What’s an upstanding British chap like Mark Baines (Roy Jenson, Soylent Green) doing in a place like Guanajuato, Mexico? To strike it rich through plundered oil! But when the superstitious locals he’s hired refuse to enter the mine in question, he goes in himself, with wife Jennifer (Samantha Eggar, The Uncanny) in tow. Inside, they find dusty mummies and a hidden slide that deposits its unsuspecting riders into Satan’s chamber, where a 300-year-old hand is swiped as some sort of prize — the archaeological equivalent to finding a plastic kazoo in a cereal box.

The Baineses know they’ve found something special; what they don’t know is that the crispy claw has a mind of its own. However, unlike the Addams Family member named Thing or yesteryear’s animated Yellow Pages logo, the Guanajuato hand is neither nimble nor evolved enough to run along its fingers. What it lacks in speed, it makes up for in slaughter. Ergo, Demonoid, Alfredo Zacarías’ follow-up to 1978’s The Bees.

For phalanges-based horror, Demonoid is markedly better than Oliver Stone’s The Hand, which came out the same year. Both films involve a disembodied mitt killing people, but only Zacarías’ picture can boast Stuart Whitman (Guyana: Cult of the Damned) co-starring as a priest. Trust me: Watching a panicked Whitman stumble about the room with a supernatural paw clutching his face is Something to See. (Perhaps those of you with the DTs have seen it before.)

The swift, schlock shocker is Eggar’s show and she goes to town with it like an ol’ pro. Never is this more apparent than the real sour apple of a surprise ending. I’m sure she felt like a idiot doing it — and a dumber one when she watched the dailies — but Eggar sells it, making that final scene truly memorable, even if the whole of Demonoid is so, so not. Folks, let’s give her a big … well, you fill in the blank. —Rod Lott

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Following his 1964 breakthrough, At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul, and its ’67 sequel, This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse, José Mojica Marins tried a different approach with his alter ego of Coffin Joe: hosting his own anthology film. Hey, even international horror icons have their off days.

The Strange World of Coffin Joe is indeed strange, but good? Not at all; it’s black and white and bored all over. For viewers still holding minor interest, precious little point exists venturing past the first story, “The Dollmaker.” Its title character is a kindly old man who crafts lifelike dolls, with the assistance of his four lovely daughters, all “of age” and yet sharing a bedroom. Conveniently, four drunks hungry for money and sex interrupt their night of slumber, until … well, you’re not stupid.

Although the middle segment, “Obsession,” represents a leap up in the grotesque, it also marks a step down in quality. A hunchbacked balloon salesman is smitten with a young woman named Tara; he delights in the time gazing longingly at her from afar. After shopping one day, she fails to realize she has dropped a package on the sidewalk — a fact not unnoticed by him, who can use it as his one-shot ticket into her good graces. Alas, that opportunity never comes, because Tara is stabbed fatally at her own wedding! But death isn’t about to stop the lonely balloon man’s hormones. Points awarded to “Obsession” for artistic touch (it’s wordless) are sacked for a languid, half-speed pace.

In the closing “Ideology,” Marins casts himself — not as Coffin Joe, but Oãxiac Odéz, a professor who posits to his guests that love does not exist. He then backs up his suspect theory with solid evidence: a variety show of torture, sadism and other debaucherous acts, like a guy sticking pins into another guy, all while a girl licks the first guy’s bloody eye. Ah, yes, it all makes sense, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it? —Rod Lott

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If my best friend dared to wear a fall-foliage shirt around me, I might be so inclined to murder him, too. In Tim Ritter’s gore-rific Killing Spree, however, at least Tom Russo has a few more compelling reasons on top of that.

The lanky, wild-eyed Tom (Asbestos Felt, Girls Gone Dead) has a cute and sexy wife in Leeza (Courtney Lercara, Slaughterhouse), a former stewardess who now stays at home. But Tom also has an inability to let go of the past — specifically, the pain lingering from being cheated upon in his first marriage; therefore, he’s paranoid over what — or whom — Leeza does while he toils away at his blue-collar job.

When he finds written evidence that Leeza laid his closest pal, Ben (Raymond Carbone, Ritter’s Truth or Dare?: A Critical Madness), despite the guy being grossly overweight, old enough to be her grandfather and all-around repellent, Tom loses his shit. And I mean loses it. Okay, so maybe the 40% pay cut at work is partly to blame, but pissed is pissed, so Tom wreaks vengeance on Ben … but only after separating the head of Ben’s new teen girlfriend (fellow Truth or Dare alum Rachel Rutz) from her torso and tossing it his way.

