In indie horror’s digital DIY era of today, everyone who wants to make a horror movie can and does. This floods the market with dreck — and because even dreck has a minute’s worth of good parts to craft an appealing-enough trailer and inspire an eyeball-grabbing cover — the market is rewarded with rental dollars from viewers left wanting. They’re Outside offers the opposite experience: File the trailer and poster art under “no great shakes,” but the movie itself is that increasingly elusive, rough-’round-the-edges gem.

Combining folk horror with found footage, the UK film follows pompous YouTube psychologist Max Spencer (Tom Wheatley, Piglet’s Big Movie) and camera-operating girlfriend (Nicole Miners) as they shoot an episode on agoraphobia. This primarily entails traveling to the middle of the woods, where former nursing student Sarah Sanders (Christine Randall, Evil Bong 3: The Wrath of Bong) has lived in a little house — and only inside it — for years and years. She’s so terrified to take one step past the threshold, Max assigns himself a 10-day challenge to change that.

Why so scared, Sarah? It all has to do with “Green Eyes” – not the Civil War legend, but folklore nonetheless. As a prologue explains, Green Eyes is rumored to have abducted a child, resulting in a parental mob burning his home, Freddy Krueger-style. As the story goes, he lives in the woods and is identifiable by his wooden mask, cape of leaves and, yes, vacant emerald orbs. Look, glowing eyes in the dark of night is the cheapest kind of scare to make … and when done correctly, as co-directors Sam Casserly and Airell Anthony Hayles have here, ridiculously effective.

Ideally, They’re Outside’s opening card wouldn’t dole out the fate of each main character, but that’s the way of the found-footage film; ultimately, knowing the end does little to hamper enjoyment of the trip there, thanks to Wheatley and Randall’s respective grasps on performing priggish and peevish. For a first feature, Casserly and Hayles do more things right than most, from using subliminal imagery for an extra jolt of creeps to casting Nicholas Vince, Hellraiser’s chattering Cenobite, to deliver the backstory in film-within-a-film exposition. It would be easy to overpraise the movie — and I may have — but these days, “just fine” can be all we ask. —Rod Lott

Courtesy of Death Cat Entertainment, the horror anthology Grave Intentions presents a quintet of tales hosted by voodoo retailer Magical Madam Josephine (Joy Vandervort-Cobb). Before each, she spotlights a relevant product in her shop, including charm pouches, voodoo dolls, crystals, talismans and even a candelabra prestuck with a Rainbow Coalition of candles. Josephine addresses the viewer with lines like, “Most believe bravery is a good t’ing,” “Oh, I pray this customer uses puppet magic wisely” and “Are you the hero … or the villain?”

While Jocelyn and Brian Rish’s wraparound is new, the stories Josephine introduces are not, being unrelated independent short films as old as 2014. Moreover, coming from half a world away is Matthew Richards’ The Disappearance of Willie Bingham. Easily Grave Intentions’ highlight, the Australian short is a blackly comic look at a child killer (Kevin Dee) used by the judicial system as an experiment for scared-straight schoolchildren and other would-be offenders; rather than put Willie to death for his crimes, he is gradually relieved of appendages, limbs, organs and then …

Running a not-so-close second in quality is James Snyder’s Violent Florence, whose title character (Charly Thorn, 2020’s Relic) demonstrates why it’s not wise to mess with a stray black cat. Meme immortality awaits.

I wish the rest of Grave Intentions were as appealing as this pair. Lukas Hassel’s The Son, The Father … gets close, but its tit-for-tat scenario of a boy (Lucas Oktay) whose alcoholic mom (Colleen Carey) to die on his 11th birthday is more depressing than entertaining, despite good performances.

Another abused child is at the center of the final segment, Brian Patrick Lim’s Marian, which stands alongside the first, Gabriel Olson’s The Bridge Partner, as the portmanteau’s weakest links. Ironically, Olson’s film is the only one with star power, as sultry newcomer Olivia (NYPD Blue’s Sharon Lawrence, vamping up a European accent) vows murder to the Moss Harbor Bridge Group’s mousiest member, Mattie (Beth Grant, Southland Tales), unprovoked. I really expected to click with this, especially with the late, great Robert Forster (Jackie Brown) aboard as Mattie’s husband — but its ending is as flat as day-old Tab, and Forster appears only in one short scene. That minor and painless disappointment aligns with Grave Intentions being an overall mixed bag — neither hero nor villain. —Rod Lott

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Given how many times Richard Burton eventually married before his death (five!), more than a little irony exists in viewing Bluebeard today. From Superman producer Alexander Salkind and The Caine Mutiny director Edward Dmytryk, the film version of France’s felonious folktale casts Burton as cerulean chin-bristled World War I hero Baron Kurt Von Sepper, returning from aerial battle to only wage the war of the sexes on the ground by marrying — and killing — one beautiful woman after the other.

Bluebeard the movie’s first victim is Bluebeard the character’s sixth wife (Karin Schubert, The Panther Squad), felled by a bullet in an hunting “accident.” Before long, Bluebeard finds himself entranced by flapper girl Anne (future Happy Hooker Joey Heatherton). Despite all the red flags surrounding the guy — a one-eyed cat, a cobweb-strewn castle, a crazy old woman combing the hair of his mother’s corpse — Anne happily becomes Wife No. 7, the Jell-O to his jam.

When she finds his … let’s just call it a “scrapbook” of past wives, he confesses everything to her chronologically, doomed spouse by doomed spouse. Buckle in, viewers, because the result is an all-star panoply of acts of uxoricide, with Burton’s master of misogyny wearing more shades of purple than the Joker and Prince would find tasteful. Virna Lisi (The Statue) is seduced into a guillotine; Marilù Tolo (My Dear Killer) is drowned; and Agostina Belli (The Night of the Devils) takes a falcon to the face.

Most amusingly, Raquel Welch (The Last of Sheila) plays against type as a nun whose inventory of global dalliances angers Bluebeard into such a rage, he locks her in a coffin. Genuinely funny is how increasingly annoying he finds the gorgeous Nathalie Delon (Le Samouraï) for her endless baby talk and for naming her breasts “Jasmine” and “Sicumin.” When she hires a prostitute (Sybil Danning, Chained Heat) over to give her husband-satisfying whore lessons, Bluebeard catches them au naturel and penetrates them both … with a pointy-tusk chandelier, so get your mind outta the gutter.

If “prestige Eurosleaze” exists, Dmytryk’s Bluebeard is the default example, with Burton at his most bombastic. The Gothic gaslighter pops with color and delights with a campy tone, trashy sequences and an Ennio Morricone score that positively fucks. Bluebeard will tickle you pink, if you let it. —Rod Lott

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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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