[REC] 4 is on a boat! It’s the veteran captain’s last voyage before retirement. A big storm is brewing. Radio communication is out. There also is a zombie-virus-infected monkey onboard. What could possibly go wrong?

All of it, including the movie itself. [REC] 4: Apocalypse arrives as such a letdown, I’ve rechristened it [REC]tum.

For the Spanish horror series’ reportedly final installment, Jaume Balagueró returns to the director’s chair after sitting out [REC] 3: Genesis. This one combines story threads from that 2012 prequel, as well as the earlier chapters, and aims to tie them up once and for all. Primary among them is Chiclet-toothed broadcast news reporter Ángela (Manuela Velasco, reprising her role from the 2007 original and 2009 sequel), now rescued from the apartment building and quarantined on an oil tanker to ensure total isolation.

Also on the ship is a laboratory, where scientists are working on a retrovirus. To do so requires they have the virus, however, which accounts for the aforementioned monkey. Don’t worry, because they have that little beast locked down in restraints and … well, you know how those things go.

But [REC] 4’s first problem is that it takes a full half-hour to go anywhere beyond one small circle. Balagueró takes too much time introducing crew members, nearly all of whom cry expendable at first glance. Doing so causes something from which none of the previous chapters suffered: serious lag. “¡Ándale! ¡Ándale! ¡Arriba! ¡Arriba!,” you’ll want to scream.

Once the undead finally start to spread, something about the proceedings feel like a third-rate copycat than a third official sequel. Typically, tight quarters raise stakes in a horror film; here, Balagueró exerts no attempt toward spatial orientation, which could account for what little action exists playing out halfheartedly, save for one over-the-top bit involving an outboard motor. It is not nearly enough.

Apocalypse, no. —Rod Lott

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Maybe I’ve got a thing for 100-year-old widows, because the 59-minute wonder known as The Naked Witch did it for me. This, despite an overnarrated, history lesson disguised as a nine-minute prologue — a slideshow of encyclopedia illustration after encyclopedia illustration that is less about educating audiences on witchcraft through the ages and more about the filmmakers trying valiantly to push the running time over the one-hour mark and into feature-length. They did not.

No matter. Deep in “the hill country of Central Texas,” a college student (Robert Short, wooden as a 1914 set of Tinkertoys) researching his thesis is on his way to “a singing festival” when the gas gauge on his sports car points to “E.” He’s forced to hoof it to the closest “thoroughly German village,” where he learns the legend of the Luckenbach Witch. Ever the nosy tourist, he ventures to the cemetery in the dead of (day-for-)night to locate the reputed sorcerer’s grave.

Succeeding, he selfishly removes the petrified stake from her mummified corpse, thus bringing her back to life and in the shapely form of a beautiful young woman (Libby Hall, Common Law Wife) with pert breasts. We know this because, as the title has it, she’s starkers. Acquiring a see-through nightie, the heretofore nude enchantress embarks on a plot of murderous revenge on the ancestors of those who treated her so ill many moons ago.

All of this is done to a baseball-game organ score and no recorded sound. With Mars Needs Women’s notorious Larry Buchanan at the helm, would you expect anything less? (Oh, you would? Good, because you’ll get that, too.) It’s really saying something to call The Naked Witch as among Buchanan’s cheapest of concoctions, yet its once-risqué charm, embodiment of minimalism and absolutely bonkers concept combine for a thoroughly memorable exploitation experience. —Rod Lott

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Officially or not, The Unliving (aka Tomb of the Werewolf, in a shorter cut) is the 12th and final entry in the cycle of films starring Spanish-horror icon Paul Naschy as the lycanthropic Count Waldemar Daninsky. We say “or not” because Naschy neither wrote nor directed it. Hell — and this is not a complaint — he’s hardly in it!

In the creative mitts of B-movie auteur Fred Olen Ray (Bikini Drive-In), the sequel is also the only one of the wild bunch — among them, The Werewolf vs. the Vampire Woman and Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror — to be most interested in a bodily fluid that’s not colored red.

In present day, sole Waldemar descendant Richard Daninsky (Jay Richardson, Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers) is anxious to find the treasure rumored to be buried in the count’s castle. To do so, he hires a psychic investigator (Stephanie Bentley, Rapid Eye Movement) and, to document it all, the crew of the investigative TV series Current Mysteries, whose host (Ulli Lommel regular Danielle Petty, Diary of a Cannibal) is slappin’ skin with her himbo producer (Leland Jay, reunited with Olen Ray after 2003’s Bikini Airways).

Unbeknownst to all, the caretaker of the Daninsky castle is actually 17th-century blood-bather Countess Elizabeth Bathory (Michelle Bauer, Evil Toons). Down in its catacombs, she tricks Richard into reviving Waldemar’s skeletal corpse, thus kick-starting a reign of nighttime terror throughout the village as the ol’ count goes loco in werewolf form.

