One otherwise sunny afternoon, Richard (Ocean’s Eight’s Richard Armitage) deserves a World’s Worst Estranged Husband award for telling his wife he wants to finalize their divorce and marry his new girlfriend — a one-two punch of info that drives the spouse to suicide. Six months later, over Christmas vacation, he earns a World’s Worst Dad trophy to add to that hypothetical mantle by forcing his two kids to spend time in their snow-covered mountain cabin with said girlfriend, Grace (Riley Keough, Logan Lucky), and then leaving them with her for a few days.

Not only is Grace a stranger, but they blame her for their mom’s death. Furthermore, they know she’s literally a psychopath, being the daughter of a Christian cult leader (played by her real-life dad, Danny) whose members killed themselves in a mass suicide à la Heaven’s Gate. Only Grace, befitting of her name, survived, yet bears heavy emotional scars, all of which Keough rightly and consistently plays in the key of dour.

What begins to happen in The Lodge once Richard temporarily vacates is best left to audiences to discover on their own. More eerie than scary, the picture marks just the second narrative feature for the Austrian duo of Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, following up the acclaimed twin terrors of Goodnight Mommy. This one is even better; call it Goodnight Stepmommy-to-Be. Just when you think Franz and Fiala are pulling pages from their 2014 film for recycling, the course of events changes wildly, and viewers might not be willing to follow if the actors weren’t so good.

Keough is, in particular, excellent, but let’s not diminish the two other equally tricky roles of Richard’s children, played by Jaeden Martell (Knives Out) and Lia McHugh (Along Came the Devil). They interact like real siblings, with McHugh believably conveying grief for which Martell, in turn, provides the big-brother support she needs. And far from Clueless, Alicia Silverstone is terrific in a brief appearance that neither requires nor allows her to lean on her trademark charm.

As was the case with Goodnight Mommy, one important character goes unbilled: architecture. Franz and Fiala build so many shots starting from that foundation, giving The Lodge a touch of delicate elegance even in its darkest corners. Their compositions are crisp and symmetrical, much like the microscopic snowflake of this arthouse horror’s poster. —Rod Lott

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In an alternate Earth populated by absolute jerks with loutish personalities, a white-masked killer is — and rightfully so — chopping the populace of Paddock County all to gory pieces, using the edge of his ax, of course.

After brutally attacking a woman in the middle of a car wash, two total dicks — computer fuck Gerald and womanizing exterminator Richard — find themselves in the middle of a murder spree of assholes being stalked and slaughtered. Of course, the prick sheriff — convinced these are all suicides — won’t do anything about it as the body count rises.

Meanwhile, Gerald meets a loathsome woman who asks his computer if he’s “gay.”

An unseen sex worker who has apparently pleasured the entire town is killed, a priggish nurse’s head is irrevocably severed and, even worse, the bucolic lady who plays the organ at church finds her dog butchered all to hell. More pre-1990 computer-based intrigue is had, with dot-matrix red herrings printed all along the way. Just give it a few minutes.

When the killer is quickly unmasked with a contemptible list of unseen clues that weren’t discovered until the last 10 minutes, director José Ramón Larraz (The House That Vanished) gives us the ol’ Spanish switcheroo, with the obvious hopes of Edge of the Axe 2: The Wooden Handle of Death to be immediately financed and put into production. It wasn’t.

A gratuitously bloody example of the depths that a somewhat respected horror director of the ’70s would sink to in the ’80s, the only way that I would run out to see Edge of the Axe is if a faceless killer is trying to chop me up, and even then I’d probably just briskly walk to my computer and Google their identity, because apparently it’s just that easy. —Louis Fowler

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Genre enthusiasts will often champion Britain’s Hammer Films as the end-all-be-all of ’60s horror. After viewing Communist Russia’s Viy, however, I think it might be high time we start holding these hammer-and-sickle films up just a little be higher. Don’t tell Joseph McCarthy!

Sometime in the 19th century, a total jerk of a seminary student is attacked by a witch in the countryside; she actually climbs on his shoulders piggyback-style and rides him around the Earth. When they finally land in the soft grass, he gives her a few rights and lefts to the face, killing her instantly; it’s then revealed that she’s actually a beautiful local girl.

