Although the remote Mamiya mansion has been abandoned and off limits for 30 years, a Tokyo TV crew talks its way into gaining access for a documentary. The crew members insist the spacious, foreboding structure contains a lost mural by its former resident, the famed painter Mamiya Ichiro. Proving themselves correct, they immediately begin restoring the dusty wall of art to its former greatness, and in so doing, awaken dark spirits who never left the grounds — you know the kind: flowing dark hair and all.

With such concessions made for its homeland audience, writer/director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Sweet Home is a Japanese take on the American haunted house film. From Robert Wise’s suggestive shadows to Steven Spielberg’s Tobe Hooper’s more malevolent forces, Kurosawa (Creepy) builds upon trope after trope to provide shock after shock.

As the title suggests, Kurosawa employs the horror genre to examine society’s modern fractured family — in particular, the role of the mother as caregiver. Among the TV team, the producer (Shingo Yamashiro, Karate Inferno) is a single father who’s brought along his precocious daughter (pop singer Nokko, in her only feature credit), who’s pushing him to admit his attraction to a fellow crew member (Nobuko Miyamoto, Tampopo). On the Mamiya side, we learn the painter’s wife accidentally killed their toddler, who happened to be playing in the furnace when Mommy fired it up; hence, the hauntings.

But no worry necessary: Sweet Home is not some term paper on matriarchal dichotomy that’s been committed to celluloid; it’s a horror movie first, foremost and even second and third. Someone is bisected parallel to the waistline, while someone else takes an ax to the head, right between the eyes. And all the grisliness is brought to an in-camera believability with practical makeup effects by the legendary Dick Smith (The Exorcist), whose command of the craft is best exemplified by a character’s dissolution into a literal pile of bones.

Because it has yet to see an official release in the United States, Sweet Home is best known for its eponymous video game, developed in lockstep, which went on to inspire the multimedia juggernaut we know as Resident Evil. Credit where credit is due and all, but Sweet Home deserves global acknowledgment for its own worth, not insignificant. —Rod Lott

When Shock Treatment arrived in the mail, I was admittedly ecstatic. The lesser-known sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show is one of my favorite flicks and truly overdue for a Region A Blu-ray treatment. Sadly, as I looked closer at the cover and read the synopsis, I realized this Shock Treatment is, instead, a French horror film.

Maybe next time.

Still, I’m a fan of French films and this strange movie starring Annie Girardot and Alain Delon (and his penis) is one of the strangest. Workaday woman Helene (Girardot) checks in to a seaside rejuvenation clinic and, for 80 minutes, we’re treated to nude massages, nude beach frolicking and nude injections of a urine-looking serum into the buttocks, mostly administered by easygoing Dr. Devilers (Delon).

Wait a second: Devilers? Devil? You don’t think …

Probably not — the film’s not that strange. It seems the true horror lies in the final 10 minutes when Helene goes into a locked room she shouldn’t and finds the gory truth of this clinic, with a gooey mess that, in typical (not Jess) Franco-fashion, was all for naught. This finale can be a little bit maddening if you’re not used to it.

Moving along with the languid pace of runaway escargot, Shock Treatment is a slow (oh so slow) burn that will test the patience of most viewers, but with the constant penile dangling, it’s hard to fast-forward through. While the film never really gels, it’s more concerned about telling a morality tale or, more to the point, just immoral tail.

That’s alright with me. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

From 1978, the Australian horror-thriller Patrick is recognized as a high point of Ozploitation. Its unofficial, unauthorized, unbelievable sequel, 1980’s Patrick Still Lives, is not. For one thing, it’s made by the Italians. For another, it’s a festival of sleaze — the kind of movie where one character screams to another, “Get away from me before I catch syphilis from you!”

So, yeah, you might just love it.

In the quick-as-an-orgasm prologue, a young man named Patrick (Gianni Dei, reuniting with his Giallo in Venice director, Mario Landi) tends to his stalled automobile when he’s hit in the face by a bottle thrown from a passing car. Cut to: Patrick’s in a coma and under the care of his father, Dr. Herschel (Sacha Pitoeff, Dario Argento’s Inferno), whose unibrow makes him look like the progeny of Buster Poindexter and a Monchhichi.

Dr. Herschel lives in and runs the Herschel Wellness Resort, an inexplicable combination of medical clinic and vacation hot spot, where the unblinking, nostrils-flaring Patrick lies motionless in a private wing. Five people arrive at the doc’s invitation for a leisurely weekend, including an alcoholic member of Parliament (Franco Silva, Umberto Lenzi’s Spasmo) who’s more partial to a bottle of J&B, the workingman’s friend, than to his walking hourglass of a wife (Carmen Russo, Lady Football), whose off-the-charts sex appeal decreases only slightly due to her smoker’s teeth.

