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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With Curse of the Stone Hand, enterprising producer Jerry Warren (The Wild World of Batwoman) whipped up something special for moviegoers: a big, steaming bowl of Chile. That is, he butchered a couple of existing Chilean films from the 1940s and ’50s to create a patchwork horror anthology barely over an hour. Because mere spit won’t bind reels of celluloid, he hired John Carradine for the wraparound footage, but was too lazy to give the veteran actor a name for his character. Why bother when “The Old Drunk” will do?

So The Old Drunk (we’ll call him TOD for short) comes across a man painting a picture of an old, sober mansion before them. TOD tells the artist he used to live there and gives him the grand tour, taking care to point out the eerie sculptures of an open-palmed hand, placed in every room by previous tenants. TOD believes intent behind the statuettes was to bring about a curse, because that’s just what well-to-do families wish to do: purposely fuck up their lives.

Robert Braun sure did. In the first story, based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Suicide Club” stories of 1878, the insolvent man played by Carlos Cores faces eviction if he can’t scrounge up a hunk of dough, pronto, so he takes what little cash his wife has and puts all his hopes in gambling. To paraphrase a flying squirrel, that trick never works, and you can guess how dire the stakes are merely from the source material’s title.

As for the second story, it’s about … well, hell if I know. A brother and a sister is about all I can be certain of; it’s that muddled. Somehow, the tale involves marriage, Batwoman star Katherine Victor, a water well, an off-limits cellar, a series of portraits, a science-class skeleton and much confusion on my part. —Rod Lott

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While I’m thankful Dario Argento was able to complete his long-gestating “Three Mothers” trilogy, the witch-centric films were subject to the law of diminishing returns. They began with 1977’s expert Suspiria, continued with 1980’s decent Inferno and concluded with 2007’s disappointing Mother of Tears. According to this capper, the latter is thought to be the most cruel and chaos-reveling of the three witches, but you wouldn’t know it judging from the screen’s limp results.

In the present day, a coffin and urn from 1815 are unearthed and sent to the Museum of Ancient Art in Rome. There, restoration specialist Sarah Mandy (Dario’s daughter Asia Argento, xXx) finds what’s inside: three butt-ugly statuettes and a “magic red tunic.” All hell literally breaks loose, starting with the slaughter of her co-worker but extended to the Roman citizenry at large, many of whom act like kooks, some of whom commit suicide, and one of whom throws her baby over a bridge.

Meanwhile, a coven of young, female witches arrives via commercial airlines to usher in the second age of their kind. Sarah does everything in her power to stop them — suddenly, she has acquired skills of invisibility and getting tips from her dead mother — and that includes mashing the Asian witch’s head to a pulp by slamming it in a door. Only in such oopy-goopy scenes does Papa Argento’s film seem to exhibit any spark.

Budgetary constraints ground Mother of Tears from the start. A period-piece sequence intended to fill in some witchery backstory is shown only in black-and-white illustrations; it may as well have been PowerPoint. Computerized effects embedded in the live-action scenes are unpolished enough to stick out as pixels, which goes against everything that makes Argento’s classics — and even his not-so-classics — click. His made-for-cable movies of the same era satisfy more than this half-baked work of the big screen, unable to cast any spell beyond that of boredom. —Rod Lott

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Tanya Dempsey (Shrieker) was one of the most masturbated-to starlets in the direct-to-DVD scene. It’s too bad she was constantly saddled with crappy movies like DeathBed. It seems like with a title like DeathBed, it would have to be good. However, this DeathBed doesn’t cause much death. It also doesn’t cause much sex. Mostly a bunch of dry humping. Dry humping can be good in real life when your pre-teen girlfriend is nervous about going all the way, but in movies the ladies should be ready to give it up. Especially the boobies.

DeathBed is the story of a young couple who move into a new apartment. At the beginning, it wants to be Rosemary’s Baby. Except it is shot on video. And is stupid. But Tanya Dempsey is decent to look at. Also in this movie is a guy named Dukey Flyswatter, whose face looks like dookie, and Joe Estevez (Beach Babes from Beyond). He has a talking parrot that gives plenty of wisecracks. It’s not as funny as LL Cool J’s parrot that gets eated by the shark in Deep Blue Sea. But parrots add production value.

The monster in this movie is a bed. That doesn’t sound creepy, does it? Well, it doesn’t really do anything creepy, either. Back in the old days, this would have been a raping bed. But now it just has non-scary ghosts that come out of it. Also, the boyfriend likes to give it to his girlfriend rough when he gives it to her on the DeathBed. That’s about it.

There is a good scene where Tanya Dempsey leans over for a long time and Joe Estevez looks at her cleavage and we get to look at it for a long time, too. This is a fucking B-movie; in B-movies, the chicks are supposed to be naked and getting screwed by trees (The Evil Dead) and fish men (Humanoids from the Deep). And even in one movie, they got screwed by worms. In this movie, there’s not even any nudity or any gore. It’s just boring and tries to act important.

The cover says that this is “Stuart Gordon presents.” Well, Stuart Gordon made Re-Animator and in that movie, the girl almost got screwed by a cut-off head! What is the world coming to? These girls don’t even get naked! This is what political correctness brings.

The director is Danny Draven (Reel Evil), who has made a bunch of other crappy movies. He seems to have a lot of fans. I don’t know why. This one is boring and has Joe Estevez in it. Not even a talking parrot can save that shit. —Ed Donovan

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