Ad copy for Jess Franco’s twisted little horror film promises, “Nothing ever stripped your nerves screamingly raw like The Diabolical Dr. Z!” And that’s true, but mostly because my nerves have never been stripped before, screamingly raw, pan-fried or otherwise.

Presumably “Z” only to his pals, Dr. Zimmer (Antonio Jiménez Escribano, Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror) bides his time wearing Coke-bottle glasses and sticking syringes full of ungodly fluids into kitty cats. Some poor schmo stumbles to their door, so naturally Dr. Z takes him into the lab, shoves a needle through his head and makes the guy his slave.

Then, with his daughter, Irma (Mabel Karr, The Colossus of Rhodes), pushing his wheelchair, he crashes some sort of international cerebral summit, where Dr. Z tells his peers about his research. They don’t exactly scream “Diabolical!,” but they sure don’t cotton to it, either, enraging the good — I mean, diabolical — doctor to the point of a fatal heart attack.

Destined to carry on her father’s work, Irma goes to catch some dinner theater. She sees the brief show of Miss Death (Estella Blain), a young blonde in a see-through black leotard who performs a bizarre interpretive dance number on a floor painted to resemble a spider’s web. (Okay, so it’s not really a “dance” number, as she mostly shimmies across the floor on her tum-tum at a snail’s pace until she reaches Mortimer Snerd’s transvestite cousin. But this display of talent is met with voluminous, approving applause all the same.)

Irma, needless to say, is inspired, so she decides to fake her own death. What Miss Death’s performance had to do with this epiphany was lost on me, but face it: She’s creepy anyway. To me, the smile-free Irma looks like the lead singer of The Cardigans after being locked inside the freezer at KFC for a week.

To fake said death, Irma picks up a hitchhiker that resembles Irma only in that she is female. After stopping for a swim, Irma runs the girl over with the car. As she’s dousing the vehicle with gasoline from her neighborhood Mobil (who knew Franco was into product placement?), she gets burned herself, which causes her to acquire what looks like a guacamole beard. No problem — with the help of a mirror, she simply numbs her face and carves a scalpel into it.

With her death now faked, she poses as a Hollywood big shot to lure Miss Death into her clutches. The ruse works, as Miss Death is as dumb as rocks, and Irma uses her to do her dirty work, murdering the doctors who laughed at her father.

With lots of needle-stickin’ action, Dr. Z is a first-rate flick from Franco (Vampyros Lesbos), who has an eye for shot composition and a feel for ambience, yet rarely had good material. —Rod Lott

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Deride it all you want, but Paranormal Activity 4 performs a valuable public service by illustrating the dangers of helping a hot single mom in need.

The found-footage film begins with the end of Paranormal Activity 2, which saw the demon-possessed Katie (Katie Featherston) kidnapping her infant nephew, Hunter; a title card informs us neither has been seen since. Turns out, Katie and her creepy kid, Robbie (Brady Allen), live right across the street from Alex (Kathryn Newton, Bad Teacher), the blonde teen through whose eyes — or various camera lenses, to be technically precise — we see the events unfold.

Katie has to go to the hospital for a few days, so Alex’s pushover parents (Alexondra Lee and Stephen Dunham, married in real life until his unfortunate death shortly before the film’s release) take in Robbie … and his imaginary friend, who turns out to be not particularly a figment of imagination. In fact, the malevolent spirit tries to kill Alex with a falling chandelier and lifts her off the bed. It also plays Xbox.

Needless to say, more sinister forces are at play, and discovering them on your own is part of the fun. This franchise continues to be a punching bag for many, yet each entry to date is wildly profitable and popular, and I’ve figured out why: They work. They tap into one of the most common fears shared by all: that someone — or something — might be in our house, invading our personal space, penetrating that one place we feel safe. And if we can’t feel safe there, boy, are we screwed.

The fact that Hollywood can do all that for relative pennies helps, too. —Rod Lott

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Damn, do I love a great haunted-house movie! And then there’s Ghosthouse.

In a large Massachusetts home — a ghosthouse, if you will — 11-year-old Henriette Baker (Kristen Fougerousse) stabs the family cat. As punishment, her father locks the girl in the basement, where she hugs her terrifying clown doll for comfort. Upstairs, somehow (and never explained, because ghosthouse), her parents are slaughtered brutally.

Flash-forward 20 years later, when Paul (Greg Scott, Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II), a ham radio operator who makes a good bowl of chili, hears a cry for help over the airwaves, so he and his girlfriend (Lara Wendel, Tenebre) track the plea to its source: our ghosthouse.

Other dumb young people are there camping out, so they all experience the manse’s terrors together: a head in the washing machine, a Doberman with nips the size of novelty giant pencil erasers, a sink that spews blood, an errant fan blade, a rocking camper, visions of the creepy Henriette and her clown doll, which occasionally sports fangs and looks to have been ordered straight from the Poltergeist merch store.

