While I didn’t see Bunnyman in this fashion, it’s possible to watch nearly all of it on fast-forward and still grasp its goings-on. That’s how little happens in its 90 minutes, and how routine and simplistic what does happen is.

The villainous gimmick of this urban legend-inspired cheapie: The killer is a chainsaw-wielding man in a head-to-toe Easter Bunny outfit. That holds potential as a terrific setup … if Bunnyman were a slasher parody. Alas, it is not.

The target of the silly rabbit (Shattered Lives’ Carl Lindbergh, who also wrote, directed, produced and edited the movie — blame him!) actually numbers several: a Toyota chock-full of dimwitted millennials on a getaway. Hiding in a dump truck, Duel-style, Bunnyman first terrorizes them on the road (his truck roars like a lion) as he terrorizes you, the viewer (enough with the friggin’ horn!). Their strategy to shake him is to pull onto the shoulder and sit and wait, and that move is just as cinematically pulse-pounding as you’d expect. Did Lindbergh shoot that scene in real-time or did it just feel like it?

A bit later, Bunnyman runs one of the poor saps over, killing him. The survivors’ sorrow is awfully short-lived, as they’re soon playfully shoving one another and laughing. Finally, Bunnyman fires up his ’saw and hops down to business. You absolutely won’t care a lick either way. None of the youngsters is afforded any kind of definable personality, much less an introduction; one assumes we’re supposed to root for the Britney Spears lookalike (Cheryl Texiera, Wiener Dog Nationals) simply because she wears cutoff shorts. It’s not enough. Nothing is.

For what it’s worth — again, nothing — Bunnyman has two sequels to date: The Bunnyman Massacre and the soon-to-come Bunnyman III. I refuse to believe any demand existed beyond Lindbergh’s purview. —Rod Lott

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Of Oliver Stone’s pair of forays into the horror genre, The Hand enjoys a higher profile than 1974’s Seizure, yet is half as interesting. A comparison of the titles alone could tell you that.

Fresh from being Dressed to Kill for Brian De Palma, Michael Caine takes pen in hand to portray Jonathan Lansdale, the creator, writer and artist of a syndicated comic strip titled Mandro after its fantasy-adventure hero cast in the Alex Raymond mold. Jonathan relishes the work — for the income, naturally, but also for the vicarious outlet it provides, as his marriage to Anne (Andrea Marcovicci, Larry Cohen’s The Stuff) has curdled.

The couple is quarreling when Anne’s irresponsible driving results in an accident that causes her hubby’s moneymaker — his right hand — to pop off like a zit that has ripened to a head. While shot convincingly — which is to say gruesomely — in order to make viewers gasp and wince, Jonathan’s appendage assassination becomes peculiarly comedic in a wordless scene soon after that sees Anne and two policemen searching a nearby field for the poor man’s errant mitt (and, in a metaphoric sense, his entire career). Whether Stone intended those few seconds as a joke is unclear, at least in this early stage of his filmography; the mocking, sensory-overload satire of Natural Born Killers was more than a dozen years away.

For the rest of the film, Jonathan is haunted by his disembodied hand. There’s no question these scenes were meant to unsettle and induce shivers in audiences of 1981, just as there’s no question these scenes are laughable today. From a shower handle morphing into an outstretched hand and a pornographic drawing that couldn’t have been his, um, handiwork — or could it? — to suspicious choking murders, our protagonist can’t escape the five fingers of death. By the end, Caine has so committed to the craziness of the piece, he resembles Marty Feldman.

In making the “artistic” choice to shoot the more surreal passages on black-and-white stock, Stone can’t resist squandering the anxiety he worked toward in his direction and script (based on Marc Brandel’s novel). Once the picture drains of color, the surprise factor follows in lockstep. Notable only for seeing a pre-Platoon Stone at work, The Hand is rather pointless. It’s certainly scareless, being an A-list update of such third-finger junk as The Crawling Hand. —Rod Lott

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Following the unintentional “Garbage day!” greatness of the first sequel, the killer-Claus franchise continues its slay ride with Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! (exclamation point theirs). The most notable thing about it is its trio of future David Lynch players: Mulholland Dr.’s Laura Harring and Twin Peaks’ Richard Beymer and Eric Da Re. It’s more fun to imagine Lynch watching this than to do so yourself. Furthermore, you’re better off watching The Terror, the 1963 Roger Corman mishmash that appears on the tube a couple of times.

Ricky Caldwell, the head case-cum-homicidal Kris Kringle, is played this time by genre fave Bill Moseley (The Devil’s Rejects). Instead of rocking the Santa suit throughout, he’s most often clad in a hospital gown and something like a spaghetti colander over his otherwise exposed brain. That’s because Ricky, shot to shreds by the police at the end of Part 2, has been revived six years later as part of sketchy research that brain scientist Dr. Newbury (Beymer) is conducting among the comatose. Despite his vegetative state, Ricky has acquired psychic abilities, which he uses to link up with Laura (Samantha Scully, Best of the Best), a young woman with no eyesight and a rather sour ’tude.

