Through camcorder footage, Home Movie follows the foibles of the Poe family from Halloween to Easter. Shortly after moving to their wooded Connecticut home, Claire (celebrated soap star Cady McClain) and David (Adrian Pasdar, House of Frankenstein 1997) notice their children (real-life siblings Austin and Emily Joy Williams) aren’t acting like their usual selves.

Like how, you ask? Like throwing rocks. Like not using their words. Like … well, as Claire records on her video diary, “Yesterday morning, the 25th of December … Christmas … Jack and Emily crucified the family cat.” Ho-ho-holy shit, kids!

That’s small stuff compared to the rest. Although Shutter Island actor Christopher Denham’s first feature as writer and director breaks no ground, especially for the found-footage subgenre, he does two things really right. The first is how differently Claire and David — respectively, a child psychologist and a pastor — approach possible solutions to their offspring’s disturbing behavior: She hopes to prescribe an answer; he spritzes holy water and shouts commands at imagined demons.

And the second is how Denham doesn’t wuss out on taking his established dark path to its logical end, making the down and dirty Home Movie mean-spirited in the best of ways. The last 15 minutes are something else, with a final shot dripping in hand-wringing eeeevilllll. It almost makes up for Pasdar’s Annoying Dad with No Off Switch routine, what with his silly voices, cartoon accents and more fart talk than the annual convention of the American College of Gastroenterology. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

For Halloween-set horror films that aren’t Halloween, 1988’s Night of the Demons is a fun night’s rental that quickly earned cult-classic status. Annnnnd Night of the Demons 3 is a sequel.

En route to an All Hallows’ Eve costume party, two high school good girls (Patricia Rodriguez and Decoys’ Stephanie Bauder) encounter car trouble. They reluctantly accept a ride from a van full of their no-good classmates swapping “yo mama” jokes. The most juvenile delinquent of the bunch (Kris Holden-Reid, Habitat) demands a stop at Quicky Mart for smokes and ends up shotgunning a cop.

To hide from the police, they head to Hull House, the old, abandoned funeral parlor. It’s still haunted by the witchy woman Angela (a crazy-eyed Amelia Kinkade), who specializes in sexually charged pranks. Few, if any, of the teens will live to see daylight. Probably not the girl (Tara Slone) with her hand in a sock-puppet snake that Angela turns into a real reptile that slithers straight to the crotch. And definitely not the dweeb (Christian Tessier, Battlefield Earth) who asks Angela if she can “suck a golf ball through 10 feet of garden hose,” to which she responds by fellating his gun … then spitting the bullets into his palm.

Previous installments were directed by such VHS-era horror faves as Kevin S. Tenney (Witchboard) and Brian Trenchard-Smith (Dead-End Drive-In), whereas Night of the Demons 3 comes to us from one Jimmy Kaufman, who’s helmed a lot of Canadian television. He likely was eager to live a little, which could account for this entry containing the most leering nude-teen shots of the franchise — and I do mean leering, as if it were shot with a zoom lens across the street.

And that’s about the most effort we see put into this tired threequel. I enjoyed Vlasta Vrana (Brainscan) in a showy part as the magic-obsessed police lieutenant, but he’s the only one invested. Even Kinkade, whose kitchen pantry likely depended on this gig, seems to be running on fumes, which at least corresponds with the production value. Other than an ill-received 2009 remake, this was it for the series — about 85 minutes too late. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Every so often, I experience a harrowing dream in which no matter the location, I face the same two-pronged conundrum:
1. My bladder is full.
2. There’s nowhere to pee.

In The House of Witchcraft, Luke (Andy J. Forest, Bridge to Hell) also is vexed by a recurring nightmare with larger stakes, I guess:
1. He enters a gorgeous country house on a spacious estate.
2. In its kitchen stands an old witch.
3. She’s boiling his disembodied head in a goddamn cauldron.

When Luke awakes, he’s hardly better off: His six-month marriage to queen of the harpies, Marta (Sonia Petrovna, Not for Publication), is on thin ice. Attempting to salvage their union, Marta’s rented a gorgeous country house on a spacious estate. No points for assuming the home is straight from his slumber, because of course it is.

Therefore, freaky things freak. Like, you know that scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds where Tippi Hedren is attacked in the attic? That happens here, but in a bedroom and with birds replaced by pillow feathers. In other sequences, writer/director Umberto Lenzi presents a sleepwalking Marta, a black cat with bloody paws, a maggot-ridden skeleton and — hey, did Luke just witness some old hag (Maria Cumani Quasimodo, Nosferatu in Venice) crowbar a priest on the grand lawn? I’ll never tell. But her face is terrifying.

