For Halloween-set horror films that aren’t Halloween, 1988’s Night of the Demons is a fun night’s rental that quickly earned cult-classic status. Annnnnd Night of the Demons 3 is a sequel.

En route to an All Hallows’ Eve costume party, two high school good girls (Patricia Rodriguez and Decoys’ Stephanie Bauder) encounter car trouble. They reluctantly accept a ride from a van full of their no-good classmates swapping “yo mama” jokes. The most juvenile delinquent of the bunch (Kris Holden-Reid, Habitat) demands a stop at Quicky Mart for smokes and ends up shotgunning a cop.

To hide from the police, they head to Hull House, the old, abandoned funeral parlor. It’s still haunted by the witchy woman Angela (a crazy-eyed Amelia Kinkade), who specializes in sexually charged pranks. Few, if any, of the teens will live to see daylight. Probably not the girl (Tara Slone) with her hand in a sock-puppet snake that Angela turns into a real reptile that slithers straight to the crotch. And definitely not the dweeb (Christian Tessier, Battlefield Earth) who asks Angela if she can “suck a golf ball through 10 feet of garden hose,” to which she responds by fellating his gun … then spitting the bullets into his palm.

Previous installments were directed by such VHS-era horror faves as Kevin S. Tenney (Witchboard) and Brian Trenchard-Smith (Dead-End Drive-In), whereas Night of the Demons 3 comes to us from one Jimmy Kaufman, who’s helmed a lot of Canadian television. He likely was eager to live a little, which could account for this entry containing the most leering nude-teen shots of the franchise — and I do mean leering, as if it were shot with a zoom lens across the street.

And that’s about the most effort we see put into this tired threequel. I enjoyed Vlasta Vrana (Brainscan) in a showy part as the magic-obsessed police lieutenant, but he’s the only one invested. Even Kinkade, whose kitchen pantry likely depended on this gig, seems to be running on fumes, which at least corresponds with the production value. Other than an ill-received 2009 remake, this was it for the series — about 85 minutes too late. —Rod Lott

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Every so often, I experience a harrowing dream in which no matter the location, I face the same two-pronged conundrum:
1. My bladder is full.
2. There’s nowhere to pee.

In The House of Witchcraft, Luke (Andy J. Forest, Bridge to Hell) also is vexed by a recurring nightmare with larger stakes, I guess:
1. He enters a gorgeous country house on a spacious estate.
2. In its kitchen stands an old witch.
3. She’s boiling his disembodied head in a goddamn cauldron.

When Luke awakes, he’s hardly better off: His six-month marriage to queen of the harpies, Marta (Sonia Petrovna, Not for Publication), is on thin ice. Attempting to salvage their union, Marta’s rented a gorgeous country house on a spacious estate. No points for assuming the home is straight from his slumber, because of course it is.

Therefore, freaky things freak. Like, you know that scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds where Tippi Hedren is attacked in the attic? That happens here, but in a bedroom and with birds replaced by pillow feathers. In other sequences, writer/director Umberto Lenzi presents a sleepwalking Marta, a black cat with bloody paws, a maggot-ridden skeleton and — hey, did Luke just witness some old hag (Maria Cumani Quasimodo, Nosferatu in Venice) crowbar a priest on the grand lawn? I’ll never tell. But her face is terrifying.

In terms of how The House of Witchcraft stands against among the rest of Lenzi’s haunted house output, the man has fared worse (The House of Lost Souls) and more delirious (Ghosthouse). This made-for-TV chiller may not be “too damn sinister,” to borrow a phrase from the estate owner’s niece (Marina Giulia Cavalli, Alien from the Abyss), but for those seeking ’80s Italian horror with all the fixtures, it scratches the itch. And whatta view! —Rod Lott

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A Russian scientist’s experiment creates killer spiders of unusual sizes. They’re shipped on a Colombia-bound commercial airliner in precariously stacked and unsecured wooden crates marked “CARGO.” A turbulent takeoff knocks the crates over, spilling those arachnids. 

From those British blokes behind Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey comes the pound-ante Spiders on a Plane, a ridiculous tardy mockbuster, given Snakes on a Plane landed nearly two decades ago. ITN Distribution could learn a lot from its American counterparts at The Asylum, whose Snakes on a Train not only ripped off the Samuel L. Jackson vehicle, but beat its release date by three days!

Regardless of calendar failings, Spiders on a Plane exists. And even with its abbreviated running time of 78 minutes, your attention will not be caught in a web; to the contrary, you will have it with these motherfucking spiders on this motherfucking plane. They eventually take out the pilot so some influencer girls have to land the 747. Before then, one of those girls (Lila Lasso, Snake Hotel) Mile-High Clubs it with a stranger, while in an adjacent restroom, her guy friend (Gaston Alexander, Mary Had a Little Lamb) unloads a massive amount of diarrhea as he inserts a contact lens. He doesn’t notice the teeny-weeny spoder crawling on the lens until he gets bitten on the eye.

All of the eight-legged freaks are CGI. Some of them look real — or, rather, real enough, while some look like wind-up toys. The lone giant tarantula looks like a pineapple with pipe-cleaner legs. At least these spiders resemble actual spiders (which cannot be said of ITN’s creaky Spider in the Attic), but Lord knows why director Ben J. Williams (Tsunami Sharks) allowed the arachnids to make chittering noises like they’re xenomorphs. Mayday! Mayday! —Rod Lott

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