Until it opened today, SKYLINE was the kind of movie it’s easy to get behind in theory; visual FX specialists turned filmmakers Colin and Greg Strouse put it together themselves after their directorial debut, ALIENS VS. PREDATOR—REQUIEM, fell victim to serious studio interference. Now that SKYLINE has been released (sans any press screenings), the one area in which it can be said to improve on AVPR is that you can see what’s going on—and unfortunately, you can hear it too.

For fans of Stevan Mena’s accomplished, classical 2004 slasher opus MALEVOLENCE, his prequel BEREAVEMENT (screening tonight in Manhattan as part of the New York City Horror Film Festival) is worth the long wait. For those unfamiliar with MALEVOLENCE, you don’t need to have seen that film to appreciate this one.

If pressed for time, TUCKER & DALE VS. EVIL could be reviewed with one word: “brilliant.” Lacking chronological constraints, the words “hilarious,” “genius” and “the best horror/comedy in years” would fit right in as well. It’s that good, and it deserves a much wider audience than it’s currently getting.

The camera surveys the scene: a desolate beach, save the cries of a few gulls…until a muscular man in conspicuous, contour-exaggeration makeup appears in the surf. Is this a Fulci-esque killer-corpse movie in the mold of ZOMBIE? No, it’s Bruce LaBruce’s take on the ghoul genre, L.A. ZOMBIE, a film that forces the audience to feel the tension between two of horror’s favorite themes: death and sex. To get the gore—and the heart—of this strangely introspective indie film, we have to follow our undead hero through a story that consists almost entirely of situations in which he sexually stimulates male cadavers back to life, often in salacious close-up.

The ads for SAW 3D depicting Jigsaw as a giant construction project are more accurate than the marketers probably know. The latest and, supposedly, last of this by now exhausted franchise is as mechanical as they come, and a big comedown from the unexpectedly decent previous entry.

If you’ve ever wanted to know what it was like to see a classic Italian giallo or poliziotteschi film during its original theatrical run, I can’t think of a modern cinema experience that could capture that feeling like seeing AMER. As the split-screen credits unfold to the beat of vintage Bruno Nicolai music, you truly get the sense of what it must have been like to catch a Dario Argento, Sergio Martino or Fernando Di Leo flick at its Rome premiere.

Jim Mickle and Nick Damici ably beat the sophomore jinx with STAKE LAND (playing tonight at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater as part of the Scary Movies 4 series, with more festival dates to come and theatrical release scheduled next year via Dark Sky Films), paying off on the promise of their impressive debut feature MULBERRY STREET. Once more chronicling the struggle of a small group of people to survive against ravenous ghouls, the duo once again demonstrate that the humans matter more than the creatures when it comes to genre storytelling.