As staged by the New York-based Ravacon Collective, Lake Nowhere replicates the all-but-lost experience of watching horror movies on VHS — in particular, slashers whose three-digit rental counts show in an image quality so degraded, your VCR’s tracking buttons were of little use. It was a magical time; you had to be there.

Like a lo-fi Grindhouse, the film begins with a pair of fake trailers for the giallo Quando Il Fiume Scorra Rosso! (When the River Runs Red!) and the eco-terror/SF hybrid Harvest Man; sandwiched in between is a beer commercial so very ’80s, it’s more convincing than the short on either side.

From there, it’s on to the feature presentation, Welcome to Lake Nowhere. Shot in six days in the tiny town of Edinburg, its setup is practically pulled from a studio template: A group of young men and women go to a cabin for the weekend; regret follows. The only difference is this isn’t made by studio suits for financial gain, but artists for the shared love of being creative; therefore, we get an original take on well-trodden territory.

What that means is in addition to tits, there’s penis.

The “kids,” so to speak, aren’t your standard lineup of brand-name jocks and cheerleaders; they’re the thrift-store hipsters who avoided jocks and cheerleaders. One of them even looks like Doug Kenney’s Stork from Animal House. Together they chop wood, play games, smoke pot, fuck and die, so some things never change.

The death portion comes at the hands and blade of whom the credits call the Masked Maniac. Being fashioned from tree bark, his mask is folk horror-friendly, but his actions may not be as by-the-numbers as your everyday slasher villain, and same goes for your “final girl.” Co-directors Christopher Phelps and Maxim Van Scoy cannily upend expectations in a compact 50 minutes. Within such a short amount a time, Lake Nowhere may be one turn too clever, effectively getting high on its own supply, but at least our host is gracious enough to share a hit. —Rod Lott

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Ah, the 1970s. It was a time when leisure suits were appropriate camping wear, Leslie Nielsen was a dirty racist and any future environmental problems could be a rousing source of bloody entertainment, most notably in William Girdler’s Day of the Animals.

As a nameless town’s rural cops sit around playing cards, gaining weight and bitching about the ozone layer, Christopher George and his steel jaw lead a handful of city folk into the California mountains for a camping excursion. As the collection of white stereotypes — and one Native American played by Middle Eastern actor Michael Ansara, natch — walk the mountain range, a large bird follows them, watching their every move.

Apparently that’s all it takes, because after the opening night’s wolf attack, the animals go crazy, especially the birds, the cougars, the dogs and a rather docile bear. They attack in rather subdued ways that seem more like everyday maulings as opposed to CFC-inspired murders which, we are supposed to believe is the cause of their temporary insanity.

To be honest, the real wild animal here is a shirtless Nielsen, leading a pack of campers in the wrong direction while swinging a large stick around, slapping small children, calling old women “bitches” and plunging a spear into the chest a young Andrew Stevens, unaware that, many years later, his hands will be gently cupping the bare breasts of a willing Shannon Tweed in straight-to-cable flicks.

Nielsen, thankfully, meets his end when, in the rain, a bear attacks him in the middle of trying to rape a woman. (Now that I think about it, maybe these animals aren’t all that bad after all …)

While many people consider Grizzly to be Girdler’s magnum opus of animal-on-man killings, I highly suggest checking out Day of the Animals, much like my own dog did, watching the screen with one eye on the screen and one eye on me, licking his slobbering chops and mesmerized by every minute of it. —Louis Fowler

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Satan is a truly unholy pain in the ass, but many times I feel that homegrown satanists are even worse; white trash teens brandishing their stepdaddy’s antique .22, mishearing things on heavy metal albums and wreaking irritating havoc like shooting squirrels in a constant need for pathetic attention. Because that’s real life, right?

In movies, however, satanists always have Eurotrash accents, wear expensive clothes and are followed by an army of silent drones to do their bidding. “If only,” I found myself saying as I watched Baphomet, a film released by Cleopatra Entertainment, the long-standing Goth record label that, I guess, is now fully entrenched in the movie business.

A pregnant woman (Rebecca Weaver) is staying at her family’s ranch when a slimy dude comes by, looking to buy the property — the guy, by the way, is the son of a high-ranking Satan-lover. When they tell him no, the devil worshippers get wicked-horny on them, killing the son-in-law in a shark attack (!) and the mother in a rattlesnake attack (meh).

The expectant woman decides to contact Cradle of Filth rocker Dani Filth — by instant messenger, natch — who in turn hooks him up with a movie-approved good witch who helps them take down the flippant satanists when they suddenly appear at their ranch, in a shootout sequence that eats up much of the film’s short running time.

There’s also a demon who suddenly appears at the end — I’m guessing that’s the titular Baphomet, but don’t quote me on that. He’s only onscreen for a few scant moments to strangely kill the cult leader, which seems pretty counterproductive if you ask me, but maybe he’s … a good guy?

