“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

Don’t get it at Amazon.

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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Die. —Rod Lott

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Not to be confused with Tobe Hooper’s 2000 creature feature of the same name, the 1979 Crocodile is a Filipino export that never would have seen these shores, if not for the monster success of Jaws prompting every huckster with access to a camera to cash in quickly. It’s all your fault, Mr. Spielberg.

Swiped from the Godzilla template (right down to the atomic-testing angle), the wafer of a story has a giant crocodile wreaking havoc as it flattens a different beach community every three days on the dot. One of its first victims is the young daughter of a doctor (Nard Poowanai), prompting the kind of personal revenge in direct opposition of the Hippocratic Oath. When sharing the screen with live humans, most of what audiences see of our reptilian villain are close-ups of a blinking eye and, rarer, close-ups of chomping jaws … with the wire that makes it work in clear view.

One character exclaims, “He destroyed an entire village as if were a toy!” (Because that’s more or less what the to-be-demolished sets are: models.) Continues the man, “Our crocodile is a mutant! By god, a mutant!”

And by god, is this film wretched! Testing the definition of “watchable,” director Sompote Sands (Magic Lizard) mattress-pads the running time with so many emergency sirens, so many typhoons, so many upturned docks, so much context-challenged stock footage and not enough of the extras who clearly have filled their cheeks with stage blood, ready to spit it out when told. Lord knows shameless producers Dick Randall (Pieces) and Herman Cohen (The Headless Ghost) had their hands in some real turds throughout their careers, but Crocodile — their only project together — is a mile-high Pinoy pile of it. —Rod Lott

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