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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With Faceless, director Jess Franco updated — unofficially, of course — 1960’s Eyes Without a Face, George Franju’s groundbreaking French classic about a mad surgeon who’ll do anything to give his facially wrecked daughter a new visage, even murder. The main changes in Franco’s work is that he made the victim the doc’s sister, and he threw in the sex and gore not permissible two decades prior. While messy onscreen, the results are tight by Franco’s standards.

In Paris, Ingrid (Christiane Jean, 1982’s Les Misérables) wears a mask to hide her acid-ravaged mug from an attack meant for her brother, Dr. Flammand (Helmut Berger, Salon Kitty). Her face looks like Wheaties left in a cereal bowl, but not forever, provided her brother can find the perfect “donor.” To that end, the physician has been kidnapping and imprisoning the most beautiful women across Gay Paree, and hired a Nazi doctor (Anton Diffring, Fahrenheit 451) — a former colleague of Josef Mengele, no less! — to aid in the surgery room with the “total face transplants.”

Unfortunately for Team Flammand, one of its recent acquisitions is a coke-snorting model (Caroline Munro, The Last Horror Film) whose pappy (Telly Savalas, Lisa and the Devil) has hired a P.I. (Christopher Mitchum, Ricco the Mean Machine) to locate her.

That he will is a given — how many murders will occur between now and then is the unknown variable, but with Franco at the helm, viewers can be assured the numeral won’t be low. Even without all the botched face-transplant procedures, Faceless is full of realistic-looking ick, from a syringe plunged in the eye to a power drill bored through the forehead. (More offensive is the film’s smooth-jazz theme song, played nearly as many times as Franco has movies, and definitely more times than Mitchum has expressions.)

With a concept that worked wonders for Franju, Franco virtually was assured a notch in the win column. That the X can be bolded is a sign of him giving this one some tender love. As graphic horror, as a sex-charged thriller, as a time capsule of big hair, as proof of Munro at her most drop-dead gorgeous, Faceless succeeds with a smile on your part and a scream on theirs. —Rod Lott

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Meet Frank Zito. He’s a Maniac, Maniac, I sure know, and all because he was locked in the closet as a boy.

As played by Starcrash‘s Joe Spinell, who co-wrote the screenplay, Zito is a sweaty louse, looking like a slightly taller Ron Jeremy. He has extreme mommy issues, to the point where he sleeps with and talks to mannequins, which he dresses up in lingerie, makeup and wigs.

He also spends his nights murdering women, from strangling a hooker in hot pants to stabbing a nurse in a subway bathroom. Seconds after each kill, Zito scalps them. While the ladies are his target, pity any man who should get in his way — ergo, the film’s famous slow-motion explosion of the head of effects artist Tom Savini (credited as “Disco Boy”) via shotgun.

In professional photographer Anna (Caroline Munro, Slaughter High), Zito actually meets a woman he doesn’t want to kill — at least not immediately. To get close to her, Zito fibs that he’s a painter. Speaking of, Maniac is a portrait — both literal and metaphorical — of Times Square at its seediest. Director William Lustig (Maniac Cop) seems to capture every grain of dirt, every bead of sweat, every smear of grease, and every puddle of God-knows-what. It looks as grimy as its subject matter feels, so much that you might want to shower afterward.

As 42nd Street-ready as they come, the flick enjoys an undying reputation as being so gory it’s disturbing, but I found it more dull and slow than anything else. —Rod Lott

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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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