What's new on VOD this week?

Remember back in October when there were 6-9 new Horror movies hitting VOD each week? Good times. Now that it's November, we find ourselves having to stretch our wings a bit, and include more and more movies that aren't pure Horror in our weekly columns (VOD, Blu-ray/DVD, Theatrical Releases.) If we didn't, then our lists would be bare.

This week we'll start with the actual Horror movies, and then list the Thrillers, Sci-Fi, and Action flicks that round out the rest of our list.

It's still a solid list, just more eclectic than usual.

The House at the End of Time: Dulce is a mother who has encounters with apparitions in her old house, where it unleashes a terrible prophecy. Thirty years later, turned into an old woman, she returns home to unravel the mystery and tragedy that has tantalized her.

House at the End of Time has the honor of being Venezuela's first ever Horror movie, which is pretty neat. Those who saw the movie at Fantasia 2014 are calling it inventive, impressive, chilling, and shocking, and so it has our total attention.

Along with Starry Eyes, House will be at the top of our viewing list this weekend.

Starry Eyes: A hopeful young starlet uncovers the ominous origins of the Hollywood elite and enters into a deadly agreement in exchange for fame and fortune.

We always suspected that Hollywood was controlled by Satan, and it looks like this movie is here to prove our theory right!

Starry Eyes looks like it's going to be a bloody, creepy satire of the horrors of Hollywood, and that alone makes us want to see it. Mainstream critics seem to like it so far, so we have high hopes that it will deliver the goods.

Miss Meadows: Prim schoolteacher Miss Meadows (Katie Holmes) is not entirely what she appears. Well-mannered, sweet, and caring, yes, but underneath the candy-sweet exterior hides the soul of a vigilante, taking it upon herself to right the wrongs in this cruel world by whatever means necessary. Things get complicated, however, when Miss Meadows gets romantically entangled with the town sheriff (James Badge Dale) and her steadfast moral compass is thrown off, begging the question: "Who is the real Miss Meadows and what is she hiding?"

It's nice to see Katie Holmes making movies again, isn't it? That whole "marrying Tom Cruise" thing didn't do very much for her career, but now it seems to be back on track. We've missed her.

Miss Meadows looks like it's going to be a violent little number, and in early reviews, it's been called a movie that will one day be viewed as a cult classic. Were totally in on this one, and we hope that it ends up beings as fun as its trailer makes it look. Plus, how can we not see something that stars James Badge Dale? He's the goods.

Bad Turn Worse: Three Texas teens hope to make a break for it and escape their dead-end existence in a cotton-mill town but get sucked into the seedy underbelly of organized crime when one of them steals from the wrong man.

We really liked Bad Turn Worse. It's not perfect, but it was an effective thriller with a great cast, that was just slick enough to work. If you like noir-ish crime thrillers, then this movie is definitely worth a watch. We say see it for Mark Pellegrino's performance alone, because he plays the heavy perfectly in this one. He also played good heavies on LOST and Supernatural too, so it looks like that's his thing.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: A growing nation of genetically evolved apes led by Caesar is threatened by a band of human survivors of the devastating virus unleashed a decade earlier. They reach a fragile peace, but it proves short-lived, as both sides are brought to the brink of a war that will determine who will emerge as Earth's dominant species.

Back in 2011, we were surprised at how much we liked Rise of the Planet of the Apes; we really don't like movies with monkeys in them. Don't know why. We just don't. Rise was great though, and when we heard that the sequel was on the way, we were pretty excited to see it.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is every bit as good as Rise was, and maybe even better. Dawn has both a different cast (aside from some of the apes), and a different director, but the story and they way that they execute it is every bit as solid. Maybe it's because Rick Jaffa wrote both movies, We're not sure.

Either way, Dawn is a great movie if you're in the mood for a good Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi flick, and especially if you liked the first movie.

The Expendables 3: Barney augments his team with new blood for a personal battle: to take down Conrad Stonebanks, the Expendables co-founder and notorious arms trader who is hell bent on wiping out Barney and every single one of his associates.

I almost don't want to include The Expendables 3 on this list, and not because it's purely an action flick; no, I hesitate to promote this third movie in this silly franchise because its producers insist on blaming its Box Office failure on Piracy. Movie Piracy is a hot topic these days (and rightly so), with some saying it's harmless, while others maintain that it's destroying the fabric of the Film Industry itself.*Neither of those things is true. As usual, the answer lies somewhere in the middle.

The bottom line here is that Expendables 3 underperformed at the Box Office because it was the third sequel in an already tired franchise, and people weren't all that keen to go and see it. Did the million people who downloaded it all across the world take some money away from ticket sales? Probably, but for the Producers to claim that they lost $230 million dollars on the movie because of Piracy is ludicrous, and shows just how out of touch with modern times that they are. *The first two movies didn't make $230 million combined, domestically.

Maybe had they made it a Hard-R instead of a PG-13 movie, it would have fared better. Then again, most critics site a poor script and awful pacing as the movie's downfall. By all accounts it seems like it's just a bad movie. They were so worried about mass appeal (ratings wise), and about how many old action stars from the 80's that they could cram into the movie this time, that they forgot to make a solid movie that fans would clamor to see.

Let's not forget that Sin City 2 bombed even worse than Expendables 3 did, and there was no Pirated copy online that caused its failure... people just didn't want to see it.

With all of that being said, will we, or should you, see this movie? Probably. We own the first two on Blu-ray (because now and then we need some silly, brainless fun), and if we liked the first two, maybe this new one will be decent enough to sit through. At least they released an Unrated Cut on VOD.