Foreign movies... no matter how "adventurous" a seasoned filmgoer considers him-or-herself, films released in other countries can often be baffling to behold, filled with subtle cultural touches that will be lost on the average U.S. viewer. Either that or they can traffic in the generic tropes of genre filmmaking that can't be disguised with artsy-fartsy subtitles. The three films selected for this article leapfrog from the catacombs beneath Russia to a remote Spanish valley hiding a terrible secret to a defiantly weird Japanese mixture of live-action and anime folklore. They also run the gamut from abyssmal claptrap to white-knuckle chills to a benign goofiness. Let's use up some frequent flyer miles, shall we?  

Moscow Zero (2006)
In Moscow, Russia, a priest named Owen (Vincent Gallo) has recently arrived looking for an old friend named Sergei (Rade Serbedzija), who has gone missing while searching for an abandoned church in the labyrinth of catacombs that run underneath the city. After buying the serivices of a trio of guides, Yuri (Desperado and Clear & Present Danger's Joaquim de Almeida, the least-convincing Russian in screen history), Vassily (Sage Stallone, Sly's kid) and Pavel (Alex O'Dogherty), Owen talks to a homeless rummy (Joss "Diplomatic Immunity!" Ackland), who points him in the (vague) right direction. Along the way, the four men pick up the obligitory girl, Lyuba (Oksana Akinshina), who warns them about the evil spirts who guard The Gates Of Hell. Oh yeah, and Val Kilmer shows up to cash an easy check in a three-minute "performance" as Andrey, some guy with an ill-defined job as the head guardian of the Gates Of Hell.  

Honestly, I'm not being lazy here... that's pretty much the entire plot of this astoundingly boring and uneventful "suspense" movie (shot by a Spanish crew... beware any movie where the director is credited via only one name). A bunch of unappealing people wandering around an interchangable series of dankly-lit tunnels while the spirits of the young children who perished there in 1920 (or something) scrape knives against the walls and wander around trying to look spooky. Despite running barely 75 minutes minus credits, Moscow Zero offers zero plot momentum, zero thrills, zero effort from the actors (and the increasingly bloated Kilmer absolutely looks like hell here. The dude was Batman 13 years ago, and now he's reduced to top-billed walk-ons in throwaway trash like this?) and zero reason to keep watching.  

Presentation  
The 1.85:1 anamorphic transfer is sharp and grain-free (except for the endless array of distorted POV shots supposedly from the perspective of the child ghosts or whatever, which look intentionally grainy), and the English 5.1 audio offers a bevy of surround effects that goose the viewer far more than the tepid visual frights on display.  

Extras  
Nothing except the usual collection of Sony previews... and thank goodness for that.  

Pants Rating: 1/2  

Shiver (2008)
A young Spanish boy named Santi (Junio Valverde, from The Devil's Backbone) suffers from a rare skin condition that causes him extreme agony when exposed to direct sunlight. Sleeping during the day and taking night classes, Santi is a lonesome soul, mercilessly teased as a "freak" by his classmates (not helped by the calcium deposits on his canine teeth giving him a distinctly vampirish smile). Santi's mother, Julia (Mar Sodupe), is urged by Santi's doctor to relocate from the big city to a small town nestled comfortably in the crack between two mountains, blocking out the deadly sunbeams that threaten Santi's health for a good portion of the day. Moving into a small house overseen by a helpful landlord, mother and son try to settle into their new, rural existance... but odd, unsettling events quickly start piling up. A local famer finds one of his sheep neatly gutted ("No animal did that!"). A young boy at the new school Santi has just started attending tells tales of a mysterious... thing that chased him alongside the path leading to his house. Calling bullshit, an older tough gets the kid and Santi to accompany him on a hunting party in the woods to flush the creature out... but both boys turn up dead, leaving Santi a strong suspect in their murders and turning the town's ire upon him and his nonplussed mother. Santi finds a tattered portrait of a young girl hidden underneath his bed. What does it all mean? Santi is determined to get to the bottom of it all with the help of a friend from his big-city life, Leo (Jimmy Barantan), and Angela (Blanca Suarez), the hottie daughter of the local sherrif.  

Touted as being "From the producer of Pan's Labyrinth and The Orphanage" on the DVD cover, Shiver is a neat little Spanish shocker with ample doses of atmosphere and frightfully effective jump scares. There are a few marvellously spooky sequences stuuded throughout the movie, ones that prey upon some almost universal, childhood fears. When Santi, left alone for the night, sees what he thinks is a face lurking in the bushes outside his house, he does what any self-respecting teenager would... starts pushing the furniture around to block the doors and windows, selects the biggest knife from the kitchen drawer, and settles down on the couch for wary sentinel duty. What follows is an almost painfully suspenseful scene where we only get shadowy glimpses of the... thing working it's way around the house as Santi cowers in a swoon of paralyzed terror under his blanket. There's also the relatable eeriness of being forced to walk home after school in the dark through a narrow lane surrounded by trees and hearing the creepy rustlings of the creatures hidden within. Who hasn't had to go through this at least once in their formative years?  

