House is one of my favorite horror films of the 1980s; House II: The Second Story, I’d like to forget.

Although the two movies share the same screenwriter (Ethan Wiley, who also upgraded to the director’s chair), House II shares none of the fun or cleverness of the 1986 original. All they have in common is that they take place in a house and co-star a supporting character from Cheers. This is one of the rare cases where I wish the sequel were exactly like the first one, because then it would be good; what’s here is something that looks like it was made for 10-year-olds, as the move from an R rating to a PG-13 attests.

Here entirely unappealing, Ayre Gross (Soul Man) stars as Jesse, an orphan who moves into the home that has been in his family for generations. Rummaging through old photos, he decides to dig up his great-great-grandfather and see if his coffin contains a lost, valuable bejeweled skull. It does, and guess what? The old coot himself is still alive! “I’m a 170-year-old fart,” says wrinkled Gramps (scene-stealing Royal Dano, Spaced Invaders).

Jesse carries on and has wacky adventures with an annoying pal, a cheap-looking prehistoric bird puppet and a dog that looks like a worm (as opposed to a dog with worms). Nothing much happens, other than John Ratzenberger showing up as an electrician and discovering an alternate universe within the wall, and yet the film still plods on for an hour and a half. The scares — and they were there — of House have moved out to make room for silly comedy that simply isn’t funny.

At least House II is a cut above the theater-skipping House IV, but hell, what isn’t? —Rod Lott

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Look, it’s very simple: Liken a fat kid’s sexual organ to an acorn, and he’ll grow up to be a cross-dressing serial killer. Moonlight as a porn model for college tuition, and that serial killer will target you. The digital-age slasher Girlhouse says so.

With a freshly deceased dad and a hilt-mortgaged mom, coed Kylie (Ali Cobrin, The Hole) puts her Topeka-born, apple-pie good looks to use to pay the bills by stripping online to the delight of masturbators the world over — people like, per the screen names we glimpse, WoodWizard, Tugboat and Cream_Slinger. (Was regular ol’ “CreamSlinger” taken, thus forcing the underscore?)

And then there’s Loverboy (unimonikered Slaine, The Town), the aforementioned overweight murderer. When Kylie understandably gets creeped out by the hulking sociopath and spurns him during a private webcam session, Loverboy snaps, dons a costume that makes him look like the drag Leatherface of Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, grabs a crowbar, walks to the website’s headquarters house and, despite supposed Fort Knox-level security, starts whacking away at the naked ladies! Er, by that, I mean with the tool in his hand — um, yes, of course, the crowbar!

Minus the biggest cliché of the slasher subgenre, everything you’d expect to happen in Girlhouse happens. First-time director Trevor Matthews (star of the 2007 horror comedy Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer) must have recognized this, and plastered the movie with scoops of female flesh to compensate for the lack of originality; the finale even rips off The Silence of the Lambs’ then-novel use of the night-vision POV.

Ironically, the fine Cobrin, so very nude in her breakthrough role in 2012’s American Reunion, is the one woman who doesn’t appear in the altogether. In a way, adhering to the rules of the subgenre, this makes sense; the Final Girl must be virginal, and compared to her housemates, she is. And compared to other stalk-and-stab exercises, Girlhouse is mighty slicker and easier on the eyes. —Rod Lott

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With his gal pal at his side, a clueless archaeology student asks their chaperone (Fred Pinero) during a school-sponsored camping trip, “Is it okay if we go to the lake and, uh, roast a few marshmallows?”

First of all, ick. Secondly, of course it is! I mean, it’s not as if they’re camping on a sacred Indian burial mound! Because if they were, they would unleash the Death Curse of Tartu.

Correction: They totally are, so they totally do.

Sounding like a cross between Hervé Villechaize’s Fantasy Island character and a sauce popular at all-you-can-inhale seafood buffets, Tartu (Doug Hobart) was a witch doctor with the hit-at-parties power to transform into wild beasts. Today, he haunts the swamps despite being a crusty sarcophagus, which is why those who dare disturb his eternal resting place risk being choked to death by a giant snake, chomped by an alligator or being ass-bitten by one of those ferocious lake-water sharks the media always crows about.

