Filmed with such care that it looks indistinguishable from mainstream films of its time, Torso is an “everyone is a suspect” giallo in which the only thing that is known about the psychosexual killer is that he wears a red scarf around his neck when he stalks his prey. Unfortunately for everyone involved, a street merchant who sells the scarf in question tells the police that he couldn’t possibly remember who bought it. This, it turns out, is a lie and the sleazy merchant gets himself murdered after he blackmails the killer. So it goes.

The main players are Jane, an American college student in Perugia; Stefano, who creepily pursues Jane’s coed friend Dani; and Roberto, a young doctor. In order to keep you suspecting every man who so much as wanders into the movie, director Sergio Martino casts some of the creepiest lookin’ dudes you’ll ever see. This contrasts greatly with the stunningly gorgeous actresses. At one point Jane and her friends decide to spend the weekend at Dani’s family villa. Once there, the four women spend a lot of time sunbathing and skinny dipping, driving the local men (and perhaps the murderer) crazy. In fact, all the women in this movie merely roll their eyes at window peepers as if it’s a daily occurrence for them. Meanwhile, minor characters drop like flies until the danger closes in on the villa.

I didn’t really think about it until now, but this movie has a lot of filler in it. It’s got a lot of killin’ in it, too, but describing the plot made me realize just how little happens in between the murder scenes. It just so happens that it’s good filler as I never really found myself disengaged. On the other hand, if I were to describe any more of the plot, I’d damn near give the whole thing away. The two paragraphs preceding this one are about half the movie, minus the kill scenes. Naturally, the action ramps up and there’s a great moment of suspense involving a broken ankle, a locked door, a skeleton key, and a sheet of newspaper.

So yeah, while I tend to focus on the goofy fun stuff for this blog (because sometimes that’s all these movies have going for them), Torso is one that exhibits magnetic filmmaking, solid performances, and beautiful vistas. And while characters make dumb decisions from time to time, there’s never really any “Why would she do that?!” moments. Although it has a reputation for being a real sicko film, I hesitate to give it three whole points on the Gore Meter. The gore is suggested more than it is shown and some characters have the audacity to die off screen. Even so, there are expertly timed cutaways that are almost as effective as later giallo films’ tendency to show it all whether their effects are good or not.

Torso is a pioneering example of the subgenre, somewhat routine but fascinatingly prototypical. It probably doesn’t do anything that will blow your mind, fifty years after its release, but it isn’t hard to see why it was so daring for its time. It isn’t jampacked with cliches, either, if only because the genre had yet to develop ’em. The killer’s reveal is no huge surprise, but it’s the journey that matters, not the destination. It’s just a solid slasher flick all around.

We have now reached the shot-on-video portion of our yearly programming. I will now include my usual disclaimer: I unironically love movies that are shot on camcorders by a group of friends and neighbors. Whenever some Cecil B. Delulu talks his homely acquaintances into spending a weekend soaked in red food dye and Karo syrup, I find the result irresistible. I have given favorable reviews to Video Violence (and its even dumber sequel) and I’ve seen Blood Cult and The Ripper multiple times apiece (though I probably wouldn’t recommend ’em). I love SOV horror for precisely the reasons the average person hates it: It looks like shit and the acting is generally horrendous. Hell, almost everything is horrendous, from lighting, to sound, to special effects. But if you were the kind of person who found yourself strangely fascinated by the local access TV shows that used to come on late at night, you may enjoy SOV horror as well.

I hesitate to say it, but I don’t think Sledgehammer was shot on consumer grade camcorders. Then again, all video in 1983 looked like garbage so it’s hard to tell. To me it feels more like it was made by folks who had access to professional production gear through a university or something (the Wikipedia page currently lacks a “PRODUCTION” section and I don’t feel like doing much more research than that). At any rate, it’s not nearly as good looking as 1989’s Iced, which I featured last year, but I like this better. On the other hand, it was obviously cut on fairly state-of-the-art equipment at the time, including a title maker that looks exactly like the one that I cut my teeth on when I was a multimedia student nearly thirty years ago.

