At a time before the word “horror” even had a translated equivalent in Japan, writer/director Nobuo Nakagawa gave the country something to be all shook up about: a cinematic trip to Hell, and one full of gore of that! Jigoku is a real freaker-outer, starting with credits that suggest an Asian 007 adventure, but only if the guy in the audio booth tripped and fell on every SFX button at once. Your ears will hate it.

But your eyes will love it! College student Shirô (Shigeru Amachi, The Tale of Zatoichi) is having a bad run, starting when a drunk yakuza fatally stumbles into path of the car in which Shirô is a passenger. Then his fiancée dies in a wreck, so he drowns his sorrows in the bodily fluids of prostitutes. Then his mom falls critically ill. Then he becomes partly responsible for the deaths of several more people.

Finally, with a little more than half an hour to spare in the running time, he goes to Hell. Worse, Buddhists believe in a Hell comprised of eight Hells, so buckle up! Upon arrival, he gets his throat pierced, has to view a Your Life’s Greatest Fuck-Ups reel and learns just how hot flames of eternity can be. Shirô gets the 25-cent tour and sees the newly dead being flayed, boiled and spiked for punishment — different strokes for different folks, all rather graphically depicted with lots of red acrylic paint.

Weird and wild, Jigoku does drag in the middle, kinda like life itself. But its Hell sequence — if one could call a third of a film a “sequence” — is quite something to see, from both a visual and a historical standpoint. I would’ve loved to witness how it went over with audiences upon release. However, if you want to see some really crazy Asian shit without the heavy-handed morality tale but with all of the “Huh?,” 1977’s Hausu is your best bet. —Rod Lott

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Quarantine 2: Terminal is among that rarest breed of direct-to-video sequels: those not only actually good, but better than the original. Whereas 2008’s Quarantine was a faithful remake of 2007’s Spanish horror hit [REC], Quarantine 2 takes off on its own course, while [REC] 2 revisits the exact same territory by staying in the apartment building whose residents have been zombified.

A good chunk of Quarantine 2, however, takes place on a commercial airliner, where one of the passengers has brought infected lab rats from said apartment building as his carry-on. Another passenger gets his finger nipped trying to help fit the damn thing in the overhead compartment, and before long, he’s puking violently and going berserk, headed straight for the cockpit.

One emergency landing later, the remaining passengers and crew disembark into a terminal that’s sealed off from the airport. They’re flat-out stuck, which wouldn’t necessarily be bad if the infected weren’t hiding in the shadows, either. The behind-the-scenes luggage area gives newbie director (and Rollerball remake screenwriter, but we won’t hold that against him now) John Pogue lots of opportunity to turn his set labyrinthian, at which he excels.

As the lead flight attendant, Mercedes Masöhn (Red Sands) is your sub for Jennifer Carpenter, and thank God for that. You won’t miss Carpenter, nor the camcorder concept. Pogue still keeps things claustrophobic without having to resort to that no-longer-novel technique. Quarantine 2 isn’t perfect — some performances could be better — but it’s effective, and more so than its big brother. —Rod Lott

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A wannabe Blair Witch Project sharted by the hacks in charge of The Asylum, 8213: Gacy House purports to be footage found by the Del Plains Police Department near the remains of the six people who shot it in the abandoned, supposedly haunted home of notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy. They were out to capture, in one’s words, “hokey-pokey usual ‘Ghost Hunter‘ shit.”

It appears to have been made by a fraternity and a sorority during a moment of relative lucidness, featuring half a dozen douche bags who take time out to fuck. There’s also a busty psychic with a trout pout (Diana Terranova, which sounds like a readymade stripper name) who, while performing a spell, conveniently gets bitten on her very large and presumably surgically enhanced breast, which she has to unbutton her shirt to reveal. (Fear not, fake-tit fans: Gacy Ghost later rips her top and bra clean off.)

The paranormal activity here amounts to flickering light bulbs, closing doors, billowing curtains, strange noises, moving bedsheets and EVP instances of “kiss my ass.” Ooh, dat’s spooky! Speaking of speech, Boobs Psychic says, “Put it near your root chakra. … It’s two inches above the groin area.” Some Douche says, “We are gettin’ some kick-ass shit, knowwhatI’msayin’?” Another Douche, Maybe Even the Same Douche says, “Holy shit! Something just caressed my back!” And Yet Another Douche, Quite Possibly That One reasons, “The problem is not that there’s a demon scratching. The problem is that we’re overly tired.”

