More lucid than Jess Franco’s usual directorial output (but not much), Bloody Moon sets its slasher sights on a language school in Spain. Sporting a sign with those peel-and-stick letters from your local Ace Hardware, the new institution has 40 female students and nearly as many red herrings.

One of its employees, Manuela (Nadja Gerganoff), gets a new roomie in her brother, Miguel (Alexander Waechter). Noticeable because the entire right side of his face is a giant scab, Miguel arrives fresh from serving time for stabbing a girl with scissors. Soon after he moves to campus and renews his incestuous relationship with Sis, the school’s elderly benefactor (María Rubio) is torched in bed, setting off a string of brutal murders.

The remaining victims, however, are the students. Since they’re all beautiful, it’s tough to tell them apart. I could do so only by how each is dispatched: a knife through the nipple, a head removed by a circular saw, and so on. Eventually, we learn we have a lead by default in the lovely Olivia Pascal (1977’s Vanessa).

Predictably, Franco loves to paint his canvas with the bright-red stuff, so it should not disappoint fans of ever-decreasing casts. Bloody Moon is equally colorful in depicting the landscape’s tranquil beauty as it is scenes of savagery. There’s a feeling of mishmash that exists in the shapeless script by Contamination’s Erich Tomek — one that willy-nilly throws in can’t-be-accidental nods to Psycho and Halloween — so laser-accurate focus is not to be expected. Pouring plasma, however? Positive. —Rod Lott

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Horror author Clive Barker’s last (to date) directorial effort Lord of Illusions manages to cram almost everything I love into one two-hour package. It has Clive Barker (natch). It has gore. It has magicians. It has seedy detectives. It has pseudo-profundity. It has religious fanaticism. It has practical makeup effects courtesy of KNB. It has Famke Janssen (X-Men). Only if you threw in an appearance by Fast Times at Ridgemont High‘s Vincent Schiavelli would I love it more. Wait, he’s in it, too!

Scott Bakula (TV’s Quantum Leap) gets an all-too-rare leading role as Harry D’Amour, a P.I. who finds himself constantly drawn to supernatural phenomena. A case involving the apparent death of a Las Vegas illusionist (the invaluable Kevin J. O’Connor, Deep Rising) leads D’Amour to Nix, a cult leader better known as The Puritan (The Faculty‘s Daniel von Bargen, just wonderfully crazy).

Barker isn’t nearly enough of a stylist to pull off the vibe he’s going for (Raymond Chandler meets The Exorcist), and there are times when I find myself wishing someone like John Carpenter had been allowed a crack at the material. Working with his largest budget, Lord of Illusions is an accomplished movie, but it could use a healthy dose of the low-budget dementedness Barker brought to 1987’s Hellraiser.

But somehow, for me, it doesn’t matter that the technique is lumpy, or that a few of the special effects are iffy. Because there’s a private dick who describes an exorcism as “the usual,” and who greets the resurrection of a demon-man with a perfectly timed “Fuck.” There’s a decayed demigod who intones, “I was born to murder the world,” before slaying all of his followers. There’s an acolyte who waves knives and prances about menacingly in spandex pants. There’s a magic trick involving falling swords that goes horribly wrong. There’s a corpse-reanimation sequence that gave me nightmares. There’s a hole that appears to literally reach the center of the Earth.

And again, there’s Famke Janssen. —Corey Redekop

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In the despicable, dirty and even depressing The Killer Snakes (that’s all the recommendation you need, right?), the saddest sad-sack character I may have ever seen in movie history works one dead-end job after another and sleeps in a shack with pornographic pictures taped to the ceiling over his bed.

He gets bullied a lot by just about everyone with whom he comes into contact — skinny, street-corner whores included. The guy is in such dire need of a haircut and a flea dip that I could barely stand to watch him. I’m still unsure as to whether his character is supposed to have a mild mental handicap or if the movie is just that poorly dubbed.

