With America rocking the found-footage business, Spain gets into the act with Atrocious. Its concept is that sibling urban-legend investigators Cristian and July (unknowns Cristian Valencia and Clara Moraleda, respectively) are dragged by their parents to spend Easter weekend in a nearby village, where stands the family’s castle, empty for 10 years. Certain to be bored to death, the brother and sister shoot video of the entire trip.

Legend has it that a girl disappeared from the grounds decades before, never to be found. Also, there’s a gated labyrinth adjacent to their property they can’t wait to explore, but their father forbids them to step foot there. So naturally, they do, and find a lot of prickly branches there. Oh, and a well. And anyone who has seen The Ring knows those things are bad news. Especially later when they find a fresh trail of blood leading to it.

That’s not all. The kids hear weird sounds emanating from the maze while they’re trying to sleep. Things really escalate when their 8-year-old brother can’t be found, leading to a too-long run through the dark. (Hope you like night vision!)

The mere title of Atrocious invites trouble (I assume it was chosen to resemble the smash Insidious), but actually, the movie isn’t even close to awful. It’s not great, either, but it is muy bueno, with a rather effective final 10 or 15 minutes that are undeniably creepy, even if you’re short of being scared. —Rod Lott

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Beth (Neve McIntosh, TV’s Case Histories), a divorced lawyer living in a British suburb, is out on the street trying to retrieve her estranged daughter from her neighbor’s house when a group of black-clad, special-forces types appears out of nowhere and guns down a terrified man brandishing a cleaver. Forced back into her home by the soldiers, Beth attempts to find out what’s going on and make sure her daughter is okay. Her married lover thinks they’re under attack from Muslim terrorists, but the truth is far more sinister, and it soon becomes clear that they cannot depend on the soldiers for aid or rescue.

A cinéma vérité-style horror movie made with a typically bleak European aesthetic, Salvage is a classic example of how there is nothing more terrifying than sympathetic and compelling characters trapped in an unexplained situation they cannot control. Eschewing flashy editing or cinematography, director Lawrence Gough simply allows the story to unfold without embellishment and without telling us anything more than what the characters themselves know, resulting in genuine tension and more than a little anxiety on the viewer’s part.

The film also benefits from a brief, 74-minute running time that trims away any fat that might detract from the story and/or character development. While some North American viewers might have trouble comprehending the thickly accented British slang, the fact that you have to really listen to the dialogue keeps you that much more invested in what’s going on.

Definitely not for those who prefer happy endings. —Allan Mott

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If you thought Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street was a fine concept, but needed an extra hour to pad with the Bollywood dance numbers it sorely lacked … well, so did India. The result is Mahakaal, which lifts entire scenes and musical cues, but also adds a Michael Jackson impersonator in a Puma sweatshirt who has no “off” switch.

The knife-fingered glove is worn by Shakaal — that’s right: Shakaal, not Mahakaal — whose face looks like a topographic map and whose head sports one mean mullet. Instead of a child molester, he’s a black-magic practitioner. My friend Richard also thinks Shakaal looks like Fangoria‘s Tony Timpone.

Anyhoo, Anita (Archana Puran Singh), the girl whose dreams he torments, resembles a Miami Sound Machine-era Gloria
Estefan, yet remains kind of hot; her authority-figure dad is played by the Hindu version of Fred Armisen. She attends a local college where all the T-shirts — Iron Maiden, Siouxsie and the Banshees, cute owls — apparently have been flown in from an American record store with whatever was left over from its closeout sale.

With a late-game possession angle and camera moves swiped from Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead, Mahakaal certainly upsets the tonal apple cart with sudden, happy musical numbers (“Come on now / You know you want to / Come and have a picnic with me”), especially when they follow scenes of near-rape. Mahakkal is always baffling, but never, ever boring. —Rod Lott

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About the only thing The Roost has going for it are its wraparound segments, aping the old-school horror-host TV showcases of yesteryear — in this case, the fictional Frightmare Theatre!, a black-and-white affair with the great Tom Noonan as our guide. He knocks the film that will follow, calling it “truly wretched” and getting in a pun or two as he teases that it is “hot on the entrails of four young people on their way to a wedding.”

Cut to The Roost — in color, but über-grainy — with said four young people exhibiting zero personality while driving through rural roads at night. Crossing a bridge, the car’s front windshield comes glass-to-face with a bat, causing them to veer off the road. They go off to find help, but just find more and more bats.

Yep, bats. Have such things ever been frightening on film? That was meant as rhetorical, but no, they haven’t, not in 1979’s Nightwing, and certainly not in 1997’s Bats, in which Lou Diamond Phillips looked forever constipated. But scariness — or lack of — is not The Roost‘s real issue; slowness is. It’s the deathly pace that kills it.

Even at only 80 minutes, the movie drags. Had writer/director Ti West (who reunited with Noonan to great effect in 2009’s creepy The House of the Devil) broken up his thin story with more bits from the horror host, rather than just having him bookend the thing, The Roost could rustle up some enthusiasm among viewers. A giant in indie horror, West wields considerable talent — just not here in this, his first feature. —Rod Lott

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The curse of genre sequels is that most people inevitably will dismiss them sight unseen. Put a Roman numeral after a title and at least half of your audience automatically will roll their eyes and look for something original, like the new remake. (See what I did there? It’s funny because remakes are the closest things we have to original movies these days. Isn’t that amusingly insightful?)

I know this because a lot of people are surprised whenever I recommend or defend Return of the Living Dead III as a worthwhile horror effort. At least 90 percent of them actually never have seen it, but operate under the assumption that it has to suck for no other reason than it said Roman numerals. But not only does Brian Yuzna’s more serious sequel to Dan O’Bannon’s comic zombie classic not suck, but it’s the rare horror film that takes its characters seriously enough to allow for a genuinely moving ending that likely will stick with you long after you’ve seen it.

Julie (Melinda Clarke, Return to Two Moon Junction) and Curt (J. Trevor Edmond, Meatballs 4) are a pair of teenage lovers whose forbidden courtship is cut short when she’s killed in a motorcycle accident. Unable to accept the loss, he takes her body to the secret military lab his Army colonel father runs, and exposes her to the zombie-making gas featured in the previous two films. At first, it seems like they might actually get the happy ending they wanted, but then Julie starts to feel the agonizing pain of the living dead — a pain that can be eased only by either inflicting even greater pain (which she achieves by turning herself into the ultimate alternative pin-up queen) or the consumption of living human brains.

Essentially Romeo and Juliet with zombies, ROTLD III transcends its story flaws (the ease with which Julie and Curt get into the top-secret military lab is rather disconcerting) due to a heartfelt script that avoids cheap jokes or irony, along with sincere performances from its talented cast. Despite its lowly status as a direct-to-video horror sequel, it’s well worth checking out … unlike Return of the Living Dead Part II, IV and V, which are all as terrible as you’d naturally assume. —Allan Mott

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