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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Had Grave Encounters come with traditional opening credits, I might not have gone beyond that point. Here’s why: The film is written, edited and directed by “The Vicious Brothers.” Embarrassed to affix real names to it? Or was “The Extreme Brothers” taken, bro?

A Paranormal Activity-type flick of near-startling inactivity, Grave Encounters begins on a high note, with a straight-faced lampoon of every single crappy “reality” show featuring would-be ghost hunters. Here, the team totaling five aims to shoot its sixth episode overnight while locked inside the abandoned Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital, where hundreds of lobotomies were performed on mental patients many moons ago.

With Sean Rogerson doing a fine job of portraying the host as a total douche (to a point of tangible annoyance), the requisite strange stuff begins to happen following a belabored setup. This includes a woman’s hair being pulled, a window opening on its own, a door slamming on its own, and so on. Things only ramp up at the tail end, but either are highly reminiscent of scenes from other movies — most notably, [REC] and the House on Haunted Hill remake — or are acted so amateurishly, what is meant as horror comes off as humor.

There are two good moments, both of which add up to less than five seconds. The only thing “Vicious” is the film’s apparent lack of vocabulary; most of the dialogue is written with three words: “fuck,” “shit” and “Matt.”

I spit on your Grave Encounters. —Rod Lott

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Don’t be dissuaded that The House of Clocks is a film Lucio Fulci directed for cable television. After all, HBO’s infinite Real Sex series is directed for cable television. In other words, none of the Italian-baked horror master’s sensibilities is toned down. To assure you, an early scene depicts a woman being stabbed in the hoohah, and her baby-making parts — looking not unlike bait-shop wares — spill out.

To turn back the clock a bit, the titular abode belongs to Mr. and Mrs. Corsini (Cannibal Holocaust’s Paolo Paoloni and Damned in Venice’s Bettine Milne), an elderly couple who have used their wealth to fill their mansion with 70 years’ worth of antique clocks. They also have their nephew and niece there, off in a separate room where they can rot in relative peace, even with the railroad spikes that protrude from their necks.

Enter three young ruffians: two guys, one girl. These shoplifting, pot-smoking, cat-in-plastic-bag-trapping punks burst into the place to rob the Corsinis blind, but accidentally kill them, too. At the moment of the old geezers’ murder, the clocks freeze. Soon, their hands inexplicably move backward, thereby enabling the deceased Corsinis to take their revenge. Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives.

Goreophobes need not bother setting a date for this one, as it’s as brutal and bloody as Fulci’s famed filmography. Once the senior citizens start to lash back at their uninvited guests, The House of Clocks isn’t located that far from The House by the Cemetery or any of the director’s other zombie works. This one isn’t as good as those, but his fans will enjoy its over-the-top bloodletting. If you thought the “spring forward” portion of daylight saving time was a shock to your system, imagine how bad it would be under this roof. —Rod Lott

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