Then five years away from death, Naschy appears awfully (and sadly) frail and slow. The poor guy can’t catch a break onscreen, either, because when he’s not sporting a horrid mullet that makes him look like a pudgier version of Dante from Clerks, he’s hidden behind a five-and-dime werewolf mask seemingly borrowed from a box in Michael Landon’s garage. (I Was a Late-in-Life Werewolf, anyone?) Naturally, when the hirsute creature runs around, it’s not Naschy doing the running.

That Naschy appears in The Unliving at all is reason enough for his fans to watch, although they should temper their expectations that this Daninsky outing feels like it tonally belongs with the others; it does not. As anyone familiar with the Olen Ray oeuvre knows, pure horror is not his thing; intentionally campy homages to pure horror are. Disembowelments are present, but they clearly take a backseat to four- and five-minute sex scenes. Fred’s films are parties, and only certain people fit in. To be one of them, know before crossing the threshold that he keeps the budgets low, the atmosphere light and the ladies’ chests ample and gelatinous. —Rod Lott

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While watching movies for review, I often take notes on my iPhone, as I did for Shutter. Tellingly, the device infamous for incorrect autocorrections wanted to change “Shutter” to “Shitter.” Given that “shutter” is a legitimate word, I can’t explain the switcheroo; perhaps, as in this film, otherworldly forces beyond our understanding were trying to tell me something.

Shutter, shitter: It fits. Shudder.

Newlyweds Ben and Jane Shaw (The Skulls’ Joshua Jackson and Transformers’ Rachael Taylor, respectively) move from the U.S. to Japan for his new job as a fashion photographer. Driving late at night to their new digs, Jane runs over a young Asian woman who suddenly appears in the middle of the road, then loses control of the vehicle and plows into a tree. Both Shaws emerge with only minor scrapes; the woman is nowhere to be found, nor is blood, let alone any trace of her to suggest she existed as nothing more than a figment of Jane’s weary imagination.

If so, that’s some imagination, because subsequent photos taken of and/or by Jane develop with inexplicable smears of white. Ben’s assistant refers to them as “spirits,” so to whom should Jane turn for counsel? Why, Tokyo’s own “spirit-photography magazine,” of course! (Want more unbelievability? The publication appears to have a paid staff of 10.) What do these spirits start to do? Kill people, of course!

A remake of the 2004 Thai film of the same name, Shutter exists as one of many substandard Americanizations of Asian horrors — Dark Water, Pulse, One Missed Call — that smothered our multiplexes in the aughts, following the wave created by The Ring and The Grudge. In keeping with those films, director Masayuki Ochiai (Infection) gives Shutter’s story space to breathe. That is a nice way of saying it’s slow. But a slow burn, it is not. Unworthy of its slight time investment, it is a humorless piffle that checks off the boxes with duty and without enthusiasm.

Only at the denouement does the movie break from its sleepiness long enough to convey a jolt. I’ve yet to conclude if that twist is truly clever or utterly ridiculous; then again, I stopped thinking about it the next morning — already several more hours than the whole deserves. —Rod Lott

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Now that all of them are married, three sisters are called to New York for the reading of their father’s “highly irregular but legal” will. The document decrees that they and their spouses are to reside “in sexual harmony” at his island estate for three days. Then and only then shall his mysterious trunk be brought down from the attic and shared among the women.

Presumably, the inheritance includes the Victorian house, although its halls and walls bear such gaudy wallpaper, I’m not sure who would covet the property. Perhaps The Ghastly Ones refers to these eyesores of rooms? Or maybe the home’s three servants, one of whom (Hal Borske) is a half-wit hunchback with novelty Bubba teeth and a craving for live rabbits.

A brief tear of murder begins when the bloodied, furry corpse of a bunny turns up beneath one couple’s sheets, prompting the serious admission, “It’s not very comfortable having a dead animal put in your bed.” (My favorite bit of dialogue? “I did not, you brazen hussy.”) Performances are accidental in The Ghastly Ones, as they are in all of Andy Milligan’s penny-ante productions that escaped from his mad mind: a sex-gore netherworld that includes Torture Dungeon, Bloodthirsty Butchers and (exclamation points his, of course) The Rats Are Coming! The Werewolves Are Here!

His directorial approach is an anti-style marked by not much going on in the upper half of the frame, the camera appearing clearly in the mirror (especially startling for an attempted period piece as this) and being so in-your-face as to accentuate his cast members’ nose hairs and blemishes. A considerable amount of blood also exists, exceeded only by boredom. —Rod Lott

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