Nostalgia-amped superfans of Sid and Marty Krofft’s The Banana Splits Adventure Hour from the late 1960s and early ’70s — back when the phrase “Saturday morning” meant something — may be horrified to see what awaits under the innocuous title of The Banana Splits Movie: a honest-to-God slasher movie (and to complain about that is no better than the fanboys whining about girls being Ghostbusters). But in this ready-to-market age of IP revivals, reboots and reheats, it’s nice to see one that doesn’t just thumb its nose at the source material, but urinates on it, too.

In the direct-to-disc flick, the Krofft show exists (albeit under the name of Taft) in the real world of present. Speaking of present, it’s the birthday of young Harley (newcomer Finlay Wojtak-Hissong), a friendless boy who likes to wear butterfly wings while dancing along with his favorite show on TV, much to the dismay of his macho-asshole father (Steve Lund, TV’s Bitten). However, Mom (Dani Kind, TV’s Wynonna Earp) is so supportive that she’s scored the fam tickets to a live taping.

No one in the audience knows the episode being taped will be the last, as The Banana Splits has been axed — fresh news taken not so well by the animatronic foursome, thanks to a pre-curtain programming upgrade. Behind the scenes and at the post-show meet-and-greet, the Splits (Fleegle, Bingo, Drooper and Snorkel) take the frustration of unemployment out on everyone who deserves it, as dictated by slasher-movie rules, which director Danishka Esterhazy (Level 16) clearly delights in depicting — after all, it’s not every day you get to shoot a giant robot lion and dog respectively flambé a pushy parent’s face or saw an Instagram “influencer” in half.

But maybe it should be. Whatever possessed Warner Bros. to turn a beloved, kiddie-courting property into R-rated Grand Guignol … well, I’m for it. I’m guessing the runaway popularity of the Five Nights at Freddy’s video-game franchise among grade schoolers — now in high school with more rebellious taste — proved an unofficial factor. Yet from the start of the Krofft empire, the line between their creations and childrens’ therapy appointments has been drawn with the sharpest of washable markers, so it takes only one turn of the screw to reimagine the cute and cuddly as vile and violent. Essentially a two-location picture, The Banana Splits Movie looks flat and cheap, but self-parodic subversiveness and perversity work in its favor. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Ladies of Virginia Beach are all atwitter over an unnamed serial rapist/killer terrorizing the community. (Let’s call him Night Killer, since the movie is named just that.) Luckily, he’s easy to spot: He’s the guy in the Toxic Avenger-esque rubber mask with matching rubber hand spouting spiky yellow fingernails long enough to vie for a Guinness World Record. Only if he stood under a neon arrow flashing “GET MURDERED HERE” could he be more identifiable.

His signature move? Punching clean through women’s torsos. Melanie Beck (Tara Buckman, Silent Night, Deadly Night) somehow makes it through a terrifying home-invasion encounter with him, emerging with scraps, bruises and amnesia, but nary an extra hole. After being discharged from the hospital, life for Melanie continues to be a living nightmare, thanks to Night Killer still at large, as well as being stalked — and then abducted and sexually assaulted — by a creepy guy named Axel (Peter Hooten, who donned the cape as 1978’s Dr. Strange).

As a director, Claudio Fragasso (aka Clyde Anderson) is remarkably consistent. However, as other Fragasso films like Beyond Darkness, Monster Dog, Troll 2, et al. raise their right hands and testify, that consistency is a remarkable disdain for reality and rationale — and Night Killer might be his most imbecilic. Nothing happens as it should or would, even when allowing for a moviegoers’ suspension of disbelief. For example — and this is minor, mind you — Melanie reacts to a threatening phone call by looking in the mirror and yanking out her breasts. In fact, it’s just the first of several instances that call for Buckman to bare at least one of them, which accounts for her wardrobe choice of saggy sweaters for easy access; exposure happens so often — perhaps only a single instance merited — that I felt embarrassed for her.

Elsewhere, Melanie lays out a picnic of pills on the shore. In a public bathroom, Axel is forced at gunpoint to strip to the blue banana hammock that passes for his underwear. Seemingly from another movie emerges Blind Vision’s Lee Lively as an apparent stand-in for Donald Pleasence’s signature Halloween role of Dr. Loomis. I’m more than happy to discuss the bonkers twist, but don’t get me started on the choreographer. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Love, like or loathe 2017’s It, at least the Stephen King adaptation felt different than the 1990 TV miniseries. The same cannot be said for the Pet Sematary remake, so close to being a beat-for-beat Xerox of the 1989 original that audiences are left wanting a good shake of the toner cartridge. Too bad, because as fondly remembered as that King-penned ’89 film is, room for improvement exists; one flip of the gender doesn’t count.

Casting, however, is a coup. Jason Clarke (Winchester) and Amy Seimetz (Alien: Covenant) make for a personable, believable couple as Dr. Louis and Rachel Creed. Soon after moving to rural Maine with their two kids and a cat named Church, they learn their wooded land leads to a cemetery for childrens’ pets, many of whom become residents after being pancaked on the highway. Just past its gravestones — over that unscalable wall of bramble — lies ancient burial ground imbued with supernatural powers of rejuvenation. Those powers are flawed, which becomes apparent when Louis — presumably inattentive the day in school they read “The Monkey’s Paw” — plants the freshly departed Church there … and Church returns to life as an insufferable, feral asshole in matted fur. When tragedy strikes further, lessons are not learned.

