I am unconvinced that Wes Craven is a great horror director. I’m not honestly sure he’s even a good one. His filmography is at best spotty; some watchable films, many outright stinkers, one great grindhouse flick (The Hills Have Eyes), and nothing remotely approaching the artistry of his peers John Carpenter and David Cronenberg. And the film that cemented his reputation, A Nightmare on Elm Street, ain’t the classic many people want it to be.

I’ve really tried to enjoy it. Freddy Krueger’s a good villain, but he’s better served in some of the sequels, especially Craven’s return to the series, New Nightmare. There are some good scares here and there, great bloodletting and weirdly effective dream sequences to compliment an intriguing, if half-baked scenario.

Craven’s choice of heroine, however, ruins everything for me. Or rather, her portrayer. Heather Langenkamp delivers one of the most utterly wretched performances I have ever sat through. Not one line reading approaches believability, and it only makes it worse that she is obviously trying her best. It’s like watching a high school play: She’s pretending, not acting. Considering Craven had a fairly talented ’80s staple nearby in Amanda Wyss (as Tina), his casting of Langenkamp is all the more puzzling.

Beyond Nancy (and her equally atrocious mother, Ronee Blakley), Elm Street is only passable horror entertainment, one of the few movies improved upon in some of its sequels (parts 3 and 7). I must admit a fondness for the ending, but only for its utter ridiculousness; watching Nancy somehow morph into MacGyver as she sets up her entire house with sophisticated traps in a few minutes somehow makes a demon pedophile who kills in dreams seem plausible. —Corey Redekop

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Judging from the opening credits of this juicy helping of Italian sleaze, you’d think this would be called When Animals Attack the Shit Out of One Another, as the film introduces us to the laws of the jungle via real-life, mondo-style footage of how the food chain works. These bits are sprinkled throughout the film at random moments as well, allowing you the full-color spectacle of, say, a snake swallowing a monkey whole.

But there’s a story here, too, albeit a sketchy one. The Mountain of the Cannibal God stars Ursula Andress as Susan, a woman in search of her husband, unheard of for months after his jungle expedition. She and her brother hire Prof. Foster (Stacy Keach, who looks coked out of his mind) to take them into said jungle to locate him, although few doubt her spouse remains alive.

The group encounters poisonous spiders, venomous snakes, arm-hungry crocodiles and spike-laden booby traps. Eventually, they come across natives wearing freaky masks, prompting an admission from Foster that he has been partaken of their unusual rituals before: “You never forget the taste of human flesh!” he screams.

Eventually, Susan does find her husband … dead and partially liquified, with a Geiger counter sticking out of his tum-tum. The cannibals strip her naked, paint her orange and tie her up. One cannibal tries to rape her, so the lead cannibal cuts off the eager man’s penis. In more deviant footage, female cannibals masturbate and a man fucks a pig. I leave it to you to determine whether that’s a recommendation or a warning. —Rod Lott

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If I were in charge, I’d give DarkWolf the more appropriate title of An American Werewolf in Do-Rag, as Kane Hodder (Jason Voorhees in several of the Friday the 13th sequels) plays his role as the horny-werewolf-disguised-as-human with a blue handkerchief tied around his thick noggin for the whole movie.

Hodder is the “DarkWolf” — a hybrid werewolf, explains an all-too-knowing policeman — who must mate with a chosen female in order to ensure the survival of its species. (Its acquisition of a capital W goes unexplained.) The chosen female is a blonde waitress (Samaire Armstrong, TV’s The O.C.) who has no idea of her fate, but soon learns when her “protector” — The Birds‘ Tippi Hedren as cinema’s most well-dressed homeless woman — is slain by the creature, as is the cop’s partner, airheaded Playboy Playmate Jaime Bergman.

Everyone in this straight-to-DVD pile of wolf poo is so unlikable, you wish the DarkWolf would kill them all, and then do himself in. But yet, DarkWolf feels the need to plod along on its grubby paws for an hour and a half, occasionally throwing in just enough gratuitous nudity to keep you from hitting “stop.”

