Welcome to Pleasant Hill Hospital, a sanitarium. Location: out of the way. Atmosphere: cozy. Visiting hours: NEVER.

In other words, welcome to Asylum of Satan, from writer/director William Girdler, who would make Three on a Meathook that same year before moving on to Abby, Grizzly and an untimely death at age 30. This, his first film, proves he had a lot to learn, like not to open a horror movie with a country theme, especially one belted by your third lead.

Cute Lucina Martin (Carla Borelli, O.C. and Stiggs) wakes up in Pleasant Hill with zero memory. No worries, the Ruth Buzzi-esque nurse tells her, because she’s under the good care of Dr. Specter (Girdler regular Charles Kissinger). Lucina’s fiancé, Chris (one-timer Nick Jolley, the aforementioned shit-kickin’ vocalist), suspects she’s been kidnapped and involves the authorities.

Turns out, Chris’ gut — and he does have one, packed into high-waisted checkered pants — is right. Dr. Specter isn’t exactly on the up-and-up; in fact, as a police lieutenant (Louis Bandy, 1983’s The Act) tells Chris, “He was picked up several times for devil worshipping.” Specter is also known in “the journals” for his vague work in “pain experiments,” which we see play out as he locks “The Cripple” (per the credits, played by Scalpel’s Mimi Honce) in a purposely drafty room full of bugs, and gives “Blind Girl” (Meathook cheesecake Sherry Steiner) a secret swimming partner by dropping a venomous snake into the pool.

As all medical dramas do, the film climaxes with a satanic ritual in the basement, as minions shrouded in folded dinner-napkin robes watch as Specter summons ol’ Scratch … who looks to be sculpted from SpaghettiOs. Shot on the cheap in little more than one location, Asylum of Satan tells a simple story with a Don’t Look in the Basement quality … minus the quality. —Rod Lott

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Frank Langella is a lusty Dracula and he wants to suck your … blood?

While the scenes of hellish lovemaking in this 1979 retread by John Badham, especially when scored with the appropriately lush music of John Williams, are a thing of blood-drenched beauty, it’s too bad the rest of the film is a Gothic snooze that’ll have you poking your heart with stakes just to stay awake.

With all the swagger of a 500-year-old demon in a hot discotheque, the bare-chested Dracula makes his way to merry ole England, exsanguinating a boatful of hardened seamen along the way. Never one to go soft, as soon as he makes it to shore, he begins his reign of erectile terror, preying upon the fair lasses of London, including a romp with Mina Van Helsing (Jan Howard) and Lucy Seward (Kate Nelligan).

However, when the legendary vampire hunter (and aged boner-killer) Professor Van Helsing (Laurence Olivier) discovers what’s going on, he launches an all-out attack on Drac and his ladies of the night, putting an end to the vampire’s libidinous cooze-cruise through Britannia, in a sun-drenched immolation that is the film’s masterful nonmasturbatory moment.

As Dracula, Langella truly is in his swarthy element, portraying the ancient Vlad as a demonic dude that just want his ding-a-ling dunked a few times, which I can understand. Few films have ever truly prodded the erotic beast that is Bram Stoker’s strokable creation, and in Dracula, it’s exploited to its most rigid climax.

But, sadly, every scene that is not focused on Dracula and his conquests are, for the most part, a dreaded bore that make me sensually massage the fast-forward button, that blessed love child of the night who makes viewing tepid movies a true contingency of purely copulative horror. —Louis Fowler

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According to Wikipedia, Niccolò Paganini was a brilliant violinist — a stringed virtuoso who shocked the early 1800s with his nimble wrist and indelible skill. Also, in the case of the film Paganini Horror, he apparently sold his soul to Satan, a deal that results in terrible horror flicks usurping your name a few decades later.

A trio of somewhat hard-rocking chicks are looking for that “hot” sound that will take them to the top of the charts; they believe they’re going to find it by using a lost composition by the very late Paganini, sold to their producer by a badly dubbed Donald Pleasence. They’re wrong, of course.

