Hey, everybody! The carnival’s in town! The carnival’s in town! And Death Screams takes place in the supposedly idyllic American small town where that kind of thing is Earth-Shattering News. Shot in North Carolina, it’s the rare slasher with no discernible lead and in which the killer has no discernible gimmick. To complete a hat trick of sorts, it’s also the only slice-and-dicer to be directed by a member of the Ozzie and Harriet Nelson family, early sitcom titans. While brother Rick zigged his way into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, David clearly zagged.

This hicksploitation horror’s biggest crime is being instantly forgettable. More screen time is given to quilt-selling than story setup. Had Nelson given any character half as many traits as the number of times someone mentions having to work tomorrow (three), we might relate to one of them. As is, they’re as fleshed-out as the fair’s “Junk Shop” booth, which literally has just a toaster. Having more presence than the appliance are H.O.T.S. honey Susan Kiger, who’s inappropriately wooed by the coach (Martin Tucker, Rockin’ Road Trip), and Jennifer Chase (1983’s Balboa) as the one ride that doesn’t leave town when the carnival does.

Amid all the toothpick activity of the sheriff (Earl Owensby Studios regular William T. Hicks, A Day of Judgment) and talk of mince pies are recurring cutaways to two teenagers floating the river like bobbed apples: the ones who were offed in the prologue for having hormones. By the time all the young people ditch the bonfire for an ill-advised trip to the graveyard, a guy named Diddle (John Kohler, Ownensby’s Dogs of Hell) excuses himself to “make heh-heh,” which is a first for my ears.

Aimless and ambling, Death Screams may not be painful, but it’s heh-heh all the same. —Rod Lott

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As residents of states in Tornado Alley know, the singular experience of hunkering down in the bathroom with your family as storm sirens wail can be frightening. It certainly is for the four-person fam of We Need to Do Something, but their sheer terror does not translate to the viewer, try as though director Sean King O’Grady might by adding a rather wily rattlesnake, disembodied voices and, well, other things.

Thick with tension among family members but not dread, the film traps the clan in the room for the duration, as a wind-transplanted tree blocks the one doorway out — effectively bringing the haunted house to them. Stress-reduced to knocking back Listerine, the father (The Innkeepers’ Pat Healy, who elevates everything he’s in) is ineffectual, which his may-as-well-be-estranged wife (Eyes Wide Shut’s Vinessa Shaw, ditto) does not let go unnoticed.

Her main concern is the safety of their children, little Bobby (John James Cronin, TV’s NOS4A2) and teen Melissa (Sierra McCormick, The Vast of Night), whose flashbacks of life outside these four walls are the only thing keeping the movie from a single-setting classification.

More often than not, We Need to Do Something’s title doubles as an audience demand. Indeed, not enough happens in 97 minutes to wring a winner, especially since it seems built for a half-hour TV episode; indeed, Max Booth III adapted it from his own novella. Similarly structured to 10 Cloverfield Lane, but without as much imagination or suspense, the film does climax with one hell of an image that wouldn’t be out of place in the better Elm Street sequels. —Rod Lott

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Over the years, I have had so many opportunities to view Dead & Buried. Sadly, something I thought would view even better took precedence and, typically, wasn’t even that good. But now, after viewing it, I feel like a jerk because Dead & Buried is good. Really good.

In the coastal village of Potters Bluff, the seafaring community has a weird way of welcoming visitors: by burning them alive. While that would hurt most places — how did the tourism bureau cover this shit up? — more and more visitors visit and more and more are horribly manhandled, mangled and murdered by the fisherman and their lone blonde seductress.

It’s a crime that has local sheriff (James Farentino, The Final Countdown) increasingly puzzled, as his attractive wife (Melody Anderson, Flash Gordon) goes about her business, teaching witchcraft to her interested middle-schoolers. It seems almost no one cares about this death and destruction — and those who do, like the area’s kindly mortician (Jack Albertson, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory), find themselves either strictly murdered or fraudulently useless.

Even weirder still, the bodies of the deceased are soon brought back to life and join the murderous rampage. What is going on here, guys?

Written by Alien’s Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett (although O’Bannon later disowned it completely) and directed by Poltergeist III’s Gary A. Sherman, Dead & Buried is one of those blissful horror films from the early ’80s that manages to continually toy with the audience, switching between subtle mystery and graphic horror to — as the corpses are stripped to the bone and re-animated — ghoulish cinema.

