A handful of strangers (including John Cusack, Ray Liotta and Amanda Peet) are murdered one at a time in a motel on the darkest and stormiest of dark and stormy nights. If the filmmakers had stuck to this B-movie premise, things could have been fun, but Michael Cooney’s over-reaching script tries for Sixth Sense-like significance.

Michael Keaton is far more effective as a tormenting figure than a tormented one, which makes his role here as an architect who starts hearing voices of the dead in static an inherently ill fit. Having Beetlejuice and the best brooding Batman scared silly by spooky noises doesn’t quite fit. Keaton is maddeningly passive, possibly

Further evidence that Satanists are rarely anything but silly in the movies, this Kim Basinger vehicle is an exploitative rehash of the Bethlehem story with a 7-year-old girl (Holliston Coleman) in the Jesus part. Rufus Sewell plays the lead Satanist who wants to turn the girl to the dark side, and his knack for making

This sequel to The Silence of the Lambs is a disappointing comic spectacle, in which gruesome details (disembowelments, sauteed brains) are offset by lighthearted dialogue that turns one of the movies’ greatest villains into a ghastly gag. Anthony Hopkins returns as Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter, but he’s more interested in delivering one-liners than scares. From

One of those grisly shockers that protests far too much, this French import spends most of its running time trying to provoke even the most hard-core of horror fans. Don’t give it the chance. Cecile De France and Maiwenn Le Besco play a pair of college girlfriends who are stalked by a leering, heavy-breathing killer

Credit rocker turned horror director Rob Zombie with this: he can film a bloody, naked corpse like no one else. This sequel to Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses has its own distinctive flair, specifically rooted in the grindhouse exploitation flicks of the 1970s. With impulsive freeze-frame shots and a retro, country-rock soundtrack, the movie stands

A thriller that can’t decide who the bad guy should be: the upscale urbanites (Sharon Stone and Dennis Quaid) who buy a country estate for cheap or the working-class former owner (Stephen Dorff) who couldn’t make his mortgage payments. As their showdown grows increasingly ridiculous, eventually resembling the intelligence of a Friday the 13th flick,

Slow-burn horror films can be a refuge of sorts for talented actresses in search of a lead role. Just as Jennifer Connelly anchored the excellent Dark Water, Kate Hudson headlines The Skeleton Key, a clever little thriller under the spell of Louisiana voodoo. As Caroline, a hospice worker who goes to work for a stroke