Try as he might, actor-turned-director John Stockwell (John Carpenter’s Christine) can’t get away from the ocean blue — Blue Crush, Into the Blue, Dark Tide, Turistas — but perhaps he should try harder, especially after that last one. If offering the continuous sight of Olivia Wilde in a bikini can’t raise moviegoers’ pulses, you’re screwed.

Made at a time where “torture porn” was briefly all the rage, Turistas follows a handful of American backpackers to Brazil, including siblings Bea and Alex, played by Wilde (TRON: Legacy) and Josh Duhamel (the Transformers franchise). When a bus wreck leaves the gringos stranded, they join forces with a fellow traveler (Melissa George, 30 Days of Night), despite her butt-ugly hair braids. Because she can speak the native tongue of Portuguese, she can help them get out of trouble.

But first: parrrrr-TAY! Livin’ it up one night on the beach, our white folks are drugged and robbed of all their possessions. Seems they’ve stumbled into a conspiracy where vital organs are harvested without consent from stupid Americans. Ironically, your interest will have waned long before this point is reached, provided you had any left after the first scene.

To the surprise of no one who’s seen Stockwell’s work before, Turistas boasts beautiful scenery and expert underwater photography — all wasted on one of the weakest horror films shat out by a major studio in the new millennium’s first decade. Looking pretty means nothing when your words bore others to tears. To borrow the movie’s own tagline, “Go home.” —Rod Lott

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Rushed out to catch a ride on that crazy Blair Witch Project mania, the soundalike-titled The St. Francisville Experiment places four young people overnight in a haunted mansion in the Louisiana town of St. Francisville: a team leader with a poor haircut, a film student with limited vocabulary skills, a busty history major and a dog-faced psychic with front teeth the size of Chiclets.

According to the found-footage film’s prologue, St. Francisville is home to more haunted houses than anywhere in America, and everything we are about to see is real. Oh, bullshit.

So that you don’t think it’s a total rip-off of Blair Witch, a few subtle differences exist:
1) There are four people instead of three.
2) Instead of a creepy basement, there’s a creepy attic.
3) Nobody says “fuck.”

Like Blair Witch, it has few shocks placed between near-excruciating stretches of shot-on-video footage. Unfortunately, its shocks are most tame: Ooh, a chandelier fell! Yikes, the chair moved! Eew, there’s a bug in my sandwich!

The finale is even more ridiculous (not to mention all the proof you need this is faked): Oh, no, the door shut! Yuck, live rats! Help, I’m trapped in a piece of carpet that’s fallen through the floor, just like Tom Hanks in The Money Pit! Directed by Ted Nicolaou (TerrorVision), this Experiment may be better than sitting through Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, but a failure is a failure. —Rod Lott

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The major problem with The Ripper is not that it’s a Jack the Ripper movie made in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but that it looks like a Jack the Ripper movie made in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Although unrelated in story, it forms an unofficial trilogy with director Christopher Lewis’ other video-lensed, T-Town opuses, Blood Cult and its sequel, Revenge — all full of faults, yet full of fun. This one stands out for the participation of splatter icon Tom Savini — not as a special-effects artist, but as an actor, playing none other than London’s most famous 19th-century serial killer.

Clad in cape and top hat, Savini first appears in the flick’s historical prologue depicting the Ripper’s first murder, complete with English accents and a horse-drawn carriage (and, unfortunately, moving cars and working traffic lights). The tale is being told by Professor Hartwell (Tom Schreier, Dark Before Dawn) to his classroom of college students. Hartwell then picks up his girlfriend, dance prof Carol (Mona Van Pernis), to go antique shopping.

While Carol negotiates the price of a brass headboard (discussed so much throughout The Ripper that the piece of furniture deserves screen credit), Hartwell is drawn to an ugly red ring that flashes images of the aforementioned prologue in his head. He later returns to purchase it, and can’t get the ring off his finger. The jewelry gives him nightmares and — gasp — turns him left-handed! It also may or may not have implanted the evil spirit of Jack the Ripper inside him, thereby making him responsible for the sudden string of intestines-yanking of several young ladies around the metro area.

