Unleashed the same year as A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven’s made-for-TV Invitation to Hell is another dark look at American suburbia, only without all of the good stuff that made his feature effort so memorable. Whereas Elm Street gave us Freddy Krueger, Hell does its best with soap star Susan Lucci, who is admittedly pretty terrifying, but not for the reasons the producers were thinking.

Lucci plays Jessica Jones, the vaguely ethnic-looking owner of an exclusive country club whose members all enjoy incredible prosperity and fortune. This is because she’s Satan, and the club’s members all have sold their souls to her for pool privileges. Everyone in the local community thinks she’s awesome, except for Robert Urich, who’s just been hired by Kevin McCarthy’s tech firm to develop a new space suit for NASA.

Urich is forced to watch helplessly as his wife (Joanna Cassidy) and kids (Barrett Oliver and Soleil Moon-Frye) are corrupted by Jones’ influence and sell their souls to her behind his back. Without any other option, he does what any good father would do: Don his experimental space suit and go down straight to Hell to rescue them. It goes without saying that he is able to do so by defeating Lucci through the eternal power of love.

Those of you familiar with Craven’s oeuvre know some films on his résumé that exist purely to pay the bills. Of these, Invitation To Hell is nowhere near the worst (Deadly Friend and The Hills Have Eyes Part II are tied for that title), but like all of the others, it’s clear he wasn’t prepared to do anything but the bare minimum to keep the money folks happy. Unlike 1978’s Stranger in Our House, which proved he could transcend the TV medium if he wanted to, Hell ranges from limp to laughable. His game cast does the best they can with the material, but it isn’t enough to save the film from descending into the kind of unintentional camp that can only come from a talented director working with a script he obviously thinks is ridiculous. —Allan Mott

Buy it at Amazon.

Who is killing all of London’s drunken bums dressed as Santa Claus? Whoever it is is wildly inconsistent in his methods, using a straight razor, a garrote, a spear and even a broken beer bottle, all the better to gouge Kris Kringle’s eye with. The result is Don’t Open Till Christmas, which is as if Pieces were a Christmas special, and all because some kid saw Daddy in a Santa suit screwing someone who wasn’t Mommy. (A similar sight lights the fuse of 1980’s also-recommended Christmas Evil.)

Pieces vet Edmund Purdom partially directs and stars as Inspector Harris, hot on the trail of the masked maniac slaying the aforementioned hobos and the occasional blonde sex worker. Frustrated at the lack of clues are a victim’s daughter (Alien 2: On Earth‘s Belinda Mayne, who cries, “My father’s just been murdered. I can’t concentrate!”) and her boyfriend (Gerry Sundquist, Boarding School), a street-corner flutist who comes under suspicion.

Scream queen Caroline Munro appears in one scene as herself, singing a synthy-sweet pop number onstage while caressing her inviting curves in a slinky, sequined red dress that sparkles as bright as her bedroom eyes. (Er, please excuse me for a couple of minutes. … Okay, I’m back.)

Consider this 86-minute exercise in holiday horror a gift from schlock producer Dick Randall. Like his earlier Pieces, the slasher is a mess about messes, bearing his distinctive stamp of delightful but highly watchable incompetence that rolls around in nonsense scripting, gory violence and gratuitous nudity. We’ll call it the bow on top. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.