At a time when the notorious Italian cannibal flicks were making un sacco di soldi the world over, Asian countries decided they, too, wanted some of that bloody lucre and started to churn out many man-eating titles, with one of the most popular — Primitives — hailing from Indonesia.

It’s kind of odd, however, as there is only somewhat implied cannibalism, but, to be fair, there are plenty of onscreen animal cruelties, including komodo killings, alligator atrocities and, most traumatic of all, monkey manglings. If you can look past that or, even worse, are a sociopath who actually enjoys that, Primitives is an engaging grotesquerie from the future filmmakers of Satan’s Slave.

A trio of stereotyped college students — the cool guy, the nerdy guy and the reserved love interest — are deep in the jungle trying to discover a new tribe of Indigenous peoples to write their term paper about. If I were the professor, I probably would have given them a B+ just for getting on the plane or, here, the flimsy wooden raft quickly destroyed in the basest of rapids.

Separated and captured by a wholly offensive tribe of “ooga-booga” natives, the cool guy (Barry Prima) and the love interest are chained to a rock and almost stripped down to their skivvies by people who apparently don’t understand the concept of clothing. Eventually, though, they escape and fall into troublesome quicksand.

Although this so-called “video nasty” gained a notorious reputation as a terrible film — mainly for the acting, writing or directing — it’s still mind-munchingly entertaining. Filled with plenty of stock footage — not to mention what I’m sure has to be a copyright-violating use of Kraftwerk’s “The Robots” over the opening credits — Primitives is a tummy-troubling entry in the celluloid cannibal phase. —Louis Fowler

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Thirteen years after his Satan-worshipping grandfather (Hy Pyke, Hollywood High) secretly slipped him a satanic necklace on Halloween, Tommy Drindle (Gregory Scott Cummins, Blood Games) is all grown up and ready to commit his soul to the devil — or something like that — in Hack-O-Lantern.

Three things are certain:
1) Tommy’s room has a bitchin’ poster for Levi’s Cords.
2) Tommy’s mother (Katina Garner, Cannibal Hookers) hates — and I mean hates — her father for his obsessive hold on Tommy. And also for having her husband murdered 13 years ago. And also for molesting her on her wedding day before that. (I’m told those things tend to stick in the craw.)
3) So many people in Tommy’s circle are going to die today, many even before the town’s Halloween party gets started.

Open House director Jag Mundhra was kinda asking for it by titling his second horror film Hack-O-Lantern, as a name like that invites viewers to prepare for a subpar experience. Then again, Mundhra’s satanic-panic shocker is a subpar experience; his gifts were in erotic thrillers, not slashers.

The only thing more out of place than the MTV video in Hack-O-Lantern’s first half is the impromptu Thanksgiving-themed stand-up routine in its second. The latter — built upon turkey and stripper impersonations — comes courtesy of “Party Comedian” Bill Tucker. Today, the Vegas performer bills himself as “Wild Bill Tucker” and, based upon the unedited promo copy at his website, might not have survived filming unscathed:

“Wild Bill’s arsenal of urban sounds effects blended into his punch lines is rare. The sounds he makes are amazingly funny & at the same time accurately fascinating. It seems, when God was creating Wild Bill he splurged with the odd ball talents that are placed so perfectly throughout his act. Now the sign language Unique? Tucker Tap Dances to his Cell Phone Ring. Warning: Wild Bill leaves pictures in your head.”

The movie leaves pictures in your head, too, including an ass cheek tattooed with a pentagram and more 30-something-looking teens the screen has ever seen, but no image more memorable than Pyke’s ugly mug. Organically creepy even before the incest angle is introduced, Pyke sounds just like you would expect, with a gravel-gargled voice that suggests he graduated summa cum laude from the Sling Blade School of Diction. Mundhra establishes the Grandpa character as the lead, only to play musical chairs throughout, with Tommy, Tommy’s mommy and Tommy’s virgin-but-not-for-long sister (Carla Baron, Terror Night) all vying for the spot willy-nilly. Not coincidentally, your attention span may do the same. —Rod Lott

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Glenn Danzig may be an icon of metal, but he’s a pariah of movies — judging from his first feature as writer and director, Verotika.

Based on stories from Danzig’s own adults-only comics imprint, Verotik, the horror anthology holds one surprise: that the horned woman introducing each segment is not named Verotika, but Morella. Played by porn star Kayden Kross (Manuel Creampies Their Asses 3), Morella begins the film by pushing her thumbs through a woman’s eyeballs until those sockets are pitch-black.

In hindsight, I think Morella did the poor woman a favor.

First up in this triumvirate of train wrecks is “The Albino Spider of Dajette,” in which a Frenchwoman with a pink Wonder Twins hairdo (porn star Ashley Wisdom, My Stepsister Squirts 3) has a problem: Her giant breasts have eyeballs where areola should be, which scares off would-be sexual partners. “Not again!” she pouts as another guy bolts from her apartment. A single tear from her eye somewhere causes a tiny white CGI spider to morph into some sort of naked spider-man (Scotch Hopkins, Virus of the Dead) coated in Liquid Paper and keen at snappin’ necks of sex workers.

