While his Catholic school roomies are obsessed with copping a feel, Perry (Bobby Jacoby, Tremors) is obsessed with conjuring a demon — specifically, Angela (role-reprising Amelia Kinkade), the satanic seductress who wrought hell in 1988’s Night of the Demons. Ozploitation pioneer Brian Trenchard-Smith (Dead End Drive-In) takes the reins from Kevin S. Tenney to direct this follow-up.

Like the original, Night of the Demons 2 is set on Halloween night. At St. Rita’s Academy, that means a big dance. But when some of the students sin their way out of an invitation, they aren’t about to let some yardstick-wielding nun rain on their parade; instead, they go to Hull House, the abandoned abode still haunted by Angela. Being dragged there is the unpopular, mousy Melissa (Merle Kennedy, May), Angela’s orphaned sister.

Not entirely the same story retread, Night of the Demons 2 distinguishes itself with better actors (including The Brady Bunch Movie‘s Christine Taylor, aka Mrs. Ben Stiller, as a snooty prude), better effects (including a lipstick tube that looks like a dog’s erection) and better breasts (Linnea Quigley has nothing on Zoe Trilling or Cristi Harris). It also has more inventive death sequences. For instance, I’ve seen plenty of movies in which a horny guy grabs a pair of boobs, but never before have I seen a pair of boobs grabbing a horny guy. Another EC Comics-style standout has one unfortunate boy playing basketball with own head; on the downside, this unleashes sports puns galore, each more groan-inducing than the one before.

Trenchard-Smith loses focus in the third act as he allows returning screenwriter Joe Augustyn to steer the material toward self-parody (example: Sister Gloria, played by Heathers‘ Jennifer Rhodes, busts out some martial-arts moves), but I suppose that’s all part of the fun. As with its predecessor, Night of the Demons 2 is one of those rare horror films that feels like a Halloween party in itself. —Rod Lott

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While based on Bram Stoker’s 1911 novel, his final, The Lair of the White Worm is such a different beast in the meaty hands of British writer/director Ken Russell, the author would blush at the hard-R results, if not faint outright.

In a bravura turn, Amanda Donohoe (Liar Liar) slithers her way through this ribald tale of the reptilian threat as Lady Sylvia Marsh, a wealthy, seductive woman who returns to her English mansion soon after the skull of the village’s legendary D’Ampton Worm is excavated by visiting archaeologist Angus Flint (Peter Capaldi, aka TV’s 12th Doctor Who) at a nearly B&B.

It so happens that the quaint inn is built over the site of an ancient convent, and it so happens that Sssssssylvia is a snake woman who was part of it. Baring needle-sharp fangs and spitting hallucinogens when she needs to, she belongs to the cult that worshipped the giant worm. Now that its head has been unearthed, she just needs to sacrifice a virgin to resurrect the monster from its hidey hole; Eve (Catherine Oxenberg, TV’s Dynasty), girlfriend of Lord James D’Ampton (a baby-faced Hugh Grant, Cloud Atlas), looks to fit the bill.

Continuing in the sacrilegious tradition of his most controversial picture, The Devils, Russell is gleefully go-for-broke in this low-budget hot mess of high camp. It’s okay to laugh at it — clearly, that was his intent — but prepare to be taken aback by it as well. Triggered by a touch of Sylvia’s venom, scenes of psychedelic nightmares set out to shock with profane images of nuns being raped, Sylvia suggestively sucking a spear and poor Jesus Christ not just having to deal with being nailed to a cross, but the oversized serpent wrapping around him.

Subtlety was thankfully absent from Lair‘s call sheets. What little audiences it had didn’t know what to make of it, and many still don’t. For the rest of us, it’s a hoot and a half, fulfilling where Russell’s 1986 companion piece, Gothic, was fatuous, and even more insane than the filmmaker. —Rod Lott

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Only Neil Jordan’s second feature, 1984’s The Company of Wolves can be viewed as Gothic testing ground for his eventual epic blockbuster in Interview with the Vampire one decade later. For all its here-and-there hiccups, however, I find Wolves to be the far superior film.

Visually sumptuous and rich in detail, Wolves is a remarkable adaptation of Angela Carter’s dark fiction, written with Jordan by Carter herself. Almost all of it takes place within the feverish, fairy-tale dreamworld of young, blossoming Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson, 1987’s Snow White). In a sequence that’s one of the screen’s best-ever representation of nightmares, her older sister dies; to let her parents properly mourn, Rosaleen goes to stay with her grandmother (Angela Lansbury, The Manchurian Candidate), who shares some seriously macabre bedtime stories. Like Alice plummeting down Wonderland’s rabbit hole, the picture keeps drilling into deeper levels as Granny’s tales are depicted.

