Hoping to learn about a family she never knew, Grace (Scout Taylor-Compton) is invited to a plantation home for a weekend by someone claiming to possess the answers she seeks. With her boyfriend, Jack (Nolan Gerard Funk, House at the End of the Street), in tow, she arrives to find the mansion spacious, yet empty of people. Oh, well — when in Rome (or South Carolina) …

Neither snakes nor satanic-looking symbols about the property scare them from B&Bing. Soon, a dead cat turns up gutted on the porch; next, robed figures hiding their faces with animal skulls and espousing a Cenobite-level obsession with pain do their best Purge formation stance surrounding the backyard; at each glance, their circle seems to get tighter. No wonder the movie is titled The Long Night; one hopes utilizing Ancestry.com isn’t this eerie.

More or less resigned to a horror-from-here-on-out career after earning the lead role in Rob Zombie’s rebooted Halloween pair, Taylor-Compton appears to have grown into it admirably, able to carry these films — workable or not — on her all-in shoulders. With The Long Night, she gets to check both “milky-eyed contacts” and “Regan MacNeil levitation” off her to-do list, as well as ground the weirdo-hallucinatory sequences that lend the flick a fentanyl-laced dose of the cosmic.

As director, Rich Ragsdale (The Curse of el Charro) makes prodigious use of drone footage and a score rivaling Cowboy Junkies for somnambulism to properly establish a definitive, deliberate mood before delving into story. The script, however, gets stuck somewhere around the second act, treading the same ground without actually progressing until the mouth finally catches the tail. In their small parts, Deborah Kara Unger (Silent Hill: Revelation) and Jeff Fahey (Body Parts) bring flashes of respite, but not surprise. —Rod Lott

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There’s a reason Mexico’s masked wrestler numero uno, Santo, never wrote a business book titled Who Moved My Queso? or The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Luchadors: He was a terrible leader.

Seriously! In Santo in the Vengeance of the Mummy alone, the man proves time and again that he was a master of the ring, but not HR. Within an hour and half, consider that he:
• adheres to a dress code different from everyone else
• values looks above lives
• shows that violence is always the answer
• mandates a 3 a.m. clock-in
• tells his followers, “I can assure you horse meat is very tasty.”
• has a child perform manual labor
• and, when the child’s grandfather is murdered, consoles the kid with these words: “Men don’t cry.”

Despite that, his 31st star vehicle — directed by Santo regular René Cardona Sr. (El Vampiro y el Sexo) — is quite fun, provided you skip the wrestling matches that bookend it. Outside the ring, Santo is recruited by professor Romero (César del Campo, The Exterminating Angel) to join an expedition to the jungle crypt — and its expected treasure, so says a freshly deciphered codex — of Nonec, an Apache prince from thousands of years ago.

Also aboard are an engineer, a photographer, a secretary (and her notepad) and another scholar, professor Jiminez (Carlos Ancira, The Living Coffin). Looking not unlike he’ll be fiddling on the roof any minute, Jiminez is present for “comic relief”; from wondering how to milk a horse to mistaking a menu being in French, when he’s merely holding it upside down. Har-de-har.

Guided to the tomb by local boy Agapito (Niño Jorgito, Santo’s real-life son), the group discovers the mummified Nonec draped with an ornate necklace threatening death for removal. They take it anyway, so a resurrected Nonec takes revenge on their camp. Bread-crust face aside, he’s not your everyday mummy, skilled as he is at archery.

Of course the silver-masked Santo will defeat the thing by close of business, just as he does everything else thrown at him, from a black panther to Buffalo — not an animal, but a wrestling opponent. Santo in the Vengeance of the Mummy makes for a semi-lively Mexploitation adventure into terror, from the storied Cinematográfica Caldéron, S.A. Ask for it by name. —Rod Lott

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For Open Water 3: Cage Dive, the jerry-rigged franchise goes the found-footage route. With (not real) news reports and interview excerpts interspersed, the movie presents itself as a millennial trio’s ill-fated audition tape for the (also not real) Guts and Glory reality show. This being an Open Water entry (albeit after the fact), we get guts — the glory, not so much.

Our wannabe influencers are Josh; his brother, Jeff; and Jeff’s girlfriend, Megan. Jeff (Joel Hogan) even plans to pop the question to Megan (Megan Peta Hill, Broil) on the show, unaware she’s cheating on him … with Josh (Josh Potthoff). Oh, brother!

In addition to riding a roller coaster — wow, real daring there, kids — the audition tape includes a cage dive with sharks in Australia. All’s well until a Poseidon-lite tidal wave tips the boat over, sending all aboard tumbling into the salty bowl of broth known as the Pacific Ocean. Feeding time!

Sharksploitation cognoscenti deem Open Water 3 to be lackluster, but I disagree. While the movie isn’t exactly swimming in originality, director Gerald Rascionato (2021’s Claw) uses found footage organically rather than a gimmick; furthermore, he stages a couple of solid jump scares and an equal number of extended scenes of unease.

