I’ve been following the career of horror director William Malone since his Tales from the Crypt days. He’s got a good eye for the creepy visual. Check out House on Haunted Hill. Unfortunately, he’s got the story sense of a 6-year-old — check out House on Haunted Hill — and doesn’t know when to stop. His endings leave a lot to be desired. And by “a lot,” I mean everything.

In Parasomnia, Dylan Purcell stars as Danny, who is wandering around in an asylum one day, gawking at the creepy inmates as if it were Bedlam, circa 1750. He sees Laura (Cherilyn Wilson), who suffers from the title condition, which keeps her asleep most of the time. Her doctor (Timothy Bottoms), who has never heard the phrase “medical ethics,” tells Danny her story, and the young man sneaks her out so she won’t get caught in the MacGuffin.

Now the guy in the room next to hers is a serial killer named Volpe (Patrick Kilpatrick). So dangerous is this monster, he’s kept standing up in chains and masked so he can’t hypnotize the staff. Right, he’s in the room next to a sleeping girl. This place is not on the shortlist for Asylum of the Year honors.

Anyway, when Danny takes Laura home, Volpe escapes to track her down and kill everyone in the world. Jeffrey Combs is wasted in the cop role. Malone has outdone himself because not only is the ending bad, the rest of the flick is, too. Okay, there are some nice visuals when we get to Volpe’s Dr. Phibes-ish lair, but my God, this thing is stupid. —Doug Bentin

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Oh, those wacky 1960s, a time in which it seemed theater and film could go way out, man. Way, way out. Maisie Mosco’s play Happy Family — which, if there is any justice in the world, wasn’t a success onstage — became a movie in 1970 that redefined the word “obscurity.” Hammer horror buffs will recognize the name of its director, Freddie Francis, but Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny & Girly is no Hammer. More of a bent, rusty nail, actually. When Britain’s National Film Theatre sponsored a Francis retrospective season, no one could locate even a videotape copy of this one.

The four title characters live in a decaying mansion somewhere in England. Sonny and Girly, both in their late teens or early 20s, go on the prowl at the local playground and pick up homeless men, drunks and hippies (remember them?); bring them home; and force them to become “New Friends” or even members of the family. When the current New Friend tries to escape, he is killed as part of The Game. Despite their chronological ages, the siblings act and talk like pre-adolescents. Mumsy and Nanny are so stereotypically pre-war Brit, they’d make Mary Poppins puke a spoonful of sugar.

Also known as simply Girly, it sounds creepy, and could be if the movie weren’t trying so hard to be mysterious in a zany sort of way. My guess is that the play was long on black comedy in the absurdist manner so popular at the time, and Francis’ tendency, naturally enough, was to play up the horrific aspects, and the two approaches to the material do not mix well at all.

The movie has a good cast of Brit character actors, led by Michael Bryant as the newest New Friend. Vanessa Howard is a very sexy Girly, in a creepy she-wants-to-cut-my-head-off kind of way. Oddly enough, my guess is that everyone involved thought they were making an art film. No cigar. —Doug Bentin

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Writer/director Tim Sullivan knows exactly what he’s doing with 2001 Maniacs: You need only wait maybe two minutes past the opening credits to get nudity, then 10 more for the plot to be fully established. A remake of H.G. Lewis’ infamous, influential Two Thousand Maniacs! of 1964, it unexpectedly plants you on the side opposite of the “heroes.” In other words, you can’t wait to see these assholes get killed.

Said assholes are frat boys on spring break; they’re the kind of guys who see and refer to women only as “pussy.” On their way to Daytona Beach, they and a few other students stupidly follow a homemade detour sign and end up at the ironically named Pleasant Valley, a small town ready to kick off its annual Guts N’ Glory Jubilee. Mayor Buckman (Robert Englund), he of the Confederate-flag eyepatch, insists they stay as the guests of honor.

That’s because, of course, they’re to be the main course of the barbecue for this cannibal clan. Via Buckman’s bevy of busty beauties, the boys succumb to their comely charms, only to end up on the business end of machines of torture. This allows Sullivan to go whole-hog in updating Lewis’ brand of Southern-fried splatter for the gorno generation.

But it’s not without a strong sense of humor, mostly effective, in the same vein as Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever (Roth serves as producer and provides a cameo), and some of it even qualifying as sharp satire on racial and regional stereotypes. If you have an open mind and don’t mind the mess, you’re apt to find 2001 Maniacs mighty tasty — perhaps even finger-lickin’ good. —Rod Lott

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Filmmakers like Tim Kincaid exist to prove to the world that it really does take more than a lurid plotline and a group of actresses willing to embarrass their families to make a decent exploitation movie. By that standard, Breeders would seem like a sure thing, but Kincaid’s incompetence is so persuasive and omnipresent, it robs the film of any guilty pleasure it might otherwise have allowed.

A group of H.R. Giger-wannabe aliens located beneath the Empire State Building have determined that only hot virgin female humans are capable of carrying their offspring to term without mutation, and proceed to impregnate a bunch of them by force. On their trail is a young detective and the female doctor tasked with treating the violated women. In a rather convenient plot contrivance, it turns out that — like every other female character in the movie — the good doctor has never known the touch of a man and, therefore, is a ripe subject for impregnation herself.

Although the movie’s nonexistent budget does factor into its failure, the majority of blame rests squarely on Kincaid’s shoulders. While his filmmaking technique renders every frame in a squalid, ugly urban reality, his scripting sets the plot in a strange fantasy world where photographers tell bikini models they should eat before they continue their photo shoots, and 20-something city women spend their time snorting coke and exercising naked, but are still innocent enough to “save themselves” for marriage. Watching Breeders, it quickly becomes clear why Kincaid eventually gave up mainstream filmmaking for the much less demanding world of gay porn. —Allan Mott

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Scared to Death was Bela Lugosi’s only color film and it’s a crazy-ass mixture of slapstick and horror, especially for a film with a concentration-camp subplot! It opens at the city morgue, where doctors prepare to perform an autopsy on a “beautiful girl,” who then narrates her own story as it clumsily unfolds in flashback.

She’s the daughter of a physician, in whose house she lives with her husband and a maid. She’s not right in the head, which is no surprise, given the home’s open-door policy to any guest that stumbles by, including magician Lugosi and his deaf dwarf assistant, Indigo, as well as the nosy reporter, his plucky girlfriend and a brick-dumb cop. The woman lives in fear of being killed by a stranger. Every so often, a green, featureless mask floats by the window outside.

I know that filmmaking was still pretty antiquated back in 1947, but you’d think the filmmakers would have been smart enough not to begin with an autopsy if they wanted audiences to be surprised when the lead female dies at the end. You’d also think they’d have the foresight not to end with the line “She was … scared to death!” but they didn’t, and God bless them for it. —Rod Lott

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