Post-Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans real estate is cheap, thereby allowing Jack (Rob Corddry, Hot Tub Time Machine) and his pregnant-with-twins wife, Vanessa (Leslie Bibb, Law Abiding Citizen) to snatch up a spacious, historic fixer-upper for a song. It’s in a neighborhood that people don’t know even exists — well, white people — but those who do have given the residence a pet name: House of Blood, on account of all the murders that have taken place there.

The threat to life comes not from outside, but from within, as the place is reputedly haunted. That would make sense, given Vanessa’s sudden bad habits and demonic vocalizations. (Pay no mind to the hairy, bloated, naked creature that attempts oral sex — that’s just a wandering patient from the nursing-care facility down the street.) Dispatched by the Vatican to exorcise Jack and Vanessa’s home are two Italian priests (co-writers/directors Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon) with a penchant for chain-smoking and orgasmic consumption of po’ boys. Says one of the holy men to our expectant parents/new homeowners, “I can assure you the devil is real … and he is a dick.”

Let it be said, as if it needed telling, that Hell Baby is a horror spoof of the possession picture, especially those involving evil children. Whether you find it successful depends less upon your tolerance for grown adults playing “catch” with a newborn and more upon that for the Garant/Lennon team, creators of TV’s Reno! 911; its theatrical spin-off, Reno! 911: Miami; and arguably the best ping-pong/kung-fu hybrid the big screen has seen, Balls of Fury — all scattershot, but with just enough hits to make the misses worthwhile. The same goes here, traversing hilarious highs and lagging lows.

As the least interesting pieces of a rather tightly contained cast, Garant/Lennon’s men of the collar are responsible for many of the misses. Stealing the show is Keegan-Michael Key (Role Models) as a friendly African-American living in Jack and Vanessa’s crawlspace; stopping it cold is Riki Lindhome (2009’s The Last House on the Left) as Vanessa’s bubbly Wiccan sister. It’s not the fault of Lindhome, a rather talent comedian, but the script. I felt embarrassed for her in her character’s introductory scene, which requires the actress to be completely, totally, full-frontal, shaved-pube nude for three minutes and no point. —Rod Lott

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Former Intelligence Counter Espionage agent Matt Helm (Dean Martin, post-Rat Pack) sees superbly stacked women everywhere: his dreams, his morning bath, his breakfast — hell, everywhere. So omnipresent are these lovely ladies that not only does he often have to ask, “You have been vaccinated?,” but that viewers of The Silencers may forget that director Phil Karlson (Walking Tall) has included a spy half to his spy comedy.

The first of four films based ever so loosely on Donald Hamilton’s series of Gold Medal adventure novels, The Silencers is more an impressive collage of décolletage than a bundle of laughs (sample joke: “If you were an Indian, Custer would still be alive!”), but the two styles make a fine pair nonetheless. For a 007 spoof, you could do much worse, and not much better.

As for that espionage portion of the formula, Helm reluctantly retires from retirement in order to save the world from Operation Fallout, for which a defecting American scientist delivers a tape to a villainous organization’s secret underground HQ for nefarious nuclear purposes. Said org is headed by the Fu Manchu-esque Tung-Tze, played by Victor Buono (What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?) under what looks like judiciously applied layers of CoverGirl LashBlast.

Helping Helm and his Grampa turtleneck infiltrate the lair is Gail Hendricks, a klutzy fellow agent who may be a double-crosser, but wow, what a double! She’s played by Stella Stevens (1963’s The Nutty Professor) at her peak of hotness, so it’s no wonder Helm literally yanks her clothes clean off her body. As foxy as Gail may be — and she is — she’s hardly the only poker stoking Helm’s fire; pouring over in Pathécolor loveliness are Nancy Kovack (Jason and the Argonauts), Daliah Lavi (1967’s Casino Royale), Beverly Adams (How to Stuff a Wild Bikini), legendary leggy dancer Cyd Charisse and so many more.

The end shot, which features Helm in bed with no fewer than 10 perfectly doable and well-rounded “Slaygirls,” promised audiences that Helm would return in a sequel titled The Ambushers. Against all odds, someone on set actually was sober enough to write that down and follow through. —Rod Lott

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Chatterbox wastes no time with its setup, so neither shall I. This infamous comedy begins when pretty Penny (Candice Rialson, Hollywood Boulevard) discovers she has a talking, singing vagina.

Its first words come right after Penny has had sex with her boyfriend, Ted (Perry Bullington), about whose bedroom performance the vagina complains. Ted’s immediate reaction is anger, prompting the vagina to chide, “Can’t you handle a little wisecrack?”