In “Change of Face” — it’s a pun! — one of the star strippers at Pussy Kats is Mystery Girl (Rachel Alig, The Cleaning Lady). She’s earned this nickname because she keeps her hideously scarred face covered throughout her routine. Off the stage and on the street, her hobbies include killing pretty ladies, peeling off her victims’ faces and tacking those skin masks to her bedroom wall.

Finally — repeat: finally — Danzig goes historical in “Drukija, Contessa of Blood.” Obviously based on the 16th-century royal serial killer Elizabeth Bathory, Drukija (Alice Haig, Chillerama) orders her village’s virgins to be rounded up so she can slit them open and bathe in their blood for supposed rejuvenating properties (“In my skin, there is tingle, Sheska!”). By the end, Drukija is lugging around a sacrifice’s head that looks lopped off a RealDoll — one perhaps retired from the Danzig tour bus.

Although the cast numbers many adult entertainers, everyone looks like a porn star, thanks to barren sets no better than a school play and mostly amateurish performances that unknowingly teeter the bar toward self-parody. In horror, hideous acts are all part of the show, but Verotika is all about those acts; the film has no other purpose or point. “Albino Spider” is the only segment — note I don’t call it a “story” — with anything resembling a conclusion, whereas the other two simply call it quits after subjecting viewers to an agonizing amount of screen time spent watching repetitive tasks.

I’d like to think even fans of the man’s music hold a higher standard for what qualifies as a movie. Yet somewhere, someone is not only watching Verotika, but enjoying it — and possibly even masturbating to the part where tabloid bimbo Courtney Stodden loses her phony, polycarbonate visage. —Rod Lott

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For his sophomore effort, director Scott W. McKinlay reassembles much of his cast and crew from his 2006 debut, Gag. That includes Brian Kolodziej, who takes the driver’s seat of Creep Van as Campbell, a young man forced to accept a lowly gig at a car wash after being fired from a grocery store for stealing porno magazines they don’t even stock.

Being without wheels, Campbell wants to buy a dirty and dirt-cheap van he finds for sale; says his co-worker/love interest (Amy Wehrell), “It looks like the poster child for rape prevention.” That’s really the least of the vehicle’s problems, because it’s driven by a guy who has booby-trapped it to do away with those who dare inquire about acquiring it. A busty blonde (super-sexy Lisa Waishes-Cornwell, Tomcats) finds its seat belt cutting into her shoulder, while a bikini babe (Angelina Armani, Fear Clinic) gets her head smashed in its spring-loaded side door.

To no one’s surprise, it’s in this realm of the sick that Creep Van finds its stride. While the film has a healthy sense of humor, one could argue successfully that it’s too jokey — verging on Troma, at that — than need be. (Speaking of, Troma head Lloyd Kaufman cameos, one assumes as nonfinancial payback for McKinlay serving as a producer for Kaufman’s Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger IV.) When it most counts — Act 3, of course — McKinlay leaves the laughs in the dust, which I wish he had done much sooner, since the comedic tone doesn’t mesh as well with the convincingly grotesque effects as he might think.

That said, I can’t help but recommend that horror fans scream, “Shotgun!” and buckle in for a harmless 80-minute ride. As a throwback to old-school slashers, you could do a ton or two worse. I was never bored by what transpired — a target at which more microbudgeted projects should take care to aim. —Rod Lott

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If there’s one thing I love about the grotty films of Lucio Fulci, it’s no matter how terrible a flick of his might be, there are always one or two vomit-worthy scenes that tend to hellishly elevate the thing above most other horror movies. In Aenigma, there’s plenty to choose from, but I’m going to go with a schoolgirl waking up covered in slimy snails.

I know here, in digital print, it doesn’t sound like much, but visually, it’s truly a waking nightmare of slithering special effects.

One of Fulci’s later films, he dutifully takes the worst elements of movies like Patrick, Carrie and Phenomena to make a film that, while not better, is definitely a lot more fun than any of those. Over the strains of a terrible attempt at a pop song, a young girl has a date with the hot gym teacher. Before anybody questions the morals, it turns out to be a bloody joke and she ends up in a coma.

Around that same time, horny new girl Eva (Lara Naszinski) show up at a Boston school for girls and she might be possessed by the bullied student who likes to manifest herself over a famed poster of Tom Cruise in Top Gun. From a head decapitated by a window to a Renaissance statue coming to life and choking a girl, the grotesque deaths keep piling up and how.

But, now that I think about it, even more disturbing than the traumatic snail death is the constant rotation of prepubescent strange the older men hanging around campus seem to be getting all up in — most notably, the gym teacher and the hospital doctor who, when at the school, wears a sweater that reads “University.”

The illicit intercourse, along with the splatter-filled set pieces Fulci (Demonia) was best known for, the only thing that truly remains an enigma to me is how to pronounce the fleetingly pretentious title. Eh-nigma? Augh-nigma? Augh-eh-nigma? —Louis Fowler

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