Dwain Esper’s Maniac is one of the more notorious early exploitation films, but it’s still dreadfully boring, even at 50 minutes. And while you can cut it a little slack for being from the 1930s, the story still doesn’t make a lick of sense. Maniac is amateurish in all aspects, from the actors (sometimes gazing in the camera) to Esper’s direction (sometimes the performers’ faces are blocked by props).

An old, eccentric doctor and his young assistant are experimenting with formulas to revive the dead. When the doctor wants to kill the assistant and then bring him back with a new heart, the assistant shoots the doctor dead. Instead of shooting him with reanimating juice, however, he holes him up in the wall of the basement and then changes his appearance to look like the doctor so no one will notice his absence.

To help mask the illusion, the assistant-as-doctor keeps seeing patients, including a shy, topless chick and one man who goes mad, kidnaps a formerly dead girl, strips off her clothes and rapes her. Meanwhile, the assistant’s wife hangs out with her friends in their bras and granny panties. The nudity in this must have been shocking way back then; now it’s simply comical.

The high point comes out of no-where, when the assistant grabs a cat and pokes its eye out in graphic detail, admires it (“Why, it’s not unlike an oyster … or a grape!”) and pops it in his mouth. Bon appétit! Then the cops arrive and find the doc in the wall, thanks to the cries of a cat accidentally trapped in there with him, thanks to a storyline swiped from Edgar Allan Poe. Then you get to go to sleep, if you haven’t already. —Rod Lott

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To be fair, the slasher portions of this infamous slasher film make up only a small part of the picture. It should be called A Criminal Investigation Into the Toolbox Murders. Regardless, The Toolbox Murders is one of those movies I was too young to watch at the time it hit VHS, only able to read and hear about it being one of the most vile things ever committed to celluloid. Not sure if this says something about hype or me, but really, now that I’ve seen it, I found the movie fairly tame.

Don’t worry, though: Bloody murders using tools do occur. They all go down at an apartment complex that, conveniently, is the kind where lovely ladies undulate in their underthings at night in front of open windows, as if inviting pervo-psycho killers with a True Value rewards card. The most infamous moment involves porn star Marianne Walter (Screw My Wife Please 44: She Needs Your Meat) being nail-gunned after masturbating in the tub. It happens.

After the ski-masked killer’s rounds of chiseling and hammering tenants, one right after the other, The Toolbox Murders switches into a police procedural, à la Law & Order: Hardware Victims Unit, as the cops investigate. Unlike Tobe Hooper’s superior 2004 remake, the movie then hits some serious drag. Had it spaced the crimes out, one’s attention would be better held.

Still, it’s The Toolbox Murders. When something with such a demented concept enjoys cultural impact decades later, it’d be a shame not to embrace it at least a little bit. It’s almost worth watching just to see Wesley Uhre, simultaneously breaking out of his Land of the Lost typecasting and smothering his career. It’s definitely worth watching just to see Cameron Mitchell, being Cameron Mitchell. —Rod Lott

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The House on Skull Mountain is pretty much everything you want in ’70s cinema: stylistic horror, blaxploitation, Victor French with a porn ’stache. The story goes that an old, Haitian, voodoo priestess has died in her mansion atop a mountain (shaped like a skull, natch) in eastern Georgia (look for it in finer guide books right next to Stone Mountain). She leaves the place and a couple of eerie servants to a quartet of distant relations: prim Lorena (Janee Michelle), jive-talking Phillippe (Mike Evans), God-fearing Harriet (Xernona Clayton) and inexplicably white Andrew (French).

The movie, of course, realizes that Andrew’s racial heritage needs accounting for and explains that that’s actually why he’s there. He was adopted and is jumping at the chance to learn about his real family. Unfortunately, he runs late to the reading of the will, and the lawyer’s not set to return for another week. Plenty of time for everyone to settle in and start dying.

