The Danny Trejo-ification of low-budget American genre pictures continues apace with the release of Machete Kills in theaters, nearly simultaneous with the release of two straight-to-video Trejo vehicles: Dead In Tombstone (Universal) and Zombie Hunter (Well Go USA). The former has Trejo playing Guerrero, a ruthless Old West gang leader who gets killed by his own men, then makes a deal with the devil (played by Mickey Rourke) to come back to earth and deliver to hell six fresh souls from the ranks of his old crew. In Zombie Hunter, Trejo plays Father Jesús, the boss of a band of post-apocalyptic refugees, who shelter nomadic badass Hunter (Martin Copping) as he makes his way to a rumored safe zone. Both movies are excessively stylish, using digital effects and outsized art direction to create worlds that are completely artificial, devoid of any significant menace or meaning. In other words: They’re heavily influenced by the cinema of Trejo’s friend Robert Rodriguez, albeit without Rodriguez’s imagination or visual panache.

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The larger question both movies raise is, “Why Trejo?” What does this stocky, weathered, growly character actor bring to the table, that he should become so ubiquitous in low-budget horror and action pictures? For Zombie Hunter, Trejo is the lone note of “authenticity” in a movie that’s all faux-cool posturing and digital splatter, presided over by an Australian leading man doing a terrible American accent. Writer-director Kevin King tries to keep Zombie Hunter light and fun by crushing it with touches of meta—labeling objects, characters, and songs with onscreen text, and having Trejo break out his Yoda-speak by saying, “Consumed by hate, that one is.” But aside from one wicked Father Jesús axe-fight, the film is rote, grating, and oppressively phony. Dead In Tombstone is better, if only because director Roel Reiné has the advantage of being able to pepper in scenes of Trejo and Rourke sitting around dusty “Old West” sets looking rough-hewn and muttering world-wearily at each other. But from the CGI-enhanced gunfights to the topless showgirls with breast implants, Dead In Tombstone is all about pumped-up fakery. Trejo, who at one time represented hard-edged realism as a character actor, is fast becoming a red flag, signaling that a movie is likely to be frivolous to the point of irrelevance.

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It’s obvious what Heroes/Gilmore Girls star Milo Ventimiglia represents in Todd Levin’s directorial-debut feature, Static (Cinedigm/Flatiron): He’s meant to provide a recognizable face in what, up until its last 10 minutes, is mostly a routine home-invasion thriller. Ventimiglia plays young novelist Jonathan Dade, who with his wife Addie (Sarah Shahi) is still trying to heal from the death of their child when he hears a knock on the door of their country house in the wee hours of the morning. The knocker is a woman named Rachel (Sara Paxton), who insists that she’s being followed by a band of masked marauders. While they try to figure out whether they can trust her, Jonathan and Addie grapple with old resentments between them—all of which take a back seat when Rachel’s assailants burst through the door.

Levin doesn’t do enough new or original with the home-invasion subgenre, aside from the ultimate explanation for who’s tormenting the heroes, which is revealed in a twist ending that makes the film seem a lot dopier in retrospect. But Static is reasonably effective once it gets rolling, and Levin does a decent job of developing the plot in a movie that contains maybe 20 minutes of dialogue. Every time Static seems to have stalled, Levin comes up with another well-staged suspense sequence, like the one where Addie’s field of vision is blocked by the open hood of their car, and she and the audience wait to see what will be revealed when the hood finally closes.

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The invaders in Static wear what look like gas masks and hazmat suits, and so do the mysterious figures in Abducted (E1), who nab lovesick young couple Dave (Trevor Morgan) and Jessica (Tessa Ferrer) in Griffith Park in Los Angeles and then stick them in a bare cell, removing them occasionally for gruesome experiments. Writer-director team Lucy Phillips and Glen Scantlebury save the explanation for the abduction until the end—and even then, they keep it vague—though they have some fun teasing what the reason might be. Dave and Jessica are convinced they’ve been kidnapped by al-Qaeda, and look for evidence to support that theory, but periodically, they’re joined by cellmates who offer persuasive proof that they’ve been abducted by aliens, or by the U.S. government.

