After a woman is fatally shotgunned in her sleep, her belongings are dumped into a curbside cardboard box marked “Free to a Good Home.” Kameron and Scott Hale’s Free to a Bad Home follows a possessed ring plucked from said trashed stash as it moves from person to person to person, telling three stories in total.

Amy (Miranda Nieman) is given the ring in marriage, as the jewelry is surreptitiously swiped by her beau, even after watching her recoil by feeling “bitten” by trying on a necklace from the box. This intriguing-enough setup leads to undue padding and an anticlimactic conclusion.

Next, a burglar (Jake C. Young) finds the ring after silently exploring a targeted house for 10 minutes, flashlight in hand. Eventually, the ring is taken by his sister, Julia (Olivia Dennis), who heads to a costume party with three friends — cue an eight-minute drive, complete with eyedropper drugs. Once there, the ladies wander for eight more minutes before running across anything resembling a story point. That gives way to a lengthy monologue and more confusion than the scene’s neon-dream lighting can mitigate.

The cursed-object concept has been done before, none as ineffectually as Free to a Bad Home. As the previous two paragraphs hammered home, nearly nothing happens in the segment, individually or in total. Although the Hales found a credible method for threading one central character to the next, none is developed enough to merit focus. Each story seems to have been built with a clear beginning and desired ending, but little attention paid to plot the all-important middle. In concocting the passed-property gimmick, the Hales gave themselves a fuse they never get around to ignite. —Rod Lott

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On Halloween night, the elderly gravedigger Mr. Fettes — “Call me Vampus,” he says — shares his miserable existence with viewers of Vampus Horror Tales, not to mention four stories of stone-cold death.

Obviously inspired by the dawn of Spanish horror comics, the anthology film is shot lovingly in black and white. As the playful but murderous Vampus, Saturnino García (The Day of the Beast) introduces each tale. He seems to be filled with them, because after all, “Death is a business that never falls flat.”

Unfortunately, the first story sure does. “The Wedding” depicts a clandestine meeting between bride and groomsman in an escape room basement. What follows is a 20-minute conversation ending with a sputtered-engine twist not worth the wait. Afterward, a filter-free Vampus dismisses it as “submissive drivel,” and I agree.

The middle pair gives the collection its chewy center. “Birthday” follows two girls at a theme park, where a killer lurks the tracks of the stalled dark-ride attraction. The ladies-in-peril theme continues with “Second Date,” as a woman discovers her man-friend has an ulterior motive for bringing her to a quiet, remote cabin. Complicating her escape: She’s blind.

Finally, “Lineage” wonders what to do when someone you love falls victim to a vampire apocalypse. The answer fails to interest; worse, the premise does the same. I would have preferred to see the wax-museum interstitial at the onset be expanded into a full tale, as its brief life packs more of a punch. (Speaking of that setting, Vampus creator Victor Matellano revives the Paul Naschy “cameo” trick from his 2014 film, Wax, so keep your ears peeled.)

The host bits are more developed than your average horror omnibus, with rapid cuts that approximate the experience of comics’ panel-by-panel reading. More beholden to that medium than las películas, Vampus Horror Tales leans toward slicing and/or stabbing necks as a means of slaughter, presumably because it’s cheap for an indie production to pull off. (And on that note, I swear the crawl of closing credits is soundtracked by the “Rain Storm” setting on my phone’s White Noise app.). —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.