The movie opens in a secluded cabin where a woman locks her son in a closet so that she can have sex with her illicit lover. The couple have rented the cabin to cheat on their spouses. When the woman asks, “Do you think they figured it out yet?” The man says, “Who cares?” as he very awkwardly puts the moves on her. (Later there’s another sex scene in which a different actor pretty much just lies on his lover, presumably because they’re real life acquaintances and not trained actors.) A figure armed with a sledgehammer enters the room and bashes the man’s skull in. In case you missed any part of this sequence, it plays again, almost in its entirety, in a completely unnecessary flashback midway through the movie.

Ten years later, a group of middle aged actors playing teens rent the same cabin for a weekend of partying. (Maybe the performers aren’t quite middle aged, but it’s hard to tell because in the 80s… the concept of drinking water instead of alcohol had not yet been invented while most people generally started smoking at birth.) This is a pretty large group of potential victims for a movie like this, which typically only feature four or five performers and drags the kills out for a plodding pace. Sledgehammer manages to innovate by having all these characters and still plodding. At one point the movie cranks up the stock melancholic music as two lovers wander the outdoor scenery… you get the sense that the editor employs slow motion here just because A) his sick VHS editing station is capable of it and B) he wanted to stretch the footage out long enough to let the song end. Similarly, establishing shots last forever.

Look, that kind of amateurishness just goes with the territory. It doesn’t hurt the movie. It endears it.

Eventually the killer is cornered, at which point he reveals his motivation. I couldn’t understand a word he was saying so I turned on the subtitles. The subtitles said, “(MUMBLING)” because even they couldn’t figure it out. So much for the grand reveal. Also muddled is the gore, which isn’t great, but I’m grading on a curve here. At least they gave it a good effort. That’s all I was asking for, really.

By now you should know if this is your type of movie. If it’s not, that’s okay. I don’t like every subgenre, either. But it is my type of movie. And no, I can’t defend that. I won’t even try. It’s some admittedly ridiculous shit to enjoy.

When Tippi Hedren asked Alfred Hitchcock why her character in The Birds would do something as stupid as investigate an obviously dangerous room, he simply told her, “Because I tell you to.” The director of Psycho II, one of Hitchcock’s protégés, also had a lax relationship with logic. Playing loose with logic doesn’t always work, but when you learn from the master, you’ve got a shot.

This time Anthony Perkins steps into the director’s seat, turning in a movie that scores higher on believability, but earns fewer points in the entertainment category due to his marginally weaker performance. The beginning is especially strange. It’s as if it takes Perkins a while to warm up to the double duty of actor and director. Once he does, he feels more like his old self, albeit a little bit meaner. That’s the 80s for ya, though. (You’ll recall this was the same era that had Timothy Dalton fighting Columbian drug dealers in a James Bond film that was considerably more violent than anything in Daniel Craig’s run.)

The film opens when a young woman (Diana Scarwid) has a mental breakdown before taking her final vows as a nun. Climbing to the top of a bell tower in a bout of hysteria, she accidentally shoves one of the nuns to her death. The convent kicks her out and she wanders the country side until she finds herself at the Bates Motel. It seems completely obvious she should become the Bride of Psycho, considering she’s stark raving mad, but the film never goes there. It’s a massively wasted opportunity if you ask me. See, she and Norman Bates have a meet-cute when he bursts into the bathroom to murder her, only to find she’s already slashed her wrists. He takes pity on the poor thing and rushes her to the hospital where the locals laud him as a hero.

