With its real-life basis and meddling by paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, The Haunted could be viewed as The Conjuring prequel you’ve never seen, albeit made for TV. In this case, Pennsylvania’s homely Smurl family.

Janet (Sally Kirkland, Two Evil Eyes) and Jack (Jeffrey DeMunn, The Mist) find their Catholic lives shattered by the presence of satanic specters in their quaint, gaudy home. What are these troublemaking apparitions? What do they want? And will they go away?

Actually, the biggest mystery here is what is Kirkland doing in a movie where she doesn’t ditch the blouse? She’s oft apt to tear the threads from her body as if her brassiere’s filled with chiggers. The only vice this comparably respectable film affords her is chain smoking.

The Smurls’ evil forces are harmless at first: yanking off sheets, shaking religious trinkets on the cabinet, touching Janet’s thigh in the middle of the night, trying to kill the youngest daughter with a light fixture. But then they grow mighty furious, levitating Janet 6 feet off the ground and hurling her from one wall to another. In The Haunted’s cheesiest moment, the spirits take the shape of a semi-voluptuous woman who tries to rape Jack as her face switches from cutie-pie to demon.

Calling in various men of God to perform an exorcism, the Smurls grow desperate enough to hire the Warrens (played by Diane Baker and Stephen Markle of, respectively, The Silence of the Lambs and 1985’s Invasion U.S.A.). This time, the ghosts manifest themselves as a couple of Amish chicks.

Laughably cheap-looking and apparently lensed in the dreariest sections of Canada by F/X director Robert Mandel, The Haunted strives for the sophisticated frights of Poltergeist, but isn’t nearly as frightening as Kirkland’s quick slide into erotic thriller-dom. Six years after Fox aired this, in an episode of the Showtime anthology series The Hunger, she merged the genres by Smurling a super-handsy ghost. —Rod Lott

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At what point did “massacre” start to denote self-aware slasher parodies and homages rather than slashers themselves? In this site’s lifetime, we’ve seen such instances as Camp Massacre, The Puppet Monster Massacre and even Sharkansas Women’s Prison Massacre. Lone Star-set sequels notwithstanding, the word’s heyday of chainsaws and meat cleavers is over; once you’ve hit Pillow Party Massacre, all power is lost.

Ironically, Pillow Party-er writer/director Calvin Morie McCarthy raises the point without fully realizing his movie is part of the problem. That’s not to say your 87 minutes will be wasted, but this Massacre could stand more clarity in its aims; often, it’s difficult to tell on which side McCarthy stands: silliness or slaughter. I’m voting the latter because while the film is full of gore, I laughed just once: “No, we grew up and developed real drug habits,” says Chynna Rae Shurts (Exorcism in Utero), refusing a spliff.

With the killer’s identity even more obvious than the title is alliterative, four female college students rent a lake house for a weekend in the woods. (Well, technically five girls, but the one who arrives first is stabbed through the eye immediately after a side-boob shower.) Two years have passed since they played a cruel prank on a high school classmate who then was institutionalized, and only the mean girls’ leader (Laura Welsh, Christmas Freak) feels any remorse.

Will that work in her favor when a patient breaks out of the nearby psychiatric hospital? Only the homicidal maniac in a black robe and Death Note-esque mask knows for sure!

None of Pillow Party Massacre is not by-the-numbers. Its slow stride needs some pep, but McCarthy succeeds where deliberate viewers most likely will want him to: pulling off the death scenes. Or maybe that’s second on their list after nudity. In case you’re curious, Pillow Party contains a pillow fight (although by happenstance), presented in a music-scored montage. Why, yes, fistfuls of down feathers do fall in slow motion — how’d you know? —Rod Lott

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As is de rigueur with the giallo, the title is meaningless. But The Scorpion with Two Tails is no giallo. It’s more like Jell-O, but if director Sergio Martino didn’t bother reading the recipe, so the result fails to cohere. It’s a mess that falls apart almost instantly.

Joan (Elvire Audray, Ironmaster) is plagued by nightmares of an ancient Etruscan cult killing its members in a cavern filled with dry ice. The cult members wear full masks seemingly donated by Dumb Donald from the Fat Albert cartoon. These visions might have something to do with her archeologist husband (John Saxon, Cannibal Apocalypse) studying ancient whatnot in an Etruscan cemetery at that very moment. If only he were killed while sharing this info with Joan on the phone, we would know for sure.

He is killed while sharing this info with Joan on the phone, not even 11 minutes into the movie. So she has no choice but to investigate what happened to him, what’s happening to her and what her wealthy asshole of a father (Van Johnson, Concorde Affair ’79) has to do, has to do with it.

Martino being Martino (Torso, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh, American Rickshaw, et al.), more murders occur; the film has more neck-twisting than the average chiropractor’s weekly appointment book.

Reportedly, Two Tails is edited down from an eight-hour miniseries. I cannot fathom watching this at that length, because what’s here amounts to so little action and other items of interest. We get slithering snakes, phony bats and, memorably, Joan’s hands swarming with real maggots. To be honest, I got more anxiety from the sheer amount of tiny Styrofoam beads thrown about as Johnson frantically searches for a vase by tearing open crate after crate. Cleaning up said beads requires more effort than Scorpion’s script received. —Rod Lott

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