For the sake of argument, let’s say you’re at the local park on a lovely fall day and you happen to see a gentleman, clad head to toe in a black coat and a black hat, not only buying a young street urchin a large tuft of cotton candy but taking him on a small paddleboat ride across a lake to a desolate clearing. Surely, if you didn’t forcibly stop him, you’d call the authorities, right?

If not, then it’s a good chance you’re the faceless killer of the mostly mundane Italian flick The Wax Mask, a latter-day effort from former masters of horror Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci — who had the good sense to die during production and leave directing duties to special effects maestro Sergio Stivaletti, who, in all fairness, does a pretty capable job.

Inside a randy brothel — one that’s housing some of Italian porn’s finest actors, I’m sure — like many people at the turn of the century were wont to do, a pair of men are placing bets on whether one of them could make it through an entire night at the new wax museum that recently opened down the street. I’m not giving anything away by telling you this white fool gets himself killed.

His corpse, like so many others throughout the course of the film, are used in the wax museum’s life-like (not really) exhibitions, seemingly presided over by a mad scientist — at least I think he’s a scientist — with a de-gloved hand that is seeking revenge on a cheating wife, although I think it’s safe to say he had his revenge by now and is just acting out for attention.

Even though the flick is nowhere near the standards horror fans have come to expect from Argento and Fulci over the years, Stivaletti salvages what he can, relying more on mystery and atmosphere than the usual buckets of grue; but, to be fair, the gore effects are, of course, watchably graphic and suitably grotesque. But, and I ask this rhetorically, is it, as the box copy tells us, the “last great Italian gore film of the 20th century”? —Louis Fowler

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Two moderately appealing lovers frolic on the shore, playing guitars and rejecting sexual advances, but something monstrous is waiting for them in the water. To the similar-sounding cues from a very popular theme by John Williams, a swimming woman gets dragged down to the merciful depths of the shallow water; we can only assume that the much-loved shark Jaws has moved into a freshwater lake in the beautiful Italian countryside.

Turns out, however, we’re actually in an unnamed Latin American country and, what the hell, it’s not a shark, it’s a crocodile. A killer crocodile, if you will.

As a group of annoying journalists (led by Richard Crenna’s son, Richard Anthony Crenna, The Great Los Angeles Earthquake) venture down the river in search of fake news to write regarding multiple cans of toxic waste destroying the marshlands, they come across the foam-and-latex killer crocodile, picking them off one by one; the newsmakers plan to get revenge on the murderous reptile with a series of stupider and stupider plans after each well-earned kill.

Meanwhile, the crocodile stays busy, eating small dogs and smaller children as well.

A local adventurer — complete with a seemingly magical floppy hat — helps the survivors to track the killer crocodile down; additionally, they’re in a sad race with the town’s linen-suited judge (played by Hollywood legend Van Johnson, The Scorpion with Two Tails) and his local toxic waste broker, apparently also on the hunt for the crocodile, mainly so they can catch him and blow him up with dynamite. Luckily, the croc eats their boat.

Directed by Fabrizio de Angelis under his Karate Warrior series pseudonym Larry Ludman, even though the crocodile and many of the bloody effects are usually effective, as you can guess, everything else here is bottom of the toxic waste barrel, all done in the likably exploitative style that the Italians became known and vaunted for, at least by lonely dudes at horror conventions.

Killer Crocodile, interestingly enough, was shot back-to-back with its very similar sequel, but didn’t we kind of say everything we really needed to about killer crocs with this one?  —Louis Fowler

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Hot on the hells of Clive Barker’s nightmarish ode to demonic cuckery, Hellraiser, from out of the shadows and into the black light came the satanic sequel, Hellbound: Hellraiser II, a vast labyrinth of infernal imagery and chilling characters that bested the original and, sadly, ensured that the still-ongoing series could never reach these serpentine highs again.

Still dealing with the pure trauma of seeing her father pulled apart by hooks and chains — it’ll screw you up every time — young Kirsty (Ashley Laurence, Warlock III: The End of Innocence) is being kept in an unsettling mental hospital run by the perverse Dr. Channard (Kenneth Cranham, The Legend of Hercules), a man intent on stupidly opening a gateway to hell. The guy is also a serious collector of Lament Configurations and even has a mute girl who conveniently likes to solve puzzles, mostly as a way to deal with her mother’s murder.

Channard, using the infamous bloody mattress from the first film as a protein-rich conduit, resurrects Julia (Clare Higgins, Ready Player One), Kirsty’s spiteful stepmom, now apparently risen to unholy power as the Queen of Hell or a position of equal malevolence. Meanwhile, Kirsty’s uncle (and Julia’s former lover), Frank (Sean Chapman, Psychosis), is being tortured on the daily by ghostly nudes that he can never touch. I know the feeling, Frank!

Kirsty, on the other hand, has her own devilish date with the dark side: travelling through the mazes of the underworld to rescue her father (Andrew Robinson, Into the Badlands), seemingly sent to hell by mistake. But when Pinhead (Doug Bradley, Wrong Turn 5: Bloodlines) and his cadre of cenobites show up to torture her nubile flesh, she makes yet another deal with the saints of sensual suffering in a bid to stop Julia and the updated Cenobite Channard, who is now floating about with a syphilitic penis attached to his cranium.

With a sadistic streak that momentarily alarms as much as it eternally arouses, Amityville 1992 director Tony Randel — not that one, unfortunately — entrenches us even further into Barker’s world of godless sin and sanctity, creating a far more bitter version of hell than has ever been seen on film, presided over by an immense monolith called Leviathan, which occasionally shoots glowing spheres of ’80s special effects at interlopers.

To be fair, I thought this netherworld would have better security that that, but I guess that probably isn’t erotic enough for Pinhead and his pals. —Louis Fowler

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Sometime in the 1990s, the unholy promise made by Near Dark was utterly fulfilled when Hollywood started to make purely American vampire flicks in the form of From Dusk Till Dawn, Blade and the underrated Vampires — or John Carpenter’s Vampires — that took the undead mythos and, with a bloody smirk, drove a stake right through them.

Future hatemonger James Woods (Videodrome) leads the cast as acerbic vampire slayer Jack Crow, employed by the Catholic Church to do what he does best: make brutally caustic one-liners while lighting creatures of the night up like a cheap firecracker throughout the scenic desert landscapes of the Southwest. It’s all in a day’s work for Jack and crew until, at a whore-filled party, the vampire master (Thomas Ian Griffith, xXx) shows up and slaughters most of the affiliated hunters, drunken prostitutes and even a priest or two in his search for a relic known as the Béziers Cross that will allow him to walk in the sunlight, apparently the dream of most bloodsuckers.

With the help of chubby sidekick Tony (Daniel Baldwin, Stealing Candy) and the novice Father Adam (Tim Guinee, Iron Man), they use pre-bitten hooker Katrina (Sheryl Lee, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me) and her mental link with the master to track him and his nest of vampires down; she’s usually in one form or another of undress while doing this, which was great in 1998.

Loosely based on the novel Vampire$ by John Steakley, this movie was released during a mostly hit-or-miss time in final act of Carpenter’s career, coming in like a bat out of hell after the (somewhat) highs of Escape from L.A. , about to careen downward with the (somewhat) lows of Ghosts of Mars. It makes sense, though, as Vampires lie dead in the middle: a decently watchable 108 minutes, but by no means a final masterpiece. —Louis Fowler

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