Man oh man, do I ever love a movie in which an olive-complected hospital attendant gets caught literally red-handed, because he’s chomping on a heart freshly plucked from an on-the-slab body! But man oh man, do I ever love more a movie that then has that shamed, swarthy man hurl himself through a plate-glass window and to his death several floors below, the impact of which pops one of his arms clean from his torso. No worries — it’s back attached for his close-up, Mr. DeMille.

In other words, man oh man, do I ever love Doctor Butcher M.D. (Per its infamous ad hype, those initials stand for “Medical Deviate.”) Yes, this film by “Frank Martin” (Marino Girolami, The Fury of Achilles) is also known as Zombie Holocaust, but I prefer the Butcher moniker because the Italian flick is more a cannibal movie than an undead one. Either way, it’s a heap of grindhouse trash, in the best meaning of the phrase.

Plot is incidental. A few educated and attractive white people go to a tropical island inhabited by dark-skinned primitives who are not. The tribesmen wear only a modicum of fabric and feast on the blood and guts of others. One of those others — but he’s not English, so it’s okay, the movie seems to say — is impaled in multiple spots, thanks to a jungle-floor booby trap, and then has his neck turned into a sanguine spigot. Another other unwittingly becomes a live buffet, complete with “eye”-petizers.

Following all this carnivorous cannibal activity time, a few zombies shamble into frame, not to mention a fully nude Alexandra Delli Colli (The New York Ripper) as the hot-honky sacrifice the subgenre demands, and a thankfully clothed Donald O’Brien (Ghosthouse) as — spoiler not spoiler — the evil Dr. Obrero (né Butcher, one assumes), working on a way to extend the human life span by 100 years. He fails. —Rod Lott

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Made by Hallmark Entertainment — yes, the greeting-card company — in the VHS heyday and sold at its stores nationwide, Creepy Classics is one of many B-movie trailer compilations to emerge at the time. This one stands out for three reasons, only one of them good: that the legendary Vincent Price hosts. Not as positive is the 30-minute running time, although that keeps the proceedings from dragging; we’ll get to the remaining reason in a sec.

Among the previews our “Master of Scarimonies” (groan) introduces are the Amicus anthology Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, Jack H. Harris’ Dinosaurus!, Freddie Francis’ The Day of the Triffids and Gorgo. (You know Gorgo, right? She’s the prehistoric sea monster whose baby is captured by “reckless skin divers.”) Price even touches on two of his own films, The Raven and The Pit and the Pendulum, both directed by Roger Corman. Every flick featured is from the 1950s and ’60s, except Oliver Stone’s The Hand — a decidedly odd outlier.

As promised, the tape’s third and final distinction: It came packaged with a 10-question trivia quiz on a single card; the idea was to tackle it after the show came to a close to see if you were paying attention. It would tax no one. No classic of compilations, Creepy Classics is for Price completists only. —Rod Lott

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Shot on video in Baltimore, “Unitied States,” Scary Tales achieves 50% accuracy with its title, in that more than one story exists — three of them, in fact — yet none of what writer/director Doug Ulrich presents is even remotely frightening, except perhaps the men’s dated haircuts.

The opener, “Satan’s Necklace,” is about “no ordinary necklace — it’s Satan’s necklace!” Despite such a devilish pedigree, the cursed jewelry is found with a run-of-the-mill metal detector by a guy with more pockmarks than this movie has words. “Sliced in Coldblood” is your very basic tale of a husband going full-on nutso upon learning he’s being cuckolded; one of the victims of his resulting murder spree is a beer-swilling, Foodtown cap-clad schlub on whose cavernous belly button the camera dwells in increasingly nauseating close-up, yet blessedly not always in focus.

Finally, like The Lawnmower Man on $1.98, we enter “Level 21,” in which a man obsessed with a new video game (whose screens we are not privy to) gets sucked into it. The fantasy world of the game looks like a neighborhood greenbelt, but populated with a dwarf, an orc in a bald cap and one “dark overlord” clad in a purple cloak and sporting the widow’s peak made famous by Eddie Munster.

