It can be tough following a successful film debut especially when your interests take your sophomore effort in a different direction from what worked so well the first time. Jon Knautz’ first feature was the horror comedy Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer, and while the film remained low profile it served definite notice that he was a filmmaker to watch. It’s filled with creatures crafted with love and practical effects and combines the grue with broad comedy. Knautz’ new film, The Shrine, retains some of that same solid effects work, but there’s not a funny moment to be found. Well, at least not an intentionally funny one. A journalist, her best friend, and her reluctant boyfriend head to rural Poland to investigate the disappearance of an American backpacker, but they only find active and suspicious resistance from the locals. Further digging reveals a mysterious and creepy shrine in the fog-enshrouded woods and a deadly secret that they’d have been better off never learning. Now they must not only fight to survive but also answer the most important question of their lives… how many Polish people does it take to whack three stupid Americans?

There were a lot of slasher movies made in the eighties, and Slaughter High is definitely one of them. The ingredients are all present including a pool of potential victims making incredibly poor decisions, a killer with motivation and excess time on his hands, at least one gratuitous and inexplicable nude scene, and some creatively gory deaths. A group of high schoolers make life miserable for a science-loving geek named Marty, but when a prank goes too far the poor nerd is left scarred, burned, and on the edge of death. Some years later the bullies are invited back to school for a reunion and discover on their arrival that not only has the school been closed but they’re the only ones on the invite list. Death is in session and soon they’re getting picked off one by one in gruesome and gory ways.

A good horror movie is a lot like a good meal. Preferably it’s meaty and delicious, needs a knife to complete, spills a bit of blood, and leaves you satisfied in the end. Or something like that I guess, I survive solely on peanut butter and steak smoothies. Bitter Feast isn’t a gourmet meal served in many courses. Nor is it exactly fast food. It’s kind of like a pretty decent banquet buffet that unfortunately sends you to the toilet right at the end. What could have been an interesting and delightfully macabre film about a chef taking out revenge against an overly harsh food critic misses a few notes and ends with what I called a “shitty cliche ending.”

After a pretty dismal 2010 in terms of horror films, I decided to look into my crystal ball and peer into the future. By the future I mean 2011. While gazing deep into my crystal ball laptop monitor, I feel fairly confidant that 2011 will be approximately 78% better in terms of horror than the previous year. Why do I feel more confident in this year’s horror slate? Because in trying to find just 11 titles to bring attention to, I had to whittle it down from sixteen. Why not give you all sixteen? Because it’s 20-eleven, not 20-sixteen, duh. Anyway, here are the 11 horror films to keep on your radar this year.

Being a heavy horror fan is a tough gig. Most producers look at horror as a quick buck genre, a franchise to be used, abused, ridden hard and put up wet to make a profit. They don’t really care too much about putting out quality product, instead they just opt for product. Or at least that’s how it seems. 2010, to me at least, felt like one of the weakest years on record for horror. I thought last year was bad, but then the past 350 some odd days happened. I’m pretty confident I could say that this is the worst year for horror since the birth of Film School Rejects. It felt that bad. Regardless of my own disappointment in the movies this year, and in myself for missing a few releases, I scrapped the bottom of the barrel barren and plucked out ten (plus one!) [that means 11] horror movies that aren’t complete wastes of your time. Then again, you might just be better off buying all the Roger Corman Cult Classics for sale from Shout! Factory.

If I were to tell you about a movie featuring beautiful, pale vampires that were all glamor and rock and roll with no sex and a lack of violence, you’d have every right to put up a hand and say pass. Unless you’re a fifteen year old girl, then you’d be really excited that I’m reviewing a Twilight film. Suck superficially sounds like something for the teen crowd but if you spend more than fifteen seconds with it you’ll discover that’s about as far from the truth as it can be. Suck manages to smartly lampoon the current fascination with vampires in their pussified forms of being beautiful, attractive monsters by creating a movie about a band that gives into their greed for fame and fortune and embrace vampirism to gain acclaim. While I personally would have liked to see a more dangerous breed of vampire at times, these rock and roll blood suckers manage humor and music in an enjoyable way.

It’s Thanksgiving in January as The Coroner catches up with this fowl-mouthed holiday treat.

