There was a time in Hong Kong cinema when Category III flicks about insanely graphic serial killers were all the rage, with The Untold Story one of the best remembered and most award-winning, which is completely surprising to me because — and let’s be honest — it’s kind of terrible.

Directed by Herman Yau with all the skill and dexterity of a low-budget TV-movie journeyman, Story stars a skin-crawling Anthony Wong as the untold storyteller, a glasses-wearing creeper with a boiling-over penchant for ultraviolent outbursts, one of which luckily takes him to exotic vacation destination Macau.

But, as you can guess, that’s really only half of the untold story.

Once there, he opens a restaurant that specializes in the best steamed pork buns in town, absolutely filled with the perfectly cooked meat of the previous night’s kill. City on Fire’s Danny Lee, who seems to always have a hooker on each arm, leads an investigative squad of buffoonish cops only interested in ogling Lee’s women while simultaneously eating free pork buns and harassing the only woman on their team, mostly for not having heaving breasts.

After years of destructive desensitization, the grue and gore aren’t really all that shocking, with the exception of the brutal scene where Wong uses a handful of chopsticks in a way they were hopefully never intended for. While the last half of the movie mostly features Wong constantly beaten while in police custody, in scenes that might give a few fascist viewers untold boners, I’m really not sure what was the point.

With a little urine drinking — according to Wong, it helps heal your busted-out, broken-down innards — the film’s abrupt ending, complete with a Dragnet-styled voiceover, only adds to the back-alley greasiness of the cleaver-heavy proceedings, a dirty job that won Wong the Best Actor trophy at the Hong Kong Film Awards. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

When Shock Treatment arrived in the mail, I was admittedly ecstatic. The lesser-known sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show is one of my favorite flicks and truly overdue for a Region A Blu-ray treatment. Sadly, as I looked closer at the cover and read the synopsis, I realized this Shock Treatment is, instead, a French horror film.

Maybe next time.

Still, I’m a fan of French films and this strange movie starring Annie Girardot and Alain Delon (and his penis) is one of the strangest. Workaday woman Helene (Girardot) checks in to a seaside rejuvenation clinic and, for 80 minutes, we’re treated to nude massages, nude beach frolicking and nude injections of a urine-looking serum into the buttocks, mostly administered by easygoing Dr. Devilers (Delon).

Wait a second: Devilers? Devil? You don’t think …

Probably not — the film’s not that strange. It seems the true horror lies in the final 10 minutes when Helene goes into a locked room she shouldn’t and finds the gory truth of this clinic, with a gooey mess that, in typical (not Jess) Franco-fashion, was all for naught. This finale can be a little bit maddening if you’re not used to it.

Moving along with the languid pace of runaway escargot, Shock Treatment is a slow (oh so slow) burn that will test the patience of most viewers, but with the constant penile dangling, it’s hard to fast-forward through. While the film never really gels, it’s more concerned about telling a morality tale or, more to the point, just immoral tail.

That’s alright with me. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Unlike a majority of the horror community, I hold absolutely no love for Chucky and the Child’s Play franchise, finding the whole thing rather dumb. So when I heard they were going to remake it, I could only react with a drawn-out yawn, so much so that I only recently viewed it on a random streaming channel.

And, you know, if I’m being honest, I kind of liked it.

Whereas the 1988 original film cast Brad Dourif as a serial killer who, using the dark power of Satan, transfers his murderous soul into the plastic body of the My Buddy-like doll Chucky — it was the ’80s and, I suppose, that’s the best we could do — this reboot, revamp and retelling instead turns Chucky into a deviously programmed doll with seriously damaged AI.

When a Vietnamese tech enters some bad codes in the doll’s internal computer out of spite, the now-monikered Buddi toy heads to America, a walking and talking app designed to help every aspect of your life for the rest of your life. When single mom Karen (a miscast Aubrey Plaza) brings home a defective Buddi toy for her deaf kid, Alex (Gabriel Bateman), everything from dead housecats to self-driving vehicular manslaughter occurs.

I’m pretty sure we all know by now the doll does it, right?

Voicing this incarnation of Chucky is Mark Hamill, who does a credible job, getting rid of Dourif’s smart-ass psycho sneer and, instead, giving Chucky an aura of murderous sympathy, with Chucky just doing as he was programmed (or not programmed) to do. It’s a plot point I’m sure pissed off many murder-loving misanthropes, but I dug it.

And while this Child’s Play was largely forgotten a couple of weeks after release — and apparently there’s a new television series featuring Chucky 1.0 on the horizon — this take was an honestly brave attempt to retell a story that has long desperately needed a new storyteller. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.