As Paul says, “It’s all just one big horrible mess.” The same can be said for the movie, directed with by-the-numbers passivity by Umberto Lenzi (Cannibal Ferox). Little effort is put toward spatial orientation in the titular residence; even less toward the script, built upon illogic. Lenzi seems intent only on getting his money’s worth for its indecipherable theme song, played in part no fewer than 17 times in 95 minutes, yet one that drives you insane upon first listen. —Rod Lott

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With Prison, the question is not “Remember when director Renny Harlin was good?,” but “Remember a world before we even knew who Renny Harlin was?” Produced and conceived by Halloween shepherd Irwin Yablans, the film marks a calling card of sorts for the then-no-name Harlin, who earned A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master from there and turned it into that franchise’s biggest entry at the time, which then vaulted him onto the A list with Die Hard 2.

As history has told us, ego kept him from staying there, but we’ll focus on the positive: Prison is a pretty decent, fairly ingenious flick for its meager budget.

Being abandoned since 1968, Wyoming State Penitentiary is something of an inhumane shithole, but 300 transferred prisoners are on their way over, squalid conditions and all. Lording over the grim castle of concrete is Warden Sharpe (Lane Smith, Dark Night of the Scarecrow), an unhappy bully of a man who believes in punishment, not rehabilitation.

Under Sharpe’s orders, inmate Burke (a baby-faced Viggo Mortensen, A History of Violence) breaks through a wall to reach the old execution chamber. In doing so, Burke inadvertently unleashes a malevolent spirit. Although represented on film as baby-blue light, this supernatural force is one mean sumbitch. It fatally roasts one prisoner confined to solitary, thwarts a would-be escapee in a tangle of wires and pipes, and wraps a guard in a tight hug of barbed wire.

Frightening is hardly the word for it, but the effects are impressive, especially in this pre-CGI era. There’s more to admire beyond that, including the novelty of seeing the reliable character actor Smith in a rare lead role. Mortensen shows quiet glimpses of the greatness to come; the underrated Chelsea Field (The Last Boy Scout) provides some much-needed estrogen for balance; and a few of the inmates stand out for their weird quirks, from harboring a Rambo fetish to drinking Lysol as if it were lemonade. Hey, when life gives you life behind bars … —Rod Lott

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Where would horror movies be without slime? It’s the perfect go-to method for disguising effect flaws while making the audience squirm with disgust. Enter From Beyond, the movie that puts the “goo” in “goopy.” Its chief monster, the dimensionally disfigured Dr. Pretorius (Ted Sorel, Basket Case 2), almost puts John Carpenter’s Thing alien to shame with its overall shape-shifting malleability and gallons of ooze.

As if that weren’t enough, the movie as a whole is an excellent exercise in mad science, sadomasochistic inventiveness and squirrelly Jeffrey Combs-ian insanity. Combs is Crawford Tillinghast, lab assistant to Pretorius, inventor of the resonator, a device that allows all within its psychic field to perceive the myriad transdimensional beasts that surround us all the time. After Pretorius’ head is removed by something from beyond (“It bit off his head like a gingerbread man!”), Tillinghast is persuaded to restart the experiment by psychiatrist Katherine McMichaels (Barbara Crampton) and cop Bubba Brownlee (Ken Foree, 1978’s Dawn of the Dead), because science.

True to form, the resonator shows them the world lying just beyond our eyesight. It also stimulates the pineal gland, which leads to increased libido (good), a third eye protruding from a stalk on the forehead (bad), and a taste for human brains (um … good?). This leads to the classic scene where the sexually repressed Dr. McMichaels unleashes her inner goddess, dresses up in leather, and gropes an unconscious Tillinghast. Crampton never quite sells the “psychiatrist” aspect of her character — when will people learn that glasses do not a scientist make? — but she absolutely nails the sex-maniac part.

Making the most of a meager budget, director Stuart Gordon bathes his horror in a gorgeous giallo lighting scheme and buckets of ectoplasm. Famed for his previous H.P. Lovecraft adaptation, Re-Animator (which also starred both Combs and Crampton), From Beyond is the stronger film, completely unafraid to delve into utterly depraved areas. Combs is reliably strange and wonderful; Foree plays the Ken Foree role to the hilt; Crampton goes places few actors would let themselves go; and the makeup artists, working with practically no money, rose to the challenge with inventive prosthetics and copious gore.

And, of course, slime. By the end, as Tillinghast and Pretorious wage a mucus-bathed battle that literally turns each of them inside out, From Beyond makes a compelling case for itself as the slimiest movie ever. —Corey Redekop

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