Alternately released as The House That Cried Murder and, more notoriously, Last House on Massacre Street, Jean-Marie Pélissié’s The Bride is an unassuming horror thriller worth a trip or two down the aisle.

Head over heels in love, Barbara (soap star Robin Strasser) can’t wait to marry David (Arthur Roberts, Midnight Movie). She’s even designed and built them her dream home, a midcentury modern number that looks like a semester’s worth of geometry homework. So what’s the problem? Well, David works for her doting dad (John Beal, Amityville 3-D), who looks unfavorably on her choice of suitor: “What I’m saying is,” he tells his daughter, “I think he stinks.”

Father indeed knows best, because at their wedding reception — repeat: at their wedding reception — David ducks upstairs for a tryst with another woman, Ellen (Iva Jean Saraceni, Creepshow). Finding them in flagrante delicto, Barbara impulsively wounds David with scissors and flees the scene. Two weeks later, she’s still off who-knows-where, while David is looking to get divorced and already shacking up with Ellen. That’s when the eerie phone calls and eerier acts of aggression begin …

Popular opinion has it that any horror movie with an MPAA rating below the R bares no teeth. While that may be true for today’s offerings more often than not, it’s stunningly narrow-minded for product from the early 1980s and on back. The Bride is the perfect example why. Affixed with a whistle-clean PG, it may be a simple story told in a frugal 76 minutes, but it hits the right buttons as it does so. The script by Pélissié and John Grissmer — who went on to give us the incredible Blood Rage, which features snippets of this film playing at the drive-in — thrives on a macabre sense of humor, while Pélisse — in his one and only directorial chore — proves he can stage suspense effectively; one shot in David’s dream sequence, with Barbara poised like a spider waiting to pounce, stands out as chilling.

Although Saraceni is a bit shrill, the no-name actors do Pélisse proud. As shameful as it is that he never helmed another feature, even more so is that Strasser goes unheralded for a strong, layered performance. —Rod Lott

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Right away, Revenge in the House of Usher renders itself suspect due to three things:
• referring to its source material, an Edgar Allan Poe short story of about two dozen pages, as a “novel”
• misspelling that legendary author’s name as “Edgard Allan Poë”
• being written and directed by Jess Franco

Book ’em, Dano.

With characters named Harker and Seward — not to mention the film’s theme of blood transfusions — Revenge makes one wonder if Bram Stoker deserved Poe’s credit. Both authors’ bibliographies rest in the public domain, so either fits the typical Franco budget.

Franco fave Howard Vernon (The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein) is Dr. Eric Usher, who invites his favorite med student, the aforementioned Harker (Robert Foster, Franco’s Night of Open Sex), to come hang at his cool castle. Old, crazed and near death — basically, Dennis Hopper in Hoosiers — Usher asks Harker to continue keeping Usher’s reanimated daughter (Françoise Blanchard, The Living Dead Girl) alive with fresh blood transfusions. As Usher confesses to his mentee, he’s killed many women — but, hey, it was “for science,” so all’s good, right?

As Usher spills his secrets, Franco cannily fills the running time and fortifies his bottom line by reusing footage of Vernon as the title character of The Awful Dr. Orlof, the filmmaker’s black-and-white breakthrough from 1962. Thrifty! And those scenes make up the only good parts of Revenge in the House of Usher — which is weird, considering this flick has an assistant with one comically large eye, not to mention Lina Romay Lina Romaying herself all over the place.

It may be impossible to overstate how boring this movie is, with a story that crawls at the pace of a snail — one that’s been showered in salt. Unofficial though it may be, the Orloff franchise has its ups and downs. This one is the below the basement, more Eurosnorer than Euroshocker. —Rod Lott

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Whereas the Hi-8: Horror Independent Eight shot-on-video anthology was a mixed bag, its sequel, Hi-Death, is start-to-finish consistent. Unfortunately, that means it’s awash in tedium. Among its five directors, most of them giants in the SOV world, not even the otherwise reliable Tim Ritter (Killing Spree) is able to satisfy.

Part of the problem is Hi-8’s story count has been reduced from seven to five, yet Hi-Death runs a few minutes longer. This time, the wraparound follows two L.A. tourists (Kristen Adams and Kate Durocher) as they spontaneously embark on a “Terror Tour” of Hollywood. They’re led to the next landmark after watching a video, so naturally, what they see, we see — only without the reward.

