GORE IN THE STORE - NEW DVD RELEASES FOR 3rd SEPTEMBER 2007.

So, “The Orphanage”, eh? I find it fascinating that the second powerhouse picture in a row to emerge triumphant from a consecutive FrightFest has been a Spanish production. And one that has Del Toro’s name associated with it, but perhaps that’s less surprising on reflection. The man’s a powerhouse himself and Juan Antonio Bayona is an eminently worthy disciple it appears. It comes in cycles, I guess. A year or two ago it was South Korea, with “Oldboy” and “A Bittersweet Life” punching well above their weight and coming out victorious. Not actually at Frightfest, yet similarly incandescent amid the decade’s often middling genre releases, was South Korea’s “Memories Of Murder”. After the influx of black-haired Japanese children, it was a welcome and unexpected respite.

And now it’s the turn of the Latin contingent. With Cuaron’s masterly “Children Of Men” earlier this year and the upcoming intrigue of “The Kovacs Box”, “The Abandoned” and new films from Paco Plaza and Juame Balaguero, it’s once again a grand time to be a fan of horror’s international flavour. With any luck this Spanish resurgence might bring Alex De La Iglesia, so talented and passionate with such pictures like “Day Of The Beast” and Accion Mutante” back into the fold after some deeply entertaining jaunts into the realms of high comedy variants on Hitchcockian suspense and nostalgic knock-about spaghetti western. Or even Bigas Luna, who has seemingly forsaken the horror genre after his distinctly unsettling “Anguish” 20 years ago for a series of hilarious and bawdy sex farces like “Jamon, Jamon”, “The Tit & The Moon” and “Golden Balls”

Surely I can’t be he only one who hopes that soon it’ll the turn of the UK to show the world once more what mettle can be made of its murderous mayhem-laden cinema. This year’s “Waz” and last year’s “Severence” and Neil Marshall’s enthralling “The Descent” are quite visible peaks in the profile of recent UK horror after the excruciating dirge exhibited by the likes of “Long Time Dead”, “Nine Lives” and “Octane”. I’d count “Shaun Of The Dead” as well, but it’s too warmly comedic, without the rougher edge of “Severence”. I think we’ll have to wait until Edgar Wright makes good on the promise of “Don’t” and the more pointedly grim aspects of “Hot Fuzz” to celebrate his prowess within the genre, I think. Which can’t be far way.

Lately, “The Zombie Diaries”, “The Living & The Dead” and now -- it seems -- “The Cottage” and the brilliant looking “Doomsday” point to an enthusiastic and active contingent willing to shred nerves and body parts in equal measure -- even if, as a horror nation, we’re in an uncertain position on the world stage. We have a legacy in this country, almost unrivalled, back through Tigon, Amicus and Hammer and, arguably, to the very creation of gothic literature as we know it. Wouldn’t it be grand to have it all back?

“Casting The Runes”: “Night Of The Demon”, directed by Jacques Tourneur remains for me the zenith of thrilling supernatural horror. The currency in which it trades is that of countless other TV shows and pictures during the 90 or more years since the short story on which it was based was written. Philosophically astute tales of dread and the macabre such as those written by “Runes” author M.R. James have unwittingly inspired a groundswell of popular fictions from “The X Files” to the all pervasive modern J-Horror trend (though there’s a huge crossover between Asia’s own classic breed of folk tales which James and his ilk were imagining for western readers). Yet between the classics and the modern genre behemoths lay the odd oddity that exploited the same material to intriguing effect. Oddities such as this 1979 ITV Playhouse episode, one that uses the very same tale that was so incredibly realized by Tourneur 20 years before.

“…Runes” director Lawrence Gordon Clark was the unassuming helmer of a variety of mainstay UK series but also of the lauded television creation ‘Ghost Stories For Christmas’, most notably the classic “The Signalman”. “…Runes” is a similarly eerie chiller, full of menace both seen and unseen. It’s a tale as much about man’s proclivity for unbelief and incredulity in the face of overt evil -- such as this story’s quietly maniacal and aristocratic shaman Julian Kerswell -- as his fragility in the face of the mere suspicion. It’s this last notion that drives “…Runes” and its intelligent, cynical exploration of a very human condition fits in with that grand, if slightly hokey tradition of British guignol, exemplified by series like “Tales Of The Unexpected”.