The acting is atrocious, even for a straight-to-video movie of this kind, and the werewolf transformation scenes are downright embarrassing. Whenever it’s time for one of those, the movie turns into a poorly computer-animated cartoon! —Rod Lott

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In stark contrast to AIP’s sometimes-silly Edgar Allan Poe anthology film Tales of Terror, the Franco-Italian omnibus Spirits of the Dead aims for serious, capital-A art, siccing a trio of international A-list directors on some of Poe’s most obscure works. Results are mixed, meaning that Roger Corman trumped the combined might of Roger Vadim, Louis Malle and Federico Fellini.

Vadim’s “Metzengerstein” stars a never-sexier Jane Fonda as 22-year-old countess/libertine Frederique who lives an orgiastic existence in a castle, where she keeps a tiger cub as a pet. Although wooed by her cousin (Peter Fonda, uncomfortably enough), Frederique loves a horse — not in an Emanuelle in America sort of way, but I wouldn’t put it past Vadim — perhaps the horse wasn’t young enough. This opening segment is about as successful as then-married Vadim and Fonda’s collaboration on Barbarella, which is to say it looks great, but has a story that plods along like so many exhausted equine. Vietnam vets may most enjoy seeing Hanoi Jane stepping into an animal trap in the woods.

Alain Delon is “William Wilson” in Malle’s middle, rushing to confess an act of murder to a priest. This leads to a series of flashbacks that illustrate Wilson has been haunted since childhood by a double bearing the same name (also played by Delon). Whereas the real Wilson is and always has been a número-uno dick, the doppelgänger intrudes to halt or expose his bad behavior, whether torturing a classmate with rats; dissecting a live, nude woman just for kicks; or cheating in a card game against a brunette Brigitte Bardot. The latter act, unfortunately, plays out in real time, consuming many more minutes than needed.

Unquestionably the finest is the finale, “Toby Dammit,” the only tale set in modern day. Fellini takes the opportunity to satirize celebrity, especially the oversized kind forever pursued by the paparazzi — here, an ill-tempered, arrogant alcoholic (Terence Stamp) who despises his fans as much as his critics. He gets his comeuppance in a long-overdue end. While sly and dreamlike, the piece is, like the others, one that makes its point at two to three times the length it should. —Rod Lott

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Not a single cast member from the Wes Craven-presented Dracula 2000 returned for Dracula II: Ascension, the first of two straight-to-video sequels, and who can blame them?

Picking up where D2K ended, with the count burnt to a crisp on a neon crucifix, Ascension wheels the charred corpse of the vampire lord into a morgue, where the enterprising workers steal the body, sensing an opportunity to make some money. They take it to the conveniently vacant and isolated mansion of their professor, played by Craig Sheffer. He’s confined to a wheelchair because of cerebral palsy and has his left hand drawn up and turned in a way that looks like he’s constantly playing charades and no one has yet guessed “hieroglyphics.”

Sheffer — like Stephen Hawking without the RoboVoice and the charisma — believes the key to his cellular regeneration lies within the blood of Dracula, so he has his students revive the body by literally giving him a bloodbath. It works, and the first to die is former Playboy Playmate of the Year Brande Roderick, who briefly comes back as cinema’s only vampire to sport matching red bra and panties from Victoria’s Secret semi-annual lingerie sale. Eventually dying (but not soon enough) is the token black guy who, after sprouting fangs, exclaims with no irony, “I got the hooyah power in me!”

Meanwhile, the increasingly oval-faced Jason Scott Lee tracks them down. He’s a priest-cum-vampire hunter, as quick with the scythe as he is with the scripture, and he is as intent on saving souls as he is severing heads. Oh, and what of Drac? He’s tied up for nearly the entire movie, freed of his chains only at the end to set up Dracula III: Legacy, leaving one to hope it has more bite. —Rod Lott

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