Setting a horror film inside an escape-room attraction is such a good idea, multiple movies have done it, including the 2019 theatrical hit Escape Room. Generically enough, two films from 2017 are simply titled Escape Room, too.

This is one of those — the one starring former Scream king Skeet Ulrich.

As Brice, Ulrich is the owner of the escape room Deranged, the logo of which adorns his ever-present black hoodie. With attendance having significantly cooled since the previous Halloween, Brice is desperate to get Deranged some new buzz to bring in the kids. Instead of offering free beer, booking a band, incorporating strippers or pursuing any valid idea, he goes browsing for antiques. At his first stop, he immediately gets worked up over a skull box behind the counter, but the shop owner (Sean Young, 1984’s Dune) says it’s not for sale, because it’s one of the world’s most cursed objects, what with housing a demon and all.

One stolen skull box later, Deranged welcomes new customers in Cutout Bin Brad Pitt (Randy Wayne, Hellraiser: Judgment) and Junior Varsity Danny Masterson (Matt McVay, TV’s Lovecraft Country) as a pair of total horror bros. The boys have brought their less-enthused girlfriends (Hometown Killer’s Ashley Gallegos and Animal Among Us’ Christine Donlon) who, in real life, would not only be attending Wine Wednesdays, but would be with other guys.

As they try to uncover clues to unlock the door within 60 minutes, Brice watches from the comfort of his office, pumping his fists whenever they jump in response to a chintzy scare effect, as if to say, “Crushing it, dude!” Chained to the wall of the escape room is a sack-headed employee our foursome christens with the franchise-ready name “Stitchface” (Taylor Piedmonte, Mimesis). Unbeknownst to them, Stitchface has been possessed by the demon from the skull box; this only becomes apparent when he starts stabbing them to death while they attempt to solve puzzles. As Billy Joel put it, one-two-three-four-PRESH-SHURE!

How’s that for a premise? If you answered “about two levels beyond what I’m willing to believe,” you clearly stole my notes. For his first feature, writer/director Peter Dukes demonstrates skill in keeping the disposable cast’s hourlong challenge to more or less just that. Dukes’ decision may be strategic to stretch the running time, as the ridiculously needless Middle East prologue certainly suggests. Either way, that doesn’t make the movie interesting; watching the customers think aloud in real time about shapes and colors amounts to a taxing sit. The effect is like watching someone play a video game, in that at least someone appears to be having fun — it just isn’t you. —Rod Lott

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I’m very much a lover of Werner Herzog’s works, having seen most of his collaborations with Klaus Kinski except, oddly enough, Nosferatu the Vampyre. Though it’s highly acclaimed and critically loved the world over, I instead watched the lackluster sexual improprieties of the pseudo-sequel, Nosferatu in Venice, where the famed monster (still played by Kinski) goes on an Italian adventure! Pass the marinara, paisans!

Or not. Employing five different directors — including Starcrash’s Luigi Cozzi and Kinski himself — instead we’re left with a mostly drab and melancholy journey through the stench-filled canals of Venice, with grandstanding actors like Christopher Plummer and Donald Pleasence taking on questionable roles in their battle to not only take on evil at its root, but apparently stave off real-life hunger in the lean ’80s.

As an obvious Van Helsing knock-off, Plummer comes to a Venetian house filled with statuesque young women, square-jawed young men, wholly off-putting crones and, of course, Pleasence as a hungry priest who seems to have been paid in craft services. Somehow, they resurrect Nosferatu (Kinski), now with a bitchin’ haircut the ladies seem to lust after.

Apparently, the only way to destroy the suave creature is for him to fall in love with a virgin, which, if I might be blunt, is pretty stupid. Still, with large holes blasted in his chest by the cowardly lot of supposed heroes as they run, the film comes to an ending I’m sure is supposed to be meaningful, but honestly seems more like a quick shot of Kinski on the way to his plane as villagers go pheasant hunting.

Final writing and directing credit was dropped in the lap of Augusto Caminito, who I guess did the best job he could with the big ball of film stock he was handed. Still, the ultimate shocker of this horror flick is the music by Vangelis that, while it don’t class up the movie, at least attempts a sheen of sorts almost comparable to Chariots of Fire. Almost. —Louis Fowler

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Beginning in the mid-’80s, I’ve been attracted to steamy, sultry redheads, with lusty firecracker Tawny Kitaen constantly on cable television. From hair-metal videos by Whitesnake to raunchy flicks like Bachelor Party, that crooked smile and ample, um, talent made her this young person’s dream girl — or one of them.

But when my parents brought home Witchboard — then a new release! — that crush reached its youthful erectile zenith. And while I find the horror flick to be somewhat boring today, I can honestly admit that Kitaen, though not in the movie as much as I remembered, is still a welcoming presence, David Coverdale’s penis be damned.

Linda (Kitaen) is throwing a party and her boyfriend, Jim (Todd Allen), decides to get wasted and be the world’s worst significant other — at least that’s what I’ve been told from my own mirroring actions. When a partygoer whips out his Ouija to contact the small child he’s been talking to — already weird if you ask me — strange things begin happening, like building sites caving in, metal barrels collapsing and masked men with axes splitting dudes right in the skull.

