INITIATION: SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT 4 (USA/1990/BRIAN YUZNA)

Somehow unrelated to its three predecessors, Silent Night, Deadly Night 4 follows the story of a journalist named Kim who, upon learning of a recent case of spontaneous combustion, decides to launch an investigation into the subject. Desperate to get approval from her boss, she offers to run the story for him, but as usual is pushed to one side. “Boys will be boys,” asserts her straw-haired colleague, but Kim is undeterred and starts researching independently. While at a bookstore, she encounters the proprietor Fima, who takes her to the spot on the roof where the woman had died. Visiting Fima at her home proves to be a wrong move when she passes out and subsequently wakes up to a visceral initiation ceremony involving rats and cockroach larvae.

The theme of Christmas has apparently been waylaid here, with only scant references to religion and the Bible to explain the festive setting. For the most part, director Brian Yuzna gives us gruesome insects with sexual overtones and sham pagan rituals in lieu of a story, Kim’s draw to the pathologically sinister Fima too obscure to be believable. Nonetheless, this fourth instalment in a famously tacky horror series is remarkably entertaining, with some godawful dialogue and subpar acting. Clint Howard, the physiognomically-challenged brother of director Ron Howard, portrays a creepy vagrant named Ricky (most likely a high point in his career), while former Bond girl Maud Adams is hilariously rigid as Fima. Naked Lunch it ain’t, but there’s fun to be had.

WOMEN'S FLESH: MY RED GUTS (JAPAN/1999/TAMAKICHI ANARU)

A relic of the Japanese craze for extreme video nasties in the 1980s, Women’s Flesh: My Red Guts eschews any notion of plot, instead displaying the slow, painful suicides of two mentally disturbed women. The film opens with a series of overexposed stills of the deceased women, presumably from a coroner’s camera, although the content of the photos implies an inappropriate sexual fascination with them. We then see the first woman attacking herself with a toothbrush, as if taken over by some demonic force. She then runs a knife around her mouth before slicing through her tongue. The second woman, sat against a black curtain, sits distracted before slowly committing hara-kiri. Hazy black and white interludes add scant detail to the women’s emotional deterioration.

While there have previously been intellectual cinematic explorations into sado-masochistic practices, Women’s Flesh disturbingly appears to be designed solely for thrills and, quite terrifyingly, is not the most extreme feature by infamous director Tamakichi Anaru. Nothing in the film suggests the viewer’s need to ‘understand’ or empathise with these women, their actions little more than a graphic display. Though utterly abhorrent in its themes and purpose, the film is at least interesting for its extremely lo-fi shooting style. VHS artefacts make each image difficult to make out, while a soundtrack of noise and electronic blips adds a supernatural element to the proceedings. Far too pointlessly morbid and puerile to warrant attention, Women’s Flesh is a bewildering bit of VHS-era gore designed merely to shock and disgust.

TROLL 2 (ITALY/1990/CLAUDIO FRAGASSO)

Though the first Troll film may not have been any great shakes itself, it’s far eclipsed by this remarkably shitty sequel which doesn’t feature a single troll. Our protagonist, Joshua, gets word from the spirit of his dead grandfather Seth that goblins exist for real, and that they are constantly tricking humans into eating food which turns them into edible plants. While on a family holiday in the town of Nilbog, Joshua grows suspicious of the green food he is served by his hosts, and urinates (yes, urinates) on the food to prevent his family from succumbing to the goblins’ ruse. Further visits from Grandpa Seth convince Joshua that the entire population of Nilbog (hint: read it backwards) is intent on tricking his family into eating green food, and it is up to him to get everyone to safety.

Anyone who has ever been on the Internet should be familiar with one of the film’s most infamous scenes (“they’re eating her... and then they’re gonna eat me... oh my GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOODDDD!!!!”), and in truth, the rest of the film is no less camp. In one scene, Joshua’s sister’s boyfriend is seduced by a Vampira lookalike, who then almost asphyxiates him with popcorn. But on the whole, the film pales into comparison to other ‘worst films ever’ such as The Room and Plan 9 From Outer Space. Besides, the goblin masks are genuinely terrifying, although this is mostly due to their shoddy production (only one of the masks has a moving mouth).