The less said about Scary Tales, the better — not because its narrative paths are laden with surprises aplenty (quite the opposite), but because at all of 68 amateurish minutes, it is too inconsequential to merit much discussion beyond saying what it is. Hey, I remember trying to make a Creepshow-style horror anthology with a VHS camcorder, too; my excuse is that I was 12 years old. I’m willing to bet my dialogue was better than “Hey, that Raisin Bran’s pretty good! Get a box,” but Ulrich does have one thing on me: the per-the-credits participation of “Dundalk Taco Bell.” —Rod Lott

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When a comely coed is killed on campus and beloved community college dean Mr. Grubeck (René Assa, Deep Cover) is arrested for her murder, the fetching student and aerobics enthusiast Robin (Debbie James, 1997’s The Underground) can’t believe it. She refuses to!

Her locks may be golden, but her gut is not; Grubeck did do it, having been possessed by satanic forces after having dialed the titular party line for his “Horrorscope.” Robin tries to figure out just what’s up, enlisting the help of bad-boy biker Spike (Pat O’Bryan, No Holds Barred), the lone human holdover from the 1988 original, who consults an occult bookstore owner (Cobra woman Brigitte Nielsen, in a slinky cameo).

Meanwhile, more people die! Or come perilously close. Thanks to Grubeck’s spectral touch of death, the lone, alcoholic witness (George “Buck” Flower, Delinquent Schoolgirls) to the aforementioned homicide gets splattered by a semi, making him explode like a water balloon hitting hot pavement. Spike himself narrowly escapes an attack by an entire kitchen, including a refrigerator unit that spits out frozen pizzas like so many saw blades, while a lawyer (Monique Gabrielle, Amazon Women on the Moon) gets trapped in a runaway car in a strong action set piece that would not be out of place in a Final Destination sequel.

Whereas the first film was directed by Robert Englund (aka Elm Street’s resident boogeyman, Freddy Krueger), 976-EVIL II was entrusted to Jim Wynorski (The Lost Empire). His handling of the death scenes — particularly that vehicular one — proves the man has severely underutilized talents that go far beyond the one he’s primarily called upon to use these days: ordering actresses to “pop your top.” Demonstrating true inventiveness is a black-and-white sequence in which Robin’s gal pal is trapped within two movies they were flipping between on TV: Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life … and then George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead: “Look, Daddy! Every time you hear a bell, a zombie takes a soul to hell!” Touches like that let Wynorski’s 976-EVIL II do the walking all over Englund’s vision of telephone-based terror. —Rod Lott

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Mayday! Mayday! A Coast Guard chopper sent on a rescue mission for a small ship in the Bermuda Triangle find quite a ghastly sight: A dead guy hanging from the mast by his feet, another dead guy chucked through a window and, inside, yet another dead guy — suspended in midair! Only a former prostitute in a purple sweater lives to tell the tale.

That reformed call girl, Eva (Kim Novak, the Hitchcock blonde of Vertigo), relays her harrowing story of survival to her rescuer, Lt. Haig (Doug McClure, Tapeheads), making Satan’s Triangle first and foremost a flashback. One would think that a day of innocent marlin fishing wouldn’t go to hell once you come upon a priest (Alejandro Rey, The Ninth Configuration) floating in the ocean. Alas, ’tis not the case …

Just about any review the curious can find of this made-for-TV movie makes particular mention of its twist ending — namely, that it terrifies and induces shivers, if not pants-wetting. The big problem is that director Sutton Roley (Chosen Survivors) forces the viewer to sit through an awfully tedious hour to get there, where a bigger problem awaits: that the ending is vastly overrated and ridiculously predictable. It would work in the 30-minute span of a Twilight Zone.

I suppose Satan’s Triangle could have possessed the power to chill in its prime-time day, when real-life fear of that stretch of North Atlantic Ocean had crested to a tabloid peak. But I don’t wanna dwell on it; you’re better off watching Mexico’s Bermuda Triangle anyway. —Rod Lott