I could not.

While Virginia — as the speech-imbued genitals are dubbed — goes from medical discovery to the talk-show circuit, the viewer is assaulted with essentially the same joke told dozens of times. Worse, while the movie moves fast from scene to scene, the proceedings are slow. The material might make a great sketch, but as a full feature, it feels interminably humorless. When the end arrives, it does so with a threat of a gender-flipped companion piece, eventually carried out by 1988’s equally patience-taxing Me and Him.

Director Tom DeSimone (Reform School Girls) should thank his lucky stars the radiant Rialson agreed to star in such drivel — nonpornographic, it should be noted — as the put-upon salon employee whose parts interfere with her customer service, but who knows what he was thinking by casting comedian Rip Taylor as her boss. Putting Rip Taylor in a movie about a vagina (no matter its skills) is like adding bacon bits to a bowl of Froot Loops. —Rod Lott

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Albert Zugsmith’s The Phantom Gunslinger should exist as an animated film. It employs sound effects from a button presumably marked “ZANY.” It has opening narration that comparatively makes Elmer Fudd a great debater. Its scenes run sped-up more often than not; if that’s not quite true, it sure appears to be.

Plus, it puts former teen idol Troy Donahue (Seizure) on spring-loaded shoes.

Donahue plays Bill, mild-mannered seminarian-cum-sheriff of Tucca Flats, a Hollywood backlot of an Old West town. It’s a peaceful place until a group of Mexican bandits rides in, calling itself The Terrible Seven; one of its members is a little person who hangs with a duck and licks an Eggo-waffle lollipop. There’s no story to it — just slapstick fight after slapstick fight after slapstick fight, either with bullets or buffets. Of course pies are thrown.

All frying pans and feathers and “Frère Jacques,” The Phantom Gunslinger makes joking references to The Magnificent Seven, Mae West and The Man from U.N.C.L.E., but really, it’s not so much a spoof of anything in particular beyond itself. Zugsmith (Sex Kittens Go to College) thinks this stuff is hysterical, but the humor is patience-trying, with just-because non-gags that range from a bank manager who strongly resembles Adolf Hitler to a saloon girl who drinks milk from a baby bottle. In the process — and in no particular order — he mildly insults Indians, Mexicans and your intelligence. —Rod Lott

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Whether inherent or learned, every bit of my being should revolt against something like Microwave Massacre, but refuses to do so. Oh, it’s a terrible, terrible, terrible movie, but among all the flicks the general public would find unwatchable, it’s one of the most watchable. Consider its opening scene: An incredibly stacked blonde (Marla Simon) risks nipple splinters by sticking her generous breasts through the conveniently tits-shaped hole in a construction site’s fence.

Why? Two logical reasons: First, because boobs. Second, it introduces us to Donald (Borscht belt comedian Jackie Vernon), our slobbish, hard-hat hero forever henpecked by May (Claire Ginsberg), his harpy of a wife who hasn’t had sex with him since 1962. She’s just bought a huge microwave oven, which she hopes will refine “my Q-zine”; Donald dismisses it as a “deranged toaster.” (That put-down is as witty as the movie gets, unless this tickles your funny bone: “I’m so hungry, I could eat a whore!”)

May’s cooking remains terrible, however, and during an argument over it, Donald bludgeons her with a pepper grinder. He then cuts her body into pieces, places them in the deep freezer and later, while hungry, accidentally gnaws on his dead wife’s arm and discovers her meat is oh-so-sweet. In order to feed his frenzy, he continuously must lure ladies over to his house to kill them. This proves to be no trouble at all, because suddenly, attractive women flock to the slovenly, unkempt, late-’50s lard bucket like flies to feces. If that analogy strikes you as disgusting, wait until you see Vernon’s hammy mitts allowed near naked, nubile flesh.

Aside from its opening and abrupt end, 1983’s Microwave Massacre has next to nothing to do with microwaves, just then becoming “a thing” in the commercial appliance world, just as made-for-VHS no-budgeters like this were in the realm of home entertainment. For this infamous gore-comedy opus à la H.G. Lewis and The Little Shop of Horrors, director Wayne Berwick (The Naked Monster) eschews rhyme and reason in favor of jokes — to be fair, semblances of jokes — about STDs, hemorrhoids and other things Vernon can deliver with a modicum of investment in the material.

Is “material” too strong a word for a dream sequence in which a nude woman is slathered head-to-toe in mayonnaise? Or a scene that has a sexy neighbor gardening with a vibrating dildo? I know the answer to both is “yes,” and yet you know I cannot wait to watch them again. —Rod Lott

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