Throughout most of its 99 minutes, the Italian-made Werewolf Woman is rhapsodically, wonderfully terrible in that way only a sleazy exploitation movie made by pretentious foreigners can be. While some unfortunate stretches of eyeball-glazing, poorly dubbed exposition exist, the sheer insanity of the rest of the picture more than makes up for them.

Busty French Sondra Locke look-alike Annik Borel plays Daniella, a severely disturbed rape victim whose fears of sex and men are exacerbated by her obsession with her resemblance to an ancestor who was burned at the stake for being a werewolf (which we see and which is hilarious), causing her to devolve into a lethal, wolf-like state the night her strong sexual feelings toward her sister’s husband correspond with a full moon.

Sent to a mental hospital, she escapes after killing a crazed nymphomaniac who attempts to rape her. More folks are killed along the way, including another wannabe rapist who actually shouts, “I’m gonna rape you!” while he’s attacking her. She briefly finds happiness and salvation in the arms of a gentle, loving stuntman, but reverts back to her old ways when her beauty attracts the attention of a trio of thugs, who rape her (sense a theme here?) and then kill her lover. Her trail of bodies finally ends when the detective on her case is inspired by a cohort’s dream to come to the forest she has made her home.

Part horror, part psychological thriller, part softcore porn and part revenger, the film also known as The Legend of the Wolf Woman is a whole lot of crazy in a frequently fascinating package. It’s never for one moment genuinely good, but in the end, that’s what makes it so great. —Allan Mott

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Unless you’re a real horror movie geek, I think it’s probably a safe bet for me to describe Jeff Lieberman’s Just Before Dawn as the best slasher movie you’ve never seen. Why it remains so obscure is something of a mystery, since the people who have seen it tend to get very excited when talking about it, and you’d figure that their enthusiasm would be contagious, but it’s never quite worked out that way.

It’s almost tempting to theorize that Lieberman might be suffering from some sort of curse, since his often-outstanding work never has gotten him the attention he deserves. His great sci-fi/horror satire, Remote Control, has yet to make it to DVD and his most famous effort, Squirm, has the dubious distinction of being the best film to have ever been mocked by Mystery Science Theater 3000 (and, yes, I happily would say that right to This Island Earth’s face).

Combining the standard elements of the slasher genre with the backwoods horror of Deliverance and The Hills Have Eyes, Just Before Dawn succeeds thanks to skillful direction, effective atmosphere and — most importantly — a cast of likable characters whose endangerment causes us to feel actual anxiety and empathy, rather than the usual slasher-movie schadenfreude.

The plot is bare-bones simple: Several campers in search of an inherited mine in a dangerous forest find themselves being hunted by the demented offspring of the area’s requisite family of religious freaks. But the beauty of the slasher genre is that the plot is always secondary to the execution, and by that standard, this neglected gem easily ranks as one of the best of its kind. —Allan Mott

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Watching this sequel to 1991’s Warlock, I started to wonder if maybe a young Michael Bay had seen it before debuting with 1995’s Bad Boys. The third film by second-generation director Anthony Hickox (Waxwork), this second entry in the Warlock mythos not only shares part of a title with one of Bay’s films, but displays all of the same stylistic hallmarks that have made Bay both one of the successful and hated filmmakers of his generation.

Filled with pointless close-ups shot at strange angles, hilariously dramatic pull-ins and a complete sacrifice of character in favor of constant momentum, Warlock: The Armageddon, like most of Bay’s work, plays less like an actual movie than an abridged version of one with all of the potentially boring bits cut out.

And that is so not a bad thing.

For those of you concerned about the plot, the film features a returning Julian Sands as the titular villain, an Antichrist who rises in anticipation of a long-awaited lunar eclipse and who must find a collection of ancient stones in order to help his father, Satan, escape from Hell and take over the living world. Stopping him are Chris Young (TV’s Max Headroom) and Paula Marshall (whom you know from a dozen cancelled shows … and my dreams), the youngest descendents of a tribe of California druids, whose deaths and subsequent resurrections make them the only warriors powerful enough to halt Sands in his tracks.

More goofy than scary, the movie features a lot of dated effects, but is made highly watchable, thanks to the game cast and Hickox’s stubborn refusal to give you enough time to dwell on the film’s many absurdities and enormous plot holes. Consider it a film for those of you who wish a certain “director” would stop wasting his “talents” on racist toy-robot sequels and get back to the gloriously stupid basics. —Allan Mott

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