Given how many times Richard Burton eventually married before his death (five!), more than a little irony exists in viewing Bluebeard today. From Superman producer Alexander Salkind and The Caine Mutiny director Edward Dmytryk, the film version of France’s felonious folktale casts Burton as cerulean chin-bristled World War I hero Baron Kurt Von Sepper, returning from aerial battle to only wage the war of the sexes on the ground by marrying — and killing — one beautiful woman after the other.

Bluebeard the movie’s first victim is Bluebeard the character’s sixth wife (Karin Schubert, The Panther Squad), felled by a bullet in an hunting “accident.” Before long, Bluebeard finds himself entranced by flapper girl Anne (future Happy Hooker Joey Heatherton). Despite all the red flags surrounding the guy — a one-eyed cat, a cobweb-strewn castle, a crazy old woman combing the hair of his mother’s corpse — Anne happily becomes Wife No. 7, the Jell-O to his jam.

When she finds his … let’s just call it a “scrapbook” of past wives, he confesses everything to her chronologically, doomed spouse by doomed spouse. Buckle in, viewers, because the result is an all-star panoply of acts of uxoricide, with Burton’s master of misogyny wearing more shades of purple than the Joker and Prince would find tasteful. Virna Lisi (The Statue) is seduced into a guillotine; Marilù Tolo (My Dear Killer) is drowned; and Agostina Belli (The Night of the Devils) takes a falcon to the face.

Most amusingly, Raquel Welch (The Last of Sheila) plays against type as a nun whose inventory of global dalliances angers Bluebeard into such a rage, he locks her in a coffin. Genuinely funny is how increasingly annoying he finds the gorgeous Nathalie Delon (Le Samouraï) for her endless baby talk and for naming her breasts “Jasmine” and “Sicumin.” When she hires a prostitute (Sybil Danning, Chained Heat) over to give her husband-satisfying whore lessons, Bluebeard catches them au naturel and penetrates them both … with a pointy-tusk chandelier, so get your mind outta the gutter.

If “prestige Eurosleaze” exists, Dmytryk’s Bluebeard is the default example, with Burton at his most bombastic. The Gothic gaslighter pops with color and delights with a campy tone, trashy sequences and an Ennio Morricone score that positively fucks. Bluebeard will tickle you pink, if you let it. —Rod Lott

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Having lived in Japan only six months, the English-speaking Karen (Ariel Sekiye) is having a rough go fitting in with fellow housewives in her community volunteer work — so much so, the gaijin resists attending the group’s two-day camping retreat. (True, it doesn’t help the trip is to a village protected by a fox spirit who “will punch you and drag you to hell.”)

The night of arrival, boss Akiyo Yoshihara (Eigi Kodaka, Headcrusher) and her fellow mean girls play kokkuri-san, the Asian country’s coin-on-paper version of Hasbro’s Ouija board — hence this film’s title, Ouija Japan. Folklore has it that breaking the rules brings consequences; sure as Shinola, the ladies awake to find their group thinned by one. Karen’s idea of calling for help is to run outside half-yelling, “Somebody! Somebody!”

How could this trip get any worse? For starters, that fox deity could self-install an app on everyone’s phone: a game that pits every girl for herself in a fight to the death.

That happens. And — just like Candy Crush, I assume — the more they kill, the more features they unlock. By sword, rifle, pipe and electric-powered gadget dropped in a full bathtub, Karen and the others battle it out until 15 lives are claimed. The upper-left corner of the screen — yours, not the app’s — keeps a body count so viewers don’t have to put forth that effort.

In Ouija Japan, first-time director/writer Masaya Kato (not the actor) has a premise that, while not exactly original, is plenty perfect for this genre — or for a mix of the horror and action genres, as we have here. However, it’s not well thought-out, with early scenes merely repeating information from the previous; by design, scuffle after scuffle make up the latter half, yet each feels so endless, it’s exhausting. Perhaps Kato was checked out as well, because the final shot is not only a cliché, but a cliché so clichéd, it’s used as the sign-off for all five Scary Movie entries.

