With his parents divorcing, simpering teen Ben (John-Paul Howard, 14 Cameras) catches the bus to a coastal New England town for the summer to live with Dad (Jameson Jones, Hollywood Homicide) and work at the harbor. There, Ben romances a cute co-worker (Piper Curda, School Spirits), runs afoul of local bullies and starts suspecting the MILF next door (Zarah Mahler, Nightmare Cinema) of being a witch.

He’s not wrong. We know this upon seeing, well, something crawl out of a deer carcass in the dead of night. The Wretched’s witch looks nothing like Broom Hilda or Margaret Hamilton; she (it?) is a feral force of evil who hops among human hosts in order to snatch babies on which to snack. With binoculars and all-around nosiness, believer Ben becomes a Hardy Boy in a hoodie to save the town. It’s Disturbia cast with a spell of toil and trouble.

Following up the 2011 zombie comedy Deadheads, their directorial debut, Brett and Drew Pierce do a few things right in The Wretched: They accurately capture that summer-at-the-lake feeling, pump in the proper amount of the supernatural, and focus on making the witch look as creepy — and real — as possible. Although I didn’t find their sophomore effort scary, its production values are impressively high.

Working against this, however, are the two young leads, with Howard and Curda turning in performances that would be at home in the cheap, tossed-off movies made for the now-defunct Chiller channel. Howard, in particular, is particularly unlikable; while his character is realistically flawed, he way overplays the cool and, as a result, comes off as just a jerk — not exactly the surrogate audiences seek when hoping to fully engage with the material. —Rod Lott

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Rituals is Canada’s answer to Deliverance. Therefore, this is the weekend they didn’t play ice hockey.

Or go curling. Up to you.

Maple-flavored stereotypes aside, Peter Carter’s film follows five surgeons in matching terrycloth fishing hats. They helicopter in to a forest for a weekend of roughing it — and certainly get just that. When their boots disappear overnight, followed by a beehive ambush and more playing-for-keeps activity, it becomes clear someone — or something — is trying to kill them … and does.

The great Hal Holbrook (Creepshow) serves as the Voice of Reason among the tortured crew, right from his opening-scene inquiry of “Is it ethical?” Despite him asking that during his unlikable colleagues’ breakfast discussion of penile-enhancement surgery — complete with X-rays! — those three words ring throughout as Rituals’ theme, especially when the doctors’ common, credulity-stretching thread comes to light. Let’s just say their antagonist has unrivaled organizational skills (and could forge a successful career as an event planner, if only he didn’t look like Chris Elliott in Scary Movie 2).

Rituals has its freeze-dried, alcohol-doused, head-on-a-stick moments. What it doesn’t have is the power to keep one engrossed for the whole of the trip. Repetition becomes the doctors’ sixth unofficial member of the group — or fifth or fourth and so on, if you want to adjust the number in real time. One physician’s tearful, on-the-fly eulogizing of another is odd, to say the least: “He was a boob … such a gentle boob.” Rituals isn’t always gentle, especially in its cabin-set climax, but lacks the sphincter-clutching suspense of other, better wilderness horrors. —Rod Lott

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In the Canadian horror film The Pit, Jamie is one of those rare kids who does know his ass from a hole in the ground. That’s because the insufferable 12-year-old boy (Sammy Snyders, The Last Chase) has discovered the titular site in the woods, in which carnivorous troglodytes dwell and hangrily await food to fall in for the gnawing.

Having zero friends and being sexually frustrated makes for a lethal combo, as Jamie uses the wide cavity to his own advantage, leveraging it for acts of cruel revenge. Whether someone has picked on him, insulted him or romanced his live-in babysitter/therapist (Jeannie Elias, Deadline), it’s into the hole! His means of luring each victim to their gravity-assisted doom — and their inability to see the double-wide abyss directly in front of their feet — stretch the concept of suspension of disbelief to its breaking point, which makes the movie even more fun. (Also pushing us in that direction? The oompah-style score comedically punctuating such sacrifices as Jamie dumping a blind old lady out of her wheelchair.)

