Quick quiz:

From the writers of SAW IV, V and VI comes:

a.) a film about a lunatic who sets outrageous death traps

b.) a film that is drenched in green, black and amber colors

c.) a film with hip techo slickness thumping on the soundtrack

d.) all of the above

Italian director Ivan Zuccon takes a thoughtful approach to H.P. Lovecraft’s seminal short story “The Colour Out of Space” in COLOUR FROM THE DARK (now out on DVD from Vanguard), transplanting the story from America to rural Italy, 1943. Right at the center of “The Great War,” just as it seemed Europe would fall to the fascists and the Nazis, we are introduced to Pietro and Lucia, who live on an isolated farm with Lucia's younger sister, Alice.

Haunted by premonitions, Lobster Girl—an exotic dancer with claws for hands—sets off on a journey to find Light, the child who was stolen from her years ago. But before the two can be happily reunited, they must first face the murderous wrath of the psychopathic albino rapist Snow, Light’s biological father.

Kudos to vault raider Michael Schlesinger and others at Sony Pictures Home Entertainment for digging up six lesser-known features from the fabled fright factory Hammer Films, out now on DVD for the first time in this above-average three-disc collection. Though best known for their Gothic horror reworkings—CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, HORROR OF DRACULA, THE MUMMY, CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF, et al.—the British studio (1935-1978) produced a wide variety of films, from ribald comedies to period swashbucklers.

If you’ve ever wondered what a SAW film would look like if Jigsaw were more contemplative than bloodthirsty, you’ll definitely want to check out AFTER.LIFE, in which Liam Neeson plays a mortician who can speak to the dead, and lecture them about how they never used their time on this Earth to truly live. Or can he?

The title of THE BLACK WATERS OF ECHO’S POND is a tad misleading, inasmuch as the action doesn’t take place around the titular body of water. “Echo’s Pond” is a facet of an ancient board game that causes all the trouble for the characters and is one of the unique features of this indie chiller, whose actual setting (an isolated vacation house on an island off the coast of Maine) is rather more generic.

If you’re a big Buffy fan but have lost track of the current Dark Horse series of what is essentially season eight (like this scribe has), issue #34 is going to be something quite surprising. In a universe filled to the brim with every kind of creature there is, and even with the scope of the mythology considerably widened by the final televised season and the beginning of this comics run, I still found myself dumbfounded at the direction the current arc BUFFY is headed in as it’s simply put, “out of this world."