Many times in many horror films, whenever an Indigenous person is introduced, it’s typically because they can offer the always-white leads some sort of supernatural hokum to help defeat whatever spiritual evil is onscreen, typically leading to their mostly unceremonious and largely forgotten deaths.

The made-for-Shudder flick Blood Quantum, however, sends those tired stereotypes straight to hell with a Native-made and Native-cast zombie flick that, for once, actually puts Indigenous people in the heroic roles and Caucasians in their real-life historical contexts as colonial terrorists and cowardly opportunists.

Sometime in the early 1980s on the Red Crow Reservation in Quebec, a fisherman’s catch of the day just won’t die, the constant flopping around the beginnings of an undead outbreak that, months later, has become a nationwide epidemic that, thank God, can’t kill Natives due to their strong Indigenous blood — at least that’s what’s implied.

As more and more whites come to the reservation for their protection, so do their freshly bitten. With even their best efforts to maintain some semblance of control, a mass infection eventually runs — or, rather, shuffles — rampant on the rez, with fresh Caucasian zombies wreaking havoc as Red Crow warriors armed with shotguns, machetes and even a chainsaw do their best to contain it.

They fail. I can’t be the only person to see the historical parallels, can I?

Though there are a few moments when the movie is slightly hampered by an obviously low budget, Blood Quantum still makes for an effective chiller, in large part to the casting of Michael Greyeyes, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Forrest Goodluck, as well as Indigenous director Jeff Barnaby for having the absolute resilience and terrifying skill to finally make a Native horror flick and get it fucking right.

(As for the title, in case you’re not Native, it’s the percentage the white government uses to measure and determine the amount of one’s Indigenous ancestry and heritage.) —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

When is Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” not Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat”? When it’s Luigi Cozzi’s The Black Cat, of course. Nary a soul should be startled by that, given the director’s history with others’ intellectual property. (This is where you Google “cozzilla.”) However, with Poe’s bibliography residing whole-hog in the public domain, anyone can make a Poe adaptation or — as Cozzi has done here, following in AIP’s financially viable footsteps — just slap Poe’s name on a movie simply for salability’s sake.

Hey, at least Cozzi includes a black cat!

Filmmaker Marc Ravenna (Urbano Barberini of Lamberto Bava’s Demons) has written a sequel to Dario Argento’s Suspiria centering on the witch Levana. And who better to play the goop-drooling, pustule-faced “mother of madness” than his own actress wife, Anne (Florence Guerin of Jess Franco’s Faceless)?

Almost immediately, Anne starts encountering visions of Levana, starting with that butt-ugly witch — whose bumpy-lumpy face looks like a sweeps-week stunt for Dr. Pimple Popper — leaping through a mirror. Frightening as that brush with delusion may be, Anne returns to that deep dark truthful mirror night after night. More creepy crap happens around her, from a refrigerator’s produce sparking with electric jolts to a professor’s stomach exploding.

Being set in the world of making movies, The Black Cat is a movie that makes references to other movies. The most overt is when Marc’s screenwriting partner (the Gene Siskel-esque Maurizio Fardo of Enzo G. Castellari’s Escape from the Bronx) name-checks Suspiria, to which Anne replies, “That title rings a bell” as Goblin’s spooky, bell-ridden theme gets needle-dropped on the soundtrack.

Cozzi goes crazy with the saturated color gels of Argento and Mario Bava, but if there’s one director he’s ripped off more, it’s himself! It appears he’s recycled the box of Christmas-ornament spacescapes from his Hercules twofer and/or Starcrash, not to mention the latter’s leading lady (Caroline Munro, sexy as ever) and, finally, Contamination’s alien eggs for Levana’s Oxy 10-ready, pox-a-poppin’ skin. Mind you, these are all welcome elements of cut-rate creativity; and with The Black Cat and Paganini Horror arriving the same year, Cozzi clearly was on a roll — hopefully garlic-buttered. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

When I was 13, a friend gave me Stephen King’s Cycle of the Werewolf for my birthday. Though I was overjoyed, my mom wasn’t too thrilled with Bernie Wrightson’s illustrations of disembodied pig heads and werewolf sex. Yet a year later, she had no problem dropping me off at Northpark Cinema 4 to see the book’s R-rated adaptation, Silver Bullet.

Not exactly a novel, Cycle depicts a tense year in the town of Tarker’s Mills as its residents are terrorized by the unexplained arrival of a lycanthrope, with each short chapter representing a month. For the most part, the chapters aren’t even related, and with their sheer brevity, they come off like tone poems rather than pieces of an overall linear tale.

That’s not a criticism of Cycle, and King transplanted a majority of those 12 stories into his own screenplay for Silver Bullet. We get the attack on the lonely fat woman, the mauling of the cop in his car, the kid flying the kite for the very last time. But a series of thinly related sketches wouldn’t work as a film, so King chose to center his narrative on Marty, the disabled kid who escapes death by shooting the werewolf’s eye with a bottle rocket.

