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Halle Bailey shines in the lead role of Ariel and sports a beautiful voice, but she's not enough to save a rehashed Disney tale that doesn't offer many surprises. It essentially repeats just about every plot beat and major set piece from the original 1989 Disney animated classic. There are a few moments that offer something different from the original, but these moments are few and far between and all the new musical numbers add nothing to the story or characters and simply drag the pacing down. Melissa McCarthy adds some life into the role of Ursula, but she's only in the film for probably 10 minutes. Unfortunately, this is another money-grubbing live action Disney remake that doesn't give its audience anything they haven't seen before.

Italian gialli films are an unpredictable lot. Some are drenched in style, sleaze and gore and some are nothing more than bland, uninspired police procedurals. Orgasmo is somewhere in between and I'm not really sure why some call it a giallo.

Carroll Baker plays a recently widowed American who's spending some time at her secluded villa when she catches the eye of a young drifter who sweeps her off her feet and brings her back to life in a sense. Things get complicated when his lusty sister shows up and throws a wrench in everything and Baker's life becomes a nightmare.

Orgasmo is less traditional giallo and more typical thriller with a little extra sleaze than usual. Pretty much everyone gets naked and has a sex scene at some point, but the violence and bloodletting are minimal and some aspects of the story are predictable.

I can't sit here and say that Her Name Was Christa is some sort of brilliant technical feat. It's not the most beautiful or polished movie I've ever seen in my life and some of the acting leaves a little bit to be desired, but in a world where most indie horror filmmakers are churning out uninspired slashers or bad zombie movies, this movie at least attempts to do something different and character driven.

It all starts when a lonely man meets a hooker and they develop a charming friendship, but when tragedy strikes, the man can't come to terms with his loneliness and let's just say that things escalate to a really disturbing degree.

Her Name Was Christa doesn't get to the good stuff until well past an hour into the film which will be a huge turn off to less patient viewers, but if you can sit with the characters for awhile, there's some pretty nasty stuff towards the finale of the movie that'll churn your stomach.

Before Wes Craven became known as a horror master, he dipped his toes into the horror pond with The Last House on the Left - a gritty, almost documentary style horror tale about two young women looking to score some "grass" who stumble into a deranged makeshift family of psychotics who torture them. But that's nothing compared to what happens when one of the girl's parents gets wind of this.

While the technical side of this film is hard to praise, the story itself is fascinating and keeps you on your toes. It's incredibly disturbing, but it's hard to turn away except when the filmmakers feel the need to add poorly devised comedic relief in between the scenes of savagery. It's easy to see where they're coming from, but it's such a hard left turn in tone that it doesn't work and brings the quality of the film down.

You have to give Disconnected a hand for daring to go against the grain and do something different. It's not your typical "teens in the woods/at a grad night/at prom/at camp/etc." being hacked up kind of horror movie, but that doesn't mean it works. In fact, it doesn't work.

Besides some flashes of potential here and there, Disconnected fails to make much of an impact due to a lack of suspense and underdeveloped characters. The entire thing is as baffling as a David Lynch movie but without the finesse. It's hinted that there might be something supernatural at play which gives it a slightly dreamlike feel, but I can't tell if that was intentional or because the filmmakers weren't sure what they were doing. However, it's probably the most interesting aspect of the film.

The ghost of a Japanese samurai warrior possesses a woman in Wisconsin during the holiday season and mayhem ensues. Am I getting that right? It's really hard to tell, because Blood Beat feels like someone gave you LSD without telling you right before the movie started. While the narrative isn't the strongest, at least it's not a film you'll soon forget. It has all the requisite blood for the slasher fans, but with a bizarre art house sensibility that feels like someone let some film students loose over the holiday break with some film gear and they just made it up as they went along.

There's nothing wrong with a depressing horror film. A lot of really good ones are, but when you're as unappealing and downbeat as Star Time is, it becomes a real chore to get through.

The surprising part is that this movie doesn't look like some long lost, crummy straight to video production. It looks fairly glossy with some striking shots and good production design. The acting isn't awful either, but there's nothing very gripping about it and the film never allows us to develop any major feelings for its characters.