Meanwhile, a no-good traveling musician (Jeff Fahey) and an LA journalist (Roberta Maxwell) conspire to get to the bottom of the killings. The musician becomes the motel’s day manager, keeping an eye on our hero while the journalist pokes around for clues. Returning as the sheriff is Hugh Gillin, once again cheerleading for Norman’s complete rehabilitation. Even though this is due to his utter incompetence as a lawman, it’s refreshing that Gillin completely sidesteps the role of an antagonistic sheriff, which are a dime a dozen in flicks like this. Besides, his incompetence is the very reason Norman can get up to his old tricks.

I’m also glad to have Fahey and Maxwell. The two vibe well with the cast, but especially with each other. Fahey has been one of my favorite actors for literally as long as I’ve been watching movies. I mean, just the fact that I’m praising the acting in a film like this should tell you it’s atypical. For a Psycho film, it’s not great, but for a slasher film, it’s high art. I’ll probably even see it again someday.

At any rate, our boy Norman is evolving. Whereas the last film was an excuse to reset the status quo, this film aims to see the character grow, which is no doubt because the man closest to the character also served as the director. The resolution is satisfying, but not nearly as insane as the last film, which had me howling with laughter at one point. (It was the comedic timing of a shovel bonk that did me in.) I’d like a little more of that in this picture, which isn’t to say it’s not funny, and it does up the gross-out factor. I mean, just wait until you see what they do with a handful of bloody ice.

10 years ago, I chose to end the second 31 Days of Gore with a great movie, which has become a bit of a tradition since then. The movie I chose for that year’s honorable spot was William Lustig’s Maniac Cop. I had planned to marathon all three movies that very day, but discovered the sequel was almost impossible to source in an acceptable format (both the DVD I had and the version that’s still on streaming services is pan-and-scan dogshit). Today you can get the UHD which boasts proper widescreen, native 4K, and Dolby Atmos sound, the latter of which doesn’t help (or hurt) the movie much at all. It’s a great way to watch the film now, which I had originally taped off of Cinemax over thirty years ago (I still have that tape, by the way).

Spoilers for the first film ahead….

At the end of the original, Bruce Campbell and Laurene Landon survived the nonstop killing spree when Maniac Cop accidentally impaled himself on a pipe and plunged his escape vehicle into the river. The sequel opens only days later, when the two survivors visit the police commissioner, learning that they’ve been cleared of all charges (you’ll remember that Campbell’s character went on the lam after being wrongfully arrested for his wife’s murder). Unfortunately, the cop couple must report to a psychiatrist before they can return to active duty. This is especially hard for Landon’s character, who openly maintains that Maniac Cop isn’t dead. Campbell’s character, a realist, begs her to play along with the cover story so they can get their old jobs back.

Part of what made the first film work so well was a solid cast of veteran cop actors including Tom Atkins, William Smith, and Richard Roundtree. This time we get another great cast with Robert Davi as a hardened homicide detective, Michael Lerner as the crooked police commissioner, and Cladia Christian as the police psychiatrist. (Danny Trejo and Clarence Williams III appear as prisoners later on.) It’s not long until the rest of the police department realizes that Maniac Cop (once again played by the formidable Robert Z’Dar) has actually returned from the grave and the second phase of his massive killing spree has already begun.

My favorite scene in the first half of the film (reminiscent of a great gag in the climax of Body Parts) is when Maniac Cop handcuffs Christian to the door handle of a sedan before dropping the shifter into a neutral and shoving the car down a hill. Your average screenwriter/director duo would be content with a few seconds of excitement there, but Cohen and Lustig milk the scenario for all it’s worth, having the car speeding downhill for what feels like miles. The scene knows good and well it’s abrading your suspension of disbelief, but confidently pushes through to ensure maximum entertainment value.

And when Maniac Cop shows up at the police station in a scene that’s clearly, uh, “inspired” by Terminator, he dispatches his victims with a gusto unmatched by any slasher I can think of. The gunshots and the squibs in that scene feel like they’ve been cranked up to 11 (maybe that’s why they bothered with a Dolby Atmos mix). Cohen and Lustig save their biggest spectacle for the finale, in which (minor spoilers) a fully aflame Maniac Cop lumbers down a cell block of Sing Sing, dispatching his victims by bear hugging them with his burning body, one after another. Yes, the stunt double is clearly the wrong size, his fire-resistant clothes and mask are a little too obvious, but a stunt has never been done like this before. It reeks of Cohen’s ability to take an obvious trope and turn it on its head.

