In 1985, when I was a 14, all I wanted for Christmas was Stephen King’s Skeleton Crew, then fresh in hardback. I got it, and the cold winter nights were perfect for reading “The Mist,” the eerie first of 22 stories in the collection.

But really, what were the Weinstein brothers thinking in releasing Frank Darabont’s The Mist movie over a Thanksgiving weekend? While it is mostly faithful to King’s original, 100ish-page story, its drastically different ending doesn’t exactly scream “holiday family motion-picture experience.”

Thomas Jane (2004’s The Punisher) stars as David Drayton, an artist and all-around family man living the quiet life in coastal Maine until the night a freak storm tears the outdoors to hell. The next day, facing no electricity, he and his little boy head to town to pick up food and supplies at the Food House grocery store, leaving his wife back at the house.

Given the storm, the store is packed with people of all backgrounds, which will make for a real pressure cooker (mostly thanks to the apocalyptic religious zealot played by Mystic River’s Marcia Gay Harden) once the eerie fog envelopes the place and traps them inside. Despite attempts at escape, gooey tentacles and oversized insects from the mist thwart those desperate plans. But what’s really in there? And will anyone who sees live to tell?

It’s the third go-round for Darabont in King features, having written and directed 1994’s The Shawshank Redemption and 1999’s The Green Mile prior. Hey, at least this one gets out of prison … or does it? People trapped in a grocery store — may as well be San Quentin.

Differences to the story are mostly subtle, except for the biggest change of all: the ending. I won’t spoil it for you, but it brings to mind a point Jeffery Deaver made in the introduction to his 2003 Twisted anthology of short stories: “Authors have a contract with their readers and I think too much of mine to have them invest their time, money and emotion in a full-length novel, only to leave them disappointed by a grim, cynical ending. With a thirty-page short story, however, all bets are off.”

True, this is a motion picture, not a work of literature, but its extended running time makes it the equivalent of a novel, and Darabont crosses the line into cruel cynicism. Up until that point, I was with The Mist all the way — a suspenseful, purposely paced horror thriller that delivers some old-school, B-movie scares. —Rod Lott

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Translated from Latin, the word “morituris” means “dying.” While watching Morituris: Legions of the Dead, I could feel my interest doing just that, with the passing of each loathsome second.

At a cursory glance, the Italian-born Morituris appears to hold promise, what with creatures looking like the guys from GWAR got a hose-down and a steampunky wardrobe upgrade. And since these armored villains are mute and former gladiators from ancient Roman history, influence of Amando de Ossorio’s Blind Dead series is not out of the question. Such things should be in Morituris’ favor.

Nope. Instead, the debut film from director Raffaele Picchio is terribly, woefully rote, and with no imagination of its own. It’s all about cribbing clichés and regurgitating them into an even less appealing state. How many horror films have we seen built upon a road-tripping car full of attractive young people? Regardless of the number, here is yet another.

We are introduced to the vehicle’s five occupants — three Italian guys who have picked up two Romanian girls — with approximately 20 minutes of dialogue between them. By the end of that, no character names have stuck (if they were shared at all); about all we know is that they are headed to an illegal, late-night rave in the middle of the woods. Once there, the guys turn on the girls and rape them. This somehow wakes the damned, who dispatch the 20-somethings in predictably porno-gore fashion.

There’s so little to Morituris’ bones that Picchio and his screenwriters are forced to pad, doing even more harm to their film. First, the prologue: Presented as some family’s old Super 8 home movies, it baffles because of an illogical POV — just who is shooting this? Second, the B story: One of the rapists has a brother, whom we cut to from time to time as he entertains a prostitute at his house, eventually leading to a scene in which the john borrows a page from Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho and shoves a Habitrail and rodent up his by-the-hour harlot’s vagina, all while 1965’s Bloody Pit of Horror is projected on the wall behind them. What’s the point? I don’t know, because that string ends there. It occurred to me that I’d much rather have been watching Mickey Hargitay — not just as the Crimson Executioner, but in anything — than another minute of Morituris. —Rod Lott

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In the same year they inadvertently made movie history with the troll-free Troll 2, director Claudio Fragasso and predominantly freckled child actor Michael Stephenson went Beyond Darkness. Actually a sequel to 1998’s goofy-ass Ghosthouse, this Italian-financed haunted-house retread bears more relation to the Hollywood horror shows it rips off.

Rev. Peter (Gene Le Brock, Metamorphosis) moves his wife (Barbara Bingham, Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan) and their two tots into a beautiful, spacious Louisiana home. On their first night, they enjoy a dinner of beans, about which their tiny daughter, Carole (Theresa F. Walker), says with glee, “And then you make stinkies!”

The downside to the fam’s newfound Norman Rockwell existence is all the paranormal activity that takes place there, thanks to a witch (Mary Coulson, Lucio Fulci’s Door to Silence) recently executed for murdering several children and swallowing their souls. The unexplained gift that greets them upon move-in day — a swan-shaped rocker, as fugly as it is a satanic shade of black — should have been their first clue. Same goes for the breathing wall, which Carole claims has a blow dryer behind it, not to mention the radio that attacks them. I kinda miss the clown.

What we have in Beyond Darkness is a beyond-shameless pastiche of The Amityville Horror and Poltergeist. When harm comes to the kids, Peter enlists the help of a fellow reverend (David Brandon, Lamberto Bava’s Delirium), a gap-toothed man of God who’s fallen from the flock and hitting the hooch hard after an encounter with the witch on Death Row. And then the film becomes Italy’s umpteenth take on The Exorcist. And then you make stinkies. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.