There is no nice way to say this: Taken individually or collectively, the acting is awful. Kodaka overplays the villain role to twirling a nonexistent mustache; after vowing to have the metaphorical last laugh, she physically utters one. Worse, in her first credit, Sekiye has a sleepy and lifeless presence; if she had a line that didn’t begin with some unnatural variation of “Oh, um, uh,” I missed it. —Rod Lott

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I love God. I love his compassion, his grace and his absolute comfort in times of need. That being said, I also fear God and, if you’re like me, the religious exploitation flicks of Earl Owensby are probably right up your sinful alley.

One of the biggest distributors of regional religious films in the ’70s — always with a bent towards horror, mind you — Owensby and his crew were out to save whatever souls possible, by whatever means necessary, even if it means by pushing every holy fear they have and, viewing many of his movies late at night as a child, that truly hit home.

A Day of Judgment, however, is one I had never seen before. Playing like a rather depressive episode of a homemade version of The Waltons, the film is set in a ’30s-era small town, where all types of sinful shenanigans are going on, usually leading to a form of murder most foul, perhaps the worst.

From the chubby bank president who tries to take away an Amish-bearded farmer’s land to a skanky dress salesman and his boss’ wife, from the hotheaded gas jockey who puts his parents away in an old folks’ home to a batty old dame who kills an adorable goat for entering her property, it may sound like typical Peyton Place fare, but takes an abominably hellish turn in the last few minutes.

See, if you’ve even looked at the Holy Bible, you’d know that God doesn’t take too kindly to their sinful actions, so he sends his emissary of death to the small town to reap every single sin they’ve ever sown, some in extremely graphic detail that I’m sure Owensby was able to rationalize to the Christian parents of America.

Leading a near-conga line of these sinners straight to the abhorrent gates of fire and brimstone, director C.D.H. Reynolds springs the terrible deeds of evil on the viewer’s sensibilities, much like a Jack Chick tract come to breathing, snorting life, with the hope of salvation — these days, at least — being completely up to the soul of the viewer with a head-scratching ending.

With plenty of summer-stock acting, grade-school special effects and other unholy trash that’ll make the most spiritually troublesome of viewers giggle and snort, as terrible as the film is — and, to be fair, it truly is — hopefully just by watching, they’ll earn some points with Jesus when Death come knocking on their door. I sure hope I did. —Louis Fowler

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Lovers of horror anthologies shouldn’t be put off by Dark Stories’ generic title, French language or origins as an internet series. Despite all those warning signs — and even more, discussed below — the portmanteau picture arrives as a nice surprise.

With more than a smidge of Scheherazade, Kristanna Loken (Terminator 3) plays a suburban mom in the wraparound story. Tied up and trapped in her basement by a sentient, super-creepy ventriloquist’s dummy (voiced by Scott Thrun, 2019’s Anna), she tells stories to the bald killer puppet as a survival technique — six in total.

Up first is a quite creative tale of an art museum exec (Delphine Chanéac, Splice) whose child is sucked into the paintings by a demon. The most overtly comic piece finds Sébastien Lalanne as a a zombie — “immortal, but delicate” — seeking vengeance on the men who put him in the morgue before all his body parts fall off. Arguably the scariest segment concerns a woman (Tiphaine Daviot) haunted by a djinn to the point of an Elm Street-ian sleeplessness.

Less satisfying, although not bad, are bits about ghosts following park jogger Dorylia Calmel (Let the Corpses Tan) and former Bionic Woman Michelle Ryan probing the claims of abduction by aliens — and subsequent God complex — of dimwitted farmer Dominique Pinon (Delicatessen).

Further confounding the aforementioned expectations, Dark Stories feels of a whole even with directing duties split between Guillaume Lubrano and François Descraques — the former responsible for another anthology series in the rather rotten Metal Hurlant Chronicles. Here, however, Lubrano’s sewing skills in unifying disparate elements have improved, striking the right balance of horror and humor all its own vs. beholden to EC Comics. So many contemporary collections of terror tales stumble from that start, so it’s a pleasure to see one not only get it right, but maintain it. —Rod Lott

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