No, the problem is boredom — so much that 8213 rates a zero. At the 57-minute mark, there’s a scene in the basement where the entirety of the dialogue is: “Shit. Oh, fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Oh, you fucking piece of shit. Come on. Fuck. Frank! Hello, turn the fuck on, shit, come on. This is not a good time. Come on. What the fuck! Oh. What the fuck. Okay! Hey! Fuck. Come on. Aw, fuck this shit. Gaw, fuck. Got it, come on. Why is this — shit. Fuck, man. Fuckin’. Shit. Oh, fuck! Franklin, Franklin, Franklin! Franklin!” Throw some sniffles in there, too.

It could really use a pedophile clown. —Rod Lott

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George Romero has been associated with some diabolically fun horror anthologies of the past, including Creepshow, Creepshow 2, Tales from the Darkside: The Movie and Two Evil Eyes. Do not add Deadtime Stories to that list. Neither writing nor directing, Romero just collects a paycheck as host. Sitting in a chair with his signature TV-tube-shaped, black-rimmed glasses nearly as big as his head, he introduces three incredibly amateurish tales with zero star power (this not being 1985, Nick Mancuso does not count), not to mention any power, period. Hell, they can’t even be bothered to keep the typeface consistent.

In the first, “Valley of the Shadow,” a woman assembles a South American jungle expedition to search for her husband, who’s been missing for three years. Once there, one team member finds trees bearing strange fruit that look like extra-veiny testicles and squirt Aim toothpaste; but pay no mind, as this discovery has nothing to do with the story. They arrive at one island where not one of them thinks to say, “Hey, what’s with all those bloody heads on the pointy sticks?” Moral of the story: White people are stupid assholes.

“Wet” is just that. Despite warnings not to, a fat, bearded ginger pulls a mermaid head out of a box and buries it with her other parts. She comes back to life, crawls into his bed, and bites off his wiener. Then he turns into a merman. It’s like Splash meets … oh, say, a Turkish prison toilet. Moral of the story: Mancuso is starting to look an awful lot like Howard Hesseman.

Tom Savini directs the final chapter, the old-timey-set “House Call,” in which a frenzied woman summons a wizened old doctor to her home because her son thinks he’s a vampire — shades of Romero’s Martin — and he is. Moral of the story: I shan’t waste my precious time on Volume 2. —Rod Lott

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The Sixth Sense can toss my hairy, brown-eyed salad. The Usual Suspects can drown itself in a jail cell toilet bowl. Planet of the Apes can’t dodge the hurled heaps of fresh monkey poop it deserves fast enough. Strong words? Probably, since I absolutely love all three of those films, but there’s no denying that none comes close to matching the late-’80s Canadian cult metal “horror” classic, Rock ’n’ Roll Nightmare, for the title of Greatest Movie Twist Ending of All Time.

Other assholes might spoil it for you, but I shall not. Instead, I will attempt to describe the epic lameness you must suffer through to reach the final nirvana of fucked-up awesomeness. Made for $90,000 Nightmare is a loopy vanity project starring screenwriter Jon Mikl Thor, a blond bodybuilder/heavy metal singer whose ambitions always seemed to dwarf his budgets and talents.

Thor (who memorably played the zombie in the MST3K-spoofed Zombie Nightmare) plays John Triton, lead singer of a metal band that has descended upon an abandoned Ontario farmhouse to practice before recording a new album and going on tour. It’s a long trip, and we get to see most of it, thanks to the nearly eight-minute driving sequence director John Fasano (Black Roses) had to insert for the film to reach feature-length.

With the band comes the groupies, girlfriends and requisite sleazy manager, all of whom are eventually killed by the hilariously tacky-looking puppet demons who call the farmhouse home. Soon (but not quite soon enough), only John is left, and the significance of his last name is revealed. I shan’t say more.

This ranks right up there with Manos: The Hands of Fate, Troll 2, The Room and Plan 9 from Outer Space as one of the most deliriously fantastic “bad” films of all time. As slow and poorly made as it is, it has a mesmerizing quality that allows you to happily travel along with it, all the way to the absurdly awesome end. —Allan Mott

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