A wannabe Blair Witch Project sharted by the hacks in charge of The Asylum, 8213: Gacy House purports to be footage found by the Del Plains Police Department near the remains of the six people who shot it in the abandoned, supposedly haunted home of notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy. They were out to capture, in one’s words, “hokey-pokey usual ‘Ghost Hunter‘ shit.”

It appears to have been made by a fraternity and a sorority during a moment of relative lucidness, featuring half a dozen douche bags who take time out to fuck. There’s also a busty psychic with a trout pout (Diana Terranova, which sounds like a readymade stripper name) who, while performing a spell, conveniently gets bitten on her very large and presumably surgically enhanced breast, which she has to unbutton her shirt to reveal. (Fear not, fake-tit fans: Gacy Ghost later rips her top and bra clean off.)

The paranormal activity here amounts to flickering light bulbs, closing doors, billowing curtains, strange noises, moving bedsheets and EVP instances of “kiss my ass.” Ooh, dat’s spooky! Speaking of speech, Boobs Psychic says, “Put it near your root chakra. … It’s two inches above the groin area.” Some Douche says, “We are gettin’ some kick-ass shit, knowwhatI’msayin’?” Another Douche, Maybe Even the Same Douche says, “Holy shit! Something just caressed my back!” And Yet Another Douche, Quite Possibly That One reasons, “The problem is not that there’s a demon scratching. The problem is that we’re overly tired.”

No, the problem is boredom — so much that 8213 rates a zero. At the 57-minute mark, there’s a scene in the basement where the entirety of the dialogue is: “Shit. Oh, fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Oh, you fucking piece of shit. Come on. Fuck. Frank! Hello, turn the fuck on, shit, come on. This is not a good time. Come on. What the fuck! Oh. What the fuck. Okay! Hey! Fuck. Come on. Aw, fuck this shit. Gaw, fuck. Got it, come on. Why is this — shit. Fuck, man. Fuckin’. Shit. Oh, fuck! Franklin, Franklin, Franklin! Franklin!” Throw some sniffles in there, too.

It could really use a pedophile clown. —Rod Lott

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George Romero has been associated with some diabolically fun horror anthologies of the past, including Creepshow, Creepshow 2, Tales from the Darkside: The Movie and Two Evil Eyes. Do not add Deadtime Stories to that list. Neither writing nor directing, Romero just collects a paycheck as host. Sitting in a chair with his signature TV-tube-shaped, black-rimmed glasses nearly as big as his head, he introduces three incredibly amateurish tales with zero star power (this not being 1985, Nick Mancuso does not count), not to mention any power, period. Hell, they can’t even be bothered to keep the typeface consistent.

In the first, “Valley of the Shadow,” a woman assembles a South American jungle expedition to search for her husband, who’s been missing for three years. Once there, one team member finds trees bearing strange fruit that look like extra-veiny testicles and squirt Aim toothpaste; but pay no mind, as this discovery has nothing to do with the story. They arrive at one island where not one of them thinks to say, “Hey, what’s with all those bloody heads on the pointy sticks?” Moral of the story: White people are stupid assholes.

“Wet” is just that. Despite warnings not to, a fat, bearded ginger pulls a mermaid head out of a box and buries it with her other parts. She comes back to life, crawls into his bed, and bites off his wiener. Then he turns into a merman. It’s like Splash meets … oh, say, a Turkish prison toilet. Moral of the story: Mancuso is starting to look an awful lot like Howard Hesseman.

Tom Savini directs the final chapter, the old-timey-set “House Call,” in which a frenzied woman summons a wizened old doctor to her home because her son thinks he’s a vampire — shades of Romero’s Martin — and he is. Moral of the story: I shan’t waste my precious time on Volume 2. —Rod Lott

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The Sixth Sense can toss my hairy, brown-eyed salad. The Usual Suspects can drown itself in a jail cell toilet bowl. Planet of the Apes can’t dodge the hurled heaps of fresh monkey poop it deserves fast enough. Strong words? Probably, since I absolutely love all three of those films, but there’s no denying that none comes close to matching the late-’80s Canadian cult metal “horror” classic, Rock ’n’ Roll Nightmare, for the title of Greatest Movie Twist Ending of All Time.