In one story, a newlywed man (Stephen Rea, The Crying Game) skips consummation in order to answer the call of nature, only to reappear years later. In another, a spiteful witch (Dawn Archibald, Caravaggio) turns a wedding reception turned into a circus of Canis lupus proportions. Eventually, Rosaleen and Granny take part in a twisted update of Little Red Riding Hood.

Horror fantasy at its classiest, The Company of Wolves uses its once-upon-a-time canvas to explore budding sexuality, just as the Brothers Grimm did in their original, unexpurgated tales. The film’s purposeful artificiality, created by production designer Anton Furst (an Oscar winner for 1989’s Batman) is seductive in its own right, drawing the viewer into a surreal existence of the filmmakers’ imagining. The werewolf transformations are superb in their grotesque nature, and when Rosaleen’s real and unreal worlds collide at the end, the effect is chilling. The material works so well, it’s a shame more of Carter’s works weren’t brought to life, especially by Jordan. —Rod Lott

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When Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later … premiered in 2002, nearly everyone reacted to its fast-moving zombies as if the director were the concept’s inventor. Wrong! Others had pulled that trick long before, including Umberto Lenzi (Ghosthouse) in the pasta-puker Nightmare City.

Rendered Superman-strong by a radioactive spill at a nuclear plant, Lenzi’s zombies move quick as ever, travel in packs, have faces that resemble day-old guacamole dip, exhibit a vampiric thirst for blood and, post-feeding, often wipe their mouths on their sleeves. (“Tsk-tsk,” tsks etiquette queen Emily Post from the grave.) Some come armed with guns, but the majority prefers weapons of the stabby variety: knives, machetes, axes and even the occasional scythe — if it cuts, it makes the cut.

Also known by the ho-hum title of City of the Walking Dead, Nightmare City is no great shakes in the plotting department; it’s one attack right after the other. What separates it from so many similar pics of the era is Lenzi’s staging of said attacks in unusual places, starting with an airport-runway bloodbath witnessed by our TV-reporter protagonist (Hugo Stiglitz, Survive!). From there, the undead:
• interrupt a live broadcast of a disco/aerobics show, wherein one spandex-clad dancer undergoes an impromptu mastectomy;
• commit a siege on a hospital, where the reporter’s wife (Laura Trotter, Miami Golem) works as a doctor and one zombie sucks on a bottle of platelets as a baby would to Mom’s nipple; and
• crash an amusement park (Six Flags Over Apocalypse?), where a body drop from atop a coaster track is one of the film’s lowbrow highlights.

As with other entries in the Italian zombie subgenre, gore is the score here. Many a head is blown off, many more throats and/or torsos are slit, but of particularly gruesome note is a female character’s eyeball removal. Only the peeper-meets-splinter scene in Lucio Fulci’s epic Zombie the year prior qualifies as more upsetting. —Rod Lott

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Half a dozen friends are so obsessed with an online game that one of them, not being of sound mind and body, is driven to suicide. (Note: This film predates Farmville.) Two years later, all but the headstrong Chelsea (Amusement‘s Katheryn Winnick, the Canadian Scarlett Johansson) are still into the game — Hellworld, a role-playing version of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser series — and they flip the freak out when they unlock an invitation to a secret, fans-only party. Begrudgingly, Chelsea attends only as the designated driver / voice of reason.

The soirée takes place in a mansion that, according to the host (Lance Henriksen, Aliens), once was a convent and an asylum, although not at the same time. Regardless, for this night, it’s a multilevel monkey house of bacchanalian activities, complete with numbered face masks for anonymous sex — the kind of environment conducive for pickup lines like, “I’d love to see your puzzle box” (uttered by future Man of Steel Henry Cavill) and, naturally, the eventual death and dismemberment of the guests by party-crashing Pinhead (Doug Bradley) and his fellow Cenobites.

The eighth film of the franchise, Hellraiser: Hellworld is the first to present its source material as something that exists outside the bounds of itself, with the young cast portraying ‘Raiser superfans who not only play the game, but wear Pinhead T-shirts and “ooh” and “ahh” over official merchandise. As with 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection, it was only a matter of time that the Hellraiser sequels use that bitchin’ Internet as a springboard, and Hellworld‘s one-by-one kills bear striking influence of the then-ascendant Saw series.

All the Hellraisers in which Barker was not involved take a lot of heat as inferior product, and Hellworld doesn’t exactly help its own cause when Henriksen’s host quips, “Like a bad horror movie, isn’t it?” Such statements invite viewer ire. But separate from the others and taken on its own, Hellworld is an enjoyable slasher, competently directed by Rick Bota, who helmed the previous two sequels as well. Packed into black leather pants, Winnick is a heroine I can get behind — and do — in everything she appears; her skills as an actress keep this afloat and far from sinking into the sludge. —Rod Lott

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