Rumor has it that a recent rash of suicides among young people in Japan is due to a bully taking revenge for past transgressions. Why else would the victims have a large “X” branded so crudely onto their faces?

After his sixth-grade teacher “leaps” to his death, Hideaki (Hirofumi Araki) strongly suspects it to be the work of Mariko, a pale, homely girl who was teased mercilessly that year of grade school before transferring. Her abusers engaged in a game called “X Game,” in which Mariko was made to pull slips of paper from a pink box; whatever demeaning act was scrawled on those scraps was what they would do to her, from forcing her to sit atop thumbtacks to lighting her hair on fire.

Karma’s a bitch, as Hideaki and three former classmates find out when they find themselves trapped in a caged room made to look like their elementary school room and guarded by two hooded men armed with cattle prods. Mariko has infused ye olde X Game with modern technology; as monitors explain to our captive quartet, they’re to enact 13 punishments, with the victim of each determined at random. Whether that’s being force-fed gallons of milk via a tube or eating a meal of fried rice and maggots, they have three minutes to comply or they’re whisked away for a branding, then returned to the game.

I need not tell you that X Game is a J-horror response to Saw; you might surmise that simply from reading the title. So was director Yôhei Fukuda’s earlier pair of Death Tube movies, but this effort is more polished in both script and sights. At a hair under two hours, it’s still too long by a quarter, yet devious enough to satisfy fans of the madman-run-contest subgenre. —Rod Lott

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Fabrice A. Zaphiratos’ directorial debut and swan song, Bloodbeat, is confused, yet unique. Name one other regional horror film in which rednecks encounter a woman possessed by the spirit of an ancient samurai warrior. Why such a setup? “Why the eff not,” Zaphiratos seems to answer.

It’s Christmastime, and at a rural Wisconsin home just good enough for indoor plumbing, the grown children of artist Cathy (Helen Benton) — she of the ever-present rainbow shawl — have come for a visit. Ted (James Fitzgibbons) has brought along his new girlfriend, Sarah (Claudia Peyton), to whom his mother takes an instant dislike. Sarah reciprocates, telling Ted that she feels like Cathy is invading her mind. Later, Cathy confesses she swears she’s met the girl before: “It’s more than déjà vu.”

What it is remains unclear, but an armored, helmeted samurai who glows blue and brandishes a sword starts killing countryfolk, including an overweight man who wears a dirty CAT Trucking cap to bed. As the samurai penetrates flesh, Sarah is wrapped up in the sheets, writhing in such orgasmic bliss that her pelvis would practically touch the ceiling fan, if the family had one. In Cathy’s home, lights flicker, windows open, groceries shake; her live-in hunter beau, Gary (Terry Brown), is nearly killed by flying packages of Lipton Tea and Quik.

Zaphiratos displays some serious bravado by daring to score the film’s climax with “O Fortuna” from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, a staple of action-film trailers. Make no mistake, however: Bloodbeat is no work of operatic tragedy. Amateurish on all levels, it has more in common with the deer entrails Gary pulls out with his bare hands: messy, smelly, something you’d rather not see. —Rod Lott

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One could read the second word of Saint Nick‘s title as not just a name, but a verb, as in “to cut into or wound,” for the unheralded film is the Netherlands’ entry in the horror subgenre of Santa Claus slashers. Both tongue-in-cheek and ax-in-face, writer/director Dick Maas’ movie loves to spill the red stuff — ho-ho-homicide!

Being set in modern-day Amsterdam, the shiny-as-tinsel film cannot be mistaken for our Silent Night, Deadly Night — not with all the seasonal-clad prostitutes waving from windows and talk of gobbling down marzipan. Even more, the slaying Saint Nicholas (Huub Stapel, Maas’ Amsterdamned) is informed by Old World design; with a red robe and a pointy hat, he bears more than a slight resemblance to the Pope. The difference is the leader of the Catholic Church does not rides across rooftops on a horse, nor carry a staff just sharp enough to make decapitation a breeze.

