Ravenous (1999)

“Ravenous” is as wildly offbeat onscreen as its behind-scenes history (rewrites, cast revolts, multiple directors) indicates. It veers shocker, horror, satire, comedy, drama, fantasty, and all-out Midnight Movie nuts. It is split open dripping guts on the floor. Oh so apt for a blood-soaked cannibal tale set in the 1870s California that marries Cormac McCarthy brooding to Stephen King camp, and featuring Guy Pearce as a haunted soldier and Robert Carlyle as … let’s call him mysterious. Pearce is a faux hero who took a dive in battle and is relegated to a western outpost with other rejects –- bookworms, stoners, drunks, and fundamentalists -– who are visited by man (Carlyle) who spins a tale of escaping a terrifying camp of cannibals. Our soldiers unwisely take action. I’ll stop there. Antonia Bird –- third hired director –- serves up a movie that’s all body parts, none a head, with Carlyle diving in madly with glee, and Pearce scrambling to keep up. The fight scenes are underdone, the comedy crashes into indigenous lore, but not a moment is boring. When a dead character reappears, you could fit a thigh in my mouth. B

Event Horizon (1997)

I saw “Event Horizon” back in 1997 and thought it an ugly, silly mess with good actors – Sam Neill and Laurence Fishburne star – mucking about in a spaceship so familiar one keeps waiting for John Hurt to lose his lunch. (Hurt does not appear.) The plot: Neill is a scientist leading the salvage of the spacecraft Event Horizon that went missing seven years prior with no clear explanation. The ship appears as if every ’80s slasher villain has run through it: Blood smears and grisly bodies abound, floating in micro-gravity. Why? How? I won’t spoil it. Naturally, though, the crew ditch the buddy system and split up because in 2047 no one has seen “Alien.” Made by Paul Anderson (not Thomas, but W.S.), “Event” smacks of a film that’s dead certain that pouring on guts, gore, eyeballs, and blood all means horror and scares, not aware that the opposite is true. The paces Neill is put through makeup-wise brings my truest pity. The scenes with men holding on by fingers to bending, twisting iron brought my continuous, unpitying laughter. Time has not been kind at all. D

Sisters (1973)

During the finale of Brian De Palma’s “Sisters,” a bloody schizoid mind fuck love letter to Hitchcock, my jaw hung open. This riffs on Siamese sisters -- one alive, the other not quite, and both played by Margot Kidder –- and doesn’t just drive off the cliff. It launches off the road at rocket speed and explodes in a splatter of gore and brain pulp. We follow, as with any good Hitchcock film, a guy (Lisle Wilson) and a gal (Kidder) attracted to each other after a bizarre appearance on a TV game show that has unsuspecting men watching woman strip bare, with the latter in on the gag. The couple’s date goes bad fast: Her ex-husband (William Finley) prowls crazy and stalks the couple to her apartment, where things get icky and –- no spoiler –- bloody. De Palma then switches gears to a writer (Jennifer Salt) who sees the crazy deeds, before slamming back into drive, then reverse, then circles, burning out the engine for a finale that hit me far different than any plot synopsis I read. I loved every whacked red-soaked second. I still don’t know how to grasp it all, but obsess nonetheless. That’s addictive filmmaking. A 

The Human Centipede (2010)

Filmmaker Tom Six once made a joke of sewing a child-rapist perv’s mouth to a truck driver’s ass. Get it: When the fat hauler would crap, perv dude would get a meal. Somehow that crack, so to speak, gave Six the idea to make a horror movie about a whacky Nazi-inspired surgeon (Dieter Laser) who sews three youth (Ashley Williams, Ashlynn Yennie, and Akihiro Kitamura) together end to end, with the guy first in line. The whole affair is grisly, gross, and warped beyond measure, but Six smartly puts much of the gore and ick off screen and –- in a sly joke that somewhat backfires -- makes the mad doc the most boring horror villain one can imagine. This all comes apart, so to speak again, at the end when fat cops come knocking and the entire medical ordeal finally unravels as beyond preposterous: Mainly hydration and oxygen. There’s too little thrill here, the “Watch your back or else!” joke that forms the “Friday the 13^th” or “Elm Street” series, however campy they might be. It’s all just leaves a bad taste in the mouth.  Again, so to speak. B

The People Under the Stairs (1991)

Wes Craven sure as hell is a master of horror, but he’s also a master of comedy, the latter trait knife sharp in “The People Under the Stairs,” a gore-filled laugh-riot that has a racist, NRA-card-packing psychotic redneck yuppie-wannabe cannibal brother and sister turned married couple (whew!) as the landlords of the L.A. “ghetto,” ruling over low-income African-Americans, stashing money and gold in their lunatic mansion. That’s right, the goofiest rich white stereotype, played over the top by Everett McGill and Wendy Robie -– they also played husband and wife on “Twin Peaks” -– who turn up the crazy to 1,011. Also stashed in that creepy-ass house: A Horde of teenagers, including a girl named Alice (A.J. Langer), all held hostage by the kooky couple, each child disposed of if they dare hear, see, or speak evil. Our hero is a black teen (Brandon Adams) who longs to be a doctor, to save his dying momma, and yet faces a life of crime. Craven dumps clichés faster than body parts, but it’s all for sick-twisted satirical laughs, and darn if they don’t work. B

