GORE IN THE STORE - NEW DVD RELEASES FOR 16th OCTOBER 2007.

“The Stand”: true, we might have waited and wished for George Romero’s cinematic take of King’s epic masterpiece (as outlined in a lengthy preface by King himself to the novel’s unexpurgated edition), but chances are we’d still be waiting. Happily then, inveterate King-o-phile Mick Garris stepped up to take those many, many pages to the small screen, where any concession to content was far outweighed by the ability to tell the sprawling, multi-faceted story in relatively uninterrupted detail. Amid the viral apocalypse of the tale’s vast narrative arc, Jamey Sheridan as the diabolical Randall Flagg steals the show from a uniformly robust and wonderfully endearing and exceptionally well-cast troupe. A killer opening with Blue Oyster Cult -- never better used -- sets the tone for this 4-hour zenith of King’s tube adaptations.

“The Langoliers”: the same cannot, unfortunately, be said of Tom Holland’s stab at one of King’s ‘Four Past Midnight’ novellas. It’s taut, terrifying and endlessly threatening on the page, a simple tale of a lost flight’s quest to find home after they disconcertingly land in an impossibly deserted US and their subsequent encounter with the unutterably vicious titular beasties. But on the screen it’s rendered with a completely bizarre tone and pace out of sorts with any kind of thrills: sci-fi, dramatic or otherwise. Features the normally solid Bronson Pinchot, David Morse and Patricia Wettig, they all seem to take co-star Dean Stockwell’s lead -- pitching it as he does somewhere between Al from ‘Quantum Leap’, Ben from ‘Blue Velvet’ and a sideline in Darren McGavin’s Carl Kolckak. Unintentional laughs from supposedly profound questions of universal philosophy mixed with awkward staging of the most simple King-style group confrontations make for a queasy, forgettable experience. A shame for all involved, many of who have proven time and again they’re above such an unfortunate misfire.

“Poltergeist 25th Anniversary”: unsurprisingly devoid of much extra material given the controversial politics going on behind the scenes at the studio, a good looking release of ‘Poltergeist’ on DVD is nevertheless always welcome. The quintessential modern spook show, full of genuine dread, intrigue and marvel, it rides a fine line between youthfully exuberant awe and very adult fear. The typical Spielbergian tropes of threatened innocence and the wondrous possibilities of discovery turning sour -- liberally sprinkled with a dash of what seems like Dante-esque satire on good old family values (see also: Joe Dante’s Spielberg-produced “Gremlins”) -- impact on the audience with the kind of timeless ease many of his great ‘entertainment’ pictures succeed in mining -- from ‘Jaws’ to ‘E.T.’ to ‘Jurassic Park’.

Allegedly cuckolded director Tobe Hooper is no slouch himself, something he had proved with ‘Texas Chainsw Massacre’ and would go onto again with the unjustly maligned ‘Lifeforce’. Here, under much mused-upon duress, he provided what is an oft-overlooked edge to the proceedings, a very personal phantasmagorical slant (especially in the latter stages of the picture), something notable in its absence from much of Spielberg’s work. It’s the lurid stamp of someone outside the mainstream and it really works amid the technical precision of Spielberg. A fascinating meeting of minds, egos and sense of story.

“Ozone”: self-made video mogul JR Bookwalter came of age with this more mature, Cronenbergian cop thriller. After the jejune hi-jinx of his debut “The Dead Next Door” (all wacky joke names, incongruous cameos and ropey gore effects -- lacking any of the verve or relative finesse displayed by Fred Dekker in his similarly homage-laden “Night Of The Creeps”) we were treated to a fairly well acted and ambitiously serious tale of mind-and-body altering substances being pushed on some very Abel Ferrara-style mean streets. The home-grown computer effects deployed to present some quirky body horror are perhaps a quaint failure under today’s bright digital light. But in 1992 for a boy in his bedroom, it’s as laudable as anything Jake West has been ingenious enough to create in recent years in a similar guerilla fashion. Well worth studying for aspiring indie shooters.

“Shatter Dead”: Scooter McRae’s incredible shot-on-video zombie epic goes even further into the realm of steadfastly idiosyncratic and horrific independent vision. Set in a near future, it follows its heroine (played by the terrifically monikered “Stark Raven”) on her journey back to her lover in a world where zombies are the mundane and commonplace lower caste in society. Full to brim with clever touches, ambitious scope and some truly courageous gore and sex set pieces, McCrae announced his avowed intention to shock from the brooding, feverish opening to the bitter, cynical finale. Shot in as unprofessional a manner as you can imagine, it doesn’t matter how lo-fi the production values get: filmmaking is fundamentally about the ideas, and this is as astonishing as home movies get.

“Final Scream” last column, I rejoiced in the initial promise exhibited by the cheerily brazen hack-work of David DeCoteau in productions like “Sorority Babes At The Slimeball Bowl-A-Rama” and “Creepazoids”. This release is the more recent flip side to that hokey but profoundly enjoyable Scream Queen-heavy sleaze. A hastily knocked off facsimile of (m)any modern slasher you care to name, reusing the laboured device of a reality TV, it’s already in the lengthy shadow of the marvelous ‘Kolobos’ and ‘Wrong Turn 2’. It’s the type of picture seemingly created for the most undemanding (and probably insomniac) cable-channel jockey. How discouraging that today, direct to video shelf-fillers feature myriad vacuous, interchangeable teens rather than genuinely characterful hard bodies like Michelle Bauer and Brinke Stevens.

"From Beyond The Grave”: ‘it’s séance time!’. finally, one of the favourites of Frighfest One Dayers past arrives on a digitally versatile format. Debuting director Kevin Connor, before his fateful meeting with Troy…I mean, Doug McClure for a series of deliriously daft fantasy epics set in various doubtfully undiscovered parts of the planet, delivers a gloriously gothic and overwrought portmanteau project to rival anything producer Milton Subotsky had penned in the decade’s preceding years.

Overwrought, avaricious and odiously neckerchiefed hippie David Warner is a standout alongside Donald Pleasance in their respective segments -- both stories as deliciously dark and twisted as the best EC comics (compared with the more Italian-in-style final episode). Like my, ahem, “heartfelt lament” on the current state of Scream Queens two paragraphs above, what a picture like this exemplifies more than anything else is the very dearth of fine characters actors which exists in the UK, or indeed genre cinema today. With their uncannily chiseled faces, not quite handsome but deeply alluring and laced with unease and apprehension, these thespians, the Warners, the Pleasances, the Ogilvys, were the faces of genre stars. Not polished or courted to inspire the winsome admiration their mainstream counterparts in music and film enjoyed, they were faces and personas that had never seemed less than truly lived in. That it sometimes seemed as though they had lived to see the terrible depth of human foibles, vices and misery was the genre’s -- and our -- immeasurable gain.

Perhaps in years to come, Nick Moran, with his hollow features, or Paul McGann with his tortured eyes might make a decent horror svengali. Both have been very fine in pictures playing in past Frighfests. But today, there’s simply no one with the power of cult personality that makes these 70s UK studio horrors soar. In that respect alone, “From Beyond The Grave” is a delicious treat. Before its slightly lackluster final yarn, it’s also an hysterical and wondrously sly piece of chiller theatre.