Vis-à-vis the ESP, Ricky repeatedly gives Laura a graphic heads-up of the murders to befall the supporting characters, yet you’d hardly know it since she and her upturned nose just go about their snooty business and, hey, it’s Christmas Eve, dammit. She and her brother, Chris (Da Re) are going to Grandmother’s house for the holiday, and he’s brought along his new girlfriend, Jerri (Harring), whom Laura immediately dislikes. To be fair, Jerri doesn’t help matters with the icebreaker, “So, tell me, how long have you been handicapped?” (Chris is only slightly less crude when he addresses his sister: “Who said you have to be the world’s champion blind orphan?”) Inevitably, Ricky follows them with intent to harm … but only after Harring’s equally inevitable disrobing.

The Better Watch Out! subtitle could double as a harbinger of the damage done to Monte Hellman’s career. How does one go from a counterculture cult classic (Two-Lane Blacktop) to a cheaper-than-Corman VHS premiere like this? (Don’t answer — we know Warren Oates had a hand.) For having a “name” (in certain circles) behind the camera, Silent Night, Deadly Night III has nothing to show for it; the work he presents is as clod-ridden and humdrum as his not-famous predecessors. At least one would think Hellman would have the good sense to end the film any other way than to plop Moseley into a tux and superimpose an image of him turning to the viewer to offer a smile and five words: “And a Happy New Year.” —Rod Lott

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WWE Studios’ first theatrical picture not to star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, See No Evil casts wrestler Kane as Jacob Goodnight. He’s the strong, silent type — as in simple-minded and mute and fond of torturing sinners, most of whom are teenagers. Four years after surviving a bullet in the brain put there by a cop — whose arm he then severed — Goodnight resides in the hidden hallways of an abandoned hotel.

There, the man society would never understand (partly due to the hole in his head buzzing with live flies) can retreat and be left alone … except for the weekend when eight juvenile delinquents (Transformers’ Rachael Taylor among them) are brought in to spruce it up for a homeless shelter. It’s all part of a community-service program overseen by that cop (Steven Vidler, The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course), now retired from the street beat, yet still without two working limbs up top. Regardless of shared history, Goodnight doesn’t see eye-to-eye with visitors … mostly because his hobby is squeezing out said peepers and showcasing them in jars.

Usually in horror movies, the bad guy’s pool of victims includes one each of all types — y’know, the nerd, the jock, the slut, the black one, etc. — but in See No Evil, they all pretty much fill the “troubled kid” slot. Goodnight is eager to use his knowledge of the hotel’s secret passageways to his advantage: spying on these well-scrubbed JD teens from behind two-way mirrors; popping out of elevators and dumbwaiters like a trapdoor spider; capturing them via hooked chains, which he wields with Olympics-worthy precision.

As slashers go, this one is nastier than most, despite opening titles that scream “made-for-TV.” (It wasn’t.) Kane exudes appropriate menace, no doubt helped by not having to speak. Nihilism spurts and gushes throughout — an uneasy feeling accentuated by the dingy, sweat-stained veneer favored by director Gregory Dark, here graduating to studio fare after a long career in porn (New Wave Hookers), would-be porn (the Animal Instincts trilogy) and may-as-well-be porn (Britney Spears videos).

Stick through the end credits for the stinger of the “deceased” Goodnight (who managed to return in 2014’s slicker, not-quite-sicker See No Evil 2) getting his face pissed on by a lifted-leg dog. Let’s see you try that, Marvel! —Rod Lott

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Our world is divided into two types of people: those who love White Christmas and those who prefer Black Christmas. ’Tis the latter group to which Flick Attack claims lifetime membership and for whom A Christmas Horror Story is made. Gifted by directors Grant Harvey, Steven Hoban and Brett Sullivan — all of whom had a paw in the Ginger Snaps franchise — the Canadian anthology jumps between four interwoven yuletide tales taking place on Christmas Eve, almost entirely in the quaint town of Bailey Downs.

Some curious students break into their high school in order to shoot a documentary about the grisly, ritualistic slayings of two schoolmates the year prior. A down-to-earth family of three drives into the wild to cut down a Christmas tree and, having trespassed on private property, ends up taking home something entirely unintended. A greedy family of four makes a trek to visit a wealthy relative and accidentally unleashes Krampus (Rob Archer, Bulletproof Monk). And finally, Santa Claus (George Buza, Diary of the Dead) switches from sleigh mode to slay mode when his elves succumb to an ill-timed zombie virus.

Serving as a loose wraparound, Star Trek’s William Shatner spins holiday tunes and comments on Bailey Downs’ goings-on as Dangerous Dan, the radio station’s night-shift DJ. While Shatner is present for pure merriment and a healthy sense of humor permeates the entire affair, A Christmas Horror Story is no winking joke, as Harvey, Hoban and Sullivan work hard to stuff this stocking with heaps of the creeps. Moving between its multiple storylines as deftly as Doug Liman’s Go, the film generates goodwill in its energetic depictions of naughty-list acts. A pair of solid scares and a purposely discomforting encounter pop up on the way toward a big twist as surprising as it is disturbing.

You better watch out for it and I’m telling you why: It’s a ton of fun. —Rod Lott

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