In his tribute to Lon Chaney, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi and makeup maestro Jack Pierce, Spanish horror legend Paul Naschy (The Beast and the Magic Sword) plays a few classic baddies of his own: Frankenstein’s monster, Mr. Hyde, the Phantom of the Opera, Quasimodo, Dr. Fu Manchu, Bluebeard and, yep, werewolf Waldemar Daninsky. 

But first we see him doing Rasputin cosplay. It’s just the kind of thing a washed-up actor would do — not Naschy, but his Howl of the Devil character, Hector. He lives in a mansion with this precocious, monster-obsessed nephew (Sergio Molina, Naschy’s real-life son) and, on occasion, a village sex worker for Hector’s fiendish, fatal, carnal doings. We’re talking nipple-tearing, throat-slicing, torso-chainsawing and back-axing — the whole nueve yardas.

Despite Howl’s rock-hard lean into starlet slaughter, this is a middling effort for Naschy as director. And despite the radiant beauty of Caroline Munro (The Last Horror Film), this is an ugly movie in terms of its low opinion of women, each and every one deemed a whore or bitch or slut. Was Naschy working through some misogyny or was it simply an excuse to get the parading ladies free of clothing posthaste? 

One thing’s for sure: The greatest lines await your ears when Hector’s servant (Howard Vernon, Countess Perverse) shows the movie’s first rent-a-harlot around the place: 

Servant: “There are places in this house where time has stopped forever.”
Harlot: “Fuck that.”

That had me Howling. —Rod Lott

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A follow-up to William Castle’s 1959 House on Haunted Hill via a found-footage is not a terrible idea. Just when it’s executed so wretchedly as in the hands of writer/director Dustin Ferguson, who often excretes enough movies annually to number in the teens. Considering one of the credited producers is “Cheap AF Videos,” at least the subprime-mortgaged House lays all its cards on the table. 

Set in 1978, this same-named sequel takes the guise of a live broadcast on Oct. 31 from WPIX-TV. At the titular abode, a reporter (Terrifier 3’s Daniel Roebuck) and a psychic (Jennifer Moriarty, Ferguson’s needless Spider Baby remake) investigate the supposedly spooky mansion. They encounter such fear inducers as a horny couple in a closet, a man in a gorilla mask hiding in another closet, and a science-class skeleton dropping from the stairwell. 

Every couple of minutes, these on-the-scene antics cut back to an in-studio interviewer (Brinke Stevens, Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama 2) and her guests, one of whom is played by Vincent Price’s daughter, Victoria. Then WPIX cuts to fake commercials for local shops and services. 

Although it opens with a six-minute highlight reel of the ’59 original, Ferguson’s House on Haunted Hill doesn’t rip off Castle’s classic as much as it does Chris LaMartina’s WNUF Halloween Special. Although WNUF takes great pains to look the part to better sell the parody, Ferguson makes no such effort. You wouldn’t know the time frame was the ’70s if not for being told via supers. No iota of attempted legitimacy shows up; the flick even repeats its batch of ads — not for comedic effect (absent), but because Ferguson lacks ideas. When you’re shooting a new batch of video clickbait every Wednesday — Cocaine Cougar, 5G Zombies, Angry Asian Murder Hornets — who has time for second drafts?

This is the laziest, lousiest excuse for a motion picture since your little nephew stole your phone while you weren’t looking and recorded himself sticking out his tongue. Ferguson pushes and pushes and pushes this thing to an interminable 64 minutes. The closing credits might be the slowest I’ve seen ever, no exaggeration, as it takes one line 70 frickin’ seconds to make the valiant rise from the screen’s bottom to top.

I watched this Hill of beans on Fawesome, blessedly free because it’s heavily ad-supported. The ill-named streaming service’s numerous breaks of seven consecutive ads — real, largely shilling Progressive — were more entertaining. 

House on Haunted Hill ’24 is “dedicated in living memory” to Messrs. Price and Castle, whom I’d like to think deflected the gesture from above with, “No, thanks. We’re good.” —Rod Lott

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In its seven-word title, Uncle Sleazo’s Toxic and Terrifying TV Hour promises a lot. It even overdelivers on that last word by running an extra 28 minutes. Still, it comes up short in the one word that counts most for a horror film: “terrifying.” It’s anything but that.

Now, what the title doesn’t signal is that portions of the pic are funny — better, even intentionally so. We’ll get there shortly.

Lucky Cerruti’s anthology comes positioned as a horror-hosted show à la Elvira. Armed with equally awful puns in “boils and ghouls” mold, the eponymous Uncle Sleazo (first-timer Jordan Hornstein, outfitted to be one foot too close to a schoolyard) intros three “movies.” These include a tiring werewolf tale in black and white, a one-note psychic romance and a sci-fi-tinged slice of body horror that, while slow, at least closes with a terrific gross-out visual.

