Nightmare Weekend’s making may qualify as the cinematic equivalent to the child’s party game Telephone: What you say on one end may arrive at the other in a garbled state — perhaps even mutated. In this case, a French crew attempted to make an English-language film, and on the all-American soil of Ocala, Fla. That they failed so spectacularly is exactly why you should watch their doomed enterprise.

Edward Brake (Wellington Meffert — what a name!) is a widowed scientist with 212 patents to his name, including a supercomputer and George, who operates it telepathically and from whom Edward’s hot teenage daughter (Debra Hunter) solicits love advice. George, by the way, is a talking, green-haired hand puppet. Let that soak in before advancing to the next paragraph.

Edward’s cunning business associate, Julie Clingstone (Debbie Laster, Bad Girls Dormitory), invites three college girls to the Brake estate for a weekend of research in a personality-reversal project — or so I gathered. The movie is so impossibly incoherent, it is open to the interpretation of Hermann Rorschach’s inkblots. All I know for sure is that Ms. Clingstone makes these Phantasm-sized metal balls pop up at inopportune times (coitus especially), jam themselves into people’s orifices and turn them into murderers. Again, or so I gathered, because to bear witness to Nightmare Weekend is to remain in a narrative haze. Things happen for no reason and then confound further by going without remark, like a tough guy having full-tilt sex with some skank against a pinball machine at the local bar.

That lucky sumbitch is played by Robert John Burke, who would go on to bigger, better parts, like the lead roles of Thinner and Robocop 3. In fact, Nightmare Weekend hosts an inordinate amount of future names, including Dale Midkiff of Pet Sematary, Andrea Thompson of TV’s NYPD Blue and Karen Mayo-Chandler of Jack Nicholson’s bed. On the spectrum’s opposite end, Nightmare Weekend also hosts an inordinate amount of one-and-doners who never had a credit before or after this.

Credited here as “H. Sala,” French director Henri Sala possesses a filmography littered with erotica (e.g. Emanuelle e Lolita), which could explain why so much attention is paid to writhing nude bodies, but Nightmare Weekend resists — if not defies — explanation. That very slovenliness makes it entertaining. Vive le balderdash! —Rod Lott

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While I didn’t see Bunnyman in this fashion, it’s possible to watch nearly all of it on fast-forward and still grasp its goings-on. That’s how little happens in its 90 minutes, and how routine and simplistic what does happen is.

The villainous gimmick of this urban legend-inspired cheapie: The killer is a chainsaw-wielding man in a head-to-toe Easter Bunny outfit. That holds potential as a terrific setup … if Bunnyman were a slasher parody. Alas, it is not.

The target of the silly rabbit (Shattered Lives’ Carl Lindbergh, who also wrote, directed, produced and edited the movie — blame him!) actually numbers several: a Toyota chock-full of dimwitted millennials on a getaway. Hiding in a dump truck, Duel-style, Bunnyman first terrorizes them on the road (his truck roars like a lion) as he terrorizes you, the viewer (enough with the friggin’ horn!). Their strategy to shake him is to pull onto the shoulder and sit and wait, and that move is just as cinematically pulse-pounding as you’d expect. Did Lindbergh shoot that scene in real-time or did it just feel like it?

A bit later, Bunnyman runs one of the poor saps over, killing him. The survivors’ sorrow is awfully short-lived, as they’re soon playfully shoving one another and laughing. Finally, Bunnyman fires up his ’saw and hops down to business. You absolutely won’t care a lick either way. None of the youngsters is afforded any kind of definable personality, much less an introduction; one assumes we’re supposed to root for the Britney Spears lookalike (Cheryl Texiera, Wiener Dog Nationals) simply because she wears cutoff shorts. It’s not enough. Nothing is.

For what it’s worth — again, nothing — Bunnyman has two sequels to date: The Bunnyman Massacre and the soon-to-come Bunnyman III. I refuse to believe any demand existed beyond Lindbergh’s purview. —Rod Lott

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Of Oliver Stone’s pair of forays into the horror genre, The Hand enjoys a higher profile than 1974’s Seizure, yet is half as interesting. A comparison of the titles alone could tell you that.

Fresh from being Dressed to Kill for Brian De Palma, Michael Caine takes pen in hand to portray Jonathan Lansdale, the creator, writer and artist of a syndicated comic strip titled Mandro after its fantasy-adventure hero cast in the Alex Raymond mold. Jonathan relishes the work — for the income, naturally, but also for the vicarious outlet it provides, as his marriage to Anne (Andrea Marcovicci, Larry Cohen’s The Stuff) has curdled.

The couple is quarreling when Anne’s irresponsible driving results in an accident that causes her hubby’s moneymaker — his right hand — to pop off like a zit that has ripened to a head. While shot convincingly — which is to say gruesomely — in order to make viewers gasp and wince, Jonathan’s appendage assassination becomes peculiarly comedic in a wordless scene soon after that sees Anne and two policemen searching a nearby field for the poor man’s errant mitt (and, in a metaphoric sense, his entire career). Whether Stone intended those few seconds as a joke is unclear, at least in this early stage of his filmography; the mocking, sensory-overload satire of Natural Born Killers was more than a dozen years away.

For the rest of the film, Jonathan is haunted by his disembodied hand. There’s no question these scenes were meant to unsettle and induce shivers in audiences of 1981, just as there’s no question these scenes are laughable today. From a shower handle morphing into an outstretched hand and a pornographic drawing that couldn’t have been his, um, handiwork — or could it? — to suspicious choking murders, our protagonist can’t escape the five fingers of death. By the end, Caine has so committed to the craziness of the piece, he resembles Marty Feldman.

In making the “artistic” choice to shoot the more surreal passages on black-and-white stock, Stone can’t resist squandering the anxiety he worked toward in his direction and script (based on Marc Brandel’s novel). Once the picture drains of color, the surprise factor follows in lockstep. Notable only for seeing a pre-Platoon Stone at work, The Hand is rather pointless. It’s certainly scareless, being an A-list update of such third-finger junk as The Crawling Hand. —Rod Lott

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