Getting murdered by inanimate objects has proven to be a successful formula -- just look at all the sequels for The Omen and Final Destination -- but Death Spa is unique in that it requires people to be inside a 1980s health club to be in any sort of danger. This is a somewhat limited pool to draw from, and once word got around that people were getting killed by the exercise equipment, we imagine the membership fees would dry up.

You can understand the brilliance of great films by watching terrible ones; for instance, here you suddenly understand that whole plot point in Jaws about how the town depended on tourism and intentionally gave beachgoers a false sense of security about the shark. Otherwise the audience is going, "Damn, can't these people just not go swimming for a while?" We dare say that Death Spa did not put as much thought into it. Beyond pointing out the obvious fact that a butterfly press cannot possibly kill someone the way it does in the film, no matter how much weight you put on it ...

Seriously, it can't pivot back beyond its own fulcrum. Read a book.

... what's to stop people from just not going in? Couldn't the people of the 1980s exercise at home, or at the YMCA, or at any number of other non-possessed spas and rec centers, with absolutely zero chance of getting drowned in the lap pool by a ghost? The Death Spa would claim one, maybe two victims before everyone in the city decided to never go near the place ever again and just sit on the couch eating diet pills in front of a Knots Landing marathon.

The producers of Strays were looking to make a horror movie about the terrorizing rampage of killer animals and settled on house cats, presumably because the only thing they could agree on was that it hadn't been done before.

"Spielberg did it with sharks and dinosaurs, right? Why not cats? Why not cats?"

The trailer attempts to sell us on the palpable threat the cats pose of frightening children and the elderly, because those are literally the only groups of people that are in any kind of danger from a house cat.

After all, there are precisely two types of incidents you have ever read about wherein a cat has killed a person (or cats, to be fair to the film's premise): suffocating a baby in a crib, or converging on an old hermit. And in pretty much every case, the old hermit was already dead, as in "Prune-Faced Millie the Cat Lady had a heart attack in her living room, and by the time the cops found her body, her 97 cats had eaten her head." That's hardly enough of a premise to sustain 90 minutes.

Searching for the one cat turd that didn't make it into the litter box is more suspenseful than this movie.

There is a reason why a house cat is always the fake scare in a horror movie when the characters are stumbling around in a murder cabin investigating strange noises, only to have the harmless old tabby jump out of the closet. No virile adult is getting brought down by a cat unless he trips over the freaking thing and falls down the stairs, and if we wanted to see ridiculous haunted accidents, we'd go back to Death Spa.

What's worse is that it seems like the makers of Strays understood this, and yet went ahead with production anyway -- one of the only deaths in the movie is a nameless power company technician who looks like he could break Admiral Whiskers' spine with a glare. How do the cats manage to kill him? One of them jumps on his back and he trips and bashes his head into a pipe.

They should've added grammatically poor Impact font subtitles and tried to sell it off as a comedy.

As works of the devil are concerned, this one kind of seems like small potatoes. Why would he bother possessing a dusty old Kenmore in a dumpy Manhattan walk-up? He can only eat people who walk inside that specific apartment and stick their heads into the refrigerator. What's to keep people from tying the thing shut, which incidentally someone in the movie totally does?

Furthermore, the movie goes out of its way to emphasize the fact that the apartment's rent is so low because of the demonic refrigerator (it's even the movie's tagline) ... so why wouldn't the landlords just go out and buy another one? Leave the hell-demon box on the curb and pick up a new fridge on the cheap from the scratch-and-dent aisle at Lowe's. Let the devil eat a bunch of hobos. Problem solved, roll credits.

The slugs horrifically (and we do mean horrifically) dispatch their victims, leaving a trail of corpses that look like the aftermath of a boiled meat explosion.

Or James Brown during his drug days.

One guy accidentally eats one of the abominable slugs in his garden salad, which apparently multiplies inside his body, because a freaking army of them bursts through his eyeballs in a spray of squiggly projectiles the next day. And if you think that's the only time in this film that somebody's eyes explode, you're wrong. Dead wrong.

"Can you please do the other eye, too? I'd rather not see the rest of this movie."

The extreme gore seems to be an effort to make up for the fact that they know it's hard to picture a slug as a threat. The things are only a few inches long, and are one of the slowest members of the animal kingdom. They have no appendages and no vertical leap to speak of. If you are standing upright and wearing shoes, a slug cannot possibly hurt you. Even mutant slugs with a mouth full of baboon teeth wouldn't be able to chew through a pair of sneakers, and even if they could, what's to keep you from simply stomping them into boogery oblivion? So the over-the-top blood and guts seem their way of saying, "Yeah, but just imagine the damage these suckers can do once they get hold of you!" Never mind that you'd need to lie motionless in your yard for several hours for that to happen.

Blood Freak is about a biker named Herschell who's driven into a homicidal rage by a combination of experimental turkey meat and marijuana. The concoction turns him into a wereturkey, because for some reason the producers felt the actor's natural face wasn't scary enough.

We disagree.

The wereturkey can only survive by drinking the blood of drug users, which we imagine is why they called the movie Blood Freak instead of Wereturkey or some variation thereof. He plods hazily after his victims, finally cornering them for some of the most drawn-out and torturously violent killings ever featured in a horror movie. He hangs one lady upside down, slits her throat, and cups his hands beneath her to catch the blood and drink it.

"It's a subtle metaphor for the commercialization of Thanksgiving."

In another sequence, he slices some dude's leg off with a table saw, once again arranging himself in the optimal position to guzzle the gushing life fluid in his beak.

"YOU BLOODY SAVAGE ... use a glass."

However, in the film's final few minutes, we suddenly learn that the whole thing was just a dream to show Herschell the error of his drug-using ways. A reformed Herschell has an extended make-out session with his girlfriend and then strolls merrily down a pier as the credits roll, because that's how movies called Blood Freak are supposed to end.

... of their careers.

For you aspiring horror directors out there, this film gives you a profound lesson in why creature design is so, so important. Do you find yourself struggling to make your wereturkey look scary, to the point that it's undermining the gruesome murder scenes? Consider a redesign of the costume. Still doesn't work? Maybe it's time to go back to the drawing board and ask yourself the hard question: Was a wereturkey the right choice for my graphic cautionary tale about the dangers of substance abuse?

Because it turns out that it really is hard to take anything seriously when the hideous monster at the core of your film looks like a guy wearing a mascot head, even if it was killing us in real life. It would've been immensely more frightening if that's what he actually was, instead of a wereturkey -- a hulking psychopath in a papier-mache turkey helmet, drinking people's blood.

The Langoliers looks like the toe fungus in a Tinactin commercial. Lenticular posters have more impressive special effects, and, to date, those have never frightened anybody. It doesn't get any better when the Langoliers start chewing the scenery like a literal interpretation of a review of William Shatner's performance in Star Trek V:

It looks like King Kong is chucking handfuls of his own deuce at the plane.

It's difficult to scare your audience once you've spent three hours boring them to tears with a bunch of people yelling at each other in an abandoned airport about an impending threat that takes way too long to explain, but when your monster looks like it came from an episode of ReBoot, you need not even have bothered.