You’ve gotta give it to Paul Naschy. In Hunchback of the Morgue, the Spanish horror icon casts himself as a hideous freak reviled by all, and yet still finds a way to write his character into a nude bed-down with a ready and willing hot lady, per his usual.

Naschy’s sympathetic Gotho lives in a tiny town, where he clerks for the local hospital morgue. Everybody in the village seems to hate him — kids pelt him with rocks, doctors openly make fun of him and then Rodney King him — everybody, that is, except Ilse (María Elena Arpón, The House That Screamed), his friend from childhood. And she promptly dies.

For safekeeping, Gotho carries Ilse’s lifeless body into the bowels of the place, suggesting that Naschy and director/co-scribe Javier Aguirre (who partnered that same year for Count Dracula’s Great Love) have drawn influence not just from Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, but another great of Gothic literature: Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera. Splayed across a slab of rock and open to the cave’s fetid air, her face is feasted upon by rats; when Gotho limps in to discover this ghastly sight, he torches them. Set aflame for real, the shrieking vermin cry hop about like Mexican jumping beans. (PETA would be most displeased.)

And that’s just scratching the oily, sleazy surface. Soon, one Dr. Orla (Alberto Dalbés, The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein) enters the picture and enlists Gotho in obtaining the bodies of dead female prisoners for an experiment in creating artificial life. Orla succeeds, resulting in a growling, primordial poop monster that we don’t see until the final scene and seems to have shuffled in from a neighboring set. In other words, this movie has everything: the fabulous Maria Perschy (Five Golden Dragons); the equally fabulous and fleetingly naked Rosanna Yanni (Two Undercover Angels); brutes of men who spill beer all over their chins, as if their lips contain no working nerves; and ace detective work like this: “According to our investigation, he’s retarded mentally.” —Rod Lott

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Half a dozen years before she Spit on Your Grave, Camille Keaton toplined a supernatural slice of Italian horror titled Tragic Ceremony. In the film from Riccardo Freda (Murder Syndrome), Keaton’s plain Jane and her three guy friends of varying unlikability hop in a dune buggy after a rough-and-tough day of carefree yachting, only to run out of gas after evening falls and a downpour, well, pours. The foursome lucks upon a mansion whose owners, Lord and Lady Alexander (A Bay of Blood’s Luigi Pistilli and Thunderball’s Luciana Paluzzi), welcome them inside for cheese and salami and shelter with all the Gothic trimmings.

Late that night, the youths learn why the Alexanders are such gracious hosts: They’ve gathered their pals for a full-blown black mass, and require Jane as the pièce de résistance. (In other words, I think she is the subject of a sacrifice!) But her buddies put this party on ice and rescue her in the nick of time, albeit by having to commit murder to do so; the robed participants turn on one another, too, because when in Rome. Most notably, one guy takes a sword to the noggin, which immediately goes halfsies. I must not be the only one who finds this bisection (courtesy of effects wizard Carlo Rambaldi, 1976’s King Kong) the highlight of this sequence, because Freda later trots it out a couple more times for instant-replay kicks, making it this film’s equivalent of Sybil Danning’s infamous top-ripping scene in Howling II.

Then our quartet flees the house to safety. Whew! The end … except it’s not — Freda still has half a Ceremony to go! Unfortunately, coming after the misplaced climax, it’s the least interesting half.

The remainder finds death coming after Jane and the guys individually, Final Destination-style, to finish what it started. At least another of Rambaldi’s nifty gore gags pops up (look out for the grooming scene!), so it’s not as if the movie totally withdrawals its syringe of cheap pleasures on this downward slope. It does, however, unravel into a mess of an ending upon an ending upon an ending, as needlessly convoluted as Tragic Ceremony’s original title in its native Italy: Extracted from the Secret Police Archives of a European Capital. —Rod Lott

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While the identity of the Zodiac Killer remains unknown, several popular theories connect him to men who since have passed away. But when has that ever stopped Hollywood from exploiting an exploitable concept? No stranger to other wacky “what if”s on the silver screen, San Francisco’s notorious serial killer of the late 1960s and early ’70s comes alive — with pleasure! — in Awakening the Zodiac.

Tired of living in a shitbox (their words) in a trailer park, blue-collar couple Mick and Zoe Branson (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’s Shane West and Hell Baby’s Leslie Bibb) play a lottery of different sorts by bidding on the contents of storage lockers in arrears, in hopes that whatever contents are inside will exceed their investment. On their latest, they go halfsies with Mick’s buddy, Harvey (Matt Craven, Happy Birthday to Me), who owns a pawn shop. While excavating the wares, Harvey finds a box of 8mm films: homemade snuff reels, shot by none other than the Zodiac Killer. They know this because, helpfully, the madman appears in an all-black costume befitting of a superhero, complete with chest insignia.

Because the FBI’s case against the Zodiac remains unsolved, a beaucoup reward remains up for grabs. Hurting for money, our trio reasons if only they can discern the name of the locker renter, they can cash in and be able to crawl out of their miserable small-town lives. Instead of letting the law do that detective work, they stupidly attempt it themselves, starting with a couple of good ol’ B-and-Es. Who’d’ve thunk it, but in doing so, these rubes attract the ire of the actual Zodiac (Stephen McHattie, Watchmen), who emerges from retirement and hasn’t lost his thirst for bloodshed in the ensuing decades.

