I love God. I love his compassion, his grace and his absolute comfort in times of need. That being said, I also fear God and, if you’re like me, the religious exploitation flicks of Earl Owensby are probably right up your sinful alley.

One of the biggest distributors of regional religious films in the ’70s — always with a bent towards horror, mind you — Owensby and his crew were out to save whatever souls possible, by whatever means necessary, even if it means by pushing every holy fear they have and, viewing many of his movies late at night as a child, that truly hit home.

A Day of Judgment, however, is one I had never seen before. Playing like a rather depressive episode of a homemade version of The Waltons, the film is set in a ’30s-era small town, where all types of sinful shenanigans are going on, usually leading to a form of murder most foul, perhaps the worst.

From the chubby bank president who tries to take away an Amish-bearded farmer’s land to a skanky dress salesman and his boss’ wife, from the hotheaded gas jockey who puts his parents away in an old folks’ home to a batty old dame who kills an adorable goat for entering her property, it may sound like typical Peyton Place fare, but takes an abominably hellish turn in the last few minutes.

See, if you’ve even looked at the Holy Bible, you’d know that God doesn’t take too kindly to their sinful actions, so he sends his emissary of death to the small town to reap every single sin they’ve ever sown, some in extremely graphic detail that I’m sure Owensby was able to rationalize to the Christian parents of America.

Leading a near-conga line of these sinners straight to the abhorrent gates of fire and brimstone, director C.D.H. Reynolds springs the terrible deeds of evil on the viewer’s sensibilities, much like a Jack Chick tract come to breathing, snorting life, with the hope of salvation — these days, at least — being completely up to the soul of the viewer with a head-scratching ending.

With plenty of summer-stock acting, grade-school special effects and other unholy trash that’ll make the most spiritually troublesome of viewers giggle and snort, as terrible as the film is — and, to be fair, it truly is — hopefully just by watching, they’ll earn some points with Jesus when Death come knocking on their door. I sure hope I did. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Despite having little to no connection with actual cannibalism, that didn’t stop unscrupulous investors from marketing The Cannibal Man as an absolute gut-muncher, because the original title of La Semana del Asesino (The Week of the Killer) didn’t have the exploitative innards they thought the film needed.

In truth — or retrospect — the film didn’t really need it, because Eloy de la Iglesia’s haunting story of a man who slowly feels the threads of sanity become more frayed with each passing day is a truly terrifying tale that should have given the Spanish director far more attention outside of cult film circles.

Spending his day working at a slaughterhouse, Marco (Vicente Parra) kills a taxicab driver one evening in self-defense, which inexplicably awakens something inside him that leads to him murdering everyone from his brother and girlfriend to others who might come around his den of squalor, situated outside a lavish apartment building.

Over the course of the week, as the house begins to smell of death and guilt — always a reactive combination — Marco takes the body parts to work, basically to turn them into liquid mush. I don’t think it gets turned into food and, to be fair, when the prospect of eating the human meat is presented to him, he becomes exceedingly nauseous. Maybe a better title would have been Almost a Cannibal, which sounds like a great romantic comedy.

Director de la Iglesia throws in numerous jabs at the then-oppressive Spanish government — most notably in dutifully homosexual swimming scenes, mildly erotic for the time. When viewed through those rebellious eyes, The Cannibal Man is indeed a film of absolute protest that, through a semi-graphic lens, makes it far more important than most give it credit for. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

One dark night, sometime in the early ’80s, I remember watching a film with HBO with my father, like I usually did almost every night when he got off work as a policeman. With its scenes of a downright creepy mausoleum, electric-eyed corpses and toothbrush-chewing schoolgirls in oblivious danger, this was seemingly a one-and-done airing, never to be viewed again, the title lost to the reanimated corpses of my mind.

It has haunted me forever, with searches at every video store I ever worked, coming up typically with only Mortuary, released the next year, but sadly, not the rotting videotape I was looking for. Recently, One Dark Night turned up in my mailbox, a movie I put on one afternoon for some background noise.

As it continued on behind me, a rush of putrid prepubescent memories came flooding back, as the puzzle of flesh and bones began to come together to form a horrid whole picture: One Dark Night was the movie I had visions of long in the back of my mind for almost 40 years; now I had it in my Blu-ray player, feasting on the insides for all eternity, or at least the next 90 minutes.

Starring a very cute Meg Tilly as good girl Julie, she’s looking to join a group of trashy girls, one of whom is played by E.G. Daily and another is constantly chewing on a toothbrush throughout the flick — it’s all coming together! They tell Tilly that for her initiation, she has to pull an all-nighter at the local mausoleum, which isn’t all that bad.

Well, normally it wouldn’t be all that bad, but earlier that day, renowned evil psychic Raymar — who was found dead in a room next to a pile of dead teenagers — was laid to temporary rest there. I say that because, as discovered by his daughter (and her hubby Adam West!), he was trying to harness his mental abilities through death and, good for him, it works.

For the teens, however, it’s not so great, as you can probably assume.

Directed by Tom McLoughlin (the highly entertaining Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives), One Dark Night is an entertaining piece of ’80s trash that still works, especially with the corpse-filled finale managing to deliver a shrill scare up my spine all these years later, betraying its low-budget roots to give us a cold slab of ancient horror that absolutely lives up to the demonic memories it bred.

Now, that I know what flick it is and have seen it as an adult, I can finally lay One Dark Night to rest in the annals of my mind under six feet of broken images and numerous tries. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.