“Something smells,” we hear no more than five minutes into Don’t Go in the Woods. “What’s that stink?” The piece-of-shit indie slasher is the answer to its own question.

Roughly 25 minutes later, we hear, “I wonder if something’s happened.” I’ll handle this one, movie: “Barely a thing.”

An obvious ploy by talent-challenged director James Bryan (The Executioner Part II) to trick Friday the 13th fans, Woods throws a bunch of asshole campers (or camping assholes, if you prefer) into the Utah wilderness. Among them are our eventual heroes, Ingrid (Mary Gail Artz) and Peter (Jack McClelland); since they both look like men, it is possible to tell them apart because Peter is wearing a pink T-shirt advertising Boogie Vision, a Bryan project that is somehow way worse than this one. (Aside: Boogie Vision is supposed to be funny, yet isn’t, whereas Woods is not supposed to be funny, yet is.)

It hardly matters who’s who, except for the antisocial antagonist who will be narrowing that list to as close to zero as he can get. Per the credits, that freak of nature is Maniac (Tom Drury), a mute mountain man who lives in a booby-trapped hoarder cabin and looks like awards-show banter writer Bruce Vilanch doing Mad Max cosplay after stopping by the crafts fair for beads. He grunts softly and carries a big stick with a pointy blade and a coonskin cap on its stabbing end. No one is safe — not the photographer in the pink beret, not the ’bout-to-boink newlyweds in the VW Bus with the Farrah Fawcett-Majors poster in its ceiling, and especially not the wheelchair-bound guy out for a … what, a rolling jaunt through the mountains and all its rough and uneven terrain?

Amateur actors utter their lines with blundering pauses … as if … they’re reading … from … cue cards. Doing that is well within the realm of possibility, since Bryan shot almost all of Don’t Go in the Woods in that fright-killer you and I and every moviegoer we know call broad friggin’ daylight. —Rod Lott

Don’t get it at Amazon.

Following the sleeper success of such slashers as Black Christmas, Halloween and Friday the 13th, the 1980s imitators leapt to claim whatever boxes were left on the calendar, resulting in New Year’s Evil, My Bloody Valentine, April Fool’s Day, Happy Birthday to Me, Graduation Day, etc.

This dash to co-op every conceivable festivity was so pervasive, Mad magazine spoofed this subgenre with a 1981 all-in-one parody titled Arbor Day; I’m half-surprised it remained up for grabs. I’m also half-surprised that the horror anthology Holidays wasn’t able to make room for that tree-commemorating celebration among the tales that do comprise this fun film. Nine more or less indie directors participate, and while crazed killers aren’t necessarily their subjects, a year of fear is covered nonetheless.

For the first segment, “Valentine’s Day,” Starry Eyes co-directors Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer provide an EC Comics twist to its story of a lovestruck high school outcast (newcomer Madeleine Coghlan). Affairs of the heart also go under the microscope in Some Kind of Hate helmer Adam Egypt Mortimer’s closer, “New Year’s Eve,” set in the lonely, cruel world of online dating. Suspend your disbelief that a young woman as cute as Lorenza Izzo (The Green Inferno) would have trouble finding someone with whom to hit the town.

Three tales depend on technology, assuming one still views the Walkman as such. That’s what Jocelin Donahue (The House of the Devil) dons in order to follow a cassette tape of mysterious instructions left to her decades before by her dad (Tremors’ Michael Gross), in the haunting “Father’s Day,” from visual effects artist Anthony Scott Burns (The Last Exorcism Part II). Meanwhile, post-Tusk, Kevin Smith again dips his feet in shits-and-giggles gore as webcam sex workers (one of whom is played by his own daughter, Harley Quinn Smith) plot pimp revenge for “Halloween.” In the darkly comedic “Christmas,” from Dark Skies’ Scott Stewart, a harried suburban dad (Seth Green, TV’s Robot Chicken) goes to extreme lengths to acquire the hottest gadget of the season.

More memorable is a pair of segments on motherhood. In Dracula Untold director Gary Shore’s “St. Patrick’s Day,” a single teacher (Ruth Bradley, Grabbers) is baby-hungry to a disturbing fault. On the flip side, the woman at the heart of “Mother’s Day” (co-directed by The Midnight Swim’s Sarah Adina Smith and first-timer Ellen Reid) gets pregnant every time she has sex. Finally, for sheer fright, look no further than the Jesus Bunny, who/which terrorizes “Easter” in the short shocker from The Pact’s Nicholas McCarthy.

Each segment’s title is rendered via original, illustrated greeting cards — when you care enough to send the very beast. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.