On top of cramming in all this entertainment value into the breakneck pace, characters still find the time to reveal key insights to their backstories. The film even gives a poignant monologue to a newsstand operator (Robert Earl Jones, the father of James Earl Jones) who witnessed one of Maniac Cop’s kills. It’s just… who the hell does that in a movie like this? Larry Cohen and William Lustig, that’s who. Easily one of the greatest sequels ever made. No, it can’t top the original, but then again, The Godfather doesn’t top Maniac Cop, either, so these two films are in a class all their own.

Writer/director Michael Dougherty is one of the writers behind Superman Returns and X2, which led me to believe this movie was going to suck. Not because those are terrible movies, but because the type of mind capable of engineering crowd pleasers usually doesn’t know jack shit about horror. (See: When Michael Bay got a wild urge to produce a Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, a movie I can’t imagine he ever actually watched, let alone liked.) Doughtery is an exception to the rule. Though Trick ‘r Treat looks like an expensive studio film, it doesn’t behave like one.

Nor does it look like a studio film from the 2000s. Consider what the average overproduced horror movie looked like at the time. Everything had an artificial slickness to it, greatly in part due to the recent advancement of digital color correction. Phony looking CGI was used out the wazoo, often to rob a practical effect of its punch. And it was the golden age of endless remakes, PG-13 ratings, and horror as tame as daytime television. Doughtery bucks the trends, making instead a film that’s equal parts whimsical and gruesome. There’s only one brief shot I clocked as gratuitous CGI. Luckily, it didn’t take me completely out of the movie. (I have a feeling CGI is used all over the place, but if it’s tasteful enough that I don’t notice it, who gives a shit?)

Told out of chronological order, the film cold-opens with a tasteful nod to John Carpenter’s Halloween before careening into a dark comedy featuring the wonderful pairing of Dylan Baker and Brett Kelly, the latter of whom played Thurman Merman in Bad Santa. This segment introduces the premise of the film: Halloween was a tradition designed to keep the bad things at bay, but because nobody takes the holiday seriously anymore, the bad things are slowly creeping back into the world. There are a lot of bad things in Dougherty’s world, from killer bus drivers to vampires who feel emboldened enough to kill in the middle of a crowded street.

One tale has Anna Paquin walking a wooded trail in a Little Red Riding Hood costume. Another features Brian Cox wearing a prosthetic nose that makes him appear as if he’s auditioning for Ebenezer Scrooge. Perhaps my favorite tale of all reveals why a group of local kids are collecting a specific number of jack-o-lanterns; there’s a tale within the tale, which is told in the manner of a creepy campfire story, sans campfire. The most interesting of all the creatures is the small figure which is seen appearing across every section of the movie, always watching from the shadows with a large burlap mask and a candy bag. This little bugger becomes considerably less interesting when it is ultimately unmasked, but I respect what Dougherty was going for here.

I was beginning to believe I had already seen every great horror anthology film. Trick ‘r Treat proves me wrong. The genius of it is the fact that not only are all these tales interconnected in amusing ways, Dougherty chews them up and spits them out into a traditional narrative rather than giving them the segmented pace that derails too many anthologies. Frankly, I don’t even know how it occurred to him to skip a horror host or a container gimmick. It kind of makes everything preceding it feel old hat. Most impressive of all is the fact that all the tales are equally entertaining. No duds. No bullshit. Just an extremely entertaining movie.

