Outside of The Most Dangerous Game, has genre cinema latched onto another concept more often than Eyes Without a Face? It’s the story gift that keeps on giving, as long as you change just enough elements to avoid litigation. Just ask character actor Michael Pataki (The Bat People), who leveraged it for Mansion of the Doomed, his first of two movies as director.

The eventually mad doctor of this early Charles Band production is Leonard Chaney, a successful surgeon played by Richard Basehart (1977’s The Island of Dr. Moreau). When his lovely daughter, Nancy (Trish Stewart, 1976’s Time Travelers), is blinded in a car wreck, Dr. Chaney’s days of reading newspaper articles about meatloaf while she romps in the pool with her beau (Lance Henriksen, Aliens) are over.

Or are they?

Good news: Dr. Chaney restores Nancy’s sight by transplanting another person’s eyeballs! Bad news: They belonged to her boyfriend! But that poor sap doesn’t need them anymore, what with being kept in a basement cage like an animal and all.

Worse news: When Nancy’s eyesight proves short-lived, her father drugs hitchhikers and “job” applicants to swipe more peepers. Pataki more than delivers the ooey-gooey goods in the surgical scenes, with full orbs in their bloody, hanging-optic-nerved glory. As for all the unwitting eye donors now left with hollow sockets, the makeup effects by future four-time Academy Award winner “Stanley” Winston (Jurassic Park) are more convincing than films of this ilk usually got. (You might also recognize the name of the cinematographer: Andrew Davis, eventual director of 1993’s The Fugitive.)

Although Basehart by no means slacks on the job, he’s not as at ease slumming than his more storied, Oscar-anointed partner in crime, Gloria Grahame (The Bad and the Beautiful), playing his assistant to the hilt. Look for her Blood and Lace co-star Vic Tayback as a detective and Marilyn Joi (C.O.D.) as one of Dr. Chaney’s, um, patients.

Mansion of the Doomed rides its cruel recruiting cycle hard before the blind learn about strength in numbers. Speaking of, Pataki’s second (and final) director’s gig found him mining another well-trod tale for Band in Cinderella, but he made it his own by adding fucking and other things Walt Disney would not have been able to unsee. —Rod Lott

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Pierre Tsigaridis makes a knockout directorial entrance with the two-fisted Two Witches, a wickedly delightful pair of interlocked tales involving the devil herself — yes, her — and the titular women who do her bidding. To paraphrase the kid at the Gas ‘n’ Sip on a Saturday night in Say Anything …, “Witches, man!”

Not since Rosemary’s Baby has a young, pregnant woman gone through as much trimester trauma as Sarah (Belle Adams, The Manor), the center of chapter one. After an unkempt “boogeywoman” (Marina Parodi) gives her “the evil eye” in a restaurant, Sarah grows more anxious and nauseated, not to mention plagued by nightmarish visions. It’s all made worse by a visit to friends who dig out the Ouija board.

The second chapter illustrates why having roommates is a living hell. For grad student Rachel (Kristina Klebe, 2007’s Halloween reboot), her difficulties amount to the waifish Masha (Rebekah Kennedy, 2011’s Season of the Witch) being needy, manipulative and, well, a witch.

One of Two Witches’ strengths is Tsigaridis’ script isn’t concerned about explaining the witchery, which makes it all the more chilling. Another is how far mere facial expressions can go in creating fright in viewers; he relies on that as much as the ol’ standby of contact lenses that make its wearers look as though their eyeballs have been swapped with freshly peeled hard-boiled eggs. (I only wish he had more trust in his audience; we don’t need flashbacks to understand characters appearing in the second story are the same key supporting players we just saw a few minutes before in the first.)

Highly influenced by Eurohorror, the witches are terrifying, fitting alongside the coven from Dario Argento’s Suspiria. Going further, in emphasizing scares over style, this is the witch movie you likely hoped Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 remake would be. I can see it becoming a perennial favorite from Halloween to Christmas, given the second half takes place at that supposed most wonderful time of the year.

From subliminal flashes to unflinching scenes of violence and the vile, Two Witches works hard and pays off, begging to be seen in a crowded theater. Bow to the new queen. And stick around after the credits. —Rod Lott

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As Infrared recently showed, with the right role, The Room sidekick Greg Sestero can act. While Miracle Valley isn’t his greatest showcase, he proves he can direct, too — on his first outing, no less.

