Once upon a time, aspiring filmmakers wanted to make movies. Today, it seems they only want to make one kind: the slasher film. That would be fine if the young pups came equipped with a new twist to offer; barring that, I’d settle for capable execution (no pun intended). In Scream Park, neophyte writer/director/producer Cary Hill obviously has the subgenre’s recipe in pocket, but doesn’t necessarily pay attention to the proper amount of ingredients. Therefore, it comes out of the oven hardly resembling what it was intended to honor.

Due to dwindling (read: nonexistent) attendance, the Fright Land theme park has filed for bankruptcy and is going out of business. On its final night, the high schoolers who work there conspire to hold an after-hours liquor party, with their butt-cut-haired manager (Steve Rudzinski, Everyone Must Die!) supervising. Making their young lives miserable are a killer in a raggedy burlap-sack mask and a killer in a more fashionable creepy-bird mask. It’s the former, however, who is more creative, what with shoving the post-coital girl’s face into the boiling grease of a deep fryer. No more fries for you, hon!

And no fun for us! With an actual amusement park in Pennsylvania as his setting, Hill makes good use of the merry-go-round, roller coaster, haunted house, etc. in the various kills, and poor use of Doug Bradley, the Hellraiser series‘ Pinhead, who cameos as the park owner who proposes a tough-to-swallow solution for turning his business around. It’s even too incredulous to ask of an audience — even one just waiting for the next onscreen slaying.

Those grisly scenes are pulled off without any panache. Free of scares or suspense, Scream Park is flat and ponderous, with some sleepy performances to match. As is the case with the majority of low- to no-budget slasher homages these days — hitting DVD within a few months’ time frame were the near-interchangeable HazMat, Murder University, Bloody Homecoming, Sorority Party Massacre and the very similar Killer Holiday — the order of the day is wasted creative force: no imagination, all imitation. That, to me, is depressing. —Rod Lott

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It’s not a party until a Templar Knight beheads someone. For the Portuguese villagers holding their annual Burning Festival, it’s going to be a party. They just don’t know it yet.

Amando de Ossorio’s Return of the Evil Dead, a sequel to his Tombs of the Blind Dead of the previous year, revives those undead Knights Templar in more ways than one, starting with a 14th-century prologue that shows why and how those dastardly killers lost the gift of sight. Why? Human sacrifices in the name of God. How? Torches.

Their ancestors’ act of revenge is what the villagers commemorate at the Burning Festival, complete with effigies of the knights. Hired for the event is a fireworks specialist who chain-smokes — not the profession’s smartest of habits. His name is Jack (Tony Kendall, The Whip and the Body), and as luck would have it, the former love of his life (Esperanza Roy, It Happened at Nightmare Inn) not only lives there, but is engaged to the corrupt, repugnant mayor (Fernando Sancho, The Big Gundown).

However, the one dick Jack really needs to worry about is Murdo (José Canalejas, Horror Express), the village idiot whose mouth is a freakish diagonal rictus. When he’s not being pelted by rocks hurled by kids, Murdo longs for the resurrection of the Knights Templar; his bloody murder of a local lovely causes them to come a-crawling from their graves. It happens during the celebration, and as anyone who saw the previous movie knows, the horse-riding Blind Dead are attracted to noise.

Silence is golden for fans of Spanish horror who are likely to find their bodies clenched as terrified villagers do their best to pass through a gauntlet of zombie knights by remaining as quiet as possible. The very idea is chilling, and de Ossorio plays it to the hilt, bathing his film in eeriness that exists even in the obvious day-for-night shots. This is a strong sequel that extends a good idea, rather than just rehash it. —Rod Lott

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Like pumpkin pie and tryptophan comas, Blood Freak deserves a place in your annual Thanksgiving traditions. It’s not every day you see a movie about mad science turning a man into a turkey monster, but if there’s a day that’s perfect for such a flick, it’s that last Thursday each November. However, if you’ve never seen it, don’t wait until fall to gobble up this one-of-a-kind crap!

