Terror Trips (2021)

"Terror Trips" opens with a group of friends and horror movie fans starting a business providing guided tours of the shooting locations of various horror movies, with the kicker being that it'll eventually lead them to experience some very real horror. Sounds promising on paper, until you realize that the best thing these filmmakers can cook up is a version of "Hostel" where the profit's in human body parts and the cast and crew don't quite have the talent to overcome budgetary constraints. This is watchable, sure, and the fractured relationships between the cadre of organ-harvesting baddies account for the movie's most interesting moments, but the acting is uniformly mid and there's just so many scarier, more novel directions "Terror Trips" could have gone in. This isn't even aggressively bad, either, which just makes it even more boring.

Ouija Shark (2020)

These days there's an endless supply of independent horror movies made with but a dollar and a dream, yet when it comes to the many shark movies floating about, it's less "dream" than title that takes precedence. Enter "Ouija Shark", in which director Brett Kelly and a ragtag band of no-name actors loosely improvise a story around a title they never had any realistic hope of living up to. I won't bore you with the irrelevant details of what could debatably be called the movie's plot, but it's something about a ouija board linked to animal spirits conjuring up what looks to be a super-imposed hand puppet of a shark, which kills a bunch of people off before the movie lazily ambles into an ending featuring an impression of Donald Trump that lives up to the standards of everything preceding it. Like "Cocaine Shark", it's never entertaining, even in a so-bad-it's-good way.

Nefarious (2023)

When the day of convicted killer Edward Wayne Brady (Sean Patrick Flanery) arrives, psychiatrist James Martin (Jordan Belfi) is drafted in to assess his mental fitness for execution. This is complicated somewhat by Edward's claims to be a demon, which aren't exactly the sanest claims to make, except that he's on a course to convince Dr. Martin of their truth, inspire him to commit three murders, and continue to perpetuate an ageless evil on Earth.

If all that sounds promising, I regret to inform you that "Nefarious" is, in fact, Christian propaganda masquerading as a thriller, in which the definition of murder is stretched according to rightist philosophy and actual elements of cinematic horror are in short supply. Sean Patrick Flanery acts up a storm as the pro-life demon occupying a man's body in service of the filmmakers' biases while Jordan Belfi sits there looking dumb and swallowing every lame talking point his verbose foe drops on him. If you're a fan of heavy-handed right wing sermonizing and solemn Glenn Beck cameos (of all things), you'll probably love it. The uninitiated -- or anyone looking for an actual good movie -- should avoid it like the plague, however.