Horror Squad reader, you likely caught Sam Raimi's so-called "spook-a-blast" in theaters or recently on home video (and enjoyed the, um, heck out of it).

So this entry could go one of two ways. We could concern ourselves with Christine (Alison Lohman), whose gypsy-spurning behavior results in a three-day-long curse. She is bashed around her house, given the mother of all nosebleeds, forced to kill her kitten (and for naught, it turns out), embarrassed before her potential in-laws, driven to pawn most of her possessions, whacked with a sizable gravestone, and then -- in spite of all her best intentions and elaborate schemes -- dragged down to hell for some good old-fashioned eternal damnation.

OR we go with Christine's boyfriend, Clay (Justin Long). He is forced to see his love fall prey to forces that he -- the psychiatry major and eternal skeptic -- fails to comprehend, embarrass herself before his parents (who weren't so keen on her to begin with), and then see her dragged to hell before his very eyes. How do you explain that away? How do you even live with that? Is that not an equally damning Fate Worse Than Death?

I guess as every Halloween brings a new Saw sequel, each one will also merit a new parody video. Last year gave us the amusing Saw School Musical (since HSM3 opened opposite Saw V), and this year, Saw VI brings with it an early glimpse at one of Jigsaw's less effective traps. The Vault of Horror is responsible for bringing this one to our attention, and, well... you can see for yourself below, lest I go and describe the joke away. Suffice to say we could have used this clip as a "fate worse than death."

As anyone who's read my stuff at Cinematical knows, I tend to mind release dates quite a bit. Real people have fantasy football, I have this armchair slate shuffling. (Don't judge me.)

Last February, I wondered out loud what Warner Bros. had in store for Richard Kelly's The Box, seeing as it had endured countless release date changes for the better part of a year. I like the moral dilemma at the film's center, and I trust Kelly -- yes, even after Southland Tales -- to expand Richard Matheson's short story in ways clever enough to justify the length of a feature.

After The Box settled down on November 6th, Universal ended up bumping back The Wolf Man from that date and replacing it with the alien abduction thriller The Fourth Kind. I wasn't all that thrilled by the trailer, but I can't deny that it always seems to get people talking when it plays before a movie.

The only time I had heard mention of Stan Helsing was when Peter wrote up the trailer for Transylmania, and now that it seems to be getting some sort of theatrical release on 10/23 -- despite hitting video shelves on 10/27 -- we've been granted a trailer with which to finally compare the horror parodies. And guess what? They look equally, terrifyingly unfunny.

Brought to us by just one of the brains behind Scary Movie (yeah, because it turned out so well with two of them), the eponymous slacker (Steve Howey) finds out he's a descendant of Van Helsing and entrusted with defending some small town from the knock-off likes of Freddy, Jason, Chucky, Mike Myers, Leatherface, Pinhead, and -- if the IMDB cast list is to be believed -- Michael Jackson. (It's only a casket if someone nails it shut, I guess.)

I guess that's as clever an excuse as any to justify the five-year gap between this and an original that was risible enough. Have no fear, though: Stan Helsing's got all the dick jokes and Leslie Nielsen that Van left out... and on Blu-ray at that!

Well, most of you readers have kept up with the buzz on this year's Grace, a fairly gruesome look at life after birth where they shouldn't be any, and probably already know where I'm going with this.

Those of you who haven't and dig the sound of a young woman (Jordan Ladd) doing anything and everything to keep her undead newborn fed should probably check the flick out before reading any further.

I can't say that I rely on subways for transportation where I live, and I can't say that I've ever had any problems on those I have ridden. However, if I relied on them to get to and fro, and if I made said commutes at the latest possible hours of the night, then I could see the threat of a late-night butcher creeping into both my poorly lit subway car and the periphery of my imagination.

Midnight Meat Train exploits the pulpy notion that some brooding mute who looks a lot like Vinnie Jones rides the rails every night, looking for fresh meat in order to keep countless (literal) demons at bay. And the ending of MMT -- yes, yes, spoilers be comin' -- relishes the idea that even these supernatural caterers must at some point retire and be replaced.

James Gunn's squishy throwback, Slither, is full of juicy death scenes and gross humor, as a small town is overrun by alien slugs capable of possessing whomever so long as they make it into their mouths and making them the slaves of their ever-mutating master.

It's also a love story. Starla (Elizabeth Banks) is devoted to her husband, Grant (Michael Rooker), and struggles to remain so as he mutates into something freakier and freakier. In what can be construed as an act of mercy, he opts to impregnate Brenda (Brenda James) down the street instead of Starla in order to further his invasion.

And poor, poor Brenda... she begins to swell up something fierce, and by the time Starla and sheriff Bill (Nathan Fillion) find her in a backwoods barn, well, she's a little worse for wear -- as massive as she is above and constantly, ravenously hungry in order to feed her progeny. Alas, Brenda's sides soon split and out spill countless alien slugs looking to take over the tiny town. Ah, the miracle of birth, born out of a Fate Worse Than Death!

Well, congrats are in order to Paramount for slyly marketing its low-budget pick-up, Paranormal Activity, to bona fide box office success with $7.1 million on a mere 159 screens, with a wider release still to come.

But many of the fans savvy enough to seek it out are by now aware that Activity's ending wasn't always as it stands now. In fact, the film runs about ten minutes shorter between its late '07/early '08 festival screenings and its current cut.

So, to answer the questions that I and others fortunate enough to have seen the original version have been fielding, we'll be taking a look at as many differences as we can remember between the two, not to mention the further rumblings of what was different in test screenings for the film.

Naturally, this means spoilers. I know, it says as much right there in the headline, but for the sake of covering our butts, let's make this clear: a spoiler warning for everything post-jump.

There, that ought to do it.