Besides a little something called the San Diego Comic-Con starting on Wednesday, there’s also every degree of genre goodness hitting theaters and DVD. Theatrically, we’re getting the well-received ORPHAN, so we have that going for us. On DVD, there’s the acclaimed CORALINE, the crappy STD sequel MESENGERS 2, and the even worse STD horror flick GHOST MONTH. Shit, DVD just goes from good, to bad, to f*ck me in the goat ass.
ORPHAN
Rated: R for disturbing violent content, some sexuality and language
Starring Vera Farmiga, Peter Sarsgaard, Isabelle Fuhrman
Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra
Run Time: 123 Min.
Married couple John and Kate are finding it hard to cope with the loss of their unborn child. To stave off the bad dreams and visions that haunt Kate in the aftermath of this tragedy, the two of them decide to adopt a child. A sweet but withdrawn raven-haired beauty named Esther captures their hearts at an orphanage, and they invite her into their family. Not long after Esther comes home, strange and disturbing things begin to happen, and Kate becomes terribly certain that Esther is not what she seems.
CORALINE
Rated: PG
Starring Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, John Hodgman
Directed by Henry Selick
Run Time: 100 Min.
Coraline is a teenager who has just moved to an old house in the middle of nowhere with her writer parents and she is bored, bored, bored. Her only companions are an annoyingly talkative boy Wybie (short for Why Born), some eccentric neighbors from the theater and circus, and a strange, button-eyed doll with a marked resemblance to Coraline which Wybie found in an old trunk of his grandmother’s. When Coraline finds an old door hidden behind an armoire and papered over with wallpaper, she convinces her mother to unlock it, only to find a wall of bricks. When Coraline revisits the door later that night, the bricks magically disappear and she discovers a strange pathway to another world where everything is just what she wishes for.
MESSENGERS 2: THE SCARECROW
Rated: R
Starring Erbi Ago, Darcy Fowers, Kalina Green
Directed by Martin Barnewitz
Run Time: 94 minutes
From Ghost House Pictures, the makers of 30 Days of Night, The Grudge and The Messengers. Unimaginable terror grows in this chilling prequel to the horror hit, The Messengers. Desperate to save his crops, a farmer places a mysterious scarecrow in his fields only to discover that with pure evil? you reap what you sow. As the body count rises around him and his family questions his sanity, he’ll have to fight back against a deadly force that knows no bounds.
Rated: R
Starring Marina Resa, Shirley To, Rick Irvin
Directed by Danny Draven
Run Time: 100 minutes
From a review on IMBd: “Simply and briefly a tragic failure and a massive waste of time and, most likely money, mostly from the director’s part but also for anyone who decides to give this visual and acoustic crime against even the modest of standards a shot.”