JUST FOR THE TIME BEING (USA/2000/GIL BRENTON)

I'm all for independent cinema - no matter how low the budget, no matter how tight the shooting schedule, there should always be a world of possibilities available when a rich imagination takes the helm. But if you can afford to cast Eva Herzigova, a woman whose net worth is $12.3 million (admittedly green in the acting department, but that's beside the point), surely a bit of quality control wouldn't hurt? Not so for this club-footed romantic drama. Christine is a moody femme fatale, whose irresistible frumpy charm wins over a father and son who come to stay at the house with her and her excitable mother.

And that’s pretty much it. The script is an abomination, each line necessitating heavy enunciation as if being read to a class of hard-of-hearing toddlers. Most of the characters are repugnant beings, making it difficult to identify with anyone – the sex-hungry mother is particularly unbelievable, having been ordered direct from the menopausal soap star catalogue. The cast do their best with awful material, but it’s all a bit futile really. Herzigova does her role some justice, and she certainly looks the part, but it’s not something she’d want to put on her CV. On the photographic side, the film wins back a few points for making good use of the gorgeous lighting. The film's prettiest moments are essentially VH1 music-video filler, and are luckily dialogue-free. To conclude negatively, you know a film’s bad when even Herzigova’s naked body can’t keep you from yawning.

DEAD WAVES (JAPAN/2005/YÔICHIRÔ HAYAMA)

Every South East Asian horror film made in the wake of Ringu and The Grudge is forever doomed to be seen as inferior mimicry to those films, partly because of the Western misconception that they invented the long-haired pale ghost. It is often unfair as some movies deserve to be seen out of context. Dead Waves is not one of them. Enigmatic TV producer Hiroshi is renowned for his cult show which purportedly performs exorcisms on request. After a flag in the ratings, Hiroshi thanks his lucky stars for a peculiar case of possession which leads him to research the phenomenon of “dead waves” – communication with the dead through the medium of television. Add to this the sudden series of teen suicides attributed to the show, and essentially every cliché has been knackered out.

The issue here is not about originality – surely one can’t be too selective about films advertising themselves as horror – but rather the clumsy handling of the elements. When a film relies heavily on scenes portraying mental illness/possession, it should be of the utmost importance that decent actors are cast in the main roles... apparently not the case here. Our protagonist lacks charisma and energy, to the point that the titular “dead waves” might as well be referring to his brain activity. The greatest disappointment comes from the lazy horror moments. Besides the crawling naked people and a sinister baby, there is no logical instigator of fear here, save for the truly awful song over the credits.

MU ZAN E (JAPAN/1999/DAISUKE YAMANOUCHI)

Exploiting a theme so often seen in grungy horror films that it has all but lost its shock value, Mu Zan E is unlikely to be remembered even by diehard gore hounds. The trite story begins with an unnamed female TV presenter taking us unconvincingly through her latest exposé on snuff films. Initially, the worst she manages to uncover are niche porn films involving liberal amounts of menstrual blood, but the more people she interviews, the more she is reeled into their world. Eventually, she unearths the hyper-brutal snuff porn ring she had presumably been anticipating for her entire professional career... and she is not disappointed. As her curiosity burgeons, she gets perhaps a little too close to the action, resulting in some rather unpleasant sights.

While the film never pretends to be anything more than a curt exercise in grisliness, it still fails to fulfil its desired reactions. The presenter’s testimonies are delivered on a cheap DV camera, an effect which actually ruins the illusion of realism by eschewing decent production values. The interviews are unlikely to fool anyone given the insipid performances of the subjects. In addition, the final denouement desperately lacks sequential credibility, in spite of the nauseatingly lavish effects. To the film’s credit, it does build up intrigue from the pixelisation of the women’s faces, but sadly this may be less of a conscious creative choice by the director, and more another sorry attempt to reach that “realism” it so sorely needed to have any impact.