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

Get it at Amazon.

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

Get it at Amazon.

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

Get it at Amazon.

What has eight legs and a man shoving a lit Bunsen burner to his neck? The Legend of Spider Forest, far from legendary.

While staying at a pub in a supposedly quaint English village, ascot-rocking painter/photographer Paul (Simon Brent, Love Is a Splendid Illusion) runs across an unusual young woman walking carefree through the woods. Named Anna (Neda Arneric, Shaft in Africa), she says little, screws lots and is often nude — all the better to tease you with, what with her left shoulder’s distinctive spider-shaped birthmark.

Paul excepted, the men who make love to her don’t survive the encounter, thanks to her summoning into action the forest’s breed of spiders, both highly venomous and immune to chemicals. Wouldn’t the arachnids make an effective weapon for a resurgent Nazi party? Director Peter Sykes (Hammer’s To the Devil a Daughter) sure thinks so.

Or so one may assume, since he doesn’t do much with it — and what he does do is muddled to a point of incomprehension. This Eurohorror oddity will tangle viewers in a web not of intrigue, but internment. At least its tarantulas — underused, sadly — are real. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

I had a short-lived friendship with a person who once, while drunk and on a bridge-burning rampage, told me they were a disciple of Lars von Trier and believed in his supposed theories of “absolute depravity.”

I hauled ass out of that person’s life not too soon after.

I feel like I made more than the right choice to vacate after viewing the film The House That Jack Built and, even more so, after the fact that von Trier cast Hollywood meathead Matt Dillon as an unrepentant serial killer. True to form, it’s a 152-minute movie with the doltish Dillon trying his best to act menacing, a seemingly impossible feat that I can’t tell if von Trier is genuinely exploiting or caustically insulting.

Told in six chapters labeled “incidents,” the killer career of Jack is followed, in a typically detached way that will cause the smarter people in the audience to smirk in unison, as women are brutally murdered, including a mother who watches him slaughter her two small children, and a verbally abused girlfriend who get her breasts sliced off and made into a purse in purely pornographic detail.

The film only becomes slightly interesting in the epilogue where Jack finds himself in the afterlife with the poet Virgil (Bruno Ganz), traveling through an eerily low-budget version of the circles of hell, leading to the only truly satisfying moment of the movie: his well-deserved casting off into the unholy flames.

The main problem with The House is that by now, the boundaries that von Trier has supposedly pushed over the past few decades have become more rote and routine than anything else; this serial killer sex fantasy has been done by better directors with a far more meaningful takes on the subject matter rather than the angry middle-schooler scribbling that, per von Trier’s own words, “life is evil and soulless.”

I hate to say it, but, like I outgrew my former friend’s notable antics, I think I might have outgrown von Trier’s insignificant shock value as well. Is that maturity? —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.