I caught the very entertaining Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer as part of the Slamdance 2008 line-up -- and I knew I had another indie horror flick on my hands that was worth hyping. (Review here.) Bolstered by a canny script and some strong work from actors Trevor Matthews and Robert Englund, JB:MS is a colorfully scrappy little monster movie with a very sly tongue-in-cheek attitude, and I'm certain it's a movie that the horror geeks will embrace once Anchor Bay unleashes it later this year. And those horror geeks have been pretty patient, so here are a few new goodies.

Under the jump you'll find a brand-new Jack Brooks poster (which is slightly different from the one Bloody-Dee is sharing right here), but there's also a newly-redesigned website for the monster maniacs to click around in. The movie will open in its native land (somewhere called "Canada"?) throughout July, but fest-freaks can meet Jack Brooks when he plays at Montreal's Fantasia Film Festival on July 5. As far as U.S. distribution goes, that's up to the merchants of mayhem over at Anchor Bay.

Several months ago I saw a monster movie called Abominable, which is an affectionately tongue-in-cheek throwback flick that reminded me of stuff like Grizzly and Prophecy. And then I stumbled across Hatchet, which would make for a perfect double feature with Abominable, because it feels like an old-school slasher flick that's been hidden on a dusty shelf for the past twenty years. And yes, I mean that as a compliment. If you possess any affection for flicks like Friday the 13th, The Burning or (ha) Humongous, then you'll consider Hatchet a grade-A treat.

The directors of Abominable and Hatchet are just about my age, which tells me that my generation of horror geeks is poised to hit the indie circuit with a vengeance. (The indie circuit and beyond, hopefully.) Hatchet wears its genre love right there on its gore-soaked sleeve, and that's why I had such a good time with the flick. It's funny without being a parody, it's unapologetically gory, and it's packed with actors who are obviously having a real good time with the material.

The plot couldn't be simpler: A chintzy tour of a New Orleans swampland turns into sheer terror as a group of goofballs find themselves haunted and hunted by the legendary lunatic known as Victor Crowley. That's pretty much it, plot-wise.

One night in Austin a few months back I was hanging out in front of the Alamo Drafthouse movie theater waiting for my next Fantastic Fest movie to begin, and (as often happens at film festivals) I struck up a conversation with a hardcore handful of horror freaks. I leaned over to introduce myself and one of the guys said "Scott Weinberg? You reviewed my movie!" -- to which I replied "Adam Green? I liked your movie!" Two weeks later, we were married.

Just kidding. Adam and I did, however, become good pals with one very important thing in common: We demand high quality from our horror flicks, whether they're Overpriced PG-13 Studio Remake Part 4 or Tiny Little Horror Indie That Needs Some Love. So with the announcement that Mr. Green's Hatchet will be hitting semi-wide theatrical release (on September 7!) courtesy of Anchor Bay, I figured it was time to nail Green down and demand a few answers from the guy. Here's how our chat went down:

Cinematical: One doesn't write & direct a movie like Hatchet without having some very intensive slasher training early in life. What were the flicks that turned you from a normal New England kiddie into a raving horror fanatic? Did your parents support your twisted habit?

Adam Green: I was lucky enough to have an older brother who shared the splatter flicks with me and I had parents who were cool and involved enough in my life to allow me to see them. I think my folks appreciated that I looked at these movies as a creative outlet ... almost like magic shows if you will. When I would see a knife go through someone, it never scared me as much as it challenged me. "How did they do that?" I was always a good kid and I never really got in trouble or (even worse) became that weird kid who watches horror movies all the time and doesn't talk to anybody. (You know the guy, I'm sure he was in your class, too!) I think if I had ever shown signs of this stuff having a negative impact on me then my parents would have put the kibosh on it. I'm sure now, seeing what is happening with Hatchet, they are glad they supported my horror habit. My earliest memories of horror are Friday the 13th Part 2, John Carpenter's The Thing, Halloween, An American Werewolf in London, and A Nightmare On Elm Street ... and Hatchet is so obviously inspired by those films that I may as well have made it in 1984.

