The Children
Directed by: Tom Shankland
Run time: 85 minutes
Rating: R
Format: Blu-Ray

The Lowdown: “The Children” is the best film yet to be released by director Sam Raimi’s direct-to-DVD distribution company, Ghost House Underground.

It’s a slow boil nightmare that pops at just the right times with impressive gore, gallons of blood and enough squirmtastic moments where you can’t help but think, oh crap, kill the kid.

Essentially a fresh take on the “something’s wrong with…” genre, director Tom Shankland has fashioned a creepy as hell ode to human frailty. If your children turned against you for no reason, even those as young as 5 years old, could you…would you…fight back and kill them to save yourself? The answer that he concocts is wonderfully twisted with some characters behaving rationally, some behaving exactly like you might expect in the face of such a hellish turn and some getting killed so brutally and unexpectedly that you are taken by surprise.

The Thaw
Directed by: Mark A. Lewis
Run time: 94 minutes
Rating: R
Format: Blu-Ray

The Lowdown: Oh Val Kilmer, what were you thinking?

“The Thaw,” the latest eco-terror horror film to consider what terrors might be unleashed on our world by global warming, looks to tiny parasitic, prehistoric worms to generate suspense.

The end result is kind of ho-hum.

The worms aren’t that terrifying. The cast, buoyed by Kilmer’s fading star wattage and up-and-comers Aaron Ashmore and Martha McIsaac, is tolerable. But the will they, won’t they escape certain doom premise gets tired pretty quick and the ending leaves a lot to be desired.

If this type of eco-horror interests you, here’s a suggestion: Check out Larry Fessenden’s 2006 indie offering, “The Last Winter.” It’s a far superior film based on the same concept.

Seventh Moon
Directed by: Eduardo Sanchez
Run time: 87 minutes
Rating: R
Format: Blu-Ray

The Lowdown: Eduardo Sanchez, forever to be known as one half of “The Blair Witch Project,” returns with “Seventh Moon,” a plodding but effective chiller about evil spirits and zombies and hell that gets a lot of credit just for being set in China, not the normal locale for an American horror film.

Amy Smart, a go-to genre actress who has lent considerable charm to such crazy, over-the-top B-movies as “Crank” and “The Butterfly Effect,” carries the water throughout, racing by foot across a foreign countryside, trying to avoid white-faced, ashen-bodied, flesh-eating spooks.

Offspring
Directed by: Andrew Van Den Houten
Run time: 79 minutes
Rating: R
Format: Blu-Ray

The Lowdown: I don’t know why, but I just don’t like movies based on the novels of Jack Ketchum. Call it a personal bias, even though I’ve never read a Ketchum book.

But for whatever reason, “The Offspring,” much like “The Lost,” “The Girl Next Door” and “Red,” the other movies based on Ketchum’s work, just didn’t connect with me.

Sure, it has wonderful gore – including a wicked scene early on where a woman stumbles into her kitchen to discover a handful of savage, flesh-eating children carving up her loved one – but I just lost interest as characters got dispatched quickly in this short, bloody offering.

The Stuff You Care About:
Hot chicks – Yes.
Nudity – Yes.
Gore – Yes.
Drug use – No.
Bad Guys/Killers – Crazy kids, creepy Chinese ghosts, prehistoric worms and cannibal tribespeople.
Buy/Rent – Buy “The Children”; Rent the rest.
Release Date – Oct. 6, 2009