In the sweepstakes of films in which strangers awake in a mysterious locale for unknown reasons or purpose, the Mahal Empire’s Death Count shoots to earn the consolation prize of Most Gory. Held captive in individual cells and outfitted with a back-of-neck explosive device are eight school faculty members, including a stereotypical Hispanic janitor, a stereotypical masculine female gym teacher and a stereotypical meathead coach for whom “violence” is a two-syllable word.

They’ve been gathered by a figure calling himself The Warden (Costas Mandylor, Saw III-VI), who looks like the CW’s Arrow, but with a bedazzled, BDSM-friendly leather eyepatch. Broadcast online, his game entails comply-or-die scenarios of self-injury, like fingernail removal via box cutter or scissoring off a fingertip. Each round, whoever gets the least “cyber likes” is eliminated. No contestant reacts properly to excruciating pain, whether hammering their hand, practicing dentistry with pliers or taking a kerosene shower. Now, before you think The Warden inhumane, please know he’s prestocked each cell with toilet paper.

Meanwhile, at the police station, the detective trying to locate the signal source is played by Michael Madsen (Species). From the looks of his bruised and butterfly-bandaged face, Madsen came straight to set from a snooze in the alley, where he tussled with a hobo for the biggest piece of cardboard. En route to The Warden’s pad, he delivers an impassioned monologue about the loss of true relationships and connections in the digital age. If that sounds preachy, it’s nothing compared to the reveal of Why The Warden Is Doing All This — a reason so asinine, it takes an otherwise serviceable bit of Sawsploitation from enjoyable trash in the first half to insufferable trash for the second.

Soon enough, a showdown — complete with a “Huzzah!”-style bit of stage magic — leads to an anti-ending, followed by end-credits jabber that shames the audience for watching. With that, one’s left to wonder why director Michael Su (The Revolting Dead) bothered with torture porn. I’ll give the benefit of doubt to screenwriter Michael Merino (Acceleration), considering his credit arrives with a rather suspicious F.U. attached: “with revisions by Rolfe Kanefsky.” No word which gentleman wrote The Warden’s “Now we’re cooking with gas!” quip (as a character gets the asphyxiant treatment) or tried to determine a credible way to get Sarah French (Insectula!) to bare her breasts. They didn’t, but she does anyway. —Rod Lott

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Three women — er, better make that four — have been disemboweled by an unseen killer in requisite black gloves. Because all of the deceased were models, suspicion falls upon strip-mall photographers Dave (James Hansen, Streets of Death) and Mitch (Larry Thomas, aka Seinfeld’s infamous Soup Nazi). Now, Mitch is creepy AF, but Dave sure seems like a nice guy — you know, for someone who takes boudoir, swimsuit and nudie pics of strange women in the shop’s back room, away from all those nice frames my mom would like.

Although engaged to be married (albeit to a cheating hussy), Dave is smitten when into the store walks Jill, a lovely lady with an indiscriminate European accent and a pressing need for glamour shots for her beau. Uh-oh, doesn’t her posing in a soccer mom-friendly one-piece technically qualify her as a model? Will this innocent sesh of snapshots place Jill on the radar of the titular Night Ripper!? Those questions are as rhetorical as whether this shot-on-video slasher will culminate in a mannequin factory.

Night Ripper! marks the sophomore movie for Victims! writer, director and producer Jeff Hathcock, who clearly has a thing for emphatic punctuation. He also has a thing for showing characters both major and minor getting both in and out of cars both arriving and departing. And yet, Hathcock manages to work in effective misdirection and uniquely staged kill scenes that belie the near-nonexistent budget — enough for Night Ripper! to earn that exclamation point for being entertaining in spite of all its faults, rather than solely because of them.

Believe me, they’re there — none more amusing than a mistress’ post-coital argument with a red herring who won’t leave his wife: “This isn’t love. This is two sweaty bodies fucking a flood lamp!” she cries, then pausing for a delicious four seconds. “And I’m tired of flood lamps!” Seconded. —Rod Lott

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As if America’s current discourse over this amendment and that amendment weren’t enough of a Gordian knot, Todd Sheets’ Final Caller lays down even more convoluted rules from our crazed druid ancestors: To appease the gods every eight years, eight people must be killed on Aug. 8. So says cannibal/serial killer Edward Ray Hatcher (Jack McCord, Sheets’ Dreaming Purple Neon), a pot-bellied pig of a human being who dubs himself “The Outsider.”

Hatcher relays all this info by calling into the live radio show hosted by FM shock jock/gaseous blowhard Roland Bennett (Douglas Epps, Sheets’ Bonehill Road). What Hatcher doesn’t specify is how many of the endangered octet will be sacrificed on station property. As a murderer, Hatcher doesn’t screw around. Among other savage things, he removes fingers via DeWalt hand saw, hammers foreheads, nails palms, razor-knives necks and, most sphincter-clenching, jams wooden handles into poop chutes. As little as you’d want to carry on a conversation with him (“You’re already seniors. With cobwebs in your pussies.”), you wouldn’t want to pay even the minimum amount due on his Home Depot bill, either.