With its shocker ending offering no rhyme or reason — just a black screen followed by credits — if I had seen this as a kid, I would still be gushing about it today. Instead, I’m gushing about it now. —Louis Fowler

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It’s the irony of ironies that the early-aughts zombie craze owes everything to George A. Romero, yet the one person somehow unable to cash in on the early-aughts zombie craze was George A. Romero. It’s also ironic I used “somehow,” because the reason for his wipeout is clear: His three tries didn’t try enough.

By incorporating another craze in found footage, Diary of the Dead, entry No. 5 in a six-film series of bread and butter, looks entirely accessible on paper, yet earned minimal theatrical engagements before shambling to video to be ignored further. To be blunt, it deserves total anonymity — and would, were it not from a beloved brand-name director. Barring product placement by MySpace, it elicits nary a shudder.

Diary’s conceit is University of Pittsburgh students making a mummy movie called The Death of Death (!) pivot to shoot the real-world events — the zombie apocalypse, of course — that interrupt their work; after all, shouldn’t their journey to safety in an RV be documented? (Mmm, debatable.) As captured by their cameraman leader, Jason Creed (Joshua Close, The Exorcism of Emily Rose), the kids’ banter is too forced for Romero’s cast — mostly Canadian, mostly unknown (now excepting Orphan Black star Tatiana Maslany) — to handle credibly. Could anyone?

The camera itself is too showy, ODing on movement in hopes you never forget found footage’s rules. I’m not sure Romero quite understood them, because the device is so labored, it’s fully dilated to 10 cm. Twenty-four long minutes in, when the low-battery icon first flashes in the corner of the screen, I found myself agreeing with Creed’s girlfriend (Michelle Morgan, 1999’s Road Rage) pleading with him to “leave it!”

In select past works — most notably 1968’s Night of the Living Dead — Romero has excelled with low funding, particularly in practical effects that chilled in their authenticity. That’s not the case here, as Diary of the Dead not only goes the CGI route, but detours toward the cheap kind, which looks especially ugly and phony in an already harsh and muddied picture. The one nifty gore gag, although still executed with seams showing, sees a nurse’s eyeballs explode into a coffee-creamer consistency when live defibrillator paddles are placed on her head. A distant second entails a mute Amish farmer (R.D. Reid, 2004’s Dawn of the Dead remake) committing the Mennonite equivalent for seppuku with a swift scythe to his own forehead.

Although he didn’t know it at the time, Romero would write and direct his final zombie pic — and final pic, period — two years later with Survival of the Dead. It’s even worse, which is really saying something since Diary is the only one with a plucky country cutie (Amy Lalonde, 5ive Girls) dispatching a cannibal corpse, then victoriously shouting, “Don’t mess with Texas!” The only creative choice that could make that embarrassment more cringe-inducing is if “The Yellow Rose of Texas” then shit-kicked its way onto the soundtrack as an aural punchline.

Yeah, Romero does that, too. —Rod Lott

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Call it what you will: Toxic Zombies, Bloodeaters, Forest of Fear, Crying Fields. No matter the title chosen, this Pennsylvania regional with many a name remains a nifty little horror film with more on its mind than splatter — although it delivers plenty of that, too, with cheap but effective makeup.

Somewhere among the 60 square miles of hill country, hippies — one of whom looks like “Refugee”-era Tom Petty — are growing $2 million worth of marijuana plants. After our far-out farmers kill a pair of federal officers looking to make a bust, the government retaliates by crop-dusting the area with a new herbicide. As you’ve guessed long before now, this action has an odd side effect in transforming the druggies into cannibalistic zombies.

In his one and only film, writer/director Charles McCrann (tragically a 9/11 victim) resourcefully takes the lead as Tom Cole, a “forest department” exec who uses a visit to the hills as a good excuse to bring his racist joke-spouting kid brother (Phillip Garfinkel) with him so they can fish; Tom’s wife (Beverly Shapiro) basically invites herself to third-wheel the outing.

Meanwhile, the toxic zombies wreak havoc on local campers, immediately orphaning a teenaged Amy (Judy Grown) and her overalls-wearing, learning-disabled brother (Kevin Hanlon), whose name seems to vacillate between Tommy, Timmy and Jimmy. Tom and company come to the kids’ aid, forming a temporary nuclear family for a fairly tense final stretch that holes them up for part of it, per subgenre rules established by George A. Romero.

Shrewdly crafted, Toxic Zombies was too late to ride the ecological movement of the 1970s and too early for the nuke-fueled zeitgeist ushered by Reagan’s America. Perhaps now, with the undead’s rise at the dawn of this millennium as a cultural phenomenon that still lingers strong, the movie finally can find its proper audience. Aside: Look for a cameo by the largest can of Campbell’s Pork & Beans the screen has dared show. —Rod Lott

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