Honestly, I’m cool with direct-to-video horror sequels. What they lack in big-name stars, they make up for in gore. See Wrong Turn 3, 30 Days of Night: Dark Days and, now, Mirrors 2.

Looking like Dexter‘s little brother, Nick Stahl plays Max, still grieving over the car-crash death of his fiancé. His dad (William Katt) hires him to be the night watchman of his soon-to-open upscale department store. He’ll be replacing the one whose mirror image happily chewed broken glass, causing his own face and mouth to be cut up.

And so it goes that upper management get killed as they watch their mirror images do gruesome things, such as slicing their own tendons. The best death scene comes when Christy Romano (formerly Disney’s squeaky-clean Kim Possible) meets a really bloody death in the shower after soaping up her new, ugly fake boobs.

While the first half plays like Final Destination in the creative deaths department, the second finds Max and second-half love interest Emmanuelle Vaugiér attempting to solve the riddle behind these gruesome shenanigans. Maybe it makes more sense if you’ve seen the first Mirrors; I haven’t. As director, DTV vet Victor García (Return to House on Haunted Hill) brings visual class to these proceedings, yielding a satisfying fright flick, even if it’s completely void of frights (Katt’s middle-age ponytail notwithstanding). —Rod Lott

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When I was a child, Terror Train freaked me out. Today, I realize there’s nothing scary about it, outside of a creepy Groucho Marx mask, an overabundance of disco tunes, and hairdos as misbegotten as the truly awful dialogue. Still, the movie’s enjoyable enough as a partially derailed example of the ’70s’ slasher craze.

Basically Halloween on a train, but with the menacing suspense left behind at the station, this choo-choo chiller details what happens (bad things!) when a bunch of asshole college seniors embark on a coke-and-booze-fueled train trip, complete with David Copperfield doing a magic show. They all wear Halloween costumes, even though it’s New Year’s Eve.

Smart, they’re not. Especially because that nerdy pledge they humiliated with a mean prank four years ago is all aboard for revenge. They made him think he was gonna make it with Jamie Lee Curtis, but had a corpse waiting instead. So he dons mask after mask and goes bonkers with a big ol’ knife.

In an unrated cut, Terror Train might have real bite. As is, it’s more of a curiosity than ticket-punching winner. Jamie Lee doesn’t even get much to do, but the third-act sequence with her in a conductor’s cage is the only set piece that approaches real fright. It leaves big questions in terms of plot holes and logic, plus the burning “Will they cast Criss Angel for the inevitable remake?” —Rod Lott

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There’s a point midway through Neighbor where, after sucking for a long time, it convinces you it’s about to not only stop sucking, but might actually justify the previous sucking that took place. Then it yells, “Psych!” and starts sucking all over again, and continues on sucking until the credits finally roll.

The film follows a nameless maniac who is able to invade the homes of strangers and torture them to death, because she looks like America Olivo (Bitch Slap) and doesn’t fit the whole psychotic serial killer stereotype. After we see her torture and kill a bunch of people we don’t know (including John Waters regular Mink Stole), she moves on to a bunch of characters we do know, but still care very little about. After she has tortured and killed them, we find out someone else has been arrested for her crimes, and she’s free to go on her hot-chick homicidal ways.

The generous fool in me wants to believe writer/director Robert Angelo Masciantonio was going for an American Psycho-esque satire here, but without that film’s pedigree and deliberate stylization, Neighbor adds up to little more than a series of increasingly violent acts perpetrated on the human body, climaxing with a scene where Olivo (whose performance is the film’s sole highlight) inserts and breaks a glass tube in her main victim’s (obviously rubber) penis.

As graphic as this moment is, it lacks the authenticity required to be genuinely frightening, which is ultimately the problem with the entire movie: It never earns the disgust it tries so hard to invoke. —Allan Mott

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Made-for-TV movies didn’t always suck. In the 1970s and very early ’80s, they were downright awesome. Just look at Duel, Gargoyles, Killdozer, Dead of Night and Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark — solid, well-oiled genre flicks one and all. But the best of these spookshows was Frank De Felitta’s Dark Night of the Scarecrow (sorry, folks, but Trilogy of Terror is only one-third good).

Charles Durning headlines as Otis, a sweaty, pumpkin-assed small-town postman who’s also a closet alcoholic, big-time bigot and all-around loser. When the mentally handicapped Bubba Ritter (Larry Drake) carries the torn-up, near-lifeless body of a little girl to her mother, Otis and pals assume the worst and grab their guns.

Bubba’s mom hides him in the scarecrow on their farm field, but the vigilante mob finds him and shoots him dead. And for nothing: Bubba saved the little girl’s life; ’twas a vicious dog to blame for her bloodiness. D’oh! Just desserts arrive as a scarecrow comes a-knockin’ for vengeance, one by one. You might say they get the short end of the straw. (Insert rimshot here.)

So much of this movie has haunted me since I saw its CBS Saturday prime-time premiere at the age of 10. Nearly three decades later, it still holds up — sadly, so does the small-mindedness of its characters — as a creepy, effective slasher film, minus the slashing. You won’t miss it; this is a well-told story that gets its thrills the old-fashioned way: It earns them. This is a true horror treasure. —Rod Lott

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Macabre is Lamberto Bava’s first solo directing credit and it arrived in the year of his more famous father’s (Mario Bava) death. The film is late giallo and lacks many of the genre’s traditional touches, but Lamberto manages the suspense well and delivers some genuinely creepy moments.

Bernice Stegers stars as Jane Baker, a New Orleans wife and mother who leaves her kids in the care of the yard man one morning so she can tryst with her lover, Frank. While the two of them are playing Ride ‘Em Cowboy, her adolescent daughter (Veronica Zinny) drowns her little brother in the bathtub. Someone calls Jane, who gets Frank to drive her home. On the way, they’re involved in a freak accident and Frank loses his head. Literally.

One year later, Jane is released from an asylum and moves into the old house where she and Frank used to meet. The blind landlord, Robert (Stanko Molnar), who has a crush on her, is glad she’s back until he starts hearing the sounds of passion issuing from her apartment as she calls out Frank’s name.

At varying points, the movie could become a ghost story, a psycho kid story, a creepy landlord story, or a nutty woman in the upstairs apartment story. Actually, it blends elements from all of them together. Unfortunately, Bava gives in to the temptation of tossing in a last-second kicker designed to shock that just doesn’t work and futzes with the story as we expect it to end. Bad move.

Filmed in New Orleans, the flick lets us see parts of the city that aren’t the French Quarter, and that’s nifty. It’s a near-miss that works for 88.5 minutes out of 89. —Doug Bentin

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