One week after prom, the school year is over and three girlfriends decide to celebrate with a slumber party … The Last Slumber Party, if the scrubs-wearing maniac with surgical scalpel and frontal lobotomy has anything to say about it. (He so does.)

Despite strict parents who oppose boys and booze, Izod-clad good girl Linda (Joann Whitley) hosts the party for her two bitchy, sexually active friends who don’t seem all that friendly toward her: Tracy (Nancy Meyer) and Chris (Jan Jensen). You can tell these two apart because Tracy is blonde, while Chris is the redhead consistently grinding out the gay slurs — “faggot,” “homos” and “queerbait” being among her go-tos. In the less-PC 1980s, that kind of talk was standard vocab among young people, delivered without dripping in prejudice marinade; I believe this was the case here, too, since the shot-on-video movie is boneheaded in so many other departments as well.

Even lines lacking dirty talk remain crouched in dumbness, from “I’m going to the kitchen to munch out” and the twice-spoken “Let’s go rustle up some men folk” to the coup de grâce worth the price of admission, when Chris whines to someone on the other end of the phone line, “Who’d the hell you think it was, Shelley Hack?” That’s my pick for the most unquotable quotable line in a Z-grade movie, and trust me: Reading it is not the same thing as experiencing it. And this movie is an experience — granted, an experience for which most haven’t the fortitude, but that’s their problem.

Shot in the Louisiana suburbs by writer/director Stephen Tyler (who also plays the mute maniac and is not to be confused with Aerosmith walking corpse Steven Tyler), this 99 Cents Only Stores version of The Slumber Party Massacre feels less like a slasher movie and more like a loosely strung-together collection of its characters climbing in and out of the window of Linda’s room (notable for its Sesame Street poster) and/or walking up and down the stairs. The many scenes shot in that garishly wallpapered stairwell and adjoining hallway are so underlit and overgrained, you’d expect Andy Milligan to earn a credit as guest director. Tyler sure shares and exercises Milligan’s grasp on tension, which is to say one slathered in Astroglide. Fittingly, the monotonous score sounds as if Tyler’s cat walked across a synth and managed to hit “record.”

Actually, the whole of The Last Slumber Party reeks of that, down to its sudden, nonsensical ending. And more power to it. —Rod Lott

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Six crazed murderers enter a popular Halloween-night haunt. Next to no one exits. And that, ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages, is what we call The Funhouse Massacre.

Led by the charismatic cult leader Uncle Manny (Jere Burns, Otis) and his dead-sexy paramour, the Harley Quinn-styled Dollface (model Candice De Visser, making a memorable and assured screen debut), this very dirty half-dozen of Statesville Mental Hospital escapees is drawn to the bloody attraction because its various themed rooms depict the devious crimes that got them committed in the first place.

For example, Animal the Cannibal (E.E. Bell, Herbie Fully Loaded) is a chef who cooks with human ingredients; Dr. Suave (Sebastian Siegel, Risk for Honor) specializes in dentistry that flies in the face of the Hippocratic oath; the Taxidermist (Clint Howard, because duh) is “sew” good with skin, but we’re not talking animals; and Rocco the Clown (Mars Crain, Hancock) has a penchant for … well, as the old saying goes, if you can’t put a smile on their face, tear off the face.

Because the haunt is inspired by the loons’ infamous handiwork, they fit right in. A running joke of the film by Andy Palmer (Alien Strain) is that the crowds think them to be part of the plan. (Okay, so it’s not a good running joke.) It’s only after grisly slayings occur among their group that visitors take notice, that amusement is usurped by bemusement.

Funhouse’s flavoring? The 1980s — very, very ’80s. If you’re not going to be original, there are worse things from which to take inspiration. In his first feature as a screenwriter, The Hungover Games actor Ben Begley (who also fills the comic-relief role of the genre’s requisite bumbling deputy) clearly displays a soft spot for that era’s horror icons à la Freddy Krueger — not for nothing does Robert Englund cameo in the prologue — and in particular their more humor-driven misadventures, where the metaphorical stakes mattered little compared to the physical stakes … or any implement that was sharp, serrated and/or pointed. The balance between this Massacre’s light tone and heavy bloodletting works pretty well. Its effervescence just runs out of bubbles before Palmer and pals officially are done. —Rod Lott

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“Something smells,” we hear no more than five minutes into Don’t Go in the Woods. “What’s that stink?” The piece-of-shit indie slasher is the answer to its own question.

Roughly 25 minutes later, we hear, “I wonder if something’s happened.” I’ll handle this one, movie: “Barely a thing.”

An obvious ploy by talent-challenged director James Bryan (The Executioner Part II) to trick Friday the 13th fans, Woods throws a bunch of asshole campers (or camping assholes, if you prefer) into the Utah wilderness. Among them are our eventual heroes, Ingrid (Mary Gail Artz) and Peter (Jack McClelland); since they both look like men, it is possible to tell them apart because Peter is wearing a pink T-shirt advertising Boogie Vision, a Bryan project that is somehow way worse than this one. (Aside: Boogie Vision is supposed to be funny, yet isn’t, whereas Woods is not supposed to be funny, yet is.)

