Also known as Terror in Toyland, You Better Watch Out and — at least in my book — I Saw Mommy Fucking Santa Claus, the oddball slasher flick Christmas Evil begins on Christmas Eve, 1947, when young Harry spies his father dressed in full Santa regalia getting it on with his mom. This prompts Harry to go upstairs, smash a snow globe and dig into his hand with the broken glass.

Jump ahead a few decades and Harry’s all grown up, now played by Brandon Maggart (Dressed to Kill), a mild-mannered, but ready-to-crack employee at a toy factory. He spends his spare time spying on neighborhood kids with his binoculars and recording their good deeds and misdeeds into leather-bound volumes of Good Boys and Girls and Bad Boys and Girls, one for each year. When he spots the Garcia kid sneaking peeks at Penthouse, he records “impure thoughts” and “negative bodily hygiene” right there along with “pulled Sally’s hair.”

Tired of being bullied and used by his co-workers who refuse to get into the Christmas spirit, Harry paints his van like a sleigh and decks himself out as Santa, ready for a night’s spree of gifts and gore. For instance, he gives a bag of fenced goods to mentally handicapped kids, then slaughters a few snobby parishioners outside their church. He entertains at a holiday party, then murders a co-worker while he sleeps. Yes, this Santa’s all about balance.

You’ll spot Home Improvement matriarch Patricia Richardson in a small role as the mother of the porno-loving kid, but Christmas Evil all belongs to Maggart. He’s hilarious and gives it his all. If he showed this to his own daughter, singer Fiona Apple, it’s no wonder she turned out so screwy. The ending to this — the looniest killer-Santa movie of them all — is a real howler. —Rod Lott

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I hadn’t heard anything about La Setta — aka The Sect, The Devil’s Daughter and Demons 4 — before watching it, but I did so simply because it’s an Italian horror film directed by Michele Soavi (Cemetery Man) and written with the legendary Dario Argento. Looking at the cover, I couldn’t tell what it was about. Looking at the back cover didn’t help, either, because it’s in Italian. Yep, this is one of those movies that could be about anything — funny, because I felt the exact same way after watching it.

It’s supposedly about a woman and her relationship to a sect of Satanists. Lots of things happen. There are lots of squirm-inducing set pieces like bugs up your nose, a scary … well, you know, scary things! Aren’t you scared yet? Context? Sorry. It’s all just ingredients — a plot that isn’t for following, but for yanking you from one contrivance to the next.

The acting isn’t any worse than Soavi’s others, but if your lead actress is going to act like an Italian who’s supposedly an American (or whatever the hell’s going on), you’d better surround that person with a plot that will distract me. As for star Kelly Curtis (Trading Places), her name certainly seems American (and she is, being the sister of Jamie Lee Curtis), but she acts and sounds as if she doesn’t quite have a grasp of the English language or has never observed rational human behavior.

None of her reactions to all the strange goings-on seem very realistic. After having an old man die in your house, then your friend is murdered and then comes briefly back to life to try and kill you, there’s no time to relax, Kelly. It’s time to start figuring shit out. —Richard York

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Jeepers Creepers II is a hair better than its predecessor, but a hair better than shit is still shit.

As the film’s opening crawl informs us, the flying, winged Creeper feasts for 23 days every 23rd spring. We begin on day 22 of such a season, when the youngest son of farmer Ray Wise (TV’s Twin Peaks) is snatched up out of the cornfield and carried away. On the next day, a school bus toting a high school state champion basketball team and assorted cheerleaders blows a tire on the near-deserted highway, thanks to the Creeper’s well-aimed special brand of homemade ninja stars.

With nowhere to go, the bus serves as a Hometown Buffet for the hungry Creeper, at first picking off (or up) all the adults, until Wise shows up for some heavy-duty harpoonin’ with his truck-mounted, jerry-rigged Post Puncher 500.

