Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made is a documentary about — what else? — Antrum, an European horror movie from the 1970s reportedly so cursed and evil, it quite literally claims viewers’ lives. As a result, the movie never made it past festival screenings and into general release before being pulled and lost … until now.

Of course, it doesn’t truly exist, because Antrum: TDFEM (as we’ll abbreviate it) is a faux documentary. The sequences setting up its premise of legitimately malevolent celluloid achieve that rare mix of being credible and exciting, working just as these things should. Co-directors David Amito and Michael Laicini then succumb to temptation and show us the movie in its entirety.

Grainy, scratched, softly focused and entirely Caucasian, it certainly looks the part. In this fake film within the fake doc, towheaded teen Oralee (Nicole Tompkins, from the fake Amityville Horror sequel The Amityville Terror) takes her mop-headed little brother (Rowan Smyth, from a real 2015 movie titled Fake) deep into the woods on a special mission: to dig a hole to hell in order to save the soul of their newly dead pup, because their terrible mother told them most assuredly, all dogs do not go to heaven. They push their shovels into the dirt where Satan himself was rumored to land after being kicked out of those Judeo-Christian clouds. And as the adage on good intentions goes …

The problem with showing Antrum within Antrum: TDFEM? Amito and Laicini’s preface so expertly builds the sordid history of the cursed film, anything that follows is bound to disappoint your mind’s expectations — and the title’s use of a superlative sure doesn’t help their cause, either. It implies what you’re about to see is more disturbing than The Exorcist, is scarier than The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or out-spooks [insert legendary horror film of your choosing here]. On that ladder of fear, Antrum stands one rung above ground level. In fact, I was so bored by its inertness that I fell asleep, even though I had just finished two cups of coffee. Starting over proved no better.

Although Antrum doesn’t satisfy as a movie, I can recommend it as a puzzle. Like Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, it is full of subliminal messages and imagery, and Easter eggs galore. Those who enjoy scouring frames to unearth such things should have a field day — maybe even two — with this one. —Rod Lott

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Years in the making, Hollywood Horror House (aka Savage Intruder) represents the singular vision of Donald Wolfe — its writer, director and producer — in his one and only feature. That he never made another is a damn shame, but perhaps it’s not for a lack of trying. This one, after all, was funded by his Movieland Tours business, a virtual ad for which bookends the film, as a bus pulls up long enough for the driver (The Three Stooges’ Joe Besser) to point out the old mansion up the hill and in disrepair.

There lives faded matinee idol Katharine Packard (the 1932 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’s Miriam Hopkins, in her final role), her days now drowned in vodka, fairy-godmother gowns and clouded memories of being somebody. Off the tour bus hops homeless hippie Vic Valance (John David Garfield, White Line Fever) and gets a job as Katharine’s live-in caretaker. She’s thrilled to have such a handsome young man around; he’s thrilled to have lucked into a meal ticket, even if that means becoming her sexual plaything. It does.

Katharine is completely oblivious to Vic’s true self: a Satan-worshipping, smack-shooting serial killer who favors the electric carving knife. A former foster child, Vic projects his considerable mommy issues onto Katharine the more he undergoes drug-induced freakouts-cum-flashbacks, rendered onscreen in rather intoxicating kaleidoscopic visuals using every color of the Crayola box — the 64-count with built-in sharpener, of course. These effects are quite good, as are the practical effects depicting viscous torrents of blood jutting from lopped appendages.

A lot goes on under the roof of Hollywood Horror House, a real generation gap of a film. It’s a study in contrasts, particularly of artifice and honesty, starting with a shot of the glamorous landmark Hollywood sign, revealed to be heavily decayed as the camera switches to a close-up. No instance is accidental; hitting most wickedly is a family enjoying a Christmas parade while an L.A. business behind them advertises in bright orange-red letters, “TOTAL NUDITY.”

On that note, Hopkins briefly bares her sexagenarian breasts in one scene, part of her total commitment to a bravura performance, because if the one-time Academy Award nominee held any reservations about appearing in a B picture late in her career (Russ Meyer’s Fanny Hill being another), she doesn’t show it. In fact, given the awards success of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Hopkins thought she had a solid shot at an Oscar nod.

Wolfe’s film is hagsploitation without the marquee name value. It’s also a nice surprise. The last half grows incrementally more sluggish as the cast thins … until Vic goes totally bonkers, and the movie willfully, wonderfully follows. —Rod Lott

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Back in my zine days, sometime in the ’90s, I traded ad space for a handful of VHS dubs, bootlegs of flicks not available in America legitimately. One of these tapes was the Mexican movie Satanico Pandemonium, a nunsploitation film with a moral message: to not make a deal with Lucifer.

