Ravenous (1999)

Ravenous is a terrifically well-made gory horror movie with splashes of humor. Robert Carlyle (The Full Monty) stars as a mysterious man who turns up at a California military outpost, circa 1850, and turns out to be a cannibal. Guy Pearce (L.A. Confidential), David Arquette (Scream), Jeffrey Jones (Amadeus), and Jeremy Davies (Saving Private Ryan) also star as American soldiers. Director Antonia Bird (Priest, Mad Love) keeps everything smart and balanced, and an amazing score by Michael Nyman (The Piano, Gattaca) -- reminiscent of 1970s-era Italian horror movies -- keeps us on our toes. This is not for the faint of heart; it may convert you into a vegetarian. read more...

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• Viewed as Monsters ▶ Yes please
• Theater of Blood ▶ Make me cringe

We Are What We Are (2013)

Jim Mickle's We Are What We Are is a remake of a 2012 Mexican film, but that doesn't matter much. It also doesn't matter much if I tell you that it's a cannibal movie, because it's really a movie about family and obligation, and that's what makes it scary. read more...

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• Viewed as Monsters ▶ Yes please
• Theater of Blood ▶ Make me cringe

Werewolf Woman (1976)

Rino Di Silvestro's Werewolf Woman (1976) is an amazing movie, but not by any normal standards. It's amazing for its peculiar imagination, for its confident disregard for common sense, and for the courage of its convictions. The movie starts with a sequence involving a werewolf woman. It's nighttime, she's covered with hair and bounds around in the woods tearing people apart. But it turns out that she's not an actual werewolf. She just thinks she is (and, apparently, one of her ancestors was a lycanthrope). So every 30 days when the moon cycles and turns full, she gets homicidal tendencies. read more...

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• Viewed as Monsters ▶ Yes please
• Theater of Blood ▶ Make me cringe
• Boldness ▶ Bold, aggressive, unrepressed, cathartic or expressive actions

The Girl with All the Gifts (2017)

With a glut of zombie movies on the market, this one, based on a novel by Mike Carey, at least tinkers with some fresh ideas, and, like the best zombie movies, its strengths are based on human themes. read more...

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Stake Land (2011)

The press materials for Jim Mickle's Stake Land reference author Richard Matheson, but only insofar as it includes a kind of cross between vampires and zombies, as Matheson employed for his great novel I Am Legend. Otherwise, Stake Land starts off as a kind of very serious, dreary version of Zombieland. A naive teen (Connor Paolo) joins up with a grizzled hardass called "Mister" (Nick Damici, who co-wrote the script), who teaches the youngster how to kill the ravenous beasties. They keep traveling north, hoping to run into some kind of haven, and pick up the usual batch of misfits (including Top Gun's Kelly McGillis) along the way. It's all fairly typical. What sets this movie apart, however, is the appearance of a bizarre religious cult that could be more dangerous than the monsters. If only it had gone farther... (Reviewed at the San Francisco International Film Festival.) read more...

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• Viewed as Monsters ▶ Yes please
• Theater of Blood ▶ Make me cringe