Last week I reported that Scanners II favored entertainment over interesting ideas, resulting in a noticeably inferior film to the 1981 classic. Scanners III: The Takeover abandons ideas altogether, but takes up the slack with fine cheese and a dynamite villain in the form of Polish actress Liliana Komorowska. The filmmakers knew exactly what she brought to the table and abandoned all pretense that this movie was about the purported hero. In fact, the hero is initially sidelined so that Komorowska can carry the bulk of the plot as both villain and protagonist. Scanners II may be the better sequel, from a filmmaking standpoint, but I much prefer this one because it gives the lizard brain exactly what it wants… and my lizard brain wants more Komorowska.

The film opens with a scanner psychically hurling a guy dressed as Santa Claus through a high rise window. A little girl walking down the sidewalk points to the sky and says, “Look, Mommy! It’s Santa!” At which point the man’s body smashes onto the pavement directly in front of her. (What also went out the window was my ability to review this movie in any kind of objective manner because this is the kind of movie I live for.) The scanner responsible for the accident is devastated that he killed his friend so he packs up and leaves America to do some soul searching.

So the original film featured a drug called Ephemerol, Scanners II introduced the variant EPH-2, and, in true uniform fashion, the third film in the series gives us EPH-3. (This reminds me of how the logo worn by the characters in Ghostbusters 2 is posing with two fingers as if its designer somehow knew they were living in a sequel. Or perhaps the logo itself is sentient?) EPH-3 now comes in the form of a dermal patch worn behind the ear. When Komorowska’s Helena Monet (Alex’s adoptive sister) learns that her father figure is planning to take the drug to clinical trials, she decides she can’t wait and administers the patch to herself.

The next day, the psychic voices that normally torment Helena’s scanner mind have suddenly become manageable. She feels good, in a bad way, using her telekinetic powers to explode an annoying pigeon. It isn’t long before she pays a visit to the mad scientist who abused her as a child, freeing his current test subjects and supplying them with enough EPH-3 that they become loyal to her plight. Unlike the lousy villain of the previous film, Helena’s pattern of violence is strategic. Eventually she installs herself as the CEO of her father’s pharmaceutical corporation to ensure a steady supply of the miracle drug.

Unfortunately for Helena (and for those of us rooting for her), Alex returns home after a two-year stay in a Thai monastery. As the older sibling, Alex poses a challenge to Helena’s control of the corporation. Yes, the movie feels like it’s veering into routine territory as it clumsily folds Alex back into the plot, but thankfully it culminates in an extravagant but swift finale. As Species knew that it was Natasha Henstridge’s movie, Scanners III knows that it is Komorowska’s. Hell, I think I enjoyed this one more than Species.

Three astronauts are exposed to a severe blast of radiation while orbiting Saturn. Only one of the astronauts, Steve West, survives. (They never explain how he makes the return trip to Earth in his rapidly deteriorating condition.) You know it’s serious when the attending doctor checks the fully bandaged man’s chart and the only thing it says is RADIATION in bold red letters. Thankfully, those bandages don’t stay on for long as the movie is eager to show off its makeup effects, provided by the legendary Rick Baker. Steve is a mess of a man, leaving behind a sticky residue on everything he touches. His ability to reason has melted much like his flesh. You’ve seen slime monsters before, but few as gross as this one.

As soon as the doctor leaves, Steve bursts out of his restraints, chases a nurse through a plate glass door, and rips off a nearby fisherman’s head, which ends up in the waterfall where three kids play. Those kids, by the way, are bad little shits, first introduced sharing a cigarette even though they’re not even out of grade school. One asks the little girl if she wants to play Doctor before putting her up to a game of Hide & Seek, which is really just an excuse to ditch her. And the aforementioned severed head looks so good, the camera lingers on it longer than necessary as it floats down the river and ultimately sails over the waterfall, smashing wonderfully on a rock below.

