Crummy by mainstream standards, this low-budget martial-arts programmer has lots of charm, starting with the opening shot depicting the inside of a church with saloon-style swinging doors banging against the wind and dust outside, and Tarantino fans will make note of some of the source elements he appropriated for his Kill Bill revenge pastiche. But the real attraction here is Yumi Higaki, playing a talented but reluctant martial-arts disciple seeking payback for injuries to the body and pride of her master (Sonny Chiba, in an extended cameo at the film's beginning). I had seen her previously in Sister Street Fighter, released two years earlier, but her poise and confidence has improved here. A prototype for any number of femme videogame ass-kickers, from Chun Li down the line, she has an overgrown-kid look to her that makes her determination and eventual triumph in the violent coming-of-age scenario more rousing.

When I settled in to take a look at Nimrod Nation, an eight-part documentary series that aired beginning in 2007 on the Sundance Channel, I expected to sit still for an episode or two before deciding when and whether to continue. To my not-inconsiderable surprise, I devoured the first four episodes in a single afternoon, took down two more in the evening, and finished out the package the following morning. Taken as a whole, Nimrod Nation is not a great documentary, but it's a friendly and unassuming collection of days in the life that gets big points for compulsive watchability.

Dawn (Jess Weixler), the protagonist of writer/director Mitchell Lichtenstein's playfully gynephobic black comedy Teeth, is a high-school abstinence advocate whose no-sex-before-marriage stance masks her deep discomfort with her own body. Because Teeth is also a horror movie, the root of her fear is physical, not psychological -- as Anne Carlisle put it in the druggy downtown classic Liquid Sky, "this pussy has teeth."

Whatever happened to the red-meat, teens-in-trouble, blood-and-breasts American horror film? On the evidence here, it’s been driven nearly underground. To be clear, The Lost, which played the festival circuit and got a handful of theatrical showings in New York and Los Angeles, isn’t a great film. It’s limited by its budget, a general flabbiness around the midsection, and genre conventions that serve as reminders of the film’s status as horror product. But, compared to the cynical teen-scare flicks and semi-competent J-horror knock-offs clogging multiplex screens, The Lost feels unhinged and even a little dangerous. Its climax has a ferocity and evokes a sense of helplessness that’s hard to shake. If the ability to genuinely disturb is any measure of a horror film’s quality, then The Lost is a pretty good one.

If you ever felt, as I did, there was some missing backstory associated with the smartly amusing Shaun of the Dead and its somewhat-less-brilliant follow-up, Hot Fuzz, you may be excited to make the acquaintance of Spaced, the consistently ingenious British TV show where director Edgar Wright and actors Simon Pegg and Nick Frost cut their comic teeth. Storywise, it’s no relation to Shaun of the Dead, even though it feels somewhat like a prequel — and it’s a bit thrilling to think of Tim Bisley, the videogame-addicted comic-book artist Pegg plays in Spaced finally given a chance to face the zombies who populate his dreams in a real-world post-apocalyptic showdown.

Here's the bad news: it's not as good as Dead & Buried. But it's still pretty good. Director Gary Sherman's 1972 feature, known in the U.S. as Raw Meat, is a spooky subway movie that takes place in the London Underground but features images of tunnelled emptiness that should send at least a mild shiver of recognition down the spine of any big-city dweller without the coin to take taxicabs every damn place under the sun. Like Dead & Buried, it involves a cop in over his head, but this time the cop — played in typically amiable style by Donald Pleasence — isn't in any real danger. Instead, the protagonists are a hip young couple (their shared pad displays poster tributes to Hendrix and Che Guevara) who trip over an unconscious man on their way up the subway stairs after the last train departs the station. She wants to find help; he doesn't want to get involved. And before a constable can be summoned, the body disappears.

Blue Underground released this notorious and oft-censored installment in the Black Emanuelle series, directed by the well-known schlockmeister Joe D'Amato and starring the knockout Laura Gemser as a labored metaphor for the free love movement. Emanuelle in America boasts the softcore action you'd expect, including some nude underwater frolicking and copious amounts of disinterested fondling and caressing. It also delivers the action you don't expect — like a woman masturbating a horse (yes, this actually happens on screen) and some hardcore, ahem, inserts shot from the kinds of camera angles that might have been commonplace in the 1970s but now seem rather unusual.

Now here's a real horror movie. So downbeat and unforgettably fatalistic that it almost qualifies as film noir, director Gary Sherman's Dead & Buried was greeted on its original release without much fanfare outside of the genre community, though it was written and directed by smart people and was championed by horror specialists. Now, the scrappy young DVD label Blue Underground has given it the kind of release it deserves.

No thank you, online horror buffs, for starting the buzz that convinced me to take a chance on May, a quirky horror film from writer/director Lucky McKee. The presence of a front-of-DVD-case rave from Aint-It-Cool-News and a back-cover blurb from Film Threat was a clue that this indie horror film's support is mostly limited to the Internet crowd. (Roger Ebert, the avuncular honorary leader of the online geek contingent, did give it a rave.) Early on, McKee displays a knack for genuinely discomfiting material involving contact lenses and animal hospitals, but such sharply focused moments are increasingly rare as he stretches his material to fill 93 minutes.

I wasn't a fan of this, despite its enjoyable, blackly comic enthusiasm for scenes of elaborate death. The arrival of New Line's special edition DVD enticed me to take a second look, and I'm still not a fan — but I appreciate the visual effects work even more than I did the first time through, thanks to the documentary features that underscore the extensive use of practical effects (that's as opposed to computer-generated effects), such as carefully constructed dummies filled with disturbingly convincing blood and organs, that went into creating the wantonly bloody punctuation for the demise of each in a string of doomed lead characters.

In spite of my own tendencies, I've come to regard films with a cult following with some suspicion. As personal and extraordinary as many of them are, others seem to have gathered fans up in a single-throated horde like the unthinking masses heading to a fundamentalist rally or a Bon Jovi concert. The European horror genre, for instance, which is regarded with great fervor by a significant population of cinephiles, is home to a number of wonderful films, but also some of the grandest, most misogynist and misanthropic howlers ever committed to celluloid. Japanese anime is another one, a niche market of films that are regarded very highly by some very smart people but has largely failed to excite my interest, despite good-faith efforts to see highly lauded examples of the form in the movie theaters where they belong.

On the commentary track that accompanies the Criterion Collection's new DVD version of RoboCop, director Paul Verhoeven kicks things off by admitting that, on a first read of the film's script, he declined the project, mistaking it for just another "B-level science fiction movie" from the Hollywood crap factories. Verhoeven's comments are closely followed by those of producer Jon Davison, who imagines Verhoeven simply reading the first 20 pages of the script by Ed Neumeier and Michael Miner and then throwing the damn thing across the room. (From RoboCop, Verhoeven advanced to the far more swollen melodrama of Basic Instinct and Showgirls -- his active philosophy where Hollywood crap is concerned seems to be "if you can't beat them, join them.")