Rest easy, 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man: No longer are you the most needless remake/reboot in cinema history. You’ve been usurped by the squishy new version of Cabin Fever.

I get that when Eli Roth’s original infected the mainstream in 2002, members of the new movie’s target audience were still voiding into Pull-Ups, but that first film hasn’t aged; it’s not like it has become irrelevant to the point of unwatchable. I’m on the record as an all-in fan of Roth’s breakthrough project, yet I approached this clone by Scavengers’ Travis Zariwny with curiosity trumping trepidation.

Like damn near everything in it, the story remains the same: Five 20-somethings on vacation in the woods become most unhappy campers when a killer virus infiltrates the local yokels’ water supply and spreads like creamy peanut butter. Except for an end-credit stinger that makes no sense, Zariwny’s additions are minute and of no consequence: selfies, hip-hop tunes, references to gamer culture, upgraded firearms, more explicit couplings and gorier renditions of the original’s most notorious pair of gross-outs: the shaving and the fingering scenes.

The biggest departure is the gender flip of supporting character Deputy Winston; whereas Detroit Rock City’s Giuseppe Andrews was a hoot in the 2002 role, Louise Linton (The Echo) is stunningly awful. Even with the same dialogue, she’s not the least bit funny. Overall, the movie’s loss of Roth’s perverse humor proves its biggest drawback; here, a vomited geyser of blood is no longer a punchline.

At least Zariwny solves the mystery of the meaning behind “Pancakes!” and throws in an audiovisual tip of the hat to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining — neither enough to warrant a recommendation. The new Cabin Fever is not a bad film; it can be enjoyed. It’s just wholly unwarranted. Why choose it when Roth’s movie is still alive and kicking? There’s a word that encapsulates the entire endeavor: Why? —Rod Lott

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Forget that whole Armageddon thing from the close of The Omen series’ third chapter, 1981’s not-final Final Conflict. Ten years later, 20th Century Fox dropped an enjoyable bundle of trash named Omen IV: The Awakening at America’s collective front porch, rang the doorbell and bolted to hide behind the neighbor’s bushes and snicker.

Antichrist politician (redundant) Damien Thorn is long dead, but the British telly reporter he had mad, bruising sex with in The Final Conflict was impregnated with his demon seed. The result is a baby girl whom Catholic nuns are more than eager to push into the arms of doting adoptive parents (doting optional), what with “666” embossed on the hater tot’s palm. As the York family, Faye Grant (Internal Affairs) and some guy with feathered hair (Michael Woods, TV’s NightMan) essay those roles, and … well, they’re not particularly giving it their all. If the word “shrill” didn’t exist, it would have to be invented for Grant’s performance.

Delia, the second-generation Antichrist, is played in grade-school form by Asia Vieira (TV’s FlashForward). See if you can spot her mustache.

This Delia girl is one mean little bitch, tormenting a fat kid in her class before moving on to meatier targets, like her psychic-obsessed nanny, whom she forces out of a second-story window and onto a merry-go-round below. Delia also uses her satanic powers to cause a nosy P.I. (Michael Lerner, Barton Fink) to meet an untimely fate in the form of a swinging wrecking ball. There’s another decapitation, too, but it pales next to David Warner’s from the original Omen, probably because this so-called Awakening was made IV the Fox network (but released theatrically overseas). It was directed by two guys, Turbulence 3’s Jorge Montesi and Halloween 5’s Dominique Othenin-Girard, which should explain everything. —Rod Lott

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Turns out Tourist Trap was a test run of sorts for director David Schmoeller in the Shit That Should Not Move horror subgenre. Having made that low-budget chiller and its mannequins so effective in 1979 for producer Charles Band, Schmoeller earned himself the gig of helming Full Moon’s flagship, Puppetmaster, which has served as Band’s bread and butter ever since, for better and often worse.

Set at the Bodega Bay Inn, this inaugural entry in the Puppet Master series (two words beginning with the first sequel) isn’t so bad. In a 1939 prologue, puppet creator Andre Toulon (William Hickey, Tales from the Darkside: The Movie) already has discovered an ancient Egyptian method of giving life to the inanimate. As the Nazis come charging in his room to swipe his secret, Toulon bites a bullet, ensuring it stays out of the Führer’s hands. Fifty years later, a select few people gifted with extrasensory powers are summoned to the inn at the behest of colleague Neil Gallagher (Jimmie F. Skaggs, 1988’s Ghost Town) who has unlocked Toulon’s secret … and since committed suicide.

Gallagher’s cohorts stick around to collectively figure out, y’know, what the hap. They include an anthropology professor (Paul Le Mat, Strange Invaders) with midtransformed-wolfman hair and dreams of things to come; a fortune teller (Irene Miracle, Dario Argento’s Inferno) who carries a stuffed dog; and, most hilariously, a scalding-hot psychic (Kathryn O’Reilly, Jack’s Back) who experiences the past of her surroundings. Seriously, she steps in the elevator and senses a rape; she plops onto her hotel room’s bed and feels the oohing and ahhing of Clark Gable and Carole Lombard’s mattress activity of decades prior. (Apparently, the Bodega Bay Inn doesn’t retire mattresses.)

Oh! And there are killer puppets. No one in Gallagher’s party possesses peripheral vision, because Toulon’s puppets roam about the halls rather freely and without causing alarm … until they decide it’s time to commit murder. Although they have no names in the movie, Band’s Full Moon catalogue of action figures, comics and other merch will not let you forget their cute monikers. Each is labeled for his or her defining trait, e.g., Jester, Pinhead and Tunneler. Leech Woman pukes up the slimy, bloodsucking worms onto the chests of her prey (an act that look like she’s defecating from the wrong end), while the skeletal-faced Blade (a dead ringer for Invasion U.S.A. villain Richard Lynch) stabs his victims. In arguably Puppetmaster’s most overt point of humor, Blade’s pupils pop out as bolts when he peeks through the keyhole as the sexy psychic in undress.

With more of a mystery vibe at play, not to mention legitimate storytelling in general, Puppetmaster bears little resemblance to the double-digit sequels Band continues churning out, now with crowdfunding assistance. While the puppets are the draw, they are not the focus. When they are onscreen, however, it’s for the benefit of Schomeller’s picture because David Allen’s stop-motion animation is quite good, particularly on a Band budget. Then again, on projects big (Young Sherlock Holmes, for which Allen was Oscar-nommed) and small (this) and really small (Equinox), Allen delivered. —Rod Lott

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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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