Like a little Omen with your Outbreak? The sixth horror film under the Dark Castle Entertainment shingle, The Reaping takes investigative scientist Katherine (Hilary Swank) to Haven, La., to determine why the dirty little town’s river has turned red with blood. The locals blame a cute lil’ girl (AnnaSophia Robb) who looks as if she’s feral and has menstrual blood caked on her leg, but Katherine’s not so sure.

She’s a miracle-buster, after all, explaining away dozens of so-called religious occurrences with good ol’ scientific know-how. Her time in Haven may change all that, however, as frogs rain from the sky, flies swarm, lice propagate, cows die, locusts attack, Idris Elba takes off his shirt, yada yada yada – it’s as if the 10 biblical plagues are actually happening!

Stephen Hopkins’ film isn’t nearly as bad as its icy reception would lead you to believe. Okay, so it’s overly orange-looking and has an end scene that you can predict halfway through, but it’s fun enough and I’m always up for a movie in which fat people’s faces are covered with boils.

The one thing that does suck is the climax, in which Hopkins goes overboard on the special effects, bleeding every last drop from the budget. I liken it to when you go to Chili’s and pay with a gift certificate, and then the waiter tells you he can’t give you change, so you’re like, “Okay, I guess we’ll get the Molten Chocolate Cake, too.”

Moral: Never trust a British actor trying to wrangle a Bayou accent. —Rod Lott

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Dude, you got zombies in my Nazi war movie!

Yeah, well, you got Nazis in my zombie flick!

Wait, how about we combine them and make a movie about … zombie Nazis! They come back to life to kill a bunch of annoying med students in the mountains of Norway. We’ll call it Dead Snow and it’ll be an homage to Sam Raimi, only even wetter. We’ll have this scene where one of the zombies gets stuck in a tree and one of the heroes goes off the edge of a cliff with another Nazi zombie holding on to his waist, and the only thing that keeps them from falling all the way is that the med student is holding on to the tree Nazi’s intestines, using them as a rope.

Yeah, and we can have a guy cut off his arm with a chainsaw because he’s been bitten and he thinks he has to cut off any body part a zombie chomps down on, and then another zombie bites him in the crotch. Just imagine the look on his face!

We can make it a little scary at the beginning and then let it all get funny, like Raimi used to do. Not too much sex, if you don’t count the guy who gets ridden hard in the outhouse just before the girl gets pulled into the dump hole.

And the best part is it doesn’t even have to be good, because one of those assholes who write for Flick Attack will kind of like it, no matter how lame it is.

Dude, I write for Flick Attack.

Really? I meant one of the other assholes.

Well, all right, then. —Doug Bentin

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Has Hollywood just completely given up on the horror anthology? Its failure to not give something as awesome as Trick ‘r Treat a theatrical release suggests the answer is “yes.” Look elsewhere to get your ominous omnibus fix — particularly, to Thailand, for the frightening foursome known as 4bia.

Read that as “phobia,” for each segment plays upon a different fear, with directors taking turns at taking the helm, and no wraparound segment to force threading them together. The first and simplest story concerns a lonely young woman who doesn’t realize the mystery man she’s texting on her cell phone is actually dead … until he comes to pay a visit.

Next, a bullied youth takes revenge on his tormenters via that old black magic, followed by a campfire tale that name-drops a slew of scary movies as it pays homage to the more “spirited” ones. The campers experience real terror, but hey, at least they’re not made to “squeal like a pig.” Finally, a female flight attendant finds that transporting a corpse in an otherwise empty jet offers many an opportunity for tummy turbulence.

4bia is slick and sick, with each segment effective because it’s roughly a quarter of the length of the running time into which many Asian films overextend their thin plots. The movie hasn’t had an official U.S. release yet — you’d think Lionsgate would put it paws all over it — but if it did, I’d buy it. The anthology film is alive and well. You just have to cast your eyes overseas for it. —Rod Lott

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So maybe you saw the 2008 American horror movie Quarantine and thought it was pretty good. Even then, I knew it was a remake of a Spanish film called [Rec]. Now I’ve seen the original and while I still think Quarantine is okay, I’m here to tell you that [Rec] is a 24-carat-solid-gold, plow-pulling, lottery-winning, mind-melting pants-pisser. I jumped out of my skin so often, I’m not sure I can get it back on again.

Manuela Velasco stars as Angela Vidal, one of those cute and perky TV reporterettes who get all the cat-stuck-in-tree human interest stories. She and her cameraman, Pablo (heard, but unseen real cinematographer Pablo Rosso), are doing a piece on what firefighters do when they’re not fighting fires, and this night, they’re called to an aging apartment building because some old woman is frighteningly sick. Like, she wants to bite people and rip large chunks of flesh off and devour them.

And then the corpses she leaves behind become reanimated and pick up her bad habits. And the cops show up, bringing the Army with them, and they seal off the building and won’t let anyone out.

As with the remake, [Rec] is shown to us through Pablo’s camera, so there’re a lot of jittery images, but it works better because co-directors Jaume Balaquero and Paco Plaza make the camera a character and not just a cinematic gimmick. The explanation of the insta-plague is also different in Spanish, and much spookier. Even the language works for non-Spanish speakers because it adds to the confusion.

I’ve never been to Spain, but I kinda like the horror. So will you. —Doug Bentin

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By all rights, I should be good and pissed about 30 Days of Night: Dark Days. The direct-to-DVD sequel is based on one of my favorite graphic novels ever, but takes my favorite character from that book and makes him barely more than a disposable catalyst to get the plot moving. In Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith’s printed version, the vampire Dane changes the way we — and Stella, the main character — see the bloodsuckers in the 30 Days of Night world. He’s also the third member of a deliciously morbid love triangle that includes Stella and her dead undead husband.

In director Ben Ketai’s version (although, to be fair, Niles co-wrote the script), Dane simply introduces Stella to a bunch of other vampire hunters and then disappears to let the humans have all the fun. And fun they have, which is why I can’t get angry about it.

Well, they don’t have fun. Not with all the bleeding and dying and smashing friends’ heads in with cement blocks that goes on. But it was gory, gruesome fun for me. And even though the movie takes other, huge liberties with the original story (simplifying some things; completely changing others, like what the vampires are up to), Niles and Ketai came up with a story that, allowed to stand by itself, holds together in an entertaining way.

The film isn’t as visually inventive as David Slade’s 30 Days of Night, but Ketai and his crew have obviously thought about some of the same things that Slade wrestled with, like how to make the movie look like Templesmith’s unique artistic style. They did a nice job of coming up with their own solutions, while also using enough of Slade’s techniques to tie the two movies together visually. —Michael May

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