Shot in Oklahoma City, Offerings, um, offers a brazenly transparent imitation of John Carpenter’s Halloween, but one in which Michael Myers is replaced by someone who resembles a grown-up version of 1970s wunderkind Mason Reese, the Underwood Deviled Ham spokeskid. Additionally, his face looks as if he settled down for a nap, but had no access to a pillow, so he made do with a plugged-in toaster oven and its frayed cord.

The slasher in this slasher bears the terrifying name of Johnny. While in grade school, Johnny (Josh Coffman) found himself the frequent target of bullying by his peers, who one day forced him to hop atop a water well in the park and circumnavigate its bricks. Little Johnny’s reward for successful completion of this daunting task? A backhanded compliment (“Not bad for a retard!”), followed immediately by a plunge down the well that renders him unwell, earning Johnny permanent residency at Oakhurst State Mental Hospital.

Ten years later, now a beefy adult, Johnny (fight choreographer Richard A. Buswell) escapes the sanitarium to exact revenge on his tormentors. One gets his head stuck in a vise, then hammered for good measure; another is hanged to death the front yard while his parents laugh their asses off (to cartoons on TV, but still). The only student saved from Johnny’s reign of terror is Gretchen (Loretta Leigh Bowman), the peroxide blonde who was actually nice to him Way Back When. In fact, he brings her hence-the-title gifts — unfortunately, they’re of the nonreturnable kind: crudely carved body parts of his feather-haired, acid-washed victims.

This leads to Offerings’ most notorious scene, in which Gretchen and friends not only eat a pizza left at her front door, but are unable to distinguish the difference between sausage and bloody human flesh. The pie becomes a bona fide plot device, like a frickin’ Maltese Falcon topped with extra cheese. In a move that predates the self-reflexive nature of Scream, Gretchen and her BFF (Elizabeth Greene) discuss the dumb decisions made by characters in horror movies, as if doing so retroactively excuses the colossal stupidity they already have displayed (with more yet to come).

Nice try, though, on the part of debuting director Christopher Reynolds (whose only other feature in this creative capacity was Lethal Justice, a 1991 obscurity also shot in the Sooner State). Multitasking as Offerings’ writer, producer and editor, Reynolds gave himself a small part as an Oakhurst physician more hypocrite than Hippocratic in saying of patient Johnny, “Every time he takes a crap, he thinks he’s had an abortion. Let me tell you, he’s had some ugly kids.”

My gut instinct upon seeing the film’s ad in my newspaper’s local listings three decades ago was dead-on correct: Offerings is a terribly told piece of B-horror trash on a Z-level budget. Reynolds could not have chosen an actress more skill-impaired than Bowman to anchor a national theatrical feature, nor a more ineffectual Donald Pleasence stand-in than G. Michael Smith as the belt-straining, biscuit-doughy Sheriff Chism, who, speaking of his name, busts a tween boy (Chasen Hampton, They Crawl) for “reading” used porno mags in an abandoned house. And yet, there is something about its aggressive incompetence that makes Reynolds’ ugly kid easy to love. Not bad for a … oh, hell, you know. —Rod Lott

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Black Christmas wasn’t the only horror film Bob Clark directed — just the best and most influential. However, let us not allow history to neglect Deathdream, at once an unofficial adaptation of W.W. Jacobs’ classic short story, “The Monkey’s Paw,” and a feverish allegory on the PTSD of our Vietnam vets.

The family of soldier Andy Brooks (Richard Backus, The First Deadly Sin) receives some tragic, not entirely unexpected news: The young man has been killed while fighting the unwinnable war in ’Nam. Hours later, an apparent miracle follows: In the Dead of Night (to borrow Deathdream’s alternate title), Andy appears in the entry hall, as if he’d come marching home.

He seems a bit, well, off, because he’s a member of the walking dead. The Brookses either are too overjoyed to notice or are in denial — perhaps a helping of both. As viewers, we are not privy to scenes of prewar Andy, but certainly he wasn’t always quite this pale or quick to strangle dogs, was he? Unremarked upon, the Scooby-Doo light switch cover in his childhood room serves as a nice contrast to his sinister new ways, and a reminder of the innocence irrevocably lost in the jungle.

Although he ended up writing for daytime soaps, Backus is awfully good as the prodigal son who joined the Army as a boy and left it as a zombie. The movie doesn’t ask him to display, oh, range, yet as his character’s physical body gradually fails him and falls away, Backus need do little more than remain still and slowly turn his all-American smile into an unholy rictus. The more homicidal he becomes, the more horrifying his face, providing Deathdream with most of its shivers.

If Andy is one-dimensional — and he is — Clark and scriptwriter Alan Ormsby (Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things) let John Marley play far more shades. Assured a spot in cinema history for being That Guy Who Wakes Next to a Horse’s Head in The Godfather, Marley has this film’s most complex performance as Andy’s father. In many ways, it establishes the template for what Gregory Peck would do a mere two years later in the showier The Omen: Be torn between the allegiance to his only son and the responsibility for ending his bad behavior. His journey encapsulates the punch line of an old Bill Cosby routine: “I brought you into this world and I’ll take you out.”

With a Pepto-Bismol color palette that mirrors the uneasiness of his tale, Clark nails making the most of not a lot. That he did it twice in one calendar year (with Black Christmas following this to theaters about four months later) makes each picture all the more impressive. —Rod Lott

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For a terrific horror anthology in which several directors contribute stories themed around All Hallows’ Eve … stick with 2015’s Tales of Halloween. Sorry to say, but 10/31 is an embarassment for the parties involved, most of all the viewer. Heck, let’s throw the actual date of Oct. 31 in there, too, and encourage it to sue for defamation; the movie is that bad.

The poster pegs the project as “from the creators of The Barn, Bonejangles, The Dooms Chapel Horror and Volumes of Blood.” If those titles resonate with you, perhaps you’ll get more out of the Indiegogo-funded 10/31 than the average bear. Expect very little; even the Elvira-“inspired” wraparound — bookends, really — is so barely there, it hardly merits mention.

The five stories contained within fall prey to the severe limitations of so many microbudgeted projects of the horror genre: They appear to have been made by men who are fans first, and filmmakers a distant second. What this means is that in each of their shorts, the directors (Justin M. Seaman, Zane Hershberger, John William Holt, Brett DeJager and Rocky Gray) seem concerned only with gore and makeup and John Carpenter-esque synths, to the detriment of acting, pacing and storytelling.

I’m certainly not against scarecrows and slashers and spooky hags who haunt quaint-but-unprofitable B&Bs. I am, however, opposed to padding a 15- or 20-minute segment with 14 to 19 minutes of filler. Among the worst offenders — in a flick so full of them, it’s practically a police lineup — are Hershberger’s “Trespassers” and Holt’s “Killing the Dance.” While the former offers first-date conversation so interminable, your mind will swipe left, it’s the latter that truly tries one’s patience; with its roller-rink setting, prepare for skating, skating and skating — and more skating! — before getting around to the inevitable stabbing.

I doubt neither the validity nor intensity of the guys’ love of horror — likely, it extends to being sacrosanct. But their infatuation clouded and doomed 10/31’s execution. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.