Carefully measured performances send slow-burn suspense down a nerve-wracking straightaway of wicked witchiness.

Bella Thorne needs just one more long-delayed dud to dethrone Mischa Barton as the queen of forgettable thrillers dumped to home video.

Cutaway scenes constituting a loose Cloverfield connection feel more forcibly included than dad’s mistress at a family reunion.

“Inoperable” learned the wrong lesson from “Lost” about instilling suspense and made the same mistake of not thinking through its threads beforehand.

Whatever side of the blade one uses to slice it, “Victor Crowley” meets the standard for old-school slasher mayhem with a self-aware streak of black humor.

Attracting attention for its mildly bizarre initial atmosphere, rational moves take the movie off track as a darkly nightmarish drama.

“Bad Apples” badly wants to be in John Carpenter’s orbit, but it isn’t even competent enough to be considered Ed Wood adjacent.

Those looking past its love handles can find an intriguingly offbeat experience they most likely were not expecting.

One might not think a movie molded for midnight madness would have so much to say about complicated parent-child relationships.

It feels like Batman.  It feels in step with “The Animated Series.”  And yet, “Gotham by Gaslight” is literally in a world all its own.

“Jigsaw” makes for a surprisingly solid stab at rejuvenating a long-toothed property whose corpse was as cold as John Kramer’s.

Can we add ‘conjuring creepypasta boogeypeople’ to the list of tired terror tropes to be put on ice for a while?

“The Open House” has nearly nothing of note, leaving just a throwaway thriller not at all worthy of bearing the Netflix name.

“Planet of the Monsters” impresses as a mature science-fiction epic with large-scale scope, although it undeniably underwhelms as a Godzilla-specific story.

I can commend the filmmakers for putting in honest effort to deliver the best formulaic “found footage” horror movie they could, even if the end result is dully redundant.

A number of “at least…” qualifiers keep “Villmark Asylum” from being hit by the same stale stick beating its dead horse of a story.

Someone with no qualms about subtitles or unflinching gore has no reason to drive down this dull detour when a bolder route splits at the same fork.

“Day of the Dead: Bloodline” mounts a persuasive ‘For Your Consideration’ campaign in the category of “Worst Movie to Bear the ‘Day of the Dead’ Name.”

Maybe when I see echoing emptiness behind the drearily dreamy drama of “The Strange Ones,” I’m rightfully seeing straight into hollowness where others swear they see substance.

I have to believe that “Devil’s Gate” had grander ambitions (than) to deliver a ho-hum episode of “The X-Files” in DTV feature form.