Legend has it that every time there’s a full moon on Dec. 5, Saint Nicholas rises from the dead to avenge his death in 1492. But to 25-year police veteran Goert Hoekstra (Bert Luppes, Black Book), it is no legend — his entire family, kiddos included, succumbed to the slaughter in 1968. The only person who believes the cop is a college guy (Egbert Jan Weeber) nursing a broken heart, because he just watched his pals in blackface get murdered on their way to a sorority party.

Presenting a nasty sense of humor throughout, Saint Nick has the air of feeling original, although it clearly isn’t, up until the tired climactic battle to the (not) finish. But in a film like this, all that matters is that heads roll, bodies are stuffed up chimneys, torsos are halved, and so on. Those happen. —Rod Lott

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Sixth in the Amityville Horror series, Amityville 1992 is, in my suspect estimation, worth watching at least once for four reasons:
1. Former Miss USA Shawn Weatherly gets naked;
2. Megan Ward strips to her underwear;
3. You have to admire a movie with the balls to use its release date and a pun in its title; and
4. It’s supremely silly.

Lipless architect Jacob Sterling (Stephen Macht, The Monster Squad) returns home from a work trip to Amityville with an antique clock he purchased there. I’m sorry, did I say “clock”? I meant an evil clock!

Once placed on the mantle, the evil clock screws itself put and immediately unlocks a time/dimension rift, causing the family members to do strange things. Jacob gets cinema’s nastiest dog bite and goes insane, while his goody-two-shoes daughter (Ward, TV’s Dark Skies) turns into a sex vixen overnight, yet turns her would-be fluid-swapping partner into a puddle of acidic goo.

The Macht vs. Doberman duel is something to see, especially when it ends with him stabbing the pooch with a broken glass bottle; PETA members will applaud later when Weatherly penetrates his leg with a fireplace poker. You’ve also got to enjoy the irony of the wacky neighbor lady narrowly missing getting creamed by a diaper truck, only to be impaled by the stork figure that then falls off it.

The proceedings are pretty bloody, which one expects from Hellbound: Hellraiser II director Tony Randel. However, thanks to a leaden script, you feel like the movie might be a victim of the clock’s time/dimension rift as well. But moments are moments, and the bare, sweaty, hanging bosom of Ms. Weatherly (Police Academy 3: Back in Training) certainly counts for something. —Rod Lott

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From 1987, Mad Ron’s Prevues from Hell was one of those dime-a-dozen trailer collections from the VHS heyday I never expected to hit DVD, but in 2010, it finally did, and evidently was successful enough to merit a sequel in Celluloid Bloodbath: More Prevues from Hell. Once again, it’s hosted in part by Happy Goldsplatt, a Cryptkeeper-esque puppet who notes that, in the grindhouse age, the trailers often were more entertaining than the flicks they promoted.

Celluloid Bloodbath offers 62 examples, broken up into themed groups that range from your obvious vampires, psychos and cannibals to more clever categories like carnival horrors, promotional gimmicks and killer animals. Italian maestro Dario Argento gets his own short showcase to close out the collection.

Among the madness are the “weird, winged wonders” and “hideous, horned horrors” of the Philippines-lensed The Twilight People, the pantyhosed thrill-killers of Meat Cleaver Massacre, and the misbegotten Monster a-Go Go “with a genuine, 10-foot-tall monster to give you the whim-whams.” Sales lines like that often prove the highlights; the circus-set Berserk! offers a yes-or-no quiz to potential viewers, i.e. “I get stabbing pains when I see a victim fall on naked bayonets!”

While not as deep-digging as Synapse’s 42nd Street Forever series, Celluloid Bloodbath does sport a couple of real obscurities in its lineup, including Alabama’s Ghost. Yet what infuriates is that, unlike the original, “interview” segments break the flow after every pair or so. Some are relevant, such as Linnea Quigley introducing her film debut in Psycho from Texas (“Now, bitch, let’s dance!”), but most have nothing to do with anything, are shot at some dreary convention, and feature non-names who have nothing of value to contribute. —Rod Lott

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