Dr. Ted Nelson, played by fellow Oklahoman Burr DeBenning, gets on the phone and calls an Air Force general to let him know Steve has escaped. The phone call reveals that not only is the general familiar with Steve’s condition, this very thing has happened before, only Steve “seems to be getting stronger.” It’s imperative, the men agree, that Steve is found immediately for reasons that will remain undisclosed until the final minute of the film. This task is of such importance that Dr. Nelson spends the next few scenes idly chatting with coworkers before heading home to eat lunch with his wife. That may sound like the movie plods, but it doesn’t, as Steve is a busybody when it comes to a-meltin’ and a-killin’. When at last Dr. Nelson picks the general up at the airport, you expect them to speed off in a serious manner, at which point Nelson immediately stalls his Toyota like a man who’s never driven a stick.

I use the word “cheese” a lot to describe the movies I feature here, but rarely camp. The Incredible Melting Man isn’t in the cheese camp. It’s squarely in the camp camp. That doesn’t mean it’s completely lacking cheese (not to mention a little sleaze in a scene involving a pushy photographer), but it has more in common with a movie like The Thing with Two Heads than it does yesterday’s Cannibal Apocalypse, which oozed cheese and sleaze. Camp is what filmmakers like William Castle and John Waters did. No part of it wants to be taken seriously. Indeed, the director has lamented that he shot a funnier movie until American International Pictures ordered him to make the kills more serious. As much as I hate studio interference, I assume that “funnier” picture was less funny than the one we got. Subtly poking fun at the genre is almost always preferable to a full-on parody, the latter of which often functions identically to a bad imitation while the actors wink at the camera to remind you that they’re above the material.

The Incredible Melting Man is somewhat tame for a melt movie in terms of meanness, but it delivers the gross even though there’s only one meltdown shown. It just so happens it’s a long, grueling meltdown that lasts the entire movie. Maybe it loses a little steam toward the end (I am utterly bored by how so many of these movies end with a foot chase through mechanical spaces), but the film closes with a shot of its violent aftermath, which is quite amusing.

John Saxon plays Captain Hopper, whose unit wipes out a village in Vietnam. When he discovers a pit containing a couple of American POWs, one of the men viciously bites him on the arm. It turns out that the men have been kept in captivity so long, they’ve turned into ravenous cannibals. Fifteen or twenty years later, Hopper is suffering from PTSD back home. One of the men he rescued is being released from the mental institution, a man curiously named Charles Bukowski. Played by Giovanni Lombardo Radice, who you’ll recognize from a number of Italian horror films including two other cannibal flicks, Charlie wants to have a drink with the man who rescued him, but something he says triggers Hopper’s flashbacks, who turns the offer down.

In literally the same scene, the girl next door (Cinzia De Carolis from Argento’s The Cat o’ Nine Tails) is trying her hardest to seduce Hopper. Initially he shoots down her advances, but ultimately succumbs. Overtaken by an uncontrollable urge, Hopper goes down on the girl and bites her. Though it’s probably the last place anybody would want to be bitten, the girl enjoys it… because this is Italian cinema at its finest. Meanwhile, Charlie finds himself unable to contain his own cannibalistic tendencies when he sees a couple getting frisky in a movie theater. After taking a chunk out of the woman’s neck, a mob chases Charlie into a flea market where he gets into a standoff with the local police.

It turns out Charlie and Captain Hopper have a virus that turns anyone they bite into cannibals. Now, I wouldn’t say it’s apocalyptic levels of cannibalism, but it certainly spreads rapidly enough to thoroughly entertain. Eventually, the only group left to root for are the cannibals themselves, who Hopper leads into the sewers as the cops chase them with shotguns and a flamethrower. It’s a refreshingly different take on the cannibal movie, which usually cast stereotypical tribesmen as the cannibals. If the film were made today, hobbyless losers would probably accuse it of being woke for its diverse cast of cannibals and the fact that director Antonio Margheriti seems to sympathize with them.

