If we’ve learned anything from sequels that don’t matter, it’s that they’re all made in Eastern Europe, so the fact that Texas took so long to move to Bulgaria surprised me.

Back in the mid 50s, Betty Hartman and Ted Hardesty are driving down a Texas road when they’re lured to a barn by the nascent Leatherface, now just Jedidiah Sawyer, and Betty is murdered by his family. When her father Sheriff Hartman (Stephen Dorff) finds her body, he makes sure that Jedidiah goes to a mental institution. Of course, his family busts him out and now Hartman is a Texas Ranger who is possibly just as messed up as the Sawyers.

This movie sat on the shelves of LionsGate and felt like it was never coming out. I don’t know who was dying to see it — well, I mean, I’ll obviously watch every sequel, so me? — but it finally came out on DirectTV more than a year later.

That said, Doriff is always great and Lili Taylor is one of my favorites. Yet this feels like the movies Chainsaw influenced and not a movie trying to influence future films.

Directors Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo made Inside and nearly made a reboot of Hellraiser and a sequel to Rom Zombie’s Halloween. Their film The Deep House got some mentions this year.

Created by Eugenio Ercolani (Aenigma: Lucio Fulci and the 80s, Banned Alive! The Rise and Fall of Italian Cannibal Movies) and Giuliano Emanuele (Italy Possessed: A Brief History of Italian Exorcist Rip-offs), this film was originally included with the 88 Films release of Buio Omega.

Thanks to interviews with George Eastman, Michele Soavi, Claudio Fragasso, Ruggero Deodato, Al Cliver, Rossella Drudi and more, this film gives a rich overview of the life and times Aristide Massaccesi, the man who is known by so many names, but also Joe D’Amato. It confirms what I’ve always believed: sure, D’Amato made some disreputable movies, but he also had a lot of heart and treated everyone he worked with incredibly well.

In some way, I wish this was more than just talking heads dryly discussing D’Amato, but I think somewhere, he’s smiling realizing that they put exactly as much effort into a dissection of his life as he would into theirs. And as always, George Eastman says incredibly horible things about someone and then says, “But I loved the guy.” I kind of feel the same way about that incredibly tall Italian grump.

Lilith’s Helli would like you to know that Ruggero Deodato invented the found footage film.

Ryan (Marcus J. Cotterell) is a film director and Ruggero Deodato superfan who has come to Rome to work with Marco (Vincenzo Petrarolo, who also directed this) and Alberto (Federico Palmieri). He doesn’t want to make a horror movie, but yeah, he kind of wants to make a horror movie

Maybe things will get better when Michelle (Manuela Stanciu) and the other actresses arrive, right?

Of course, Marco and Alberto are more into sleeping with the girls than making a movie and when something overtakes Michelle, she ends up biting off more than Alberto had in mind. This movie should teach you not to hire actresses off the internet, ply them with drugs and then treat them as if they were in a Rocco Siffredi movie when a demonic force is nearby. Shouldn’t you know that already?

As the rest of the crew — which also includes makeup artist Sara (Joelle Rigollet, Inside) — wakes up to screams in the middle of the night, they soon learn that this home and this movie was probably no accident. Some dark fate awaits everyone.

I mean, the house has a secret ritual chamber for Lilith, who was cast from Eden because she would not follow Adam. And now, she wants to return to our world. So yeah — a feminist demon attacking the crew of a Ruggero Deodato movie shot in found footage style, but it looks way better than it should and despite the bad acting from much of the male cast, I still found myself enjoying it, particularly the ending where despite the real dead bodies — I mean, within the movie and with Italian movies you really do need to explain that — Deodato arrives and tells the cameras to shoot everything.

If it didn’t have so much to do with Deodato, I doubt I’d have even seen this film, so the stunt casting is a success. Luckily, the movie for the most part — particularly the occult reveal — worked enough to keep me for the entire running time.

You can watch this on Tubi or buy the DVD from MVD.

In 1989. street-smart Laquita Johnson is forced into a camping trip with a bunch of ridiculous white students on her first day at a new school. You know what happens when people go into the woods? If the movies on my shelves have anything to say about it, people die.

Of course, the anthropology class at O’Fish Community College is doomed. And unlike all the slashers we watched as kids, this time the final girl gets to be black. And she’s up against magic rocks, underwater zombies and the woods themselves.

If you’re ready for a satire of slashers that plays smart instead of dumb, this one is ready for you to enjoy. There’s not much of a budget, but you know, I think that’s a large part of why I found it so charming.

Director Jason Berg hasn’t done anything before but I really hope he has another movie in him. Same to his co-writers Heidi Ervin (who also plays Rebecca O’Sunnybrook) and Rachel Ward Heggen (who is Megan). They know the right side of the clever and stupid paradigm, which trust me, is not always so simple.

Sometimes, I think, “This movie looks like it was fun to make. ”

This would be one of those movies.

Black Holler is available from Wild Eye Releasing.

I mean, if you’re going to name your giallo something, The Black Gloves isn’t bad. The movie that this is a prequel to — Lord of Tears — and the connected film — The Unkindness of Ravens — both have even better titles, however.

Finn Galloway is a psychologist obsessed with a patient who is haunted by an entity known as the Owlman. Now, he’s discovered another subject with the same fear, a ballerina who has hidden herself away from the world. If Finn treats her, he’ll get the answers he needs. And he’ll probably die at the claws of the Owlman.

Based on the 70s reports of an owl creature called the Cornish Owlman or the Owlman of Mawnan, this movie references the gothic horror of the past while pushing toward something new.  And if you have a title that references black gloves, you need some identity issues and psychotic madness too, right?