With girlfriend Sarah (model Angela Mariano, doing just fine in her acting debut) down in the dumps due to a gravely ill mom, David (Sestero) takes her on a weekend road trip to an out-of-the-way ranch in the unforgiving Arizona desert. Besides, he’s trying to snap a pic of the elusive, never-before-photographed “silver hawk.”

Birds should be his least concern, given the area’s bats: the members of a cult settled in the area. When a menacing motorcyclist (scene-stealing live wire Rick Edwards, Skatetown U.S.A.) invites them to an event — Father Rick’s Awakening — a spiritually thirsty Sarah talks David into going.

Upon their departure, David’s pal jokes, “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid!” As we’ve established before, the noxious beverage he’s referencing was Flavor Aid. Still, the sugar-powder shoe fits; with Miracle Valley being about a cult, the friend’s barb soon no longer lands as funny.

So you think you know where Miracle Valley is going. And you’re right … but also not. Sestero’s script follows the well-tread path of all krazy-kook movies before it, until he chooses where to head next seemingly by throwing a stack of old Marvel Comics in the air — The Incredible Hulk and The Tomb of Dracula in particular — and letting the fallen pages guide him.

That’s largely a compliment. While he doesn’t always make the right choice, he at least makes a different choice. In doing so, Miracle Valley upends your expectations while fulfilling your hunger for exploitation, and leaves a good-looking corpse. With the epilogue at Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic Fallingwater home, how could it not? —Rod Lott

In a Queens apartment, Laura (Laura Dooley, TV’s Mr. Mercedes) discovers her roommate, Elizabeth, is dead — like, a stinky two days dead — but signs of neither struggle nor trauma exist. Arriving to investigate are detectives Miller (Frank Wihbey, 2015’s The Sadist) and Richards (Adrienne King, 1980’s Friday the 13th). Perhaps, Miller suggests, Laura should to a hotel for the night? No go; she can’t afford a room (yet has no qualms about calling crime-scene cleaners minutes later), so she’ll just stay put.

From there, The Dead Girl in Apartment 03 alternates between two things: Laura in apartment 3 (not “03,” title be damned), and Richards and Miller discussing the case. Only one of these branches extends toward intrigue. Naturally, it’s the former, as Laura hears mysterious scratches and doors opening on their own, panics when the electricity go out and sees weird cultists pop up who look straight off The Long Night’s call sheet.

A true narrative doesn’t take hold until the final 20-minute stretch, when Laura learns about her roomie’s favorite hobby. Graft the film’s opening 10 minutes onto that (minus the two-minute Bond-villain speech) and, wow, writer/director Kurtis M. Spieler (New York Ninja) would really have something.

As is, a meandering middle hinders a decent ghost story. It’s also longer on atmosphere than action, which isn’t automatically a strike against The Dead Girl in Apartment 03; good when your eyes dart about the frame to look for an approaching wraith, but bad when the photography is so dark, you have to squint to spot. No worries — the score by Satanic Panic ’81 lets you know each and every time Elizabeth’s ghost appears. —Rod Lott

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A classified ad seeks a quintet of participants for an experimental film. The project entails the five living together in a suburban house, their every move and conversation recorded “for VHS.” Selected are a narcissistic actress (Nichole Pelerine), a woman-hating hack stand-up (Danny Terranova), an academic sweater guy (John Fairlie), a socially withdrawn artist (future WWE Diva Amy Weber) and a riot grrrl type (Promise LaMarco). The latter works at Hot Diggity Dog, where she pees into the lemonade of impatient customers.

The most annoying among them — it’s not even close, even with all being unlikable — gets killed pretty quickly. Immediately, the house goes into lockdown mode, sealing the contestants inside for some devious Big Brother shit. See, the home is equipped not only with cameras, but traps, from a razor ’frigerator to ankle pinchers popping outta drywall. The Property Brothers would shit!

Sounds sweet, right? Agreed, Kolobos does. Yet in co-directing their own script, Daniel Liatowitsch and David Todd Ocvirk are unable to get their immense ambition to pay off. The biggest factor of dissatisfaction is the amateurish acting — some so poor, I cringed. The gore effects made me cringe, too, but because they’re good; particularly brutal is the unfortunate meeting of a character’s face and the harsh corner of a bathroom countertop.

While the death sequences (and a resulting disco-ball head) are inspired, the whole of the Nebraska-shot indie is not. Even the starting credits rip off Goblin’s Suspiria score as brazenly as Richard Band did Bernard Herrmann for Re-Animator. Worse, the killer is exactly who you expect. —Rod Lott

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