Part of what made Nicholas McCarthy’s The Pact so effective was its twist — one not of plot, but overall structure. Without spoiling its secret, the 2012 indie chiller cleverly led viewers to believe it belonged to one horror subgenre, only to reveal itself as another. Without spoiling the sequel, either, it is disappointing to see The Pact II undo that trick. It’s tough to tell for certain, but if it hasn’t fully embraced its predecessor’s initial path, it has blurred the line.

Although Caity Lotz (The Canary of TV’s Arrow) returns for what amounts to an extended cameo, the central character this time around is June (Camilla Luddington, TV’s True Blood), a crime-scene cleaner by day and aspiring graphic novelist by night. One of her freelance scrub-downs of gray matter is, believes no-nonsense FBI Agent Ballard (Patrick Fischler, 2 Guns), the work of a serial killer. To say more would ruin everything I warned against in the previous paragraph.

I can say that co-directors Dallas Richard Hallam and Patrick Horvath (Entrance) do their best to stay true to the tone established by McCarthy in the original Pact — and carried through to his similarly eerie follow-up, 2014’s At the Devil’s Door — but their screenplay ultimately keeps this reverent-in-intention sequel from being nearly as good. Luddington and Fischler deliver big nonetheless. While the film is spooky in places, The Pact II cannot replicate its big brother’s feat of eliciting real scares. At least it tried. —Rod Lott

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Where, oh, where would Mick Garris be without Stephen King? The unemployment line? (I’m asking for a friend.) The number could change between the time I hit the “publish” button and this sentence hits your eyes, but Garris has directed seven movies scripted by and/or adapted from the superstar horror author’s work. Although Garris already had achieved mild acclaim with his two first features, 1988’s Critters 2 and 1990’s Psycho IV: The Beginning, once he brought King’s first original screenplay to theaters in 1992, it’s as if he never looked back.

He should, because sorry to say, he’s just not very good at it. The slumber-inducing Stephen King’s Sleepwalkers is stunningly awful, in part because it exudes that bush-league feel of made-for-television pictures, but mostly because Garris clearly enables King’s worst inclinations as a screenwriter, including a reliance on jukebox rock, cringe-worthy quips (“Cop kabob!”) and King’s own cameos.

High schooler Charles Brady (Brian Krause, Naked Souls) moves with his mother (Alice Krige, Ghost Story) to a small town in Indiana, where he immediately sets his hormonal sights on a classmate who happens to be a virgin (Mädchen Amick, TV’s Twin Peaks, forever biting her bottom lip). Her inexperience is A-OK with him, because his mom loves virgins. In fact, she feeds upon them.

See, the Bradys are vampiric shape-shifters — half-human, half-feline and all-silly — and Charles’ job is to procure fresh meat for Mama … when he’s not serving up some of his own. (Translation: Incest. We mean incest. These two cannot keep their paws off one another.)

If scares were top among Garris and King’s goals — and they were — the hokey effects ensure that goal would go unreached. The catchpenny-CGI morphs from human form to were-kitties or whatever are wretched enough; Krause and Krige are forced to don makeup appliances that look like ThunderCats characters short a single chromosome. As a viewer, you can’t help but laugh at it — all of it — and if Garris and King intended chuckles, too, they don’t let you know they are in on their own joke. And Stephen King’s Sleepwalkers is nothing if not a joke. —Rod Lott

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While the hero of Cry_Wolf runs for his life roughly halfway through the movie, he passes his school’s cafeteria menu board touting the dish of the day: “TOASTED CHEESE.” It’s the perfect summation of the film itself: well-done junk.

Newly transferred to Westlake Preparatory Academy, British high school student Owen (Julian Morris, Donkey Punch) is befriended immediately by cute redhead Dodger (Lindy Booth, 2004’s Dawn of the Dead), who invites him to join her bored, rich, mostly deplorable friends to play a “lying game.” Owen’s victory and a recent unsolved homicide in the nearby woods sparks a bigger idea in Dodger: Convince the student body that the murderer is a prep-school serial killer who has made his way to Westlake and is just getting started. The budding lovebirds concoct an entire backstory and outfit (orange ski mask, camo jacket, hunting knife) for “The Wolf,” and let one mass email do the rest.

Anyone can guess where Cry_Wolf goes from there, in part because director Jeff Wadlow (Kick-Ass 2) flat-out shows you, flashing-forward with quick clips of students encountering The Wolf — scenes which play out in full an hour later. That baffling choice defuses some of the suspense … but not all, as Wadlow and fellow scribe Beau Bauman (who later co-wrote 2007’s Prey) planted twist after twist after twist. That’s not to say all of the curves pay off; the exposition-packed final scene in particular collapses under its own weight.

Cry_Wolf came too late in the teen-slasher cycle beget by Wes Craven’s Scream a decade earlier to make a mark, yet it’s a better effort than most of the imitators. That includes 1998’s Urban Legend, which Cry_Wolf resembles in theme. Wadlow’s work is now dated, with quaint plotlines reliant upon the Nokia 3300 mobile phone, AOL Instant Messenger and Jon Bon Jovi. —Rod Lott

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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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