Abducted isn’t as good as it could’ve been. It suffers from a problem that a lot of contemporary horror/thrillers have, in that it begins with a bare-bones premise, then doesn’t do much with the little that’s there. It’s as though the whole project is just a workshop, never meant to be a complete film with an actual story to tell, or theme to explore. But Abducted is far more entertaining than a lot of other movies of its ilk, for a couple of reasons. For one, Phillips and Scantlebury don’t go crazy with backstory, which something a lot of genre filmmakers use as a substitute for plot and character development. (Modern horror movies often spend more time with who their heroes were than who they are.) Mainly, what makes Abducted work is that Dave and Jessica actually talk to each other and take an active role in trying to figure out what happened to them, rather than bickering and cowering. Also, even though Dave and Jessica record their plight on their cell phone for posterity, Phillips and Scantlebury resisted the temptation to make Abducted a found-footage movie. They wrote an actual script, then staged, shot, and edited it like an actual film. Amazing.

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Too often these days, micro-budget horror filmmakers lean on the found-footage gimmick, because it excuses movies that look cheap and choppy. But the format is getting harder and harder to justify, at least judging by James Cullen Bressack’s paper-thin To Jennifer (MVD/Psykik Junky). Chuck Pappas plays Joey, a heartbroken bro who comes up with the idea to get revenge on his cheating girlfriend by making a video of his cross-country road-trip, which he’s sure will end with him catching her on camera having sex with another man. As is the case with far too many found-footage movies, To Jennifer spends an hour on the kind of random, sloppy, home-movie-quality nothingness that no one would want to watch if it weren’t going to lead to some violence. To Jennifer’s time-killing is worse than most, though, because Joey and his buds are insufferable assholes, whose every fifth word is either “dude” or “fuck,” and who punctuate every sentence by cackling like morons. Give Bressack some credit for accurately capturing the culture of young men who disrespect women and spend all their time trying to play dumb pranks on each other. But To Jennifer doesn’t appear to be a satire, or a social comment. It’s just a tedious vacation video that dead-ends in predictable, pointless slaughter in its final five minutes.

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The one advantage To Jennifer and other found-footage films have over conventional low-budget horror, though, is that the acting tends to be looser and more natural, even if that means the characters are inarticulate and inane. That’s preferable to the alternative, if the alternative is a movie like The Black Waters Of Echo’s Pond (Starz/Anchor Bay), which gathers a group of mostly shitty young actors (some of them with thick accents), has them play a circle of friends at a rural house party, then has those characters engage in long, shouty conversations in which they reveal their boring secrets. Some are jealous of each other’s success. Some are cheats. Some have made selfish, irresponsible choices. All of their hard feelings toward each other emerge over the course of one long, dark night, as the friends play a strange board game they find in the basement of their waterfront resort cabin.

The Black Waters Of Echo’s Pond starts out well, with a flashback to an archeological dig in the 1920s that suggests a larger mythology involving the destructively mischievous god Pan. The film also features some impressive gore effects, a neat piece of design on the board game, and the welcome presence of Robert Patrick, who pops up periodically to spin tales of maritime adventure. But after the early promise of an epic tale, told through the rules and strategy of a complicated game, Black Waters devolves into scene after scene of shrill characters accusing each other of sexual and/or business indiscretions before getting stabby. Writer-director Gabriel Bologna and his co-writers could’ve taken so many different paths, but they followed the most-trod one, worn dull from overuse.

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These days, some of the best work being done in the horror genre is in short films, but the mediocre shorts anthology Chilling Visions: 5 Senses Of Fear (Chiller/Scream! Factory) has more in common with bland features like Static, Zombie Hunter, and The Black Waters Of Echo’s Pond. (The movie even includes images of a sicko in a hazmat suit and gas mask over the opening credits, because apparently that’s now shorthand for “psychopath.”) The hook here is that each of the five shorts corresponds with one of the five senses: In “Smell,” an office drone gets a career boost from magic cologne; in “See,” an optometrist develops eyedrops that allow him to see the wonderful things his patients see, or to plague people with terrible visions; in “Touch,” a blind child survives a car accident, then runs into a germophobic serial killer in the woods; in “Taste,” a flippant hacker tanks a job interview, driving his interviewer to try and literally eat him alive; and in “Listen,” a group of researchers and editors try to piece together a lost song rumored to drive its listeners dangerously mad.