If there’s a horror trilogy that doesn’t get enough love, it’s Sleepaway Camp. Wait, actually no, there are four of those now. Okay, so if there’s a horror trilogy that doesn’t get enough love, it’s Slumber Party Massacre. Now, these Roger Corman produced films aren’t necessarily great, but they hit all the notes a good slasher film should hit. There’s a great deal of nudity, a good bit of gore, and a peculiar weapon- in this instance, a three-foot long drill. The first installment follows a group of high school girls having a, you guessed it, slumber party, which is rudely interrupted by an escaped psycho killer and his drill. You can  guess where it goes from there – the bad guy tries to stick his very phallic weapon into the women. The women don’t want it. Tough.

It’s Halloween time (close enough, jerk bags!) so I’m turning the Coroner’s Report into a horror column! Wait what? Exactly. This is always a horror column, because that kind of thing is my bag, baby. But now it’s also part of the 31 Days of Horror and in honor of that, I’m jumping into the way back machine and traveling to 1987 to bring you an in-depth look at Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. This dark, gothic horror film follows Larry, his daughter Kirsty, and his second wife Julia as they move into a house previously occupied by the bad boy brother Frank. Written for the page and the screen by Clive Barker, who also directed, Hellraiser gave birth to one of the iconic characters of the genre: Pinhead. He’s what’s known as a Cenobite, an interdimensional traveler who bills himself as an angel to some, a demon to others. If your religion is all about hooks tearing your body apart, he’s an angel. If that’s your idea of hell, well… The crux of the story is Frank, who has escaped from the Cenobite Hell and seeks Julia’s help in returning to form. To do this, there will have to be murders and sacrifices. Duh.

Coming to Blu-ray September 28th is director Adam Green’s follow-up to the pretty excellent 80′s inspired slasher Hatchet. His sophomore effort ditches the buckets of bloods, head rips, and disfigured villains (but keeps Kane Hodder) and instead opts for a more realistic thriller about a trio of friends stuck on a chairlift. Yeah, kind of like Open Water but you know, in a chairlift. Except there are no sharks. No, instead their are wolves. This is one of those titles that doesn’t lend itself amazingly well to the Coroner’s Report: with so few characters, there’s bound to be a low body count and with no sadistic inbred dude hiding in the woods, there won’t be much head cutting. Also, there are no boobs. But is it worth watching anyways?

Available now on DVD from Anchor Bay, Growth explores the all too frighteningly real phenomenon of parasites infecting, harming, and potentially altering their hosts. It combines that with the all too common and (for the moment) science-fictional idea of genetically engineering human beings. Via parasites. Because that’s logical. In Growth, things exist in an alternate future timeline where, in 1989 it was apparently common practice for a bunch of scientists to head off to a small island, breed parasitic shellfish that create perfect pearls which are in turn sold on the open market to bring in more money to expand genetic testing on parasites that will rewrite human DNA and create super soldiers. This of course goes wrong, but no one really cares, and the island continues to exist and the local cops occasionally just shoot infected people in the face. But don’t worry, because the island is surrounded by salt water and salt water not only kills the parasites, but melts the host. Yeah.

Back in 2006 I had the great pleasure of viewing Hatchet in theaters, something not many people can claim. At the time, I had an immense amount of fun with the flick. Whether it was the movie, the film festival, or Kane Hodder sitting behind me like a behemoth, I was into it. Press fast forward on the button of life and it’s 2010 and this “old school American horror” flick is available in the high definition Blu-ray format, courtesy of Anchor Bay. If you’re unfamiliar with the title, Adam Green’s first foray into features follows a group of young twenty-somethings, and a few older folks, as they journey into the swamps of Louisiana on a haunted tour. As any learned horror fan would expect, soon things go south and Victor Crowley, the local boogey man, is tearing them limb from limb.

A couple of times each year I like to take a moment to just look at how horror is coming along in the year. Take a look back and what we’ve seen this year so far and gaze into the future of what’s still to come. Thus far, 2010 has been fairly underwhelming overall, and the horror scene has been no different on the big screen. We got, as usual, a bunch of remakes – at least four theatrical so far come to mind – and very few standouts. Perhaps the biggest news of the year in terms of horror was the remake of Nightmare on Elm Street being critically panned by everyone except me, but performing well enough to merit sequel considerations. On DVD, Roger Corman has been thrust back into the spotlight with Shout! Factory’s re-releasing of his massive library.