After a hard day of being fired from the place where they serve the innards of snakes’ gall bladders and being caught masturbating by the woman he loves from afar, this miserable little man befriends an injured cobra in his shack. The cobra is sad because his gall bladder has been taken from him without his consent. So our hero zero sews him up and nurses him back to health, affording the same treatment to all the serpent’s equally scaly pals, also robbed of this organ.

Somewhere along the way, he trains the snakes to attack and kill, although we never see this most difficult of training processes. It’s time for revenge. First he goes to the whorehouse where earlier he was the recipient of much kicking and abuse. He does his business with the hooker most resembling circus clown Emmett Kelly (in a scene so entirely disgusting you’ll want to shower) and then lets the cobras go full-fang at her bodyguards, while she faints. He takes the unconscious whore home, ties her up and then lets the slithering creatures have sloppy seconds.

Starring Kurt Lang (Purple Storm), Maggie Lee (Kung Fu: The Punch of Death) and “1001 killer snakes” (per its poster), the Shaw Brothers production is one of the more perverted and sick-minded exploitation offerings I’ve seen. Its X rating is well-deserved. —Rod Lott

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Wes Craven’s My Soul to Take arrives with such a preposterous premise: that seven premature babies born the night of the death of a serial killer grow up as mirrors of his personality. (Granted, the dude did expire at midnight sharp, but c’mon!)

However, his kitchen-sink prologue makes me think the ludicrous nature of it all is intended, like a self-parody that was perhaps two notes too subtle for mass audiences to notice. Scream, it is not — but it is better than what would be Craven’s follow-up, 2011’s Scream 4.

Sixteen years after that over-the-top opening, the so-called Riverton Ripper — he of the cruelly curved blade emblazoned with the word “VENGEANCE” — is back. This time, his targets are those birthday boys and girls, including the asshole jock, the blind minority, the Jesus freak (“If things get too hot, just turn on the prayer conditioning”), the abused misfit and our protagonist, the unpopular and possibly schizophrenic Bug (Max Thieriot, TV’s Bates Motel).

The Ripper is easy to spot: He resembles a prematurely bald Rob Zombie and soup-kitchen hobo. It’s an unsettling and decidedly odd choice for a villain, but the misunderstood My Soul to Take is nothing if not a picture that bops along on its own unusual, discordant rhythms. Love it or hate it, you haven’t quite seen this film done this way before. It’s wildly imperfect, but interesting in its insanity, which is enough for me. —Rod Lott

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Purportedly based on an Edgar Allan Poe short story, this film is just about as much Poe’s as some scoutmaster spinning tales around a campfire. The Argentine/American patchwork oddity Legend of Horror throws the young Pierre — he of the Elvis sideburns — into a dank prison cell with the wacky-ass, hygiene-neglecting Sidney. This Sidney fellow cackles like a hobo on ripple and has forged an unhealthy friendship with a mouse, predating The Green Mile by a good three decades.

As the two cellmates plot their escape, Sidney entertains Pierre with a story about how ended up in this good-for-nuthin’ place. Switch to a “flashback” (really a dubbed, sizable chunk of another movie altogether, 1960’s Masterworks of Terror) in which a then-strapping Sidney visits his uncle, a clock salesman with a bad eye and a piss-poor attitude toward customer service.

In due time, Uncle Freaky-Eye pushes Sidney to the breaking point, whereupon young Sid smothers the bastard with a pillow. As the cops interview him regarding his uncle’s disappearance, Sidney is driven to a confession by hearing the heartbeat of the corpse. (All ties to Poe begin and end in that one scene.)

Jump back to our prisoners, who have busted out of the joint and seek refuge. Sidney kills a couple of guards who come after them, but to the delight of the audience, does so via the magic of “Magicmation” — a fancy cinematic term for “stop-motion!” At the end, all the people Sidney has killed come back to life and cause him to be impaled in a graveyard. For no discernible reason, the film abruptly ditches the black-and-white format for a splash o’ color. Never you mind — it just makes it that much more of a hoot. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Something Weird Video.