Take one blind and cranky war veteran, replace “Hoo-ah!” with howls, and you have Late Phases, arguably the best pure werewolf film since 2000’s Ginger Snaps. To be fair, that category is not exactly snapping with fierce competition — Wes Craven’s Cursed, anyone? Thought not! — so let’s broaden the genre and call it a solid suspenser.

The sight-challenged military man at the center of this hairy tale is Ambrose McKinley (Nick Damici, Stake Land), whose son (Ethan Embry, Cheap Thrills) moves him into the Crescent Bay Retirement Community despite recent reports of residents disappearing. Sure enough, Ambrose barely has time to unpack before his next-door neighbor is mauled to death by a werewolf.

Well, we know a werewolf is to blame, because director Adrián Garcia Bogliano (Penumbra) lets the viewer in on the claw-gashing action. No one else is privy to the slaughter, yet Ambrose not only somehow surmises the culprit is of the felled-by-silver-bullets variety, but also correctly predicts the next strike will arrive with the following month’s full moon. You can question the “how” all you want; it won’t change a damn thing, so may as well just go with it as Bogliano does.

That you’ll want to speaks to the Spanish filmmaker’s strengths as a director. Late Phases marks his inauguration into English-language features, and he commemorates the challenge by bringing the best of his previous work with him: the mounting tension of 2010’s Cold Sweat and the hallucinatory horror of 2012’s Here Comes the Devil. His eye considerably elevates the so-so script by Eric Stolze, whose 2012’s Under the Bed is as dull as Phases is sharp.

Strangely, its weakest link is the lead performance from Damici, who makes an already crotchety character damn near insufferable — and certainly annoying — by adhering to a needless accent exaggerated to the point of comical: “Those” become “dose”; “thing” becomes “tang.” Good thing his supporting cast is so strong, it truly supports; standouts include Manhunter’s Tom Noonan, Bitch Slap’s Erin Cummings and The Last Starfighter himself, Lance Guest.

The MVP might be David Greathouse (Jug Face), who dons the werewolf suit — that’s right: suit instead of CGI, thereby working wonders in the projection of menace through the screen. The final showdown of man vs. lycanthrope provides much of the movie’s meat; pay particular attention to the 1:15:31 mark, where the beast takes a flying, slow-motion leap toward a car. It’s begging for animated-GIF immortality. —Rod Lott

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This much I recall about The Reincarnation of Isabel, less than 24 hours after viewing:

1. It opens with the memorable image of a nude nun, her chest cavity blackened and burned as if she’s missing a heart.

2. Holy shit, she is!

3. A vampire played by Mickey Hargitay (Bloody Pit of Horror) is trying to revive his deceased lover (Rita Calderoni, Nude for Satan) through a ritual requiring the ticker and peepers of a virgin.

4. Everything else played like a loathsome fever dream mixed with Dramamine and three vodka tonics.

The Italian film from writer/director Renato Polselli (The Vampire and the Ballerina) also is known under of the alternate, better title Black Magic Rites. That’s a very important piece of info, as I almost bought this maddening piece of shit twice. #themoreyouknow —Rod Lott

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Poor, lonely, miserable, working-class cog Donald Kohler (Dan Grimaldi, best-known as twins Patsy and Philly Parisi on TV’s The Sopranos) is having a very bad day. First, his boss berates him for not coming to the aid of a co-worker who bursts into flames when a can of spray paint explodes in the incinerator. Then, Donald slumps home to find Mom (Ruth Dardick) dead in her rocking chair. His initial reaction is shock, until reality hits: Now he can play his disco LPs at full volume and jump on the living-room furniture from the Old Biddy collection!

Oh, and of course, flame-broil some broads. Hi-diddle-dee-dee, the bachelor’s life for me …

Welcome to Don’t Go in the House, the only slasher film I can think of where the killer’s signature outfit is a head-to-toe asbestos suit. Because the child Donald had his arms held over the gas stove by his mother — an apparent honors grad of the Piper Laurie in Carrie School of Parenting — the adult Donald likes to lure young, beautiful women into his spacious home, knock ’em out, strip ’em nude, tie ’em up and unleash the cruel, hot licks of a flamethrower upon their easy-to-bubble bods. Good thing the Kohler residence comes with a steel-paneled room! (Hell, when you have that, who needs an extra powder bath?)

