Right away, Revenge in the House of Usher renders itself suspect due to three things:
• referring to its source material, an Edgar Allan Poe short story of about two dozen pages, as a “novel”
• misspelling that legendary author’s name as “Edgard Allan Poë”
• being written and directed by Jess Franco

Book ’em, Dano.

With characters named Harker and Seward — not to mention the film’s theme of blood transfusions — Revenge makes one wonder if Bram Stoker deserved Poe’s credit. Both authors’ bibliographies rest in the public domain, so either fits the typical Franco budget.

Franco fave Howard Vernon (The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein) is Dr. Eric Usher, who invites his favorite med student, the aforementioned Harker (Robert Foster, Franco’s Night of Open Sex), to come hang at his cool castle. Old, crazed and near death — basically, Dennis Hopper in Hoosiers — Usher asks Harker to continue keeping Usher’s reanimated daughter (Françoise Blanchard, The Living Dead Girl) alive with fresh blood transfusions. As Usher confesses to his mentee, he’s killed many women — but, hey, it was “for science,” so all’s good, right?

As Usher spills his secrets, Franco cannily fills the running time and fortifies his bottom line by reusing footage of Vernon as the title character of The Awful Dr. Orlof, the filmmaker’s black-and-white breakthrough from 1962. Thrifty! And those scenes make up the only good parts of Revenge in the House of Usher — which is weird, considering this flick has an assistant with one comically large eye, not to mention Lina Romay Lina Romaying herself all over the place.

It may be impossible to overstate how boring this movie is, with a story that crawls at the pace of a snail — one that’s been showered in salt. Unofficial though it may be, the Orloff franchise has its ups and downs. This one is the below the basement, more Eurosnorer than Euroshocker. —Rod Lott

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Whereas the Hi-8: Horror Independent Eight shot-on-video anthology was a mixed bag, its sequel, Hi-Death, is start-to-finish consistent. Unfortunately, that means it’s awash in tedium. Among its five directors, most of them giants in the SOV world, not even the otherwise reliable Tim Ritter (Killing Spree) is able to satisfy.

Part of the problem is Hi-8’s story count has been reduced from seven to five, yet Hi-Death runs a few minutes longer. This time, the wraparound follows two L.A. tourists (Kristen Adams and Kate Durocher) as they spontaneously embark on a “Terror Tour” of Hollywood. They’re led to the next landmark after watching a video, so naturally, what they see, we see — only without the reward.

In “Death Has a Conscience,” from Sodomaniac’s Anthony Catanese, a junkie (Jensen Jacobs, Miss December) rides out her heroin high at a fleabag motel, and acquires a few, um, very temporary roommates. Amanda Payton’s “Night Drop” shows what happens to a video store’s new employee (Christopher Preyer, Clownado) on his first night closing up shop. True to its retro setting, tried-and-true jump scares are involved.

The aforementioned Ritter’s “Dealers of Death” concerns a serial killer known as the Switchblade Bandit (Todd Martin, Earth Girls Are Sleazy), who gets off collecting other serial killers’ memorabilia. While the Bandit’s dialogue elicits a few laughs, the segment suffers greatly from the same problem as the remaining four: being painfully overlong. No piece has enough story to fill its allotted time — perhaps unavoidable with fewer stories this go-round — so scenes either are drawn out or run in circles.

The final two tales are the worst offenders; incidentally, both are about tortured artists. The whatta-named Fabiana Formica (Cemetery Man) delivers a fine performance as an auditioning actress up against a bullying director (Jay Sosnicki, Dolly Deadly) in “Cold Read,” from Camp Blood series impresario Brad Sykes. Finally, Zombie Bloodbath trilogy creator Todd Sheets turns in “The Muse,” about a crazed painter (Nick Randol, Dreaming Purple Neon) struggling to work with quite a unique patron.

The passion each filmmaker (videographer?) holds for horror shines big and bright — perhaps too much, since the overall emphasis seems to be on effects than effectiveness. On that note of practicality, they succeed in demonstrating remarkable ingenuity under an edict that bans CGI and green screens. I only wish the results were more fun. —Rod Lott

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From a village in Lancashire, the elderly Ballantyne sisters stick to the traditions they know best: tea time, neighborhood gossip, monster hoarding — you know, that sort of thing. When soldiers at a nearby base begin dying “vicious, brutal” deaths, forthright Joyce (Flora Robson, The Shuttered Room) and batty Ellie (Beryl Reid, Psychomania) start to wonder and worry that perhaps their, um, “housemate” is to blame.