Considering that they’re roughly on par when it comes to “good ideas,” Burning Bright should have taken a cue from Snakes on a Plane and called itself Tiger in a House. After all, when you hear the phrase ‘burning bright’ the things furthest from your mind are probably, in order: hurricanes, autism, tigers. Burning Bright follows the plight (rhymes!) of a girl (Briana Evigan) and her autistic brother who find themselves stuck in a boarded up home with a very hungry tiger. You see, the step-father is building a zoo. And a hurricane is coming. And the tiger got in the house. During the hurricane. And the house was sealed shut with the kids in side. And the tiger is hungry.

Finally dredged from the depths of cinematic hell, the classic Roger Corman-produced Humanoids from the Deep is finally back on to DVD (and even Blu-ray!) courtesy of the fine folks at Shout! Factory as part of their Roger Corman Cult Collection. One of the earliest films to deal with genetic modification, the film follows the denizens of a small town who come under siege from mutated, humanoid salmon monsters (no joke) after a cannery company’s experiments with growth hormone pollute the local waters. While tensions over the cannery on land result in fist fights, a massive swarm of humanoids play a different kind of game – the rape, murder, eat game. What follows is an awesome spectacle of exploitation cinema, which are somewhat wrongly called B-Movies these days.

If you were Andrew Paquin and your sister, along with her husband, were currently starring in one of the most popular and sexy shows currently on television, what would you do? If “write a script and get them to guest in it so that a studio could put their faces prominently on the box art” then you should get a drink with him. Because you think alike. So perhaps that is a bit harsh. I mean, really, who wouldn’t take advantage of something like that? Regardless, Open House is a thriller currently available on DVD that stars Brian Geraghty and Tricia Helfer as a pair of sadistic squatters with a thirst for blood. Not thirsting for blood this go around is Stephen Moyer, who guests stars along with his wife, Anna Paquin, who is in the film for a few minutes.

With the “too violent for Comic Con” 3D reimagining coming our way this August from the (mostly) awesome Alexandre Aja, you bet your bottom dollar there is a brand spanking new edition of the original available to purchase. From our friends at Shout! Factory, who are doing a kick ass job releasing plenty of cult classics, the 1978 Joe Dante helmed Piranha is coming to shelves near you soon. While this release isn’t as completely packed with new features as the Death Race disc was, it’s still probably the most complete release you’ll ever see for this film. This is the paragraph where I often give a bit of plot information about the film, so here goes: it is literally Jaws but with piranhas instead of a shark and a guy in a flannel shirt instead of Roy Scheider.

I’m not certain how I heard of Someone’s Knocking at the Door and I’m quite sure I never put it at number one in my Netflix queue.  Strange then, that it showed up at my door just the other day in a timely fashion for me to review it for this column before heading off to Comic-Con. SKATD is a strange, strange, strange film. Not for the weak of heart or of stomach, the film is drug fueled and based around the premise, kinda, of a pair of sexual partner killers who murder by using their genitals.  Yes, the film is about being raped to death. How is one raped to death, you might be asking?  Apparently the answer revolved around having a vagina capable of swallowing a human head or a dong the size of my leg. As you might now be thinking, I must warn you: this review is graphic.

Like any horror fan, if you approach me with a movie that promises not only girls, but also bikinis, and also murder, I’m going to pop out of my seat with excitement. Such was the case with Bikini Girls on Ice, a Canadian film that snuck across the border and into my DVD player. Judging from the title alone I thought I was in for some sort of magical Icecapades type film only with more blood and more boobs. Little did I know that there was no ice skating rink, very few exposed boobs, and that most of the murder would occur off-screen.  This is normally the part of the article where I write the plot down, but even by horror movie standards, the story is thin – as thin as ice, hohoho. As near as I can tell, a bus full of girls on their way to a bikini car wash breaks down at a gas station in the middle of nowhere, so they do the only two logical things: have their car wash anyway and get murdered.

Struggling in what feels like a horror dry-spell, for this week’s report I turned to others to help direct me towards a film to review. Fellow horror hound Rob Hunter bravely stepped forward and recommended I check out Animals, currently streaming on Netflix. Now, when I say bravely, I mean cowardly, because this film has been tied up in development hell for years, faced all sorts of troubles in getting made, and was dumped straight into the video world. Hunter, perhaps in an attempt to dodge a bad bullet, set me on the case.