The Road to Salina - DVD

Setting his sights on weight-obsessed America, the ever-prolific King penned this chiller about an obese attorney who hits and kills a Gypsy woman with his car. Cleared of any wrongdoing, he is cursed by the woman's father and begins dropping pounds... and dropping... and dropping, until he must gorge himself to stay alive. Robert John Burke, Michael Constantine, Joe Mantegna star. 93 min. Widescreen; Soundtrack English.

Thumbing down a desert highway, young drifter Jonas (Robert Walker, Jr.) stopped at a service station run by Mara (Rita Hayworth)-who took him for Rocky, her son who vanished four years earlier. In the moment, he opted to play along with his hostess's delusion... but after Mara's daughter Billie (Mimsy Farmer) came home and accepted him as her brother, the oddness would start reaching dangerous levels. Long-sought thriller co-stars Marc Porel, Sophie Hardy, and, in his screen farewell, Ed Begley. 96 min. Widescreen; Soundtracks English, French; Subtitles English; audio commentary; theatrical trailers.

A different kind of American independent horror film, Toad Road - from Executive Producer Elijah Wood and his genre-themed production company Spectre Vision - is a hallucinatory and hypnotic odyssey through mutating realities, drug use, urban legends, and nightmares. Imagine a fusion between the sexually candid naturalism of Larry Clark or Harmony Korine, and the backwoods creep-out of the Blair Witch Project, and you'd be halfway there. Stuck in a dead end town, young James kills time with his druggie friends, engaging in debauched chemical intake to the point of unconsciousness, until he meets Sara, a sweet new arrival to their group. However, Sara wants James to take her further into the world of narcotics experimentation (just as James was contemplating abandoning this lifestyle)... and she also wants him to introduce her to the sinister local legend of Toad Road, a spot deep in the forest that is apparently home to the Seven Gates of Hell. Writer-director Jason Banker's fiction feature debut is an enigmatic and unique fusion of improvisational realism undoubtedly influenced by Banker's work as a documentary filmmaker, and otherworldly, haunting rural terror. Unlike any other film you'll see this year, Toad Road is mesmerizing.