Other assholes might spoil it for you, but I shall not. Instead, I will attempt to describe the epic lameness you must suffer through to reach the final nirvana of fucked-up awesomeness. Made for $90,000 Nightmare is a loopy vanity project starring screenwriter Jon Mikl Thor, a blond bodybuilder/heavy metal singer whose ambitions always seemed to dwarf his budgets and talents.

Thor (who memorably played the zombie in the MST3K-spoofed Zombie Nightmare) plays John Triton, lead singer of a metal band that has descended upon an abandoned Ontario farmhouse to practice before recording a new album and going on tour. It’s a long trip, and we get to see most of it, thanks to the nearly eight-minute driving sequence director John Fasano (Black Roses) had to insert for the film to reach feature-length.

With the band comes the groupies, girlfriends and requisite sleazy manager, all of whom are eventually killed by the hilariously tacky-looking puppet demons who call the farmhouse home. Soon (but not quite soon enough), only John is left, and the significance of his last name is revealed. I shan’t say more.

This ranks right up there with Manos: The Hands of Fate, Troll 2, The Room and Plan 9 from Outer Space as one of the most deliriously fantastic “bad” films of all time. As slow and poorly made as it is, it has a mesmerizing quality that allows you to happily travel along with it, all the way to the absurdly awesome end. —Allan Mott

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Building a hotel over one of the seven gateways to Hell will come back to bite you in the ass. So will bringing home a woman with milky eyes and a German shepherd, especially if you meet them standing motionless in the middle of the road. These and other lessons, director Lucio Fulci imparts with torn parts in his splatter horror classic The Beyond, aka Seven Doors of Death.

In a sepia-toned prologue taking place in 1927, we learn that the occupant of room 36, a painter/warlock, fatally was beaten with chains and nailed to the wall by Louisiana residents who apparently don’t cotton to painters/warlocks, rendering the place cursed. Sixty years later, Liza (Katherine MacColl, Hawk the Slayer) inherits the place, complete with flooded basement, whereupon the hotel claims its first modern-day victim in Joe the plumber (not the Tea Party hero, but oh, if it were!). Liza is warned by the aforementioned milky-eyed blind girl (Cinzia Monreale, Beyond the Darkness) to move, but Liza is unswayed: “Listen, I’ve lived in New York!”

Melding two beloved fright-film subgenres — the zombie movie and the haunted-house thriller — Fulci’s The Beyond goes way beyond the horror norm, testing audience’s tummies with an triple-eye-gouging, face-melting, head-impaling, throat-tearing, forehead-penetrating, cheek-puncturing good ol’ time. The practical effects are grossly realistic, except for one point where some fakery is obvious. However, that’s the part where several tarantulas slowly crawl onto a paralyzed guy’s face and tear it apart, claiming the honor of being cinema’s all-time sickest spider scene. Arachnophobes will flip.

If you can stomach it, see it! Apropos of nothing, one of the walking dead at the 1:20 mark looks like a young Robert De Niro. —Rod Lott

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The Japanese horror film Uzumaki will make your head spin … but not necessarily in a good way. The crazy shit all starts when schoolgirl Kirie Goshima (Eriko Hatsune) notices her boyfriend Shuichi’s father being mesmerized by a snail shell, then a pottery wheel — anything containing a spiral, which he captures obsessively with a camcorder.

The old man’s madness soon results in his suicide, at which point it spreads to the immediate populace via a spiraling plume of smoke. Soon, everyone in that vortex shape — hair curls, an inner-ear part, a millipede — sends everyone to Loopyville. As They Might Be Giants once sang, “The spiraling shape will make you go insane / Everyone wants to see that groovy thing.”

You’re better off with the TMBG tune or Junji Ito’s terrific three-volume manga on which this flick is based. Whereas the books move quickly, page by page, the movie shambles about at a pace of one of its supporting characters: the one who shows up at school shuffling along with a prodigious slime trail behind him.

Director Higuchinsky — yes, just the one name — succeeds in presenting the tale with some interesting angles and inventive setups, and does not skimp on gore when it’s called for. The apocalyptic end scene, however, looks drawn, demonstrating the limitations of the budget. It’s a semi-solid try, but with such rich material to draw from, could be far creepier and far better. —Rod Lott

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