Stick a spider in a movie, and I’ll see it. While this movie’s title (Spiders, duh) promises more than one arachnid, it really only features one … but the damn thing grows to be about 30 feet tall, so who’s complaining?

Here, a shuttle mission goes awry when the spider on board for experimental purposes goes crazy and kills the crew. The shuttle crash-lands at an Area 51-sorta place, where some annoying college newspaper reporter and her two pals — a hacker geek and a photographer who uses a point-and-shoot number — are snooping around for a story. (For the three leads, Mosquito director Gary Jones cast three of L.A.’s most unappealing young actors, resembling the poor man’s Sandra Bullock, Brendan Fraser and Chris O’Donnell, respectively.)

They enter the shuttle wreckage and then the bowels of the secret base, only to find themselves trapped and menaced by this very angry, very aggressive, big-ass spider, who seems to be growing in size at an alarming rate. The U.S. Army’s also running around looking for the thing, so the movie quickly becomes a mix of Aliens and, um, itself. Created by KNB, the spider effects are mostly pretty cool, especially in the balls-out finale, where the eight-legged creature terrorizes a retirement home — excuse us, we mean college campus — in broad daylight.

What’s not so hot is the by-the-numbers screenplay, which seems to have been assembled using every stock line from the horror genre. To wit: “We’ve got to stop it!,” “You go that way,” “Let’s get out of here!,” “Save yourself!” and the ever-popular, spoken-too-soon “I think we made it!” Although it doesn’t quite know when to quit, you’ll be cheesily entertained for most of Spiders’ running time. While it’s not scary, a lot of the arachnid’s appearances gave me the shivers. (Aside: See if you can spot all the vaginal imagery in the spider’s mouth.) —Rod Lott

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True to its title, Cat in the Brain opens with close-up footage of a cat (puppet) wolfing down on (obviously fake) bloody brain matter. And we would expect nothing less from Italian gore king Lucio Fulci. When someone who hates horror movies asks, “What kind of sick mind would make such a thing?,” now you can answer, “Well, this guy.”

The film certainly pokes fun at his image, as Fulci more or less plays himself, a middle-aged bearded man who wears sweaters over shirt and tie, wears glasses and makes really sick flicks where the gallons of spilled blood look like someone bought red paint in bulk. In this meta work, where Fulci is “overcome with a sense of repulsion,” he visually links onscreen acts of horrific violence with eating raw meat — a chunk of flesh equals stark tartare.

Pretty quickly, Fulci goes mad as the felonious behavior of his films seeps into his daily life and he experiences disturbing visions, like the slaying of a whore in broad daylight (and a nipple-muncher under the cloak of darkness), and an orgy in which a billiards player redefines “corner pocket” with the nude woman draped across the pool table. Many, many clips from his previous films — from Sodoma’s Ghost to Touch of Death — are utilized.

It’s all very nasty stuff, that even heavy use of Edvard Grieg’s classical-music hit “In the Hall of the Mountain King” can’t serve as a reliable salve. It really is like a proto-Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, but one that most video viewers won’t have the stomach to take. I can’t say I really blame them. —Rod Lott

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Unleashed the same year as A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven’s made-for-TV Invitation to Hell is another dark look at American suburbia, only without all of the good stuff that made his feature effort so memorable. Whereas Elm Street gave us Freddy Krueger, Hell does its best with soap star Susan Lucci, who is admittedly pretty terrifying, but not for the reasons the producers were thinking.

Lucci plays Jessica Jones, the vaguely ethnic-looking owner of an exclusive country club whose members all enjoy incredible prosperity and fortune. This is because she’s Satan, and the club’s members all have sold their souls to her for pool privileges. Everyone in the local community thinks she’s awesome, except for Robert Urich, who’s just been hired by Kevin McCarthy’s tech firm to develop a new space suit for NASA.

Urich is forced to watch helplessly as his wife (Joanna Cassidy) and kids (Barrett Oliver and Soleil Moon-Frye) are corrupted by Jones’ influence and sell their souls to her behind his back. Without any other option, he does what any good father would do: Don his experimental space suit and go down straight to Hell to rescue them. It goes without saying that he is able to do so by defeating Lucci through the eternal power of love.

Those of you familiar with Craven’s oeuvre know some films on his résumé that exist purely to pay the bills. Of these, Invitation To Hell is nowhere near the worst (Deadly Friend and The Hills Have Eyes Part II are tied for that title), but like all of the others, it’s clear he wasn’t prepared to do anything but the bare minimum to keep the money folks happy. Unlike 1978’s Stranger in Our House, which proved he could transcend the TV medium if he wanted to, Hell ranges from limp to laughable. His game cast does the best they can with the material, but it isn’t enough to save the film from descending into the kind of unintentional camp that can only come from a talented director working with a script he obviously thinks is ridiculous. —Allan Mott

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Who is killing all of London’s drunken bums dressed as Santa Claus? Whoever it is is wildly inconsistent in his methods, using a straight razor, a garrote, a spear and even a broken beer bottle, all the better to gouge Kris Kringle’s eye with. The result is Don’t Open Till Christmas, which is as if Pieces were a Christmas special, and all because some kid saw Daddy in a Santa suit screwing someone who wasn’t Mommy. (A similar sight lights the fuse of 1980’s also-recommended Christmas Evil.)

Pieces vet Edmund Purdom partially directs and stars as Inspector Harris, hot on the trail of the masked maniac slaying the aforementioned hobos and the occasional blonde sex worker. Frustrated at the lack of clues are a victim’s daughter (Alien 2: On Earth‘s Belinda Mayne, who cries, “My father’s just been murdered. I can’t concentrate!”) and her boyfriend (Gerry Sundquist, Boarding School), a street-corner flutist who comes under suspicion.

Scream queen Caroline Munro appears in one scene as herself, singing a synthy-sweet pop number onstage while caressing her inviting curves in a slinky, sequined red dress that sparkles as bright as her bedroom eyes. (Er, please excuse me for a couple of minutes. … Okay, I’m back.)

Consider this 86-minute exercise in holiday horror a gift from schlock producer Dick Randall. Like his earlier Pieces, the slasher is a mess about messes, bearing his distinctive stamp of delightful but highly watchable incompetence that rolls around in nonsense scripting, gory violence and gratuitous nudity. We’ll call it the bow on top. —Rod Lott

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The best adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel I’ve ever seen, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde rightly won Fredric March an Oscar for his portrayal of the scientist who seeks to separate the good from the evil in man, and unfortunately succeeds.

When the enterprising Jekyll tests his experimental serum, he transforms (sometimes startling without the use of makeup or camera tricks) into Hyde, a hairy, snaggletoothed, horny creature with a taste for blood, prostitutes and the blood of prostitutes. Neither the police nor Jekyll’s fiancée take too kindly to this development.

The best thing about this version is Rouben Mamoulian’s direction, which looks innovative even today through his unique use of subjective camera, split-screens and framing of certain shots. It’s way ahead of its time. The film kind of peters out in the last half-hour and I’m bothered by the way everyone pronounces the doc’s name as “JEEK-ul,” but this is still a great old horror movie through and through. —Rod Lott

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