For 300 days, a family of three has lived incognito and in peace in an underground fallout shelter. Day 301, however, will be different.

Hidden takes place almost entirely on that fateful day, largely confined to the bunker and near-exclusively between the trio of family members: Ray (Alexander Skarsgård, Battleship); his wife, Claire (Andrea Riseborough, Oblivion); and their 9-year-old daughter, Zoe (Emily Alyn Lind, The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghost of Georgia).

Billed as The Duffer Brothers, feature-debuting writers/directors Matt and Ross Duffer dole out answers to viewers’ immediate list of questions — Why are they hiding? How did they find the place? What’s going on? — piecemeal and on their own time frame. They do so in order to build suspense, yes, but also to let their characters develop, which is refreshing. At first, we know only that Zoe fears someone or something she calls “the Breathers,” and that’s enough for a start. The less you know beyond that, the better.

For its first half, Hidden works reasonably well. The Duffer sibs take a near-procedural approach in their contribution to end-of-the-world cinema, demonstrating how one might go about the duties and dreariness of day-to-day survival, from canned-goods meal planning and pumping well water to passing the punishing hours with homemade board games. They show us everything but the honey bucket!

Ironically, once Hidden reveals all its cards, interest doesn’t just wane — it dries up, making the last 20 minutes somewhat of a slog. Of particular umbrage is its “twist.” I hesitate even to call it that since anyone paying attention will see it coming from an early scene, when Claire tells her daughter, “Sometimes the truth is hidden from us.” A line like that hits you over the head with as much blunt force as is expended by Claire when she takes a wrench to the head of a peaches-thieving rat.

Also stolen: the whole of Hidden, directly from the top-billed Skarsgård and Riseborough, by the tiny Lind. Just barely a teenager, the girl gives a realistic performance that, unlike her fellow child actors, is not at all showy or affected. She’s a natural. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

One cannot credibly discuss Neon Maniacs without first asking what makes these maniacs neon at all, as the noble gas is not part of their outfits and they do not appear to own any. The only logical explanation I can think up is, “Because it was 1986, that’s why.”

Just accept it, since Joseph Mangine’s movie makes no effort to explain the creature cluster that comes to life after their trading cards are discovered in a steer’s skull beneath the Golden Gate Bridge and then bled upon. Or something like that. It’s not clear, nor does it need to be. The flick is all the more enjoyable in its absolute absence of backstory.

Heck, although great pains were undertaken to give each of its dozen monsters an individual identity, neither Mangine nor screenwriter Mark Patrick Carducci (Pumpkinhead) bothered to name them; only by reading the end credits or viewing the trailer do you learn they even have monikers. They’re more labels, really, what with the likes of Axe, Mohawk, Samurai, Ape and Decapitator, and I was hard-pressed after the fact to connect all the names with their corresponding ugly faces. I know them better as the one who looks like Maniac Cop, like Ali Gator from The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, like The Toxic Avenger, like a Blue Man Group member after a vehicular mishap, like My First Cenobite, like Ruth Buzzi with a crossbow, and so on.

Anyway, they lay waste to a van full of high schoolers hanging out under the San Fran landmark for a night of football, firecrackers and fellatio. Only the sweater-wearing, birthday-girl virgin Natalie (Basic Instinct’s Leilani Sarelle, smoking-hot even with her ’80s Big Hair) survives the bloodletting — a pretty sweet present, if you ask me — but the cops write off her in-shock babbling as a teenage prank, despite all her missing friends. Suspended from school as a result, Natalie continues to be pursued by the demons, but finds an ally — and a fresh new beau — in a grocery delivery boy (Clyde Hayes, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter) her pals dismissively referred to as “pasta breath” and “baloney boy.” (Take their gruesome deaths as karmic payback, if you prefer.)

Not to spoil anything — because there is nothing to spoil — but the kids’ final showdown with the Neon Maniacs ends at a battle of the bands, where the audience is equipped with squirt guns because of this exchange slightly earlier:

“Look, what I’m saying is the only defense against these things is water. Just plain, old water.”

“Water?”

“Water.”

Water! (And a decade and a half before M. Night Shyamalan lazily used it!) Meanwhile, Mangine (whose only other directorial credit was Smoke and Flesh, a 1968 tab of hippiesploitation) threatens to kill his own viewers by subjecting their ears to a score of smooth jazz. Seriously, it’s so sax-drippy-dippy that you half-expect to see Dustin Hoffman shoving a mime. But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, Neon Maniacs is nothing but fun, as cheesy as it is earnest, as earnest as it senseless. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.