It hardly matters who’s who, except for the antisocial antagonist who will be narrowing that list to as close to zero as he can get. Per the credits, that freak of nature is Maniac (Tom Drury), a mute mountain man who lives in a booby-trapped hoarder cabin and looks like awards-show banter writer Bruce Vilanch doing Mad Max cosplay after stopping by the crafts fair for beads. He grunts softly and carries a big stick with a pointy blade and a coonskin cap on its stabbing end. No one is safe — not the photographer in the pink beret, not the ’bout-to-boink newlyweds in the VW Bus with the Farrah Fawcett-Majors poster in its ceiling, and especially not the wheelchair-bound guy out for a … what, a rolling jaunt through the mountains and all its rough and uneven terrain?

Amateur actors utter their lines with blundering pauses … as if … they’re reading … from … cue cards. Doing that is well within the realm of possibility, since Bryan shot almost all of Don’t Go in the Woods in that fright-killer you and I and every moviegoer we know call broad friggin’ daylight. —Rod Lott

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Following the sleeper success of such slashers as Black Christmas, Halloween and Friday the 13th, the 1980s imitators leapt to claim whatever boxes were left on the calendar, resulting in New Year’s Evil, My Bloody Valentine, April Fool’s Day, Happy Birthday to Me, Graduation Day, etc.

This dash to co-op every conceivable festivity was so pervasive, Mad magazine spoofed this subgenre with a 1981 all-in-one parody titled Arbor Day; I’m half-surprised it remained up for grabs. I’m also half-surprised that the horror anthology Holidays wasn’t able to make room for that tree-commemorating celebration among the tales that do comprise this fun film. Nine more or less indie directors participate, and while crazed killers aren’t necessarily their subjects, a year of fear is covered nonetheless.

For the first segment, “Valentine’s Day,” Starry Eyes co-directors Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer provide an EC Comics twist to its story of a lovestruck high school outcast (newcomer Madeleine Coghlan). Affairs of the heart also go under the microscope in Some Kind of Hate helmer Adam Egypt Mortimer’s closer, “New Year’s Eve,” set in the lonely, cruel world of online dating. Suspend your disbelief that a young woman as cute as Lorenza Izzo (The Green Inferno) would have trouble finding someone with whom to hit the town.

Three tales depend on technology, assuming one still views the Walkman as such. That’s what Jocelin Donahue (The House of the Devil) dons in order to follow a cassette tape of mysterious instructions left to her decades before by her dad (Tremors’ Michael Gross), in the haunting “Father’s Day,” from visual effects artist Anthony Scott Burns (The Last Exorcism Part II). Meanwhile, post-Tusk, Kevin Smith again dips his feet in shits-and-giggles gore as webcam sex workers (one of whom is played by his own daughter, Harley Quinn Smith) plot pimp revenge for “Halloween.” In the darkly comedic “Christmas,” from Dark Skies’ Scott Stewart, a harried suburban dad (Seth Green, TV’s Robot Chicken) goes to extreme lengths to acquire the hottest gadget of the season.

More memorable is a pair of segments on motherhood. In Dracula Untold director Gary Shore’s “St. Patrick’s Day,” a single teacher (Ruth Bradley, Grabbers) is baby-hungry to a disturbing fault. On the flip side, the woman at the heart of “Mother’s Day” (co-directed by The Midnight Swim’s Sarah Adina Smith and first-timer Ellen Reid) gets pregnant every time she has sex. Finally, for sheer fright, look no further than the Jesus Bunny, who/which terrorizes “Easter” in the short shocker from The Pact’s Nicholas McCarthy.

Each segment’s title is rendered via original, illustrated greeting cards — when you care enough to send the very beast. —Rod Lott

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Fleeing an unhealthy relationship, Greta (a pretty but perfunctory Lauren Cohan, TV’s The Walking Dead) takes a babysitting job overseas in jolly old England. An older couple, the Heelshires (played by Diana Hardcastle of Good People and Jim Norton of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs), are overdue for a much-needed holiday and need her to watch their young son, Brahms.

And oh, he’s such a doll — an actual, literal, life-sized doll they treat as flesh and blood, despite its creepy face. Rather than hightail it with an “Um, I think I left my socks in the States, BRB,” Greta stays — an admirable work ethic for a millennial, if also ragingly stupid.

More Michael Myers in visage than Mortimer Snerd, Brahms is “playful,” according to Mrs. Heelshire, which is quite the euphemism for “homicidal.” Nevertheless, Greta tends to her to-do list of daily duties with Brahms, from waking him at a precise time and reading him poetry to tucking him in bed with a goodnight kiss. (Insert your own wood joke here.) Not on the Heelshires’ numbered, typed tally: second-guessing every strange sound heard or unusual flash caught by peripheral vision in the Heelshires’ palatial estate — two things on which our au pair understandably spends an excessive amount of time.

Overcoming its thought-free title, The Boy exceeds expectations, as long as they’re set on low. After all, it is the work of William Brent Bell, director of the much-loathed The Devil Inside. Here, he toils not in the gutter of found footage, but the Gothic governess ghost story, except this modern update … well, I’ll never tell. I will say that the movie has more going on than first appears, especially for PG-13 studio fare, and that the built-in creepiness of Brahms boils to a twist that, while may not be dictionary-definition original, at least qualifies as unexpected. When’s the last time that adjective applied to mainstream horror with a teen-friendly rating? —Rod Lott

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