Having lived in Japan only six months, the English-speaking Karen (Ariel Sekiye) is having a rough go fitting in with fellow housewives in her community volunteer work — so much so, the gaijin resists attending the group’s two-day camping retreat. (True, it doesn’t help the trip is to a village protected by a fox spirit who “will punch you and drag you to hell.”)

The night of arrival, boss Akiyo Yoshihara (Eigi Kodaka, Headcrusher) and her fellow mean girls play kokkuri-san, the Asian country’s coin-on-paper version of Hasbro’s Ouija board — hence this film’s title, Ouija Japan. Folklore has it that breaking the rules brings consequences; sure as Shinola, the ladies awake to find their group thinned by one. Karen’s idea of calling for help is to run outside half-yelling, “Somebody! Somebody!”

How could this trip get any worse? For starters, that fox deity could self-install an app on everyone’s phone: a game that pits every girl for herself in a fight to the death.

That happens. And — just like Candy Crush, I assume — the more they kill, the more features they unlock. By sword, rifle, pipe and electric-powered gadget dropped in a full bathtub, Karen and the others battle it out until 15 lives are claimed. The upper-left corner of the screen — yours, not the app’s — keeps a body count so viewers don’t have to put forth that effort.

In Ouija Japan, first-time director/writer Masaya Kato (not the actor) has a premise that, while not exactly original, is plenty perfect for this genre — or for a mix of the horror and action genres, as we have here. However, it’s not well thought-out, with early scenes merely repeating information from the previous; by design, scuffle after scuffle make up the latter half, yet each feels so endless, it’s exhausting. Perhaps Kato was checked out as well, because the final shot is not only a cliché, but a cliché so clichéd, it’s used as the sign-off for all five Scary Movie entries.

There is no nice way to say this: Taken individually or collectively, the acting is awful. Kodaka overplays the villain role to twirling a nonexistent mustache; after vowing to have the metaphorical last laugh, she physically utters one. Worse, in her first credit, Sekiye has a sleepy and lifeless presence; if she had a line that didn’t begin with some unnatural variation of “Oh, um, uh,” I missed it. —Rod Lott

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I love God. I love his compassion, his grace and his absolute comfort in times of need. That being said, I also fear God and, if you’re like me, the religious exploitation flicks of Earl Owensby are probably right up your sinful alley.

One of the biggest distributors of regional religious films in the ’70s — always with a bent towards horror, mind you — Owensby and his crew were out to save whatever souls possible, by whatever means necessary, even if it means by pushing every holy fear they have and, viewing many of his movies late at night as a child, that truly hit home.

A Day of Judgment, however, is one I had never seen before. Playing like a rather depressive episode of a homemade version of The Waltons, the film is set in a ’30s-era small town, where all types of sinful shenanigans are going on, usually leading to a form of murder most foul, perhaps the worst.

From the chubby bank president who tries to take away an Amish-bearded farmer’s land to a skanky dress salesman and his boss’ wife, from the hotheaded gas jockey who puts his parents away in an old folks’ home to a batty old dame who kills an adorable goat for entering her property, it may sound like typical Peyton Place fare, but takes an abominably hellish turn in the last few minutes.

See, if you’ve even looked at the Holy Bible, you’d know that God doesn’t take too kindly to their sinful actions, so he sends his emissary of death to the small town to reap every single sin they’ve ever sown, some in extremely graphic detail that I’m sure Owensby was able to rationalize to the Christian parents of America.

Leading a near-conga line of these sinners straight to the abhorrent gates of fire and brimstone, director C.D.H. Reynolds springs the terrible deeds of evil on the viewer’s sensibilities, much like a Jack Chick tract come to breathing, snorting life, with the hope of salvation — these days, at least — being completely up to the soul of the viewer with a head-scratching ending.

With plenty of summer-stock acting, grade-school special effects and other unholy trash that’ll make the most spiritually troublesome of viewers giggle and snort, as terrible as the film is — and, to be fair, it truly is — hopefully just by watching, they’ll earn some points with Jesus when Death come knocking on their door. I sure hope I did. —Louis Fowler

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Lovers of horror anthologies shouldn’t be put off by Dark Stories’ generic title, French language or origins as an internet series. Despite all those warning signs — and even more, discussed below — the portmanteau picture arrives as a nice surprise.