All three segments share a core problem: They’re neither scary nor suspenseful; frankly, each exhibits weak plotting and dreadful pacing despite minimal running time. Serving as something of a saving grace, however, are the commercial breaks in between. This is where the jokes come in, from a cartoon about a Basket Case-esque vestigial twin to a musical with a talking, singing puke puppet.

Whether these inspired bits toss you a fake trailer for the movie Clown Cop or an ad for Dahmer’s Apartment Playset, the influence of Chris LaMartina’s WNUF Halloween Special on Cerruti (2020’s Freak) is apparent. I could go for a full feature of them. Now, whether these smatterings of humor belong sandwiched between stories we’re asked to accept at straight-face value depends on your tolerance for tonal whiplash.

To diminish their weaknesses, the three stories could stand to be more zippily paced, even if it brought Uncle Sleazo’s closer to that titular Hour. —Rod Lott

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If Devils Stay has the nerve to call itself a possession picture, why does the title lack a possessive apostrophe? Ba-dum-tss!

That joke is to prove to my English teachers I paid attention. Devils Stay, however? No laughing matter.

Schoolgirl So-mi (Lee Re, Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula) dies of cardiac arrest shortly after a heart transplant. Her father (Park Shin-yang, The Big Swindle) takes the tragedy hardest of all, because he’s also the surgeon responsible for her procedure.

Looking back, Dr. Cha notes his beloved daughter did act strangely after getting her ticker swapped out. What’s more, he believes his little girl is still alive. Say, you don’t think that secondhand heart could have something to do with it, do you?

Of course! We’ve all seen Body Parts.

A young priest (Lee Min-ki, 2009’s Tidal Wave) explains it all: So-mi is possessed by a demon who will rise again in three days, using her fresh corpse as a vessel. As Dr. Cha and his family grieve, So-mi’s “guest” kills some people and an oversized moth crawls from the girl’s cakehole. This is either the first feature for TV director Hyun Moon-seop (Nightmare Teacher) or the weirdest episode of ER ever.

Soused in South Korean customs and universal superstition, Devils Stay earns points for finding a new angle into the exorcism subgenre. The movie may not exist without The Exorcist, but minus one short scene, it’s not ripping off The Exorcist. One could argue the strangest element is its front-and-center embrace of Catholicism since Asian films usually default to Buddhism.

On one hand, Hyun cues up rote scares, accompanied by suddenly loud music stings as if he distrusts his own abilities. And he has abilities, because on that other hand, Devils Stay displays some arresting, imaginative visuals — none more potent than So-mi’s body hovering outside in mid-air. Still, with a drawn-out denouement, Hyun’s theatrical lacks the trickery to ascend to next-level special where recent Korean spookers Sleep and Exhuma reside. Maybe next time? —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Few things in life frighten me more than the prospect of “life” in a nursing home. (Knock on digital wood.) Sharing a room my freshman year of college was traumatic enough; add the forced fun, failing health and hovering scent of death urine, and I’m filing that under “DO NOT WANT.”

So when a judge (Geoffrey Rush, Mystery Men) earns placement in one following a courtroom stroke, I understand his surliness. Despite his stay’s temporary status for rehabilitation, he’s irritated to be trapped in an environment he can’t control with the tap of a gavel. And that’s before he attracts the ire of longtime resident Dave (John Lithgow, 2019’s Pet Sematary remake).

You know Dave, right? He’s the guy whose arm basically ends in Jenny Pen, the hand puppet of a baby doll with hollow eye sockets. The object’s inherent creepiness is nothing compared to the cruelty it inflicts upon the elderly. Your mileage may vary along Dave/Jenny’s reign of terror, but their particular shenanigans with a catheter gave my willy the willies.

Something within The Rule of Jenny Pen’s bones screams Stephen King to me. In actuality, it’s based on a short story by Owen Marshall, a writer unknown to my brain, but clearly a favorite of director James Ashcroft; the New Zealand filmmaker’s previous feature, Coming Home in the Dark, also adapts Marshall’s prose. (I can’t help but wonder if the source material also ignores why a facility with an investment in keycard entry would have no security cameras. Maybe they overspent on acquiring all the Matt Monro and Gene Pitney LPs?)

Ashcroft’s film doesn’t exactly zip along at the speed of the judge in his motorized wheelchair. Even acknowledging its slow-burn ambitions, I’d argue Rule runs 30 minutes past what the plot allows. But then we’d be denied the scene-stealing whole of Lithgow at his most sinister — even more so than his Emmy-winning run as the Trinity Killer on Dexter.

Even if the picture lacks a payoff as diabolical as the setup demands, it has a lot to say about bullies and the systems that allow them to keep terrorizing their targets. Watch with a morbid mix of fascination and curiosity. —Rod Lott