At once a tribute to Italian horror of the 1980s — “the times of Lamberto Bava, when monsters and dolls squirted blood” — and a modern-day attempt to reinvent it, Ubaldo Terzani Horror Show is more successful at the first point than the second. Regardless, it’s both comforting and disturbing that wardrobes of fright-film geeks in both hemispheres consist almost entirely of black horror tees.

Likely an onscreen substitute for sophomore Italian writer/director Gabriele Albanesi, the 25-year-old Alessio (Giuseppe Soleri) is a horror-flick nut and a wannabe filmmaker who’s too tied up in the splatter on which he’s been suckled for so long. His producer insists he try something more psychological, and sends him to Turin to collaborate on a script with the famous horror novelist Terzani Ubaldo (Paolo Sassanelli).

The author’s books prove mighty intense to Alessio, so much that they provoke explicit nightmares. Ubaldo delights in the madness that pours from his pen; in working with this young man, the mentor hides the degree of his nefarious intentions as he gradually becomes a corrupting influence — especially when Alessio’s girlfriend (Laura Gigante) comes to spend the weekend at the host’s insistence.

By and large, this little Horror Show is a twisted love triangle that delights in digging in to the gut-strewn genre that inspired it. Those sequences of pain and death are undeniably grotesque, in the unflinching manner of Lucio Fulci. Those who knows that man’s wet works are most likely to appreciate this flawed but admirably fucked-up valentine. That its final shot fades to a blur is no accident, as Albanesi smudges the line between fantasy and reality throughout. —Rod Lott

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The eyes have it in Anguish, a perfectly oddball horror film from Spain that’s obsessed with all things ocular.

Oh, and snails. It also really digs snails.

Future Oscar nominee Michael Lerner (Barton Fink) is John, an optometrist’s assistant and all-around schlub who lives with his kooky, bird-loving, pint-sized mother (Zelda Rubenstein, Poltergeist). John’s losing his eyesight, so with the help of Mom, who specializes in psychic hypnosis or something, he collects the peepers of other people. It’s good to have a hobby.

Nearly a third in, writer/director Bigas Luna (Jamón Jamón) pulls quite the fast one on us, revealing that all the action we’ve been watching is taking place on a movie screen. Within the rapt audience, one teen girl is particularly freaked the fuck out.

She has good reason to be, as her fellow moviegoers begin to be killed, just as John is offing innocents onscreen. If Luna’s trying to make an “art imitates life or vice versa” statement, it gets a little lost in the mess of the meta, but Anguish is really kind of ingenious and definitely ahead of its time. It would make a good double feature with Lamberto Bava’s Demons from two years earlier, which also plays with the trapped-in-a-theater concept.

When I was in high school, a local mom-and-pop video store was having a huge sale on posters, and I bought dozens, plus a weird countertop box advertising the VHS release of Anguish. It directed you to peep through a cut-out hole at its top, and any curious customers who did were greeted with a still of the film’s graphic scene of eye surgery. Just thought you’d like to know. —Rod Lott

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A planet where apes evolved from men? That strange, sci-fi concept of Ted Post’s Beneath the Planet of the Apes is mere child’s play compared to bizarreness of the director’s outré exercise in suburban horror that is The Baby. Dudes, this one’s colored in all shades of fucked-up.

Newly widowed social worker Ann Gentry (Anjanette Comer, The Loved One) is assigned to investigate the Wadsworth family, headed by a frowny, chain-smoking matriarch (Ruth Roman, Strangers on a Train). Mrs. Wadsworth lives with her two daughters and one son, which isn’t all that odd until you realize that the boy, her “Baby,” isn’t a baby at all, but a fully grown adult (David Manzy) who never matured beyond infancy. He wears diapers and all.

Initially repulsed, Ann starts to ignore most of her other clients to visit this special case. She recommends Baby be put in a clinic — a suggestion that, to Mrs. Wadsworth, goes over about as well as that 10th vodka tonic. Weirdness grows as Baby cajoles his naive teen babysitter (“What kind of question is that? Of course I’m wearing panties. Don’t I always?”) into breast-feeding him on the job.