With more than a smidge of Scheherazade, Kristanna Loken (Terminator 3) plays a suburban mom in the wraparound story. Tied up and trapped in her basement by a sentient, super-creepy ventriloquist’s dummy (voiced by Scott Thrun, 2019’s Anna), she tells stories to the bald killer puppet as a survival technique — six in total.

Up first is a quite creative tale of an art museum exec (Delphine Chanéac, Splice) whose child is sucked into the paintings by a demon. The most overtly comic piece finds Sébastien Lalanne as a a zombie — “immortal, but delicate” — seeking vengeance on the men who put him in the morgue before all his body parts fall off. Arguably the scariest segment concerns a woman (Tiphaine Daviot) haunted by a djinn to the point of an Elm Street-ian sleeplessness.

Less satisfying, although not bad, are bits about ghosts following park jogger Dorylia Calmel (Let the Corpses Tan) and former Bionic Woman Michelle Ryan probing the claims of abduction by aliens — and subsequent God complex — of dimwitted farmer Dominique Pinon (Delicatessen).

Further confounding the aforementioned expectations, Dark Stories feels of a whole even with directing duties split between Guillaume Lubrano and François Descraques — the former responsible for another anthology series in the rather rotten Metal Hurlant Chronicles. Here, however, Lubrano’s sewing skills in unifying disparate elements have improved, striking the right balance of horror and humor all its own vs. beholden to EC Comics. So many contemporary collections of terror tales stumble from that start, so it’s a pleasure to see one not only get it right, but maintain it. —Rod Lott

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Despite having little to no connection with actual cannibalism, that didn’t stop unscrupulous investors from marketing The Cannibal Man as an absolute gut-muncher, because the original title of La Semana del Asesino (The Week of the Killer) didn’t have the exploitative innards they thought the film needed.

In truth — or retrospect — the film didn’t really need it, because Eloy de la Iglesia’s haunting story of a man who slowly feels the threads of sanity become more frayed with each passing day is a truly terrifying tale that should have given the Spanish director far more attention outside of cult film circles.

Spending his day working at a slaughterhouse, Marco (Vicente Parra) kills a taxicab driver one evening in self-defense, which inexplicably awakens something inside him that leads to him murdering everyone from his brother and girlfriend to others who might come around his den of squalor, situated outside a lavish apartment building.

Over the course of the week, as the house begins to smell of death and guilt — always a reactive combination — Marco takes the body parts to work, basically to turn them into liquid mush. I don’t think it gets turned into food and, to be fair, when the prospect of eating the human meat is presented to him, he becomes exceedingly nauseous. Maybe a better title would have been Almost a Cannibal, which sounds like a great romantic comedy.

Director de la Iglesia throws in numerous jabs at the then-oppressive Spanish government — most notably in dutifully homosexual swimming scenes, mildly erotic for the time. When viewed through those rebellious eyes, The Cannibal Man is indeed a film of absolute protest that, through a semi-graphic lens, makes it far more important than most give it credit for. —Louis Fowler

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Not to be confused with the found-footage spooker Apartment 143 — dyslexia excepted — Apartment 413 is almost entirely a two-hander in one location. Yes, of course it’s the unit of the title: a depressing-looking place in a depressing-looking complex in Austin, with a fitting “FML” carved into the window AC unit’s exterior side.

Community college dropout Marco Reyes (Nicholas Saenz, Mr. Roosevelt) needs a job. And fast, because his girlfriend, Dana (Brea Grant, All the Creatures Were Stirring), is about-to-pop pregnant. He’s not having much luck, considering his alarm mysteriously fails to wake him as set, thus causing missed interviews.

As he sits in his apartment all day applying for jobs — and playing video games — stranger things begin happening: Trash re-appears; an unknown text message suggests it’s “not your baby”; and Post-it Notes pop up like magic, scrawled with threats like “THIS IS A WARNING.”

Things escalate from there. Stress? Black mold? Psychotic break? Residual haunting from the site’s domestic murder two years prior?

You’ll find out, although the ending is more confounding than disturbing. As the first film for both director Matt Patterson and writer Ron Maede, Apartment 413 likely serves as a calling card for bigger and better things, rather than a Texas-sized reworking of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion through a millennial-hipster lens. At just under 80 minutes, credits included, not enough happens to do lasting damage, yet so much solitary time with an increasingly unlikable guy is a lot to ask of the audience; as a short, it would be three times more effective. —Rod Lott

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