Roll up, roll up, roll up and welcome to the circus of weirdness we like to call Movies From Beyond.

We have the lot – scary clowns like Tim Curry in It, a ringmaster that reminds us of Captain Spaulding from House Of 1,000 Corpses and, of course, Killer Clowns From Outer Space all wrapped up in a gaudy big top, so take your seats and enjoy the show.  

This week – Planet Terror and Vacancy…

This is the first Movies From Beyond of the new year so what better to talk about than probably the best B-movie of 2007? That'll be Planet Terror (also known as the other half of the Grindhouse project). This one is Robert Rodriguez’s effort and is, in our humble opinion, the stronger of the two – not least as you get the fantastic Machete faux trailer as part of the recently-released DVD. We are big zombie fans and this gore machine didn’t disappoint us with a strange bio-weapon infecting some soldiers, led by Bruce Willis, who then go on to eat and infect their way through small-town America. We particularly enjoyed the crazy Dr. Block and Quentin Tarantino as a pervy marine as well as the machinegun-legged go-go dancer Cherry. If you like over the top blood-splattered movies then this is the one for you.  

A slight change of pace was the slow burning Vacancy. We caught this on our shiny new Blu-Ray player so it was crystal clear – think Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho meets 8mm as Luke Wilson (Old School) and his missus check into a motel only to wind up special guest starring in a snuff movie. This was a really good watch as we do sometimes like our horror a little less obvious, and this worked well at gently turning the tension up on our heroes' attempt to escape.

Looking ahead to the new year there are some definite future classics we are wetting our pants over, especially JJ Abram’s Cloverfield. This has been viral-marketed to death but the story basically is as follows; a monster lays waste to New York. Sounds like Godzilla, but we love Godzilla so we'll troop to the cinema in February to see it. A gem of a zombie movie by the name of Fido is also out on DVD in the next couple of months. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have a pet Zombie? Well, wonder no more…

[story by Simon Woodley]