The lone fiction feature for director Lew Lehman (who wrote John Huston’s feeble Phobia the year before) and screenwriter Ian A. Stuart, The Pit is filled with situations that challenge common sense and ideas that come half-baked — for example, did I mention Jamie’s teddy bear is apparently sentient? Therefore, this one’s best viewed as a wildly whacked-out-of-its-gourd metaphor for puberty. A major player in Bad Seed cinema, Jamie is not only overly petulant and thoroughly unpleasant to be around, but sends pornographic images to the hot librarian (one-and-doner Laura Hollingsworth) and later tricks her into posing for some of his own via Polaroid. The kid is irredeemably abhorrent.

If you don’t want to cheer at the Canuxploitation chestnut’s final shot, we shouldn’t be pals anyway. —Rod Lott

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Despite a title that sounds like a primo Hawkwind cut from Warrior on the Edge of Time, this 1983 flick is actually a Spanish/Japanese co-production starring none other than Paul Naschy (aka Jacinto Molina) as ageless lycanthrope Waldemar Daninsky, this time on the prowl in feudal Kyoto.

Cursed by a sorceress in his native Europe to always carry the chubby mark of a throat-biting werewolf, pudgy monster-man Daninsky travels to Japan at the behest of his local alchemist to find a cure from Kian (Shigeru Amachi), a wise man with a penchant for fighting monsters and solving mysteries.

Together, Daninsky and Kian take on assassins, ninjas, samurais and, of course, a satin shirt-clad wolfman. And while all that is entertaining enough, the set piece has to be the werewolf-vs.-tiger scenario that happens about midway through, an epic fight of bloodied fur that’s on par with the living dead vs. tiger shark from Lucio Fulci’s Zombie.

When he made The Beast and the Magic Sword, Molina was bankrupt and turned to Japanese producers for an influx of cash; they gave him the money and so much more, from the inspiration to bring the lycanthrope movie to Japan to the sheer guts of having said lycanthrope punch a tiger in his man-eating mouth.

Apparently filmed at Toshiro Mifune’s studios, this 10th and, for a while, final of the Daninsky films, it’s also one of the best in the series; while the story is a bit far-fetched, this Were Wolf and Cub tale of high action and even higher production values is an extremely entertaining melding of European trash and Asian class. —Louis Fowler

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The surprisingly Italian flick Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory — originally titled Lycanthropus — is nowhere near as exploitative as the American moniker sounds, but still has some solid scares and solid stares, mostly thanks to ingenue Barbara Lass as Priscilla.

As a handsome new science teacher arrives at a girls’ reform school somewhere in the hills of what I’m guessing is Italy, students are being slaughtered by the apparent wolves that roam the area after dark. As we soon learn, however, it’s a slightly hirsute werewolf that knows a sprightly form of proto-parkour, leaping tree-trunks in the wilderness.

But when Priscilla’s equally comely pal is murdered, she decides to get to the bottom of this mystery with the new teacher; the school’s caretaker, with his gimp arm, is nearly beaten up by drunken townspeople in a tavern for their troubles. Red herrings abound!

Typing all that out, it ultimately saddens me that this entire madcap premise wasn’t the basis for a novelty hit by a Bobby “Boris” Pickett rip-off — possibly Italian as well — that bubbled under the Hot 100 in the early ’60s. I think it would have gone something like this …

Priscilla was walking back to the dorm after class,
When she heard a howl that made her heart beat fast,
She investigated with the new science teacher,
And wondered aloud “Who is this groovy creature?”

It was a werewolf … ah-hooooo!
It was a werewolf … where can he be?
It was a werewolf … ah-hoooo!
It was a werewolf … in a girls’ dormitory!

Or maybe not. —Louis Fowler

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