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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When anthropology professor Nugent leads five students into the forest to find Bigfoot, well, bad things happen. We know this because the whole of Night of the Demon is presented as a flashback, with the professor (Michael Cutt, Hider in the House) spilling the cryptozoological tea to doctors and the sheriff from the confines of his cheap hospital bed.

What he conveys is — and isn’t — your typical sasquatch tale. Yes, all the expected elements are present and accounted for (such as the camping collegiates hearing strange sounds at night), along with ones you wouldn’t (like, oh, stumbling onto a sex cult). Yes, Nugent and his pupils eventually meet Bigfoot — and how! — but also a local yokel known as Crazy Wanda (Melanie Graham). Used and abused by her fundamentalist father (“I’m saving your soul, you ungrateful bitch!”), Wanda’s a simple-minded, Sissy Spacek-esque waif whose baby is the product of Bigfoot rape.

With the unasked question of “What would Bigfoot’s face look like at the point of orgasm?” answered, it’s safe to say Night of the Demon ventures miles and miles beyond Boggy Creek.

The coupling is hardly all the craziness contained, as Nugent relays many an episodic cutaway to explicitly gory Bigfoot encounters for which he was not present. Some of these find the 6 feet of Crisco-enabled mange:
• yanking an old man’s arm clean from the socket
• whirling a poor sap in a sleeping bag overhead, ‘round and ‘round like a goddamn pinwheel until the sack of meat is impaled on a tree
• slamming two knife-wielding Girl Scouts together in a manner that they inadvertently saw one another’s arm
• giving a woodsman a shoulder massage with his own ax
• and, most famously, rudely depriving a bush-pissing motorcyclist of his penis

Nugent’s group is hardly untouched, starting with one student having his head smashed against a tree, leaving what appears to be the remains of a meatball sub with extra sauce. It all culminates in a cabin siege that tops, well, everything to which your eyeballs have been privy up to now. Here and there, porn director James C. Wasson (What the Big Boys Eat) puts the audience in Bigfoot’s POV, visually marked by red around the frame’s edges, giving Bigfoot the most bloodshot eyes possible without stepping inside Matthew McConaughey’s man cave.

Despite a title paving the expectation for Ol’ Scratch instead of a sasquatch, Night of the Demon is the Bigfoot movie you wish every Bigfoot movie had been. —Rod Lott

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Not every horror film begins with a baboon being bagged. Because honestly, how many does South Africa make? Public-domain mainstay House of the Living Dead is one of the precious few.

In the plantation home of the wealthy Brattling clan, the snooty, elderly matriarch (Margaret Inglis) lives with her two adult sons. Michael (Mark Burns, 1974’s Juggernaut) is engaged to the lovely Mary Anne Carew (Shirley Ann Field, Horrors of the Black Museum), against his mother’s wishes. His brother, Breck, is a doctor working to prove his belief that one’s soul can be kept alive outside the physical body.

Ol’ Breck conducts his experiments in the attic. Ever since he was injured by a horse, Breck and his sideways Frankenfoot rarely leave the room, so you know he’s going to be the most inhospitable of guests when the ginger Mary Anne travels to town to meet her impending in-laws.

The motherland’s attempt at a Roger Corman-style big-house horror, sans the Poe leaping point, House of the Living Dead isn’t close to dreadful as reviews would lead one to believe. Less-than-lackluster prints and a misleading coattails rider of a title are likely to blame for negative reaction, but the film from Virgin Witch crafter Ray Austin is a capable Gothic yarn with a twist that, while easy to guess, is well-played. —Rod Lott

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