It goes without saying that Awakening the Zodiac packs nary a fraction of the punch of David Fincher’s 2007 true-crime masterpiece, Zodiac, and you’d be a fool to expect it to. Although inspiration is drawn from the real-life crimes, most explicitly in the time-warped prologue, historical accuracy is not on the mind of director/co-screenwriter Jonathan Wright (Nostrum), who’s more concerned with leveraging the boogeyman’s brand-name infamy into a marketable hook and letting it lie there. Marginally functional yet utterly predictable, the movie squanders its limited creepiness and becomes a victim of its own stupidity; it even takes the time — and wastes ours — to have Harvey explain the concept of ciphers to Mick and Zoe — the stuff of workbook pages geared toward third-graders. Bibb and Craven exude more energy than the film deserves, while West just does that thing he always does, which is to say he stands around with his face scrunched into what looks like a balled-up fist. —Rod Lott

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Among all the Jaws imitators to have surfaced from international waters, Italy’s Great White is unique: It is the only one to be sued out of the marketplace by the litigious Universal Studios for being too much of a carbon copy. Okay, so in hindsight, maybe it wasn’t the brightest idea to send Vic Morrow to wardrobe as if he were going to a Halloween ball as Robert Shaw’s salty shark hunter Quint.

Milking his Irish accent so hard, Morrow plays grizzled second fiddle to clean-cut James Franciscus (The Cat o’ Nine Tails) in the Roy Scheider family-man role and publicly theorizes that the toothed beast may be “crazed.” The appearance of (B-roll of) this shark threatens to ruin their coastal town’s upcoming windsurfing competition, which is such a big deal that is the radio station DJ talks about local surfers between stacks of platter the way other markets do traffic and weather. Yes, it’s That Big, and the mayor (Joshua Sinclair, Lady Frankenstein), who may as well be named Murray Hamilton, isn’t about to let a few bloody stumps disrupt the economically rewarding festivities.

The longer Great White (aka The Last Shark) goes on, the more you can sense members of the Uni legal team drooling on a draft of the injunction. Whereas Steven Spielberg had the iconic score of John Williams working in his favor, Enzo G. Castellari (Cold Eyes of Fear) is saddled with the discordant theme of what sounds like a seal choking as it passes gas. Whereas Spielberg relied upon that rarely working but terrifyingly lifelike shark, Castellari has to get by on a mix of stock footage, a rigid model and, best/worst of all, a barely moving head that might have been “borrowed” from Universal’s famed tram ride.

To be fair, Castellari does have one thing Spielberg’s classic does not: a shot of a corpse-stiff dummy rocketing into the sky as the shark bursts from the water like a geyser. So phony it’s funny, the bit dared me not to replay it thrice. —Rod Lott

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With an electrical socket as its logo, Raw Feed jolted to life, kinda, in 2006 as a direct-to-DVD subsidiary of Warner Home Video and intended home for envelope-pushing horror free from MPAA meddling. Instead, Raw Feed issued product that felt overly derivative and devoid of imagination; six flicks later, the outlet ran out of juice. Its final offering was 2008’s fittingly titled Rest Stop: Don’t Look Back, a sequel to the line’s debut. That first film, plain ol’ Rest Stop, is so rote, I couldn’t submit myself to a part 2. I feel like I’ve seen it anyway.

Young Midwestern lovers Nicole (Jaimie Alexander, Thor: The Dark World) and Jess (Joey Mendicino, whose only other movie role to date is the sequel) run away from home and hit the open road toward California. (In other words, like John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, if the Joads headed west not for work, but the freedom to copulate.) After stopping for an open-air quickie, Nicole’s girl bladder ruins everything when she has to tinkle. Begrudgingly, Jess pulls over to — cue ominous music — a rest stop in the middle of the woods. It’s a place where no right-minded city planner would allow one to be built, lest he’s seeking to serve the body-waste needs of storybook creatures.

Surprise! The facilities are a dump! (Last Shithouse on the Left, anyone?) While Nic is squatting atop the scum-layered stool to make water, Jess mysteriously makes like a tree and leaves. You won’t pry it outta me, but his vamoose act might have something to do with the shit-kickin’ redneck in the yeller truck.

If not for the pre-existing Joy Ride and Wrong Turn franchises revving up around that time, Rest Stop might be fresher meat … except that still leaves dozens of other crazy-dude-in-a-vehicle films to contend with, notably the ’80s VHS fave The Hitcher and the granddaddy of them all, Steven Spielberg’s Duel.

Better known as a writer of nearly two dozen X-Files episodes and creator of its short-lived The Lone Gunmen spin-off, John Shiban made his feature directing debut with Rest Stop, and has yet to follow it up. He also wrote it, yet given the pedigree of the landmark X-Files series, the only thing shocking about his script is how color-by-numbers predictable it is, which allows boredom to set in faster than quick-dry cement. More about spilling blood than turning twists, it owes its brightest spots not to leading lady Alexander, who spends the back half shirtless, but to the performance by former child star Joey Lawrence (Urban Legends: Final Cut) as a cop. Whoa! —Rod Lott

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