If you’re ever boarding a commercial airline and the pilot happens to mention it’s his last flight before retirement and a long vacation with the grandkids, turn around and get off! Because there’s a middle-aged housewife zombie locked up in the cargo bay and she. Wants. Out.

The proof is in Flight of the Living Dead: Outbreak on a Plane, which is like Snakes on a Plane, minus the snakes, adding the undead, but keeping same the ratio of “fuck” and its variations to all other words spoken. I’m fairly certain the subtitle only exists to hammer this point home, and even potentially confuse/trick viewers too clueless to know the difference.

Soap actor David Chisum is no Samuel L. Jackson, but his FBI agent has a gun. So does Richard Tyson as a federal marshal with a beret that, at certain angles, make his hair look like Princess Leia. There are three super-hot flight attendants (that’s how you know it’s fiction) on the Paris-bound plane, one pro golfer whose carry-on is a golden putter, Kevin J. O’Connor in the John Malkovich role of kooky criminal, several douchebags and, eventually, a jumbo jet full of zombies that just seem to come out of nowhere, despite the confined setting.

Once it gets going, Flight is awfully fun, but it could’ve been more fun, had the whole of it played things as over-the-top as the last chunk of scenes. One moment even veers into the purposely slapstick deaths of the great Final Destination 2. It gives you a lot of simple-minded entertainment for your ticket, but no free bag of peanuts. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Popular legend has it that when Zombie High was (very briefly) released to theaters, its distributor printed the negative with the reels in the wrong order and nobody could tell the difference. True or not, there’s no denying the film has a jagged, unfinished feel to it that is simply too strong to be overcome by its talented cast and a plot ripe with satiric potential.

Virginia Madsen — at the height of her Virginia Madsen-ness — plays a scholarship student at a prestigious prep academy, which has just started admitting female students (including her roommate, Sherilyn Fenn, only then at the cusp of her potential Sherilyn Fenn-ness). Despite its reputation and successful alumni, there’s something definitely off about the students at the school. Turns out, they’re all emotionless zombies whose brains have been drained to provide the serum necessary to keep its ageless faculty members alive.

Despite acknowledging the comic possibilities of its plot in the third act, Zombie High ends up being a dry, flaccid movie that completely fails to take what it has and turn it into something entertaining. As a result, the few moments that do stand out seem to have happened more by accident than design. That it ends with a bizarre animated sequence apparently inspired by similar sequences found in Savage Steve Holland’s Better Off Dead and One Crazy Summer only adds to the confusion.

A horror/comedy that is never frightening or funny, Zombie High is one of those films that prove that an interesting concept is ultimately powerless against a terrible script and incompetent execution.—Allan Mott

Buy it at Amazon.

Something of a minor cult classic, I, Madman stars The Lawnmower Man‘s mattress mate Jenny Wright as Virginia, a frustrated actress and employee of a used bookstore who’s spending dark and stormy nights with her nose buried in an all-but-forgotten pulp thriller by one Malcolm Brand, featuring a disfigured maniac named Dr. Kessler. She’s my kind of girl, not only because she reads for pleasure, but because she does so wearing only a satin half-camisole and white panties.

Anyway, once she’s through with Much of Madness, More of Sin, she seeks out Brand’s only other novel, titled I, Madman. This being the days before the magic of the Internet, she can’t track it down. Oddly, it shows up at her apartment door one day, but who left it there? In that follow-up book, Dr. Kessler continues a string of murders, seeking body parts from his victims in order to put his own disfigured face back together. These scenes play out before our eyes as Virginia imagines herself as part of the story, with Kessler played by the film’s makeup effects artist, Randall William Cook, later a three-time Oscar winner for The Lord of the Rings.

Much to the consternation of Virginia’s cop boyfriend (Clayton Rohner), the murders begin to play out in the real world. No one believes Virginia when she tells them it’s the work of this fictional Dr. Kessler, especially since he’s described as wearing a cloak over half of his face, and the scalp of a redheaded victim over his bald head.

There’s more than a little Phantom of the Opera flavor to I, Madman, and its bleeding of the garish murders on the page into the real world is an interesting idea. John Carpenter tried it — and failed — with his H.P. Lovecraft tribute In the Mouth of Madness, but here, of all people, The Gate director Tibor Takács succeeds. He didn’t have a lot of money to do so, but he appears to have a grasp on the cheap thrills that paperback thrillers offer, and approaches the movie with the same kind of go-for-broke attitude. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Well before the end-of-Bush-era housing market collapse, I had the damnedest time trying to sell a perfectly good home. We had spent thousands of dollars in updates; the neighborhood was safe; and the school district was solid. Took me 16 agonizing months.

But in Book of Blood, a young woman gets her face ripped clean off by an unseen force of malevolence in her parents’ home, and professor Mary (Sophie Ward, the little girl from Young Sherlock Holmes, all growed up!) is all like, “Huh, I think I’ll move in and see whassup. So long as it passed inspection!” She invites her hunky new student, Simon (Jonas Armstrong), to move in, too.

This being based on two Clive Barker stories, all is not well. Writing appears all over the walls of the upstairs bedroom, warning not to “mock us.” Plus, flesh carving (just how rough does it Barker like it, I wonder?) and forbidden sex, in which Ward’s nipples are so erect and pencil-eraser elongated, her partner risks ocular trauma.

Adapted and directed by John Harrison of the underrated Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, it has an ending that makes you think, “Who wrote this? Jeane Dixon?” It’s also not scary, unless you’re terrified of dragonflies, in which case you’re totally fucked. It’s no Candyman or even Midnight Meat Train, but it’s decent enough, if senseless. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Okay, I admit it: I’m not perfect. I’ve done some pretty lousy things in my life. But I have never done anything, wanted to do anything, or even thought of anything to make me deserve this movie. If Stalin were in Hell watching The Morgue, I’d think, “the poor bastard,” and shuffle sadly away.

In the first place, the setting isn’t even a morgue. It’s a mortuary and mausoleum. After closing, only two people remain on the premises: janitor Margo (Lisa Crilley, Annapolis) and night watchman George (Bill Cobbs, Night at the Museum). Margo, who naps in coffins, allows just anyone in and George vanishes for hours at a time. It’s a terrible thing that Cobbs’ career has this lousy bump in it. It may turn out to be a high point for Crilley.

So on this night of nights, Margo is interrupted by a family of three that comes in because they ran out of gas. (Mom is played by Heather Donahue, she of the enraged nostrils in The Blair Witch Project.) Then a few minutes later, a couple of banged-up jokers show up and bust through the French doors. And, oooh, the ghost of Horace, a former employee who committed suicide in the restroom by slitting his own throat — sing with me, “Bleedin’ in the boys’ room” — is wandering the halls seeking people to kill because, hell, why not?

The movie is so bad it took two directors to do the deed, Halder Gomes and Gerson Sanginitto. Remember their names. That way, if you ever forget the names of the characters in Dumb and Dumber, you can just call them Halder and Gerson. With a twist ending that’s about as twisty as the shortest distance between two points, this is the kind of flick that results when guys watch movies like this and think, “Hey, I can make a movie as good as that.” And then do. —Doug Bentin

Buy it at Amazon.