After a woman is fatally shotgunned in her sleep, her belongings are dumped into a curbside cardboard box marked “Free to a Good Home.” Kameron and Scott Hale’s Free to a Bad Home follows a possessed ring plucked from said trashed stash as it moves from person to person to person, telling three stories in total.

Amy (Miranda Nieman) is given the ring in marriage, as the jewelry is surreptitiously swiped by her beau, even after watching her recoil by feeling “bitten” by trying on a necklace from the box. This intriguing-enough setup leads to undue padding and an anticlimactic conclusion.

Next, a burglar (Jake C. Young) finds the ring after silently exploring a targeted house for 10 minutes, flashlight in hand. Eventually, the ring is taken by his sister, Julia (Olivia Dennis), who heads to a costume party with three friends — cue an eight-minute drive, complete with eyedropper drugs. Once there, the ladies wander for eight more minutes before running across anything resembling a story point. That gives way to a lengthy monologue and more confusion than the scene’s neon-dream lighting can mitigate.

The cursed-object concept has been done before, none as ineffectually as Free to a Bad Home. As the previous two paragraphs hammered home, nearly nothing happens in the segment, individually or in total. Although the Hales found a credible method for threading one central character to the next, none is developed enough to merit focus. Each story seems to have been built with a clear beginning and desired ending, but little attention paid to plot the all-important middle. In concocting the passed-property gimmick, the Hales gave themselves a fuse they never get around to ignite. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

On Halloween night, the elderly gravedigger Mr. Fettes — “Call me Vampus,” he says — shares his miserable existence with viewers of Vampus Horror Tales, not to mention four stories of stone-cold death.

Obviously inspired by the dawn of Spanish horror comics, the anthology film is shot lovingly in black and white. As the playful but murderous Vampus, Saturnino García (The Day of the Beast) introduces each tale. He seems to be filled with them, because after all, “Death is a business that never falls flat.”

Unfortunately, the first story sure does. “The Wedding” depicts a clandestine meeting between bride and groomsman in an escape room basement. What follows is a 20-minute conversation ending with a sputtered-engine twist not worth the wait. Afterward, a filter-free Vampus dismisses it as “submissive drivel,” and I agree.

The middle pair gives the collection its chewy center. “Birthday” follows two girls at a theme park, where a killer lurks the tracks of the stalled dark-ride attraction. The ladies-in-peril theme continues with “Second Date,” as a woman discovers her man-friend has an ulterior motive for bringing her to a quiet, remote cabin. Complicating her escape: She’s blind.

Finally, “Lineage” wonders what to do when someone you love falls victim to a vampire apocalypse. The answer fails to interest; worse, the premise does the same. I would have preferred to see the wax-museum interstitial at the onset be expanded into a full tale, as its brief life packs more of a punch. (Speaking of that setting, Vampus creator Victor Matellano revives the Paul Naschy “cameo” trick from his 2014 film, Wax, so keep your ears peeled.)

The host bits are more developed than your average horror omnibus, with rapid cuts that approximate the experience of comics’ panel-by-panel reading. More beholden to that medium than las películas, Vampus Horror Tales leans toward slicing and/or stabbing necks as a means of slaughter, presumably because it’s cheap for an indie production to pull off. (And on that note, I swear the crawl of closing credits is soundtracked by the “Rain Storm” setting on my phone’s White Noise app.). —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Last summer, as part of a spinal procedure requiring me to remain semi-conscious, ketamine was administered as an anesthetic. A first-timer to the drug, I was ill-prepared for the trip of its drip: one in which my body was pushed through shapes and colors that do not exist. Members of the Trainspotting generation know better, using it recreationally for the very reason I found terrifying.

The experience is so tough to describe with an approximation of accuracy, I yield to the Reddit poster who writes, “you are kitty tripping balls. It’s when MEOW becomes WOEM and the sky is on the floor and vice versa.”

That merits reuse when discussing The Outwaters. It’s a found-footage movie like none you’ve seen. Heck, that still applies if you pull “found-footage” from the equation. On paper, it sounds like every other project in the subgenre: Four friends venture into the Mojave Desert to shoot a music video. Something happens. What we see comes from three memory cards the police recovered from the scene.

In execution, it’s so much more than that, although you wouldn’t know it if you gave up before it gets there — and many will. As writer, director and producer (and editor and cinematographer and sound designer and SFX person and …), Robbie Banfield boldly dares to double down on the mundanity for The Outwaters’ first 52 minutes, only to throw audiences for an absolute loop thereafter.

