After her nutty Aunt Catherine takes a fatal swig of strychnine, Helen (Lorin Jean Vail, 1986’s The Patriot) learns she’s the sole survivor of the family — and, therefore, sole beneficiary of an estate worth $8 million.

With husband Bob (Scott Thompson Baker, 1987’s Open House), Helen moves to Spain to occupy her aunt’s property in the hoity-toity neighborhood Eight Mannors [sic]. The only thing about the home stranger than the kitchen’s trapdoor is the collection of oddballs among the house staff and neighbors, from a hot maid and a blind man (The Panther Squad’s Jack Taylor) to a priest and a guy whose wardrobe is Nazi garb.

As the requisite strange occurrences begin — e.g., a piano playing on its own, carbon monoxide poisoning, suffocation by shower curtain — Helen and her many fashionable ’80s sweaters believe these hangers-on may be after her inheritance and, by extension, her life. The group murder of a violinist hired for a private performance lets viewers know early that despite Bob’s you’re-just-paranoid protestations, Helen’s suspicions couldn’t be more spot-on.

But the movie sure could be. Never as fun as it inches toward, Rest in Pieces is only as clever as its punny title, which is to say the film from José Ramón Larraz (hiding behind the Joseph Braunstein pseudonym he used for Black Candles and Edge of the Axe) is an undistinguished shocker. His horror films of this era play like comfort food to former lurkers of video-store aisles, yet not every Larraz sticks to the ribs.

Sure enough, this one passes right through, with the big takeaway being its casting coup of honest-to-God Academy Award winner Dorothy Malone as Aunt Catherine — her final role if not for the résumé-saver Basic Instinct. Heroine Vail, however, is in no danger of getting near an Oscar, for several reasons — stopping acting in 1988 being the least of them. —Rod Lott

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There was a time in Hong Kong cinema when Category III flicks about insanely graphic serial killers were all the rage, with The Untold Story one of the best remembered and most award-winning, which is completely surprising to me because — and let’s be honest — it’s kind of terrible.

Directed by Herman Yau with all the skill and dexterity of a low-budget TV-movie journeyman, Story stars a skin-crawling Anthony Wong as the untold storyteller, a glasses-wearing creeper with a boiling-over penchant for ultraviolent outbursts, one of which luckily takes him to exotic vacation destination Macau.

But, as you can guess, that’s really only half of the untold story.

Once there, he opens a restaurant that specializes in the best steamed pork buns in town, absolutely filled with the perfectly cooked meat of the previous night’s kill. City on Fire’s Danny Lee, who seems to always have a hooker on each arm, leads an investigative squad of buffoonish cops only interested in ogling Lee’s women while simultaneously eating free pork buns and harassing the only woman on their team, mostly for not having heaving breasts.

After years of destructive desensitization, the grue and gore aren’t really all that shocking, with the exception of the brutal scene where Wong uses a handful of chopsticks in a way they were hopefully never intended for. While the last half of the movie mostly features Wong constantly beaten while in police custody, in scenes that might give a few fascist viewers untold boners, I’m really not sure what was the point.

With a little urine drinking — according to Wong, it helps heal your busted-out, broken-down innards — the film’s abrupt ending, complete with a Dragnet-styled voiceover, only adds to the back-alley greasiness of the cleaver-heavy proceedings, a dirty job that won Wong the Best Actor trophy at the Hong Kong Film Awards. —Louis Fowler

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Although the remote Mamiya mansion has been abandoned and off limits for 30 years, a Tokyo TV crew talks its way into gaining access for a documentary. The crew members insist the spacious, foreboding structure contains a lost mural by its former resident, the famed painter Mamiya Ichiro. Proving themselves correct, they immediately begin restoring the dusty wall of art to its former greatness, and in so doing, awaken dark spirits who never left the grounds — you know the kind: flowing dark hair and all.

With such concessions made for its homeland audience, writer/director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Sweet Home is a Japanese take on the American haunted house film. From Robert Wise’s suggestive shadows to Steven Spielberg’s Tobe Hooper’s more malevolent forces, Kurosawa (Creepy) builds upon trope after trope to provide shock after shock.

As the title suggests, Kurosawa employs the horror genre to examine society’s modern fractured family — in particular, the role of the mother as caregiver. Among the TV team, the producer (Shingo Yamashiro, Karate Inferno) is a single father who’s brought along his precocious daughter (pop singer Nokko, in her only feature credit), who’s pushing him to admit his attraction to a fellow crew member (Nobuko Miyamoto, Tampopo). On the Mamiya side, we learn the painter’s wife accidentally killed their toddler, who happened to be playing in the furnace when Mommy fired it up; hence, the hauntings.