For a horror film from a Goth record label, it does about as well as it can, which, sadly, is not very. It’s far too talky and — in the case of Dani Filth — far too silly to ever be believable, at least for me. But, you know, make a movie about a couple of kids throwing rocks through a church window and setting the Bible on fire in the woods while rocking out to Megadeth, then you guys might have a good movie. Might. —Louis Fowler

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In 2007, it was nice to see a Stephen King adaptation at an actual movie theater again, where they belong, instead of the watered-down, overlong miniseries that played several nights on network TV and basic cable. It was also nice to see it contain actual scares, surviving the transition from its source material intact.

1408 comes from King’s 1992 short-story collection, Everything’s Eventual: 14 Dark Tales. As King notes in his introduction, it was never meant to be an actual story, but an example of how writing progresses from draft to draft. For whatever reason, he finished it, and it’s one of Eventual’s many highlights. It’s easy to see why it was handpicked for big-screen treatment, and its modest success — combined with Frank Darabont’s The Mist later that year — helped usher in another wave of quality King films still going semi-strong more than a decade later.

John Cusack stars as Mike Enslin, a writer of several midlist books on haunted places. He’s working on one for hotels, rating each on a scare scale of one to 10 skulls. In his research, he’s found that supposed ghost-infested bed-and-breakfasts are just a way to drum up business. That will all change with his stay in room 1408 at New York’s Dolphin Hotel — a room perennially kept unoccupied for a reason: 56 occupants have died in it, none lasting for more than an hour.

Or, as the Dolphin manager (Samuel L. Jackson) puts it, the room is “fucking evil.”

Once inside, Mike’s stay starts off innocently enough: unexplained mints on the pillow, blared Karen Carpenter from the clock radio. But soon, actual bodily harm comes to him, and the clock starts providing a handy 60-minute countdown toward his apparent doom. With a barrage of spirits and phenomena and other things that go bump in the dark, it’s like The Shining compressed into one compact suite.

While King’s original story of the same name is structured roughly into thirds — before, during and after Mike’s stay — most all of the film is concerned with the during. Granting the tale an ominous touch, King relates the goings-on in the room not as they happen, but only afterward, via whatever details Mike left on his voice recorder.

What he doesn’t say makes our imagination run wild. But movies being visual, 1408 shows all, and some of it is very creepy. With the film more or less being confined to one space, Mikael Håfström does a great job of concocting more and more things to make Mike’s night a living hell. Although it includes all of the shocks of the story, it has to expand upon it in order to hit feature-length, adding a subplot about Mike’s ex-wife (Deep Impact’s Mary McCormack) and dead daughter to help fulfill that.

Hope you like Cusack, because the entire movie is on his shoulders. If he weren’t such a talented actor, we’d want to check out of 1408 early. But he makes the skeptic Mike likable, believable and sympathetic. As much as the moviegoer in us likes to see him go through the ringer, we feel bad for him all the same. In fact, parts of the film are real downers, but that just means it works.

The movie’s not perfect, mostly because of maybe two too many false endings. But it’s a smart and stylish chiller/thriller — everything that Håfström’s previous film, Derailed, was not. —Rod Lott

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With Beneath Us, the genius lie entirely in the pun of the title. First-time feature director Max Pachman’s slice of immigrationsploitation leaves subtlety out of the picture, despite the resonance and seriousness of its premise.

Four undocumented workers — including brothers Alejandro and Memo — are hired by the über-wealthy, über-voluptuous Mrs. Rhodes (Lynn Collins, X-Men Origins: Wolverine) to finish construction on a guest home at a bargain-basement price. The property she shares with her husband (James Tupper, 2017’s Totem) is well-fortified, cut off from the rest of the world and all its promise with an electric fence. Forced to work day and night with no rest until the job is done, the workers too slowly realize they’re not going to be allowed to leave alive, what with the underground cavern of hired hands past.

To call the bosses are “racist” is to undersell their cruelty, which is hardly a one-off; Mr. and Mrs. Rhodes are essentially serial killers with the highest credit limit possible on a Home Depot credit card. The longer the job takes, the crazier Mrs. Rhodes gets, which is both the film’s greatest asset and liability. From the first scene, Pachman takes care to set up the troubled family dynamics of Alejandro (Rigo Sanchez, TV’s Animal Kingdom) and Memo (Josue Aguirre, Incarnate), then play them out … until he allows Tupper and especially Collins to approach their parts from rail No. 3.

Make no mistake: Collins is enormous fun in an utterly unhinged performance, but her Karen-to-the-nth-degree antics distract from the movie’s message even more than her push-up bra. It’s difficult to make politics stick in horror when your antagonist vamps and tramps her way through what amounts to a Tex-Mex Avery cartoon. —Rod Lott

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