The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

Leave it to Joss Whedon, creator of the self-aware “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” film and TV series, to turn the horror genre on its bloody head, with a film inside a film that blasts apart the decades-old pattern of character types, predestined deaths, third-act disasters, and tired climaxes that can be graphed to the last “gotch’ya.” With “The Cabin in the Woods,” Whedon and co-screenwriter Drew Goddard (who directed) show us the masters behind the genre movie curtain as a subterranean set of directors, writers, and technicians punching buttons and giving orders to ensure that every horror cliché appears. That in itself provides more than half the laughs. Who knew every dumb college-age dope move in, say, “Friday the 13^th” was so essential? Is it scary? No. Should it be? Maybe. The skewering of other’s attempts at scary more than makes up for any lack of fright. Chris Hemsworth -– before “Thor” -- leads the college-age side as the “jock,” while Bradley Whitford and Richard Jenkins lead the control side, riffing as if they are in a serious Aaron Sorkin production by Tarantino. Beware Merman! B+

Land of the Dead (2005)

Three years before the economy collapsed, and six years before Occupy Wall Street tried to shake America out of its cloud of greed and luxury, George Romero – the original Zombie King – made “Land of the Dead,” a rebel grandchild of a grandparent that was once its own kind of hell-raiser. Dig it: In a post-zombie-apocalypse America, the ever-shrinking human population is walled up inside Pittsburgh, divided into two classes – the peasants, fighters, and scavengers on the street, and the privileged suits atop a glass-and-steel tower, safe from harm. Of course the stomach-chomping zombies will come, and the rich will flee, and the down-trodden will do the right thing. Romero goes full satire, casting ex-“Easy Rider” Dennis Hooper as a Donald-Trump-like lunatic carting around cases of money in a world where money is useless. Grimly, the bloody delicious irony zombie shuffles its way stage left as the third act loses its head just when the story demands this world be burned by the hand of an evolved zombie who once pumped gas as a living minimum wage slave. B-

The Fly (1986) and The Fly II (1989)

David Cronenberg’s nightmare love story horror flick “The Fly” is mad genius, sickly twisted, and lets Jeff Goldblum spin gold as a loner nerd scientist named Seth Brundle who wants to change the world as we know it. He doesn’t, but sure as hell changes his own corner when a teleportation experiment goes wrong and he zaps himself and a house fly from one souped-up self-built transport pod to another, two go in, one comes out. Cronenberg fires on all bloody cylinders, starting with a romance between Goldblum and Geena Davis as a reporter, then sci-fi fantasy, then body horror as Seth morphs to a superman assured he has jumped the evolutionary ladder to mad man when his body starts falling apart, and becoming ... another. Twenty-six years on “Fly” still shocks with Goldblum’s transformation under makeup, and then the stop-motion creatures that replace him. The lines are cheesy – “Be afraid! Be very afraid!” – but the visuals burn deep, as does Cronenberg’s obsession with dying and disease. Last note: Mr. C must release a director’s cut soon: Check out a cut scene on YouTube, as Seth makes a monkey-cat as part of his own healing scheme shown later. Insane. A

In “The Fly II,” Cronenberg buzzes off to better films, and we’re stuck with Chris Walas – the makeup guy on the first film – as director of a “Like Father, Like Son” spookfest. Let’s give it points: “Fly II” flies in a different direction as Martin, the mutant flyboy of Goldblum’s scientist and Davis’ reporter, is raised inside a mega-corp lab, and as a 20-year-old (really 5) falls in love, all flowers and dancing sweet. Sure as hell, though, we get a grisly transformation and all goes to shit fast with bad visual effects and a LOL “Alien” rip off as Marty McFly (tee-hee!) goes on a bender against his surrogate Mr. Burns daddy, so boring bad, he could be a 1970s Disney villain. Lee Richardson is the old man, and Eric Stoltz – he did “Mask” before this – is young Martin. It’s all a maggot baby so unworthy of Cronenberg I wanted to take a rolled-up magazine and … well, you know. C

Insidious (2011)

American-made horror flicks, especially ones rated PG-13, are a dime-a-dozen and pointless as alcohol-free beer. The urge to shock and cut a swath through the audience is undone by the need to ensure 12-year-olds can get in. “Insidious” is an exception. Dig it: Ghosts and ghouls rule your new dream house, but it isn’t the home that’s haunted. It’s your child. Spooky. That’s the premise that drives our parent heroes (Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne) to tumble desperate into the arms of some ghost busters straight out of “Poltergeist.” Dig it further: Imagine, guys, coming home to see our wife talking to your own mother … and a priest. (I’d shit myself.) As with “Poltergeist,” what we don’t see is the real shocker, not blasé gore. The rating lulled me in, and the film whacked me on the head, “Sixth Sense” style. Too many scenes at the end are dark to the point of murky (and baffling) confusion, and the villain is murkier, but “Insidious” had me up at 3 a.m., listening for spooked baby monitors we do not own. B