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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Which is harder to swallow: a dollhouse being haunted or a man moving his wife into a home she’s never seen? Either would be unthinkable, yet Amityville Dollhouse gives you both, God love it. (Look, after a lamp, a clock and a mirror, a dollhouse isn’t much of a stretch, but surprising your spouse with place of residence is step one to divorce court.)

Capping off 10 months of he-man construction with his own bare hands, Bill Martin (Summer School nemesis Robin Thomas) has built a brand-new house for his new wife, Claire (Out of the Dark’s Starr Andreeff, whose name looks like the birth-certificate clerk had a stroke while typing), and their blended family of three kids. Inside the property’s original wooden shed, Bill finds a rather intricate dollhouse, which he gives to his daughter (Rachel Duncan, 1995’s Rumpelstiltskin) for her birthday. Because the toy is a to-scale replica of 112 Ocean Ave., Long Island, New York 11701, the Martin home quickly morphs into a metaphor for the dysfunctional American family, complete with a portal to hell via the den’s fireplace.

Yes, Amityville Dollhouse is a stupid title. Yes, Amityville Dollhouse has a stupid premise. No, Amityville Dollhouse is not boring.

How could it be with a giant mouse under the girl’s bed? With zombie wasps that burrow into ears? With the head of doomed That ’70s Show starlet Lisa Robin Kelly bursting into flames? With Claire’s über-nerd son (Jarrett Lennon, Servants of Twilight) being terrified of spiders, but not the reanimated, guacamole-faced corpse behind his bedroom door? With Claire possessed into having MILFy fantasies about sex with her jock stepson (Allen Cutler, The Demon Within)?

The answer: It cannot and is not. I don’t know what Joshua Michael Stern (The Contractor) was thinking when he wrote the script, but I do know I’m glad director/producer Steve White doesn’t seem to have questioned it. Playing like Poltergeist by way of The Brady Bunch, this eighth film in the Amityville Horror franchise is indeed its looniest. —Rod Lott

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Amityville: A New Generation, the seventh in the Amityville Horror series, takes the original film’s tagline of “For God’s sake, get out!” to heart, transferring the devilish deeds from the suburbs to the streets — to be specific, the seediest Los Angeles has to offer. There, an ornately (and garishly) framed mirror has found its way from a certain possessed house in Long Island, New York, to the cardboard abode of a hobo (Jack Orend, Aaah! Zombies!!), who gives it to Keyes (Ross Partridge, Kuffs), a struggling photographer living in the sparsely rented lofts across the street.

Much to the dislike of his ad-exec girlfriend (Lala Sloatman, Watchers), Keyes lugs the demonic mirror into the building, where it causes all sorts of problems for his landlord (David Naughton, An American Werewolf in London), his starving-artist neighbor (Julia Nickson, Ready Player One), her boyfriend (Robert Rusler, Weird Science) and so on. Dead bodies pile up as Keyes experiences startling visions that change his behavior — not unlike James Brolin’s character in 1979’s OG Amityville Horror.

That idea of the sins of the father bubbles to prominence, revealing A New Generation to have more on its mind than mining quick-buck rental dollars. While lesser filmmakers would treat the material as trash, director John Murlowski (Santa with Muscles) and his DP, eventual Oscar winner Wally Pfister (Inception), bring some class to it, pulling off some ingenious shots and in-camera effects as creative as the story’s protagonists. Returning as screenwriters from the previous year’s Amityville 1992: It’s About Time, Christopher DeFaria and Antonio Toro actually make viewers care about Keyes, as does the Dermot Mulroney-esque Partridge, of course, by committing to a performance instead of just cashing a paycheck.

Partridge’s goodwill extends to others around him, including Terry O’Quinn (1987’s The Stepfather) as the investigating detective, Lin Shaye (Insidious) as a nurse and Richard Roundtree (Shaft himself) as a fellow tenant. That a sixth sequel would boast such relative star power is as surprising as the quality of the film itself. —Rod Lott

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After Amityville 3-D bombed big at the 1983 box office, the Amityville Horror franchise retreated to network television for the fourth entry, Amityville: The Evil Escapes. Ironically, this first nontheatrical foray at least had the foresight to bring back original screenwriter Sandor Stern, who also stepped into the bound-to-be-thankless job of directing it.

Recently widowed, Nancy Evans (Patty Duke, Valley of the Dolls) has no choice but to pack up her three kids and go live with her uptight biddy of a mother, Alice (Jane Wyatt, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home), in California. Waiting for Nancy at the stately home is a birthday present shipped from her sister, Helen (Peggy McKay, UFOria): one fugly lamp purchased for $100 at a Long Island yard sale as a gag gift. The gag backfires on Helen, who cuts her finger on this gaudy piece of furniture — imagine Sesame Street’s iconic lamppost as constructed by The Wicker Man’s villagers — and gets tetanus and dies, failing to realize she thrifted among the cursed contents at the cursed Amityville house.

At Alice’s home, the lamp throws everything into disarray. At first, the disturbances are nothing a tube of Neosporin couldn’t solve, then they leap into the sinister with the discovery of Alice’s parrot in the toaster oven (which is probably the title of a Jimmy Buffett song). Other incidents include an out-of-control chainsaw, a sink disposal hand-mauling and strangulation by supernatural extension cord, all culminating in the possession of Nancy’s youngest child (Brandy Gold, Wildcats) and an attic-set showdown pitting a priest (Fredric Lehne, Terror Tract) against, well, the lamp of the damned.

For the virtually bloodless telefilm, Stern brings back several of his 1979 screenplay’s greatest hits: the flies, the red eyes, the sludge, the priest unable to communicate by telephone. Unfortunately, earnest attempts at scares are doomed by mood-killing bright colors, presumably dictated by NBC for prime-time readiness, as Evil Escapes is shot like any of the webs’ disease-of-the-week pics of that era. If made for theaters and aptly cast, with all else being equal, this material could have clicked.

After this, the Amityville sequels were straight to video. Incidentally, the estate sale in the prologue sets up three of them, each following a different object: a clock (Amityville 1992: It’s About Time), a mirror (Amityville: A New Generation) and a dollhouse (uh, Amityville Dollhouse). Producers never got around to all the other items glimpsed, but I’d like to think that an abandoned treatment for The Amityville Thermos sits in a desk somewhere. —Rod Lott

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