Basements were built for shelter and storing wine. But I suppose they’re good for caging humans, too, which is how Dr. Blackwood (Bill Greer) makes use of the space in the desert castle serving as his sanitarium. It’s where, amid other misdeeds, his ever-blinking hunchbacked assistant (Pierre Agostino, The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher) whips an underwear-clad cutie until her back resembles a bag of spilled Twizzlers.

With box walls that scream “magnet-school Shakespeare,” the castle doubles as the residence for Dr. Blackwood and his basically R-word sister (Lynne Marta, Blood Beach). Into this intermingling of mental illness and domestic bliss steps Diane, aka the new Mrs. Blackwood (Deedy Peters, channeling the confidence of Martha Raye in her Polident commercials).

Once she starts poking her nose into his bizness, her husband starts gaslighting her so she won’t notice the lady he sticks in a box with a snake. Or the guy he guillotines. Or the eye exam conducted via fireplace poker. And especially not the murders being committed by a cave monster, played by quick shots of red bicycle-handle streamers.

Meanwhile, from certain side angles, Dr. Blackwood’s hairline resembles the shape of a Southwestern or Midwestern state. I’m going with New Mexico.

Absolutely zero possession occurs in Help Me… I’m Possessed!, but I hardly care because then we would be denied that wonderful title. Although directed by Charles Nizet (The Ravager), this bargain-basement potboiler is written by the Blackwoods themselves, Peters and Greer, both way over their heads. At least their script goes out of its way to treat the mentally ill with respect rather than stereotype them … okay, yeah, I’m totally kidding there, as you can see.

A decade after playing this pic’s fire-and-brimstone physician who achieves a sexual thrill for decapitating a guy, Greer went on to produce more than 100 goddamn episodes of TV’s Charles in Charge. Shoulda quit while he was ahead. —Rod Lott

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Maybe it’s a “me thing,” but if I had a comatose child whose life were dependent on electrical machines and other things to work without a hitch, I wouldn’t knowingly move my loved ones into a legendarily haunted house, no matter how many points the realtor sacrificed to lower the principal.

Yet Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character does just that in Amityville: The Awakening. The 10th official entry in the storied (get it?) Amityville Horror franchise, the Franck Khalfoun film cannily exists in the real world. Its characters discuss not only Ronald DeFeo Jr.’s family slaughter of 1974, but George and Kathy Lutz’s (fabricated?) experiences that informed Jay Anson’s 1977 bestseller, which a student recommends, and 1979’s blockbuster movie, which they watch — after briefly considering Amityville II: The Possession and outright deriding the Ryan Reynolds remake, as one should.

That’s a fun conceit in what is a resoundingly dull picture — something to be expected when your lead is the vapid Bella Thorne (Boo! A Madea Halloween), more tabloid personality than actress, as attested by a résumé that extends from the Disney Channel to hardcore pornography. Thorne plays Belle, a single vowel away from her own first name, underlining the low-stretch demands of her role as twin sister to James (Cameron Monaghan, Tron: Ares), the aforementioned vegetative boy who can’t move anything but, we presume, his bowels.

Once 112 Ocean Avenue trots out its usual unlisted amenities — voices from beyond, swarms of CGI flies, dogs driven bonkers, et al. — James’ condition ironically shows signs of inexplicable improvement. Why, it’s almost as if he’s possessed by those vague demonic forces in the cellar’s bricked-up passage to hell.

Amityville: The Awakening is one odd duck feathered with questionable creative choices that suggest a problem-plagued production — not from any Satan basements, but worse: Dimension Pictures’ meddling head honchos Bob and Harvey Weinstein. They copresent with Blumhouse, which aligns with this viewer’s feeling of Awakening having one foot stuck in the teen-horror past as the other struggles to reach as far forward as possible. We know Khalfoun is more than capable of crafting suspense, as his P2 debut and Maniac remake prove, but this tired exercise is merely a jump-scare-a-palooza free of imagination and the ill at ease.

Although toilet goo appears to be absent this go-round, it’s not; the movie itself is a bowl of that. —Rod Lott

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No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers — unless you’re stuck in summer school. Mark Harmon is nowhere in sight. Instead, we get Charlie (one-timer Simon Wallace), who arrives to class like he’s King Shit, although he’s gangly, mainlines Tic-Tacs and wears rollerblades. 

Most repellent, Charlie runs a movie review website. Assumedly this keeps him up late, because he keeps drifting into sleep glorious sleep. (However, his “reviews” appear to be one phrase and a letter grade.) Every time he falls aslumber, he’s in a self-contained dream on campus, thus affording the shaggy Summer School the veneer of a horror anthology. Among its five directors is Mike P. Nelson, who graduated to bigger, better things like the 2021 Wrong Turn reboot.

In these nightmares, Charlie might encounter vampires or spider-masked furries. He could find himself the subject of a satanic sacrifice, complete with gored chicken. His teacher (Jennifer Prettyman, Zombie Dollz) and security officer (Ty Richardson) could be gun-toting Nazis, or he could be pursued by horny hillbillies who think his shirtless self looks “finger-lickin’ good.” 

Regardless, each time he dies, he wakes up in class again — sometimes alone, sometimes among classmates like the bleached-blonde, Jennifer Tilly-ish Lindsey (Amy Cocchiarella, who should be the lead). It’s all a bit much and unable to sustain itself. Paired with somnambulistic pacing and pauses, the murky videography really harms engagement. And with Charlie front and center, Summer School all but challenges us to hang with it. He’s arrogant and looks like he never met a comb. Where’s Freddy Krueger when you need him?

