Welcome again to the weekly dip into the pool of the cool we call Movies From Beyond.

If you have read it before, you know what it is all about. If you are one of those Johnny-Come-Lately types, this is the place on hecklerspray where B-movies, forgotten classics and all manner of blood, guts and exploration movies come to die – slowly and noisily, of course.

This week – Snoop Dogg's Hood Of Horror and Battle Royale…  

This week we have continued to reel from the amazing Cloverfield, and we've been wondering if we would ever see anything nearly as good. The answer is not quite, but we did catch the bizarrely yet enticingly-titled Snoop Dogg's Hood Of Horror. This is B-movie at its finest with an anthology of ‘Urban’ stories, much like Tales From The Crypt meets NWA. There are some truly bizarre casting moments here, including Billy Dee Williams (The Empire Strikes Back) and Ernie Hudson (Ghostbusters) as well as his royal pimpness Snoop Dogg playing a sort of narrator / hound of hell (hound like dog, geddit?).  

All three segments of the movie are nice and bloody with various ingenious ways of dispatching the cast, and we really got the feeling that nobody involved took it too seriously, especially in the last story Rapsody Askew. If you are into this type of movie you might want to also check out The Twilight Zone Movie having just come out on DVD after years and years, and also the new collector's edition of Creepshow.  

To change the pace a little we felt it only right to delve deep into the ‘Foreign Language’ section of our DVD collection and pull out 2000’s Battle Royale. This is one for the ages, as it tells the story of the what should happen to all those hoodies we see loitering around outside Tesco Express – put an exploding necklace on them, dump them on a deserted island with a lucky dip of weapons and let them kill each other. The winner is the last one standing.

Yeah, it has been done recently by Stone Cold Steve Austin in Condemned, but this is dark and grimy with a kill score update flashing up on the screen and some brilliant death sequences involving everything from a shotgun to a pan lid and a crazed ex-teacher as the demented MC. Some people are put off by having to read subtitles but come on, get some damn culture you heathen!

[story by Simon Woodley]