While that should put an end to things, alas, it’s only a warm-up. Tom keeps finding new diary entries: the electrician who came to fix the ceiling fan, the TV repairman who knows karate, the Mexican drapery deliveryman, the dopey lawn-care dude in the Pretenders tour T. At one point, our hero hilariously freaks out by screaming what we’re all thinking: “Why is she writing all of this down?”

Infidelity is a bell that can’t be unrung, and as Tom grows more and more unhinged and untethered from reality, Felt takes his character gloriously over the top, back ’round the planet, and over the top once more. As the man’s name conveys, Felt is something else; he devotes his all — novelty thong included — to the part. Without him, Killing Spree still might be a hoot to watch, but that’s an alternative I don’t wish to picture. When Tom goes into cuckoo-cuckold mode, Ritter assists his leading oddball with the simplest and cheapest of special effects for 16mm film: flipping the switch of the red lightbulb to saturate the room. It’s like the True Value version of the Dario Argento gel.

It’s also a fine example of Ritter doing what he can with what one assumes was a sack of spare change saved from a month’s worth of cigarette runs to the Circle K. Although transparently cheap as Bazooka Joe bubble gum — and even less nutritious — the direct-to-VHS Killing Spree is never not deliriously, deviously and devilishly entertaining. —Rod Lott

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As part of their honeymoon, Dr. John Beck (Stewart Moss, Raise the Titanic) and Cathy (Marianne McAndrew, Russ Meyer’s The Seven Minutes) tour the Carlsbad Caverns. Itching for a quickie, Cathy breaks away from the group to look for a humping spot … and proceeds to tumble into a crevice full of creepy-crawlies. Being a he-man hubby, John leaps to her rescue, but in doing so is bitten by a bat.

You know what happens next, yet you will watch The Bat People regardless. (Directed by Airport ’77’s Jerry Jameson, the film is known alternately as It Lives by Night.)

Allow me to spell out the obvious: John starts turning into a man-bat. The first thing that something is awry is when his eyes roll back in his head before hitting the ski slopes, and he shakes violently. Thanks to the facial tic, it looks like an uncontrollable orgasm every time it happens … and it happens a lot across 91 minutes: at the hospital, in a hot tub, while fleeing the police — you name it. Eventually, hairy hands give way to a full transformation into the titular (but singular) creature, which looks less like a bat and more like a Planet of the Apes denizen confined to the short bus. Adding insult to injury is that the changed doc likes to slaughter people — you know, like real bats do.

Michael Pataki (Dracula’s Dog) co-stars as a perverted sheriff who’s on to Mr. Beck’s crime spree, but really just wants to get into Mrs. Beck’s silky britches. Interestingly, Moss and McAndrew were married in real life, and their union remains unbroken today; not even this AIP stinker could kill it. Actually, for all its chintziness, The Bat People sent one career soaring: that of Stan Winston, here (in his first feature) credited as “Stanley” and eventually the Oscar-winning effects artist of Jurassic Park, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Aliens and other movies that illustrate he clearly got better (as did the gigs). —Rod Lott

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Two years after the events of the first film (yet only one year after the release of that hit horror remake), The Hills Have Eyes II sends a squad of U.S. Army National Guard trainees back into Sector 16, that stretch of desolate desert where the wild things are. In this case, “wild things” refer to the inbred family of radiation-mutated hillbillies who live in the mountain caves, yet kill largely out in the open.

Working from a script from Wes Craven (director of the 1977 original and its 1984 sequel) and son Jonathan Craven (Mind Ripper), Martin Weisz (Grimm Love) makes the movie look like it belongs to Hills 2006, yet doesn’t do quite the same thing, which would have been easier … and lazier. Instead, he ups the ante of gore and general discomfort, opening with a scene certain to have cleared its theater audiences of noncommittals, as a newborn who is clearly a product of mutant rape slimes its way out of the bloody orifice of a nude, bound blonde (Cécile Breccia, Starship Troopers 3: Marauder).

Competing with that most unconventional home birth for sickest scene are a forced French kiss from Pustule Man, a sledgehammer to the scrotum and, involving our likable-enough protagonists (Banshee Chapter’s Michael McMillian and the Prom Night remake’s Jessica Stroup), a port-a-potty surprise! The details of each, I leave for you to discover. That’s not to say every move Weisz and the Cravens made was a good one; no matter their intention, having one of the deformed cannibal clan members assisting the American soldiers smacks of Sloth in The Goonies: greasy kids’ stuff perfectly at home in PG family fare … and wildly out of place for hard-R horror.

Nothing in these Hills distinguishes itself from being a Wrong Turn sequel (to name-check another blood-drenched 20th Century Fox franchise). Not when one of the redneck mutants machetes an arm off a good guy hanging from a cliff, then uses that lopped-off limb to wave at the G.I. falling to his death. I get it. —Rod Lott

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