Most slashers would be content to stop there, but first-time director/co-writer Joseph Ellison takes things a little further by giving us a glimpse into Donald’s mixed-up mind; he is haunted by the literal ghosts of his crispy victims, whom he imagines come to life at inopportune times. (He keeps their ashen corpses in an adjoining room, each dressed to the nines and seated in her own chair as if on display like a menagerie.) It’s a halfway-novel twist to an otherwise dreary, dirty tale, and as Don’t Go in the House’s resident Norman Bates, Grimaldi turns in a pretty good performance of an utterly despicable human being.

Even with depicting the abuse Donald suffered, Ellison fails to establish a credible link for the grown man’s newfound, strike-anywhere hobby. He also fails an opportunity for a killer joke in not having Donald drop the needle on “Disco Inferno.” That’s the one instance in which an increased budget would have helped. —Rod Lott

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Third movie, four stories, five or more shades of fucked-up: That’s V/H/S: Viral. And that’s a good thing.

Coming from the filmmakers behind such indie shockers as Timecrimes, Resolution and Deadgirl, this presumably final sequel of the rather divisive and ornery horror-anthology franchise again plays with — and relies upon — the found-footage concept, yet adds a level of subtext bound to sail over the heads of those viewers who could stand to heed its message. We’ll get to that in a sec.

But first, a quick rundown of Viral’s videos:
• An amateur magician graduates from the trailer park to the Vegas stage when he acquires a cloak that derives its considerable powers from human blood.
• A scientist invents a machine that enables him to interact with the parallel-universe versions of himself and his wife.
• Punk-ass skateboarders in search of the next killer curb mess with the wrong drainage ditch in Mexico: one that wakes the dead.
• Finally, serialized as the wraparound tale is the cryptic saga of a young man, his abducted girlfriend and the streets-speeding ice cream truck that just might have her inside.

Coiled with a devilish sense of humor, Viral is more malleable and freeform than 2012’s V/H/S and 2013’s V/H/S 2; more often than not, unpredictability rules, leaving us to believe that anything can happen. It does, in a glorious parade of mayhem that sends up the utter self-absorption of today’s attention-seeking tweeters, Instagramers and YouTubers who live for “likes” and soak up validation like a sponge to spilled milk. If that plan of attack sacrifices scares — and it does — for knowing winks at the expense of the Me-Me-Me Generation, so be it! #theywouldntgetitanyway —Rod Lott

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The Merrye children of Spider Baby don’t seem like they would have much to be merry about. The poor kids suffer from a rare neurological disorder particular to their bloodline. As a narrator helpfully tells us in the opening, at around the age of 10 or so Merrye family members regress to a “pre-human condition of savagery and cannibalism.”

Incredible, but true.

Okay, so it’s not really true. But try telling that to the slobbery, tongue-wagging Ralph Merrye (Sid Haig, House of 1000 Corpses) or his creepy sister Elizabeth (Beverly Washburn, Pit Stop). And then there’s incorrigible Virginia (Jill Banner, The President’s Analyst), who believes herself to be a spider, trapping victims with a rope before “stinging” them with a flurry of butcher knives to the head.

The only thing standing between the murderous Merryes and civilization is the kindly figure of Lon Chaney Jr. (The Wolf Man) as the family’s longtime chauffeur and now caretaker for the plum-crazy brood. And when Lon Chaney Jr. is the beacon of normalcy, you’ve got problems, friend.

From an irresistible opening theme song by Chaney Jr. to its could-this-be-the-end-question-mark resolution, Spider Baby spins a web of pure exploitation gold. You should expect nothing less from the debut picture of Jack Hill, the B-movie writer/director of Switchblade Sisters who would help launch the career of Foxy Brown herself, Pam Grier. The film was shot in 12 days in 1964, but languished on the shelf for several years after the producers went bankrupt.

Spider Baby is a cautionary — albeit funny and macabre — tale of inbreeding run amok. Do not miss. —Phil Bacharach

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