Nostalgia is a powerful narcotic, especially in these COVID-riddled, globally warming times seemingly spinning out of control. With such a crummy present and a future too terrifying or unknowable, we comfort ourselves that the past — or at least a fictitious version of the past we yearn for — was better, simpler or maybe just cooler. In Last Night in Soho, a mostly successful psychological horror picture, such romanticism has taken hold of Eloise “Ellie” Tucker, a young woman who moves from the English countryside to London fashion school with a head swimming in the Swinging Sixties’ music and fashion.

But as William Faulkner famously observed, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Or, as the almost-as-literate Billy Joel later put it, “The good ol’ days weren’t always good.”

Ellie isn’t your typical fashion student. First, she is winningly played as a wide-eyed ingénue by Thomasin McKenzie (Jojo Rabbit). Second, Ellie has psychic abilities, as evidenced by her penchant for seeing her deceased mum’s reflection in mirrors. Ellie’s doting grandmother (Rita Tushingham) cryptically references some past incident where such visions might have been overwhelming, but the granddaughter just shrugs it off and hurries to the mod London of her dreams.

The Carnaby Street of yesteryear is long gone. Instead, Ellie is met by a reality of alienating dorm parties, leering old men and a particularly mean-girl roomie (Synnøve Karlsen) who prompts our heroine to rent a room in the flat of an elderly woman (Diana Rigg of ’60s-era TV phenomenon The Avengers) in a nearby neighborhood.

Things start to look up. Even Ellie’s sleep gets exciting. In her dreams, she is introduced to the beautiful and sophisticated Sandy (Anya Taylor-Joy, TV’s The Queen’s Gambit), an ambitious singer determined to make her mark in 1960s Soho. Director Edgar Wright (Baby Driver) and cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung, as enamored of the past as Ellie, envelop their dreamscape London in sumptuous color, while the soundtrack is punctuated by the period pop of Dusty Springfield, Petula Clark and Cilla Black.

But don’t forget what Joel cautioned about the good ol’ days. Ellie’s dreams take a sharp turn as Sandy falls for a smooth-talking manager (Matt Smith) and gets an up-close-and personal experience with Soho’s seamy underbelly. As the proceedings grow darker, Ellie’s dream world begins to spill over into her waking life.

Last Night in Soho is most fun when Ellie and her glamorous doppelgänger explore 1960s London through a series of dazzling set pieces. Wright, a professed cinephile, pays homage to films of that period by using iconic Brit actors Rigg, Tushingham, Terence Stamp and Margaret Nolan, the gold-painted Bond girl of Goldfinger’s title sequence. The nostalgia narcotic proves to be an irresistible high.

Up to a point, that is. The stakes keep rising, but Wright and co-scripter Krysty Wilson-Cairns 1917) might have written themselves into a corner with a preposterous third act that dampens a little of the exuberance preceding it. I can forgive it, though; two-thirds of a great movie is nothing to dismiss, especially if you’re watching through rose-colored glasses. —Phil Bacharach

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After you’ve given world cinema a robotic penis drill, what’s left? For Shinya Tsukamoto, the answer had zip to do with terrifying genitalia and everything to do with spritzing neck stumps, poltergeist kitchenware and singing disembodied heads — among other, spindly legged things — in Hiruko the Goblin.

Based on a manga by Daijirô Morohoshi, Tsukamoto’s first post-Tetsuo: The Iron Man project concerns famous archeologist Hieda (Kenji Sawada, Samurai Reincarnation), grieving his wife’s accidental death. When a colleague contacts him with news of discovering an ancient burial tomb on the grounds of a school and said to appease evil spirits, Hieda suddenly regains purpose — not to mention a questionable slapsticky presence.

Needing the type of distraction only an invisible demon can provide, Hieda investigates with the chance assistance of the school custodian (Hideo Murota, Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha) and a student (Masaki Kudou, Tokyo Heaven). The teen knows a thing or two about curses, as his back occasionally smokes ’n’ sizzles — like a fresh package of Hormel Black Label bacon on an oily griddle, but with crispy faces emerging from the burnt meat.

Hiruko would be unmemorable if not for its creep du grace taking hold at halftime: human-headed spiders. Who cares if they’re a pair of legs short? Arachnophobes are guaranteed at least one serving of the heebie-jeebies as these unholy creatures skitter about, crawl up walls and — shudder — leap toward our heroes. All done with models, the spiders give Tsukamoto a stronger tool for conjuring horror than the film’s dull, drawn-out first block, which lifts the frantic-cartoon tricks from early Sam Raimi.

