Suspense novelist Jeffery Deaver once praised the short-story format, writing that the minimal time investment on the part of the reader allows the writer to get away with endings he or she cannot in the long form. In other words, the writer can be meaner, more devious. He's absolutely right, and the theory applies wholesale to The ABCs of Death, more or less a horror anthology depicting "26 ways to die."

Don't ask why Ninja III: The Domination begins with a ninja assault on a municipal golf course. Just be grateful it does. You also may wonder why its sex scene employs a can of V8: Don't question it. Just lie back and enjoy it.

Tobe Hooper got a raw deal. The director of horror hits The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Poltergeist didn't deserve to be sent to movie jail for 1985's Lifeforce. It's a well-crafted, well-intentioned work that was mismarketed and misunderstood, losing a bundle of money and soon sending Hooper into the lands of episodic television and direct-to-video features.

With Dead Souls, we can prove something about the Chiller cable network's original features that Remains could not: Source material is not to blame for their pervasive generic nature — it's the economy, stupid.

There's a theory about remakes that perhaps Hollywood should stop remaking good movies and instead remake the bad ones, so that they may be improved. The problem with that theory is one runs the risk of the remake being bad, too. Case in point: The Philadelphia Experiment.