A tween Corey Haim (The Lost Boys) stars as Marty, a casting decision that immediately dates the film. While every other townsperson falls victim to the werewolf despite having two working legs, the kid in the wheelchair outlasts them all. He gets help from his homely sister (Megan Follows, The Nutcracker Prince) and their crazy drunk uncle, “played” by Gary Busey (Surviving the Game).

Busey is incredible in this flick, and by that I mean semi-lucid — and this was a few years before the motorcycle accident that caused his head injury and what we now know as the acronym-spouting “Gary Busey.” At the end is an amazing reaction shot where the werewolf bursts through the wall, and Busey’s looking right into the camera and going through half a dozen amazing facial contortions in the span of half a second. Hilarious.

Twin Peaks’ Everett McGill plays the town reverend, who pleads with his congregation not to kill the beast. (Semi-related side note: King’s decision to greatly compress time for the film was smart, because I never believed the rev could go unnoticed for three months as he does in the book.) Terry O’Quinn (1987’s The Stepfather) has a small role as the sheriff, and Reservoir Dogs’ Lawrence Tierney is, appropriately, a bartender.

As a whole, the film is fairly cheesy, but what does one expect from a mid-’80s effort from King Kong ’76 producer Dino De Laurentiis? I’d argue that it’s comfortably cheesy — enjoyable for all of its 95 minutes, and with its share of solid horror moments well-timed by first-time feature director Daniel Attias (who went directly to series TV and never looked back). Plus, in these days of CGI overkill, it’s actually quite nice to see a werewolf that’s just a guy in a suit.

Today’s audiences likely would laugh at Carlo Rambaldi’s work on the monster — as well as the entire film — but I have to admit a soft spot for this one. I appreciate it more today than the several times I saw it several decades ago. Cycle of the Werewolf is kind of an interesting one-off experiment – the calendar as novella — but Silver Bullet brings its ideas to life. –Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

That a good chunk of A Night to Dismember’s climax takes place in daylight should surprise nobody fluent in the slasher film’s director, Doris Wishman.

Years ago, Vicki Kent (Samantha Fox — the porn one, not the music/model one) axed a couple of neighborhood boys to death. The act earned her a lengthy stay at a sanitarium. As she’s released into the real world — or as real as living with one’s parents can be — Vicki attempts readjustment to “normal” life. However, her brother (South Bronx Heroes director William Szarka) would rather she not be free to murder again, so he attempts to scare her back into hospitalization by going to the store to buy “a hideous mask.”

Also, the crudely depicted killings begin anew, which private detective Tim O’Malley (William Longo Jr.) investigates and narrates … and narrates … and narrates. The events constituting Dismember — including one death by car rollover — are told to us this way because Wishman didn’t film with live sound; even if she hadn’t dubbed everything in post, viewers still would require narration for a base level of comprehension, especially with an untold number of family tree branches thrown at us in the opening minutes. God bless her, Wishman held a unique approach to filmmaking — one in which the written word was never secondary, because it was always tertiary.

Further throwing your grasp on lucidity are shots that look to come from different stock, if not entire decades. With the occasional photograph or negative image spliced in, A Night to Dismember resembles the result of a particularly tricky filmmaking challenge — one in which Wishman either compiled the entire movie from existing footage to fit Judith J. Kushner’s script, or edited an entire movie and then asked Kushner to fashion a script around that. Honestly, the movie is so disorienting, disorganized and discombobulated, neither is out of the realm of possibility. It could use a couple of Deadly Weapons. —Rod Lott

Get it at dvdrparty.

The tagline for the existential teen horror flick The Dead Ones is “High School Is Hell,” which almost immediately should give you an idea where we’re going with this whole thing: to hell.

A quartet of thoroughly irritating teens with slight mental issues are taken in the middle of the night to clean up their high school, I’m guessing as punishment. As they barely scrub the dirt and debris that seems to have settled in, they gripe, complain and cut themselves. Meanwhile, a second group of teens heavily into Slipknot cosplay attack the sleeping school at the same time.

But as the time periods constantly shift — and more monsters and other horrific visions start to appear — it becomes heavily evident where the teens are and why. Apparently this is the devil’s detention hall. (Detention hell?)

After living through 20 or so years of some of the more nightmarish of school shootings, it’s a bit shocking to see director Jeremy Kasten — he of The Wizard of Gore remake fame — present the teens’ backstories of abuse and whatnot as a means to garner these kids a little sympathy, but it’s an attempt that falls painfully flat once they strap on masks and a few guns.

I do have to wonder though how a group of teens were able to afford masks with state-of-the-art voice changers and boss leather jackets and pants, not to mention the high-powered assault rifles. Scratch that last one — this is America, after all. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.