Short on budget, but long on style and quirk, writer/director/actor Park Bench’s literally biting Canadian horror/satire THE DEATH OF ALICE BLUE (opening for a limited theatrical run today in Toronto, followed by an expansion across Canada) is a real find. It’s an arch, theatrical, funny and absolutely stunning-looking film, riding genres with gleeful abandon, playing with conventions and admirably cheating its limitations. And man, does it have a great central character…

With BLACK DEATH, it’s high time that director Christopher Smith be acknowledged as one of the major modern forces in horror. The British filmmaker been getting better with each successive movie, and his latest (which had its North American premiere at the recent Fantasia film festival in Montreal) is a striking, mature and deeply scary piece of work.

It might seem that there’s little left to be done with the devil-possession subgenre or pseudodocumentary horror, but in combining the two, THE LAST EXORCISM comes up with something fresh. The movie, which had its international premiere at the recent Fantasia film festival in Montreal and opens theatrically August 27 from Lionsgate, delivers thrills that have nothing to do with spewed pea soup or shaky runs through dark woods.

SUCK, which plays Montreal’s Fantasia film festival this Saturday, looks and sounds like a lot of low-budget horror/comedy/rock-’n’-roll flicks of the ’80s (many of them, like this one, hailing from Canada), but with one important difference—it’s actually funny. It also respects both the horror and the rock sides of its story, avoiding spoofy condescension as it mixes the genres.

Take one part CALVAIRE/THE ORDEAL and one part HIGH TENSION, stir in some mutants and you have LA MEUTE (THE PACK), which unfortunately shapes up as one of the weakest in the past decade’s resurgence of French-language frights. While the movie (which had its North American premiere this week at Montreal’s Fantasia film festival) has the surface attributes of a gritty rural shocker, it suffers from both overfamiliarity and some serious story inconsistencies.

Simon Rumley is one hell of a filmmaker. He doesn’t make easy films, and his stories aren’t neatly confined to a genre, but they certainly are horrific and they’ll most definitely stay with you late into the night. His last foray into cinema, THE LIVING & THE DEAD was a sort of Gothic, English manor tragedy infused with Lynchian madness about a mentally retarded young man’s inability to take care of his terminally ill mother and the deteriorating consequences. For his latest feature, he’s turned his eye to America in the ominously titled RED WHITE & BLUE, and the results are just as heartbreaking. The movie screens at Montreal’s Fantasia film festival on July 21 with Rumley and cast attending.

A SERBIAN FILM, playing Friday, July 16 and Monday, July 19 at Montreal’s Fantasia film festival as part of the Subversive Serbia series, is one of those rare movies I can’t quantify with a rating (thus no skulls at the end of this review). Even as a die-hard horror fan, I found parts of the film too much to stomach—especially in the last half-hour, which left me feeling that director/co-writer Srdjan Spasojevic was indulging in grotesque shock-provocation for its own sake. And yet I can’t deny the power and the skill with which he spins the bulk of his story.