Made for TV, the New York-set The Rats originally was slated to air the week of Sept. 11, 2001, until suddenly, broadcasting a Big-Apple-in-peril flick didn’t seem like such a good idea anymore. But aside from a prologue in which the titular creatures short out the electricity in Lady Liberty, there’s nothing all that NYC-centric about it. If it can be set there, it can be set anywhere.

Thousands of aggressive lab rats have decided to fight back against humans, beginning in a posh downtown department store overseen by Twin Peaks’ Mädchen Amick, who is aging well. She calls in exterminator Vincent Spano (Rumble Fish), who is not.

Although it does throw in some rat gore and an attack on kids in a public swimming pool, The Rats runs through the numbers: Disbelieving city officials? Check. Opposite leads who eventually find love through a time of crisis? Check. Minor black supporting character dies? Check. Come up with a cliché, and sooner or later, The Rats gets to it, right down to the ever-predictable it-ain’t-really-over final shot. Child’s Play 2 and Man’s Best Friend director John Lafia does a decent job, having experience with all sorts of beasts, like killer dolls, robot dogs and Ally Sheedy. —Rod Lott

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Early into Wrong Turn 5 — the opening credits, to be exact — a great visual joke is delivered: The first two words of the title plop onscreen over a shot of leaf-covered forest grounds, but the numeral portion is represented by an open hand freshly chopped from the arm of a female jogger. If only writer/director Declan O’Brien (who also helmed the previous year’s Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings) had displayed more of that wit.

Instead, he settles right in to a rote tale of five college kids you won’t care about, much less be able to tell apart — until they’re torn apart, in which case knowing who’s who is made all the easier. They’re camping out at a West Virginia town hosting the annual Mountain Man Festival, a music fest that rivals Coachella, according to the TV news reporter on assignment in the small town’s obvious backlot set. Of course, they’ll never get there.

Wrong Turn 5 assumes you’ve seen every entry of the franchise — all but the 2003 original made expressly for home video — so it need not introduce you to its trio of inbred, mutilated hillbillies who feast on their human victims: Saw-Tooth, One-Eye and Three-Finger, so named for their individual deformities. (Cleft Palate, it appears, was too much of a line-crosser.) Well, I have seen the entire series, and just a smidge of catch-up each time would be appreciated. This installment throws a Pinhead into the mix: Hellraiser icon Doug Bradley, as the killers’ normal-looking father figure.

One can’t complain too much about its economy; this is, after all, a franchise that exists solely to showcase gruesome deaths. In that department, this fifth go-round offers two gloriously gory demises. The best involves one tow truck, two legs and three sledgehammers; the other, a guy buried up to his neck in a soccer field, and a big ol’ piece of farm equipment bearing rotating blades. O’Brien scores by choosing practical effects over computer-generated ones. —Rod Lott

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Seven years after their pledge sister died during an initiation-ceremony round of Russian roulette — hey, shit like that’ll get you kicked off campus — five sorority sisters are invited to attend a mysterious reunion in a seemingly empty ranch house in the middle of nowhere, in Sisters of Death.

Now let’s see: a reunion for just five people? Seven years later? In a far-off locale, with no apparent host? And not one of them bats a fake eyelash to find this the least bit suspicious?

As they soon learn, the host with the most is the flute-playing father of the dead girl, and he wants the life of the trigger girl as repayment. But which of the girls — Playboy Playmate Claudia Jennings among them — did the deed? Oh, well, if he has to kill them one by one to find out, so be it.

So the girls run helplessly around the cavernous house, rooms of which house all kinds of creepy crawlies, like spiders, snakes and Beverly Hills 90210’s Joe E. Tata. The shock ending comes out of nowhere, really, but I have to admire it. —Rod Lott

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In the Italian-America rip-off of The Exorcist known as Beyond the Door, a woman gets pregnant with Satan’s spawn. Viewers may not be sure whether the baby could be odder than the two tots she already has: a daughter who carries a dozen paperback copies of Erich Segal’s Love Story wherever she goes, and a boy who drinks cans of room-temp Campbell’s green pea soup through a straw — not just once, but through the whole movie.

Juliet Mills (TV’s Nanny and the Professor) stars as Jessica, the married San Franciscian whose womb somehow becomes a home for a fast-growing fetus implanted by Ol’ Scratch. Assigned to guard that uterus at all costs is Dimitri (Richard Johnson of Lucio Fulci’s Zombie), in exchange for a few more years of living.

And so, much to the dismay of her husband (Gabriele Lavia, Deep Red) with the Donald Sutherland ‘fro, Jessica vomits blood and levitates and spins and twists her head and throws her hubby across the room and speaks in a smoker’s voice and nibbles off discarded banana peels she finds on the sidewalk.

With the movie’s shameless reason for existing, one expects Beyond the Door will have, to borrow a phrase from Jess’ spouse, “as much balls as a castrated jellyfish.” Luckily, it has more, and they’re filled with crazy. From a standpoint of horror, the glowing-eyed dolls’ attack on the children’s room is a highlight; from one of WTF, it has to be the husband being accosted on the street by an African-American guy aggressively playing the flute with his nose. —Rod Lott

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Did we need to know how Leatherface acquired his trusty power tool? No. Did I mind having the tale told anyway? Eh, not really, although The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning so closely follows the machinations of its 2003 big brother (itself a remake of Tobe Hooper’s 1974 splatter classic), it’s nearly as much as a remake as it is the prequel it proclaims.

The 1939 prologue depicts the birth of Leatherface in, appropriately enough, a slaughterhouse. Abandoned in a Dumpster, the baby is rescued by the Hewitt family, whose Uncle Charlie (R. Lee Ermey, Full Metal Jacket) understandably opines, “That’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Fast-forward to July 1969, the era of Vietnam, where four friends (more or less headed by Jordana Brewster of The Fast and the Furious franchise) in a van find themselves stranded in the middle of nowhere, then at the mercy of a crazed clan of rednecks who live in a spooky house. The big guy carries a chain saw. Sound familiar? It should, right down to the climactic family dinner, with the only key difference being Leatherface not possessing his grisly mask of flesh until he carves it away from one of his victims. Oh, so that’s how he got that … whew! Mystery solved!

Director Jonathan Liebesman (Wrath of the Titans) shoots things so handheld, the film itself risks suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome. The proceeding are too shaky, too dimly lit and too routine, yet there’s a lot to be said for watching Diora Baird (Wedding Crashers) bouncing around as she flees. —Rod Lott

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