Not even three minutes of Poor White Trash Part II tick by before an unseen ax murderer kills one of our two presumed main characters — newlyweds on a log-cabin honeymoon, no less! With her new hubby freshly dead, insta-widow Helen (Norman Moore, Problem Child) runs for her life into the woods — and all to the tune of an inappropriately upbeat score, complete with rubber-band instruments.

Helen soon finds safety — relatively speaking — when she bumps into possum-hunting redneck Odis Pickett (Gene Ross, The Legend of Boggy Creek), who lives nearby with his son (Charlie Dell, 1986’s Invaders from Mars), daughter (Camilla Carr, A Bullet for Pretty Boy) and pregnant wife (Ann Stafford, Keep My Grave Open). “Lookie here what I done brung home for supper,” Odis tells them, and he doesn’t mean possum.

If you read Odis’ quote as a leering threat of nonconsensual sexual congress, pat yourself on the back. When it comes to Helen, who shore is purty, every overstrained syllable that manages to escape the uneducated man’s mouth crackles with electricity. Unfortunately for her, it’s like the kind of electricity generated by the exposed ends of frayed cords used for misogynist methods of torture as depicted on the covers of pulp detective mags: unwanted.

Or, as his daughter says best, “I know what kind of privates you got in mind: same ones you been pokin’ in me since I’s goin’ on 12!”

Welcome to Deliverance as a family sitcom. Yessiree, this here Trash comes scooped and dumped by the Arkansas-born/Texas-dead director of the public-domain fright favorite Don’t Look in the Basement, S.F. Brownrigg.

Poor White Trash Part II has jack-squat to do with the original-recipe Poor White Trash, except the nekkid pursuit of a quick-and-easy buck. Seeing how the plain ol’ Poor White Trash was a shrewd and profitable retitling of 1957’s Bayou for the drive-in market, why not see if White lightning could strike twice? Trash Part II first entered the world with the none-too-subtle title of Scum of the Earth … but should not be confused with the 1963 Scum of the Earth, a sexploitation serving dished out by Herschell Gordon Lewis.

However, you are forgiven for any confuzzlement, because Brownrigg’s picture owes quite the debt to Lewis’ pioneering gore films (as well as his hicks-in-the-sticks flicks, e.g., Moonshine Mountain). With its shock scenes — tame by today’s standards, natch — of killbilly kapers, it also prefigures the slasher subgenre that would propagate like inbred offspring across drive-in screens by decade’s end.

Call it what you wish. Brownrigg’s blood-strewn streak of soap-opera camp makes Poor White Trash Part II tough to take seriously, but easy to take in. —Rod Lott

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Reclusive widow Sarah Winchester (Helen Mirren, The Fate of the Furious) owns 51% of the gun company that bears her name, but the board of directors fears she’s lost her marbles since losing her husband and only child to the Grim Reaper. After all, what possible good reason could a person have to purchase an eight-room home, only to add 92 rooms onto it?

That’s what Dr. Price (Jason Clarke, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes) is going to find out! Hired by the board, the whore-lovin’, opium-droppin’ doc is dispatched to the Winchester house in San Jose, California, to assess the missus’ state of mind. What he finds is that the abode is twistier than she is, what with its maze-like stairwells, false doors, secret rooms, hidey-holes and gh-gh-gh-ghosts! Yep — with a straight face, she tells Price that her increasingly spacious house plays host to many specters: one for each life snuffed by the brand of rifle that brings her riches, which is why the residence is in perpetual renovation. (Lucky for her bank account, the story takes place in 1906.)

Topical only on the surface, Winchester finds inspiration from true events — namely, the widow’s Winchester Mystery House, long a tourist attraction — yet could stand to find more, whether in fact or in fiction. After setting up the home’s funhouse uniqueness, sibling directors Michael and Peter Spierig (Jigsaw) do not do enough with it, jettisoning it quickly for a rote possession storyline and haunted-house jump scares that could take place in any Insidious sequel.

Still, being talented pros, neither Mirren nor Clarke — nor third lead Sarah Snook (the Spierig brothers’ Predestination) as Sarah’s niece — half-ass the half-baked material, which is admirable on their part. Winchester is well-made mediocrity. —Rod Lott

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Shot in Oklahoma City, Offerings, um, offers a brazenly transparent imitation of John Carpenter’s Halloween, but one in which Michael Myers is replaced by someone who resembles a grown-up version of 1970s wunderkind Mason Reese, the Underwood Deviled Ham spokeskid. Additionally, his face looks as if he settled down for a nap, but had no access to a pillow, so he made do with a plugged-in toaster oven and its frayed cord.

The slasher in this slasher bears the terrifying name of Johnny. While in grade school, Johnny (Josh Coffman) found himself the frequent target of bullying by his peers, who one day forced him to hop atop a water well in the park and circumnavigate its bricks. Little Johnny’s reward for successful completion of this daunting task? A backhanded compliment (“Not bad for a retard!”), followed immediately by a plunge down the well that renders him unwell, earning Johnny permanent residency at Oakhurst State Mental Hospital.

Ten years later, now a beefy adult, Johnny (fight choreographer Richard A. Buswell) escapes the sanitarium to exact revenge on his tormentors. One gets his head stuck in a vise, then hammered for good measure; another is hanged to death the front yard while his parents laugh their asses off (to cartoons on TV, but still). The only student saved from Johnny’s reign of terror is Gretchen (Loretta Leigh Bowman), the peroxide blonde who was actually nice to him Way Back When. In fact, he brings her hence-the-title gifts — unfortunately, they’re of the nonreturnable kind: crudely carved body parts of his feather-haired, acid-washed victims.