The coolest horror flick of the year that nobody went to see has claimed itself a DVD release date. After giving the critically-embraced Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon a cursory (and very limited) theatrical release, Anchor Bay will bring the slick slasher deconstruction home to DVD on June 26th. According to Bloody-disgusting.com, the platter will come complete with audio commentaries, a couple of featurettes, several deleted and extended scenes, two of the very cool trailers, thoughts from writer/director Scott Glosserman and a perfectly lovely anamorphic widescreen transfer.

For the record, Anchor Bay released Behind the Mask in 72 theaters on March 16th. (It opened opposite Dead Silence and Premonition, hardly heavy-hitters but most certainly "genre" flicks.) Over the course of its 3-week theatrical run, the movie grossed less than $70,000. I mention that rather ugly number not to draw attention to the film's fiscal failure, but to indicate how damn hard it must be to "sell" a movie like this one. It's got no stars, it's definitely an "indie" and it's tailor-made for a very specific niche audience. But this is what makes DVD so great: I predict that millions of horror fans will have a ball "discovering" Leslie Vernon on their own ... and if this movie doesn't become a cult mini-classic within five years time, then I vow to retire from the horror game forever. (Disclaimer: In actuality I promise no such thing.)

Anyway, you can see for yourself if the horror community has over-hyped Behind the Mask when the flick goes digital in June. As far as Anchor Bay's theatrical releases are concerned, they also have a full-bore September 7 release planned for Adam Green's Hatchet -- a flick that better get more than 72 screens and 70k before we hear news of a DVD release!

For a while you couldn't find it on DVD at all. And then MGM released a pretty solid (albeit annoyingly non-anamorphic) Phantasm DVD that sold for about ten bucks -- and then that DVD went out of print. So for a while there the horror freaks couldn't find a copy of Don Coscarelli's trippy horror masterpiece at ALL! But as Jeff Anderson told us a few weeks ago, Anchor Bay is coming to the rescue!

Arriving in DVD shoppes on April 10 is a full-bore (and, yes, anamorphic) "Anchor Bay Collection" Phantasm DVD, and while the extras sure do look pretty slick ... they also look like they were ported directly from the old MGM release! I could be mistaken, but it sure seems like if you already own the MGM version, the only upgrade this new platter offers is the new anamorphic transfer. Otherwise you already own the deleted scenes, the feature-length Phantasmagoria documentary, the promotional interviews and featurettes, the trailers and TV spots and the rather amusing audio commentary with Don Coscarelli, Michael Baldwin, Bill Thornbury and Angus "The Tall Man" Scrimm. But if you don't have that MGM disc, this one's an absolute keeper -- provided you enjoy movies with murderous spiky-balls, hulking morticians, undead fly-finger creatures, and pint-sized mutant slaves imprisoned in alternate dimensions. (Hmm, I might actually spin Phantasm again tonight...)

When it comes to horror on DVD, we start with outfits like Lionsgate and Anchor Bay, and since I spend a good deal of time saying very nice things about (most of) LG's horror output, now's the time to celebrate a milestone for Anchor Bay: No, not another re-issue of Halloween or Army of Darkness ... They've picked a flick for their very first* theatrical rollout! That Hatchet movie! (And let's give it up for the festival-fave horror indies; both Hatchet AND Behind the Mask will be earning theatrical releases early next year, which is a testament to the quality of both flicks; movies like these -- good, bad or awful -- generally get remanded straight to the video stores.)

Yes, it's Adam Green's Hatchet that (according to a recent press release) will hit theaters next April, a film that's played a whole bunch of festivals and gave me a very entertaining 90 minutes when it screened at last September's Fantastic Fest. Chock-full of old-school horror staples (Kane Hodder, Robert Englund, Tony Todd, etc.), a sly sense of humor and more than a few ferocious flurries of gore, Hatchet is precisely the sort of horror flick that'll please anyone who grew up on the earliest exploits of Freddy, Jason and Mikey.

Check back in a few weeks for our interview with Gory Adam Green; you won't believe what his next project is.

*I could be wrong on this. Anyone out there know if Anchor Bay went theatrical on something before Hatchet?

