What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas — you just gotta get there first. Tell that to the terrified trio of showgirls who find themselves cast in a Terror Circus when their crappy car blows a radiator and breaks down on a rural route frequented only by tumbleweeds.

The interchangeable ladies (played by Buckskin’s Manuela Thiess, Sisters of Death’s Sherry Alberoni and Warlock’s Gyl Roland) are pleased to accept a ride from total stranger Andre (Andrew Prine, Eliminators) … until they realize they’re then trapped. In fact, they’re the latest additions to Andre’s ever-expanding menagerie of “my little bears”: women he keeps chained up in his Barn of the Naked Dead (one of the movie’s alternate titles, with Nightmare Circus being another). Justifies one of the comely captives, “He had nice eyes.”

Guess what, gang? Andre’s got mommy issues. As a self-appointed ringmaster, Andre dons a top hat, takes whip in hand and works the women over, toward his goal of building a “trained animal act.” And if the ladies don’t obey his orders? Easy: Those deemed “untrainable” are let loose in the field to play tag with his not-so-trained cougar. Me-OW!

Prine’s antagonist is perhaps even more wacko than his serial killer of The Centerfold Girls; regardless, his portrayal is just as committed (no pun intended). As if you needed telling, Terror Circus is not in the greatest of taste, then or now, yet it actually has more in store for viewers than first glance. The most interesting thing about it would be the deformed cannibal freak (wearing a wedding ring!) whom Andre keeps in the shed, if not for the fact that the film is directed by Robert Altman protégé Alan Rudolph (Breakfast of Champions), who — according to reportage in 2013’s Forgotten Horrors to the Nth Degree by Michael H. Price and John Wooley — not only disowns it, but denies involvement entirely. Nice try, Alan! He should be proud that his Circus takes an end turn in defiance of both genre beats and audience expectations. —Rod Lott

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Translating to “barbarous Mexico,” the anthology film Mexico Barbaro is built upon ocho segments from as many directors, who largely draw upon the country’s urban legends and folklore to deliver its south-of-the-border scares. No one tell Donald Trump that a fraction of them are frightening, lest the dude propose something crazy like building a wall to keep this stuff out of our country!

Right in the middle of these hateful eight tales perch Barbaro’s two strongest, coincidentally presented consecutively: “Drain” and “That Precious Thing.” In the former, a young woman is commanded by a demon to “drain the blood from your sister’s vagina” within a 12-hour deadline or “I’ll suck your soul through your anus!” (In my country, we call that “motivation.”) Although it sounds silly, the story elicits a serious case of the creeps.

Conversely, the latter of the two sounds scary, yet reveals itself as funny instead, as two lovestruck teens renting a remote cabin in the woods for the express purpose of ditching virginity find their cherry-poppin’ efforts thwarted by a pustule-ridden creature. (In my country, we call that “blue balls.”)

With Jorge Michel Grau (2010’s cannibal family saga, We Are What We Are) as the lone “name” among the otherwise unknown filmmakers, the remaining six pieces involve such elements as scar-faced prostitutes, boiled doll heads, a morgue and a haunted mansion. Half of them qualify as clunkers, yet the movie — more of a shorts showcase than a binding whole — ends with just enough good to recommend taking the trip. Besides, it won’t take as long as you’d anticipate; although tagged with a running time just shy of two hours, the final 15 minutes are consumed by the end credits — practically a segment in itself. —Rod Lott

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As far as I know, Eli Roth’s long-on-the-shelf The Green Inferno is the lone 2015 theatrical release to utilize the threat of female genital mutilation as a subplot. Then again, I could be wrong — I still haven’t seen Minions.

Incensed over learning of the barbaric, Third World practice during a class lecture, petulant freshman college student Justine (Roth’s wife, Lorenza Izzo, Knock Knock) joins the campus activist group in order to Change the World, starting with the Amazon rainforest. (“Activism’s so freakin’ gay,” protests her roomie, an emo-pessimist played by singer Sky Ferreira.) Seeing as how good intentions pave the road to hell, the well-meaning Americans’ rickety, Buddy Holly model of a plane crashes in the jungle — one that plays home to a primitive tribe of cannibals. The few survivors are rounded up, caged in bamboo and await mealtime.

Collegians: It’s what for dinner.

From massive diarrhea to brutal dismemberment, Roth spares his cast — and, thus, the viewer — no humiliation, discomfort or pain-wracked demise, as anyone who has witnessed his Hostel saga knows all too well. Roth takes a lot of crap for reveling in the revolting, yet his films are about more than that and that alone — something that can’t be stated about most of today’s horror. Inferno, in particular, burns bright as an extreme, not-for-most experience that is legitimately disturbing, grimly humorous and frightening to consider — exactly upon which Roth counts. (Hell, I get travel anxiety just visiting Texas.) Only the CGI ants fall short of achieving the visceral reaction he doggedly works toward.

