Having lived in Japan only six months, the English-speaking Karen (Ariel Sekiye) is having a rough go fitting in with fellow housewives in her community volunteer work — so much so, the gaijin resists attending the group’s two-day camping retreat. (True, it doesn’t help the trip is to a village protected by a fox spirit who “will punch you and drag you to hell.”)

The night of arrival, boss Akiyo Yoshihara (Eigi Kodaka, Headcrusher) and her fellow mean girls play kokkuri-san, the Asian country’s coin-on-paper version of Hasbro’s Ouija board — hence this film’s title, Ouija Japan. Folklore has it that breaking the rules brings consequences; sure as Shinola, the ladies awake to find their group thinned by one. Karen’s idea of calling for help is to run outside half-yelling, “Somebody! Somebody!”

How could this trip get any worse? For starters, that fox deity could self-install an app on everyone’s phone: a game that pits every girl for herself in a fight to the death.

That happens. And — just like Candy Crush, I assume — the more they kill, the more features they unlock. By sword, rifle, pipe and electric-powered gadget dropped in a full bathtub, Karen and the others battle it out until 15 lives are claimed. The upper-left corner of the screen — yours, not the app’s — keeps a body count so viewers don’t have to put forth that effort.

In Ouija Japan, first-time director/writer Masaya Kato (not the actor) has a premise that, while not exactly original, is plenty perfect for this genre — or for a mix of the horror and action genres, as we have here. However, it’s not well thought-out, with early scenes merely repeating information from the previous; by design, scuffle after scuffle make up the latter half, yet each feels so endless, it’s exhausting. Perhaps Kato was checked out as well, because the final shot is not only a cliché, but a cliché so clichéd, it’s used as the sign-off for all five Scary Movie entries.

There is no nice way to say this: Taken individually or collectively, the acting is awful. Kodaka overplays the villain role to twirling a nonexistent mustache; after vowing to have the metaphorical last laugh, she physically utters one. Worse, in her first credit, Sekiye has a sleepy and lifeless presence; if she had a line that didn’t begin with some unnatural variation of “Oh, um, uh,” I missed it. —Rod Lott

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Lovers of horror anthologies shouldn’t be put off by Dark Stories’ generic title, French language or origins as an internet series. Despite all those warning signs — and even more, discussed below — the portmanteau picture arrives as a nice surprise.

With more than a smidge of Scheherazade, Kristanna Loken (Terminator 3) plays a suburban mom in the wraparound story. Tied up and trapped in her basement by a sentient, super-creepy ventriloquist’s dummy (voiced by Scott Thrun, 2019’s Anna), she tells stories to the bald killer puppet as a survival technique — six in total.

Up first is a quite creative tale of an art museum exec (Delphine Chanéac, Splice) whose child is sucked into the paintings by a demon. The most overtly comic piece finds Sébastien Lalanne as a a zombie — “immortal, but delicate” — seeking vengeance on the men who put him in the morgue before all his body parts fall off. Arguably the scariest segment concerns a woman (Tiphaine Daviot) haunted by a djinn to the point of an Elm Street-ian sleeplessness.

Less satisfying, although not bad, are bits about ghosts following park jogger Dorylia Calmel (Let the Corpses Tan) and former Bionic Woman Michelle Ryan probing the claims of abduction by aliens — and subsequent God complex — of dimwitted farmer Dominique Pinon (Delicatessen).

Further confounding the aforementioned expectations, Dark Stories feels of a whole even with directing duties split between Guillaume Lubrano and François Descraques — the former responsible for another anthology series in the rather rotten Metal Hurlant Chronicles. Here, however, Lubrano’s sewing skills in unifying disparate elements have improved, striking the right balance of horror and humor all its own vs. beholden to EC Comics. So many contemporary collections of terror tales stumble from that start, so it’s a pleasure to see one not only get it right, but maintain it. —Rod Lott

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Not to be confused with the found-footage spooker Apartment 143 — dyslexia excepted — Apartment 413 is almost entirely a two-hander in one location. Yes, of course it’s the unit of the title: a depressing-looking place in a depressing-looking complex in Austin, with a fitting “FML” carved into the window AC unit’s exterior side.

Community college dropout Marco Reyes (Nicholas Saenz, Mr. Roosevelt) needs a job. And fast, because his girlfriend, Dana (Brea Grant, All the Creatures Were Stirring), is about-to-pop pregnant. He’s not having much luck, considering his alarm mysteriously fails to wake him as set, thus causing missed interviews.

As he sits in his apartment all day applying for jobs — and playing video games — stranger things begin happening: Trash re-appears; an unknown text message suggests it’s “not your baby”; and Post-it Notes pop up like magic, scrawled with threats like “THIS IS A WARNING.”

Things escalate from there. Stress? Black mold? Psychotic break? Residual haunting from the site’s domestic murder two years prior?

You’ll find out, although the ending is more confounding than disturbing. As the first film for both director Matt Patterson and writer Ron Maede, Apartment 413 likely serves as a calling card for bigger and better things, rather than a Texas-sized reworking of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion through a millennial-hipster lens. At just under 80 minutes, credits included, not enough happens to do lasting damage, yet so much solitary time with an increasingly unlikable guy is a lot to ask of the audience; as a short, it would be three times more effective. —Rod Lott

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Pay semi-close attention, class, to bee-obsessed Aster’s speech toward the start of Royal Jelly. The lead character’s presentation on the honeybee — particularly its strict caste system and post-coital genital ripping — isn’t just there for filler, no matter how bored the high schooler’s classmates look. Writer/director Sean Riley (Fighting Belle) practically highlights and underlines where his sophomore film will go from here — unfortunately not as quickly as you will like. (For a teen-transformation movie that properly uses horror as a metaphor for puberty, you want Ginger Snaps.)

Played by relative newcomer Elizabeth McCoy with appropriately paste-white skin, the Carrie-level outcast is stuck in a stereotypical Cinderella household, where her evil stepmother (Fiona McQuinn, Hallowed Be They Name) takes all the noodles and her snooty half-sister (debuting Raylen Ladner) makes her scrub menstrual blood from the bedsheets.

Weirdo substitute teacher Tressa (Sherry Lattanzi) shows an unhealthy interest in her; Aster gladly soaks up the attention, despite the elder’s habit for wearing sunglasses indoors. Tressa takes the misunderstood misfit to egg the houses of the mean girls, who respond in kind by busting Aster’s beehive. That’s not a euphemism; she literally tends to one in her yard.

That said, Royal Jelly is no modern-day version of The Wasp Woman, nor another update of The Fly. After the setup, when Aster flees to Tressa’s farm and meets her son (Lucas T. Matchett), it becomes a turgid, soap-bubble drama made all the rougher by performances both amateurish and at tonal odds with one another. Lattanzi embraces the camp, whether she realizes it or not, while her young charges play scenes as if Twilight leapt to a series on The CW. This marks the first feature credit for many of its cast members.

Normally, I don’t reveal details about a film’s ending, but I must here: Aster sprouts wings, like the kind little girls wear around the playroom. I had to laugh — certainly the reaction Riley neither intended nor wanted. —Rod Lott

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