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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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

Buy it at The Orphan Killer.

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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