The surprisingly Italian flick Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory — originally titled Lycanthropus — is nowhere near as exploitative as the American moniker sounds, but still has some solid scares and solid stares, mostly thanks to ingenue Barbara Lass as Priscilla.

As a handsome new science teacher arrives at a girls’ reform school somewhere in the hills of what I’m guessing is Italy, students are being slaughtered by the apparent wolves that roam the area after dark. As we soon learn, however, it’s a slightly hirsute werewolf that knows a sprightly form of proto-parkour, leaping tree-trunks in the wilderness.

But when Priscilla’s equally comely pal is murdered, she decides to get to the bottom of this mystery with the new teacher; the school’s caretaker, with his gimp arm, is nearly beaten up by drunken townspeople in a tavern for their troubles. Red herrings abound!

Typing all that out, it ultimately saddens me that this entire madcap premise wasn’t the basis for a novelty hit by a Bobby “Boris” Pickett rip-off — possibly Italian as well — that bubbled under the Hot 100 in the early ’60s. I think it would have gone something like this …

Priscilla was walking back to the dorm after class,
When she heard a howl that made her heart beat fast,
She investigated with the new science teacher,
And wondered aloud “Who is this groovy creature?”

It was a werewolf … ah-hooooo!
It was a werewolf … where can he be?
It was a werewolf … ah-hoooo!
It was a werewolf … in a girls’ dormitory!

Or maybe not. —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.

What has eight legs and a man shoving a lit Bunsen burner to his neck? The Legend of Spider Forest, far from legendary.

While staying at a pub in a supposedly quaint English village, ascot-rocking painter/photographer Paul (Simon Brent, Love Is a Splendid Illusion) runs across an unusual young woman walking carefree through the woods. Named Anna (Neda Arneric, Shaft in Africa), she says little, screws lots and is often nude — all the better to tease you with, what with her left shoulder’s distinctive spider-shaped birthmark.

Paul excepted, the men who make love to her don’t survive the encounter, thanks to her summoning into action the forest’s breed of spiders, both highly venomous and immune to chemicals. Wouldn’t the arachnids make an effective weapon for a resurgent Nazi party? Director Peter Sykes (Hammer’s To the Devil a Daughter) sure thinks so.

Or so one may assume, since he doesn’t do much with it — and what he does do is muddled to a point of incomprehension. This Eurohorror oddity will tangle viewers in a web not of intrigue, but internment. At least its tarantulas — underused, sadly — are real. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

I had a short-lived friendship with a person who once, while drunk and on a bridge-burning rampage, told me they were a disciple of Lars von Trier and believed in his supposed theories of “absolute depravity.”

I hauled ass out of that person’s life not too soon after.

I feel like I made more than the right choice to vacate after viewing the film The House That Jack Built and, even more so, after the fact that von Trier cast Hollywood meathead Matt Dillon as an unrepentant serial killer. True to form, it’s a 152-minute movie with the doltish Dillon trying his best to act menacing, a seemingly impossible feat that I can’t tell if von Trier is genuinely exploiting or caustically insulting.

Told in six chapters labeled “incidents,” the killer career of Jack is followed, in a typically detached way that will cause the smarter people in the audience to smirk in unison, as women are brutally murdered, including a mother who watches him slaughter her two small children, and a verbally abused girlfriend who get her breasts sliced off and made into a purse in purely pornographic detail.

The film only becomes slightly interesting in the epilogue where Jack finds himself in the afterlife with the poet Virgil (Bruno Ganz), traveling through an eerily low-budget version of the circles of hell, leading to the only truly satisfying moment of the movie: his well-deserved casting off into the unholy flames.

The main problem with The House is that by now, the boundaries that von Trier has supposedly pushed over the past few decades have become more rote and routine than anything else; this serial killer sex fantasy has been done by better directors with a far more meaningful takes on the subject matter rather than the angry middle-schooler scribbling that, per von Trier’s own words, “life is evil and soulless.”

I hate to say it, but, like I outgrew my former friend’s notable antics, I think I might have outgrown von Trier’s insignificant shock value as well. Is that maturity? —Louis Fowler

Get it at Amazon.