One of the most disarmingly clever genre deconstructions I've ever seen is Scott Glosserman's Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon -- which is just another way of saying "It's a horror mockumentary created by folks who definitely know their old-school slasher flicks, and aren't afraid of being a little irreverent while paying homage to the genre that Jason (and Michael and Freddy) built." I saw the movie with a very enthusiastic crowd back at last March's SXSW Film Festival -- and then once again at the Alamo Drafthouse on Halloween Night when I happened to be back in Austin for reasons of a more personal (to say nothing of curvier) nature.

And after two sessions with Leslie I can tell you: This flick really works, but only if, as a child, you used to love sneaking HBO peeks at Friday the 13th Part 4, Halloween Part 5 and Freddy Part 6 while your parents were off doing more, ahem, parental things. Bolstered immeasurably by the fantastic lead performance of Nathan Baesel (and kept consistently afloat by Glosserman's witty screenplay), Behind the Mask is a certifiable hoot for the horror crowd. If the "meet the hot young slasher" mockumentary idea doesn't sell you at first, I'd also remind you that Behind the Mask delivers genre veterans like Robert Englund, Scott Wilson and Zelda Rubinstein. And if you're still not curious, then fine: You're officially off my list of true-blue horror geeks.

So here's some good news: Not only has Anchor Bay purchased Behind the Mask for distribution, but they'll be doing it in a theatrical capacity! Yep, Anchor Bay is gonna bang out some prints and distribute the flick on January 5 -- although obviously it's going to be a fairly limited-style release pattern. But don't worry; I hear those Anchor Bay guys do some pretty fine horror-work on the DVD front as well.

Between the one with the lenticular cover and the "Network TV" version, I've simply lost count of how many different Halloween DVDs Anchor Bay has released in my lifetime. (I'll guess eight, and that's not including the feature-length Halloween documentary that recently got its very own DVD release instead of being packaged as Disc 2 in a normal Special Edition.) Me, I own one copy of John Carpenter's unquestionable classic (this version, I think), and I've never really felt the urge to invest in any of the subsequent releases.

But I may have to change that tune pretty soon.

Don May Jr., the horror-lovin' DVD producer who runs Synapse Films, recently let Fangoria know about a virtual Holy Grail of Horrordom: "What we've got is pretty much all the unused original camera negative from John Carpenter's original Halloween," is what May had to say, and to imply that the guy is very excited about the treasure trove would be an understatement on par with "Dr. Loomis is mildly obsessed with Michael Myers."

A lot of people have taken to calling the Masters of Horror series a Showtime production, but the truth is that the experiment was born over at Anchor Bay. Series creator Mick Garris had the idea to snag a bunch of the finest horror-makers under the sun, have each one direct an hour-long mini-movie, and then let the Gorehounds devour the goods through the magic of DVD. But then Showtime got involved, and they aired 12 of the 13 episodes between last December and March of this year. (The 13th episode, Takashi Miike's Imprint, was deemed too harsh by the Showtime folks, which means you won't be able to see it till the DVD hits shelves.)

Unfortunately, Anchor Bay has taken a fairly money-hungry approach to releasing Masters on DVD: Two episodes hit stores yesterday, available individually or as part of a 2-pack. But with a list price of $16.98 apiece (which means a retail cost of about 11 bucks each), it seems that the horror faithful are expected to dole out about $150 if they want the entire season. (By comparison, my 13-episode collection of the brilliant Firefly set me back only about 40 bucks!) But hey, nobody's saying you have to buy 'em all, right? We horror geeks aren't ravenous completists and ferocious collectors ... are we? (To be fair, if the first 2 DVDs are any indication, each release promises to come stocked with loads of extra goodies, so at least we're getting some value for our money.)

Anyway, to commemorate the DVD debut of the series (well, the first two episodes) I thought it might be helpful to give our readers a Masters Guide -- despite the fact that I've seen precisely ONE episode of the show so far! Click below for a list of all the actors, the Masters, the release dates, all 13 plot synopses, and a variety of trivial hoo-hah intended mainly for the hardcore horror freaks.