As becomes apparent, Landi and screenwriter Piero Regnoli (Nightmare City) draw very little from the ’78 Patrick beyond “borrowing” its prostrate protagonist — a concept they wedge into the template of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians (but more like half a dozen, given the budget). Before Patrick uses his comatose mind powers to pick off cast members with a boiling swimming pool and rolled-up car window, he uses them to engage in silly parlor tricks like breaking stemware, shaking shrubbery and typing a memo via the hunt-and-peck method.

Had Landi stopped there, we viewers of Patrick Still Lives could say, “Well, that was fun,” and go on with our lives. However, Landi did not stop there. Notoriously, Patrick psychically seduces the doctor’s secretary (Andrea Belfiore, Luigi Cozzi’s Hercules II) into stripping nude, slamming her pubic thatch against his bedpost and masturbating on the couch. Even most notoriously is what Patrick has in store for the character played by Maria Angela Giordan; having her breast bitten off in Burial Ground (shot in the same mansion) is nothing compared to being raped — and then skewered rotisserie-style — by a floating fireplace poker. The effect couldn’t look more fake, yet it shocks nonetheless. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Unlike a majority of the horror community, I hold absolutely no love for Chucky and the Child’s Play franchise, finding the whole thing rather dumb. So when I heard they were going to remake it, I could only react with a drawn-out yawn, so much so that I only recently viewed it on a random streaming channel.

And, you know, if I’m being honest, I kind of liked it.

Whereas the 1988 original film cast Brad Dourif as a serial killer who, using the dark power of Satan, transfers his murderous soul into the plastic body of the My Buddy-like doll Chucky — it was the ’80s and, I suppose, that’s the best we could do — this reboot, revamp and retelling instead turns Chucky into a deviously programmed doll with seriously damaged AI.

When a Vietnamese tech enters some bad codes in the doll’s internal computer out of spite, the now-monikered Buddi toy heads to America, a walking and talking app designed to help every aspect of your life for the rest of your life. When single mom Karen (a miscast Aubrey Plaza) brings home a defective Buddi toy for her deaf kid, Alex (Gabriel Bateman), everything from dead housecats to self-driving vehicular manslaughter occurs.

I’m pretty sure we all know by now the doll does it, right?

Voicing this incarnation of Chucky is Mark Hamill, who does a credible job, getting rid of Dourif’s smart-ass psycho sneer and, instead, giving Chucky an aura of murderous sympathy, with Chucky just doing as he was programmed (or not programmed) to do. It’s a plot point I’m sure pissed off many murder-loving misanthropes, but I dug it.

And while this Child’s Play was largely forgotten a couple of weeks after release — and apparently there’s a new television series featuring Chucky 1.0 on the horizon — this take was an honestly brave attempt to retell a story that has long desperately needed a new storyteller. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

The damned thing is that Masters of Horror: The Damned Thing has the nerve to call itself an adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s classic short story. In that 1894 tale, a group of men in a cabin hear a chilling account of the death of a man by an unseen force in the forest that ripped him to shreds. In this hourlong film … well, at least someone gets ripped to shreds. Similarities, you end there.

This Thing opens 24 years ago, when – shortly after black goo drips from the ceiling – a dad goes nuts, shoots his wife dead and almost kills his son, too, but he gets eviscerated and does whirly-loops as his guts spill out on the ground.

Surviving Kid grows up to be a small-town sheriff with a permanent limp, played by Sean Patrick Flanery (TV’s The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles), and his obsession with events of the past have driven off his button-cute wife (Marisa Coughlan of Freddy Got Fingered) and their only child. At least he has a right to be, because with the anniversary of That Night coming up, the people around town are starting to act crazy.

How crazy? Oh, like kill-yourself-with-repeated-blows-of-a-hammer crazy.

With a script by Richard Christian Matheson (Nightmare Cinema), The Damned Thing errs in many ways, including trying to find a credible explanation for the monster. Bierce’s was ingenious, revealing only that it exists in a plane of color human eyes cannot see, but this show leaves nothing to the imagination, giving us a Sandman-style petroleum-based beast.

Director Tobe Hooper — responsible for two certifiable scare classics (Poltergeist and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, of course) and flicks on the other end of the quality spectrum – is not at the top his game here, although production values are strong. His camera forever swirls about, scenes go on too long and – worst of all – it isn’t the least bit frightening. He gets off a couple of good gross-outs – the aforementioned toolbox murder and an encounter with a car-crash victim – but that’s about it.

Bierce’s story would be challenging for anyone to adapt without going into it knowing it’s all in the suggestion. But the Masters of Horror team has made so many alterations, the title no longer fits. Even if it weren’t based on a pre-existing piece of literature, the Thing has little life to it. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.