Otherwise, this film feels like one that I should not be watching. I felt the same about “bites” of the fabled Italian cannibal gross-out epics I manage to sample as a teenager — movies Roth is paying tribute to with transparence, so he can take that as a compliment. Lest there is any question about his objective, the end credits provide a veritable RIYL list of the subgenre’s sickest and most notorious offerings. Of considerably less use, those credits include the Twitter handles of cast and crew members, perhaps just to satisfy the gullible in proving the people they saw gutted onscreen are very much among the living. —Rod Lott

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In Shriek of the Mutilated, one of the few films in which director Michael Findlay does not indulge his psychosexual kinks, college professor Dr. Prell (Alan Brock) takes four of his students on a field trip to Boot Island, in hopes of finding and capturing a yeti. Seven years earlier, a similar sojourn ended in tragedy, but in the immortal words of the great philosopher Shoeshine Boy, aka Underdog, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

Their mission’s HQ is the home of Prell’s fellow academic, Dr. Werner (Tawm Ellis), who employs a mute and “harmless old buzzard” American Indian, Laughing Crow (Ivan Agar, 1968’s Behind Locked Doors), to do his bidding. (His tasks include the preparation of meals; one Laughing Crow recipe is human head stew.) With Prell barking orders, the armed students venture into the woods to rustle up a yeti; I am spoiling nothing by noting that not only do they find their prey, but become the prey.

Shriek will make you do just that, with the kind of delight only offered by the well-meaning Bs. While I’m not sure what was up with the decapitation prologue since it has no bearing on the film that follows, Findlay lucked into an actual story — not his usual playing field — but it’s still rife with goofiness. For example, scored by Hot Butter’s novelty hit “Popcorn,” an early party scene has Spencer (Tom Grail), a survivor of Prell’s previous yeti hunt, flip the fuck out when he learns his old prof is still obsessing over such an abominable quest. So naturally, Spencer goes home, slits the throat of his wife (Luci Brandt) and, still clothed, hops in the tub with a can of Coors. While he soaks and scrubs and burps, his not-quite-dead spouse manages to crawl into the bathroom and toss a plugged-in radio in with him. Why this sequence merits inclusion is not worth pursuing.

Anyhoo, that yeti: Despite initial camera tricks (Findlay’s wife, Roberta, handled cinematography) to keep him obscured, Shriek of the Mutilated gives viewers plenty of plain-sighted views of the creature with “a rank, foul odor,” so worry not about being gypped. (Worry plenty about amateurish performances, since few cast members have a filmography that goes beyond a credit of one.) The monster looks like Disney’s Shaggy Dog standing upright. The uncredited man within the hirsute suit is producer Ed Adlum, who co-wrote with his Invasion of the Blood Farmers partner, Ed Kelleher, and the two deserve some sort of recognition for their laughable twist ending. I mean, how often can one say it would satisfy the disparate fan bases of Martha Stewart and Herschell Gordon Lewis? —Rod Lott

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Nightmare Weekend’s making may qualify as the cinematic equivalent to the child’s party game Telephone: What you say on one end may arrive at the other in a garbled state — perhaps even mutated. In this case, a French crew attempted to make an English-language film, and on the all-American soil of Ocala, Fla. That they failed so spectacularly is exactly why you should watch their doomed enterprise.

Edward Brake (Wellington Meffert — what a name!) is a widowed scientist with 212 patents to his name, including a supercomputer and George, who operates it telepathically and from whom Edward’s hot teenage daughter (Debra Hunter) solicits love advice. George, by the way, is a talking, green-haired hand puppet. Let that soak in before advancing to the next paragraph.

Edward’s cunning business associate, Julie Clingstone (Debbie Laster, Bad Girls Dormitory), invites three college girls to the Brake estate for a weekend of research in a personality-reversal project — or so I gathered. The movie is so impossibly incoherent, it is open to the interpretation of Hermann Rorschach’s inkblots. All I know for sure is that Ms. Clingstone makes these Phantasm-sized metal balls pop up at inopportune times (coitus especially), jam themselves into people’s orifices and turn them into murderers. Again, or so I gathered, because to bear witness to Nightmare Weekend is to remain in a narrative haze. Things happen for no reason and then confound further by going without remark, like a tough guy having full-tilt sex with some skank against a pinball machine at the local bar.

That lucky sumbitch is played by Robert John Burke, who would go on to bigger, better parts, like the lead roles of Thinner and Robocop 3. In fact, Nightmare Weekend hosts an inordinate amount of future names, including Dale Midkiff of Pet Sematary, Andrea Thompson of TV’s NYPD Blue and Karen Mayo-Chandler of Jack Nicholson’s bed. On the spectrum’s opposite end, Nightmare Weekend also hosts an inordinate amount of one-and-doners who never had a credit before or after this.

Credited here as “H. Sala,” French director Henri Sala possesses a filmography littered with erotica (e.g. Emanuelle e Lolita), which could explain why so much attention is paid to writhing nude bodies, but Nightmare Weekend resists — if not defies — explanation. That very slovenliness makes it entertaining. Vive le balderdash! —Rod Lott

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