Relax, The Orphan Killer is an orphan who’s a killer, not a killer of orphans. That said, yeah, he’s still the kind of guy who’ll stab a machete in your face, or choke you with barbed wire, even ax a nun if he has to. On the playful side, he likes to steal bras for sniffing purposes.

Masked murderer Marcus (David Backus, Priest) can’t get over the fact that after their parents were killed some 20 rough-odd years prior, his 5-year-old sister, Audrey, was adopted and he wasn’t. While she got to play with Barbies, he had to be molested by a priest and made a mockery of by other kids. So he tracks down Aud (Diane Foster, who also co-produced), strings her up, rips open her blouse and tortures her. Sibs!

This relationship isn’t much different than the one between Michael Myers and Laurie Strode of the exalted Halloween franchise, except that Marcus speaks (mostly about Jesus and pain and suffering — y’know, the usual) and, quite thoughtfully, wears a tie while on his rampage of rivalry. There’s not much more to it than that, with writer/director Matt Farnsworth filtering in pieces of the backstory on a need-to-know basis between instances of bloodletting. That savagery, however, is executed (pun intended) quite well.

In fact, the overpowering aggro-metal music notwithstanding, The Orphan Killer is one of the most impressive pure DIY horror films I’ve seen, if not the most. Marcus isn’t likely to be the next horror icon — neither are Victor Crowley, ChromeSkull, Babyface and the other touted wanna-be Vorheeses — but Backus certainly succeeds in making him repugnant. Foster, exuding a Scarlett Johansson/Elizabeth Olsen quality, plays her wounded heroine role to the hilt. Her efforts are worth it, given Farnsworth’s slick, yet brutal direction and top-notch effects that make this squarely not for the squeamish. —Rod Lott

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That damned Alaric de Marnac! He’s the 16th-century knight who caught his wife in flagrante delicto, so he beat her to death with a mace. Not content with that act of revenge, he rises from the tomb every 100 years to kill any Marnac woman. Or at least that’s the legend told to Geneviève (Julia Saly, Night of the Werewolf), a wealthy woman with a dire heart problem. She’s been brought by her husband, Paul (writer/director Paul Naschy), to his childhood “holiday home” to rest comfortably, away from the hustle and bustle of civilization.

After all these years, the swanky spread is still taken care of by Maville (Lola Gaos, Blood Castle), the elderly maid, who now has (reluctant) help from her orphaned niece, Julie (Pat Ondiviela), a former drug-doin’ prostitute. From the start, Geneviève witnesses what others brush off as hallucinations: a snake in her bed, a hobo in her bathtub — why, it’s almost as if someone is trying to scare her to death!

Spoiler alert: As John Cougar Mellencamp once sang, “I need a lover who won’t drive me crazy.” If I got as much action as Naschy gives himself in Panic Beats, my unit would be worn to a nub. As befitting of such a sex-fueled, greed-driven set-up, it’s as if everyone has an evil-off in a race to be the last asshole standing.

The whole bloody affair ends with a predictable comeuppance, but a perfectly gory one. Bright and colorful, the Spanish splatter is amped up in an effort to keep pace with the era’s slasher films of the other hemisphere. Although no stupid teenager, Naschy makes for a strong-willed presence in front of the camera, and clearly has a ball behind it, orchestrating one gruesome scene after another, at a pace faster than his more famous efforts. If you’re into the man at all, just Beat it. —Rod Lott

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Three brand-name directors from Asia each tell a story in Three… Extremes, an anthology as odd as its title’s punctuation. It begins with “Dumplings,” by Fruit Chan (Don’t Look Up), in which an aging actress (Miriam Yeung) eats dumplings prepared by Bai Ling (Crank: High Voltage) that reverse the ravages of time on one’s skin. The secret? High-gluten flour. Oh, and finely chopped aborted babies.