Unrelated to his radio DJ-centric segment of 2013’s Hi-8 horror anthology, Final Caller is well-trod territory for Sheets as a showcase for torture-porn gore and gallows humor. Although the very bloody effects are convincing in their refusal not to flinch, one still can sense a giddiness among the cast members in making this microbudget mash-up of Oliver Stone’s Talk Radio and, oh, every subtlety-free indie slasher. A character’s T-shirt boasting the logo of Wild Eye Releasing, the flick’s distributor, establishes the level of seriousness we’re supposed to take all this.

An icon of shot-on-video horror, Sheets boasts a filmography of 50 some-odd titles across an astounding near-four decades. With that much hands-on experience, you’d expect progress and growth; indeed, Final Caller allows him to demonstrate a true knack for the rhythms of editing and setting up his shots. I’d love to see what he could do with an actual budget. Until then, however inconsistent, this effort lives as an example of doing better with next to nothing. —Rod Lott

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Usually, low-budget creature features oversell themselves. The British-born Spider in the Attic presents itself as a rare exception — but only because it has multiple spiders versus the singular promise of the title. In every other case, it disappoints as expected.

The prologue shows scientist Dr. Zizerman (Chris Cordell, The Curse of Humpty Dumpty) pitching a fit over being fired for his unethical practices and skirting regulations. See, he’s genetically altered a regular spider to become a rather large hissing spider with a scorpion-like stinger, deliberately kept in low light to shield the sheer shittiness of the CGI. It escapes its glass box and kills Dr. Z in his bed. Kinky.

Linda Buxton (Nicola Wright, Top Secret!) is a flailing producer of true crime shows. Her career’s on the verge of cancellation when her home-from-the-military daughter (Sarah Alexandra Marks, Easter Bunny Massacre) and pregnant daughter (Chelsea Greenwood, Amityville Scarecrow), convince her she just needs to solve the mystery of Dr. Zizerman’s death to bring in the numbers. The Buxton women head to the abandoned house, with others on hand to assist. Despite gripping mugs of tea, having harsh bangs or wearing opera gloves, somehow not a single one is named Penelope.

As you can guess, spiders attack, but director/co-writer Scott Jeffrey (Cannibal Troll) sure takes his damn sweet time to let them loose. Killing the entire vibe of such a enterprise, the arachnids come so crudely computer-animated, they’re not threatening. In shots calling for numerous ones, it looks like whoever was running the effects program followed — and repeated — this uninspired series of keystrokes: Select > Copy > Paste > Scale > Rotate.

One thing’s for sure: If Spider in the Attic were shot in the fall, any nearby residents hoping to score fake cobwebs for a seasonal porch display were certain to encounter an empty shelf at the shoppe. Ditto for the cotton balls aisle. —Rod Lott

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We Bought a Zoo can F itself, because Mark and Jenna have bought a ghost town.* Their plans are to revitalize the remote, abandoned Old West town of Blackwood Falls into a family-friendly shopping destination and tourist attraction.

A recovering alcoholic turned workaholic, Mark (Andrew C. Fisher, 2010’s Night Music) is so sure it’ll work, he’s sunk their life savings into it. Jenna (Mandy Lee Rubio, Jurassic Tale) is … well, doing her damnedest to stay a supportive spouse.

The premise is not unlike this year’s millennial-driven Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot, swapping one boogeyman for a boogeywoman. After digitally signing on the dotted line, of course, our couple learns Blackwood Falls’ true history: The Texas townspeople thought the brothel to be run by witches, not bitches, so they burned it to the ground and buried its prostitutes in a mass grave. Oops!

Minus a few flourishes impossible for Mark’s camera to catch, A Town Full of Ghosts plays as found footage intended for his YouTube channel. Even in his dead-of-night sojourns (Where’s that piano music coming from? Do you smell smoke?), he’s smashing that “REC” button almost as often as he pushes Jenna’s buttons of evaporating patience.

The found-footage subgenre has become so overused the last two decades, especially by indie filmmakers, because going that route maximizes what little resources are at their disposal. Therefore, it’s a bit of a wonder writer/director Isaac Rodriguez (Last Radio Call) is able to prove there’s life in it yet. He adds elements that work so well, they justify its use, from a wasp nest that grows exponentially overnight to, best of all, the ghost town’s wooden maze. The POV sequences of stumbling through it in darkness ring particularly effective; Rodriguez even tops it with an overhead drone shot that approximates the God-like view a classic video game, as we see Mark turning left and right, unable to see the horror ahead.

The movie’s not perfect, as Mark’s transformation seems rushed and some digital effects work diminish the scares. Still, amped by the built-in atmosphere, those frights are present and largely work, in part by the movie closing up shop at an economical 67 minutes. —Rod Lott

*In actuality, We Bought a Zoo can also F itself for being We Bought a Zoo.

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