While these gross-out scenes aren’t near the level of what Savini can do, they do look good, especially for Super VHS. As with Lewis’ other slashers, they’re the movie’s raison d’être, leaving less attention paid to other elements, like pacing and performances. As Hartwell’s pet student, Revenge killer Wade Tower gets a sex scene with his girlfriend (Andrea Adams, Blood Lake); she remains clothed, but he bares bright-red briefs. Staying in that same color scheme, New Coke abounds as the characters’ drink of choice. —Rod Lott

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Having watched James Wan “evolve” as a filmmaker — the gruesome Saw, the dull Dead Silence, the better-than-it-should-be Death Sentence — I assumed he’d hit a career stride of making moderately entertaining, derivative genre flicks. Unsurprising, in other words. So color me eight shades of surprised when Insidious, a haunted-house movie that absolutely does not try anything new, grabbed me with old-timey spookhouse values like craftsmanship, sound design and frights instead of gore. It’s so old-school it’s new again.

Insidious joins movies such as The Woman in Black and The Orphanage in the current renaissance of horror films that forgo the genre’s modern cynicism and instead stress atmosphere over blood. Working with a tiny budget, Wan recreates the plot of Poltergeist (child kidnapped into ghost realm; family must retrieve him) without the grandiose effects that made Tobe Hooper’s movie a rollicking funhouse and an exception to the rule that big budgets are death for horror films (looking at you, The Haunting remake). Wan keeps the effects to a minimum, plays with silence (always a good bet for tension), and succeeds in generating actual terror. The most nerve-rattling scene has absolutely no scares at all — just a whispering psychic describing a demon only she can see.

Populating his plot with appealing actors such as Patrick Wilson (Watchmen) and Rose Byrne (28 Weeks Later), Wan keeps the movie on a slow boil, amping up the dread, sprinkling a supply of boo! moments about, and artfully toying with the audience. For two-thirds of its running time, Insidious is one of the scariest movies in recent memory, only stumbling into the realm of rote when it fully reveals “the further,” the netherworld that is pretty much just a lot of fog.

Yet even here, the budgetary restraints lend the goings-on a charm lacking in bigger-budgeted fright flicks (i.e. the abysmally silly ending to Poltergeist II: The Other Side). It’s a forceful reminder that genre filmmakers often do their best work in the low-budget sphere. Let’s pray Sam Raimi doesn’t forget. —Corey Redekop

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Twice in 1989 was Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” brought back to the big screen. One was from Roger Corman, whose 1964 adaptation of the same short story remains the definitive version. The other starred Frank Stallone, who’s not even the definitive Stallone sibling.

Although top-billed, Sly’s younger brother (of the Roller Blade Seven trilogy) isn’t the lead of Masque of the Red Death. That honor goes to debuting Michelle McBride (Subspecies) as Rebecca, a paparazzi photographer who crashes an exclusive costume party at a Bavarian castle in order to surreptitiously snap a soap star (Brenda Vaccaro, Supergirl) who talks about how big her breasts are and how small the other female guests’ breasts are.

It’s the kind of only-in-the-’80s-movies gala, complete with games of human chess, live rock music by a band whose lead singer wears star-shaped sunglasses, and a Fabergé Easter egg hunt. Oh, I almost forgot! There’s also a loon in a red mask (masque?) killing off a lot of the attendees. It’s almost as if he/she is experimenting, since the methods of murder are inconsistent — you’ve got your knife, your sword, your needles (syringe and knitting), your pit and your pendulum …

In barely more than a year’s time, legendary B-movie producer Harry Alan Towers cranked out two other Poe flicks (The House of Usher and Buried Alive bookend this one), all of which are freewheeling with their source material. Poe played in the sandbox of the Gothic; here, director Alan Birkinshaw (Killer’s Moon) plunges into slasher territory. His Masque reveals itself to be awfully silly, but so splashy and colorful to keep from being truly awful. Despite losing all of the original tale’s erudition, it entertains. —Rod Lott

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