Twilight, Stephanie Meyer's four-book vampire series, has sold 17 million copies, it's inspired a clothing line at Hot Topic and chocolates at Godiva; the first in the series, also called Twilight, is now a low-budget movie ($37 million; peanuts in Hollywood) that's sold out 700 screenings before it's even opened. Its stars are on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, its production has been tracked by legions of fans and it's being called the next Harry Potter. The anticipation is high, there's been a strict press embargo on reviews, but the movie's out and people have seen it and so the question is: does it deserve epic squee? Is it worthy? The answer largely depends on your gender.

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Forget WALL-E and the Sisterhood of Traveling Pants 2. The big news in DVDs this week is the release of Indonesian action-horror-black magic-nationalist war cry, The Warrior, long considered the holy grail of unseen Southeast Asian sleaze. For the uninitiated, a bit of history first: Desperate to protect their movie industry from being overrun by foreign imports back in 1973, Indonesia's authoritarian government passed a law requiring film distributors to produce one local film for every three foreign imports they brought into the country. Predictably, producers soon learned that local working class audiences wanted sex, violence and horror in copious quantities. Their sales agents realized that the only Indonesian productions anyone overseas wanted were sex, action and horror flicks. And so, in a fit of pragmatism, filmmakers were given the freedom to wallow in shocking amounts of blood and skin for a Muslim country.

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The House of Usher is where it all started. American horror didn't have a Gothic tradition before penny-pinching, sausage grinder director, Roger Corman, begged his money-grubbing, knuckle-dragging bosses at American International Pictures to let him hire horror icon Vincent Price and adapt an Edgar Allan Poe short story. Previously AIP had been churning out low budget cheapies like Attack of the Crab Monsters and Sorority Girl with ten day shooting schedules and budgets hovering around the $100,000 mark. But Corman wanted to try something new: Instead of two black and white flicks shot in ten days, why not do one color flick for $250,000 with a fifteen-day schedule? Corman grabbed Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, (because it was in the public domain and because everyone recognized the title) hired scifi scribe Richard Matheson (The Incredible Shrinking Man) to churn out the script, and spent $50,000 on Vincent Price. His bosses, Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson objected. "There's no monster!" they cried. "The house is the monster," Corman responded. 

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Who would have thought that the director of Soul Man and Friday the 13th Part III would be capable of turning out a horror pinata like House, full of blood, guts and goofiness hitting you in the face like a shower of candy. Oh, wait, sorry. That's House, the 1986 horror movie, and we're supposed to be talking about House the 2008 horror movie. This kind of confusion is a sign that House '08 has nothing memorable going for it. In fact, it's going to be known for only one thing: It's a Christian horror movie, and that's not a good sign. Hollywood is often referred to as "godless," and thank goodness for that, because the "godly" Christian entertainment industry can't make a decent movie to save its life, and House is just more evidence for the prosecution.

Based on a Christian thriller by Frank E. Peretti and Ted Dekker, House is one of those movies where a bunch of strangers are trapped in a house and must avoid a shadowy stalker and survive until sunrise. They get to the house via the typical contrivances: Missed turn-offs, flat tires, cell phones out of range, sudden rainstorm. Once in the house we discover that too much is never enough for director Robby Henson. First they bump up against a family of menacing caretakers including creepy mom (played by Laverne & Shirley alum Leslie Easterbrook), mentally unhinged son (Lew Temple, a regular in Rob Zombie movies) and psychotic hubby (horror icon Bill Moseley). As if that weren't enough, we also get a menacing sheriff (Michael Madsen) and a masked killer known as the Tin Man, leading one to assume that the Scarecrow and Cowardly Lion are not far behind.

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Plowing the same field as Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd, the rock opera Repo! The Genetic Opera is from director Darren Lynn Bousman of Saw 2, 3 and 4 but it has more imagination and wit than the entire Saw franchise put together. Burton's Sweeney did the gore musical with more money and bigger stars, but despite its claustrophobic staging and "let's put on a show" stylization, Repo! still delivers enough blood, guts and musical glory to securely capture its target demographic: Teenage girls. If the teens and tweens who went to see High School Musical 3 wind up taking a look at Repo! then this flick has a chance of becoming a big, big hit. It's a Miley Cyrus movie for kids who read Twilight and buy Emily the Strange T-shirts.

Kicking off in a series of budget-saving comic book panels, Repo! tells the story of a future world where the mighty GeneCo has cornered the market in replacement organs and body parts. Their payment plans come with a catch, however -- miss enough and the Repo Men come and take back that heart, kidney or pair of eyes with a snicker snack slice of their shiny knives. Cut to: A city of goths who plunder graveyards the way homeless people go through the garbage, looking for recyclables they can sell to buy a little something to make all their troubles go away, in this case the mega-effective GeneCo painkiller Zydrate. In the middle of this swirl of black lipstick and latex corsets are two motherless families, the Wallaces and the Largos.

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Some movies are bad, and that's not good. But some movies are so bad, so amateurish, so bizarrely unappealing in every single respect that you're left in awe that the filmmakers even knew which end of the camera to point at their actors. The Haunting of Molly Hartley is that kind of film, a movie made by people so devoid of common sense that you're amazed they understand written speech and know how to use simple tools. There is no purpose to it: Is it Christian propaganda? Is it supposed to scare the audience? Is it supposed to entertain any living creature? It fails on all counts, and so the only purpose I could find for it was that it was a movie setting out to hit every single motion picture cliche -- all of them -- as hard as possible.

