Lil’ Audrey Rose, age 5, is killed within the first minute of the film that bears her name, burning to death with her mother in their overturned car, following a head-on collision on the highway. Several years later, a man in a novelty beard (Anthony Hopkins, The Silence of the Lambs) is seen stalking the Templeton family all over New York City, from Central Park to their 11-year-old daughter’s private school.

What links the two events? As Elliot Hoover (Hopkins) tells Mr. and Mrs. Templeton (Rollerball‘s John Beck and Heartbreak Ridge‘s Marsha Mason) after persuading them to meet him, he firmly believes that the soul of his dead daughter, Audrey, resides in the body of their very much alive one, Ivy (Susan Swift, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, in a great child-actor performance). Naturally, the parents think he’s nucking futs, but you know, come to think of it, Ivy has been experiencing some violent nightmares. Soon, she’s throwing herself all over their West 67th apartment like she’s going for the gold at a gymnastics tourney, all while supposedly asleep.

Judging from his work helming 1963’s The Haunting and, to a lesser degree, 1949’s Curse of the Cat People, director Robert Wise once knew what worked in horror — especially that which is suggested rather than seen — but exhibits that skill only in Audrey‘s first half. Before taking a huge shift in story direction, Wise achieves a creepy uneasiness that will remind viewers of The Exorcist‘s early scenes, as an apple-cheeked only child not suffering from a lack of parental love and attention suddenly becomes inexplicably abnormal.

What kills the momentum? Hoover tries to convince the Templetons to allow him access to Ivy, in order to free Audrey’s soul that cries out for help. This leads to the film becoming a courtroom drama, like Kramer vs. Kramer for the pro-reincarnation community. Stock footage of funeral practices in India is about the least of the back half’s problems when one considers a lengthy hypnosis session and an ending so terrible, it’s insulting. Letting Frank De Felitta (The Entity) adapt his own novel was perhaps not so Wise, Bob. —Rod Lott

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In 1940, the entire population of Friar, N.H., scaled a mountain trail. Only one person survived, and he went crazy; the others 571 were found frozen, slaughtered or not found at all. Nearly 70 years later, a small group of obsessives follows the same path to unravel the mystery. Interesting premise you have there, YellowBrickRoad, and one you botched completely. Its crime is not being purposefully vague, but utterly boring.

Led by Teddy Barnes (Michael Laurino) and his wife, Melissa (Anessa Ramsey, The Signal), who plan on co-authoring a book on their subject, the group of eight take a hike — literally! — and unfortunately, it feels like one shot in real-time. After a long stretch, weird things start to happen to them — the kind a $500,000 budget can afford: Teddy having nightmares, a compass going willy-nilly, and all hearing music of the old-timey, juke-joint variety that used to score Betty Boop cartoon shorts.

One by one, step by step, the campers sloooooowly go bonkers, and periodic video interviews captured by a psych professor (Alex Draper, Mimic 2) demonstrate their increasing loss of memory and deteriorating spatial orientation. But that doesn’t count as anything “happening.” Little does until the final hour, when — spoiler alert — the mapmaker (Clark Freeman) rips off the leg of his sister (Cassidy Freeman, TV’s Smallville) after she runs off with a stinky hat he found along the trail while urinating. Swiper, no swiping!

Written and directed by feature first-timers Jesse Holland and Andy Mitton, YellowBrickRoad is like having a piping-hot slice of pizza placed in front of you, but being told not to eat it for a while: It looks good and smells good, yet when you finally take a bite, its lukewarm blandness has even your taste buds questioning whether it was worth the effort. The difference is that the movie is interminable, right up to the pointless, pretentious end. At least it’s not a found-footage film, but you’ll still want to click your heels.

Lordy, it’s the worst. As one of its taglines reads right on the DVD cover, “DO NOT FOLLOW.” You’ve been warned. —Rod Lott

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Three decades passed between the 10-year-old me being intrigued by the TV ads for The Boogens and actually being able to see the film. I wasn’t disappointed, because the little horror film is pretty solid. I should have expected as much, considering how many images from those 30-second commercials never left my mind. They were exactly as I remembered them.

The opening credits rely the backstory through vintage newspaper front pages: A small town in the Colorado Rockies briefly was a pay-dirt place for mining silver … until the “attacks” happened, and the mines were closed. Years later, they’re reopened, and the dynamite unleashes the Boogens — creatures that look like the evil spawn of a turtle and a giant spider, with tentacles spiked at the end for maximum neck-slashing action.