It’s worked so far.

Comely Sister Maria (the oft-nude Cecilia Pezet) is picking wildflowers one afternoon, as nuns did in the days of the Inquisition, when she meets Lucifer himself (the oft-sleazy Enrique Rocha). After tempting her with a very red apple, he promises to make her Mother Superior if she gives in to his unholy caterwauling.

Of course, she does, seducing the town’s young goat herder, forcing a nun to hang herself, and strangling the O.G. Mother Superior after unleashing a torrent of blasphemies. As a celebration, the remainder of the nunnery strips down and dances around in a Satanic bacchanalia that would make a medieval woodcut artist justifiably proud.

With not one, not two, but three shocking endings, Satanico Pandemonium — subtitled La Sexorcista for reasons unknown — has gained notoriety in the past 20 years as being the inspiration for Salma Hayek’s vampire queen in From Dusk Till Dawn. But, beyond that name check, the film stands on its own cloven hooves just fine, a bloody gem from comedian Tin-Tan’s director of choice, Gilberto Martínez Solares. —Louis Fowler

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Behind the camera of Dance Macabre stands a trifecta of 20th-century cinematic cheese in director Greydon Clark and producers Menahem Golan and Harry Alan Towers, so it’s a shame this Russia-lensed terror tale is more Limburger than Parmesan.

In what originally was intended as a sequel to his 1989 turn as The Phantom of the Opera, Robert Englund stars as Anthony Wager, famed choreographer of the fabled Madame Gordenko’s ballet academy. For the school’s inaugural class of students from outside the Iron Curtain, rebellious American teen Jessica (Michelle Zeitlin) is enrolled, to whom Anthony takes a great liking because she resembles his late, beloved Svetlana. As for Madame Gordenko, well, she’s bound to a wheelchair and (apparently) sunglasses, and speaks using a throat harmonica.

To the surprise of no one, Anthony’s rising interest in Jessica is inversely proportional to the school’s student population — why, it’s almost as if someone is trying to eliminate the competition so she can cop the top spot by default! Also to the surprise of no one, those kills come rather rote and unimaginative — something one can’t say about the dialogue, which is so bewildering it sounds like Clark had his script translated into Russian, then translated back into English and shot that version; to wit, “Do you want to get wet with me? Do you like bubbles?”

Do you like Dario Argento’s Suspiria? Because in setting and premise, but nothing else, Dance Macabre is indebted to that horror classic — and I mean a lot, as in the-mob-will-come-to-break-your-legs a lot. In something of a cosmic interest payment, Clark presages an element of Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake by — spoiler alert, although it should be evident from the trailer — having Englund bend gender to also play Gordenko. While the makeup is unconvincing, it adds a touch of the perverse to a dull film lacking originality and energy. —Rod Lott

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A TV mainstay of the 1970s, Fantasy Island ran for seven seasons successfully by adhering to a four-step formula, sprinkled liberally with Ricardo Montalban as suave resort host Mr. Roarke:
1. Guests fly to the titular isle.
2. Guests experience their fantasy.
3. Guests learn a lesson.
4. Guests depart the island.

Jeff Wadlow’s film version of Fantasy Island does the same, yet can’t succesfully make it through less than two hours. The concept’s second step is so malleable and ripe with possibilities that it would be difficult to botch, yet the Blumhouse production does just that. It isn’t the incompetent train wreck its savage reviews may suggest; it’s just boring, which is arguably worse.

In for Montalban is End of Watch’s Michael Peña as Roarke. Among his weekend guests are a sandblasted Lucy Hale (reteaming with Wadlow from Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare), out for revenge; Priest’s Maggie Q, out for love; Swallow’s Austin Stowell, out for closure; and brothers Ryan Hansen (Central Intelligence) and Jimmy O. Yang (Patriots Day), out to get laid. Other than keep these subplots on separate tracks as the TV show, anthology-style, Wadlow attempts to unify them into one big plot weighed down with rules and mythology no one wants or needs explained.

The problem in doing so is that each begins with distinct elements, from torture porn to raunchy comedy to family drama, then all shoved under the veneer of the supernatural. And since no subplot works on its own, they underwhelm even more in tandem. As a mor(t)ality tale, Fantasy Island throws viewers a lot of things that sound inviting — duplicitous duplicates, sea snakes, Charlotte McKinney’s bouncing breasts — but add nothing to its spooky stew of emptiness. I wish I had seen it in theaters, if only to witness audience members’ reaction to the last shot’s “reveal”; I suspect they groaned, and they had every right. —Rod Lott

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