Opening with two teenaged lovers being killed eleven years ago, the movie kicks things off by jamming in four "Jumping Cats" in just the first ten minutes. A Jumping Cat is that unfortunate moment in a horror movie when the music builds, the tension mounts, and something leaps at the actress... and it's only the cat. Phew. In the opening scene of Molly Hartley we get the wind (Cat 1) birds thrown at the actress (Cat 2), a boyfriend saying boo (Cat 3) and a masked stranger in the background who turns out to be her dad (Cat 4). Four cats! Cut to the present day, and young singer Haley Bennett, playing the titular Molly Hartley, shows up for the first day at her private school. Her dad is worried about her; there's something mysterious in her past and she skips her appointment with the school counselor. The most popular boy at school (Chace Crawford of Gossip Girl) likes her, but his mean girlfriend warns Molly to stay away.

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Special effects dude, Toby Wilkins, has recently been tapped by Sam Raimi's Ghost House Pictures to direct part three of the very tired Grudge franchise, which is weird because the Grudge movies (like the Saw films) are part of the current trend in horror that beat you over the head with Meaning, usually in the most obvious and boneheaded ways. The ghosts in The Grudge want revenge, Jigsaw wants to make people appreciate their lives, blah, blah, blah. Refreshingly, Wilkins' horror debut, Splinter, is a throwback to the monster movies of yore. Here, the monster attacks innocent people because, well, it's a monster and attacking people is part of its job.

Seth and Polly (Paulo Costanzo and Jill Wagner) are going camping to celebrate their anniversary. Unfortunately, they get carjacked by Dennis (Shea Whigham) and his meth-head girlfriend Lacey (Rachel Kerbs), which puts a damper on the romance. They'll soon discover that the dampening has only just begun. Pulling over at a gas station they notice that things seem quiet... too quiet. Bingo! Cue the attack by the mold monster, a fungus that infects people when they prick themselves on its long, black, sea urchin spines. Once infected, the mold eats their brains and takes over their bodies, which is problematic because this mold, like most molds, doesn't understand human physiology. When it wants to make its host walk, it bends them in ways human bodies weren't made to bend, causing their bones to crack and their joints to splinter. Sometimes the host is dead, which is gross, but sometimes the host is still alive and the results are hideous, as if an invisible, demonic chiropractor is adjusting joints really badly.

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Don't let the title fool you: Roger Corman's The Haunted Palace is based on the work of Edgar Allan Poe in name only. Though his Poe pictures were successful, Corman wanted to tackle H.P. Lovecraft and adapted his novella "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" for the screen. American International Pictures didn't want to mess with a good thing, however, and slapped the Poe title on it, marketing it as another in Corman's series. Despite this misleading title and some disjointed Poe verse tacked on to bookend the movie, The Haunted Palace is dark, moody, classic Corman.

The movie opens in the small village of Arkham in the late 18th century. Cloaked figures walk the fog-shrouded streets, and the citizens are deathly afraid of "the devil himself," Joseph Curwen (Vincent Price). Curwen lives in a large palace that looms over the village; he's rumored to be a warlock, but the only thing folks know for sure is that he owns a copy of the Necronomicon, and young girls who wander into the castle emerge hours later with no recollection of what went on inside. The villagers join together old-fashioned angry mob-style, complete with the requisite torches. They pull Curwen from his palace and set about burning him in the town square, but not before he can spout off a few promises from the pyre: He will return, and he's totally putting a curse on them, their children, and their children's children. Curwen stops there and is soon engulfed in flames, but one can assume that their children's children's children are also at risk.

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I like to think of the Saw franchise as the ultimate product of the mortgage bubble. The first Saw installment was released in 2004, at the height of the housing bubble; it was a dark dose of medieval grand guignol in the middle of sunny times. People were buying their homes with all the thought and care they put into buying a new pair of shoes, taking on mortgages that, deep down, they knew they couldn't afford. Between 1997 and 2006, home prices increased by 124% and you were a fool not to drink the Kool Aid. In the same way, it was fun to take a sip of the dark stuff every year from the Saw franchise, like a little shot of torture porn that vaccinated you and let you have a few safe shivers. Now that the subprime mortgage mess has exploded and it's been revealed what we thought were the good times were actually the bad, the Saw franchise seems equally threadbare and sour. Let's hope that with the crash of the economy, the franchise will pack up its deathtraps and turn out the lights -- because I can't imagine it continuing.

Saw V picks up immediately after the end of Saw IV, and you need to have re-watched the previous installments to have any clue as to what's happening on screen: Two cops chasing each other in and around a bunch of flashbacks. These flashbacks take up almost a third of the movie, so that this installment feels like a cow chewing its cud, coughing up the same scenes again and again, only to swallow them and then regurgitate them in an endless loop. FBI Agent Strahm (Scott Patterson) escapes from a death trap early on and must walk down many dark hallways holding his gun and his flashlight while trying to clear his name. FBI Agent Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) also walks down dark hallways holding his gun and flashlight trying to frame him. Meanwhile, their boss (Mark Rolston) is also walking down dark hallways trying to figure out what's going on.

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Early in 2008, Spanish directors Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza made a shot-on-video horror flick called Rec that became a film festival must-see and then played to great acclaim across Europe. Shot with a first-person camera, it follows a cheesy late night TV show's camera crew as they shadow a company of firefighters on their all-night shift. The firefighters get called to a building where it quickly becomes clear that flesh-eating zombies are on the loose, and the crew wind up trapped inside and fighting for their lives.

Sony Screen Gems bought both the distribution rights and the remake rights to Rec and have made a shot-for-shot English-language remake called Quarantine. The original Rec was a low budget affair with one single goal: To make the audience jump. And it worked; it's a movie that has you springing out of your seat like a Mexican jumping bean. The question is: Does Quarantine achieve the same results?

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