Made in the dead of a Wisconsin winter, Trapped Alive (or simply Trapped to some) begins as a crime thriller, ends as a subterranean slasher, and fails to fully succeed at either. It’s not for a lack of trying.

Late on Christmas Eve, three felons break out of prison. Led by the port-wine-stained Face (Alex Kubik, Stunts), the trio hijacks a car driven by two young ladies, Monica (Laura Kalison) and Robin (Sullivan Hester), on their way to a party and takes them hostage. All five fall into a nearby mine, which plays home to — what else? — a mutant cannibal (Paul Dean, Annabelle Comes Home). You can guess what happens from there, as long as you think to throw in a sheriff’s deputy (Randolph Powell, National Lampoon’s Class Reunion) who looks like Will Forte.

Being a regional horror film, Trapped Alive is to be approached with lowered expectations, as the clumsy direction by Leszek Burzynski (who wrote the previous year’s Tiny Tim vehicle, Blood Harvest) screams “first feature” as loudly as the actors’ overwrought performances. Nowhere are these deficiencies more apparent when Burzynski has Mindwarp’s Elizabeth Kent deliver a multiple-page monologue in one unbroken take from Exposition City.

Still, the movie gets some things right. What little money Burzynski had at his disposal appears to have been applied wisely to three spots: an impressive mine set, the serviceable monster makeup and the extended cameo by Flick Attack all-star Cameron Mitchell, who, as Robin’s widowed father, has little more to do than drink and fret over her whereabouts. Perhaps he has reason to be worried, with Robin forced to strip to her bra and panties in a contrivance almost the equal of Carrie Fisher losing her dress to a sword-slinging Nazi Munchkin in Under the Rainbow. —Rod Lott

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For the sake of argument, let’s say you’re at the local park on a lovely fall day and you happen to see a gentleman, clad head to toe in a black coat and a black hat, not only buying a young street urchin a large tuft of cotton candy but taking him on a small paddleboat ride across a lake to a desolate clearing. Surely, if you didn’t forcibly stop him, you’d call the authorities, right?

If not, then it’s a good chance you’re the faceless killer of the mostly mundane Italian flick The Wax Mask, a latter-day effort from former masters of horror Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci — who had the good sense to die during production and leave directing duties to special effects maestro Sergio Stivaletti, who, in all fairness, does a pretty capable job.

Inside a randy brothel — one that’s housing some of Italian porn’s finest actors, I’m sure — like many people at the turn of the century were wont to do, a pair of men are placing bets on whether one of them could make it through an entire night at the new wax museum that recently opened down the street. I’m not giving anything away by telling you this white fool gets himself killed.

His corpse, like so many others throughout the course of the film, are used in the wax museum’s life-like (not really) exhibitions, seemingly presided over by a mad scientist — at least I think he’s a scientist — with a de-gloved hand that is seeking revenge on a cheating wife, although I think it’s safe to say he had his revenge by now and is just acting out for attention.

Even though the flick is nowhere near the standards horror fans have come to expect from Argento and Fulci over the years, Stivaletti salvages what he can, relying more on mystery and atmosphere than the usual buckets of grue; but, to be fair, the gore effects are, of course, watchably graphic and suitably grotesque. But, and I ask this rhetorically, is it, as the box copy tells us, the “last great Italian gore film of the 20th century”? —Louis Fowler

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Thirtysomething Canadian filmmaker G. Patrick Condon excels at procrastinating — so much so that he’s squandered the money intended for his latest feature, a slasher film. Fearing investors’ kneecap-breaking action for his fraudulent inaction, the possibly alcoholic director has no choice but to make his movie, pronto.

Because desperate times call for desperate measures, he rents a three-story house in the country and on the cheap; wires closed-circuit cameras in every nook and cranny, Big Brother-style; and requires the cast to live there during the weeklong shoot. That edict is especially curious since Condon considers actors to be “vile human beings.” No wonder he hires himself to play the killer.

The trick of Incredible Violence is Condon isn’t playing at all; he’s snapped under pressure and prepared to slaughter his cast members for the good of the project. Actually, Incredible Violence has another trick waiting: Its director is also G. Patrick Condon. What I didn’t realize until later, however, is that the Condon of the movie within the movie isn’t really Condon; he’s played by Stephen Oates (TV’s Frontier).

Part of me wonders if watching would be any less of a meta-on-meta mindfuck knowing that information in advance, but I have my doubts, because Incredible Violence is pretty crazy as is, thanks to Oates’ performance as the master manipulator in the attic. Pulling the strings on his own Milgram experiment, his Condon pecks new scenes on the fly, sending them to be spit from dot-matrix printers in each room. His unpaid actors do his spurts of his bidding 24/7 and improvise the rest. When his narrative needs advancing, Condon emerges only to murder, adding a crude papier-mâché theater mask to his ensemble of fur coat and increasingly soiled undershirt.

Although it may not look or sound like it, Incredible Violence intends to disturb and delight, with Condon — the real one, mind you — veering into scenes of the darkly comic and transparently savage with little forewarning. Too bad the performers’ conversations in between are drawn-out to the point of being too conversational — the result of a slack pace and, I suspect, actual improv. Love it or hate it, the film is its own thing: mumblegore. —Rod Lott

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