In terms of how The House of Witchcraft stands against among the rest of Lenzi’s haunted house output, the man has fared worse (The House of Lost Souls) and more delirious (Ghosthouse). This made-for-TV chiller may not be “too damn sinister,” to borrow a phrase from the estate owner’s niece (Marina Giulia Cavalli, Alien from the Abyss), but for those seeking ’80s Italian horror with all the fixtures, it scratches the itch. And whatta view! —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

A Russian scientist’s experiment creates killer spiders of unusual sizes. They’re shipped on a Colombia-bound commercial airliner in precariously stacked and unsecured wooden crates marked “CARGO.” A turbulent takeoff knocks the crates over, spilling those arachnids. 

From those British blokes behind Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey comes the pound-ante Spiders on a Plane, a ridiculous tardy mockbuster, given Snakes on a Plane landed nearly two decades ago. ITN Distribution could learn a lot from its American counterparts at The Asylum, whose Snakes on a Train not only ripped off the Samuel L. Jackson vehicle, but beat its release date by three days!

Regardless of calendar failings, Spiders on a Plane exists. And even with its abbreviated running time of 78 minutes, your attention will not be caught in a web; to the contrary, you will have it with these motherfucking spiders on this motherfucking plane. They eventually take out the pilot so some influencer girls have to land the 747. Before then, one of those girls (Lila Lasso, Snake Hotel) Mile-High Clubs it with a stranger, while in an adjacent restroom, her guy friend (Gaston Alexander, Mary Had a Little Lamb) unloads a massive amount of diarrhea as he inserts a contact lens. He doesn’t notice the teeny-weeny spoder crawling on the lens until he gets bitten on the eye.

All of the eight-legged freaks are CGI. Some of them look real — or, rather, real enough, while some look like wind-up toys. The lone giant tarantula looks like a pineapple with pipe-cleaner legs. At least these spiders resemble actual spiders (which cannot be said of ITN’s creaky Spider in the Attic), but Lord knows why director Ben J. Williams (Tsunami Sharks) allowed the arachnids to make chittering noises like they’re xenomorphs. Mayday! Mayday! —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Carnal Fear rocks! But apparently not hard enough. The band’s first single, “Spread Eagle,” went “top chart,” but the album failed to go platinum. That puts a lot of pressure on their follow-up record, so the foursome convenes at their manager’s Oklahoma lake house to finish the album, Death Whispers, within a three-day deadline.

In other words, it’s a terrible time for the lead singer, Mitch (Trey Fillmore), to suffer bizarre recurring visions, no matter how many frozen treats, toy monkeys and bare breasts they contain. It’s also a terrible time for a masked serial killer to prey on beautiful women in the area. It’s Branded — the title speaking to the sizzlin’-hot drug spoon pressed against the victims’ left boob. 

The first sign of trouble arrives with drummer Crash (Jamie Sworski), he of the heavy eyeliner, pubic goatee, dog collar, UPC code tattoo and raging heroin problem. He even brings his junkie groupie of choice, Skat Kat (Tulsa-based director Darla Enlow), whose bobbing corpse attracts police suspicion. It’s enough to drive Carnal Fear’s MILFy manager (Dana Pike, The Last Trick or Treater) into a wine-swilling tizzy, what with their upcoming European tour and all.

Branded captures a special time in American culture. Not when men dressed like a nu-metal venereal disease (although there’s that), but when sales of DVDs rivaled that of smack, created a hunger for content that allowed homegrown Hitchcocks like Enlow to crank out their low-budget takes on the slasher. In her case, Branded comes sandwiched between Toe Tags and The Stitcher, and I’m all for her casting herself in each. Here, Enlow’s first line — spoken while rubbing her trashy lingerie-clad hindquarters against Crash’s crotch — is, “Hey, baby, up for a little sport fucking?” (He is, as am I.)

Speaking of speaking, screenwriter Gigi Phillips helps lift Branded above the fray with the gift of lively dialogue. As the Carnal Fear manager, Pike gets to deliver one memorable putdown (“You couldn’t follow the instructions on a cereal box”) after another (“I would’ve aborted you”). And this being shot on video in Oklahoma, every utterance of “told” is pronounced by Pike as “toad.”

Phillips doesn’t leave the boys empty-mouthed, either, especially when demonstrating the friction between band members. Mitch berates Crash for neglecting band duties, saying work is “a stretch in your vocabulary, since you probably never made it quite that far in the alphabet!” A livid Crash responds, “You’re right, muh-muh-Mitch! I only made it to the Ps: ‘party’ and ‘pussy!’ You should be so lucky!”

You know who also should be so lucky? The killer’s other victims, particularly the Carnal Fear fans at the bait shop. One of them (Angie Knowlton) makes the pink bikini sexier than it’s ever been since Heather Thomas, while her friend (Bonnie Stribling) gets a teddy bar duct-taped to her chest, because why the hell not. I wonder if that touch comes straight from the novel.

Yes, Branded is based on a novel — exactly whose, though, is a mystery tougher than crack than the killer’s identity, as the credits don’t credit anyone for it. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.