Thriller
Rod Lott
According to some fun facts that open The Tall Man, some 1,000 children vanish each year who never are found. In the near-dead mining town of Cold Rock, that's because they're taken by the mysterious titular figure who's cloaked in black and darts in and out of the woods.

Thriller
Rod Lott
Michael Biehn was so inspired by appearing in Grindhouse that he wrote and directed his own grindhouse tribute, The Victim.

Thriller
Rod Lott
Even if this weren’t a big month for Jaws, what with a digitally restored re-release and Blu-ray debut, we’d likely still be inundated with shark movies.

Thriller
Rod Lott
Compared to the continent of Europe, the rate of death by guns in America is six times higher. You wouldn’t know it based on the current wave of crime films from that half of the globe. Arguably kicked off by the worldwide success of Sweden’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, the movies generally are ballsier and bloodier and, therefore, better.

Thriller
Rod Lott
Tab Hunter can't make it with chicks because ... well, insert your own joke about his private life here, but in 1973's Sweet Kill, aka The Arousers, it's because he has mommy issues that rank right up there with Norman Bates and Oedipus.

Thriller
Rod Lott
Beer brewing can be a risky business. Consider Alfred Heineken: In 1983, the CEO of the Dutch corporation that bears his name was kidnapped and held for a sizable ransom, all of which is dramatized in the near-epic film The Heineken Kidnapping. It's more engrossing than its generic title lets on.

Thriller
Rod Lott
What do you get when a prosecutor, a police officer, a journalist, an accountant, a judge, a bodyguard, a paramedic and one unemployed junkie skank are drugged, shackled and forced to play a game of survival involving man-eating sharks? The Asylum Home Entertainment's Shark Week, not to be confused with the Discovery Channel programming people look forward to.

Thriller
Rod Lott
Stop me if this sounds familiar: a handful of people trapped in an elevator, in a life-or-death situation, and one of them is not who he or she seems to be.

Thriller
Rod Lott
Penumbra is Spanish for "partly in the shadows," which is how we first find the fourth-floor apartment that Margarita Sanchez (Cristina Brondo, Dario Argento's Do You Like Hitchcock?) shows to Jorge Kepler (Berta Muñiz), representative for a prospective renter willing to pay four times the going rate, and for a full year in advance.

Thriller
Rod Lott
Kill List is not your ordinary, average hit-man thriller — it’s an excellent one. The UK film skirts into areas of horror before plunging in at the end, but maintaining an uncompromising level of excellence throughout. It's a strong candidate for that year-end best list. That said, its subject matter will prove to be too much for most to take.

Thriller
Rod Lott
Straight out of South Korea, No Mercy shows exactly that. But too bad it's only for the first act.

Thriller
Rod Lott
Presented as a story in the nonexistent Dark Mystery pulp mag, The Girl from the Naked Eye respectively refers to a call girl and the club where she worked.

Thriller
Rod Lott
Among independents, a recent movement has proven you can do an awful lot with very little — especially when limited to one set, as ATM and Brake nearly do.

Thriller
Rod Lott
You hear a title like Some Guy Who Kills People and think, "Is that all the energy and enthusiasm they can muster?" Well, this little thriller is a surprise, all underpromising and overdelivering, mostly due to a deft performance by '90s indie-film mainstay Kevin Corrigan (The Dictator).

Thriller
Rod Lott
Despite Inspector Morse enjoying a dozen-season run on TV, I’ve never seen an episode of the mystery series spawned from Colin Dexter’s novels. In no way did this detract from my enjoyment of Endeavour, a feature-length prequel, and is indeed enjoyable.