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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If you’re like me, you poor bastard, the title of this flick alone will land it in your Netflix queue. Then there’s the poster, depicting a pair of sexy, blood-spattered nurses. To hell with the queue — this one’s for instant streaming.

Sick Nurses is a horror film from Thailand and if the action took place in the real world, it would make very little sense. We’re in a hospital that seems to house no patients — just a half-dozen hot young nurses and one doctor who make a living harvesting and selling body parts. When one of the nurses who thinks the doctor is hers exclusively finds out that he is going to marry her pregnant sister, she cracks up and threatens to reveal their illegal operation. The other nurses kill her and, on the seventh day after her death, she returns to enact her revenge on everyone.

At this point, this goofy little film gets a bit more serious as directors Piraphan Laoyont and Thodsapol Siriwiwat go all surreal with the visuals. The hospital’s empty halls stop looking like ways to keep the budget down and start looking like corridors of the mind where bad things, and only bad things, ooze out of the walls or float along the ceiling.

But the quasi-artsy imagery never completely overcomes the over-the-top quality. What began as a camp comedy becomes a camp black comedy with lots of gore, long streaming hair and garter belts. —Doug Bentin

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One of the most satisfying zombie movies I’ve ever seen isn’t a movie at all, but the British TV series Dead Set, a five-episode wonder. You know how everyone talked about how awesome AMC’s The Walking Dead show was upon its debut in Halloween 2010? Well, Dead Set did the undead far better two years earlier, and makes our Yank efforts look like Sesame Street by comparison.

Don’t get me wrong: I liked The Walking Dead. But I didn’t love it, because every episode seemed to stretch half an hour’s worth of story into twice the time. There’s no such problem with Dead Set. With the exception of the extended first ep, each one is just a hair above 20 minutes; all are packed with survivor interaction and zombie action.

What sets it apart immediately is its concept, in that the housemates of UK’s Big Brother reality show are blissfully unaware of the zombie uprising outside their studio, until said uprising extends indoors. Suddenly, that week’s eviction ceremony is the least of the contestants’ worries.

Dead Set gets away with a lot that the U.S. tube wouldn’t allow. Remember Walking Dead‘s buzzed-about scene in which a couple of characters bathed themselves in zombie blood and entrails to go undercover? That’s tame compared to the Big Brother producer (Andy Nyman) personally stripping an expired player of skin and meat, right down to the bone.

Watch all five back-to-back for a bloody good 141-minute feature experience. —Rod Lott

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