And now for one of the most basic bitch opinions I have: One of the reasons there are so many Italian cannibal movies I wouldn’t watch a second time, much less review for this blog, is because of the unsimulated violence toward animals that was so common in them. Cannibal Apocalypse, unfortunately, has a two-second bit of animal abuse involving the aforementioned flamethrower and what appears to be a live rat. I can’t say for sure it was intentional… though it seems clear the filmmakers didn’t care if it happened, either, as you can plainly see there were no precautions guarding against it.

Other than that one blemish, Cannibal Apocalypse is possibly my favorite kind of movie to review. Italian horror (when it isn’t killing real animals) is simply my happy place. I don’t know how to defend this stance to the uninitiated and I don’t know how to make converts of those who don’t automatically get it. I cannot put into words why I love the run-and-gun nature of their economic filmmaking, which is admittedly fast, crude, but not at all artless. The strangely written (often dubbed) dialogue, the awkward cuts, the lingering shots of gore, the upbeat Italo disco music… they seem more like dreams than movies.

Cannibal Apocalypse has no ghosts, no monsters, no supernatural things that go bump in the night. Instead it offers a couple scenes of gobbledygook to explain why a cannibal virus is running amok, almost as an afterthought, and just runs with the idea. Like the similar but higher octane Nightmare City, it’s a zombie movie without the zombies, a mad scientist film without the boring mad scientists. Just pure action, a lot of gore, and very little filler. Okay, so it’s light on the logic, too, but that’s not an issue here. And it almost grazes the very surface of what Vietnam veterans must have faced upon reintegrating into American society, but that feels entirely accidental.

At any rate, I’m considering starting a new feature to catalogue all the Italian cannibal films that don’t feature actual cruelty to animals. So look forward to that sooner or never.

I’ve been staring at a blinking cursor, wondering how to construct this piece without giving too much away. Those of you who have seen the movie will know my dilemma. Those of you who haven’t may wonder why I phrase things a certain way. That’s what One Cut of the Dead is like: there’s a little bit of “wait, what?” going on in the beginning, but that’s only because you haven’t been initiated into the club yet.

So… do you like Japanese horror movies? Here’s one that ultimately does something so unexpected, it will likely become a part of the subgenre’s conversation forever. What starts out looking like nothing special eventually reveals itself to be layered in a thrilling way. There were parts of it that made me think, “What the fuck is this shit?” And by the end, I was happily won over. I think most will be, too, even if they’re not fans of horror. It’s the rarest kind of movie that begs to be seen again as soon as possible.

Here’s the premise: a small crew of filmmakers are shooting a low budget zombie movie when they’re attacked by actual zombies. It turns out the director of the movie-within-the-movie has summoned the real zombies to get a better performance from his lead actress. Now he runs around with a handheld camera, popping out of nowhere to enthusiastically yell “Action!” whenever she’s being attacked by the flesh eaters. Never mind the fact that none of the director’s footage would be usable. The dude has completely lost it.

Thankfully we’re not watching the movie through the lens of the erratic movie director, who drops in and out of the mayhem as his insanity deems fit. Instead we’re watching the events as captured by a silent camera operator who, in real life, would be screaming their head off. Yes, everything I described is captured in one continuous shot, hence the terrible title. The end credits say it’s based on a stage play (no surprise there) with a much better title: Ghost in the Box… though there aren’t any ghosts in the movie so I suppose it’s a very loose adaptation. (I wouldn’t know because I’ve never seen the play as I don’t live in Japan.)

I digress. There have been several such movies designed to look as if they were captured in one take. The result is often impressive, but the more it’s done, the more it becomes a gimmick. One Cut of the Dead is very much a gimmick, but that’s clearly by design. It’s a gimmick with a purpose. Shot on location at an abandoned water treatment facility (standing in for a top secret military installation), the scenery offers a dynamic playground for the performers to run around in. At one point an actor almost falls through the railing of a second floor balcony for real, but the movie, as it must, goes on. When you’re shooting like this, you only get one shot, no resets, so cut it some slack, will ya?

