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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Having given birth to the modern zombie genre with Night of the Living Dead, George A. Romero further explored the terrain in several sequels, including the fourth entry, Land of the Dead. So different are the films that he can never be accused of making the same movie twice; but this time, the result just isn’t all that good.

Working with a huge-for-him budget and some name actors, Land had every opportunity to be the “zombie masterpiece” as the ads touted. From the very first shot — a sly visual gag of a pointing diner sign reading “EATS” — you think Romero may very well pull it off. But then the camera slowly pans over to some kind of zombie oompha band. If we’re going to fault George Lucas for the Wookie’s Tarzan yell in Revenge of the Sith, we’ve gotta take Romero to task for this, too.

A thin story emerges: In one major metropolitan area, survivors live in a well-fortressed downtown area surrounded by rivers, barbed wire, electric fences and armed guards to keep the undead out. The rich among them live in a palatial skyscraper filled with fine dining, shopping and housing, all owned by the wealthy Dennis Hopper. He’s hired armies to roam the streets for the sole purpose of killing zombies.

Meanwhile, Gas Station Attendant Zombie has somehow learned to become smarter and corrals a whole mess of zombies to follow him to the gated community for some late-night snacks. Zombies attacking a skyscraper. That should be an awesome movie (and it was, almost, in Demons 2). But rather than deliver that, Romero would rather get preachy and political. Screw messages! Me want zombies! —Rod Lott

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Well, you can’t hit one over the fence every time at bat. The House That Dripped Blood is the third of Amicus Productions’ portmanteau horror anthologies, and it’s at best a shaky single achieved as the result of a fielder’s error.

The script is by Robert Bloch and based on four of his short stories: “Method for Murder,” “Waxworks,” “Sweets to the Sweet” and “The Cloak.” The last two are classic Bloch, but here, the scripts are weakened, especially in “The Cloak,” by producer Max Rosenberg’s insistence on putting humor onscreen and keeping the horror off.

The cast makes the film sort of worth watching. Denholm Elliott stars in the first story, about a writer of horror stories who begins to think that his creations are coming to life. Peter Cushing and Joss Ackland are in segment two, about a creepy wax museum and the nutjob who operates it. Christopher Lee tops a tale of a man trying to live with an adolescent witch, and Jon Pertwee and Ingrid Pitt finish off with a comic vampire yarn.

The film contains no thrills or chills — not even a weak shiver — and is for Cushing/Lee fans only. Note that Vincent Price was originally offered, but turned down the role of the snotty, egotistical horror movie star eventually played by Pertwee. Price got his chance to burlesque hammy actors two years later in Theatre of Blood, and that one’s a must-see. —Doug Bentin

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