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
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
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
A real ladies’ man of an author (William Joyce) is convinced by his publisher to hop a flight from Miami to the Caribbean isle of Voodoo, because he thinks the stories of human sacrifices there might make good research for a rip-roarin’ adventure novel. Our writer is not convinced, however, until he hears of the island’s 5-to-1 girl-guy ratio, and he’s all, like, “Homina homina homina!”
Armed with a litany of sleazy pick-up lines (ranging from “What part of heaven did you fly out from?” to the less subtle “We’ve got some dictation to do!”), he soon scores with a blonde bombshell (Heather Hewitt), whose father is a scientist who feeds radiated snake venom to natives, turning them into crusty-faced, bug-eyed zombies. Although our hero quickly dispatches one with a tiki torch to the face, a random Mexican isn’t so lucky, losing his head to a zombie-slung machete.
I Eat Your Skin was directed by Del Tenney, the guy who gave us the legendarily awful Horror of Party Beach, and it shows. You get to see a tube shoved down the throat of a live snake, and when an alarm goes off, you also get to hear someone saying “Whoop!” repeatedly on the soundtrack. Certainly a cheapie like this can’t be scary, but it’s definitely charming in its own Playboy After Dark meets Revolt of the Zombies kinda way. —Rod Lott
Few films have had such a long and troubled history as Exorcist: The Beginning, the fourth (or technically, fifth) film in the not-so-lucrative franchise. The Reader’s Digest version: Execs so hated Paul Schrader’s cut, that rather than salvage it in editing, they opted to start from scratch with a whole new script and cast. For this, they logically hired Renny Harlin, because apparently, making two movies with Sly Stallone (Cliffhanger and Driven) qualifies you as the go-to guy for psychological horror. And the end result? Not as interesting as that explanation. Mind you, this prequel is not a hoot-and-holler laughfest that was Exorcist II: The Heretic. But neither is it the woefully underrated thriller that is Exorcist III.
Stellan Skarsgård (The Avengers) stars as Father Merrin (Max von Sydow’s character from the 1973 original), in a story about his first face-to-face showdown with the devil. It’s the 1940s, and following a test of faith which he feels he’s failed, he’s no longer a man of the cloth, but a freelance archaeologist. He’s hired to go to East Africa to locate a valuable artifact, being the demon Pazuzu. While there, he finds a Catholic church buried beneath the sand that’s not on any historical record of the Vatican. And buried beneath that? An evil cave!
That’s when all the CGI creatures start attacking. Sadly, Harlin’s idea of a scare is to suddenly make one of these — a crow, a bat, a fly — suddenly appear, accompanied by a loud musical cue. It’ll make you jump all right, but only because your ears have been rendered deaf. A pack of hyenas get the most screen time, but unfortunately, they look as fake as the dog in the Scooby-Doo live-action movies. Just as forced is Merrin’s burgeoning romance with the village’s hottie doctor, played by Izabella Scorupco (GoldenEye). Having forsaken the almighty, Merrin makes a valiant pass for her pants. But no sooner have they locked lips when the bed of a sleeping kid mere feet away suddenly jumps across the floor and shakes violently. Lemme tell you, it’s an erection killer.
I was really only intrigued by the finale, which has Merrin regaining his Jesus powers and using them against a supporting character who’s all Sataned out, looking not coincidentally like Linda Blair’s possessed Regan. But that’s, what, 10 minutes out of nearly two hours? Granted, a few more scenes keep The Beginning from being a total loss:
• Lucifer snaps the bones of various local tribesmen attempting some voodoo-magic exorcism.
• A villager gives birth to a bloody baby covered in live maggots.
• Izabella takes a shower and you see half a booby. —Rod Lott
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. 
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.
