Hey there folks- longtime Marathoner, first-time poster. Anyway, just got back from the Toronto Film Festival, where amid the wide array of international art cinema I was lucky enough to take in a handful of new horror films. My thoughts on the movies, in the order I saw them:

The Mother of Tears- Lots of fun, although I'm sure part of that had to do with the fact that Argento introduced the film and did the Q&A afterward, and was as crazy as ever. Still, the film's kind of a blast, with all of the elaborate gore makeup and naked lesbian witches you've grown to expect from Argento. He's never been all the great with stories, but he really lets his freak flag fly this time, and if the movie lacks the baroque visual style of his 70s classics, it's highly entertaining all the same, with a handful of great "gotcha!" moments that demonstrate that Argento still knows how to scare the hell out of an audience.

The Orphanage- this Spanish thriller was produced by Guillermo Del Toro, and like Pan's Labyrinth and The Devil's Backbone, The Orphanage manages to be simultaneously supernatural and psychological. The director, Juan Antonio Bayona, isn't as gifted at atmosphere as his mentor, but he's definitely got a lot of potential in that area. There's also a great lead performance from Spanish actress Belen Rueda as a former resident of the title orphanage who is forced into revisiting the mysterious world of her childhood. Less of a fright flick than a chiller in the vein of The Others, but it's definitely worth seeing.

George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead- About as far as one can get from Land of the Dead while remaining a Romero zombie movie. This was one of the more divisive films I saw during the festival, and I'm actually kind of torn about it. The biggest problem I can see is that the subtextual stuff that Romero has always thrown into his films isn't as well-integrated into the story as it usually is, which makes it less satisfying as a Dead movie than it should be. However, the film's storyline isn't exactly subtle, as a group of students decide to keep the cameras rolling Blair Witch style in order to document a zombie infestation. Still, Romero's almost always interesting, and there are certainly a number of exciting moments here, but it's hard to say how well this would go over with a marathon crowd.

Stuck- on the other hand, based on the response this got at the Midnight Madness screening I attended, I bet Stuart Gordon's latest would absolutely kill at a marathon. This film was based on a news story from 2003 in which a young woman hit a homeless man, who became lodged in her windshield. This is a far cry from Gordon's Lovecraft-inspired Re-Animator, and Gordon doesn't shy away from realism here, from the grey, working-class setting to the selfish motivations of his anti-heroine. Likewise, the violence really packs a punch, not just because it's gross, but because it hurts. It's rare to see an Oscar-nominated actor give as guileless a performance as Stephen Rea does here, as for most of the film he's covered in blood and grime and stuck in a pane of glass. Surprisingly, Mena Suvari is just as good, playing a character who works as a caregiver but can't extend the same care when the chips are down. Stuck is a B-movie in the most exciting sense of the word, with a messy, unpleasant story told in an unvarnished style, the kind of movie Hollywood invariably screws it. This wasn't just the best genre film I saw in Toronto- it was one of the best films overall.