In deep borscht now, he’s forced to spend three nights praying with her corpse in a church. The first two nights, though rather spooky with her corpse flying around and such, is mostly all right because he has a protective chalk circle around him, creating a protective barrier. But that third night, the student — drunk out of his gourd, mind you — faces a bizarre cavalcade of diabolical imps, crawling ghouls and a globular blob that needs help from the emaciated zombies to lift his goopy eyelids up.

Viy is a well-done politburo of irreligious terror that, especially when viewed against the anti-Russian propaganda we Americans have been brainwashed with regarding Communism, it is surprisingly ahead of its time, filling the screen with more demonic imagination and unsettling imagery than most of the Western horror flicks that never made it past the Iron Curtain. —Louis Fowler

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Have you ever noticed that many of the children in Italian horror films are just as unappealing as the grotesque monster attacking them?

In his flick The House by the Cemetery, director Lucio Fulci puts yet another thoroughly unlikable brat through the rigor-mortis ringer by having him not only being trapped in a house by a cemetery, but one where the confusing zombie Dr. Freudstein — tell me about your mother, Mr. Fulci — is stalking and slashing its inhabitants with psychotic abandon.

Dr. Freudstein, by the way, is a 150-year-old medical man whose guts are filled with maggots and grue. He was notorious for performing human experiments that are apparently still going on, mostly via blades through the head and jaggedly sliced throats. How exactly that’s helping science is beyond me, but I heard he recently won a large grant.

Fulci favorites Catriona MacColl (The Beyond) and Paolo Malco (The New York Ripper) are Lucy and Norman Boyle, respectively, an upwardly mobile couple who uproots their hectic city life for a Massachusettsian existence in an unnecessarily spooky house by a cemetery. I hope they got a good deal, especially since Norman’s colleague apparently murdered a woman there the week before.

Their unattractive son, Bob (Giovanni Frezza), complete with an unnerving dubbed voice, is haunted by a somewhat helpful German girl who lives in a framed picture of the house by cemetery.

Full of all the realistic blood-spatterings, gut-spillings and throat-rippings we’ve come to know and love from Fulci — as well as another head-scratching ending that puts an uneasy layer of dread over the entire proceedings — House by the Cemetery is one of his career high points, full of stabby endpoints. —Louis Fowler

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In Bill Rebane’s accidentally entertaining The Game, three bored and elderly millionaires named Maude, George and Horace (Carol Perry, Stuart Osborn and Don Arthur, respectively) recruit nine healthy adults to gather at an island hotel to play the fogies’ annual overnight “Game of Fear.” That just means the old folks creep around at all hours in an attempt to scare the contestants into leaving, with the last man (or woman) standing the next day to be awarded $1 million, essentially making this Rebane’s Lake Resort on Haunted Hill.

After sharing the rules, either George or Horace — it doesn’t matter whom — tells his assembled players, “We’re quite proud of the creativity that went into this.” What else to call flashing lights, dry-ice fog, “bwa-ha-ha” sound effects, dummies hanging on rope, a locked sauna, a fake shark fin in the swimming pool, real tarantulas in the soup bowl, a jail cell filled with rats, a grounds-roaming hunchback and — yikes! — nonflushing toilets? There’s also a round of Russian roulette, but the scariest element of all actually arrives pregame: a gratuitous disco sequence in which the spinster Maude wipes her hand up the butt of the skeeziest contestant (Jim Iaquinta from Rebane’s Rana: The Legend of Shadow Lake).

However, the best scene in The Game (findable here and there as The Cold) occurs when a young lady in silky undergarments is spread out on the bed as Rebane’s immortal The Giant Spider Invasion plays on TV. Her slumber is interrupted as a worm-like hand puppet bursts through the sheets, then vomits. I can’t tell you which character it is, because they are nigh indistinguishable, save for two: Pamela Rohleder’s Southern belle, whose voluminous bra size surpasses her IQ, and the aforementioned Iaquinta’s human form of gonorrhea, ready to take advantage.

While the script by William Arthur and Larry Dreyfus (who later co-wrote the director’s 1988 talking-truck movie, Twister’s Revenge!) is born from a legitimately good idea, Rebane artlessly bungles it. Foremost among his errors is scoring the horror film with ragtime ditties as the merry, maniacal and masked millionaires dance down the hallways toward their latest scheme. At one moment late in The Game, Maude, George and Horace sing — and then debate — that folk nugget “Jimmy Crack Corn.” And I don’t care. —Rod Lott

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