We meet two brothers (Banfield and Scott Schamell), an aspiring singer (Michelle May) and a newlywed friend (Angela Basolis), as they prep to leave L.A. earthquakes behind for the shoot. In the desert, Banfield’s able to capture moments of beauty, both visually and aurally. Camping overnight, they hear what they think is ball lightning. The next morning, what’s with the electric currents running through the rocks?

Then, with no forewarning, the film takes such the hardest hard right, spatial concepts like degrees and directions cease. For the next hour, The Outwaters trafficks in sheer terror and cosmic whatthefuckery at once Lynchian and Lovecraftian. You’ll question what you’re taking in as it unspools. It’s as audacious as it is mind-bending, and weeks later, I’m still trying to parse how several of its shots were pulled off.

For all the viral brouhaha Skinamarink recently enjoyed, The Outwaters deserves it more, despite being equal in viewer polarization and befuddlement. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Broadcast on Halloween night 1992 in the UK, Ghostwatch may be the greatest prank in TV history, not to mention a seminal moment in small-screen horror, a britches-wetting touchstone for a generation. Three decades later, it’s well-regarded and influential, having left footprints on arguably every inch of “found footage.” (Plus, WNUF Halloween Special would not exist without it.)

Presented as a “live” BBC special, but scripted in actuality by horror scribe Stephen Volk (2011’s The Awakening), Ghostwatch purports to investigate — and possibly even exorcise — supernatural forces at the home of the Early family. As single mum Pamela (Brid Brennan, Excalibur) tells on-site presenter Sarah Greene — and, by extension, in-studio host Michael Parkinson — the poltergeist has terrorized her and her two young daughters with bumps in the night, broken dishes, stained clothing and, ewww, a smelly tap. Pam’s girls chalk it up to Pipes, an entity so-named for its pipe-banging propensity.

Suffice to say, before the 90-minute time slot is up, Pipes shows it’s no slouch. Its “appearances” are why Ghostwatch is held in high regard. Having BBC TV personalities appear as themselves helped get it there, selling the illusion of reality. Because viewers were so bought-in to the premise, there’s no denying Ghostwatch‘s conclusion isn’t brilliant. (It may be more brilliant than you might realize; using the pause and frame-advance functions of a remote shows the extent of the subliminal working toward the greater gasps.)

All that said, the space between the frights can feel like stretches, which they are. Off and on, it’s something of a tough sit. That’s a reasonable expectation while waiting for paranormal acts that original viewers weren’t certain would occur within the allotted airtime. Knowing beforehand that they do — and that they’re ultimately quite a doozy — dilutes the program’s power. Watched today from that perspective, Ghostwatch is easier to admire than submit to.

I guess you had to be there? How I wish I were. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

In his lifetime, Robin Hardy directed a genuine cult classic in 1973’s The Wicker Man. Unfortunately, he made only two other films. Worse, the last of them was The Wicker Tree.

While the quasi-sequel is based on Hardy’s 2006 novel, Cowboys for Christ, who’s he kidding? If you’ve seen the original Wicker or its bug-nuts Nicolas Cage remake, you know exactly where this new one leads, even without the benefit of Edward Woodward as your guide.

In The Wicker Tree, that role falls to young Christian country starlet Beth Boothby (Brittania Nicol, apparently a for-the-better one-and-doner). With her purity-ring cowboy fiancé (Henry Garrett, Red Tails), Beth accepts a two-year missionary position in Scotland. She’s even tailored her message to her audience: “Jeezus was braver ’n Rob Roy!”

Not everyone in the pagan village is happy to host the Americans, but town employer/nuclear magnate Sir Lachlan Morrison (Graham McTavish, Aquaman) and his wife (Jacqueline Leonard) put on game faces and trade insults behind her back: “I bet she smells like a dairy.”

If only there were … oh, some kind of, I dunno … “May Day festival” planned for which they could trick the hicks into, um, “participating.”

Hopes that Hardy may approach the material with a wicked sense of humor rise early with a glimpse of Beth’s Britney Spears-esque pop-tart past (via a video for “Trailer Trash Love”), but when you later see well-to-do Scots line-dancing at a posh party, those hopes have long been torpedoed. So go any chances of the filmmaker beating the odds by capturing lightning in a bottle twice. While technically competent, the movie doesn’t go anywhere approaching the unexpected; this Tree takes root, but never sprouts.

Hardy’s on the record for calling his final film “very horrifying.” That’s very generous … and perhaps very delusional. The Wicker Tree offers some gorgeous scenery, a super-brief Christopher Lee cameo, a sex scene with a toy horse’s head and nothing else of note. Folk horror is rarely so wearisome. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.