The tagline for the existential teen horror flick The Dead Ones is “High School Is Hell,” which almost immediately should give you an idea where we’re going with this whole thing: to hell.

A quartet of thoroughly irritating teens with slight mental issues are taken in the middle of the night to clean up their high school, I’m guessing as punishment. As they barely scrub the dirt and debris that seems to have settled in, they gripe, complain and cut themselves. Meanwhile, a second group of teens heavily into Slipknot cosplay attack the sleeping school at the same time.

But as the time periods constantly shift — and more monsters and other horrific visions start to appear — it becomes heavily evident where the teens are and why. Apparently this is the devil’s detention hall. (Detention hell?)

After living through 20 or so years of some of the more nightmarish of school shootings, it’s a bit shocking to see director Jeremy Kasten — he of The Wizard of Gore remake fame — present the teens’ backstories of abuse and whatnot as a means to garner these kids a little sympathy, but it’s an attempt that falls painfully flat once they strap on masks and a few guns.

I do have to wonder though how a group of teens were able to afford masks with state-of-the-art voice changers and boss leather jackets and pants, not to mention the high-powered assault rifles. Scratch that last one — this is America, after all. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

At a time when the notorious Italian cannibal flicks were making un sacco di soldi the world over, Asian countries decided they, too, wanted some of that bloody lucre and started to churn out many man-eating titles, with one of the most popular — Primitives — hailing from Indonesia.

It’s kind of odd, however, as there is only somewhat implied cannibalism, but, to be fair, there are plenty of onscreen animal cruelties, including komodo killings, alligator atrocities and, most traumatic of all, monkey manglings. If you can look past that or, even worse, are a sociopath who actually enjoys that, Primitives is an engaging grotesquerie from the future filmmakers of Satan’s Slave.

A trio of stereotyped college students — the cool guy, the nerdy guy and the reserved love interest — are deep in the jungle trying to discover a new tribe of Indigenous peoples to write their term paper about. If I were the professor, I probably would have given them a B+ just for getting on the plane or, here, the flimsy wooden raft quickly destroyed in the basest of rapids.

Separated and captured by a wholly offensive tribe of “ooga-booga” natives, the cool guy (Barry Prima) and the love interest are chained to a rock and almost stripped down to their skivvies by people who apparently don’t understand the concept of clothing. Eventually, though, they escape and fall into troublesome quicksand.

Although this so-called “video nasty” gained a notorious reputation as a terrible film — mainly for the acting, writing or directing — it’s still mind-munchingly entertaining. Filled with plenty of stock footage — not to mention what I’m sure has to be a copyright-violating use of Kraftwerk’s “The Robots” over the opening credits — Primitives is a tummy-troubling entry in the celluloid cannibal phase. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.