I suspect Cage Dive’s negative numbers largely derive from viewers’ annoyance with the vapid narcissists at its chewy human center. Make no mistake: They are annoying, but isn’t that how it should be? Ever since the original Open Water showed moviegoers that even the protagonists we like have no chance to see shoreline again, isn’t their demise the specific appeal of the sequels? (Call it the Voorhees effect.) Something tells me Rascionato agrees — to be clear, that “something” is the scene in which Megan accidentally kills an innocent person with a flare. —Rod Lott

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Screamtime is beloved among British members of the VHS generation. Other than nostalgia, I’m not sure why. Across the board, crucial factors such as wattage, imagination and payoff run low.

Linking three patched-together short films by UK sexploitation giant Stanley Long (London in the Raw) and House of the Long Shadows scribe Michael Armstrong, a rather daft wraparound conceit finds a couple of English hooligans watching tapes freshly shoplifted from a local video store: “I wanna see uh few mooovies.”

Arguably the most well-remembered segment comes first. It concerns Jack (Robin Bailey, the Dave Clark Five vehicle Having a Wild Weekend), a Punch and Judy-style street-theater puppeteer whose wife and stepson nag him over his beloved puppets to a point beyond humiliation and emasculation, and into annihilation. You know what’s bound to happen once he snaps, but it works in spite of its obviousness.

A meek spouse also figures in the midsection. This time, it’s the newlywed Susan (Dione Inman, 1985’s Pickwick Papers TV series), whose eyeglasses are the size of tea saucers. She wishes she could return one wedding present: the fixer-upper home gifted from her in-laws. Not only does it suffer electricity issues, but the bathtub fills with what looks like a menstrual cycle and a ghost boy rides his bike in circles on the front lawn. A hallway is the site of one effective jump scare; otherwise, this story is a bit of a cheat.

Finally, young motocross nut Gavin (UK pop singer David Van Day) needs more money than the schedule (aka “shed-ule”) at his menial menswear job allows. His out is to tend the lush garden of two biddies. They tell him it’s filled with gnomes and fairies, and you get one guess at whether such a cuckoo statement proves true once Gavin attempts a nighttime robbery of his elderly employers. —Rod Lott

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Irascible, unkempt coot Snakey Bender (Les Tremayne, 1953’s The War of the Worlds) loves only one thing more than marching bands, and it’s certainly not baths or combs. It’s snakes, which he finds and sells for a living.

In his tiny Texas town, Snakey may be known by everyone, but not necessarily beloved. In fact, he’s perpetually castigated by the cartoonish-looking pastor (Marvin Kaplan, Hollywood Vice Squad) for feeding “God’s creatures” (mice) to the snakes.

Every Wednesday night, Snakey’s schedule is packed. First, he and his farmer pal, Burt (Richard Kennedy, The Capture of Bigfoot), get drunk and dance to slabs of vinyl by John Philip Sousa … until Burt lands a hussy wife (Janet Wood, The Centerfold Girls).

Second, he brings his biggest and most phallic snake, Lucifer, to the home of the single school teacher (Bebe Kelly, If You Don’t Stop It … You’ll Go Blind!!!), who gets off sexually by wrapping the serpent around her muumuu-draped body … until she’s blackmailed by the sibling grocery store owners (C.B. Hustlers’ Bruce Kimball and Pee-wee’s Big Adventure’s Alice Nunn, Large Marge herself) into a threesome, lest word get out of her fetish and she loses her job.

With rural life suddenly against him at every turn, Snakey does what any viewer of Fangs waits impatiently for him to do: Take slithering, hissing, rattling revenge, letting his scaly pets serve as “judge, jury and executioner.”

The only turn as director for Ted V. Mikels collaborator Art Names, Fangs isn’t the all-out reptile-attack picture as the Harry Novak production Rattlers or William Grefé’s Stanley. It’s more like a morality tale with a herpetology twist and dialogue that suggests Tennessee Williams ghostwriting Sordid Lives. Consider such dialogue as Snakey’s “Aw, horsefeathers!” and “Where in thunder you hidin’ the pork ’n’ beans?” — not to mention Nunn’s taunt of “What’s a-matter, Snakey? Don’t ya like my taffy?”

Take this with a drop of neither venom nor sarcasm: Tremayne is awesome in this. The part probably paid no better than the canned goods his character buys — on credit, mind you, because he’s dirt-poor — yet Tremayne doesn’t treat the drive-in material any differently. During the “band session” with Burt, he gives a monologue as devoted to his craft as Lawrence Olivier or Marlon Brando, never minding what he’s saying just amounts to an All Music Guide entry on Sousa.

Having grown up watching Tremayne mentoring TV’s Shazam! every Saturday morning, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine him getting drunk, kicking Billy Batson out of the RV and taking a hard right, only to end up deep in the dark, dark heart of Texas. Enjoy! —Rod Lott

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