March 30, 2009 March ends on a high note with a slew of major titles hitting DVD, including the re-release of Lucio Fulci's "Cat in the Brain" and the AfterDark Horror Fest box set.

Dark Sky Films is resurrecting the late '60s/early '70s Czech horror film "The Cremator." Here's the storyline: Karl Kopfrkingl (Rudolf Hrusinsky) works at a stately crematorium in Prague. Obsessed with his duties, he believes he is liberating the souls of the departed. With Nazi forces gathering at the Czech border, Karl descends into a mania that allows him to wholly enact his disturbed beliefs. No one is safe from his quest for salvation, not even his own family.

Redemption is resurrecting the Jean Rollin film "The Escapees." In this film, on the run from an asylum for the insane, a feisty young girl and her forlorn female companion embark on a surreal journey with a group of traveling erotic dancers. Sounds fun!

Redemption is also unleashing "Saint Francis." Francis, the son of a corrupt TV preacher, tumbles down a hallucinatory rabbit-hole of sex, drugs, aliens, fratricide, and planetary apocalypse in this twisted take on the life of Saint Francis. Starring the delectable burlesque performer Dita Von Teese, Saint Francis is a hallucinatory tale of sex, drugs, fraticide and planetary apocalypse. Francis, the son of a corrupt TV preacher, is a liar, junky and a thief who has trouble telling the difference between reality and his imagination.

Severin Films is resurrecting "The Sinful Dwarf," a 1973 dwarfsploitation film that enjoys a healthy cult following. Diminutive former kiddie-show host Torben Bille - who looks disturbingly like Jack Black in a trash compactor - stars as the pint-sized pervert who imprisons drugged teenage sex slaves in the attic of his drunken mother's decrepit rooming house... and that's just the first ten minutes! The delicious Anne Sparrow - in her first and understandably only screen role - co-stars in this towering achievement in graphic depravity, now fully restored from a 35mm print

Shriekshow, meanwhile, has restored "Terror Circus" (aka "Barn of the Naked Dead"). Three showgirls on their way to Las Vegas have car trouble and are stuck all night out in the desert. The next morning cheerful Andre (Andrew Prine) offers them help in fixing their car. However, Andre is really a maniac with a lot of family problems; his mother ran out on him when he was a child so now he keeps kidnapped women chained up in his barn and trains them to perform circus tricks. Andre's father is still around of course, but because the old homestead is next to a nuclear test site he has been transformed into a raving homicidal mutant that Andre keeps locked up in a shed.

The best time travel horror movie ever made, "Timecrimes," hits stores on March 31. Click here for our fawning review.

Blue Underground is debuting the Blu Ray version of George Romero and Dario Argento's "Two Evil Eyes."

Lucio Fulci's "Cat in the Brain" is hailed by some as the most violent movie ever made. Kind of the "8 1/2" of gore films, Fulci himself stars in this blood-soaked epic as a director being driven insane by his own movies. Fulci is thrust into an ultra-violent nightmare of death and depravity where murder and madness consume his sanity in a vortex of violence.

And finally, Lionsgate is releasing "After Dark Horror Fest 3," a box set of the films that saw limited theatrical release last year. Titles include "Autopsy," "The Broken," "Butterfly Effect 3" (whatever happened to '2'?), "Dying Breed,” “From Within," "Perkins 14," "Slaughter" and "Voices."


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