Watching this sequel to 1991’s Warlock, I started to wonder if maybe a young Michael Bay had seen it before debuting with 1995’s Bad Boys. The third film by second-generation director Anthony Hickox (Waxwork), this second entry in the Warlock mythos not only shares part of a title with one of Bay’s films, but displays all of the same stylistic hallmarks that have made Bay both one of the successful and hated filmmakers of his generation.

Filled with pointless close-ups shot at strange angles, hilariously dramatic pull-ins and a complete sacrifice of character in favor of constant momentum, Warlock: The Armageddon, like most of Bay’s work, plays less like an actual movie than an abridged version of one with all of the potentially boring bits cut out.

And that is so not a bad thing.

For those of you concerned about the plot, the film features a returning Julian Sands as the titular villain, an Antichrist who rises in anticipation of a long-awaited lunar eclipse and who must find a collection of ancient stones in order to help his father, Satan, escape from Hell and take over the living world. Stopping him are Chris Young (TV’s Max Headroom) and Paula Marshall (whom you know from a dozen cancelled shows … and my dreams), the youngest descendents of a tribe of California druids, whose deaths and subsequent resurrections make them the only warriors powerful enough to halt Sands in his tracks.

More goofy than scary, the movie features a lot of dated effects, but is made highly watchable, thanks to the game cast and Hickox’s stubborn refusal to give you enough time to dwell on the film’s many absurdities and enormous plot holes. Consider it a film for those of you who wish a certain “director” would stop wasting his “talents” on racist toy-robot sequels and get back to the gloriously stupid basics. —Allan Mott

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There are seven reasons why John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness is awesome:

1. The plot revolves around an aged container of sickly green liquid that contains Satan himself. “A life form is growing out of pre-biotic fluids. It’s not winding down into disorder, it’s self-organizing.” The idea is so ridiculous, it’s awe-inspiring.

2. This is auteur John Carpenter at his most unfettered, working with extremely low budgets and unconstrained by the dictates of producers. Yes, some effects are dodgy, the acting is rough, and this ain’t a suspense classic like Halloween or a monster epic like The Thing. But when vested in the material, Carpenter works the creepy like few can. The dream sequences gave me daymares for weeks.

3. Right smack in the middle, a religious tome reveals that Jesus Christ was an extra-terrestrial who tried to warn humans about the dangers inherent in the liquid, and no one bats an eye. That is some cold analytical shit happening right there.

4. Carpenter wrote the screenplay as Martin Quatermass, after the hero of the British Quatermass films, and their influence is obvious. Technobabble such as “Say goodbye to classical reality, because our logic collapses on the subatomic level … into ghosts and shadows” does epic battle with theological nonsense: “It’s your disbelief that powers him. Your stubborn faith in, in … common sense. He lives in the smallest parts of it.”

5. The soundtrack is a classic Carpenter synth score.

6. Donald Pleasence! Victor Wong! An unlikely odd couple who debate Carpenter’s absurd science-vs.-religion dialogues with grace and aplomb.

7. Can we get a little love for the lesser Simon? Yes, we all dig Major Dad, but dammit, Jameson Parker needs some respect! And he rocks the ‘stache! —Corey Redekop

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As Gilles in The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll, Paul Naschy finds himself in the middle of every hitchhiking ex-con’s dream: being hired as caretaker for three neurotic, not-ugly sisters living together in a huge estate. The one with the bum legs (Maria Perschy) is hot, the one with the gnarled monkey hand (Diana Lorys) is even hotter, and the one with the flaming red hair and big breasts (Eva León) is super-duper hot. You can tell it won’t be long before Gilles starts milking the udders, if you know what I mean.

No, I mean he literally is shown milking a cow’s udders. That’s part of his job duties. Another: listening to the two upright sisters talk smack about the others — says León: “They’re bitches who keep me isolated! And I don’t have defects!” A fringe benefit: bedding them both.

But director Carlos Aured’s Blue Eyes is more about a different kind of poking: that with a knife. As a Spanish take on the giallo, the film plops these characters within an environment where beautiful blondes have a peculiar habit of being slit and having their blue eyes plucked by a black-gloved killer. Being someone who’s spent time in the slammer, Gilles is under suspicion for the murders, and why not? After all, he’s the one who has recurring dreams of choking fine-looking women.

Better known under its unsubtle U.S. title of House of Psychotic Women, this Naschy vehicle spills plenty of the blood for which he is rightfully beloved. That much I expected. What I didn’t expect was the graphic slaying of a pig, steam and all, unfaked. It’s jarring, whereas the murder sequences unspool to some of the happy-go-luckiest music you’ve heard, and the nursery rhyme “Frère Jacques” becomes a familiar refrain. “Din, dan, don” or “Ding, dang, dong,” it helps make the thriller with the masterfully macabre ending oddly irresistible. —Rod Lott

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Few movies will make you happier to be married than Audition. I mean, wives may eat your souls, but they don’t cut off your feet with razor wire, amiright, fellas?

Seven years after the death of his wife, sad single dad Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi, War) is under pressure to remarry, but afraid he’ll be unable to find his true ideal in his middle age. He agrees to an odd ruse by which he’ll pretend to be auditioning women for a movie, so he can bombard them with a litany of questions, and then hone in on his favorite later.

That chosen one is 24-year-old former ballet dancer Asami (Eihi Shiina, Tokyo Gore Police). Abused as a child, the quiet, mild-mannered and plainly pretty woman barely can make eye contact; nonetheless, Aoyama is smitten. He’ll soon wish he weren’t, because this girl is a freak. And not in the bedroom way.

Audition is one of those movies that would be best to see going in completely cold, because Japanese maverick Takashi Miike lulls you into thinking his film will be about something else, only to slam you into something quite the opposite more than hour into it. Unfortunately, you can’t, because the freaking posters and DVD covers give the twist away; however, the pain is not as bad as you’ve been led to believe. In other words, it’s no Guinea Pig, and thank God.

Mind you, it’s still powerful and tough to forget. You’ll never eat a bowl of dog vomit again. —Rod Lott

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According to my trusty Leonard Maltin iPhone app, director Curtis Harrington was so disappointed with the television version of his Ruby, he insisted on taking the infamous Alan Smithee credit. Before it was retired, the pseudonym was used by filmmakers who felt their artistic vision had been so catastrophically usurped, they could not allow to have their name attached to a project, lest it negatively affect their reputation and career.

But having just sat through the unmolested director’s cut for which he took full credit, I’m having difficulty imagining how much worse that other version could be. I say this because the film I watched is so relentlessly mediocre, it’s hard to figure out how it could ever be edited into an outright Smithee-worthy disaster. As is, Ruby simply doesn’t take enough risks to ever be that bad.

Pointlessly set in 1951 (a fact easily forgotten given how little effort is made to convincingly convey the period), Ruby is a supernatural gangster revenge thriller with a mute teenage girl thrown into the mix just so the producers could throw Exorcist and Omen references into the trailer. A post-Carrie Piper Laurie looks fabulous as the title character — a washed-up singer/moll who runs a drive-in 16 years after the father of her daughter was gunned down by the other members of his gang — but overplays the part to the precipice of campy embarrassment.

Unfortunately, there isn’t enough of her performance to turn the film into a so-bad-it’s-good classic à la Mommie Dearest. Instead, Ruby is the least satisfying kind of bad film there is: a dull, unimaginative one. Which is something of which even Alan Smithee would be ashamed. —Allan Mott

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