The dialogue is as basic as possible, yet the actors are unable to deliver simple lines without sounding like Ben Stein reading a phonebook.

Were it a candy bar, “No One Lives” would not exactly qualify for the satisfaction of a Snickers.  “No One Lives” has the creamy nougat of splattery shock kills and a chocolate covered coating of thin horror entertainment.  Yet it is missing the caramel texture of a layered story and the peanut clusters of uniquely memorable moments.

 “Under the Bed” ... has two crippling defects.  Not enough to put the film in a wheelchair or to require crutches, but enough to give it a very noticeable permanent limp.

 “Extracted” is extraordinary not only in how it manages to turns restrictions into advantages, but in how it crafts a tale of conflict and intrigue without introducing a true villain or placing characters firmly on one side of the good and evil line.

As an independent science-fiction feature, “Scavengers” has the look of a low-budget television movie, with none of the B-movie charm.  If it were a pilot for a potential show on SyFy, the safe bet is that it would not be picked up as a series, even if it had “Sharknado” as a lead-in.

Is “The Demented” worth going out of your way to track down? No. Could you still do a lot worse when it comes to run of the mill low-budget independent zombie films? Yes, definitely.

“The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh” is a lot of gothic style applied to lukewarm material that does not really fit inside the framework.

“The Ouija Experiment” opens with a strong first hour, and then everything goes to pot when it comes time for a third act that packs as much punch as a windsock and unravels the atmosphere completely.

The good news is that “Exorcism Chronicles” is mercifully short, as the movie is only about ten minutes long.  The bad news is that those ten minutes are spread over a one hour and 38 minute total runtime.

For a screenplay with three writers, it is odd that the story is so boilerplate.  The audience is consistently ahead of the characters onscreen and Samuel Morse himself could not do a better job of telegraphing all of the plot turns.

 “Visible Scars” is the horror movie equivalent of a precocious toddler indulging in a short attention span ...  Imagine a two-year-old bounding around a playroom, changing directions on a whim when the previous destination no longer holds interest.  “Visible Scars” bumbles about ... abandoning characters like action figures waiting to be stepped on, and forgetting plotlines when it runs out of ideas for what to do with them next.

“Crickley Hall” certainly qualifies as a ghost story, but not necessarily as a horror movie. A more fitting way to describe the three-hour adaptation of James Herbert’s novel would be as a drama with supernatural elements.

Should “Resolution” find the wide audience that it deserves, it has the potential to end friendships, doom marriages, and lead to fistfights in the parking lot after a screening.  That is a hyperbolic overstatement, but the fact remains that “Resolution” is a polarizing film.

Drawing parallels with the 2007 Japanese original helps articulate the problems of the 2012 American remake.

“Lords of Salem” lives and dies by its distinctly Rob Zombie imagery. Up for debate is whether that imagery exists in service to the story or simply to be deliberately shocking.

If “The Ring” and “The Grudge” have given you your fill of revenge-fueled Asian poltergeists, “Apartment 1303” will not do anything to reignite an interest in the subgenre.

The poster art is not kidding with its two-word tagline, “enough said!” That is actually one word more than is even necessary, as the one-word title alone already says it all: "Sharknado."

The movie’s aim is to frighten through the mind and not through the eyes.  The method will not work on everyone, but those whose patience allows them to be drawn into the setting will find “Jug Face” to be both thoughtful and chilling.

“Found footage” is exchanged for a traditional narrative.  Cotton passes the torch to Nell.  Practical FX make way for the digital variety.  In an effort to create its own identity, “The Last Exorcism Part II” shelves everything that made the original uniquely entertaining and ends up being a movie that falls short of the first film’s bar.

Desperate to create a sense of suspense artificially, frantic music swells and the camera continually spins dizzily around the actors as they mutter, “c’mon” at a computer screen.  But really, scenes of enhancing pixels in a digital image and listening to a detective shout, “stop, go back” come with a very limited capacity for excitement.