While the sight of a possessed Kitaen clad in a men’s suit and mimicking a middle-age male voice is both tantalizing and worrisome for a variety of reasons I should probably see someone about, the mostly boring film does offer three explosive finales I didn’t see coming. So thanks for that, director Kevin Tenney: I liked the wedding one best!

Two years later, Tenney directed Night of the Demons. I only saw it recently, because when it came out, my mother forbid me to rent it, because in her words, watching it would “invite the devil in the house.” —Louis Fowler

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With movies being a great escape from the grind of daily life, it’s ironic that the global pandemic has kept them off-limits for about a year. Now that we have figured out how to co-exist with the virus — well, some of us, anyway — we can attend an actual theater again!

Among our scant few choices? A film about our very real COVID conundrum: In the Earth. Good thing it’s pretty close to great. Coming from writer/director Ben Wheatley — returning to the folk-horror roots of 2011’s brilliant Kill List, his greatest success in a chameleon of a career — its core message is this: Can’t wait to get back to your old, pre-coronavirus ways? Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.

After a year in lockdown, a remote wilderness lodge reopens to host scientist Martin Lowery (Joel Fry, 10,000 BC) for field research. He’s studying its fertile forest land to develop more efficient crops. As he’s setting up shop, others at the lodge mention a local folktale of a spirit in the woods, talk of mysterious deaths in a nearby village, reports of people lost in the woods, rumors of a professor missing for months — omens Wheatley dispenses to his players as often as hand sanitizer.

When park ranger Alma (Ellora Torchia, Midsommar) guides Martin into the woods to show him the ropes, they encounter Zach (Reece Shearsmith, Wheatley’s High-Rise), a babbling kook who performs rites in an effort to communicate with Mother Nature. An act of violence traps this unlikely triumvirate, forcing Martin and Alma to wonder if even a shred of truth exists in Zach’s freakish theories and activities.

I’m purposely being vague to let In the Earth’s surprises do their dirty work on you, too.

It gives nothing away to say In the Earth finds a “happy” medium between the ghostly phenomenon of The Stone Tape and the ghastly witchery of Suspiria. Just as those works span varying styles of horror, Wheatley begins his high-strung story with the cheeky innocence of urban legends as campfire tales before invading that purely mental space with the unflinching physicality of modern gore. Will audiences cringe more at a rather pointed instance of ocular trauma or an impromptu amputation and subsequent cauterization? It’s a toss-up, but Lucio Fulci would be proud of the former, while the latter makes Kathy Bates’ famous swing of the sledgehammer look like T-ball practice.

As the film expands into ever more disturbing territory, sound becomes a critical factor; as a viewer, you feel the pummeling the characters take. Add strobe lighting, subliminal imagery and X-Acto editing by Wheatley, and you’re no longer watching a movie but experiencing a potentially allergy-triggering exercise in psychedelic immersion. The effect is not unlike my most recent trip to the dentist, when an overdose of nitrous oxide caused my hand to vibrate loudly as it existed in 16 places at once. You had to be there.

Or you can be here, under Wheatley’s divisive spell, which I recommend. Those daring to cross the threshold will emerge 100 minutes later with one of two educated opinions: that In the Earth is either a tool of torture best reserved for war criminals or a generous dose of terrifying, cinematic sensory bliss. Following end titles unlike any I’ve seen before, I left with a headache. I’m serious when I say that’s a plus. —Rod Lott

I’ve had a long, storied history with Spanish director Álex de la Iglesia’s El día de la bestia — better known in America as The Day of the Beast — than I care to admit. Having been a strange lover to his Acción mutante since my bootleg-buying days, sometime in the summer between high school and college, I ordered a VHS copy of Beast from the back of some zine I don’t even remember.

Since that 10th-generation dupe, I’ve had the Trimark VHS I got as a previously viewed tape from one of the many video stores I worked at, as well as a washed-out DVD transfer with no subtitles numerous years ago from eBay, all in a pathetic effort to watch what I now consider to be the finest horror flick ever made.

Thinking that was the best I was going to get in my viewing life, it’s a miracle from God that Severin Films released it in a most proper format: Blu-ray and 4K, in a transfer where I can see what is going on and, through much-needed subtitles, finally understand what is going on instead of just inferring it.

Ordained priest Angel (Álex Angulo) has one night — Christmas Eve — to become as terrible as possible to find where in Madrid the son of Satan will be born. Through a series of horrifically comical events, he befriends metalhead José María (Santiago Segura) and television psychic Cavan (Armando De Razza) to help him on his quest, almost a diabolical variation of the Don Quixote theme.

With an acid-tripping scene that inspired a few personal nightmares, not to mention a brutally evil ending where the devil appears in the flesh, de la Iglesia manages to invoke every single Catholic fear — especially of the Spanish variety — to craft a frighteningly dark view of not only the end of society, but the end of the world and the followers of such wanton destruction.

Of course, through a jaundiced eye of black comedy, The Day of the Beast manages to wring as many soul-wrenching laughs out of the infernal goings-on as it does skull-piercing frights from the satanic horror that, I can thankfully say, once again, make this my favorite horror film of all time, no contest. —Louis Fowler

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