“Minotaur”: this full-bloodied, low budget UK co-production creature feature is a mixed bag. A blend of Harryhausen-esque mythological adventure and alternative, “Alien”-inspired stalk and slash, Jonathan English’s picture is stuck with a windswept look that makes striking use of limited funds and savvy production value but becomes lost in the resulting murky storytelling amid the strum und drang.

In patriarch Rutger Hauer’s rural village, a yearly curse condemns the younglings of the community to suffer a terrible fate -- the mainland’s exploitation of them as sacrifice to the hideous, labyrinth-bound creature that otherwise threatens to terrorize them for eternity. Watching over the beast is plainly insane Tony Todd, all bare-chest and cheerless hysteria. He’s a high point among the otherwise rather bland ciphers that round out the cast of Minotaur bait, thrown to their gruesome deaths in what amounts to the rest of the plot.

The picture’s gothic-laced effects work is very good and the creature, once revealed, reminds us that old-fashioned fur and fury – of the kind once excelled at in the UK by Bob Keen and Co. -- is often the godsend for this type of relatively diverting adventure.

It’s just a shame that, beyond the initial tremor of dread invoked by the brutal ransacking of the village and throwing of innocents to the titular chimera, it plays out like b-roll footage from the climax of “Alien 3” rather than Sir Ridley Scott’s magnificent outing. Energetic, moody but rather detached and unconcerned with characterization, it’s up to Tony Todd’s lunatic high priest to inject the proceedings with the appropriate level of camp commotion. Vincent Price would be proud.

“La Morte Vivante (Living Dead Girl)”: Jean Rollin is often unfairly lumped in with that other purveyor of demonstrative disrobing Jess Franco -- the French director’s penchant for writhing nudes and sanguinary sexual exploits often belying a poetic streak the deceptively urbane Franco may have possessed but rarely employed. Nowhere is this more evident during Rollin’s career than in this lyrical chamber piece, an intense, passionate picture that would make a superb companion feature to Del Toro’s “Cronos” or Abel Ferrra’s “The Addiction”.

That old pulp standby, toxic waste, reanimates the recently deceased Helene from her fetid slumber in a rural French catacomb and, much to her distraught sister Catherine’s consternation, begins a lengthy period of blood lust, in which Catherine becomes entangled and eventually complicit.

Like “Hellraiser” after it, Rollin’s picture is less explicitly about the grim bloodlust itself and more a dramatic exploration of the unwitting Faustian pact that develops between the undead and a living loved one. As such, it’s a quiet, brooding picture, far removed from the gaudy pornography of Franco’s similarly elegiac “Bare Breasted Countess”, though it’s as enamored with exposing ripe and nubile forms as any of Franco sleazy forays.

Rollin’s “Fascination” may have more bite -- with its charnel house aura most probably drawn from Georges Franju’s 1949 abattoir documentary “Le Sang des bêtes” -- but “Living Dead Girl” is an artful, exploitation fairytale and one of the great, unsung Euro horrors of the 70s.

“Broken”: Someone -- well, me, actually -- once described Adam Mason’s previous celluloid foray, ‘Dust’ as “the ugliest film ever made by anyone, anywhere, ever.” Mason is never the less a brave filmmaker whose ambitious nerve and dark creative infatuations mean he is constantly on the defensive in answer to his frequently -- and understandably -- harsh critics. His third feature, ‘Broken’, is a hell of a repost, whichever way you cut it.

A literal endurance test as an unnamed Man subjects seemingly random victims to a woodland trial-by-whatever-means-necessary in an effort to ‘break’ them for an undisclosed purpose, Mason and co-director Simon Boyes, have in two gruelling years of production, delivered an unremittingly intense and gruesomely detailed excursion to a deliciously dark place. Mason’s partner, Nadja Brand once again bravely subjects herself to an unrelenting camera lens as the makeshift “wife” of a very bad man (the very good Eric Colvin) holding her captive in a forest-scape so bleakly captured by the picture’s rather impressive cinematography, it suggests an apocalypse in miniature. Indeed as the picture progresses, what emerges from the perfunctory exploitation set-up is a surprisingly powerful subversion of our expectations, a domestic satire full of broken limbs, broken minds and broken families: ‘Saw’ by way of Nicholas Roeg. Against the odds, on an admirably sheened shoestring budget, Mason’s band of tenacious filmmakers have delivered home grown goods for all but the most weak-stomached nihilist.