Look, if you’re gonna play a live-action version of a Dungeons & Dragons-style table game, you gotta do it right, like the med students of Shakma:
1) Play it in a 10-story building overnight.
2) Give everyone trackers and walkie-talkies, over.
3) Scrawl clues on chalkboards.
4) Put the villain in a Halloween wolf mask.
5) Outfit the princess in head-to-toe “sister wife.”

And for maximum pants-wetting action you can’t even get from a 32-sided die:
6) Let a hyperaggressive baboon with a beet-red ass — and festering resentment for being experimented upon — run amok, over.

The students — The Blue Lagoon’s Christopher Atkins and A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Amanda Wyss among them — don’t exactly “let” the baboon into the game. Neither does their professor, played by Roddy McDowall, despite the advanced familiarity with pissed-off primates he brings to the role. But because Atkins’ character fails to euthanize the animal as instructed, Shakma gets loose and seeks to destroy, dismantle and dismember — preferably all at once.

Shakma is played by Typhoon, whom you’re likely to have seen in the telepods of David Cronenberg’s The Fly. Remember how sweet and sympathetic he was in that sci-fi classic? Well, that monkey has more range than Atkins, because Typhoon is as mean as a nest of murder hornets.

With his unit dangling like an unwrapped string cheese, Shakma hisses, leaps and attacks with convincing fury. Talk about committing to your art, too, because 44 minutes in, the animal bats at a door so forcibly, he rage-poops without the slightest of pauses.

As silly as its title, Shakma seems to be like a slasher movie, but with a monkey in the middle. Although co-directors Hugh Parks and Tom Logan (of the same year’s Dream Trap) botch the movie overall, there’s something to be said about its wild-kingdom premise. Naturally, its death scenes are its finest resource, over. —Rod Lott

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Call me blasphemous if you must, but I’ve always seen Demons 2 as a far superior movie to the first film.

I originally picked up discount VHS copies of both flicks at Suncoast Video in ninth grade and secretly watched both in the video editing booth at school, mostly due to their undoubtedly satanic nature that would have brought me hell at home.

Demons is somewhat fondly remembered by Italian horror fans for its wholly cinematic rampage in a Brigadoon-like movie house where an audience full of grating stereotypes is mysteriously locked in as a sketchy film about Nostradamus inspires the gates of hell to open and the titular beasts to wreak havoc on the world.

In Demons 2, however, a remake (I believe) shows on television, one that the once-again stereotypical denizens of an apartment building are all watching. Starting with a wholly whiny woman having a birthday party where she throws a temper tantrum every few minutes sobbing about God knows what, a demon pops out of the TV showing the film and possesses her, rather violently.

Now a demon herself, as she throat-rips all of the partygoers into demons themselves — not sure how that works, but I’ll go with it — they, in turn, infect the other tenants, including members of a health club, a small boy and, in one of the movie’s evilest aspects, an adorable dog I named Mr. Scruffles.

Meanwhile, two uninfected heroes try to survive the night, with varying results.

With far better special effects pulled off in far more imaginative ways, Demons 2 has a slight Gothic riff on the first one, with the main difference being the soundtrack, featuring great tunes by The Smiths, The Cult, and Love and Rockets, to name a blackened few. That’s more than enough to recommend it as far as I’m concerned. —Louis Fowler

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Most small children are disturbed and frightened by movies they were too young to have ever watched. I, on the other hand, had shaking nightmares simply about the VHS box for The Brotherhood of Satan, creating a dreamworld of horrific visions that recently came back the other night after I viewed the flick for the first time ever — and still about that damn VHS box!

In case you never saw the box, it was released on cheapo label GoodTimes Home Video sometime in the late ’80s. The cover featured the head satanist handling a knife as a couple of absolutely catatonic kids stood behind him, if I remember it correctly. It was one of the worst images in my fragile mind for a long time, only because it seemed so real, thanks to parents who put the fear of Satan deep in me.

Although the movie has a few solid Luciferian chills here and Mephisto-friendly spills there, it’s too bad there was no way for it to live up to the prepubescent expectation of downright fear and absolute loathing. I should have known better.

Playing out like a big-budget retelling of Manos: The Hands of Fate, a road-tripping family is caught in a small town when their car breaks down; as they try to find help, children drive voodoo-inclined army tanks over anyone entering city limits. I’m not sure how these travelers got passed them, but as they try to convince the yokel cops that something strange is afoot, their small daughter suddenly disappears.

Turns out a group of elderly satanists are trying to possess the kids, if only so they can live another some-odd hundred years. Truthfully, if I had to stay in that shitty small town, I’d just let the Lord take my soul because I ain’t doing another century of that.

Helmed by television director Bernard McEveety and surprisingly produced by character actors L.Q. Jones and Alvy Moore, The Brotherhood of Satan has a trace of a frighteningly good idea here — one fraught with my own childhood fears of who we’re taught satanists truly are. For all of their dark intentions, they just can’t pull it off.

If you ever hear about a documentary regarding spooky video slipcases and the nightmares they invoked in kid, please point it my way. —Louis Fowler

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