In “Death Has a Conscience,” from Sodomaniac’s Anthony Catanese, a junkie (Jensen Jacobs, Miss December) rides out her heroin high at a fleabag motel, and acquires a few, um, very temporary roommates. Amanda Payton’s “Night Drop” shows what happens to a video store’s new employee (Christopher Preyer, Clownado) on his first night closing up shop. True to its retro setting, tried-and-true jump scares are involved.

The aforementioned Ritter’s “Dealers of Death” concerns a serial killer known as the Switchblade Bandit (Todd Martin, Earth Girls Are Sleazy), who gets off collecting other serial killers’ memorabilia. While the Bandit’s dialogue elicits a few laughs, the segment suffers greatly from the same problem as the remaining four: being painfully overlong. No piece has enough story to fill its allotted time — perhaps unavoidable with fewer stories this go-round — so scenes either are drawn out or run in circles.

The final two tales are the worst offenders; incidentally, both are about tortured artists. The whatta-named Fabiana Formica (Cemetery Man) delivers a fine performance as an auditioning actress up against a bullying director (Jay Sosnicki, Dolly Deadly) in “Cold Read,” from Camp Blood series impresario Brad Sykes. Finally, Zombie Bloodbath trilogy creator Todd Sheets turns in “The Muse,” about a crazed painter (Nick Randol, Dreaming Purple Neon) struggling to work with quite a unique patron.

The passion each filmmaker (videographer?) holds for horror shines big and bright — perhaps too much, since the overall emphasis seems to be on effects than effectiveness. On that note of practicality, they succeed in demonstrating remarkable ingenuity under an edict that bans CGI and green screens. I only wish the results were more fun. —Rod Lott

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From a village in Lancashire, the elderly Ballantyne sisters stick to the traditions they know best: tea time, neighborhood gossip, monster hoarding — you know, that sort of thing. When soldiers at a nearby base begin dying “vicious, brutal” deaths, forthright Joyce (Flora Robson, The Shuttered Room) and batty Ellie (Beryl Reid, Psychomania) start to wonder and worry that perhaps their, um, “housemate” is to blame.

After all, as the title has it, they have The Beast in the Cellar.

There’s not much to this Tigon production from James Kelley, writer and director of the pervo thriller What the Peeper Saw. Much of it takes place in the Ballantyne household, which wouldn’t necessarily be a negative if more happened besides talking. Conversations more mundane than macabre fill the film to its brim, even after a fall confines Joyce to bed — and sedatives — for an extended period.

The scenes of slaughter are brief and bloody, yet shot with whiplash-inducing camera movement to retain a semblance of mystery, although viewers can read Cellar’s cards before it dares show them. When it does, the reveal is even more abrupt than it is underwhelming, especially preceded by a good 10 minutes of Ellie’s exposition dump, which not even Reid’s wonderful performance can save. After that kind of buildup, you deserve better. —Rod Lott

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Hard to believe, but until the iPhone opened the floodgates for anyone to make a movie, we had the spread of Amityville Horror sequels pretty well contained. Of those pre-remake efforts, none is widely considered great, but none is worse than The Amityville Curse.

Made in Canada and supposedly based on Hans Holzer’s book of the same name, the fifth series entry has some set of balls in using a house that looks nothing — and I mean nothing — like the iconic, attic-as-eyes, real-life residence of 112 Ocean Avenue. It’s this film’s version of a soap opera’s cast switcheroo, but at least those shows pass it off as the result of plastic surgery. Curse has no excuse.

Married couple Deborah (Dawna Wightman, The Psycho She Met Online) and Marvin (David Stein, Hangfire) buy the abandoned abode as a fixer-upper. Being terrible hosts and even worse friends, they invite a few pals over to stay at the shithole, which has holes in the floor and rust in the pipes. To homeowners on a fixed income, those structural problems are frightening enough — and sadly more frightening than anything else Curse tosses our way: A barking dog! A hairy spider! A wine glass that breaks upon the clink of a toast! Another hairy spider! It’s enough to make Deb and her ESP exclaim, “There’s something evil in this house!”

To be fair, yes, we’re shown supernatural elements as well, but if director Tom Berry (the Shelley Hack vehicle Blind Fear) can’t be bothered to be invested in them, why should we? More attention seems to be paid to the batty, cat-lady psychic with a glass eye (Helen Hughes, The Peanut Butter Solution). Points to Wightman for enacting the hardware-store defense strategy nearly a quarter-century before Denzel Washington made it famous, but too little, too late: The Amityville Curse is one mundane movie. It might work rebooted as a “reality” series for HGTV. —Rod Lott

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