But no worry necessary: Sweet Home is not some term paper on matriarchal dichotomy that’s been committed to celluloid; it’s a horror movie first, foremost and even second and third. Someone is bisected parallel to the waistline, while someone else takes an ax to the head, right between the eyes. And all the grisliness is brought to an in-camera believability with practical makeup effects by the legendary Dick Smith (The Exorcist), whose command of the craft is best exemplified by a character’s dissolution into a literal pile of bones.

Because it has yet to see an official release in the United States, Sweet Home is best known for its eponymous video game, developed in lockstep, which went on to inspire the multimedia juggernaut we know as Resident Evil. Credit where credit is due and all, but Sweet Home deserves global acknowledgment for its own worth, not insignificant. —Rod Lott

When Shock Treatment arrived in the mail, I was admittedly ecstatic. The lesser-known sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show is one of my favorite flicks and truly overdue for a Region A Blu-ray treatment. Sadly, as I looked closer at the cover and read the synopsis, I realized this Shock Treatment is, instead, a French horror film.

Maybe next time.

Still, I’m a fan of French films and this strange movie starring Annie Girardot and Alain Delon (and his penis) is one of the strangest. Workaday woman Helene (Girardot) checks in to a seaside rejuvenation clinic and, for 80 minutes, we’re treated to nude massages, nude beach frolicking and nude injections of a urine-looking serum into the buttocks, mostly administered by easygoing Dr. Devilers (Delon).

Wait a second: Devilers? Devil? You don’t think …

Probably not — the film’s not that strange. It seems the true horror lies in the final 10 minutes when Helene goes into a locked room she shouldn’t and finds the gory truth of this clinic, with a gooey mess that, in typical (not Jess) Franco-fashion, was all for naught. This finale can be a little bit maddening if you’re not used to it.

Moving along with the languid pace of runaway escargot, Shock Treatment is a slow (oh so slow) burn that will test the patience of most viewers, but with the constant penile dangling, it’s hard to fast-forward through. While the film never really gels, it’s more concerned about telling a morality tale or, more to the point, just immoral tail.

That’s alright with me. —Louis Fowler

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From 1978, the Australian horror-thriller Patrick is recognized as a high point of Ozploitation. Its unofficial, unauthorized, unbelievable sequel, 1980’s Patrick Still Lives, is not. For one thing, it’s made by the Italians. For another, it’s a festival of sleaze — the kind of movie where one character screams to another, “Get away from me before I catch syphilis from you!”

So, yeah, you might just love it.

In the quick-as-an-orgasm prologue, a young man named Patrick (Gianni Dei, reuniting with his Giallo in Venice director, Mario Landi) tends to his stalled automobile when he’s hit in the face by a bottle thrown from a passing car. Cut to: Patrick’s in a coma and under the care of his father, Dr. Herschel (Sacha Pitoeff, Dario Argento’s Inferno), whose unibrow makes him look like the progeny of Buster Poindexter and a Monchhichi.

Dr. Herschel lives in and runs the Herschel Wellness Resort, an inexplicable combination of medical clinic and vacation hot spot, where the unblinking, nostrils-flaring Patrick lies motionless in a private wing. Five people arrive at the doc’s invitation for a leisurely weekend, including an alcoholic member of Parliament (Franco Silva, Umberto Lenzi’s Spasmo) who’s more partial to a bottle of J&B, the workingman’s friend, than to his walking hourglass of a wife (Carmen Russo, Lady Football), whose off-the-charts sex appeal decreases only slightly due to her smoker’s teeth.

As becomes apparent, Landi and screenwriter Piero Regnoli (Nightmare City) draw very little from the ’78 Patrick beyond “borrowing” its prostrate protagonist — a concept they wedge into the template of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians (but more like half a dozen, given the budget). Before Patrick uses his comatose mind powers to pick off cast members with a boiling swimming pool and rolled-up car window, he uses them to engage in silly parlor tricks like breaking stemware, shaking shrubbery and typing a memo via the hunt-and-peck method.

Had Landi stopped there, we viewers of Patrick Still Lives could say, “Well, that was fun,” and go on with our lives. However, Landi did not stop there. Notoriously, Patrick psychically seduces the doctor’s secretary (Andrea Belfiore, Luigi Cozzi’s Hercules II) into stripping nude, slamming her pubic thatch against his bedpost and masturbating on the couch. Even most notoriously is what Patrick has in store for the character played by Maria Angela Giordan; having her breast bitten off in Burial Ground (shot in the same mansion) is nothing compared to being raped — and then skewered rotisserie-style — by a floating fireplace poker. The effect couldn’t look more fake, yet it shocks nonetheless. —Rod Lott

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