The “shock” ending isn’t one, signaling its own approach with everything but an overweight guy in an orange vest and hard hat. Let’s just say I wonder if Charlie promised his Terry Pratchett paperbacks to anyone. You’re better off auditing actual summer school than viewing this remedial Goosebumps. To quote the movie’s poetically sassy line, “You’re welcome, dillhole.” —Rod Lott

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Any resemblance Brute 1976 bears to Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes is purely, assuredly, unequivocally intentional. A closing-credits dedication to their memory confirms it, as if there were any question. Even horror irregulars will detect the influence in the prologue, well before a character asks, “Remember that movie with the chainsaw that came out a couple years ago?”

Sure do. Brute 1976 takes its van of half a dozen hippie-dippy protagonists to the middle of nowhere in Nevada for a magazine cover shoot. After snaps, they check out a nearby mining town forebodingly named Savage and now abandoned.

Okay, so it’s not completely abandoned. An unofficial family of felony-hungry fuck-ups call Savage home. They include a guy sporting a half-skull and antlers, another donning a mask of tightly wound beef jerky and, most fashionable, a bald man (Jed Rowen, The Ghastly Love of Johnny X) who admired a woman’s breasts so much, he wears her chest like an apron. Thus, when someone asks, “Is that a chainsaw?” the answer is always “yes.” (For the record, the question is posed twice.)

With Brute 1976, director Marcel Walz and writer Joe Knetter do for the grimy slashers of the disco decade what their 2022 collaboration That’s a Wrap did for the glossy slashers of the late ’90s: Embrace with a fervent love, up to and including the point of suffocation. Whether that tickles your sweet spot depends on your tolerance for an often explicit level of camp (a milder sample: “She’s grazin’ for a glazin'”). With the film turning pages of the calendar backward to America’s bicentennial year, Wrap’s ’90s-style sardonicism isn’t merely replaced by post-’Nam pessimism, but buried.

With that, Brute’s strength naturally rests in its depravity, none more memorable or un-unseeable than when a defecating crew member spots two fingers beckoning from a glory hole and can’t think of a reason not to utilize it. What happens next is as if the iconic shower scene from Porky’s accidentally — and graphically — were directed by the Property Brothers.

Taking advantage of the sunny expanse of the Nevada desert, Walz gets to use his outside voice while maximizing minimal resources. Part of that entails bringing along his rep players — reliably, Sarah French and Gigi Gustin — who know exactly how to modulate to his degree of kink-laden kitsch. Brute 1976 represents a step up for him, which bodes well for the sequel, Brute 1986. I’m in. —Rod Lott

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Zach Cregger’s Weapons taps into the same suburban fear that gave his 2022 surprise hit, Barbarian, staying power. What’s more, while Weapons includes a similarly rewarding and refreshing twist, the film doesn’t depend on it. Instead, it uses it to create a tonal anomaly of a flick that — at least for now — solidifies the former Whitest Kids U’ Know member as a must-watch horror director on the level of Jordan Peele and Ari Aster.

At 2:17 a.m. in the middle of a week, 17 third-grade classmates mysteriously vanish, save Alex (Cary Christopher). Their teacher, Justine (Julia Garner, The Fantastic Four: First Steps), shoulders the blame as the town demands a culprit. Archer (Josh Brolin, No Country for Old Men), the father of one of the missing kids, begins his own investigation of the disappearances while school principal Marcus (Benedict Wong, Doctor Strange) struggles to quell the town’s spiraling rage.

Like Barbarian, Cregger opts for a split narrative across six characters. While this helps Weapons comfortably outpace its two-hour runtime, it does feel somewhat needlessly inflated and could’ve benefited from a narrower focus. That said, it doesn’t significantly detract from the film; it just causes it to tread water for a decent chunk of the third act.

Minor criticisms aside, Weapons shines with exceptional cinematography, snappy dialogue and an expectation-subverting meld of heartwarming storytelling and unflinching brutality. Multiple tracking shots cleverly capture the self-destructive drinking and “eating” habits of three prominent characters. (This aspect of the film culminates with an especially wild scene that feels like it borrows from 2000’s Snow Day as much as it does 1980’s Cannibal Holocaust.)

While the film’s central figures feel a bit one-note, they’re leveraged by excellent performances from Garner, Brolin and a returning Amy Madigan (Uncle Buck). And while Austin Abrams’ (Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark) character is ultimately overexposed, his future collaboration leading Cregger’s Resident Evil movie carries a lot of promise.

Ultimately, Weapons earns most of its resonance through its unexpected accessibility. No, this isn’t a kids’ movie. Yet it borrows enough elements from early 1990s films like The Witches and Ernest Scared Stupid that it feels comfortably nostalgic despite its originality. Declaring it an instant classic feels like an overstep, but its undeniable charm paired with its grotesque violence could give it the legs to be timeless. And maybe it will be.

In a year already stacked with heavy-hitting horror movies, Weapons rises to the top of the pack. While it might not be technically “better” than Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, it operates on a different, largely incomparable level. In the end, Weapons is a crowd-pleasing flick that reminds us we should spend less time placing films on hierarchies and more time celebrating them.

See Weapons in a theater, and be sure to order seven hotdogs and a couple cookies. It’ll be more immersive than any RealD Cinema ever could be. —Daniel Bokemper

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