Director Lawrie Brewster and writer Sarah Daly have created several horror films together and if they’re all like this, it’s time I start hunting them down.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Based on the stage play, Ghost Stories is a movie that redeems the horror anthology after years of poor direct to video and screaming excuses for entries in the canon. It’s written and directed by Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman, who stars as Philip Goodman, a famous professor and television personality who is obsessed with outing fraudulent psychics and explaining away the paranormal.

Now, he’s been invited to meet his inspiration, Charles Cameron (Martin Freeman*), who was once an occult investigator just like Philip, but now is a poor man living out his last days in a trailer. He asks him to investigate three cases, which form the stories of this anthology.

The first case is that of a night watchman named Tony Matthews, whose wife has died of cancer and daughter has locked herself away from the world. Now, he’s haunted by a young girl while he works. Then, a teenager obsessed with the occult accidentally runs over a demonic creature in the woods. The investigator becomes more and more unnerved by the cases, ending with the story of a banker whose wife has died in childbirth as she unleashed an inhuman child upon the world.

That’s when reality falls apart and Philip can no longer explain the unknown and must face down whatever he is enduring. I don’t want to give away the rug pull in this movie, but trust me that it makes sense and gives this story even more dramatic heft.

I love how the opening of this movie was inspired by faith healer Peter Popoff being exposed by skeptic and magician James Randi. It’s almost exactly the way the real life incident happened.

If any movie made in the last few years deserves to be compared to the heights of Amicus, this would be it.

*Freeman and Nyman told the cast, crew and media that this role was played by Leonard Byrne, even getting Freeman to wear a prosthetic mask to further game everyone involved.

16 gallons of blood went into making the last thing that Herschell Gordon Lewis would direct which would be this movie. His two tales — “Gory Story” and “The Night Hag” — aren’t great, but they have lots of blood and Lewis hosting them.

“Attack of Conscience” is completely unrelated to the feel of the movie, particularly when you contrast its tale of a woman dying over and over at the hands of her abuser with “GOREgeous” in which a man who can no longer get it up kills women with objects like high heels.

In the same way that many of Lewis’ films are celebrated because they’re the first of their kind, this is the last of its kind. That said, you won’t enjoy this anywhere near as much as his more well-known material such as Two-Thousand Maniacs! or Blood Feast.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Just in case you were confused, this is not the Japanese movie Jisatsu Sākuru (AKA Suicide Club and Suicide Circle), but the story of Liz, a young woman who has been trapped in her apartment, when she finds a web community called the Suicide Club that really should have been called the Kill People Club.

Once a user joins, they’re asked to pick someone they want to be killed or they themselves get killed for not nominating someone. The club then sends masked killers to do the actual wetwork and then records it and sends everyone the video.

The first part of this movie is really decent, setting up a Rear Window voyeur vibe. Sure, the film doesn’t really deliver on that promise, but it’s not a bad movie.

Klariza Clayton, who plays Liz, is really great though. She imbues the character with a spark that feels real. And writer/director Maximilian von Vier really sets up the mood that works so well in the first act. I’m interested in his next two projects, The Kaiserfeld Rule, in which a woman in a concentration camp plays chess with real lives on the line, and Magick.

You can get Suicide Club from Wild Eye Releasing.

Originally known as The Legend of the Mad Axeman, this film tells the story of an urban legend who just may be true, an insane man with an axe who has killed in the past and has now returned to murder again. I mean, that new title — Axecalibur — and the poster art totally got this on in my DVD player before everything else in my to watch stack.

You can watch this on Tubi or get the DVD from Wild Eye Releasing.

The second film in the Legendary MonsterVerse, Kong: Skull Island reboots and remakes King Kong for a new generation that would see the 70’s remake as silly, the Peter Jackson film as old and if that last statement is true, would think that the 1933 original was some kind of archaeological find like the Shroud of Turin.

In 1944* and 1973, Kong has made his presence known as war continues to intrude on Skull Island. This leads Bill Randa (John Goodman), head of the U.S. government organization Monarch, to send a team to that island to find out exactly what’s going on with the monsters that have emerged.

Once there,  Lieutenant Colonel Preston Packard (Samuel Jackson), former British Special Air Service Captain James Conrad (Tom Hiddleston), photographer Mason Weaver (Brie Larson) and seismologist Houston Brooks (Corey Hawkins, playing the younger version of the character from Godzilla: King of the Monsters) begin dropping seismic explosives and mapping the island before Kong attacks.

The battle separates the scientists and soldiers, with Packard wanting to kill Kong and the others meeting the natives and discovering that the big beast is the last of his kind, protecting the island and its natives from the Skullcrawlers that wiped out its entire family.

By the end, Kong is victorious and has proved his true good nature. Monarch recruits Conrad and Weaver, while revealing that Kong is not alone, revealing cave paintings of Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan and King Ghidorah.

I’m excited to see what happens next, as the films have placed both Kong and Godzilla on the same emotional playing field. They’re both the last of their kind, dealing with the loss of their race to an enemy (the Skullcrawlers and the Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms) and are absolute predators. However, Godzilla has no interest in human beings while Kong serves as their protector.

Who knew that a modern King Kong movie would reference seventies films like The Conversation and Apocalpyse Now, somehow becoming one of the best films in the series?

Here’s to being pleasantly surprised.

* I love that John C. Reilly’s character has been on the island since World War II. He also has on a jacket that references Kaneda’s in Akira: “Good for your health, bad for your education.”