It all leads to an expected tragic ending, but what is not expected is how disturbing The Baby feels as a whole. It’s not just Baby’s chalkboard-nails crying fits that bother, but an overall pervading sense of unease, and yet somehow, this thing earned a PG rating. Unlike most horror films of the 1970s, it’s not fun — just remarkably confounding and unsettling. I recommend giving it a watch, if only so I’m not the only one so agitated afterward. —Rod Lott

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Hangman’s Curse is perhaps the world’s first Christian paranormal teen mystery spooker, and as expected, it’s so bad, it’s good — a crazy combo of The Omega Code, The X-Files and Spy Kids, with elements of Heathers and Arachnophobia thrown in just to muddy up an already messy mix.

David Keith and Mel Harris star as the parental units of the Springfield family, a gypsy-like clan roving the country in an RV with their twin teenage children, Elisha and Elijah, and Max, the drug-sniffing dog, all working together as The Veritas Project, a crack freelance undercover investigations team. They’re hired by a public high school to uncover the truth behind a series of mysterious deaths that has so far claimed the lives of three football players. The bullied Goth kids — depicted as Satanists, of course — explain that the soul of a kid who hung himself in the school years ago is getting revenge on all classroom tormentors.

Donning baseball cap and spectacles, Keith unconvincingly goes incognito as the school janitor, while Harris looks at evidence under microscopes and calls for the assistance of a nutty professor, played by Frank Peretti, author of the book on which the film is based. I can understand cutting him a little slack since these characters are his and all, but Peretti is no actor and seems to think the dramatic narrative is sturdy enough to support his decision to channel Bruce Dern, Jerry Lewis and Prof. Irwin Corey, inadvertently providing many funny moments. (The honor for the funniest, however, goes to the scene in which virginal Elisha wraps a snake around her neck and comments, “It reminds me of a boyfriend I once dated.”)

The kids are the real stars of the ham-fisted, underlit, amateurishly acted film, especially Elisha (Leighton Meester, TV’s Gossip Girl), who exclaims “Oh, snaps!” whenever something doesn’t go her way — like plunging down an air duct and landing in the nest of hybrid killer spiders. The tumble and resulting bites nearly kill her, but she’s saved by reciting the Lord’s Prayer. (Oh, and a fresh dose of anti-venom, but that doesn’t get near as much credit.)

Whom did the Christian backers hire to helm their cinematic testament of God’s love? Rafal Zielinski, director of such noted church faves as all three Screwballs titty flicks, of course. They also couldn’t have picked a better example for the sanctity of marriage than Harris, who’s such a firm believer, she’s been hitched five times. —Rod Lott

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Among the handful of movies released by the late-aughts-resurrected Hammer Films, The Woman in Black is the one that feels most like the old-school Hammer that film fans the world over hold near and dear to their hearts. (Let Me In, however, remains the best.) It’s low-key and Gothic, and relies little on special effects to get viewers scared.

Based upon a slim novel by Susan Hill that already earned an adaptation by British television in 1989, this new Woman has the fortunate status of having a leading man in Daniel Radcliffe, in his first post-Harry Potter role. You’ll quickly forget he was a boy wizard; here, he’s a lawyer and father of one little boy, and still grieving over the death of his wife during childbirth — so much so that he’s more than a tad suicidal.

His employer sends him to one of those out-of-the-way villages where everybody knows about — but dare not go there, much less speak of — the mansion known as Eel Marsh House. His duty is to sort through the paperwork of its newly deceased owner so her will can be settled, but he spends more time investigating the expansive home’s strange noises and the fleeting appearance of the title character, whose visage fleets about his peripheral vision.

But not ours. Although used sparingly by director James Watkins (Eden Lake), the ghost gets right up in our faces to provide effective jolts in line with the recent Insidious, which also preferred practical effects over the all-too-easy (and all-too-artificial) computer-generated ones. That the specter at this film’s center has a rep for sending children to their death raises the stakes in an already eerie tale. Atmosphere abounds, expressing a visual chill to match the physical one moving up your spine. —Rod Lott

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