Poor, lonely, miserable, working-class cog Donald Kohler (Dan Grimaldi, best-known as twins Patsy and Philly Parisi on TV’s The Sopranos) is having a very bad day. First, his boss berates him for not coming to the aid of a co-worker who bursts into flames when a can of spray paint explodes in the incinerator. Then, Donald slumps home to find Mom (Ruth Dardick) dead in her rocking chair. His initial reaction is shock, until reality hits: Now he can play his disco LPs at full volume and jump on the living-room furniture from the Old Biddy collection!

Oh, and of course, flame-broil some broads. Hi-diddle-dee-dee, the bachelor’s life for me …

Welcome to Don’t Go in the House, the only slasher film I can think of where the killer’s signature outfit is a head-to-toe asbestos suit. Because the child Donald had his arms held over the gas stove by his mother — an apparent honors grad of the Piper Laurie in Carrie School of Parenting — the adult Donald likes to lure young, beautiful women into his spacious home, knock ’em out, strip ’em nude, tie ’em up and unleash the cruel, hot licks of a flamethrower upon their easy-to-bubble bods. Good thing the Kohler residence comes with a steel-paneled room! (Hell, when you have that, who needs an extra powder bath?)

Most slashers would be content to stop there, but first-time director/co-writer Joseph Ellison takes things a little further by giving us a glimpse into Donald’s mixed-up mind; he is haunted by the literal ghosts of his crispy victims, whom he imagines come to life at inopportune times. (He keeps their ashen corpses in an adjoining room, each dressed to the nines and seated in her own chair as if on display like a menagerie.) It’s a halfway-novel twist to an otherwise dreary, dirty tale, and as Don’t Go in the House’s resident Norman Bates, Grimaldi turns in a pretty good performance of an utterly despicable human being.

Even with depicting the abuse Donald suffered, Ellison fails to establish a credible link for the grown man’s newfound, strike-anywhere hobby. He also fails an opportunity for a killer joke in not having Donald drop the needle on “Disco Inferno.” That’s the one instance in which an increased budget would have helped. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Third movie, four stories, five or more shades of fucked-up: That’s V/H/S: Viral. And that’s a good thing.

Coming from the filmmakers behind such indie shockers as Timecrimes, Resolution and Deadgirl, this presumably final sequel of the rather divisive and ornery horror-anthology franchise again plays with — and relies upon — the found-footage concept, yet adds a level of subtext bound to sail over the heads of those viewers who could stand to heed its message. We’ll get to that in a sec.

But first, a quick rundown of Viral’s videos:
• An amateur magician graduates from the trailer park to the Vegas stage when he acquires a cloak that derives its considerable powers from human blood.
• A scientist invents a machine that enables him to interact with the parallel-universe versions of himself and his wife.
• Punk-ass skateboarders in search of the next killer curb mess with the wrong drainage ditch in Mexico: one that wakes the dead.
• Finally, serialized as the wraparound tale is the cryptic saga of a young man, his abducted girlfriend and the streets-speeding ice cream truck that just might have her inside.

Coiled with a devilish sense of humor, Viral is more malleable and freeform than 2012’s V/H/S and 2013’s V/H/S 2; more often than not, unpredictability rules, leaving us to believe that anything can happen. It does, in a glorious parade of mayhem that sends up the utter self-absorption of today’s attention-seeking tweeters, Instagramers and YouTubers who live for “likes” and soak up validation like a sponge to spilled milk. If that plan of attack sacrifices scares — and it does — for knowing winks at the expense of the Me-Me-Me Generation, so be it! #theywouldntgetitanyway —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.