All mutton chops and good manners, Herschell (Steve Hawkes, who co-wrote, -directed and -produced with Brad F. Grinter) is a lost-soul biker who looks like the love child of Elvis Presley and Richard Kiel. After coming to the aid of a Bible-thumping beauty with the unsubtle name of Angel (Heather Hughes, Grinter’s Flesh Feast) on the highway, she invites him to stay at her groovy pad. Apparently decorated with the entire inventory of velvet paintings from that corner with the abandoned gas station, the place also is home to Angel’s polar-opposite sister, Ann (Dana Cullivan), for whom life is a constant drug party, despite her sibling’s penchant for spouting Scripture. Protests a sky-high Ann, “This Bible stuff is really a drag.”

Ann tries to push pot, then herself, onto Herschell, who rebukes both advances … until the next day when a bikinied Ann successfully seduces a shirtless Herschell by the pool. The dude’s muscled, and his might leads to a job offer by the girls’ father: “I could use a husky man like you on my poultry ranch.” Aside from picking up freshly laid eggs and shaking them, Herschell is tasked with playing guinea pig for a chemical experiment that turns him into a mutated man with a giant turkey head and sends him on a murder spree. Why, God, why?

That answer is simple, because a chain-smoking Grinter sledgehammers the story’s moral lessons with the occasional story-stopping lecture toward the camera, like a rednecked Rod Serling. In his final host segment, Grinter discusses the sin of putting chemicals into our templed bodies, all while hypocritically sucking down a cancer stick that causes a deep coughing fit. That he and Hawkes didn’t feel a need for a second take says a lot about Blood Freak‘s place on cinema’s ladder of technical prowess, which is to say it resides on the lowest rung. The Florida homemade morality tale is such a piece of gobsmacked entertainment, I wouldn’t want it standing any higher. —Rod Lott

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Ironically, the element that attracts most viewers to Terror in the Haunted House is the very thing they’ll care the least about: its “Psycho-Rama” gimmick of subliminal images. There’s a devil head here, a snake or skull there, but nothing worth writing tweets about. Instead, the story supplants cheap novelty and pulls you in, whereas we’d expect the opposite.

Life is ever so keen for the just-married Sheila (Cathy O’Donnell, Detective Story), if not for the fact that she is plagued by nightmares of an old house to which she swears she’s never been. She always awakes before she reaches the attic, where she’s certain “death in its most hideous form” awaits; in Switzerland, her shrink (Barry Bernard, Return of the Fly) believes her subconscious is shielding her from some heinous act in her past that she cannot remember.

Oh, well, so much for that breakthrough, because it’s off to Florida with hubby Philip (Gerald Mohr, The Angry Red Planet)! “I’ve got everything,” Sheila says, “tickets, passports, money, smallpox certificates.” Arriving in the Sunshine State, Philip drives up to their new rental home and … wait for it … it’s the one from Sheila’s dreams! Let the family curses and falling chandeliers begin.

O’Donnell has the part of the Meek and Subservient Newly Mashed Cherry down pat enough to carry us through an hour and some change. She does more for Terror in the Haunted House (aka My World Dies Screaming) than the flat direction from Harold Daniels (Roadblock). The script by Robert C. Dennis (The Amazing Captain Nemo) contains some nifty twists, but the exposition-filled end makes Psycho‘s look like the definition of brevity.

As for those subliminal frames, flashing messages such as “GET READY TO SCREAM!” and “SCREAM BLOODY MURDER!” kind of kills any intended shock effect. Luckily, Terror‘s power source is rooted in the psychological. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

With HazMat, writer/director/producer Lou Simon not only proves that women can make slasher films, too, but also that they can be as terrible as men’s.

Dave (Todd Bruno) is the host of a TV prank show titled Scary Antics. Since it’s on the bubble, he aims to amp things up; ergo, the setups grow meaner. The latest involves some “friends” setting up Jacob (Norbert Velez) at a supposedly haunted warehouse … that also is the site of his own father’s murder. Hilarious, right, bro?

Pretty quickly after entering, Jacob cannot separate reality from stupid prank shows and snaps. He then … well, let’s let one of the more annoying characters tell us via her unbelievably calm phone call for help: “There is a crazy man with an ax. He’s already killed two people and he’s coming after us.”

Misreading of dialogue plagues the script’s pages; the tech guy who speaks as if he has rocks in his mouth reads the panicked “Oh, no!” as the morphine-sedated “Oh, no.” As per usual in microbudgeted horror, the act of killing has been given more attention than performances or plot, both of which are atrocious here. Too bad, because on looks alone, Jacob’s HazMat suit screams “franchise character.” Let’s hope it never gets the chance. —Rod Lott