Not sure about buying that creepy fixer-upper? It’s tough. Yes, someone will almost certainly decorate the banisters with your vital organs. But just look at the size of that courtyard!

Like seriously, the setting of Damian Mc Carthy’s Oddity is one of the most ideal horror locations since Fede Alvarez’s Don’t Breathe. On top of it all, Mc Carthy makes the most out of this inevitably haunted house with a modern ghost story that’s as deliciously cheesy as it is entertaining.

Hospital director Ted (Gwilym Lee, Bohemian Rhapsody) and his wife, Dani (Carolyn Bracken, You Are Not My Mother), are in midst of renovating their “dream” home. Dani is bludgeoned to death as Ted works a night shift at the friendly neighborhood psych ward. A year later, Ted visits Dani’s twin sister, Darcy (also Bracken), a blind psychic and owner of an oddity shop. After Darcy touches the glass eye of the late suspected killer, Ted’s old patient (Tadhg Murphy, The Northman), Darcy realizes the truth is messier than the crime scene. With a terrifying wooden doll in tow, the psychic resolves to avenge her sister’s murder and arrives uninvited to Ted’s home.

Some may not think of this as a weakness, but Oddity’s biggest hurdle comes from its stiff and long-winded dialogue. It doesn’t help that most of the performances (save Lee’s) can’t muster much to soften that rigidity. Certain exchanges between characters feel like they never quite got out of rehearsal, coming just short of the Stuart Gordon tone Mc Carthy tries to strike.

That said, stilted and awkward deliveries don’t hold the film back too much. In some ways, it lends itself to the idea no one in Oddity should be taken at face value. Even if you predict where the film is going — and you probably will — Mc Carthy keeps us hungry for the killer’s comeuppance with captivating charm. It also manages to pay off its ending, satisfying a seemingly random aside that still has something powerful to say about belief without overtly jamming it down our throats.

Even Oddity’s jump scares avoid falling into an uninspired formula. It feels familiar, sure, but these sequences aren’t concerned reinventing the wheel or making up for a lackluster plot. It almost feels like Mc Carthy could’ve abandoned some of the surprises outright and the film still would’ve landed in a satisfying place. Still, the director gets creative, and the heart poured into Oddity beautifully pulses and twitches on screen.

Oddity refuses to take itself too seriously, not so much leaning on ’80s convention as it is celebrating it. And by doing so, it reminds us that not every horror flick needs to be a jarring mediation of grief or, in the Terrifier franchise’s case, grotesque slapstick. Sometimes, watching someone chased out of a creepy house by a pissed ghost is enough. —Daniel Bokemper

Get it at Amazon.

If Roger Ebert didn’t coin the phrase “dead teenager movie,” he famously owns it by virtue of inclusion in his ’80s-filmgoer’s glossary. On this far side of that decade’s slasher craze, you don’t need the term defined; you know exactly what it entails. Quinn Armstrong’s Dead Teenagers knows you know, and sets out to subvert the subgenre with a good upending.

The final chapter of Armstrong’s Fresh Hell trilogy, Dead Teenagers plops five hormone-addled high school friends in a woods-adjacent cabin — the same location for the other two movies, in fact. Right away, cocky jock Ethan (Angel Ray, 2023’s Malum) breaks up with Mandy (newcomer Jordan Myers). After all, he’s college-bound and “pussy ’bout to be, like, pow-pow-pow!” Clearly, the actors are too old to play this young, but rather than being a deficit, the choice soon is revealed as intentional.

Mandy’s heartbreak and Ethan’s thoughtless timing get shoved aside by strange events; in the forest, she finds a piece of equipment from the shoot of Fresh Hell’s first chapter, The Exorcism of Saint Patrick, as well as script pages for Dead Teenagers, the very movie we’re watching. Then a hulking man whose face is hidden behind a welding mask shows up to slaughter; like every slasher villain, he comes with an exploitable name: Torch (Chris Hahn, 2021’s Wrong Turn remake).

Mandy and friends suddenly realize they’re in a movie; this inadvertent act of self-awareness amounts to improvisation, changing the course of what’s supposed to happen. Incidental characters who pop into the story continue to play their part as scripted, because they only exist on the page; thus, most notably, a cop (Beau Roberts, returning from Saint Patrick) exchanges blows with someone who’s not even present.

As you’ve likely already assumed, Dead Teenagers doesn’t just go meta, but doubles, even triples down on doing so. Its postmodern nature is not of the arch Scream variety, but a textbook deconstruction so thorough, its footnotes have footnotes.

Ambitious? That’s putting it lightly. Although Armstrong doesn’t quite wring it into being fully successful, he has enough tricks — such as Mandy happening upon a crew van or entering a time loop — to make the Fresh Hell entry the most fully realized. If you watch only one among the trio, this should be it. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.