You have a wannabe star who is convinced by an agent to start killing people to make himself famous, which sounds like an interesting enough concept, but it's hard to care what happens when the lead character is neither intimidating enough to scare us or pathetic and well developed enough for us to be on his side.

For the first 30 minutes of Satanic Panic, I was all in. The characters were interesting, the story was plausible in its own wacky way, and the pacing was pretty good, supplying both some creeps and laughs along the way. Somewhere by the middle of the movie, I found myself scratching my head as things just happen for no reason with very little explanation at all. While some of these things are pretty cool (trees in the forest spouting arms and grabbing people like something out of Disney's Snow White), most of them come out nowhere and makes it seem as if the writers got bored and started throwing everything in they could think of just to keep things interesting.

This isn't to say that Satanic Panic is a bad movie. Even in its most confusing and bizarre moments, it has enough energy and spark for 15 other indie horror films.

Every now and then, you want to watch a movie that's just cozy and won't make you think too hard, scare you too much, or leave you too disturbed. One days like that, Funeral Home would make a nice movie companion. It never goes anywhere too dark, there's not any blood or gore to speak off, and it moves along at a reasonable pace, leaving you mostly unmoved, but not feeling like you wasted your time either.

Heather moves in with her quirky grandmother to turn their old funeral parlor into a boarding house and, as soon as the guests arrive, they start disappearing or dying under mysterious circumstances.

Any horror or mystery fan won't find the central mystery of Funeral Home too tough to crack, but that's part of the charm. Sometimes, it's just nice to see a familiar story well told.

Perhaps fans of Stephen King's novel have been stewing for years since the release of Brian De Palma's film version of Carrie due to the changes and deletions he made and that's the reason this was made or maybe NBC just didn't have any better ideas for programming, so they decided to use this TV movie as a backdoor pilot for a TV series. Either way, I can't shake the feeling that this Carrie doesn't bring much new to the table.

Angela Bettis stars as the title character - a bullied outcast who lives with her insane religious fanatic and who discovers that she has telekenetic powers after having her first period. Of course, there's that horrible prom prank that ends in bloodshed.

This TV version is more faithful to King's novel, but if you ask me, the wraparound story kills a lot of the suspense leading up to the climactic prom massacre and everything's shot with a weird digital look that makes everything appear cheap. That's not even mentioning the horrid CGI effects during the prom sequence and subsequent town destruction.

That said, Bettis is wonderful in the lead role and does manage to step out from Sissy Spacek's imposing shadow a few times and do her own thing with the role. Patricia Clarkson underplays her role as Carrie's psychotic mother with mixed results.

David Cronenberg's The Fly was one of those rare remakes that was not only better than it had any right to be, but also a better film than its predecessor. The Fly II is a perfectly acceptable and reasonable continuation of the Cronenberg film, but there's something missing.

Seth Brundle's son (Eric Stoltz) turns out to have been infected with the fly virus and he's aging at an alarmingly rapid rate. Of course, this has its perks - he's very sharp, smart, and almost superhuman. Obviously, he's being studied in a lab and given a ritzy apartment to stay in at night. He ends up attracting a young secretary at the lab (Daphne Zuniga) right as the bad side effects of his virus begin to manifest. Can they find a cure before he suffers the same fate as his father?

The Fly II isn't a bad movie, but it's a bit more surface level than the original, which does hurt the film a bit. It has its fun moments and there are some great gore effects towards the end (including a very nasty acid to the face bit), but the romance between Stoltz and Zuniga can't hold a candle to the one between Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis in the original.

Final Exam gets a bad rep. It's not gory, it's not terribly scary, and it takes about an hour to get to the slashing, but it's obvious that it was tying to do something a little different. Judging by most people's reactions, they didn't succeed, but I beg to differ.

Not once was I bored and that's more than I can say for a lot of other movies. The characters and performances were amusing and watchable, which kept me going until the bodies began to hit the floor. The killer could stand to be a bit more imposing and I do think, in this case, he should have worn some kind of a mask, but that's a small quibble.

I admire Final Exam for trying something new. On the surface, it seems like your run of the mill slasher film (which it turns into in its last half hour), but there's a uniquely humanist angle here that I like.