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.

Adam Garrett is a hard-nosed homicide detective whose life changes forever when he discovers the dismembered body of a wealthy college student at a landfill. Examining the corpse, he notices a bizarre symbol and the ominous number 333 carved into her flesh. As Garrett investigates the case further, he is visited by Tanith, a mysterious witch who draws him into a dangerous world of the occult and satanic worship. With all the evidence pointing to Jason Moncrief, a troubled misfit and singer in a Goth band, and more murders lurking on the horizon, Garrett must take matters into his own hands and solve the case before its too late.

Anyone who reads their fair share of short stories and novellas knows that, among the foremost fundamentals of good storytelling thrown out the window, character development is usually first to go. As they’re shorter forms than the standard novel, their authors are often all too quick to jump into the action, leaving us with flat, two-dimensional characters whose personal predicaments and perils we couldn’t care less about. Thankfully, this is not the case in the four stories laid out in the remarkably character-driven FOUR NAILS IN THE COFFIN, by author/screenwriter Mark Wheaton (pictured).

The title is no lie—one bleeding thing sure does lead to another in Joey Comeau’s (pictured) achingly beautiful novel ONE BLOODY THING AFTER ANOTHER (ECW Press). Beginning with a red-drenched furball getting coughed up at a job interview, this tender terror initiates an avalanche of beheaded specters, familial cannibalism, the intensely graphic mastication of animals, phantasmal vomiting mommies, malevolent maple trees and…high-school lesbianism.

I have a hunch that there aren’t too many of you out there who don’t simply adore Gizmo and his Gremlin spawn. I’m also pretty sure the average fright fan doesn’t mind a good board game every once in a while. So a few months ago, when WizKids/NECA announced the release of a GREMLINS-themed game, I thought, “Match made in heaven! How could this go wrong?”

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.