Happy birthday, Angela!* This is such a momentous one — the big 25! OMG, does the time fly! — that I’ve got a really special gift in store for you: me.

I don’t mean sexually, so please don’t take it that way (although I’m told I do work wonders with a crucifix 😉 LOL). What I mean is that I, Satan, will take possession of your mind, body and spirit. All you have to do is “accidentally” cut your hand and bleed on your birthday cake, K? I’ll take it from there. (Don’t ask me how; I’m not sure I could explain it myself — trust me.)

They say that possession is nine-tenths of the law, and I say it’s equally not so bad. At first, you won’t even notice; you’ll just be really thirsty, but hey, nothing that chugging an Ozarka or two can’t quench! I might also order a raven to break through the windshield of the bus you ride and nip at your bandaged hand — don’t think of it as a “bite,” but more of a “love nibble.” That namby-pamby boyfriend of yours** will freak out over it — duh! — so we’ll just downplay it like no big whoop.

Later, your very presence will cause distress to others — nothing too terrible: Flowers will wilt; an orderly will stab out his eyes. You will feel the sudden need to yank the taxi cab’s steering wheel into oncoming traffic and/or parked cars, but I promise not to kill you; I just want to upset your tight-ass father.*** Oh, and one minor detail: Then I gotta put you in a coma for 40 days.

When you wake up, you’re gonna whisper at the walls and get so much attention for it! That’s what you “millennials” crave anyway, right? Attention? (No need to answer — I totally know it’s a “yes” because I frickin’ created the whole self-absorption thing, and then I invented social media to help spread it. Girl, you should see my Facebook stock! #insidertrading

Anyhoo, gotta bolt, so Imma cut this short and say that once I get all up in there and take over, I’m gonna play things out just like that hit comedy The Exorcist, except with diversity among the Catholic priests**** and way more property damage and … well, y’know, you’re legally bangable. Not that I pay much attention to your government’s “rules” and “regulations.” (Truth be told, I shit upon them.)

Basically, the whole thing will be pretty boring to anyone on the outside looking in, but it’ll be fun for me, and that’s all that matters. Not to take anything away from your big day, though. At least not in the long-term. I have many, many friends in the publishing biz*****; I’ll get you a book deal to make up for the inconvenience.

Laters, babe!
Satan

—as told to Rod Lott

*Olivia Taylor Dudley, Chernobyl Diaries
**John Patrick Amedori, The Last Stand
***Dougray Scott, Taken 3
****Ant-Man’s Michael Peña and Furious 7’s Djimon Hounsou
*****James Patterson, Stephenie Meyer, Nicholas Sparks, E.L. James, Mitch Albom, etc.

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On the Ultra Studios backlot, seven Hollywood tourists take in the VIP tour, guided by a kindly senior citizen (Henry Gibson, The ’Burbs). Chief among the sites is the Psycho-esque house from the Psycho-esque film Hysteria; they are not supposed to enter, but cajole the poor old man into going inside anyway. Guess that rule wasn’t just for show, because, like a Roach Motel, they are unable to exit. In order to do so, each has to share his or her personal story of struggle, most of which are wonderfully sick and twisted.

That’s the structure of Trapped Ashes, a five-director homage to the Amicus-style horror anthology film that thrived in the late 1960s and early ’70s: Tales from the Crypt, Asylum, Torture Garden, et al. It’s the kind of movie that often fails to work in contemporary times because most modern creatives don’t know how to approach it; this one does, even if its ambitions often are felled by budget.

Ashes’ kickoff story is both its best and most insane. Would you — could you — expect anything less from a title like “The Girl with Golden Breasts” in the hands of Ken Russell, the crazed director of The Lair of the White Worm? That “girl” is Phoebe (American Pie Presents Band Camp’s Rachel Veltri, as brave as she is beautiful), a wannabe actress who scores fewer auditions now that she’s passed her early 20s. In desperation, she augments her chest to get parts. Too bad her implants — “reprocessed human tissue … from cadavers,” explains the doc — are vampiric, causing her nipples to sprout teeth and bite both sexual partners and fellow performers. On the plus side, her new nips are able to drink blood from straws!

