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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Hosted by Rob Zombie (if appearing on the DVD menu counts), Fangoria Blood Drive presents an hour’s worth of horror shorts that represent the cream of the crop in a contest held by the splatter-movie magazine. Judging by the results, the deadline should have been extended, maybe by years.

In “The Hitch,” a man picks up a female hitchhiker during a rash of area killings. The comedic “A Man and His Finger” shows what happens when a guy accidentally chops off one of his digits, which sports a mind of its own. “Inside” focuses on a young woman who … well, hell, I’m still unsure — it’s that narratively challenged. “Shadows of the Dead” suggests the end of the world will be brought about by zombies, and those inspired by George Romero, predictably.

“Mister Eryams” follows a church-contracted investigator of ghosts, examining reports of apparitions in a woman’s home. A clinically depressed chain smoker experiences “Disturbances” in her home, including dolls that do harm. A chemical meant to combat the West Nile virus backfires in “Song of the Dead,” resulting in, yep, more Romero zombies, but also a truly terrible song belted out by a fresh victim.

And not a single segment is worth watching. This is amateur-hour (literally) stuff, less concerned with storytelling than pulling off a gross-out special effect. The occasional good idea is hampered by botched execution, and while some may chalk that up to budgetary restraints, I blame a deficiency of creativity. An argument against DIY filmmaking, these works are the worst. —Rod Lott

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Soooo much pussy is present in René Cardona Jr.’s The Night of a Thousand Cats, a Mexican horror film that will scare nobody but representatives of PETA. It will, however, entertain the hell out of practically anyone willing to tolerate the director’s slow, but unintentionally silly style, evident in such zoo-minded snoozers as Tintorera: Killer Shark and Beaks: The Movie. This particular animal-oriented effort stars Nightmare City‘s Hugo Stiglitz as — wait for it — Hugo, a leather-wearing cad who flies around in his helicopter to pick up hot ladies. (Hey, it may be a gimmick, but guys, it works.)

Taking his latest find back to his bachelor pad, a 1600s monastery owned by his family, Hugo introduces her to his bald, mute robed goon of a servant with a limp, Dorgo (Gerardo Zepeda, El Topo), who’s “obedient and as faithful as a cat” and not too shabby in the cooking department, either; according to Hugo, “meat is his specialty.” (Dorgo also gets a hard-on for a stethoscope, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Anyhow, Hugo’s date is going along swimmingly, until a cat interrupts the meal. At that point, our angered, bearded douche hurls the helpless animal over a ridiculously tall chain-link fence, on the other side of which stand hundreds — or perhaps 1,000, hmmm? — of felines, meowing their precious widdle paws off. So Hugo grinds his girl up and feeds fistfuls of the ground round to the kitties. (Oh, but not the head! That goes in his basement collection.)

The script then plops Hugo back into the chopper to spy in on babes in pointy-boob bikinis, and pick the next one to fuck ‘n’ chuck. For a guy who gets so much bed action, Hugo’s sex scenes should be better, but Cardona’s camera zooms in on the noses of polar bears and other stuffed heads on the wall, which don’t mean nothin’. (I apologize for quoting Richard Marx; it’ll never happen again.) —Rod Lott

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