Despite sharing a writer/director, several cast members and even the frickin’ typeface for the posters, Kevin S. Tenney’s Witchtrap is not a sequel to Kevin S. Tenney’s Witchboard, as the publicity took great pains to remind prospective viewers. Whatever its parentage, the name matters not/squat; Witchtrap is a fiendishly entertaining example of 1980s horror: not “good” enough for a theatrical run, but perfect for a weekend’s VHS rental (or Blu-ray purchase, as the case may be today).

Parapsychologist Dr. Agnes Goldberg (Witchboard alum Judy Tatum) scores a choice opportunity to test her ghost-vacuum theory (seriously) when she is hired by Devin Lauder (Tenney) to investigate strange goings-on at the mansion he’s inherited. The 19th-century Gothic abode is haunted by his multitasking Uncle Avery (Witchboard alum J.P. Luebsen), a psychic magician illusionist warlock. Devin would love to make bank renting the place out, but Avery’s ghost — and his accompanying “horrible, ungodly shrieks and moans” — scares people away and occasionally sends them to their death.

Dr. Agnes recruits several teammates to assist, including physical medium Whitney (Kathleen Bailey, 1989’s Night Visitor) and acid-washed video technician Ginger (Linnea Quigley, Tenney’s Night of the Demons). As mandated by Devin, three security operatives tag along to provide protection — most notably the loudmouthed Vincente (Witchboard alum James W. Quinn, having an absolute ball, which sets the proper vibe for viewers). Vincente gets all the great lines, from “You. You are a real Neanderfuck, do you know that?” to “I always knew you were a scumbag, but I never knew how scummy a bag you could be!”

Security was a good call, what with the inverted cross and pentagram-emblazoned altar still assembled in the attic. However, they don’t exactly excel on the job, as team members expire in quick succession, each in a method wholly unique from the one before, but all accompanied by Whitney flailing about in a whip-my-hair combo of grand mal seizure and mind-blowing orgasm as her body channels Uncle Avery’s malevolent spirit; Bailey does an admirable best to sell this peculiar blend of gyrations, but Tenney needle-drops a theme of maddening bombast as if in doubt.

Whether his characters are done in by bullet, vehicle or showered, Tenney clearly relished staging every demise — the very reason films like Witchtrap exist, of course. (Also, now is as apt a time as any to say that Ghostvacuum would make a more fitting title.) The practical effects are standouts even at a cut-rate level, in particular a final scene that recalls Vincent Price’s candle impersonation at the end of Tales of Terror. As with Tenney’s other horror highs, Witchtrap plays like a plastic pumpkin overflowing with Halloween candy, with nary an apple or any other good-for-you alternative in sight. You’d have to be a Neanderfuck to think otherwise. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Based on a Malaysian tall tale, if the credits are to be believed, The Oily Maniac proves Hong Kong’s esteemed Shaw Brothers Ltd. studio didn’t just make historical epics about hitting and kicking. Once in a blue moon — 1976, to be exact — it made a movie about a meek handicapped lawyer by day, petroleum-based monster by night.

And just to make it crazy, part of it takes place at a coconut oil garden.

Danny Lee (Infra-Man himself!) is Ah Sheng Yung, the legal eagle confined to arm crutches and braces, thanks to a childhood bout with polio. He’s quite self-conscious about his disability, bleating “Why am I crippled? Why?” as he beats his useless legs with balled fists. Just as his Uncle Bah is about to be executed for murdering a guy in self-defense, Sheng learns some news about his late father, Bah’s bro:
• Papa was an exorcist and a shaman.
• He tattooed Bah’s back with a spell to protect the less fortunate.
• If the spell is used for other reasons, Bah warns, you die “in a very, very bad way.”

Naturally, Sheng traces Bah’s back on paper, goes home, digs a hole in the middle of the house, gets shirtless, lowers himself in, prays for peace and power, and — voilà! — transforms into The Oily Maniac. (Later switcheroos are brought about by dousing himself in diesel fuel straight from the gas-station pump and taking an impromptu bath in a barrel of tar at a construction site.) With superpowers not dissimilar to Swamp Thing, ol’ Oily looks like a bowel movement with yellow gumballs for eyes and a near-external heart that glows red as it beats. He can liquify into an animated blob — all the better to seep into cracks, slip under closed doors and glide across asphalt while chasing cars. He can regenerate body parts that get sliced off in the heat of battle. He can leap into the air with featherlight ease. And, like Hulk, when he turns back to Sheng, he always comes out of it with britches in place and intact.

Fighting injustice in its various forms, Oily’s first order of business is saving his disinterested love interest, Yue (Ping Chen, The Mighty Peking Man), from attempted rape. Director Meng Hua Ho (The Cave of Silken Web) seems to revel in the sexual ickiness, or if not, he sure amps it up as the film proceeds. Another target is a suspect doctor who specializes in vaginal rejuvenation for prostitutes; Oily drops in on the operating room in a manner eerily prescient of David Cronenberg’s The Fly interrupting his beloved’s abortion, stirrups and all. Outdoing that may be the scene in which a pop-music starlet complains about her botched boob job; as she says, “She screwed it up totally,” she opens her shirt to reveal one gnarly, swollen, purple teat with enough topographic texture to rival a 3-D map of the moon.

