Pay semi-close attention, class, to bee-obsessed Aster’s speech toward the start of Royal Jelly. The lead character’s presentation on the honeybee — particularly its strict caste system and post-coital genital ripping — isn’t just there for filler, no matter how bored the high schooler’s classmates look. Writer/director Sean Riley (Fighting Belle) practically highlights and underlines where his sophomore film will go from here — unfortunately not as quickly as you will like. (For a teen-transformation movie that properly uses horror as a metaphor for puberty, you want Ginger Snaps.)

Played by relative newcomer Elizabeth McCoy with appropriately paste-white skin, the Carrie-level outcast is stuck in a stereotypical Cinderella household, where her evil stepmother (Fiona McQuinn, Hallowed Be They Name) takes all the noodles and her snooty half-sister (debuting Raylen Ladner) makes her scrub menstrual blood from the bedsheets.

Weirdo substitute teacher Tressa (Sherry Lattanzi) shows an unhealthy interest in her; Aster gladly soaks up the attention, despite the elder’s habit for wearing sunglasses indoors. Tressa takes the misunderstood misfit to egg the houses of the mean girls, who respond in kind by busting Aster’s beehive. That’s not a euphemism; she literally tends to one in her yard.

That said, Royal Jelly is no modern-day version of The Wasp Woman, nor another update of The Fly. After the setup, when Aster flees to Tressa’s farm and meets her son (Lucas T. Matchett), it becomes a turgid, soap-bubble drama made all the rougher by performances both amateurish and at tonal odds with one another. Lattanzi embraces the camp, whether she realizes it or not, while her young charges play scenes as if Twilight leapt to a series on The CW. This marks the first feature credit for many of its cast members.

Normally, I don’t reveal details about a film’s ending, but I must here: Aster sprouts wings, like the kind little girls wear around the playroom. I had to laugh — certainly the reaction Riley neither intended nor wanted. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

One dark night, sometime in the early ’80s, I remember watching a film with HBO with my father, like I usually did almost every night when he got off work as a policeman. With its scenes of a downright creepy mausoleum, electric-eyed corpses and toothbrush-chewing schoolgirls in oblivious danger, this was seemingly a one-and-done airing, never to be viewed again, the title lost to the reanimated corpses of my mind.

It has haunted me forever, with searches at every video store I ever worked, coming up typically with only Mortuary, released the next year, but sadly, not the rotting videotape I was looking for. Recently, One Dark Night turned up in my mailbox, a movie I put on one afternoon for some background noise.

As it continued on behind me, a rush of putrid prepubescent memories came flooding back, as the puzzle of flesh and bones began to come together to form a horrid whole picture: One Dark Night was the movie I had visions of long in the back of my mind for almost 40 years; now I had it in my Blu-ray player, feasting on the insides for all eternity, or at least the next 90 minutes.

Starring a very cute Meg Tilly as good girl Julie, she’s looking to join a group of trashy girls, one of whom is played by E.G. Daily and another is constantly chewing on a toothbrush throughout the flick — it’s all coming together! They tell Tilly that for her initiation, she has to pull an all-nighter at the local mausoleum, which isn’t all that bad.

Well, normally it wouldn’t be all that bad, but earlier that day, renowned evil psychic Raymar — who was found dead in a room next to a pile of dead teenagers — was laid to temporary rest there. I say that because, as discovered by his daughter (and her hubby Adam West!), he was trying to harness his mental abilities through death and, good for him, it works.

For the teens, however, it’s not so great, as you can probably assume.

Directed by Tom McLoughlin (the highly entertaining Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives), One Dark Night is an entertaining piece of ’80s trash that still works, especially with the corpse-filled finale managing to deliver a shrill scare up my spine all these years later, betraying its low-budget roots to give us a cold slab of ancient horror that absolutely lives up to the demonic memories it bred.

Now, that I know what flick it is and have seen it as an adult, I can finally lay One Dark Night to rest in the annals of my mind under six feet of broken images and numerous tries. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.