Four years before Barbara Hershey infamously got raped by a ghost in The Entity, Al Adamson had it done (poorly) to Nurse Sherri, his attempt at cashing in on the then-popular possession-pic craze.

Sherri (Jill Jacobson, The Jigsaw Murders) has the unfortunate position of working the ER when a cult leader (Bill Roy, Black Samurai) with occult powers dies on the table, and passes his soul into her. That night, as she lay on her bed, a barely animated patch of green dots and squiggly lines enters her room, parts her legs and goes to town.

From then on, Sherri’s literally not herself, speaking in a deep register reminiscent of third-rung Looney Tunes characters and slaughtering those responsible for her possessor’s death. His disembodied, superimposed head occasionally pops up to laugh manically at others. Meanwhile, all her fellow RNs can do is think of sex — and acting on it, as if they’re in one of Roger Corman’s Nurses movies.

Adamson’s reputation is that of an inept, bottom-of-barrel filmmaker à la Ed Wood — a position not quite accurate if one considers the entirety of his work, but wholly warranted if one were to judge him on Nurse Sherri alone. It’s an ambling, scattered-focus potboiler made for all the wrong reasons, and given that Adamson’s usual starlet, real-life leading lady Regina Carrol, is absent from the cast, one can’t help but wonder if he just couldn’t harness any passion this time. Viewers who are able to might want to watch both cuts; the theatrical one plays up the horror, while the alternate amps up the copulation. —Rod Lott

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Don Mancini created two horror villains in the fall of 1988. One, of course, was Chucky, as seen in Child’s Play. The other was Cellar Dweller, as unseen in Cellar Dweller, a dirt-cheap creature feature from Empire Pictures and Troll director John Carl Buechler. For his first credit, Mancini went under the nom de plume of Kit Du Bois — a name with more style than the movie.

Thirty years ago, horror comics artist Colin Childress (Jeffrey Combs, Re-Animator) died when a monster he drew on the page came to life. Thirty years later, Childress is idolized by cute brunette Whitney Taylor (Debrah Farentino, Storm of the Century) who attends the Throckmorton Institute for the Arts in order to create “the ultimate monster.” The school stands on the site of Childress’ former home, so Whitney is hot to use his basement studio to create her “populist tripe” (as comics are dubbed by the school’s administrator, played by Yvonne De Carlo of TV’s The Munsters).

Whitney draws what Childress did: a hairy demon with a pentagram carved into its chest. For no good reason, she draws separate stories of the monster attacking and eating her classmates, and whatever she draws actually happens. (“I told you so!” cries Dr. Wertham, from hell.) As George A. Romero proved in Creepshow, incorporating comic-book elements can be cinematic; as Buechler certainly learned, however, simply cutting from the action to a motionless panel is like applying the emergency brake to the story.

There’s a scene in which a scheming filmmaker (Pamela Bellwood, Hangar 18) folds a vintage comic book in half to hide it in her jacket, and I can imagine any fanboys cringing at the damage she does. I bring that up because that’s the most reaction Cellar Dweller can muster. The titular beast is a nifty practical effect, which was Buechler’s bread and butter, but the movie itself — all 78 slow-going minutes of it — makes his Ghoulies III: Ghoulies Go to College look like high art. Cellar Dweller is so stupid that Whitney foils the hirsute varmint with white-out correction fluid. —Rod Lott

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