Luckily, all the dumb humans would have to do is listen for the drums-and-chants soundtrack to kick in, because every time writer/director William Grefé (Mako: The Jaws of Death) presses that “PLAY” button, danger is afoot. For viewers of this Florida Everglades-lensed, barely budgeted, half-charming oddity, the sound loop also acts as a wake-up call to snap out of your half-attention stupor and prep for actual action. —Rod Lott

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Of all the imitators spawned in the wake of 1973’s The Exorcist, why did Warner Bros. legally suppress Abby? It is hardly a Xerox, even if director William Girdler (Grizzly) attempts an uncomfortable medical-test scene and also has his possessed protagonist orally expel fluids — not pea-soup vomit, but that watery foam my shih tzu yaks up on the carpet instead of the tile.

Abby is infamous for being the blaxploitation genre’s take on William Friedkin’s aforementioned film, following other Afro-centric boogeyman-benders as Blacula, Blackenstein and Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde. (I guess The Blaxoricst was deemed too crass?) The God-fearing Abby (Carol Speed, The Big Bird Cage) and her reverend hubby, Emmett (Terry Carter, Foxy Brown), move into a new home while Emmett’s dad, Prof. Williams (William Marshall, the two-time Blacula), investigates a cave in Nigeria that once was the site of black-magic rituals. In doing so, he opens a box that unleashes a demonic spirit that somehow — Girdler does not explain it — enters Abby’s body half a world away, causing her to masturbate in the shower.

At first, signs of her soul takeover are fairly benign, like stuff blowing around the room — the kind of paranormal activity that can be defeated with a paperweight. But then shit gets real as Abby deliberately slices open her arm with a knife, curses in a deep voice (“I’m not your ho!”), kicks Emmett in the nuts and laughs about it, and tries to hump the male clientele at her marriage counseling office — a real practice-killer, that. The prof hurries home to play Max Von Sydow to his son’s Jason Miller before this Linda Blair lays every dude in a bar within a six-block radius. The devil literally made her do it!

A step above Girdler’s usual level of awfulness begets entertainment, as Abby turns out rather well, rip-off or not; “opportunist” is a more correct term for the director than “thief.” Marshall is, as always, a commanding presence, and it’s as if the rest of the main cast rose to the task. Speed delivers a solid and sympathetic performance, except when she is called upon for lip-and-tongue action, and as brothers, Carter and Austin Stoker (John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13) make an appealing pair of grounded heroic Everymen. Cartoon voice actor Bob Holt deserves some credit for embodying Satan’s pipes in order to sell Abby’s Ol’ Scratch routine, but I’ve got to give it up to Girdler: His not-quite-subliminal cuts of the demon’s face register as legitimately disturbing. —Rod Lott

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Popcorn exhibits a deep, abiding love for the movies: the content, the concessions, the venues, the experience. That it does so within the constraints of a slasher film severely limits its audience, both then and now. Their loss.

Hungry for funding, a class of film students decides to put on a one-night-only triple feature of horror — or, as teacher Tony Roberts (Amityville 3-D) pronounces it, “har-ar.” The B titles selected for exhibition in the abandoned Dream Land theater all were released originally with William Castle-style gimmicks, which the kids aim to recreate with full ballyhoo:
• Mosquito!, an Atomic Age tale of giant-bug rampage, in the three dimensions of “Project-O-Vision”;
• The Amazing Electrified Man, a black-and-white Poverty Row shocker with Tingler-esque wired seats, aka “Shock-O-Scope”; and
• The Stench, a Japanese sci-fi stink bomb in “Aroma-Rama.”

While cleaning up for the night of 1,000 frights, the students unearth a dusty reel of an avant-garde short made by acid-tripping cultist Lanyard Gates (makeup artist Matt Falls). Years ago, the guy killed his family at the Dream Land screening of his film. While his body never was identified, good-girl student Maggie (Jill Schoelen, 1987’s The Stepfather) recognizes him as the star of her recurring nightmares. The reason why will be as evident to viewers as the identity of the killer punching the tickets of those in attendance.

Although equal time is not in the cards, Popcorn’s punch comes less from the villain and more from the movies-within-the-movie, pieces of each we see projected with tongue planted firmly in cheek. Director Mark Herrier (aka Billy from the Porky’s trilogy) took just enough care to make the fake films look enough like the real deal … or perhaps the credit is due to Popcorn’s original kernel colonel, Deranged’s Alan Ormsby, who wrote the script, but was fired from helming after production began. Whoever deserves the applause, Joe Dante took the facsimile-flick idea to an even more nostalgic degree just two years later in his underrated Matinee, but of course, he had the means (read: studio budget) to provide such a polish.

Smarter than it gets credit for, Popcorn is able to do a lot with a little. While it would be interesting to see the result with more money and less behind-the-scenes turmoil, what we’re left with is worth its weight in artificial butter. —Rod Lott

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