Carnal Fear rocks! But apparently not hard enough. The band’s first single, “Spread Eagle,” went “top chart,” but the album failed to go platinum. That puts a lot of pressure on their follow-up record, so the foursome convenes at their manager’s Oklahoma lake house to finish the album, Death Whispers, within a three-day deadline.

In other words, it’s a terrible time for the lead singer, Mitch (Trey Fillmore), to suffer bizarre recurring visions, no matter how many frozen treats, toy monkeys and bare breasts they contain. It’s also a terrible time for a masked serial killer to prey on beautiful women in the area. It’s Branded — the title speaking to the sizzlin’-hot drug spoon pressed against the victims’ left boob. 

The first sign of trouble arrives with drummer Crash (Jamie Sworski), he of the heavy eyeliner, pubic goatee, dog collar, UPC code tattoo and raging heroin problem. He even brings his junkie groupie of choice, Skat Kat (Tulsa-based director Darla Enlow), whose bobbing corpse attracts police suspicion. It’s enough to drive Carnal Fear’s MILFy manager (Dana Pike, The Last Trick or Treater) into a wine-swilling tizzy, what with their upcoming European tour and all.

Branded captures a special time in American culture. Not when men dressed like a nu-metal venereal disease (although there’s that), but when sales of DVDs rivaled that of smack, created a hunger for content that allowed homegrown Hitchcocks like Enlow to crank out their low-budget takes on the slasher. In her case, Branded comes sandwiched between Toe Tags and The Stitcher, and I’m all for her casting herself in each. Here, Enlow’s first line — spoken while rubbing her trashy lingerie-clad hindquarters against Crash’s crotch — is, “Hey, baby, up for a little sport fucking?” (He is, as am I.)

Speaking of speaking, screenwriter Gigi Phillips helps lift Branded above the fray with the gift of lively dialogue. As the Carnal Fear manager, Pike gets to deliver one memorable putdown (“You couldn’t follow the instructions on a cereal box”) after another (“I would’ve aborted you”). And this being shot on video in Oklahoma, every utterance of “told” is pronounced by Pike as “toad.”

Phillips doesn’t leave the boys empty-mouthed, either, especially when demonstrating the friction between band members. Mitch berates Crash for neglecting band duties, saying work is “a stretch in your vocabulary, since you probably never made it quite that far in the alphabet!” A livid Crash responds, “You’re right, muh-muh-Mitch! I only made it to the Ps: ‘party’ and ‘pussy!’ You should be so lucky!”

You know who also should be so lucky? The killer’s other victims, particularly the Carnal Fear fans at the bait shop. One of them (Angie Knowlton) makes the pink bikini sexier than it’s ever been since Heather Thomas, while her friend (Bonnie Stribling) gets a teddy bar duct-taped to her chest, because why the hell not. I wonder if that touch comes straight from the novel.

Yes, Branded is based on a novel — exactly whose, though, is a mystery tougher than crack than the killer’s identity, as the credits don’t credit anyone for it. —Rod Lott

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Basements were built for shelter and storing wine. But I suppose they’re good for caging humans, too, which is how Dr. Blackwood (Bill Greer) makes use of the space in the desert castle serving as his sanitarium. It’s where, amid other misdeeds, his ever-blinking hunchbacked assistant (Pierre Agostino, The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher) whips an underwear-clad cutie until her back resembles a bag of spilled Twizzlers.

With box walls that scream “magnet-school Shakespeare,” the castle doubles as the residence for Dr. Blackwood and his basically R-word sister (Lynne Marta, Blood Beach). Into this intermingling of mental illness and domestic bliss steps Diane, aka the new Mrs. Blackwood (Deedy Peters, channeling the confidence of Martha Raye in her Polident commercials).

Once she starts poking her nose into his bizness, her husband starts gaslighting her so she won’t notice the lady he sticks in a box with a snake. Or the guy he guillotines. Or the eye exam conducted via fireplace poker. And especially not the murders being committed by a cave monster, played by quick shots of red bicycle-handle streamers.

Meanwhile, from certain side angles, Dr. Blackwood’s hairline resembles the shape of a Southwestern or Midwestern state. I’m going with New Mexico.

Absolutely zero possession occurs in Help Me… I’m Possessed!, but I hardly care because then we would be denied that wonderful title. Although directed by Charles Nizet (The Ravager), this bargain-basement potboiler is written by the Blackwoods themselves, Peters and Greer, both way over their heads. At least their script goes out of its way to treat the mentally ill with respect rather than stereotype them … okay, yeah, I’m totally kidding there, as you can see.

A decade after playing this pic’s fire-and-brimstone physician who achieves a sexual thrill for decapitating a guy, Greer went on to produce more than 100 goddamn episodes of TV’s Charles in Charge. Shoulda quit while he was ahead. —Rod Lott

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Maybe it’s a “me thing,” but if I had a comatose child whose life were dependent on electrical machines and other things to work without a hitch, I wouldn’t knowingly move my loved ones into a legendarily haunted house, no matter how many points the realtor sacrificed to lower the principal.

Yet Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character does just that in Amityville: The Awakening. The 10th official entry in the storied (get it?) Amityville Horror franchise, the Franck Khalfoun film cannily exists in the real world. Its characters discuss not only Ronald DeFeo Jr.’s family slaughter of 1974, but George and Kathy Lutz’s (fabricated?) experiences that informed Jay Anson’s 1977 bestseller, which a student recommends, and 1979’s blockbuster movie, which they watch — after briefly considering Amityville II: The Possession and outright deriding the Ryan Reynolds remake, as one should.

