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The Fog was John Carpenter and Debra Hill's hotly anticipated follow up to their runaway smash, Halloween, and it offers up a much different story than what moviegoers might have been expecting. Instead of bloodthirsty escaped mental patients coming after babysitters, it features a mature cast of Hollywood veterans who are all the citizens of a small coastal town who are being terrorized by the watery ghosts of those who were unjustly murdered by the people who helped found the town.

Carpenter keeps graphic bloodshed to a minimum and lets Dean Cundey's beautiful cinematography and the stellar ensemble do all the heavy lifting. That said, Rob Bottin's gruesome zombie ghost makeup is impressive.

The Housekeeper is a reasonable adaptation of A Judgement in Stone with some dramatic license here and there. Rita Tushingham stars as an illiterate anti-social who murders her father and gets a job as the housekeeper to a wealthy family. She befriends the local busybody and religious freak and they develop a disturbing friendship that leads to murder.

It's not too hard to see where The Housekeeper is going early on. You know the titular character will lose her mind and blood will be shed but this film is interesting enough to leave you wondering how this will all go down and it's still pretty grisly once it does.

Tushingham is wonderful as Eunice and Jackie Burroughs plays to the cheap seats as Joan, the religious freak who gets Eunice mixed up in her own insanity. Everyone else is fine at best.

Miss Leslie's Dolls wears its low budget and limited resources on its sleeve and feels like it was cobbled together over a holiday weekend, but there's so much charm and spirit that one can overlook any major flaws and appreciate it for the bizarre freak show that it is.

Like in many horror films, a car full of fresh blood breaks down in the middle of nowhere and the inhabitants (in this case, 3 college girls and one guy) find shelter in a spooky house by a graveyard where an eccentric middle aged woman named Miss Leslie lives. Miss Leslie is immediately drawn to one of the girls who bears a striking resemblance to someone she once knew and loved. As the night goes on, the group of young folks find out that Miss Leslie isn't as harmless as they once thought and their lives could be in danger.

Miss Leslie's Dolls suffers from many quirks that a lot of low budget films have. Some of the acting isn't so great, nighttime scenes are sometimes impossible to make out, pacing is off and can feel padded at times, and most of the gore effects amount to someone throwing a bucket of fake blood on the floor. Still, your jaw will rarely leave the floor throughout its run time.