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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Upon the death of her rich uncle, Elizabeth (Erna Schurer, Strip Nude for Your Killer) travels to his castle for the reading of his will. With her fiancé (Roland Carey, The Diamond Connection) in tow, she learns she is the sole beneficiary of his estate, castle included! It’s such an incredible piece of property, if you can pay no mind to the still-in-use torture dungeon or the insane woman in one of the bedrooms.

In the two-day wait for paperwork processing, some locals tell Liz her uncle was planning to sell the place, which is news to her. Others are pushier, needling her about taking it off her hands. At any rate, the requisite strange things begin to occur, from nocturnal visions and a tree bursting through the bedroom window (13 years before Poltergeist) to, yep, that old chestnut known as first-degree murder.

A good reason exists for Satan’s Doll being obscure: so is its writer and director, Ferruccio Casapinta, whose filmography starts and ends here. Despite its nasty-sounding title (no doubt made nastier if confused with an X-rated film from 1982 with almost the same name), the movie is rather cheerful in its coloring and overall harmless — a minor giallo more Scooby-Doo than Sergio Martino. Instantly forgettable, this Doll contains enough of the “old dark house” trappings to interest viewers, even if the mystery at its core is hardly the stuff of Agatha Christie. —Rod Lott

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I’m always leery of movies that star pro wrestlers, yet I’m not sure why. After all, Kane killed it in See No Evil, John Cena has become a gifted comedian in the likes of Blockers, and Dwayne Johnson is doing just fine, thanks. So let’s blame Hulk Hogan.

Now comes a WWE star I’ve never even heard of, CM Punk (née Phil Brooks), in the indie haunted-house shocker Girl on the Third Floor. He’s pretty good. The film is great.

With his patient wife (Trieste Kelly Dunn of the brilliant Cold Weather) about-to-burst pregnant, Punk/Brooks’ Don is moving his family to a Victorian home in a picturesque suburb. Because the house needs a lot of TLC, he moves in beforehand for a top-to-bottom renovation. After all, marbles drop from the upper stories, one wall sports splotches of mold, and the electrical outlets throughout look vaginal to the point of Giger-ian, complete with oozing fluid not unlike semen. The place even comes with a built-in seductress (sexy Sarah Brooks, 100 Days to Live) who may be a ghost.

Needless to say, Something’s Not Right. And it’s a doozy.

While a seasoned producer of genre movies like Big Ass Spider! and XX, Travis Stevens has never made a feature before. He’s obviously been observing the craft, however, because in his first at-bat, he reveals a keen eye for composition and a mastery of mood. Part of the latter is knowing when to employ the score (composed in part by legendary music producer Steve Albini), which manages to support the story, rather than telegraph it.

He also gets a semisolid performance out of Brooks (also in the Rabid remake), who seems to know his limitations and tries to stay within the lines. Aside from the farm of tattoos, Brooks looks like Jon Hamm after a 30-day juice cleanse. His character makes an unforgivable choice in Act 1 that feels like a misstep at first, until we gradually learn the man is deeply flawed. As the practical effects keep piling on, the viewer wonders if Don might have earned all the hell coming his way, which makes for a more interesting picture. By the end, Girl on the Third Floor is the film that the Stevens-produced We Are Still Here so badly wanted to be. —Rod Lott

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Wanna see an oddball anthology of holiday horror filled with twists and bursting with creativity? Then you better watch out and queue up A Christmas Horror Story instead, because All the Creatures Were Stirring is frustratingly average. Making that all the more disappointing is how roaringly strong the start is. Set in a dreary-looking office at a depressing-looking office Christmas party, the first story offers a Belko Experiment-esque twist on the dreaded game of Dirty Santa, but with booby-trapped presents that play for keeps. Why haven’t any of the Saw sequels thought of this?

Unfortunately, the fire dies down from there, worsening with each passing, welcome-worn segment, from reindeer death games and demonic recruiting to yet another tired take on Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, this one centered around a character so insufferable (played by Jonathan Kite of TV’s 2 Broke Girls) that the bit is off-putting. The movie goes sci-fi in its conclusion with a UFO encounter notable only for featuring the name value of Hustlers’ Constance Wu. Elsewhere, you’ll find more amiable talents strewn about, including Jocelin Donahue (The House of the Devil), Chase Williamson (John Dies at the End), Brea Grant (Beyond the Gates) and Joe Dante regular Archie Hahn (Amazon Women on the Moon).

All five tales come wrapped in the guise of an experimental theater production on Christmas Eve, as witnessed by two people on a date. There’s a couple behind All the Creatures Were Stirring, too: shorts-helming spouses Rebekah and David Ian McKendry, making their full-length feature as writers and directors. You can’t regift what they got you. —Rod Lott

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