Troubles abound in the San Francisco nightlife scene, as a trail of bodies left by an unknown serial killer bears one peculiar calling card: The victims’ brain cavities have been sucked dry, emptied through the eye sockets. While the police are left in quite the pickle, the murders are like gold to magazine journalist Jean (Kate Alexander, From a Whisper to a Scream), who’s writing an article on “the atmosphere of fear” when she’s not enjoying the FWB setup with her roomie, Bryan (Caleb Dreneaux). The snot-nosed punk rocker — a member of the local phenom Disease — appears to be young enough to have exited his lover’s womb.

Because Bryan once was involved in a fatal incident of ODing groupies, the long arm of the law extends his way. Police detective Alonzo (Deadly Desire’s Jonathan Zeichner, heavily perspiring a mix of ’80s tough guys Nick Mancuso, Steven Bauer and Joe Piscopo) is crazy-suspicious of Bryan (“Saying Disease is just a band is like saying Hitler was just an overzealous politician!”) and clearly will end up soiling the sheets with Jean, even though he repeatedly and dismissively calls her “Reporter Lady” to her face. (When the inevitable sex scene arrives, ’tis a real Sophie’s Choice to determine which is grosser: that he keeps his necklace on or that his arms are so hairy, viewers might think he’s still wearing a shirt.)

Despite Alonzo’s public investigation, literally brainless bodies keep turning up. Perhaps the neighborhood’s facially disfigured hobo everyone refers to as The Creeper (Robert Duncanson, looking like Manos’ Torgo swallowed a whale) has something to do with it? Whatever, man, cuz danger ain’t gonna keep Disease (collectively billed as The Nuns) from spreading its aural infections, e.g., “Slit your wrists / Fuckin’ bitch / My suicide child / My suicide child!” Other than Disease’s sporadic performances (one at a house party where a guy walks around with a python draped around his neck, no big whoop), music in Night Feeder amounts to producer James Gillerman’s tin-eared score of seemingly random buttons pushed on a Little Virtuoso teaching keyboard.

For all of the movie’s ridiculous wrongs, its most glaring misstep among VHS-shot oddities is most unexpected: having ambition. Yes, freshman (and still that today) feature director Jim Whiteaker remains constrained by underfunding, yet proceeds with Linnea Due and Shelley Singer’s whodunit-procedural script as if it were slated for airing on PBS’ Mystery! They try hard, even aiming for scientific accuracy in a gory autopsy sequence depicted so meticulously that it feels real-time. Many members of the cast actually can act; while leads Alexander and Zeichner are unable to elevate the material, maybe it doesn’t need elevating. After all, the movie never reaches monotony.

Special commendation goes to Cintra Wilson (So I Married an Axe Murderer) for scene-stealing through general spaciness. Everything out of her mouth emerges with an “Oh, wow” quality, no matter what is being said. That I cannot ascertain how much of this is performance only adds to Night Feeder’s appeal. Don’t let anyone spoil the ending! Even if they do, there’s still plenty of 1980s video-horror fun to be had by soaking in all the aerobics, overly teased hair, cordless phones with antennas and so so so much leather. —Rod Lott

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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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