When anthropology professor Nugent leads five students into the forest to find Bigfoot, well, bad things happen. We know this because the whole of Night of the Demon is presented as a flashback, with the professor (Michael Cutt, Hider in the House) spilling the cryptozoological tea to doctors and the sheriff from the confines of his cheap hospital bed.

What he conveys is — and isn’t — your typical sasquatch tale. Yes, all the expected elements are present and accounted for (such as the camping collegiates hearing strange sounds at night), along with ones you wouldn’t (like, oh, stumbling onto a sex cult). Yes, Nugent and his pupils eventually meet Bigfoot — and how! — but also a local yokel known as Crazy Wanda (Melanie Graham). Used and abused by her fundamentalist father (“I’m saving your soul, you ungrateful bitch!”), Wanda’s a simple-minded, Sissy Spacek-esque waif whose baby is the product of Bigfoot rape.

With the unasked question of “What would Bigfoot’s face look like at the point of orgasm?” answered, it’s safe to say Night of the Demon ventures miles and miles beyond Boggy Creek.

The coupling is hardly all the craziness contained, as Nugent relays many an episodic cutaway to explicitly gory Bigfoot encounters for which he was not present. Some of these find the 6 feet of Crisco-enabled mange:
• yanking an old man’s arm clean from the socket
• whirling a poor sap in a sleeping bag overhead, ‘round and ‘round like a goddamn pinwheel until the sack of meat is impaled on a tree
• slamming two knife-wielding Girl Scouts together in a manner that they inadvertently saw one another’s arm
• giving a woodsman a shoulder massage with his own ax
• and, most famously, rudely depriving a bush-pissing motorcyclist of his penis

Nugent’s group is hardly untouched, starting with one student having his head smashed against a tree, leaving what appears to be the remains of a meatball sub with extra sauce. It all culminates in a cabin siege that tops, well, everything to which your eyeballs have been privy up to now. Here and there, porn director James C. Wasson (What the Big Boys Eat) puts the audience in Bigfoot’s POV, visually marked by red around the frame’s edges, giving Bigfoot the most bloodshot eyes possible without stepping inside Matthew McConaughey’s man cave.

Despite a title paving the expectation for Ol’ Scratch instead of a sasquatch, Night of the Demon is the Bigfoot movie you wish every Bigfoot movie had been. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Not every horror film begins with a baboon being bagged. Because honestly, how many does South Africa make? Public-domain mainstay House of the Living Dead is one of the precious few.

In the plantation home of the wealthy Brattling clan, the snooty, elderly matriarch (Margaret Inglis) lives with her two adult sons. Michael (Mark Burns, 1974’s Juggernaut) is engaged to the lovely Mary Anne Carew (Shirley Ann Field, Horrors of the Black Museum), against his mother’s wishes. His brother, Breck, is a doctor working to prove his belief that one’s soul can be kept alive outside the physical body.

Ol’ Breck conducts his experiments in the attic. Ever since he was injured by a horse, Breck and his sideways Frankenfoot rarely leave the room, so you know he’s going to be the most inhospitable of guests when the ginger Mary Anne travels to town to meet her impending in-laws.

The motherland’s attempt at a Roger Corman-style big-house horror, sans the Poe leaping point, House of the Living Dead isn’t close to dreadful as reviews would lead one to believe. Less-than-lackluster prints and a misleading coattails rider of a title are likely to blame for negative reaction, but the film from Virgin Witch crafter Ray Austin is a capable Gothic yarn with a twist that, while easy to guess, is well-played. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

A year before Witchboard bewitched enough audiences to beget follow-ups and facsimiles, Roberta Findlay (Tenement) summoned similiar subject matter in The Oracle, but with nary a witch nor a board. Here, the evil antique in question appears to be the painted hand of a child mannequin clutching a calligraphy feather long enough to have been plucked from Captain Hook’s hat. Preloaded with ink, it scrawls simple messages from the beyond (e.g., “Help me” and “Nooo”) onto stationery. Its penmanship is ghastly.

When mousy housewife Jennifer (Caroline Capers Powers) finds it in the basement of her apartment building, the label on her overalls is practically her reaction: “OshKosh B’Gosh.” The kindly Italian maintenance man (Chris Maria De Koron, in full “I make-a the pizza!” mode) encourages her to keep it, not realizing it will ruin Christmas for her and her asshole husband (Scrambled Feet’s Roger Neil, who looks like an attempt to clone Tom Atkins at a Duane Reade photo counter).