Shiver does get a bit more formulaic as it's mysteries unspool (there's a lengthy Blair Witch Project camcorder homage that's nearly a decade out of date), and the ultimate reveal of just what the creature is strains credulity, but Shiver nevertheless offers just what the seasoned horror fan craves in This Sort Of Thing. Recommended.  

Presentation  
Presented in anamorphic 1.85:1, Shiver is a beautifully-shot film, and even though large portions of it are filmed in pitch-black night, there's no visible grain or other flaws to mar the experience. The Spanish 5.1 audio offers an excellent array of subtle creaks, crunching leaves, and snapping branches that give an eveloping sense of mounting eeriness (and, in one scene, the sudden, explosive ring of a telephone nearly left me clinging to the ceiling). Awesome.  

Extras  
Sadly, there's nothing save a lonely trailer (1:33) contained on this disc. A commentary or featurette would have been nice for this nifty sleeper.  

Pants Rating: ***1/2  

Kitaro (2007)
When a construction company in Tokyo threatens to relocate a group of stubbon tenants in a soon-to-be-demolished apartment complex, they hire a group of Yokai, a gang of bizarre Japanese spirits, in an effort to scare them out, under the supervision of the flatulent Rat Man (Yo Oizumi). But one young boy named Kenta (Ruka Uchida) makes a plea to the Yokai hero Kitaro (Japanese pop star Eiji Wentz) to come to their aid. Sending his fellow Yokai packing, Kitaro also gives Rat Man a stern talking-to. But then Rat Man falls into an underground chamber and discovers a strange, glowing rock hidden within. Stealing it in hopes of pawning it and getting a few meals out of it, Rat Man doesn't know that it belongs to a den of kinsune -- Fox Gods who needs the stone to... ah, I dunno, keep evil spirits in or something. But young Kenta's father, Haruhiko (Go Riju), looking to pawn his wedding ring in order to keep his family afloat for a little while longer, sees the mysterious rock and becomes entraced by it. He swipes it and passes it onto Kenta, making him swear never to reveal it's whereabouts to anyone, even his sister Mika (Mao Inoue), before he's arrested for the crime of robbery. Soon, young Kenta finds himself being chased by the evil kinsune baddies and protected by Kitaro and his Yokai friends like Cat Girl (Rena Tanaka), the Sand Witch (Shigeru Muroi) and Daddy Eyeball (voice of Isamu Tanonaka), the spirit of Kitaro's reincarnated father, who now exists as a CGI figure with a giant eyeball for a head who likes to take baths in a warm bowl of sake!   Trust me, this film gets a lot weirder than the above plot description can adequately convey. Did I mention the giant head contained inside a flaming wagon wheel, or that Kitaro can shoot his hair off like a deadly hail of pointy porcupine quills, or the flying roll of toilet paper that Kitaro rides like a magic carpet?  

Supposedly adapted from a Japanese manga comic series unread by me, Kitaro is relentlessly surreal fare for someone dropping in with little or no background on the whole storyline. The film kinda-sorta works as a stand-alone piece, but I still feel like I walked into a movie halfway through and wound up tapping some stranger on the shoulder and whispering "Hey, what'd I miss?"   Still, as far as Asian children's movies go, Kitaro is agreeably silly stuff full of imaginative characters and solid performances by the actors. Hey, at least it's not CJ7...  

Presentation  
Presented in crisp, anamorphic 1.85:1 widescreen and given a thunderously loud 6.1 Japanese audio track in both DTS and Dolby Digital flavors, Kitaro is an all-out assault on the senses. If you liked the movie, then there ya go.  

Extras  
There's a Japanese TV Special: Yokai In The City (36:13), which offers the weird sight of actors, clad in oversized, rubber costumes based on several of the Yokai characters (I guess they're pretty popular in Japan) wandering around Tokyo and interacting with staged actors and random, nonplussed pedestrians ("Show me your panty!" cries one to a gaggle of girls clad in French maid outfits, who then proceed to beat him up while stomping on his crotch... no, really). The Making Of Yokai In The City (10:00) shows the rubber-suit actors and camera crew staging scenes and walking around. There are also Trailers (3:29 total) and TV Spots (2:07 total), as well as some previews (not gonna bother with those, thanks).  

Pants Rating: ***