Thirty seconds is all it takes for nurse-school dropout Edith Mortley (Priscilla Alden) to kill her first victim in Death Nurse 2. As viewers of its previous year’s predecessor know, timing is not among writer/director Nick Philips’ strong points. Hell, I’m not sure he has any strong points, thereby resulting in an auto-accident watch made more difficult by being shot on video.

This sequel offers more of the same: more of Edith grousing, “You nosy old bitch”; more scenes from Philips’ Criminally Insane/Crazy Fat Ethel films passed off as her dreams; and more minutes, yet this still fails to hit an hour by a handful of seconds.

Plot? Edith continues to kill patients, but at least DN2 offers a twist: This chapter’s new admissions are indigents the mayor finds pesky, from the alcoholic Brownie (Philips’ wife, Irmgard Millard, playing a different drunk from DN1) to some crazy guy who spouts rhetoric in front of City Hall about the country being headed toward socialism. (Yes, Philips apparently predicted the establishment of the Tea Party.)

Still, Death Nurse 2 is so lazy that it even reuses scenes from its big sister. This follow-up easily boasts the saga’s best sequence, when Brownie and her butcher knife chase Edith ’round and ’round the living room furniture — so cartoony, it lacks only a Carl Stalling score.

Once more, the movie just ends by petering out mid-scene. Oh, how were all the loose threads supposed to conclude? —Rod Lott

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In Grease, when they sang about Sandra Dee being “lousy with virginity,” I’d like to believe it was a direct reference to The Dunwich Horror, an H.P. Lovecraft adaptation from AIP. In it, Dee plays Nancy Wagner, a college virgin lured to the sleepy, strange town of Dunwich by its least favorite son, the creepy-eyed Wilbur Whateley (Dean Stockwell, Blue Velvet), sporting a porn-star mustache.

Wilbur lives with his freaky-ass grandpa in a big, spooky house. He’s also the son of the devil and has recruited Nancy as his virgin sacrifice for a ceremony that will open the gates of hell. Meanwhile, just what in the hell is that thing in Wilbur’s closet?

This could have been some half-assed, thrown-together horror effort, but surprisingly, it’s pretty classy, like Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe pictures. Although some dialogue is dry, the look and feel of Dunwich is top-notch. Die, Monster, Die!‘s Daniel Haller does a terrific job with the direction, especially in the latter half when things get really weird; the tricks he pulls with quick cuts and color flashes help intensify the film’s jolts.

Dee looks rather puffy-faced in this one, but does turn her image on its head by doing a nude scene. Stockwell pulls his patented weirdo character out of his sleeve, but hey, it works. Everything gels in this one; I find it somewhat of a minor classic. Dig that ending! —Rod Lott

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It’s surprising it took this long for Full Moon Features to jump aboard the found-footage bandwagon, since the horror subgenre thrives on an element that is the low-budget production company’s specialty: cheapness.

Reel Evil centers on a three-man crew of struggling filmmakers, headed by the practical, beautiful Kennedy (Jessica Morris, Role Models). James (Jeff Adler) runs camera, while sound is handled by Cory (Mega Python vs. Gatoroid‘s Kaiwi Lyman, who looks like a real-life Thor). They’re hired to shoot behind-the-scenes footage for a horror movie being lensed in an abandoned insane asylum in downtown Los Angeles.

Connected by tunnels, the sprawling complex makes for built-in ambience for a backstory of a doctor whose mental patients harbored cannibalistic tendencies. Of course, ghosts of these guys pop in and out, strongly echoing 1999’s House on Haunted Hill remake and more effective when practical vs. computer-generated.

In typical Full Moon fashion, director/co-writer Danny Draven (2002’s DeathBed) finds a way to wedge a great deal of wholly gratuitous nudity into the works, yet somehow lucks upon a recipe that’s more fun and fulfilling than the bulk of its Handycam brethren. Being concise sure counts, as the show stops at the 72-minute mark, seguing into a terrific title sequence clearly influenced by Seven. That said, keep expectations low, as you should with each and every found-footage film. —Rod Lott

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At once inert and incredible, the shot-on-video Death Nurse is a true test of pain tolerance among movie watchers. The good news is it runs exactly 57 minutes and 15 seconds; the bad news is it runs exactly 57 minutes and 15 seconds.

Fake nurse Edith Mortley (Priscilla Alden) helps her wannabe-MD brother, Gordon (Albert Eskinazi), run the Shady Palms Clinic, which writer/director Nick Philips of both Criminally Insane/Crazy Fat Ethel films (with which this shares cast, crew and mismatching footage) makes no attempt to hide is a hideously decorated condominium. The Mortley sibs perform “surgery” on patients (read: kill them for kicks), either bury them in the backyard or feed them to the rats in the basement; and then bill Medicare for services rendered.

If Gordon isn’t stabbing knives into one patient (whose mouth is shut with mere masking tape), Edith is smothering another with a pillow (and her considerable girth). Shady Palms also houses a female patient who’s battling alcoholism (Irmgard Millard, Philips’ wife), but she’s considerably safer because Gordon is balling her in exchange for sips from Edith’s bottle of sherry.

Family members and authorities start to get suspicious just before the flick ends, with no movement toward any level of resolution. Imagine a TV show fading to a commercial break and never coming back … well, until the following year’s Death Nurse 2, that is.

This no-budget effort — apologies to the word “effort” — is inept in every aspect imaginable. Philips (aka Nick Millard) includes sequence after sequence of interminable non-action that have nothing to do with anything other than padding the running time to a feature length, and he fails even at that. The blood of victims sometimes is orange, like tomato soup stirred with milk. Such a meal possesses more character. —Rod Lott

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To mix similes, Sledgehammer moves like a snail through molasses rolling down a glacier. In other words, it’s slow. On purpose. And not in a “not much is happening here” way, but a “the director is using the slow-motion effect so much, we should check to see if he fell asleep” way.

That said, as the film played, my fascination with it grew to an obsession by the time it hit the last of its 87 minutes. Sledgehammer is remembered as one of the most successful of the shot-on-VHS slashers, and not just by virtue of being among the first. For all its ineptness, the seven-day wonder is oddly compelling and, against all odds, as hypnotic as it is illogical.

A boy is locked in a closet by his mother so that she and her no-good boyfriend can screw around in the living room. As they engage in foreplay, the grade-school youth somehow escapes, acquires the titular tool, and bashes in their heads. Fast-forward 10 years, and a group of throughly unappealing 20-somethings arrives at the same out-of-the-way cabin for a party weekend. You know what happens next, yet you’ll want to see it happen, anyway … provided you can stand the likes of seemingly interminable establishing shots.

What debuting director David A. Prior (Killer Workout) manages to do with so little may be accidental, but not entirely. His actors (headed by brother Ted Prior, Surf Nazis Must Die) are beyond help, and the script is as woefully lunkheaded — how else to explain the food-fight sequence, the chubby jock who licks people, the John Oates doppelgänger spurring the sexual advances of what passes for a hot blonde? However, the mood created by a creepy mask, a John Carpenter-esque synth score and dreamlike imagery lift the crude, homegrown effort from mere crap to at least really interesting crap. —Rod Lott

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