[REC] 4 is on a boat! It’s the veteran captain’s last voyage before retirement. A big storm is brewing. Radio communication is out. There also is a zombie-virus-infected monkey onboard. What could possibly go wrong?

All of it, including the movie itself. [REC] 4: Apocalypse arrives as such a letdown, I’ve rechristened it [REC]tum.

For the Spanish horror series’ reportedly final installment, Jaume Balagueró returns to the director’s chair after sitting out [REC] 3: Genesis. This one combines story threads from that 2012 prequel, as well as the earlier chapters, and aims to tie them up once and for all. Primary among them is Chiclet-toothed broadcast news reporter Ángela (Manuela Velasco, reprising her role from the 2007 original and 2009 sequel), now rescued from the apartment building and quarantined on an oil tanker to ensure total isolation.

Also on the ship is a laboratory, where scientists are working on a retrovirus. To do so requires they have the virus, however, which accounts for the aforementioned monkey. Don’t worry, because they have that little beast locked down in restraints and … well, you know how those things go.

But [REC] 4’s first problem is that it takes a full half-hour to go anywhere beyond one small circle. Balagueró takes too much time introducing crew members, nearly all of whom cry expendable at first glance. Doing so causes something from which none of the previous chapters suffered: serious lag. “¡Ándale! ¡Ándale! ¡Arriba! ¡Arriba!,” you’ll want to scream.

Once the undead finally start to spread, something about the proceedings feel like a third-rate copycat than a third official sequel. Typically, tight quarters raise stakes in a horror film; here, Balagueró exerts no attempt toward spatial orientation, which could account for what little action exists playing out halfheartedly, save for one over-the-top bit involving an outboard motor. It is not nearly enough.

Apocalypse, no. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Maybe I’ve got a thing for 100-year-old widows, because the 59-minute wonder known as The Naked Witch did it for me. This, despite an overnarrated, history lesson disguised as a nine-minute prologue — a slideshow of encyclopedia illustration after encyclopedia illustration that is less about educating audiences on witchcraft through the ages and more about the filmmakers trying valiantly to push the running time over the one-hour mark and into feature-length. They did not.

No matter. Deep in “the hill country of Central Texas,” a college student (Robert Short, wooden as a 1914 set of Tinkertoys) researching his thesis is on his way to “a singing festival” when the gas gauge on his sports car points to “E.” He’s forced to hoof it to the closest “thoroughly German village,” where he learns the legend of the Luckenbach Witch. Ever the nosy tourist, he ventures to the cemetery in the dead of (day-for-)night to locate the reputed sorcerer’s grave.

Succeeding, he selfishly removes the petrified stake from her mummified corpse, thus bringing her back to life and in the shapely form of a beautiful young woman (Libby Hall, Common Law Wife) with pert breasts. We know this because, as the title has it, she’s starkers. Acquiring a see-through nightie, the heretofore nude enchantress embarks on a plot of murderous revenge on the ancestors of those who treated her so ill many moons ago.

All of this is done to a baseball-game organ score and no recorded sound. With Mars Needs Women’s notorious Larry Buchanan at the helm, would you expect anything less? (Oh, you would? Good, because you’ll get that, too.) It’s really saying something to call The Naked Witch as among Buchanan’s cheapest of concoctions, yet its once-risqué charm, embodiment of minimalism and absolutely bonkers concept combine for a thoroughly memorable exploitation experience. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.