This leads to Offerings’ most notorious scene, in which Gretchen and friends not only eat a pizza left at her front door, but are unable to distinguish the difference between sausage and bloody human flesh. The pie becomes a bona fide plot device, like a frickin’ Maltese Falcon topped with extra cheese. In a move that predates the self-reflexive nature of Scream, Gretchen and her BFF (Elizabeth Greene) discuss the dumb decisions made by characters in horror movies, as if doing so retroactively excuses the colossal stupidity they already have displayed (with more yet to come).

Nice try, though, on the part of debuting director Christopher Reynolds (whose only other feature in this creative capacity was Lethal Justice, a 1991 obscurity also shot in the Sooner State). Multitasking as Offerings’ writer, producer and editor, Reynolds gave himself a small part as an Oakhurst physician more hypocrite than Hippocratic in saying of patient Johnny, “Every time he takes a crap, he thinks he’s had an abortion. Let me tell you, he’s had some ugly kids.”

My gut instinct upon seeing the film’s ad in my newspaper’s local listings three decades ago was dead-on correct: Offerings is a terribly told piece of B-horror trash on a Z-level budget. Reynolds could not have chosen an actress more skill-impaired than Bowman to anchor a national theatrical feature, nor a more ineffectual Donald Pleasence stand-in than G. Michael Smith as the belt-straining, biscuit-doughy Sheriff Chism, who, speaking of his name, busts a tween boy (Chasen Hampton, They Crawl) for “reading” used porno mags in an abandoned house. And yet, there is something about its aggressive incompetence that makes Reynolds’ ugly kid easy to love. Not bad for a … oh, hell, you know. —Rod Lott

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Black Christmas wasn’t the only horror film Bob Clark directed — just the best and most influential. However, let us not allow history to neglect Deathdream, at once an unofficial adaptation of W.W. Jacobs’ classic short story, “The Monkey’s Paw,” and a feverish allegory on the PTSD of our Vietnam vets.

The family of soldier Andy Brooks (Richard Backus, The First Deadly Sin) receives some tragic, not entirely unexpected news: The young man has been killed while fighting the unwinnable war in ’Nam. Hours later, an apparent miracle follows: In the Dead of Night (to borrow Deathdream’s alternate title), Andy appears in the entry hall, as if he’d come marching home.

He seems a bit, well, off, because he’s a member of the walking dead. The Brookses either are too overjoyed to notice or are in denial — perhaps a helping of both. As viewers, we are not privy to scenes of prewar Andy, but certainly he wasn’t always quite this pale or quick to strangle dogs, was he? Unremarked upon, the Scooby-Doo light switch cover in his childhood room serves as a nice contrast to his sinister new ways, and a reminder of the innocence irrevocably lost in the jungle.

Although he ended up writing for daytime soaps, Backus is awfully good as the prodigal son who joined the Army as a boy and left it as a zombie. The movie doesn’t ask him to display, oh, range, yet as his character’s physical body gradually fails him and falls away, Backus need do little more than remain still and slowly turn his all-American smile into an unholy rictus. The more homicidal he becomes, the more horrifying his face, providing Deathdream with most of its shivers.

If Andy is one-dimensional — and he is — Clark and scriptwriter Alan Ormsby (Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things) let John Marley play far more shades. Assured a spot in cinema history for being That Guy Who Wakes Next to a Horse’s Head in The Godfather, Marley has this film’s most complex performance as Andy’s father. In many ways, it establishes the template for what Gregory Peck would do a mere two years later in the showier The Omen: Be torn between the allegiance to his only son and the responsibility for ending his bad behavior. His journey encapsulates the punch line of an old Bill Cosby routine: “I brought you into this world and I’ll take you out.”

With a Pepto-Bismol color palette that mirrors the uneasiness of his tale, Clark nails making the most of not a lot. That he did it twice in one calendar year (with Black Christmas following this to theaters about four months later) makes each picture all the more impressive. —Rod Lott

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For a terrific horror anthology in which several directors contribute stories themed around All Hallows’ Eve … stick with 2015’s Tales of Halloween. Sorry to say, but 10/31 is an embarassment for the parties involved, most of all the viewer. Heck, let’s throw the actual date of Oct. 31 in there, too, and encourage it to sue for defamation; the movie is that bad.

The poster pegs the project as “from the creators of The Barn, Bonejangles, The Dooms Chapel Horror and Volumes of Blood.” If those titles resonate with you, perhaps you’ll get more out of the Indiegogo-funded 10/31 than the average bear. Expect very little; even the Elvira-“inspired” wraparound — bookends, really — is so barely there, it hardly merits mention.

The five stories contained within fall prey to the severe limitations of so many microbudgeted projects of the horror genre: They appear to have been made by men who are fans first, and filmmakers a distant second. What this means is that in each of their shorts, the directors (Justin M. Seaman, Zane Hershberger, John William Holt, Brett DeJager and Rocky Gray) seem concerned only with gore and makeup and John Carpenter-esque synths, to the detriment of acting, pacing and storytelling.

I’m certainly not against scarecrows and slashers and spooky hags who haunt quaint-but-unprofitable B&Bs. I am, however, opposed to padding a 15- or 20-minute segment with 14 to 19 minutes of filler. Among the worst offenders — in a flick so full of them, it’s practically a police lineup — are Hershberger’s “Trespassers” and Holt’s “Killing the Dance.” While the former offers first-date conversation so interminable, your mind will swipe left, it’s the latter that truly tries one’s patience; with its roller-rink setting, prepare for skating, skating and skating — and more skating! — before getting around to the inevitable stabbing.

I doubt neither the validity nor intensity of the guys’ love of horror — likely, it extends to being sacrosanct. But their infatuation clouded and doomed 10/31’s execution. —Rod Lott

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