Phillipe is a creepy fool who drunkenly hits on Cousin Lorena; Harriet is a timid housemaid who sees visions of death. Lorena and Andrew quickly form a relationship that may or may not be romantic (I choose “not,” because it allows me to continue judging Phillipe while still liking the two leads), giving this House some appeal that it probably doesn’t deserve. There’s nothing overtly sexual in the way they act around each other; they’re just extremely comfortable in one another’s company and encourage each other in more ways than simply trying to stay alive. There’s a particularly sweet scene where Andrew complains about not knowing anything about himself: “I don’t even know what color I am.”

“Oh, Andrew. Is that really important?”

“You know that it’s not,” he says. Convincingly, too. “But I’d like to know.”

It’s nice to see since they were so obviously lonely people before they showed up in voodoo country. I’m not sure that Georgia actually is voodoo country, but we’ll run with it. At any rate, the sweetness of their relationship raises the stakes for both Andrew and the audience when Lorena becomes the next to be drummed out. —Michael May

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I am not a fan of hospitals. I can’t take three steps into one without being overcome with a wave of anxious nausea, keenly aware that somewhere in that building — far closer than I’d like — someone is drawing his or her last breath. Ironically, it’s that same anxiety that draws me to hospital-set and medical-themed horror movies, since they allow me to face my fear without risk or consequence. Having seen a lot of them, I can comfortably say that the 1982 Canadian-made Visiting Hours ranks near the top of the list.

While it admittedly never exploits its setting as effectively as Boaz Davidson’s Hospital Massacre, it manages to avoid descending into the ridiculous camp that mars that otherwise interesting effort and, more importantly, creates sympathetic characters we want to see live, rather than die — the hallmark of every successful horror movie.

The film stars Michael Ironside as a misogynist maniac on a mission to kill the popular female broadcaster (Lee Grant) who has taken on the cause of a battered woman unjustly convicted of murdering her abusive husband. When his initial attack on her is thwarted, he returns to the hospital to finish the job, but only manages to kill a bunch of other people before she is able to use his own knife to end his deadly spree.

Directed with style and tension by Jean-Claude Lord, Visiting Hours succeeds thanks to effective performances from its talented cast, which also includes William Shatner as Grant’s producer, and Linda Purl as the young, single mom/nurse who finds herself also stalked by Ironside after she witnesses him leaving the scene of one of his crimes. —Allan Mott

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Not to be confused with the horse-fucking documentary of the same name, Japan’s Zoo is a horror anthology culled from the works of the country’s uni-monikered Otsuichi, presumably a Stephen King of sorts. You wouldn’t know this from the film, which has no wraparound story or any system of linkage, nor the freaky, faceless guide pictured on its cover, which it could use. Each helmed by different directors, the five tales vary in length, style and quality; only one is excellent, while another is an utter chore.

“Kazari and Yoko” is a solid opener, a tale of two sisters who couldn’t be more different, despite being twins. Kazari is beautiful and doted upon by their mother; Yoko is treated literally like a dog and often abused. One day, Yoko decides to play a trick, and it’s as crafty as the segment overall. By contrast, the closing story, “Zoo,” is the worst of a bunch. Its elongated plot finds a guy killing his girlfriend at an abandoned zoo, then returning every day to take a Polaroid of her maggoty corpse so he can make a flipbook. It also has something to do with a zebra, and it doesn’t help that it’s purposely shot on ultra-grainy video.

“So Far” is a quasi-ghost story that goes on too long, with a twist that mitigates any power. It examines what happens when an only child’s parents are killed in a car crash, but return as ghosts, only unable to be seen or heard by the other spouse. “The Poem of Collected Sunlight” stands out, but only because it’s animated. The two-character bit is like the Frankenstein myth rendered as a tonal piece.

“Seven Rooms” makes the entire film worthy of existence, as a little boy and his older sister awake in a locked room with a dirt floor and concrete walls, with no recollection of getting there, nor much hope for escape. It’s like a combination of Cube and those ones with the chainsaw. Now, nothing about “Seven Rooms” (or any of Zoo, for that matter) is scary, but it’s packed with mystery, suspense and ingenuity — elements most of the other segments severely lack. —Rod Lott

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