Look, if you’re gonna play a live-action version of a Dungeons & Dragons-style table game, you gotta do it right, like the med students of Shakma:
1) Play it in a 10-story building overnight.
2) Give everyone trackers and walkie-talkies, over.
3) Scrawl clues on chalkboards.
4) Put the villain in a Halloween wolf mask.
5) Outfit the princess in head-to-toe “sister wife.”

And for maximum pants-wetting action you can’t even get from a 32-sided die:
6) Let a hyperaggressive baboon with a beet-red ass — and festering resentment for being experimented upon — run amok, over.

The students — The Blue Lagoon’s Christopher Atkins and A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Amanda Wyss among them — don’t exactly “let” the baboon into the game. Neither does their professor, played by Roddy McDowall, despite the advanced familiarity with pissed-off primates he brings to the role. But because Atkins’ character fails to euthanize the animal as instructed, Shakma gets loose and seeks to destroy, dismantle and dismember — preferably all at once.

Shakma is played by Typhoon, whom you’re likely to have seen in the telepods of David Cronenberg’s The Fly. Remember how sweet and sympathetic he was in that sci-fi classic? Well, that monkey has more range than Atkins, because Typhoon is as mean as a nest of murder hornets.

With his unit dangling like an unwrapped string cheese, Shakma hisses, leaps and attacks with convincing fury. Talk about committing to your art, too, because 44 minutes in, the animal bats at a door so forcibly, he rage-poops without the slightest of pauses.

As silly as its title, Shakma seems to be like a slasher movie, but with a monkey in the middle. Although co-directors Hugh Parks and Tom Logan (of the same year’s Dream Trap) botch the movie overall, there’s something to be said about its wild-kingdom premise. Naturally, its death scenes are its finest resource, over. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Call me blasphemous if you must, but I’ve always seen Demons 2 as a far superior movie to the first film.

I originally picked up discount VHS copies of both flicks at Suncoast Video in ninth grade and secretly watched both in the video editing booth at school, mostly due to their undoubtedly satanic nature that would have brought me hell at home.

Demons is somewhat fondly remembered by Italian horror fans for its wholly cinematic rampage in a Brigadoon-like movie house where an audience full of grating stereotypes is mysteriously locked in as a sketchy film about Nostradamus inspires the gates of hell to open and the titular beasts to wreak havoc on the world.

In Demons 2, however, a remake (I believe) shows on television, one that the once-again stereotypical denizens of an apartment building are all watching. Starting with a wholly whiny woman having a birthday party where she throws a temper tantrum every few minutes sobbing about God knows what, a demon pops out of the TV showing the film and possesses her, rather violently.

Now a demon herself, as she throat-rips all of the partygoers into demons themselves — not sure how that works, but I’ll go with it — they, in turn, infect the other tenants, including members of a health club, a small boy and, in one of the movie’s evilest aspects, an adorable dog I named Mr. Scruffles.

Meanwhile, two uninfected heroes try to survive the night, with varying results.

With far better special effects pulled off in far more imaginative ways, Demons 2 has a slight Gothic riff on the first one, with the main difference being the soundtrack, featuring great tunes by The Smiths, The Cult, and Love and Rockets, to name a blackened few. That’s more than enough to recommend it as far as I’m concerned. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

Most small children are disturbed and frightened by movies they were too young to have ever watched. I, on the other hand, had shaking nightmares simply about the VHS box for The Brotherhood of Satan, creating a dreamworld of horrific visions that recently came back the other night after I viewed the flick for the first time ever — and still about that damn VHS box!

In case you never saw the box, it was released on cheapo label GoodTimes Home Video sometime in the late ’80s. The cover featured the head satanist handling a knife as a couple of absolutely catatonic kids stood behind him, if I remember it correctly. It was one of the worst images in my fragile mind for a long time, only because it seemed so real, thanks to parents who put the fear of Satan deep in me.

Although the movie has a few solid Luciferian chills here and Mephisto-friendly spills there, it’s too bad there was no way for it to live up to the prepubescent expectation of downright fear and absolute loathing. I should have known better.

Playing out like a big-budget retelling of Manos: The Hands of Fate, a road-tripping family is caught in a small town when their car breaks down; as they try to find help, children drive voodoo-inclined army tanks over anyone entering city limits. I’m not sure how these travelers got passed them, but as they try to convince the yokel cops that something strange is afoot, their small daughter suddenly disappears.

Turns out a group of elderly satanists are trying to possess the kids, if only so they can live another some-odd hundred years. Truthfully, if I had to stay in that shitty small town, I’d just let the Lord take my soul because I ain’t doing another century of that.

Helmed by television director Bernard McEveety and surprisingly produced by character actors L.Q. Jones and Alvy Moore, The Brotherhood of Satan has a trace of a frighteningly good idea here — one fraught with my own childhood fears of who we’re taught satanists truly are. For all of their dark intentions, they just can’t pull it off.

If you ever hear about a documentary regarding spooky video slipcases and the nightmares they invoked in kid, please point it my way. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

It’s Friday night at the offices of the cash-strapped Click Clique website, where the employees have been summoned to a pitch meeting. For Halloween, with layoffs looming, they’ll run a clickbait listicle on the 13 most frightening viral videos, so the staffers take turns passing the wireless keyboard around the conference table to queue up their ideas, and What Happens Next Will Scare You.

In this unique anthology of caught-on-camera moments, “influencer” claptrap and other streaming bits of ephemera, those clips include a ghost ruining a little girl’s birthday party, a DUI traffic stop gone very wrong, a vinyl recording of Native American death song, a clown’s video dating profile, a cryptozoological interruption of a local-yokel fishing show and something that may be the worst fetish ever.

Other videos are longer and more complex, for reasons eventually apparent. In this category fall an Italian Catholic priest reviewing the rites of exorcism, a 911 call from a panicked funeral home director reporting resurrected corpses, a speculative paranormal show on a stuffed teddy bear named Scraps and, in a four-parter broken up across the running time, a mean-girl teen vlogger detailing her encounters with a “troll bitch” at school.

Because What Happens Next comes from Chris LaMartina, director of the immortal WNUF Halloween Special, it’s an incredibly creative mix of horror and comedy. As with WNUF, “story” is less important than structure, and early details gain meaning as the movie progresses. Transitions are often ingenious, and the more attention you pay, the greater your rewards. That refers not only to spotting direct ties to the WNUF world — performers and characters — but the grains of throwaway background gags, such as a screen thumbnail labeled “2 Screwdrivers. 1 Urethra.” —Rod Lott

Get it at WNUF Big Cartel.

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