Somewhat softer of a punch to the gut than the notorious A SERBIAN FILM, with which it shares the Subversive Serbia showcase at the current Fantasia film festival in Montreal, THE LIFE AND DEATH OF A PORNO GANG is no less explicit, though its sexual content may be even more extreme than its gore. Before the bloodshed even kicks in, there are graphic scenes of rape and bestiality, which will no doubt clear the room of more sensitive viewers before the knives and chainsaws come out.

If you see only one movie this summer in which extraterrestrial hunters duke it out with well-armed humans…well, to see the better one, you could have attended ALIEN VS. NINJA’s world premiere last weekend at the New York Asian Film Festival, or if you’re in the Montreal or London areas, catch it this Sunday, July 11 at the Fantasia film festival or Friday, August 27 at Film4 FrightFest respectively. Or keep an eye out for further fest dates, because this one’s a rollicking, bloody good time that benefits from an enthusiastic audience.

The cinema of Tak Sakaguchi (BE A MAN! SAMURAI SCHOOL, SAMURAI ZOMBIE), Noboru Iguchi (ROBOGEISHA, MACHINE GIRL) and Yoshihiro Nishimura (TOKYO GORE POLICE, VAMPIRE GIRL VS. FRANKENSTEIN GIRL) is a very specific brand for a very specific audience, but those who do take a shine to all that insanity can be excited about the perfect storm that is their first film together. Legendarily born out of last year’s New York Asian Film Festival—where the three filmmakers got very drunk and realized a joint venture would be glorious—they quickly churned out a script and a movie in time for a premiere at this year’s edition of one of NYC’s best fests, and a midnight show tomorrow (Saturday, July 10) at Montreal’s Fantasia film festival.

When a movie is titled PREDATORS as opposed to PREDATOR, the way ALIENS followed up ALIEN, you’d expect there’d be a lot more of the titular beasts on screen. But the new reboot/reimagining/whatever you want to call it of the alien-hunter franchise feels like it actually contains less Predator action than the original. And it doesn’t do so well by its humans either.

It’s difficult to discuss the Fangorian appeal of CONFESSIONS, which has its international premiere this week at the New York Asian Film Festival, without giving away too much. It’s the kind of film that grabs you and holds you by plumbing the depths of damaged psyches and exploring different kinds of emotional, rather than physical, violence—before getting to its endgame, which sends you out of the theater with your soul shuddering. To even suggest what that entails would be a crime, though not nearly as harsh as those that transpire on screen.

The positive buzz for genre fans on ECLIPSE, the third in the TWILIGHT saga that’s made vampires and werewolves safe for tween girls everywhere, has been that the placement of 30 DAYS OF NIGHT’s David Slade at the helm would result in a darker film that would be more enjoyable for the rest of us. That it has—to an extent—but another positive is that under Slade’s direction, the characters have also lightened up a bit.

You might expect an Asian flick about a rampaging, man-eating giant wild boar to be a simple, down-and-dirty creature feature, but CHAW (playing this week at the New York Asian Film Festival) is more ambitious than that. While it delivers the goods in terms of monster action, it also tries to deliver a lot more, with varying levels of success.