Horror action movies can fit into several categories. Some are creative, imaginative, engrossing and groundbreaking, while others are predicable, cliche-filled and just plain gross guilty pleasures. Horror action movies don't have to necessarily be good to be fun.

Guilty Pleasures: You Know You Love Them

Why not start with the fun ones? I am talking about horror action movies that started with one interesting concept and ran with it through a string of sequels with varying degrees of success. Usually the reason for keeping the franchise going is to make more money from a familiar set-up.

Leigh Whannell and James Wan were the creative team who came up with the first Saw movie in 2004. You have to admit that the concept is original. A civil engineer named John Krammer (Tobin Bell) is dying from a tumor resulting from colon cancer. He realizes the value of life and forces others to come to that realization through a series of "tests."

How do you escape death? This is the question posed in the Final Destination series. The "killer" here turns out to be death. Through a series of events people who normally would've died had they been where they were planning to be end up surviving, only to die later in the order they would have died in the first place.

Friday the 13th and Nightmare On Elm Street both started with interesting plots. In the first the 1980 original, Mrs. Voorhees (Betsy Palmer) kills to prevent the camp where her son drowned from reopening. Jason (the son who never died and can't be killed) becomes the killer for the remainder of the series.

Accused child murderer Freddy Krueger invades the dreams of the children of the parents who banded together to kill him. As with Friday the 13th, Wes Craven's Nightmare On Elm Street has a good storyline as its base. It's the sequels that got a little ridiculous becoming the stuff of movie cliches.

Forever changing the notion of a typical college travel experience was Eli Roth's Hostel. The 2005 film uses the familiar lure of sex with beautiful women to bring three college travelers to an "undocumented" (meaning nobody will ever be able to find you once you come here) hostel in Prague.

Here's a rundown of some familiar cliches guilty pleasure horror action movies have spawned over the years.

The hapless victim. This is the person who has no clue what they are walking into and misses a thousand obvious hints that something is going to happen.

Sex is the ultimate distraction. Often it is the promise of sex or the lure of a beautiful woman that keeps otherwise rational human beings from seeing the warning signs before heading off to be killed.

Don't assume it's over. Just when you think the killer is caught and the madness is over, it is only a temporary lapse in the action.

False sense of security. For some reason whenever the bad guy is killed the hero or heroine feels the need to hug their significant other right in front of the body, which we all know has at least one more breath of life in it and is waiting to make a final attack. This also applies to finding an abandoned house to seek shelter and thinking nobody will ever find you here when in reality they are right upstairs.

Video Games Provide Inspiration

Video games need to be creative to capture the attention of young players. Unfortunately the transition from video game to movie can have mixed results. Resident Evil revolves around an out-of-control virus, Far Cry involves the creation of genetically modified soldiers and BloodRayne features unique human vampires.

Silent Hill has a plot more befitting of the horror action genre. The movie version centers on a woman drawn to a town whose name her daughter cries out while sleepwalking. In an effort to save her, she goes to this town, which turns out to have a bizarre connection with the girl.

The town appears to be empty and scattered with falling ash. As is the case with most empty movie towns, there is a dark side to this place. The end result is one of the few video games that successfully translated into a good movie.

Zombies Keep You On Your Toes

Zombies are scary and keep up the action. While there have been countless zombie movies, George Romero found the right combination of zombies and horror with his 1968 masterpiece Night of the Living Dead.