A senseless but gonzo adaptation (and/or approximation), Hirkuo the Goblin is reminiscent of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Sweet Home, with Tsukamoto having a slight edge in creativity and, of course, a surfeit of industrial steam-engine sounds. His movie feels like a dream, (in)complete with the gaps of logic that function as connective tissue, lending an additional layer of discomfort and otherworldliness. —Rod Lott

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From the first few frames of the Malaysian horror film Roh (which translates to Soul), you’re surrounded with an intense form of backwoods dread that something is definitely not right. It continues throughout the entire running time, creating a beautiful form of subtle terror few films are able to keep up for as long.

A small girl with decaying features follows a brother and sister — who’ve just seen a deer hanging by its necks, mind you — to their ramshackle hut. Though suspicious, the sister tries to help the girl. But after the child gives a freaky warning that the whole family will die in a couple of dies, she expires herself in a cascade of blood, leaving the family to bury her and keep the whole thing a secret.

A secret, that is, until a creepy woman and an even creepier man are, well, creeping around their house, both closer to the dead-eyed dead girl than they will ever admit. As the family tries to desperately fight the sincerely spooky hauntings, by the end, we don’t know if we’re looking into a nightmarish daydream or a brutal reality you can never wake up — or worse, die — from.

In Roh, the scares easily move between wholly atmospheric surrounding to absolutely terrifying jump cuts — something that should be impossible for a first-time feature director. The so-called masters of horror in the West could take plenty of lessons from Emil Ezwan, because in the delicately scant running time of 83 minutes, he’s crafted a horrific new legend I’m surprised Americans haven’t tried to rip off yet. —Louis Fowler

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Look, if you’re gonna play a live-action version of a Dungeons & Dragons-style table game, you gotta do it right, like the med students of Shakma:
1) Play it in a 10-story building overnight.
2) Give everyone trackers and walkie-talkies, over.
3) Scrawl clues on chalkboards.
4) Put the villain in a Halloween wolf mask.
5) Outfit the princess in head-to-toe “sister wife.”

And for maximum pants-wetting action you can’t even get from a 32-sided die:
6) Let a hyperaggressive baboon with a beet-red ass — and festering resentment for being experimented upon — run amok, over.

The students — The Blue Lagoon’s Christopher Atkins and A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Amanda Wyss among them — don’t exactly “let” the baboon into the game. Neither does their professor, played by Roddy McDowall, despite the advanced familiarity with pissed-off primates he brings to the role. But because Atkins’ character fails to euthanize the animal as instructed, Shakma gets loose and seeks to destroy, dismantle and dismember — preferably all at once.

Shakma is played by Typhoon, whom you’re likely to have seen in the telepods of David Cronenberg’s The Fly. Remember how sweet and sympathetic he was in that sci-fi classic? Well, that monkey has more range than Atkins, because Typhoon is as mean as a nest of murder hornets.

With his unit dangling like an unwrapped string cheese, Shakma hisses, leaps and attacks with convincing fury. Talk about committing to your art, too, because 44 minutes in, the animal bats at a door so forcibly, he rage-poops without the slightest of pauses.

As silly as its title, Shakma seems to be like a slasher movie, but with a monkey in the middle. Although co-directors Hugh Parks and Tom Logan (of the same year’s Dream Trap) botch the movie overall, there’s something to be said about its wild-kingdom premise. Naturally, its death scenes are its finest resource, over. —Rod Lott

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Call me blasphemous if you must, but I’ve always seen Demons 2 as a far superior movie to the first film.

I originally picked up discount VHS copies of both flicks at Suncoast Video in ninth grade and secretly watched both in the video editing booth at school, mostly due to their undoubtedly satanic nature that would have brought me hell at home.

Demons is somewhat fondly remembered by Italian horror fans for its wholly cinematic rampage in a Brigadoon-like movie house where an audience full of grating stereotypes is mysteriously locked in as a sketchy film about Nostradamus inspires the gates of hell to open and the titular beasts to wreak havoc on the world.

In Demons 2, however, a remake (I believe) shows on television, one that the once-again stereotypical denizens of an apartment building are all watching. Starting with a wholly whiny woman having a birthday party where she throws a temper tantrum every few minutes sobbing about God knows what, a demon pops out of the TV showing the film and possesses her, rather violently.

Now a demon herself, as she throat-rips all of the partygoers into demons themselves — not sure how that works, but I’ll go with it — they, in turn, infect the other tenants, including members of a health club, a small boy and, in one of the movie’s evilest aspects, an adorable dog I named Mr. Scruffles.

Meanwhile, two uninfected heroes try to survive the night, with varying results.

With far better special effects pulled off in far more imaginative ways, Demons 2 has a slight Gothic riff on the first one, with the main difference being the soundtrack, featuring great tunes by The Smiths, The Cult, and Love and Rockets, to name a blackened few. That’s more than enough to recommend it as far as I’m concerned. —Louis Fowler

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