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Some characters and ideas recur from film to film, and the production value of Chilling Visions is high enough that each film contains at least one memorable image or scene. (The metal mask that the interviewer uses to gnaw on her victim in “Taste” is particularly terrifying.) But “Smell” sets the tone for Chilling Visions in the way its protagonist Seth (played by Corey Scott Rutledge) works at a generic job, then attracts generic hotties when he puts on his cologne. The film isn’t about his job, or about the women he meets, and yet that lack of detail in the setting and supporting characters is indicative of a kind of one-dimensional thinking that’s common to all of these films—and to too many horror films of late. One of the most indelible moments in all of Chilling Visions isn’t scary at all. It comes in “Smell,” when Seth steps out of his house, and it’s a real house in a real neighborhood, not a studio set or soundstage, or a featureless clearing in the woods. Horror is much more horrific when it happens in a recognizable place to recognizable people, and not just in the heads of writers and directors who know every horror cliché, but don’t have any sense of life.

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It’s rare for a bonus feature to supersede the main title on a DVD/Blu-ray set, but the triple-disc special-edition Blu-ray of the 1976 British horror film House On Straw Hill (Severin) is as valuable for its third disc—a DVD containing the 2005 documentary Ban The Sadist Videos!—as for the discs containing the actual movie. Directed by David Gregory, Ban The Sadist Videos! recalls the furor that arose in the U.K. in the 1980s over ultra-violent horror films that were dubbed “video nasties.” Gregory looks back at the cultural conditions that sparked a nationwide panic: the rise of video stores, the subsequent popularity of foreign exploitation movies that had never been seen in Great Britain before, and a new wave of conservative politicians who were sympathetic to “deeply concerned” voters demanding they “protect children.” Ban The Sadist Videos! also documents what happened during the run-up to and aftermath of the passage of the 1984 Video Recordings Act, remembering how cine-illiterate cops confiscated movies like Apocalypse Now and The Big Red One, presuming from their titles that they were inappropriate; and how even after the censorship standards became more codified, critically respected films like Evil Dead, Straw Dogs, and The Exorcist were effectively banned.

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Gregory cuts together archival footage and new interviews, and he does let the people who stood up for the bans have their say. But Ban The Sadist Videos! also sounds a warning about how easy it is for hysteria to overtake reason, with real consequences. Small video distributors and shops had their businesses crushed, private citizens had their homes raided, the British Board Of Film Censors wantonly cut movies to their own capricious specifications, and rarely did anyone speak up for the rights of adults to watch whatever they damn well pleased. As film critic Derek Malcolm puts it in the documentary, it was “hard to mount a counter-campaign” arguing that trashy movies about Nazi sex camps had value. Very quickly, the unconscionable nature of the “video nasties” became accepted as a given, leaving the battle to be waged over how rigorously to prosecute common gorehounds.

House On Straw Hill (also known as Trauma and Exposé) was one of the 39 films successfully prosecuted for obscenity during this era, all of which subsequently became hot commodities on the black market. The version on Severin’s DVD/Blu-ray combo set was pieced together from a badly damaged original negative and collectors’ privately held prints, in order to present the film uncut for the first time in years. The difficulty in producing a clean, complete version of House On Straw Hill is an example of what can happen when filmmakers aren’t allowed to keep their work in circulation in their home country.

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Not that House On Straw Hill is some unassailable work of art, by any means. James Kenelm Clarke’s bloody, tawdry thriller stars Udo Kier as Paul, a successful writer of high-class smut who hires an unstable, sex-crazed secretary named Linda (Linda Hayden) to move to the countryside and help him write his latest book. Between Linda’s manipulativeness, Paul’s violent fantasies, the troublemaking nature of Paul’s bombshell girlfriend Suzanne (Fiona Richmond), and the looming presence of two local juvenile delinquents, it’s only a matter of time before the movie erupts into the kind of rape and butchery that the VRA and the BBFC were created to suppress. But it’s also, to a large extent, a comment on how male entitlement and class privilege create the conditions that lead to rape and butchery. Plus, the film’s violence, while extreme, isn’t all that realistic or disturbing. Its effect isn’t to titillate; it’s more of a piece with the film as a whole, which is an exploration of how fantasy and nightmare intertwine. Just because the movie doesn’t explore it masterfully was no reason to yank it out of circulation.