That’s a fun conceit in what is a resoundingly dull picture — something to be expected when your lead is the vapid Bella Thorne (Boo! A Madea Halloween), more tabloid personality than actress, as attested by a résumé that extends from the Disney Channel to hardcore pornography. Thorne plays Belle, a single vowel away from her own first name, underlining the low-stretch demands of her role as twin sister to James (Cameron Monaghan, Tron: Ares), the aforementioned vegetative boy who can’t move anything but, we presume, his bowels.

Once 112 Ocean Avenue trots out its usual unlisted amenities — voices from beyond, swarms of CGI flies, dogs driven bonkers, et al. — James’ condition ironically shows signs of inexplicable improvement. Why, it’s almost as if he’s possessed by those vague demonic forces in the cellar’s bricked-up passage to hell.

Amityville: The Awakening is one odd duck feathered with questionable creative choices that suggest a problem-plagued production — not from any Satan basements, but worse: Dimension Pictures’ meddling head honchos Bob and Harvey Weinstein. They copresent with Blumhouse, which aligns with this viewer’s feeling of Awakening having one foot stuck in the teen-horror past as the other struggles to reach as far forward as possible. We know Khalfoun is more than capable of crafting suspense, as his P2 debut and Maniac remake prove, but this tired exercise is merely a jump-scare-a-palooza free of imagination and the ill at ease.

Although toilet goo appears to be absent this go-round, it’s not; the movie itself is a bowl of that. —Rod Lott

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No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers — unless you’re stuck in summer school. Mark Harmon is nowhere in sight. Instead, we get Charlie (one-timer Simon Wallace), who arrives to class like he’s King Shit, although he’s gangly, mainlines Tic-Tacs and wears rollerblades. 

Most repellent, Charlie runs a movie review website. Assumedly this keeps him up late, because he keeps drifting into sleep glorious sleep. (However, his “reviews” appear to be one phrase and a letter grade.) Every time he falls aslumber, he’s in a self-contained dream on campus, thus affording the shaggy Summer School the veneer of a horror anthology. Among its five directors is Mike P. Nelson, who graduated to bigger, better things like the 2021 Wrong Turn reboot.

In these nightmares, Charlie might encounter vampires or spider-masked furries. He could find himself the subject of a satanic sacrifice, complete with gored chicken. His teacher (Jennifer Prettyman, Zombie Dollz) and security officer (Ty Richardson) could be gun-toting Nazis, or he could be pursued by horny hillbillies who think his shirtless self looks “finger-lickin’ good.” 

Regardless, each time he dies, he wakes up in class again — sometimes alone, sometimes among classmates like the bleached-blonde, Jennifer Tilly-ish Lindsey (Amy Cocchiarella, who should be the lead). It’s all a bit much and unable to sustain itself. Paired with somnambulistic pacing and pauses, the murky videography really harms engagement. And with Charlie front and center, Summer School all but challenges us to hang with it. He’s arrogant and looks like he never met a comb. Where’s Freddy Krueger when you need him?

The “shock” ending isn’t one, signaling its own approach with everything but an overweight guy in an orange vest and hard hat. Let’s just say I wonder if Charlie promised his Terry Pratchett paperbacks to anyone. You’re better off auditing actual summer school than viewing this remedial Goosebumps. To quote the movie’s poetically sassy line, “You’re welcome, dillhole.” —Rod Lott

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Any resemblance Brute 1976 bears to Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes is purely, assuredly, unequivocally intentional. A closing-credits dedication to their memory confirms it, as if there were any question. Even horror irregulars will detect the influence in the prologue, well before a character asks, “Remember that movie with the chainsaw that came out a couple years ago?”

Sure do. Brute 1976 takes its van of half a dozen hippie-dippy protagonists to the middle of nowhere in Nevada for a magazine cover shoot. After snaps, they check out a nearby mining town forebodingly named Savage and now abandoned.

Okay, so it’s not completely abandoned. An unofficial family of felony-hungry fuck-ups call Savage home. They include a guy sporting a half-skull and antlers, another donning a mask of tightly wound beef jerky and, most fashionable, a bald man (Jed Rowen, The Ghastly Love of Johnny X) who admired a woman’s breasts so much, he wears her chest like an apron. Thus, when someone asks, “Is that a chainsaw?” the answer is always “yes.” (For the record, the question is posed twice.)

With Brute 1976, director Marcel Walz and writer Joe Knetter do for the grimy slashers of the disco decade what their 2022 collaboration That’s a Wrap did for the glossy slashers of the late ’90s: Embrace with a fervent love, up to and including the point of suffocation. Whether that tickles your sweet spot depends on your tolerance for an often explicit level of camp (a milder sample: “She’s grazin’ for a glazin'”). With the film turning pages of the calendar backward to America’s bicentennial year, Wrap’s ’90s-style sardonicism isn’t merely replaced by post-’Nam pessimism, but buried.

With that, Brute’s strength naturally rests in its depravity, none more memorable or un-unseeable than when a defecating crew member spots two fingers beckoning from a glory hole and can’t think of a reason not to utilize it. What happens next is as if the iconic shower scene from Porky’s accidentally — and graphically — were directed by the Property Brothers.

Taking advantage of the sunny expanse of the Nevada desert, Walz gets to use his outside voice while maximizing minimal resources. Part of that entails bringing along his rep players — reliably, Sarah French and Gigi Gustin — who know exactly how to modulate to his degree of kink-laden kitsch. Brute 1976 represents a step up for him, which bodes well for the sequel, Brute 1986. I’m in. —Rod Lott

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