This is like professional wrestling: not everything is sold well, but it’s extremely entertaining, more so in its second half than its peculiar first. It’s so wild, I kept thinking: Wouldn’t it be great to see the behind-the-scenes footage? I have a feeling that stuff would make the movie, and what it accomplishes, even more impressive. So that’s all I’m gonna say about this one, which is one of the more exciting movies I’ve seen all month. What a blast.

Norman Bates has just been released from the mental institution, twenty-two years after the events of the Hitchcock film. Not only is Norman’s psychiatrist (Robert Logia) optimistic about his rehabilitation, a number of the locals are surprisingly friendly to the murderer, including the sheriff (Hugh Gillan). One of the people who isn’t supportive is the sister of Marion Crane, who has Vera Miles reprising the role. Also returning is Anthony Perkins, playing the infamous mama’s boy with charm and affability.

While Norman was away, the state took care of his property, installing a crooked manager (Dennis Franz) who’s turned the Bates Motel into a flophouse. Norman is shocked to discover drugs and prostitution are now the motel’s most desired amenities, so he fires the manager, turning the man into an enemy. Meanwhile, prank calls and nasty notes pile up in an attempt to make Norman snap. Perkins plays the role so well, you don’t wait for the excitement that comes from his inevitable backsliding into psychosis. Instead, you find yourself rooting for him to keep it together.

Enter Mary (Meg Tilly), the troubled young woman who moves in with Norman. The script takes care to establish that her character is an idiot (she even refers to herself as stupid), presumably to suspend the audience’s disbelief that anyone would be dumb enough to move in with a convicted murderer. While the gambit might have paid off in a better movie, the script has many more characters whose stupidity isn’t explained. The dumbest of them all is Marion’s sister, whose complicated revenge plot hinges on putting another one of her family members in danger. This is some wildly stupid stuff, but it’s entertaining as hell. You get the feeling that everyone involved is well aware it isn’t Shakespeare (or Hitchcock for that matter) and that’s alright.

Even if it is an uneven mess, Psycho II isn’t as blasphemous as Gus Van Idiot’s masturbatory remake of the original. It’s clear that Perkins took the assignment seriously, rather than looking for an easy paycheck. Even as the plot concocts one excuse after another to separate the delusional man from more reliable narrators (and witnesses), he’s a blast to watch… which is to say until the script calls for his full blown insanity, giving him little more to do than stare blankly while he monologues about murders he may or may not have committed. Fret not because there’s a wonderful sequence of events waiting for you at the end of this film, which knows it can’t top the original’s ending and goes for macabre humor instead.

One could pick at the plot holes for hours, but I won’t fault the logic in a movie that has none. This is the kind of picture in which people can be murdered in dusty basements and the perpetrator can scrub away all traces of blood, change into clean clothes, and establish an alibi before the cops investigate the scene of the crime only minutes later. There are moments when someone watches Mary through a hole in the bathroom wall and I still don’t know who was actually doing the peeping. And there are so many people sneaking into Norman’s home, I have to wonder: Where the hell are they parking? The Bates Motel is supposed to be in the middle of nowhere.

There are a few moments of gore, which feel like an intentional hybrid between Hays Code sensibilities of the 60s and 80s slasher trends, landing somewhere in between the two eras in terms of gruesomeness. At one point, a character falls down the very stairs where Martin Balsam died in the first film, only this fall is much more kinetic and ends with a self-inflicted wound, which is captured in a nasty close-up with grizzly sound effects. Even so, none of the imagery is quite as visceral as the moment when the very tip of the killer’s knife dimpled Janet Leigh’s skin in the first film… I don’t know why that bloodless image is so much more effective than anything in this film, which literally shows a wound spreading open on a victim’s face (which is a pretty good effect, by the way).

By the end, it’s clear that the entire film was just an excuse to get Norman out of prison and back in the motel so they could turn the character into an 80s movie slasher in future installments. I can think of dozens of slashers I like much less than Anthony Perkins in this role so I’ll take it.