After all, as the title has it, they have The Beast in the Cellar.

There’s not much to this Tigon production from James Kelley, writer and director of the pervo thriller What the Peeper Saw. Much of it takes place in the Ballantyne household, which wouldn’t necessarily be a negative if more happened besides talking. Conversations more mundane than macabre fill the film to its brim, even after a fall confines Joyce to bed — and sedatives — for an extended period.

The scenes of slaughter are brief and bloody, yet shot with whiplash-inducing camera movement to retain a semblance of mystery, although viewers can read Cellar’s cards before it dares show them. When it does, the reveal is even more abrupt than it is underwhelming, especially preceded by a good 10 minutes of Ellie’s exposition dump, which not even Reid’s wonderful performance can save. After that kind of buildup, you deserve better. —Rod Lott

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Hard to believe, but until the iPhone opened the floodgates for anyone to make a movie, we had the spread of Amityville Horror sequels pretty well contained. Of those pre-remake efforts, none is widely considered great, but none is worse than The Amityville Curse.

Made in Canada and supposedly based on Hans Holzer’s book of the same name, the fifth series entry has some set of balls in using a house that looks nothing — and I mean nothing — like the iconic, attic-as-eyes, real-life residence of 112 Ocean Avenue. It’s this film’s version of a soap opera’s cast switcheroo, but at least those shows pass it off as the result of plastic surgery. Curse has no excuse.

Married couple Deborah (Dawna Wightman, The Psycho She Met Online) and Marvin (David Stein, Hangfire) buy the abandoned abode as a fixer-upper. Being terrible hosts and even worse friends, they invite a few pals over to stay at the shithole, which has holes in the floor and rust in the pipes. To homeowners on a fixed income, those structural problems are frightening enough — and sadly more frightening than anything else Curse tosses our way: A barking dog! A hairy spider! A wine glass that breaks upon the clink of a toast! Another hairy spider! It’s enough to make Deb and her ESP exclaim, “There’s something evil in this house!”

To be fair, yes, we’re shown supernatural elements as well, but if director Tom Berry (the Shelley Hack vehicle Blind Fear) can’t be bothered to be invested in them, why should we? More attention seems to be paid to the batty, cat-lady psychic with a glass eye (Helen Hughes, The Peanut Butter Solution). Points to Wightman for enacting the hardware-store defense strategy nearly a quarter-century before Denzel Washington made it famous, but too little, too late: The Amityville Curse is one mundane movie. It might work rebooted as a “reality” series for HGTV. —Rod Lott

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After years of viewing constant cinematic monsters, Race with the Devil is the first film in a long time to give me not only chills, but thrills and spills. A classic of ’70s satanic film starring Peter Fonda and Warren Oates as a pair of motorcycle enthusiasts who run afoul of demon cultists on vacation, it awoke those sleeping memories of farm-boy fears growing up in rural Texas.

Sure, nothing like this ever happened to me but, possibly due to numerous episodes of Unsolved Mysteries that said it would, I was always terrified of robed devil worshippers in our old pasture during the dark ages of the satanic panic; Race really does play into those night terrors the only way a flick written by exploitation engineer Lee Frost possibly could.

Taking their (then) state-of-the-art RV off-road for a drunken night with their wives near a familiar Texas river, in the distance a group of Luciferians not only hold a typical nude ritual, but sacrifice a woman to whatever gods they choose to worship. When Fonda and Oates get spotted, they take off in a pulse-pounding race where, it turns out, everyone in Texas is a damn satanist.

From local swimming pools to area bus accidents, the sweet RV gets torn to shreds as devilish evildoers jump from trucks to smash out the windows, douse with gasoline and, saddest of all, to hang whatever random animal is just hanging out. With nowhere to escape to, you can bet this’ll have a completely downbeat Fonda-era conclusion, though it is creepily earned.

Both Fonda and Oates are, of course, always watchable, but it’s the killer script by the aforementioned Frost — of Love Camp 7 and The Thing with Two Heads fame — and his usual collaborator, Wes Bishop, that is a true test of suspenseful fear and unabashed terror that, like an unearthed memory, has unwillingly taken me back to a freaky time when followers of the cloven hoof were around every corner and there was nothing I could do about it. —Louis Fowler

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