To celebrate high school graduation, four couples have concocted an utterly monstrous, mind-roasting plan: to spend the night in a furniture store. And not just any furniture store, but Fine Furniture downtown, whoa-ho! John (Sean Kanan, The Karate Kid Part III) even knows the ropes — because Dad owns the place — so it’s going to be totally bitchin’! On the agenda are beer, food and, of course, sex in the showroom beds.

Seeing the maze of mattresses and mannequins scattered across the joint’s multiple stories, Kim (Weekend Pass’ Annette Sinclair, a former Mrs. Bob Seger) suggests an epic, pre-dinner game of hide-and-go-seek. As the film’s title of Hide and Go Shriek confirms, that’s exactly what they do. The title also makes clear that some of the players aren’t going to live to see morning, because a killer is afoot.

The only movie ever directed by one Skip Schoolnik, the obscure Hide and Go Shriek arrived well after the ’80s slasher wave crested, but deserves wider awareness. That has zip to do with the acting, which is loud and bush-league, and everything to do with an ahead-of-its-time reveal I won’t spoil. Despite editing that saps any suspense, the film lands on the slasher genre’s comfort-food side. Giving it a big shove are the effects from Screaming Mad George (Beyond Re-Animator), with an elevator decapitation as a gruesome highlight, and the gratuitous nudity, including a rather hysterical sequence in which Judy (Donna Baltron, Bikini Squad) is so nervous about losing her virginity, yet launches into a striptease act so polished, her upper thighs have to smell like dirty dollar bills.

The idea of horny teens staying overnight in a department store had been done much better in 1986’s Chopping Mall, thanks to that Jim Wynorski pic’s satiric edge. By contrast, Shriek’s laughs are not intentional, what with these crazy kids’ $6 haircuts, Chinese fire drills and Bloom County T-shirts. —Rod Lott

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Nostalgia-amped superfans of Sid and Marty Krofft’s The Banana Splits Adventure Hour from the late 1960s and early ’70s — back when the phrase “Saturday morning” meant something — may be horrified to see what awaits under the innocuous title of The Banana Splits Movie: a honest-to-God slasher movie (and to complain about that is no better than the fanboys whining about girls being Ghostbusters). But in this ready-to-market age of IP revivals, reboots and reheats, it’s nice to see one that doesn’t just thumb its nose at the source material, but urinates on it, too.

In the direct-to-disc flick, the Krofft show exists (albeit under the name of Taft) in the real world of present. Speaking of present, it’s the birthday of young Harley (newcomer Finlay Wojtak-Hissong), a friendless boy who likes to wear butterfly wings while dancing along with his favorite show on TV, much to the dismay of his macho-asshole father (Steve Lund, TV’s Bitten). However, Mom (Dani Kind, TV’s Wynonna Earp) is so supportive that she’s scored the fam tickets to a live taping.

No one in the audience knows the episode being taped will be the last, as The Banana Splits has been axed — fresh news taken not so well by the animatronic foursome, thanks to a pre-curtain programming upgrade. Behind the scenes and at the post-show meet-and-greet, the Splits (Fleegle, Bingo, Drooper and Snorkel) take the frustration of unemployment out on everyone who deserves it, as dictated by slasher-movie rules, which director Danishka Esterhazy (Level 16) clearly delights in depicting — after all, it’s not every day you get to shoot a giant robot lion and dog respectively flambé a pushy parent’s face or saw an Instagram “influencer” in half.

But maybe it should be. Whatever possessed Warner Bros. to turn a beloved, kiddie-courting property into R-rated Grand Guignol … well, I’m for it. I’m guessing the runaway popularity of the Five Nights at Freddy’s video-game franchise among grade schoolers — now in high school with more rebellious taste — proved an unofficial factor. Yet from the start of the Krofft empire, the line between their creations and childrens’ therapy appointments has been drawn with the sharpest of washable markers, so it takes only one turn of the screw to reimagine the cute and cuddly as vile and violent. Essentially a two-location picture, The Banana Splits Movie looks flat and cheap, but self-parodic subversiveness and perversity work in its favor. —Rod Lott

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Ladies of Virginia Beach are all atwitter over an unnamed serial rapist/killer terrorizing the community. (Let’s call him Night Killer, since the movie is named just that.) Luckily, he’s easy to spot: He’s the guy in the Toxic Avenger-esque rubber mask with matching rubber hand spouting spiky yellow fingernails long enough to vie for a Guinness World Record. Only if he stood under a neon arrow flashing “GET MURDERED HERE” could he be more identifiable.

His signature move? Punching clean through women’s torsos. Melanie Beck (Tara Buckman, Silent Night, Deadly Night) somehow makes it through a terrifying home-invasion encounter with him, emerging with scraps, bruises and amnesia, but nary an extra hole. After being discharged from the hospital, life for Melanie continues to be a living nightmare, thanks to Night Killer still at large, as well as being stalked — and then abducted and sexually assaulted — by a creepy guy named Axel (Peter Hooten, who donned the cape as 1978’s Dr. Strange).

As a director, Claudio Fragasso (aka Clyde Anderson) is remarkably consistent. However, as other Fragasso films like Beyond Darkness, Monster Dog, Troll 2, et al. raise their right hands and testify, that consistency is a remarkable disdain for reality and rationale — and Night Killer might be his most imbecilic. Nothing happens as it should or would, even when allowing for a moviegoers’ suspension of disbelief. For example — and this is minor, mind you — Melanie reacts to a threatening phone call by looking in the mirror and yanking out her breasts. In fact, it’s just the first of several instances that call for Buckman to bare at least one of them, which accounts for her wardrobe choice of saggy sweaters for easy access; exposure happens so often — perhaps only a single instance merited — that I felt embarrassed for her.

Elsewhere, Melanie lays out a picnic of pills on the shore. In a public bathroom, Axel is forced at gunpoint to strip to the blue banana hammock that passes for his underwear. Seemingly from another movie emerges Blind Vision’s Lee Lively as an apparent stand-in for Donald Pleasence’s signature Halloween role of Dr. Loomis. I’m more than happy to discuss the bonkers twist, but don’t get me started on the choreographer. —Rod Lott

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