"The Last Man on Earth" with Vincent Price. IMHO, one of Price's greatest performances, based on I Am Legend by Richard Matheson, and the most faithful adaptation of the classic novel.
"Angel Heart" with Mickey Rourke--A hallucinatory, horrific, faustian tale, which turns New Orleans into a film noir abbatoir.
"Infection"--directed by Masa Yuki Ochiai. Stylish, gruesome body horror, with viral vectors and supernatural overtones, and a wonderful use of color codes to define divergent realities. Hint--the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
"Evil To Kako"-- Zombie apocalypse, served up as a low-budget Greek survival story.
"Truth about Demons" Karl Urban realizes he's marked as a human sacrifice in a cat-and-mouse tale where the Devil wants his due.
"Book of Blood" -- The most recent Clive Barker adaption, filmed in Glasgow, well-acted, visually arresting, gothic horror story that gets under your skin. This isn't your mother's Poltergeist.
"Trailer Park of Terror"--White Trash Zombies, with all the gruesome humor and horror that made me fall in love with the Evil Dead trilogy.
"Sangre Eterna" or Eternal Blood--Chilean horror film where vampire roll-players lose their grip on the dice cup of reality.
"Opera" by Dario Argento. He's hardly an unfamiliar name, but Argento's less-seen take on a cursed production of Macbeth is a beautiful, baroque nightmare. If you can't keep your eyes on the screen, there are ways to keep them open--terrible ways. Some of the most disturbing images ever put on celluloid, like Francis Bacon paintings come to life.
"Necronomicon"--Hard to find Lovecraft anthology adaptation by Stuart Gordon. The winner here is David Warner in "Cool Air" and Jeffrey Combs playing Lovecraft.
"The Black Cat" by Stuart Gordon. Moving, award-worthy biopic, starring Jeffrey Combs, playing Edgar Allan Poe. Part of the Masters of Horror series. A fitting tribute for Poe's 200-year anniversary.
"Splinter"--The best horror movie that didn't get wide release this year. It's a ferocious, break-neck paced tale of body horror, where a parasitic organism infects victims tissue and manifests as, well, splinters. The spiny, colonial organism is attracted to heat, and has been dormant in woodland mammals for centuries. Now it's found human hosts, and the images of the infected moving like broken marionettes is guaranteeded to turn over your cringe-o-nomitor. The bastard child of Cronenberg and George Romero.