Next up, “Cut,” a movie-set piece about an actor (Won-hie Lim) taking revenge on his director (Byung-hun Lee, I Saw the Devil) by Park Chan-wook. Although it gets points for injections of black comedy that actually work, “Cut” isn’t as strong a tale as one would expect, coming from the man who made the bee’s knees of all vengeance pictures, Oldboy.

In fact, given the level of directorial talent involved, this entire project should be better than it is. Visually, it’s superb across the board, but when I see the word “extreme,” I don’t think “tone poems,” which is really what I’d peg the final story as. Directed by Takashi Miike (Audition), “The Box” illustrates why it’s not nice to lock a human being into one. The segment drags. Actually, they all do — at roughly 40 minutes, each is too long.

Not so strangely, a sequel exists, 3 Extremes II. Strangely, it actually predates this one by a couple of years. They do things differently on the other side of the world. Like boiling fetuses with cabbage, which Chan needlessly expanded into a full feature all its own, Dumplings, later that year. —Rod Lott

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For some R&R after wrapping a movie, mustachioed prick actor Michael (Stefano Patrizi) takes his girlfriend, Deborah (Silvia Dionisio), and select fellow cast and crew members to the spooky, middle-of-nowhere mansion where he grew up. His ailing mother (Anita Strindberg) still lives there, despite the home being the spot where Michael, as a child, fatally stabbed his maestro father for beating up Mom.

Mom’s happy to see Michael (take a drink every time you feel an incest vibe; you’ll die before the end) and wishes he’d visit more often, but he refuses: “I’m always on the move, you know. Like a gypsy.” That’s probably a good thing, because Michael’s friends start getting killed. Who’s the black-gloved killer? It may be tough to tell at first, because everyone but the dog wears black gloves.

The final film for The Horrible Dr. Hichcock director Riccardo Freda, the so-nasty-it’s-nice Murder Obsession colorfully plays with all the elements that make a giallo great, from a bloody beheading to showcasing the nude body of Black Emanuelle herself, Laura Gemser, no less than three times, including her first encounter with the unknown psychopath, who attempts to drown her in the bathtub.

The best scene, however, is an extended nightmare sequence, which we see as Deborah relates its surreal details to her uncaring boyfriend. Among other things, she runs into a giant spider web, complete with giant spider; gets her chest scratched by bushes she pushes her way through; finds snakes at her feet; becomes tied to a post by some white-robed crusty faces who vomit green froth; and then is felt up by that oversized arachnid — all while she’s wearing a tissue-thin nightie. That’s commitment, kids. —Rod Lott

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The Convent is made with such obvious affection, I’m able to forgive that it literally plunges a knife into the heart of its least hateful character 30 minutes into its running time, and then makes us wait another 20 before Adrienne Barbeau shows up to kick some serious demon nun ass. It begins memorably in 1960, with a hot, young brunette in a Catholic schoolgirl uniform walking into a church and batting away at the assembled sisters (and father) with a Louisville slugger before setting them ablaze and blasting them with a shotgun, all to the sweet sound of Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me.”

Forty years later, the location of this massacre is the destination of choice for a trio of truly obnoxious fraternity assholes, their virgin pledge, two girlfriends and the super-cute, sarcastic Goth girl who’s just like the woman I imagined I’d end up marrying back when I was 14. (It didn’t happen.)

The trouble starts when super-cute Goth girl is sacrificed by a quartet of pathetic Satanists, which causes the demons that necessitated the previous massacre to rise up from wherever they went the last time this all went down. In the end, the only person who can stop the demons from raising the Antichrist is the hot, 50-something version of the hot schoolgirl who took care of the problem the first time.

Needless to say, Barbeau is truly awesome as the foul-mouthed, liquored-up, tight-jeans-wearing demon slayer and is — along with The Convent’s sly sense of humor — the main reason to ignore the its obvious deficits and give it a chance. Clearly inspired by Night of the Demons and Evil Dead 2, The Convent is better than the former and nowhere close to the latter, which is exactly how it should be in a fair and just world such as our own. —Allan Mott

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