One of the jobs of a reviewer is to boldly go where others are too sensible to tread and – with that in mind – I've spent the last week languishing in the DVD dungeon searching for a gem amongst the astonishing number of cheap horror films currently on display.

It's strange and dirty work but, as Hunter Thompson said, when the going gets weird the weird turn pro.
And, sad though it is to say, best of the current bunch is the remake of a cheap and nasty old seventies flick, Last House on the Left. I reviewed that last month but it's been delayed until sometime in October. It is admirably unpleasant.

OK. While there are a lot of crap horror movies out there, The Midnight Meat Train (***) is actually better than Vinnie Jones' glowering murderer on the DVD cover would suggest. Directed with an impressive degree of style by Ryuhei (Azumi, Aragami) Kitamura from a story by horror legend Clive (Hellraiser) Barker, this director's cut is gory and imaginative and, thankfully, has a plot reaching beyond Jones' killer and his predilection for wholesale butchering on the late-night subway. It does, however, once again confirm the inadvisability of amateur photographers trying to get snaps of serial killers.

Six US soldiers in the wilds of Afghanistan are captured by nasty Taliban but soon have bigger problems from giant Sand Serpents (**). Think Tremors, or those worms from Dune. After giving the game away with the title, the dubious CGI terrors are revealed early in proceedings when one shoots into the air to gobble up a helicopter like some creature from a bad Japanese monster movie. Besides some truly risible special effects the film actually has a nice feel.

More things come out of the ground in The Burrowers (***), this time in a period western setting. An impromptu posse finds more than it bargained for when tracking the supposed Indian kidnappers of a frontier family. There is a toughness to this which is pleasing though it ultimately delivers better as a gritty Western than a horror movie due to lack of in-depth exploration into the (again CGI, but at least disguised by cover of night) creatures that pop up from the ground, immobilise people and eat them alive.

Obviously a vanity project for Kenneth Del Vecchio who wrote the book and screenplay, produces and acts (badly), the best thing about Kinky Killers (*) is its title. With a plot so incoherent as to defy description, awful acting and no production values, even the presence of regular murders and gratuitous nudity does nothing to make this fun.

Snuff Movie (**) seems almost topical, featuring a Roman Polanski-like director whose wife and friends were murdered by a Manson-like cult. Made with trippy intensity, things get out of hand when he tries to make a film recreating the murders. Unlike Kinky Killers, the gratuitous nudity here is quite fun and the final twist goes some way to redeeming what sometimes appears to be a chaotic mess.

An unhappy girl gets possessed in The Chair (*) when she moves into the house of a historically spooky psychic weirdo. But due to budgetary restraints she does it very quietly and cheaply. And, unfortunately without anything noticeably frightening happening.
But even I have my limits. After that lot and the distinct feeling that my brain was about to burst I abandoned the rest of the horror genre's recent offering. If I missed anything good amongst this lot, email and let me know: Ogre, Driftwood, Re-cycle (Hong Kong), Dark Floors, P (Thailand), Drawn in Blood, Small Town Folk, Simon Says, Bogeyman 3, My Bloody Valentine 3-D, Walled In.