After Jennifer communicates with the spirit world, results include a poltergeist tantrum, a runaway car, animalistic snarls in the elevator, claws emerging from the trash chute, things glowing Listerine-green — not coincidentally, all fit Findlay’s threadbare norm. That’s hardly a negative; rather, the in-camera action allows The Oracle to hit the sweet spot of ’80s indie horror, goofball faults and all.

Ending excepted, the money shot comes when a character stabs his own arms as he hallucinates them covered by tiny creatures — unmoving rubber things from a kid’s Fright Factory set (ages 8+, batteries not included). That Findlay puts more of her stamp on the single scene she could graft onto a porno — a hooker slaughtered by an androgynous killer (Pam La Testa, Findlay’s Blood Sisters) — says how little she cares for the horror genre. However, as framed by her XXX Liquid A$$ets collaborator R. Allen Leider, the story beams are just solid enough to overcome the director’s evident disdain.

For someone who never acted before or since, Powers brings what matters most: lungs. Has anyone ever screamed more on film? Hopefully a few of her cries were for a lozenge (“Riiiicolaaa!“), because they clearly weren’t asking for less dowdy dresses that didn’t look swiped from a community college production of Anne of Green Gables. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Hey, everybody, it’s spring break! Never mind that we all look like we’re 30 and in vo-tech! Or that our old, gross neighbor lurking around the house in broad daylight is trying to kill us! Let’s party hearty! Woooooohoooooo!

There you have Sorority Slaughter in a nutshell (unsalted, mind you, due to budgetary constraints). It’s a relentlessly stupid, plotless exercise in misogyny, wicker furniture, wood paneling, shag carpeting, hairy arms, Korean deli-counter gore, American cellulite, acid-washed denim, pawed asses and lawn chairs for those asses. But mostly misogyny and wood paneling, given this is a shot-on-VHS production of the mail-order murder specialists of the New Jersey-based W.A.V.E. Productions.

I could and would forgive all that, except it’s so oppressively mundane. With W.A.V.E. impresario Gary Whitson ostensibly writing and directing, Sorority Slaughter stars stalwart Sal Longo as the neighbor who individually — and very, very slowly — sacrifices the cast members one by one to the devil himself. It also features more minutes of car washing than Car Wash, The Bikini Carwash Company and The Bikini Carwash Company 2 combined. (You know what? Imma throw Cool Hand Luke in there, too.)

Look for cameos from scream queen Titanic 2000’s Tina Krause, TV Guide and a shelf full of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books — or don’t look at all. That last option gets my highest recommendation. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

I’ve always found the criminal hijacking of television stations intriguing, usually from a scarier frame of mind than most people. To the creators, it’s a fractured art project; to me, it’s the knob-turning product of manipulative fear I find myself watching in the dark over and over again when I really shouldn’t.

Disagree with me if you must, but I think director Jacob Gentry and writers Phil Drinkwater and Tim Woodall seem to agree with me, as their flick, Broadcast Signal Intrusion, repeatedly hits every play button of unrealized fear that I’ve never been able to fully express to anyone else.

Hearkening back to the signal disruptions of years past such as the Max Headroom incident or the “I Feel Fantastic” video, here we find video archiver James (Harry Shum Jr.) as he’s found a few old broadcast interruptions of a mannequin in a strange room chanting something over and over again, played to great effect; disturbed, he ends up going down one rabbit-eared hole after another to find the smallest shred of truth behind it.

Pretty soon, creepy acolytes, disturbed video enthusiasts and the suicidal followers of these urban legends come out of the VHS woodwork under the guise of helping him out, but mostly end up terrorizing him. As this obsession stretches into his past and his long-lost wife, he appears to head this manic direction as well.

Whereas Broadcast Signal Intrusion seems to be desperately reaching for a finale that might — while not explaining everything — go for an incredibly outlandish ending that a bizarre film like this truly deserves. Sadly, it peters out in the most deflating way possible, leading me to want to spend my life feverishly hunting for the original ending.

But that’s crazy because that’s the original ending … I mean, it has to be, right? —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.