At feature length, Strange Aeons: The Thing on the Doorstep is based on H.P. Lovecraft‘s well-known — but not always well-liked — 1937 story “The Thing on the Doorstep.” I was looking forward to seeing this adaptation … but that’s because I had it confused with “The Outsider,” for some reason.

Once that misunderstanding was cleared up, it was obvious that director Eric Morgret’s film follows the original plot pretty closely, even retaining the occasionally odd character names — Asenath, anyone? — despite being set in the present day. Its hero is bearded, mild-mannered college professor Dan Upton (J.D. Lloyd), whose graduate assistant Edward Derby (Erick Robertson) falls under the spell of the mysterious and beautiful Asenath (Angela M. Grillo).

And no wonder: He has magical sex with her, during which she implants all sorts of weird-ass thoughts and tentacled visions directly into his brain. That kind of thing tends to set a girl apart from the rest of the pack, especially when she does so while naked.

Seriously, though, this relationship marks changes in Derby’s personality, thus driving a wedge in his friendship with the professor, thus creating a bizarre love triangle that can’t end well. At all. (And you know that even without the appearance of that infernal Necronomicon.)

While Doorstep has no shortage of freaky-deaky imagery, it also sports a few sound issues and performances that bend toward the amateur level. Its main problem, however, is even with the benefit of variances from Lovecraft’s source material, simply not enough ideas are present to sustain it for an hour and a half.

It might help if its characters seemed more real. For instance, when someone shambles into your house on a dark and stormy night, saying nothing, their head tucked down and hidden under a hat, hell, yes, something is wrong! Be. Fucking. Scared! —Rod Lott

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After viewing a news report of the mess Woodstock festivalgoers left behind on the dairy farm, angry ol’ coot Bert (Tige Andrews, TV’s The Mod Squad) leaves his house in a huff to go looking for “those lousy hippies!” Too bad he chooses to do so on a night of historic thunderstorms.

As he climbs metal scaffolding and hurls planks while screaming, “Freaks! Freaks!” he gets a few giant electrical shocks that soon turn him into a werewolf. (This is all part of established werewolf lore, correct?) Meanwhile, a groovy band that missed out on Woodstock is headed to the farm to take pictures on the stage, in hopes of fooling a record company into a contract. Unwittingly, the two parties hop the Marrakesh Express to the same destination: disaster.

The thing about The Werewolf of Woodstock: Crazy as it is, it fails to meet the bar set by its perfectly outrageous title, even though the lycanthrope steals a dune buggy at the end. Reminiscent of the weird, live-action videotaped program that would show up on an odd Saturday morning, it’s as toothless as a meth addict, which shouldn’t be a surprise since Dick Clark produced. Although it’s directed by eventual Not Necessarily the News creator John Moffitt, this 66-minute made-for-TV movie is played straight.

The Werewolf of Woodstock features Andrews in a bad mask, Belinda Balaski (The Howling) and Andrew Stevens (The Terror Within II) among the band members and, at the local police station, Meredith MacRae (Bikini Beach), Michael Parks (Tusk), Robert Dix (Horror of the Blood Monsters) and a pot of spaghetti sauce (needs more oregano). —Rod Lott

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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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