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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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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