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It can be frustrating to watch a film that doesn’t seem to understand its own strengths; it’s downright maddening to watch three of them. With “Peninsula” (stylized for its North American release as “Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula”), director Yeon Sang-ho has now made an entire trilogy of exuberant, maximalist, and ultimately tiresome zombie movies that cannibalize their best ideas in a crazed dash towards mediocrity. This erratic and derivative new chapter is by far the most chewed up of the three, as its outsized ambition (or at least its scale) makes it that much easier to see how . At the end of a summer that we’ve all just been trying to survive, there’s definitely some fun to be found in a go-for-broke action saga that isn’t afraid to play around with the inhumanity that tends to follow a pandemic, but “Peninsula” is just another...

We're back with a new installment of Horror Highlights! Today, you can watch the trailer for UK Haunters, read the list of winners from Fantaspoa's digital festival, watch the trailer for Wicked Ones, and find out which special guests are slated for The Last Drive-In's summer special!

UK Haunters: "UK Haunters is a vlog style documentary that explores the UK Haunt scene from the Pov of film maker Dan Brownlie as he opens up the UK haunt scene for the world to view. While shooting a feature film at the London Tombs scare attraction (entitled 'The Tombs'), director Dan Brownlie got a peek into the inner workings of how scare attractions work and some of the tricks of the trade. Bowled over by the ingenuity and inventiveness he decided he needed to know more. After searching for more information Dan found there were no documentaries covering the huge UK scene,...

Stars: Jessica Cameron, Ria Fend, Jess Impiazzi, Akie Kotabe, James Kermack, Danielle Harold, Carl Wharton, Devora Wilde, Anthony Ilott, Marcia Do Vales, Barry Jay Minoff, Ayvianna Snow, David Lemberg | Written by Michael William Smith | Directed by Dan Brownlie

A live streamed, publicity stunt, filmed inside London’s most famous scare attraction takes a terrifying turn as the event awakes an evil spirit. Something relentless and seemingly unstoppable starts stalking the celebrity guests through the claustrophobic halls of this maze of terror.

The Tombs was, if memory serves, filmed a number of years ago in London at the scare attraction The London Tombs… Making this, despite being filmed some time ago, the latest film in a current spate of hunted attraction films to have hit DVD (and VOD) shelves, following on from the likes of Haunt, from the writers of The Quiet Place, and The Asylum’s Clown. Both films from...

Fantastic Fest is one of the best film festivals in the states and the largest in the Us. Held in Austin Texas at the Alamo Drafthouse, the event screens nothing but the best in genre films. Sound On Sight contributors Emmett Duff and I will be in attendance to bring the best coverage we can possibly whip up. With the Toronto International Film Festival just ending, we are back in full swing and our coverage starts now. Here is a preview of some of the high profile films on display this year.

Here is a list of films our staff as already seen. He titles highlighted in red are must sees. We highly recommend not missing them.

1- A Lonely Place to Die – **** stars

Written by Will Gilbey and Julian Gilbey

Directed by Julian Gilbey

UK, 2011

A rare thriller that actually contains thrills, UK export A Lonely Place to Die...

Haunters aka Choneung Ryukja

Directed and Written by Min-suk Kim

South Korea, 2010

Fantasia imdb

The best superhero movie this year is not Captain America or Thor or Green Lantern or X-Men: First Class; it features no costumes, no secret origins and amazingly, no exposition.

The obvious comparison for this film is M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable, but where that film ends Haunters begins, skipping the traditional secret origin and in fact any explanations for the super-powers on display.

Cho-In (Dong-won Kang) is your Mr. Glass analogue. Like Elijah Price he is crippled, but with a prosthetic leg instead of Osteogenesis Imperfecta. He has the strange ability to mentally control anyone that he can see. We get a very cursory introduction to Cho-In as a young boy, not to explain how he got his powers, but to show us his incredibly screwed up childhood: when Cho-In used his powers to save...

What happens when you cross a superhero movie with a Korean thriller? There are no costumes, no gadgets, no global crisis—just messed up personal/family lives and a ton of people die violently. Maybe that’s pigeonholing, but Haunters is proving it to be true.

In this messy superhero origin story, Kyu-nam (Ko Soo) is an unemployed nobody hired to safeguard a small office’s safe against a recurring mysterious thief, only to discover that the thief has the superpower of controlling the actions of anyone he sees. Anyone, that is, except Kyu-nam. Annoyed by this, the villain Cho-in (Kang Dong-won) attacks Kyu-nam’s good-natured boss, which pisses Kyu-nam off and sends him on a vendetta to stop this villain before he harms more people.

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Writer/director Min-suk Kim’s Haunters is a South Korean flick currently featured at the New York Asian Film Festival. The original Korean title of the film, Psychic, makes much more sense than what it eventually settled with, as Haunters really doesn’t have much to do with the plot line. Kim’s previous 2008 screenplay for The Good, The Bad, The Weird was pretty strong, but the same scope of work doesn’t shine through on Haunters.

After an abusive childhood of being imprisoned and blindfolded, Cho-in (Dong-won Kang) has to rely on a wooden prosthetic leg. Along with being physically abused, both his parents attempted to kill him. But Cho-in was born with an amazing supernatural gift. He can use mind control on anyone within his line of sight. After freeing himself from the binds of his parents, he survives the streets by using his powers of persuasion to...

If evil could control everyone around you, what would you do? Korean film, Haunters, is the story of a sociopath with the power of mass mind-control and the only man who immune to his gaze. Haunters is directed by Kim Min-suk (The Good, The Bad, The Weird) and stars Gang Dong-Won and Ko Soo. It makes its North American premiere at the 2011 L.A. Film Fest.

From the looks of this trailer, this looks like a beautifully shot film with striking scenes that will stick with you long after you leave the theater. Check out the synopsis and trailer below:

Haunters: Synopsis

After losing his job at a scrap metal yard, Kyu-Nam finds a new job at a small pawn shop named Utopia. He is immediately drawn to the family atmosphere at Utopia, working with his new boss Jung-Sik and boss’s daughter Young-Sook. Unfortunately for Kyu-Nam, his moment...

The New York Asian Film Festival has announced that its tenth anniversary edition will open on July 1 with the North American premiere of Yoshimasa Ishibashi's Milocrorze: A Love Story ("one solid slab of psychedelia," promises the festival; image above) and close on July 14 with the New York premiere of Na Hong-Jin's The Yellow Sea (aka The Murderer), which has just screened at Cannes in Un Certain Regard (see the roundup).

There'll be two Centerpiece Presentations, Benny Chan's Shaolin, with Andy Lau, Nic Tse and Jackie Chan, and Takashi Miike's Ninja Kids!!! — which, you may remember Danny Kasman caught in Cannes, and got quite a nice kick out of it, too. The festival will also be screening Miike's "director's cut" of 13 Assassins.

There'll be three special focuses. First off...

Wu Xia: Hong Kong's Flying Swordsmen

Tsui Hark's Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame...