Rag on Sci-Fi Channel original movies all you want - I know I often do; but somebody (besides me) must be tuning in given how much they keep on cranking them out. As a matter of fact, the ratings for these films are steadily increasing. Sci-Fi plans for 36 news films in 2009 and this week we're getting a taste of things to come.

The Hollywood Reporter put out a story about the on-going working arrangement between the Sci-Fi Channel and distribution company RHI Entertainment and production company Muse Entertainment. The three newest monster fruits of their creative loins are:

SAND SERPENTS: Jason "Iron Eagle" Gedrick stars in this monster movie about American combat soldiers in the Afghan desert who battle the Taliban and a horde of giant carnivorous serpents.

ALIEN WESTERN: An Old West town in the 1890s is the battleground where monstrous buglike machines from another world attack stage their invasion.

CARNEY: Based on the Jersey Devil legend, a fiendish carnival side-show attraction escapes and terrorizes a Depression-era Mid-Atlantic town.

I'm assuming "ALIEN WESTERN" is just the working title until they come up with a real title since it sounds more like a two-word description of what kind of movie it is and not an actual film title. SAND SERPENTS also sounds awfully rudimentary too but still one I could see the channel going with.

All three will begin filming soon in Romania. Romania must be amazing place; it can stand-in for modern Afghanistan, the Wild West, and the American Mid-Atlantic circa the 1930s. Given all the other Sci-Fi Channel films that have been filmed there and what locales it has doubled for, Romania must be like the Lon Chaney of shooting locations.

The trio of films join two other recently announced productions: the Rick Schroder directed HELLHOUNDS (which I previously reported on for Dread Central) and RISE OF THE GARGOYLE starring Eric Balfour of "Six Feet Under" as a struggling author whose wild theories about pagan architecture are proven all too true when a flesh & blood gargoyle rises from the rubble of a demolished church with its sights set on destroying Paris.

The most recent film from the Sci-Fi/RHI/Muse partnership premieres on the channel this Sunday night at 9/8 Central: SWAMP DEVIL, starring the great Bruce Dern as a man wrongly accused of murder who can only prove his name by proving the existence of an evil tree-like creature stalking the local swampland.

Other 2009 Sci-Fi Channel titles include the likes of:

MALIBU SHARK ATTACK: Peta Wilson stars as one of many in the scenic California town terrorized by prehistoric sharks unleashed by an underwater earthquake that also produced a tsunami that has flooded the community. I previously wrote about this one for Dread Central too.

LOST TREASURE OF THE GRAND CANYON: When Smithsonian researchers stumble upon a lost Aztec city, Shannon Doherty and Michael Shanks lead a rescue team to save them from ancient Aztec warriors and their horrible serpent god.

PHANTOM RACER: Greg Evigan stars as a racecar driver from beyond the grave.

THE IMMORTAL VOYAGE OF CAPTAIN DRAKE: Sir Francis Drake is reborn as a swashbuckling adventurer played by Adrian Paul, battling pirates and the supernatural while searching for the mystical cure that will save a mysterious Syrian sultan's dying son.

LAKE PLACID 3: Yep, more croc-in-lake action. LAKE PLACID 2 was Sci-Fi's highest rated movie of 2007 so why not try to strike ratings gold again in 2009?