The rest of the film is a downhill slope, with each subsequent segment just a little less enjoyable than the one before it. From Friday the 13th franchise father Sean S. Cunningham, “Jibaku” finds an American woman (Lara Harris, No Man’s Land) cheating on her husband while they attend an architecture conference in Japan. Her lover? A perverse spirit of a monk or something like that who lives in a vaginal cave, I think. Some minimally animated scenes lend this story some foreign flavor before getting to the inevitable appearance of tentacles.

Next is the interesting “Stanley’s Girlfriend,” from Two-Lane Blacktop helmer Monte Hellman. As told by John Saxon (From Dusk Till Dawn), it details an ill-fated love triangle between his younger self, a director friend who is(n’t) Stanley Kubrick (Tygh Runyan, Snakes on a Plane) and Stanley’s gorgeous but mysterious companion (Amelia Cooke, Species III). I’m just unsure what place it has in a horror film. Finally, marking the directing debut of Oscar-winning Matrix SFX artist John Gaeta is “My Twin, the Worm,” in which a woman’s womb plays host to a baby girl and a tapeworm. Because this bit is not even close to intriguing as it sounds, boredom accentuates its production values of Red Shoe Diaries or any other generic, erotica-themed cable TV series.

Gremlins great Joe Dante directs the wraparound story, which accounts for Gibson getting such a choice role, not to mention the requisite Dick Miller cameo. Despite having such a large number of cooks, Trapped Ashes feels like a unified effort and has a lot of style for a straight-to-video effort. With an aim to disturb rather than scare, the movie offers the most rewards — however minuscule and diminishing — to those well-versed in numerous subgenres, from EC Comics to J-horror. All others will be left confuddled. —Rod Lott

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For 300 days, a family of three has lived incognito and in peace in an underground fallout shelter. Day 301, however, will be different.

Hidden takes place almost entirely on that fateful day, largely confined to the bunker and near-exclusively between the trio of family members: Ray (Alexander Skarsgård, Battleship); his wife, Claire (Andrea Riseborough, Oblivion); and their 9-year-old daughter, Zoe (Emily Alyn Lind, The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghost of Georgia).

Billed as The Duffer Brothers, feature-debuting writers/directors Matt and Ross Duffer dole out answers to viewers’ immediate list of questions — Why are they hiding? How did they find the place? What’s going on? — piecemeal and on their own time frame. They do so in order to build suspense, yes, but also to let their characters develop, which is refreshing. At first, we know only that Zoe fears someone or something she calls “the Breathers,” and that’s enough for a start. The less you know beyond that, the better.

For its first half, Hidden works reasonably well. The Duffer sibs take a near-procedural approach in their contribution to end-of-the-world cinema, demonstrating how one might go about the duties and dreariness of day-to-day survival, from canned-goods meal planning and pumping well water to passing the punishing hours with homemade board games. They show us everything but the honey bucket!

Ironically, once Hidden reveals all its cards, interest doesn’t just wane — it dries up, making the last 20 minutes somewhat of a slog. Of particular umbrage is its “twist.” I hesitate even to call it that since anyone paying attention will see it coming from an early scene, when Claire tells her daughter, “Sometimes the truth is hidden from us.” A line like that hits you over the head with as much blunt force as is expended by Claire when she takes a wrench to the head of a peaches-thieving rat.

Also stolen: the whole of Hidden, directly from the top-billed Skarsgård and Riseborough, by the tiny Lind. Just barely a teenager, the girl gives a realistic performance that, unlike her fellow child actors, is not at all showy or affected. She’s a natural. —Rod Lott

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One cannot credibly discuss Neon Maniacs without first asking what makes these maniacs neon at all, as the noble gas is not part of their outfits and they do not appear to own any. The only logical explanation I can think up is, “Because it was 1986, that’s why.”

Just accept it, since Joseph Mangine’s movie makes no effort to explain the creature cluster that comes to life after their trading cards are discovered in a steer’s skull beneath the Golden Gate Bridge and then bled upon. Or something like that. It’s not clear, nor does it need to be. The flick is all the more enjoyable in its absolute absence of backstory.