As Pleasence goes to a tower and throws the money he made off the deal to all of Italy, the gang decides to record in Paganini’s old estate, where a small girl recently threw a radio in the bathtub where her mom was lounging. While I hope she got sent to timeout for that, concurrently a metal-faced killer is stalking the band as they try to record a “fantastic video clip” in the style of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

Gleefully, when the producer (or is he the video’s director?) discovers a room with a comically large hourglass in it, the film goes right into a most bloody scherzo, defying description as the remaining rockers run around the mansion, cashing in a one-way ticket to hell, complete with a wholly nonsensical ending I hoped Pleasence earned an easy-enough paycheck for.

With a couple of decent power ballads, some powerful jump-scares and, of course, the participation of Daria Nicolodi, Paganini Horror is a trashy little film, one that for years I thought starred Klaus Kinski; turns out that’s Kinski Paganini, a film even Werner Herzog thought was “unfilmable,” so I really want to watch it more than this. —Louis Fowler

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For the ideal Thanksgiving-themed horror film, watch Blood Freak. Then, if you have room for seconds, go for Blood Rage. It tops your relatives’ at-the-table political bickering with the lead character dropping this bon mot: “Looks like you’re gonna get a chance to meet the rest of the family. My psychotic brother just escaped. Could you pass the green beans, please?”

That plot-establisher comes from the mouth of Terry (Mark Soper, The Understudy: Graveyard Shift II), who, 10 years prior, hacked a guy to death at a drive-in movie and blamed it on his twin brother, Todd, who was instantly rendered catatonic upon witnessing the murder. Now grown up and living in mental institution, Todd (also Soper, but with messier hair) remembers the details, throws a fistful of pumpkin pie in frustration and flies the coop to make things right.

Todd’s unannounced homecoming coincides with Thanksgiving dinner, where the boys’ mom (Louise Lasser, Frankenhooker) announces her engagement at dinner. It’s enough to make a jealous son lash out — but which one? Knowing a killer is on the loose (if not his true identity) at the apartment complex, what do Terry and his teen pals do? Oh, just hang out, go here and there, play video games, fuck on diving boards — that sort of thing.

Not always the case for slasher movies, Blood Rage makes good on its title, as director John Grissmer graduates from Scalpel to machete, cooking up a cornucopia of dismemberment and decapitation from which his camera never shies. As the crazed sibling puts it, “That isn’t cranberry sauce, Artie. That is not cranberry sauce.”

Meanwhile, Lasser, collecting a day’s pay in Shirley Temple curls, mostly sits on a couch or the kitchen floor. As she utters early in the film, “Well, I say this big bird is ready for carving.” Couldn’t agree more, Louise! Happy Thanksgiving! —Rod Lott

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When I was about 3 or so, my father was a Houston police officer; he would always get off work around 9 p.m., when my mother would have dinner waiting for him at home. Usually he would eat it in front of the television, watching the newest movie currently showing on HBO.

He would often let me stay up and watch whatever was on with him, resulting in me seeing a lot of movies I was probably too young for, one of which was the lycanthropic horror comedy of An American Werewolf in London; it was a very influential film on me then, inspiring and influencing much of my pop-cultural life over the past 40-odd years.

When backpacking friends David and Jack (David Naughton and Griffin Dunne, respectively) are traveling through the English countryside, after a rather uncomfortable drink at a pub called The Slaughtered Lamb, they find themselves ripped and shredded by a hairy beast while walking down the dark and dusky moors.

David wakes up in a hospital, under the care of Alex (Jenny Agutter), a nurse who falls in love with him way too quickly, but it still fueled my own Florence Nightingale fantasies during my own recent hospital stay. He also starts seeing the rotting corpse of Jack, warning him that he will change into a werewolf during the upcoming full moon, something that, sadly, did not happen to me during my own recent hospital stay.

The scene where David does indeed change into the monster is still a thing of brutal wonder, one that when I was a kid made me firmly believe in werewolves and their bloody rampages through Piccadilly Circus. The very pre-CGI effects — courtesy of Rick Baker — still leave me speechless, wondering how they did that and ignoring any effects-based special features that would tell me.

Directed by John Landis at the height of his filmic powers, An American Werewolf in London is a deft mixture of hilarity and horror, made concurrently with Joe Dante’s unrelated The Howling, which is also a must-see; try to avoid, however, the blasphemous 1997 sequel, An American Werewolf in Paris, a flick that even Landis had good sense to put a silver bullet in. —Louis Fowler

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