Premiering last Saturday night as a SyFy Original Film, Rise of the Zombies is absolutely everything we have come to expect from that particular imprint - cheaply made, terribly acted, starring washed up actors who seem to have nothing left but a little bit of name recognition, and delivering laughably bad special effects that you fully expect to see made fun of the next week by Joel McHale on The Soup. Whereas last week's movie Zombie Apocalypse was a little silly but still enjoyable on its own merits, this one just.... isn't. So hey, let's snark on it for a while.

Saturday night was apparently Zombie night on the SyFy channel, and party animal that I am I spent my evening watching three zombie movies back to back. One of those was Zombie Apocalypse, in which Ving Rhames apparently decided that, what the hell, he's already been in two other zombie flicks (the excellent 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake and the decidedly NOT excellent 2008 Day of the Dead remake), so he may as well go with the trifecta. How does this one fare? Read on to find out.

I've got an oddball entry this week, largely because I spent much of the last week on vacation and hanging out with an old friend from out of town. The main reason he flew down was for us to make our annual pilgrimage to Universal Studios' Halloween Horror Nights. It is one of my favorite things to do all year, and if you ever have the chance to go to the event either here in Orlando or over in Los Angleles I can wholeheartedly recommend it. Without a doubt, my favorite house this year was Penn & Teller's Newkd Las Vegas 3D.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of catching Dredd 3D in the theater.  You might not have seen it go by, if you blinked you pretty much missed it – which is a real shame. Unfortunately the movie was plagued with two basic problems (at least here in the United States): 1) It is based on a comic book series that most Americans have never heard of, and 2) The Americans that have heard of Judge Dredd only know it as the disastrous Sylvester Stallone bomb that came out in the mid-90’s. Even worse, the trailer for Dredd 3D makes it look like a ripoff of the insane Indonesian action movie The Raid. So yeah, unfortunately the cards were stacked against Dredd 3D and that’s a real shame. In any case, I found myself walking out of the movie theater and realizing that I had not actually read any Judge Dredd since around 1987 – and that really blew my mind.

Pictured: My Mind

In 2007 Spanish writer/director Jaume Balagueró unleashed upon the world the truly amazing horror film [REC], a truly amazing 78 minute thrill ride that managed to take the “found footage” genre in an entirely new direction. Despite it being completely unnecessary, there was of course an American remake (because we all know Americans simply refuse to read subtitles). Against all expectations, the nearly shot-for-shot remake Quarantine turned out to actually be pretty good in its own right. It was helped in large part by casting in the lead Jennifer Carpenter, best known as Dexter Morgan’s sister on Showtime’s Dexter. Three years later the studio followed up with a direct-to-video sequel that, interestingly enough, was NOT a remake of the also-very-excellent [REC]². Instead, Quarantine 2: Terminal goes off in a completely new direction and supplies an entirely different set of scares for audiences already familiar with its Spanish progenitor. How well does it succeed? Well, therein lies a tale.