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It’s October, so you know what that means… Halloween! And what better way to celebrate the festival of fear than with a whole heap of new movie releases? But with a whole heap of new horror movies on the way this month, we thought we’d take a look at what UK distributors have to offer on DVD later this month:

Toolbox Murders 2

The handyman of horror is back with a new box of tricks in in this terrifying sequel to Tobe Hooper’s 2004 reimagining of the 1978 cult favourite. Picking up directly after the events of Hooper’s film, we follow ‘Coffin Baby’, Hollywood’s most twisted killers, as he plans to put the screws to a new victim – Samantha, the sister of his prey from his previous rampage. Samantha finds herself held captive in a house of horrors and forced to undergo the most unspeakable tortures…

Unlike previous releases,...

I, like most horror movie fans, love an anthology. There’s no other genre that makes use of the short film the way horror does. Throw three of them together, maybe a bookend segment, and you’ve more than likely got something that horror fans are going to be paying attention to. The first V/H/S film was met with mixed reception, some loved it, some hated it. Me? I loved it. I’m a fan of almost everyone involved in it, and I thought it was a quite solid anthology. Then V/H/S 2 came along a year later, and it was greeted with almost nothing but praise. I’ll admit, as much as I enjoyed the first, V/H/S 2 blew it away. It wasn’t perfect, of course, but it was just on a different level than the first. Now we have a third, and supposed final,...

V/H/S brought us stories from Ti West, Adam Wingard, Glen McQuaid, and Joe Swanberg, among others. V/H/S 2 gave us far superior films from Gareth Evans and Timo Tjahjanto, Gregg Hale and Eduardo Sanchez, Jason Eisener, Simon Barrett, and Adam Wingard (again). For the third entry of the franchise, V/H/S Viral delivers another mixed bag, with entries from Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead, Marcel Sarmiento, Nacho Vigalondo, Gregg Bishop, and Todd Lincoln, whose segment "Gorgeous Vortex" was cut from the film for mysterious reasons. The series' most challenging aspect remains its wrap-around segments, which serve to loosely link the stories together. For an anthology, one would assume that these would be among the strongest in the film; sadly, that's not the case. "Vicious Circles" features...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

'V/H/S: Viral' arrives in theatres tomorrow for those who've not yet caught it on VOD and hot on its heels is this latest alternative look poster for the anthology threequel. It's been kicking around On Demand for a little while now and this new poster arrives based around the Marcel Sarmiento helmed wrap-around segment entitled 'Vicious Circles'. It comes courtesy of Magnet Releasing who'll be unleashing the third installment in the franchise into Us theatres this Friday. Filmmakers Todd Lincoln ('The Apparition'), Nacho Vigalondo ('Open Windows'), Gregg Bishop ('The Other Side'), Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead ('Resolution') are also on board with their efforts....

Headcleaner: VHS Series Gets Third Installment Blues

Perhaps after this third installment this franchise can enter the same void for the format which it’s named, as this is by far the least thematically inventive anthology of the trio. A quintet of five up and coming horror directors spackle this latest omnibus, once loosely geared to tickle our nostalgic fancy for the retired home video format from an era where gritty and scary films used to be more prolific.

Interweaving between its three sordid tales is the wraparound segment, “Vicious Circles,” from director Marcel Sarmiento, better known as the helmer of “D is for Dog” from the first The ABCs of Death film and his feature, Deadgirl. Beginning with a tense teenage couple, whereby the young male filmmaker stumbles upon a high speed Los Angeles chase and uses the opportunity to snag some YouTube footage that will make him famous,...

V/H/S: Viral

Written by Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead, Nacho Vigalondo, Gregg Bishop, Marcel Sarmiento, David White, T.J. Cimfel, Ed Daugherty

Directed by Justin Benson, Aaron Moorhead, Nacho Vigalondo, Gregg Bishop, Marcel Sarmiento

USA, 2014

When the first film in this series was released 2 years ago, it came as a much-needed breath of fresh air for the found-footage subgenre, a subgenre that had tired itself out by the time even Paranormal Activity 2 came out. What stood out the most about it was that none of the filmmakers involved were trying to fool you into thinking that any of it was real, while studio made found footage films still marketed themselves as “this is real footage”. Rather than try to pull a trick you wouldn’t fall for, they just had fun with the format and sought to break down the limitations of it. V/H/S 2 doubled down on...

Popular in the 1960s and early 1970s with more rare appearances in the 1980s, 1990s and the 2000s, the anthology-style horror film has made a solid resurgence in recent years with such portmanteau releases as The ABCs of Death films and the V/H/S series.

With Mexico Barbaro, Fear Paris and other projects in various stages of completion, the anthology horror film looks to continue to be an important part of the horror cinema landscape.

Some anthology films employ a framing or wraparound sequence in an attempt to connect the segments that make up the film while others dispense with this classic Amicus-style approach entirely and simply present a collection of short films connected by genre.

Either way, a horror anthology film is ultimately about the quality of its individual segments and this article will take you on a tour of the greatest horror anthology segments of all time.

V/H/S brought us stories from Ti West, Adam Wingard, Glen McQuaid, and Joe Swanberg, among others. V/H/S 2 gave us far superior films from Gareth Evans and Timo Tjahjanto, Gregg Hale and Eduardo Sanchez, Jason Eisener, Simon Barrett, and Adam Wingard (again). For the third entry of the franchise, V/H/S Viral delivers another mixed bag, with entries from Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead, Marcel Sarmiento, Nacho Vigalondo, Gregg Bishop, and Todd Lincoln, whose segment "Gorgeous Vortex" was cut from the film for mysterious reasons. The series' most challenging aspect remains its wrap-around segments, which serve to loosely link the stories together. For an anthology, one would assume that these would be among the strongest in the film; sadly, that's not the case. "Vicious Circles" features...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

What started as a clever way of combining the current found footage trend and fun anthology horror has now become an annual series that many genre fans have embraced. V/H/S: Viral, the third entry into the found footage series, delves into more action territory than straight-forward horror. I guess a change of pace isn’t a bad thing. Though some fans might be put off by this. The wrap around features a chase through the streets of La (“Vicious Circles”), the first story includes an aerodynamic fight between magicians over a mysterious cloak (“Dante the Great”), and the final story includes a burly brawl featuring kids using their skateboards to fend off possessed demons (“Bonestorm”). A lot of excitement is created by these three stories but the feeling of dread or fear is nowhere to be found. All of these amount to an anthology that doesn’t aim...