I’m not even sure why the movie features a courtroom scene of a Rashomon-esque rape trial, but it does, with the following exchange between perverted prosecutor and perjurious plaintiff:
“Did he touch your breasts?”
“He did.”
“Was it the right one? Or left?”
“Both sides.”

Anyhoo, Oily enters her bathtub through the faucet, inflates like a water balloon, and kills her, so I guess that’s why it’s there. Reason or no, the filmmakers must have been hitting the opium den pretty hard. As if the title didn’t scream as much, The Oily Maniac is so utterly insane, it comes bundled in its own straightjacket. If nothing else, you’ll love this psychedelic pile of comic-book pulp for that reason alone.

Oh, one more thing: If Troma co-founder Lloyd Kaufman didn’t see The Oily Maniac before creating The Toxic Avenger, then someone damn sure told him about it. The evidence is too messy to ignore, your honor. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Because Sebastian was born with a caul over his face, his brother, Joe (Emilio Gutiérrez Caba, In the Folds of the Flesh) believes that the kid has clairvoyant powers — shades of Stephen King’s The Shining. Joe is correct.

Now that their father has passed away, those powers come to the forefront for the teen Sebastian (Christian Borromeo, Tenebrae). Throw in high-school hormones, and Li’l Sebastian is awash in a highly volatile stew. It’s creepy enough that he sits in his room playing with a knife. It’s creepier that he secretly records his newly widowed mother (Helga Liné, Black Candles) having one-night stands, and later fondles her undies and sniffs her sheets. But to have his lower lip bleed whenever he has a vision of someone’s near-future death? That’s the absolute creepiest.

Wait, I take that back. His tactile and olfactory activity concerning Mom? That is the absolute creepiest; the unsettling hints of incest make it a kissin’ cousin to Andrea Bianchi’s Burial Ground. The lip thing is just weird.

After a couple of people close to Sebastian die shortly after he sees their demise, he begins to worry if he perhaps is willing their fates. Joe’s girlfriend (Alexandra Bastedo, 13 Frightened Girls) is concerned and, being a big believer is the psychic world, wishes to help Sebastian get the bottom of his prescient visions. Or are they visions of the past?

Stigma represents another trip into the supernatural for director José Ramón Larraz (The House That Vanished) and it’s right in line with other possession pics that popped up in the second half of the 1970s after the success of The Omen and The Amityville Horror kept the subgenre spinning. It’s more than a little ballsy in that Larraz gives you no hero; Sebastian is a despicable character – smug and spoiled and simpering. And there’s no Gregory Peck to his Damien. This family is like the circuses of dysfunction that made Jerry Springer the ringmaster of trash TV: You wouldn’t want to spend any real time with them, but through the safety of the tube? It’s difficult to look away. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

When “the Godfather of Gore,” Herschell Gordon Lewis, passed away in 2016, his final movie was 2009’s The Uh-Oh! Show. That footnote since has been supplanted by Herschell Gordon Lewis’ BloodMania, a four-part anthology that’s at least four times worse than the previous worst thing he had done, which is really saying something — and I’m a fan! Seriously, The Uh-Oh! Show — highly flawed, yet highly fun — is Call Me by Your Name compared to this.

Following interminable opening credits that treat its no-name actors as if they constitute an all-star cast à la It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Lewis addresses the video camera as himself, an ersatz Cryptkeeper to introduce each deplorable tale, half of which he directed, including the first.

Of that one, “Gory Story,” he declares, “You’re about to get your money’s worth” — a promise unfulfilled, even if you watch the film for free. Brewster Bricabrac (Roger LeBlanc, Painkillers) possesses a possessed hook hand, which continues to injure him — a single joke dragged out 20 minutes too long. While an improvement, “The Night Hag,” also from our host and about a hairy she-creature haunting a suburban family’s home, fails to engage past an initial, quickly discarded sitcom spoof.

Freshman filmmaker Melanie Reinboldt directs “Attack of Conscience,” featuring a comatose woman (Sonia Deleo) who dreams of dying over and over at the hands of her abusive lover (Donovan Cerminara, 30 Days of Night: Dark Days). This short is not only confusing, but tonally askew from the rest of the picture. Finally, tyro helmer Kevin Littlelight offers “GOREgeous,” in which former rock star Gordo (Stuart Bentley), suffering from erectile dysfunction, slices and dices his “deaf retard” wife and continues a murderous rampage from there. It’s the kind of piece in which a girl complains, “These high heels are killing me!” while a high heel juts from her bloodied, stabbed back.

Groan. I’d dub BloodMania unwatchable, if not for the fact that I watched the damn thing. It took me three days to get through it. Avoid at all costs; your allegiance for Lewis should go only so far. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

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

Get it at Amazon.