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

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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

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What is wrong with horror fans? Really? I mean, damn! A lot of you think John Carpenter lost it with In the Mouth of Madness, but the fact is — note: fact, not opinion — that this tip of the hat to H.P. Lovecraft is one of the director’s most intriguing movies.

Sam Neill is John Trent, an insurance investigator called in by a publisher (Charlton Heston) to track down missing author Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow). Cane is a horror writer whose work frequently has a maddening effect on less stable readers. His new novel, only part of which has been delivered to his publisher, is reputed to be the one that will drive everyone mad. Trent believes that the whole situation is a publicity stunt, so he takes Cane’s editor (Julie Carmen) on a search for the town that is the book’s setting.

Mouth contains several set pieces that blend Lovecraftian concepts with Carpenter’s vision to create an unsettling atmosphere that grows more and more surreal, twisting reality, religion and fantasy around each other like an insane caduceus. The film is loaded with references to Lovecraft’s tales, and maybe that’s why it has never been particularly popular. It may be too old-school and literary for teen horroristas. Perhaps, too, Carpenter’s devotion to prosthetic rather than CG monsters makes it seem quaint. The director calls it the final film in his “Apocalypse Trilogy,” along with The Thing and Prince of Darkness, two other box-office underachievers.

But Mouth contains a great laugh line. After going through hell, then getting strapped into a straightjacket and slammed into a padded cell, Trent is forced to listen to elevator music designed to quiet the lunatics. As “We’ve Only Just Begun” plays over the asylum’s speakers, he slides to the floor moaning, “Oh no — not The Carpenters, too!” —Doug Bentin

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In Japan, Steel Trap is titled Jigsaw: Tower of Death, which is appropriate, because this is nothing if not another Saw-inspired game of gore. Mind you, that’s not a complaint, even if its twist ending is telegraphed early on and executed poorly.

During a rockin’ New Year’s Eve party in an abandoned office building, seven really attractive people — including a celebrity chef and a couple of coke-snorters — are invited to the 27th floor for an invitation-only after-party. Food and drink are just the tip of the knife, too, as a clue informs them that this shindig is a treasure hunt — you know, just like those Nicolas Cage movies, but shorn of historical documents and replaced with viscera.

The table’s place settings sport not only the guests’ names, but unofficial titles like “Loser,” “Heartless” and “Two-Faced,” yet they don’t see anything wrong with that. The clues are given in nursery rhymes, yet they aren’t the least bit creeped out by them. The first one takes them to a disembodied pig’s head wearing a crown, yet they keep on going.

I won’t spoil the deaths; they’re kind of creative in that Final Destination sort of way, and that includes being utterly implausible. But realism isn’t what I ask of films like Steel Trap. Nor crisp dialogue, as this is not: “Signal blocked? What the hell’s that mean?” “It means somebody blocked the signal.” —Rod Lott

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J.T. Petty’s well-made look at the underground world of pseudo-snuff horror movies troubled me more for its final thesis than for what it actually shows onscreen. While featuring interviews with real-life filmmakers, actors and academics (including a personal hero of mine, Men, Women and Chain Saws author Carol J. Clover), the film’s dominant narrative comes from the fictional investigation into the cinematic activities of a doughy loser named Eric Rost (Eric Marcisak).

As the man behind the titular S&Man (pronounced “sandman”) series, which consists of him stalking attractive women on camera before killing them onscreen, Eric is reluctant to give away his filmmaking methods — afraid that doing so will undermine his reputation and mystique. Unable to contact any of the women who have appeared in the films, Petty (playing himself) is faced with the very real possibility that Eric’s product is the genuine article.

It’s no easy task to combine the real and the fictional as well as Petty does here, but ultimately, I found myself troubled by the conclusions he reaches. In his final narration, he tells us that we watch horror movies knowing that the violence is fake, while wishing it were real — which, in my case, simply isn’t true.

The fact is, I am generally indifferent to the violence in horror movies — I enjoy them for other reasons I don’t have the time or space to go into — and I am able to watch them without self-inflicting psychic trauma because I am able to take comfort in the knowledge that what I am seeing isn’t real. To suggest otherwise is to indict myself with a cultural crime I have not committed.

The other problem with Petty’s thesis is that in order to fully exploit it, he ruins the film’s delicate balance between journalism and fiction. It simple isn’t credible that a conscionable documentarian wouldn’t, at a certain point, take what they have learned about Eric’s activities and report them to the police. And while Petty’s inaction is meant to support his apparent contention that there is little difference between real and staged violence, it instead only works to prove how ultimately misguided that contention is. —Allan Mott

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