JCII has its moments, but only a precious few, and fleeting at that. This installment gives the monster far more screen time, but it’s simply the same thing over and over: Creeper attacks; Creeper flies away; Creeper attacks again. If we were supposed to empathize with the characters, writer/director/convicted pedophile Victor Salva could’ve picked another group besides cocky athletes. For my money, the Creeper can’t kill them fast enough.

But then, Salva’s camera wouldn’t be able to linger on their shirtless, hairless upper bodies. It’s hard to believe the film’s overt homoeroticism isn’t at least semi-intentional, what with all the bare chests, the multiple scenes of guys peeing together and dialogue like “You want to poke it with sticks?” and “Can’t they just whip out the jack and pump this mutha up?”

I liked Wise, but then again, I like him in just about anything. I also liked Nicki Aycox (Joy Ride 2: Dead Ahead) as the Girl Who Somehow Has It All Explained to Her in Dreams, but then again, that’s probably because she’s the only hot one. But any horror film that delivers such an illogical ending (so chop it up already, whydon’tcha!) and christens its characters with names like “Double D” and “Big K” deserves a flat-out F. —Rod Lott

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Primal Rage is a rare example of a horror movie that manages to create some degree of tension due entirely to a pre-production fuck-up. When the filmmakers decided not to cast the highly appealing soap star Sarah Buxton as their female lead, but instead as the female lead’s doomed roommate, they made it impossible for viewers not to agonize over the likelihood of her eventual fate — if only because she’s the only remotely sympathetic person in the entire picture. That her painful descent into madness and violent death is suggested to be an indirect punishment for a previous abortion only makes Rage that much more infuriating.

An Italian production shot in the States, the movie is about what happens when university professor Bo Svenson (sporting the most pathetic ponytail in the entire history of mad science) experiments on a monkey, which then goes on to bite a muckracking student journalist who contracts a contagious disease that turns all of its victims (all five of them) into zombie-like homicidal maniacs.

Written by Umberto Lenzi, the auteur responsible for the infamous Cannibal Ferox, and directed by Vittorio Rambaldi, the son of Oscar-winning E.T. FX artist Carlo Rambaldi, Primal Rage is — with the exception of one decapitation near the end — virtually gore-free and filled with cheap-looking effects.

Despite the film being ineffective even as unintentional camp, horror completists might want to watch it as a double feature with Slumber Party Massacre II, if only to make their way through star Patrick Lowe’s entire filmography in just one sitting. —Allan Mott

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Easily the best of three giant-croc offerings from 2007 — Primeval and Black Water being the others — Rogue is a semisolid slice of Ozploitation from Wolf Creek writer/director/producer Greg Mclean.

His near-two-hour tour plops viewers on a two-bit riverboat commanded by Kate Ryan (Radha Mitchell, Pitch Black), an Aussie native who’s never left the territory and seems to love her life of driving tourists up and down the muddy waters of the outback. On the half-full voyage are, among others, a grieving widower; two married couples, one with a teen daughter (Mia Wasikowska, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland); and an American magazine travel writer (Michael Vartan, TV’s Alias).

A flare for help diverts Ryan’s usual route into sacred land. Shortly after finding the flare’s source — ripped to pieces, of course — she and her passengers are bumped by one mega-mammoth crocodile onto a pocket of land. It’d be a safe spot until rescue if it weren’t located in a tidal river, making them sitting ducks at the mercy of ticking time.

A midpoint, midnight set piece in which they attempt to move to safer parts by traversing a rope hanging over the river is a real nerve-wracker, well-orchestrated by Mclean. It’s all downhill from there, mate, as the last third is occupied by a long, quiet stretch of Vartan attempting to outsmart a CGI creation. Had Mclean kept the monster mostly unseen, Rogue may have worked wonders for its entirety.

His camera captures some beautiful scenery of Northern Australia, but also some horrible conditions that make me never want to visit: the unrelenting heat, the ever-present flies, the ass crack of Avatar‘s Sam Worthington. I’ll continue to settle for vicarious, periodic trips to Outback Steakhouse. —Rod Lott

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