John Lithgow (Obsession) would seem born to inherit and inhabit the role of kindly neighbor Jud Crandall, the kindly neighbor who warns Louis about all of the above, yet aides and abets anyway. Although one of our finest and most versatile actors, Lithgow is not nearly as effective as Fred Gwynne was three decades prior. Perhaps the comparison is unfair, but Lithgow apes Gwynne’s distinctive drawl; before delivering the iconic line of “Sometimes, dead is better,” he dramatically pauses as co-directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer (Holidays) push their camera in, as if signaling to a nostalgic audience, “Get those clappin’ paws ready!”

For all the craft and care Team Kölsch/Widmyer has put into giving the new Pet Sematary a shiny coat, it should be more engaging — even mildly frightening (especially since co-scripter Matt Greenberg wrote one of the scariest King adaptations in 1408). The first film’s surefire scare, Rachel’s physically twisted sister, suffers here from sheer overuse and needless extension. This isn’t a bad movie — just unnecessary. Sometimes, less is better. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

A cabbie walks into a police station, and what happens next is not a joke. The tomboyish driver is Luz (featuring-debuting Luana Velis), and she has flung herself out of her car in the dead of night because she is being pursued by a demon. It happens.

How do authorities handle such a situation? In the case of Luz, the first feature from writer/director Tilman Singer, hypnosis. Under the subconscious-tapping care of Dr. Rossini (Jan Bluthardt, also feature-debuting, in a go-for-broke performance that elicits chills and chuckles), Luz recreates the events that brought her to the station. They are not without merit.

Luz is being sold as a horror movie in the mold of Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci and David Cronenberg. While their influence on Singer can be glimpsed, the pitch may be doing a disservice to the German film in setting audience expectations it cannot possibly meet. Those primed for a possession thriller filtered through those masters’ lenses will be ill-prepped for a near-somniferous pace that makes the slow-burn style of today’s reigning arthouse-horror hits (e.g., Hereditary, It Follows, The Witch) look positively hasty. On top of that, Singer’s cold visuals, sacrilegious agenda, timeline-tinkering and refusal to fill in all the blanks he’s drawn have the potential to frustrate viewers even further.

However, those viewers are not the kind Singer seeks, as his quasi-experimental, oft-transgressive film capitulates to no one. In scenes drawn out longer than they should play — and even in shots that run for several minutes at a time, resisting any urge to cut away — the nonetheless 80-minute Luz initially appears to bear a thick coat of neophyte pretension. Although hardly ostentation-free, its method comes to reveal a WTF-inducing madness for those still around. Recalibrate expectations and you, too, can be among them. —Rod Lott

I’ve seen Citizen Kane once. But Lucio Fulci’s The New York Ripper — as well as many other of Fulci’s flicks — I’ve viewed on VHS, DVD and now Blu-ray, more times than I can even count, many from a very young age that my parents should probably be ashamed of.

The New York Ripper, however, as bloody and gory as you’d imagine, is also Fulci at his most misogynistically goofy, throwing in so many offensive tropes against women that you have to wonder who was the person who hurt him so bad, filling his Italian soul with such anger. I have my theories, and Fulci does a great job of stabbing them all to hell, right in the guts and other assorted parts.

In a hysterical preamble, a possibly homeless man is playing fetch with his dog underneath the Brooklyn Bridge, only instead of a ball, the pooch brings back a largely decayed human hand. From there, we follow jerky police detective Fred (Jack Hedley, For Your Eyes Only) and even jerkier psychotherapist Paul (Paolo Marco, Watch Me When I Kill) as they constantly crack wise while they investigate the bizarre clues that take them on a wild goose chase throughout the city.

Let me rephrase that: a wild duck chase, mostly because the slasher will call and taunt both his victims and police in a creepy, Donald Duck-esque voice — one that I’m sure had the Disney lawyers checking their copyright-law books. From the inner workings of a live sex show on 42nd Street to the scummy apartment of the neighborhood sex freak, every red herring is taken as deviantly far as they can go in a reasonable, somewhat mainstream film.

With a brutally downbeat ending — spoiler alert! — featuring a little girl dying of a childhood illness (natch) and crying for her daddy in a hospital room, there are many times when The New York Ripper is such a down and dirty film, I’m surprised no one is wearing a Make America Great Again hat, each scene pornographically lingering on every physical and mental stab wound with sadistic glee.

The Blu-ray reissue from Blue Underground is an absolute embarrassment of impoverished riches, from the second disc full of fully produced documentaries and interviews, to a copy of the sleaze-funk score by Italy’s answer to Isaac Hayes — at least by me — Francesco De Masi. While many of the stars might be embarrassed to have taken part in — or be taken apart by — The New York Ripper, I’ll proudly set this edition on my shelf next to Zombie, The Beyond and, hell, even Citizen Kane. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.