An arthouse skin applied over upsetting images and ideas brews a niche tea poised to burn some tongues while pleasing other palates.

“American Nightmares” essentially operates as “Tales from the Hood 3.” What it doesn’t have is “Hood’s” wry edge of wit or professionally sharpened appearance.

“Suspiria” emerges as the absolute best kind of remake in that it functions as a complementary companion, not a supplanting surrogate.

“Creepshow” is the closest any motion picture has ever come to accurately capturing a comic book in feature film form.

If it starred a couple of moonlighting WB flavors of the season, and maybe threw in a Creed single, the film would have its own Scream Factory Collector’s Edition by now.

Always take a chance on expanding exposure to horror stories from around the globe. You never know when you might find a terrifying treasure as ghoulishly golden as “Tumbbad.”

“Cucuy: The Boogeyman” serves a simple purpose as feature film filler that puts the basic in basic cable.

Early exposition often plays like deleted material from “The Sopranos” featuring incidental actors too campy to make the final cut.

A no muss, no fuss approach to slasher storytelling makes “Halloween” probably the second best film in the saga.

“Head Count” needs a more forceful personality to push it over the edge of being average, and further into the realm of being bold.

Between the boilerplate fiction and carelessly cut corners, “Thriller” could quite possibly be the worst movie to ever bear the Blumhouse banner.

“Housewife” contains “good” and “bad” bits, adding up to an overall hodge-podge that’s neither and both at the same time.

No matter what you think you see coming, “Knuckleball” still has armfuls of suspenseful surprises in store.

The dark aura of “The Dead Center” would pair terrifically with the supernatural suspense of “The Autopsy of Jane Doe” and the slasher thrills of “The Corpse of Anna Fritz.”

“Hell House LLC II” plays like a nickel-and-dime rush job scrabbling to find a story in the editing room instead of having clearly focused goals in mind.

“Ride” coasts on cruise control towards an easy recommendation for Will Brill’s performance alone. Then the conveyor belt of contrivances creates a pileup demanding to drag down the grade.

“The Clovehitch Killer” creates an atypical serial killer thriller with intangibly haunting consequences for its characters and audience alike.

“Tales from the Hood 2” still gets the basic job done, though its lack of refinement means it may as well be slugged out of a Solo cup instead of a stemmed glass.

What kind of quality can be expected from a movie whose director used a pseudonym and whose publicist employed imaginary praise to drum up an illusion of acclaim?

I would believe “Blood Child” is a true story before I’d believe any one of its actors as an authentic person.