Although largely unseen until the picture’s end, the monsters take shelter in the basement of a house into which two young, virile hired hands (an extra-randy Jeff Harlan and Xanadu‘s Fred McCarren) move. Girlfriend Anne-Marie Martin (TV’s Sledge Hammer) and her pal Rebecca Balding (Silent Scream) come to visit, bringing along a yappy little dog that’s actually a darn good actor, as far as animals go. That they won’t all last until the end is a given, but how and in what order?

Despite its goofy, ooga-booga title — never spoken by any of the characters — the film takes itself at just the right level of seriousness; it’s not the piece of quick-buck schlock I feared it might be. Director James L. Conway (Hangar 18) tells the story earnestly, making it a welcome respite from the era’s slasher craze. Smarter than you’d think and lagging only in the middle, The Boogens recalls the creature features of yore — perhaps not with class, but definitely with ingenuity that belies its low budget. —Rod Lott

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Twice a year, you’re supposed to spread pre-emergent fertilizer on your lawn to prevent weeds from ever popping up. Someone should have done the same to The Ruins, a terrible killer-vines horror flick based upon Scott Smith’s not-at-all-terrible 2006 novel of the same name.

Two couples of college kids vacationing in Mexico meet a charismatic German guy who needs help finding his brother, from whom he’s heard no word since venturing out on a trip to check out some ancient ruins in the nearby jungle. Somehow, this seems like a viable alternative to another day of drinking and doing it, so our quartet of all-American students agrees to help the complete stranger out.

Bad move. No sooner do they arrive on the site — which looks like a stair-step stone temple — than locals speaking a foreign tongue shoot one of their new friend’s friends, via an arrow to the heart and a bullet through the nose. This drives our imperiled heroes and heroines to the top of the site, where they’re imprisoned by the growing armed throng below. Then there’s the matter of the ruins’ plant life: It’s, like, alive, dude. And it eats people by burrowing into their skin and moving around. With precious little food or water and seemingly no hope to get through the human gauntlet below, the collegians’ future doesn’t look so rosy.

It’s hard to fathom why The Ruins is as bad as it is, since Smith (A Simple Plan) is also responsible for the screenplay. It’s simply boring, which is weird, because what played out as gripping over 336 pages seems an absolutely tedious uphill climb at just 93 minutes. Part of the reason may be we’re given no insight into who the characters are, so we don’t really care about what happens to them. We know they like to pound back the booze, and that’s about it; they’re ciphers.

If anything, the movie deserves a bravery badge for not diluting the shock moments of the novel — most notably, an impromptu double amputation in grisly detail — but it chickens out of presenting the book’s chilling ending, going for one of those insipid Hollywood “gotcha” moments — the cinematic equivalent to a middle finger hoisted toward the audience. —Rod Lott

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When the Canadian horror film Ghostkeeper first hit U.S. home video, the box art depicted some sort of demon chicken that, naturally, isn’t anywhere to be found. I cry fowl — er, foul — on the title, too, because Ghostkeeper also has no real ghost.

It does have a genuine keeper in the first scene, however: a shopkeeper whom our lead characters derisively call “Gramps,” yet he warns them of an oncoming storm anyway. Those young people who should know better are three snowmobilers out having New Year’s fun. Per the “Surf City” rule, there are two girls for every boy, and the dumber of the females says, “How can mountains be dangerous? They’re so beautiful.” (Later, she relates that one time in 10th grade where she indulged in her prostitution fantasy.)

Making their way through the powder, they have to climb up to a seemingly abandoned lodge for shelter. Per all ’80s fright flicks, two clichés occur quickly: A cat jumps out of nowhere, and the smarter woman (Riva Spier, Rabid) says, “I think there’s somebody else here.” She’s right! It’s an old woman with stringy hair and a perpetual frown (Georgie Collins, TV’s Lonesome Dove: The Series). She lives there with her son and a “windigo”; the latter resides in the basement, but both kill people for a hobby.

In this case, the evil is more a supernatural force than a bloodthirsty creature, but you’ll hardly notice, because next to nothing happens. Snowy locales can make excellent settings for scary movies — see: The Shining — but scenery is all this pile of Canuck crap has going for it. I’m all for slow-burners, but Ghostkeeper is just a slow-starter that never reaches a modicum of momentum, and there’s a huge difference. —Rod Lott

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