In Japan, Steel Trap is titled Jigsaw: Tower of Death, which is appropriate, because this is nothing if not another Saw-inspired game of gore. Mind you, that’s not a complaint, even if its twist ending is telegraphed early on and executed poorly.

During a rockin’ New Year’s Eve party in an abandoned office building, seven really attractive people — including a celebrity chef and a couple of coke-snorters — are invited to the 27th floor for an invitation-only after-party. Food and drink are just the tip of the knife, too, as a clue informs them that this shindig is a treasure hunt — you know, just like those Nicolas Cage movies, but shorn of historical documents and replaced with viscera.

The table’s place settings sport not only the guests’ names, but unofficial titles like “Loser,” “Heartless” and “Two-Faced,” yet they don’t see anything wrong with that. The clues are given in nursery rhymes, yet they aren’t the least bit creeped out by them. The first one takes them to a disembodied pig’s head wearing a crown, yet they keep on going.

I won’t spoil the deaths; they’re kind of creative in that Final Destination sort of way, and that includes being utterly implausible. But realism isn’t what I ask of films like Steel Trap. Nor crisp dialogue, as this is not: “Signal blocked? What the hell’s that mean?” “It means somebody blocked the signal.” —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

J.T. Petty’s well-made look at the underground world of pseudo-snuff horror movies troubled me more for its final thesis than for what it actually shows onscreen. While featuring interviews with real-life filmmakers, actors and academics (including a personal hero of mine, Men, Women and Chain Saws author Carol J. Clover), the film’s dominant narrative comes from the fictional investigation into the cinematic activities of a doughy loser named Eric Rost (Eric Marcisak).

As the man behind the titular S&Man (pronounced “sandman”) series, which consists of him stalking attractive women on camera before killing them onscreen, Eric is reluctant to give away his filmmaking methods — afraid that doing so will undermine his reputation and mystique. Unable to contact any of the women who have appeared in the films, Petty (playing himself) is faced with the very real possibility that Eric’s product is the genuine article.

It’s no easy task to combine the real and the fictional as well as Petty does here, but ultimately, I found myself troubled by the conclusions he reaches. In his final narration, he tells us that we watch horror movies knowing that the violence is fake, while wishing it were real — which, in my case, simply isn’t true.

The fact is, I am generally indifferent to the violence in horror movies — I enjoy them for other reasons I don’t have the time or space to go into — and I am able to watch them without self-inflicting psychic trauma because I am able to take comfort in the knowledge that what I am seeing isn’t real. To suggest otherwise is to indict myself with a cultural crime I have not committed.

The other problem with Petty’s thesis is that in order to fully exploit it, he ruins the film’s delicate balance between journalism and fiction. It simple isn’t credible that a conscionable documentarian wouldn’t, at a certain point, take what they have learned about Eric’s activities and report them to the police. And while Petty’s inaction is meant to support his apparent contention that there is little difference between real and staged violence, it instead only works to prove how ultimately misguided that contention is. —Allan Mott

Buy it at Amazon.