Heck, although great pains were undertaken to give each of its dozen monsters an individual identity, neither Mangine nor screenwriter Mark Patrick Carducci (Pumpkinhead) bothered to name them; only by reading the end credits or viewing the trailer do you learn they even have monikers. They’re more labels, really, what with the likes of Axe, Mohawk, Samurai, Ape and Decapitator, and I was hard-pressed after the fact to connect all the names with their corresponding ugly faces. I know them better as the one who looks like Maniac Cop, like Ali Gator from The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, like The Toxic Avenger, like a Blue Man Group member after a vehicular mishap, like My First Cenobite, like Ruth Buzzi with a crossbow, and so on.

Anyway, they lay waste to a van full of high schoolers hanging out under the San Fran landmark for a night of football, firecrackers and fellatio. Only the sweater-wearing, birthday-girl virgin Natalie (Basic Instinct’s Leilani Sarelle, smoking-hot even with her ’80s Big Hair) survives the bloodletting — a pretty sweet present, if you ask me — but the cops write off her in-shock babbling as a teenage prank, despite all her missing friends. Suspended from school as a result, Natalie continues to be pursued by the demons, but finds an ally — and a fresh new beau — in a grocery delivery boy (Clyde Hayes, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter) her pals dismissively referred to as “pasta breath” and “baloney boy.” (Take their gruesome deaths as karmic payback, if you prefer.)

Not to spoil anything — because there is nothing to spoil — but the kids’ final showdown with the Neon Maniacs ends at a battle of the bands, where the audience is equipped with squirt guns because of this exchange slightly earlier:

“Look, what I’m saying is the only defense against these things is water. Just plain, old water.”

“Water?”

“Water.”

Water! (And a decade and a half before M. Night Shyamalan lazily used it!) Meanwhile, Mangine (whose only other directorial credit was Smoke and Flesh, a 1968 tab of hippiesploitation) threatens to kill his own viewers by subjecting their ears to a score of smooth jazz. Seriously, it’s so sax-drippy-dippy that you half-expect to see Dustin Hoffman shoving a mime. But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, Neon Maniacs is nothing but fun, as cheesy as it is earnest, as earnest as it senseless. —Rod Lott

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Just as few things in life bring me more pleasure than a good horror anthology, there are few things in life I loathe more than a bad one. And Theatre of the Deranged II is wretched.

Hosted by Internet-famous psychic ghost hunter Damien Shadows (actually wig-wearing ringleader Eric Hollerbach), this sequel to the 2012 obscurity presents five stories of “blood curling” terror, all supposedly full of “audiovisual conjuring spells.” After each, Mr. Shadows explains — in leaden, dreadfully unfunny skits — how to combat the evil to which viewers have just been exposed. If that truly were the case, this Deranged project would cease to exist.

The movie doesn’t work because … well, for myriad reasons, but notably because the tales come from such disparate directors whose DIY visions form no satisfactory cohesion, collectively or (with one exception) individually. As a whole, their approaches lean toward the comedic roughly as much as the horrific; the effect is reminiscent of channel surfing, and almost every choice seethes with regret.

For example, Shane Ryan, the man behind the infamous Amateur Porn Star Killer trilogy, contributes the opener, “Tag,” a pretentious and bloody anti-narrative that would be baffling even if its two women weren’t speaking in Japanese. Next is Shawn Burkett’s sorority-house slasher send-up, “Panty Raid,” a juvenile exercise in stupidity in which the killer rids the campus of one unaware coed by kicking her sex toy into her as she’s pleasuring herself with it. “Tag” flows into “Panty Raid” as well as an 80-year-woman driving a Lincoln Town Car does with freeway traffic at rush hour, yet the shorts would be unbearable standing alone, too.

The anomaly of Theatre of the Deranged II — yes, one exists! — is My Pure Joy director James Cullen Bressack’s “Unmimely Desire.” Although it’s too long, the segment possesses what the other pieces do not: achievement. In this case, we’re talking genuine laughs. After all, when’s the last time you saw a mime murder people with his invisible weaponry? It’s inventive and clever, yet made on the same nonexistent budget as those surrounding it. Whether he realized it or not, Bressack proves that good ideas don’t necessarily need big bucks to be pulled off. But without that funding, bad ideas look even more hopeless. —Rod Lott

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