Two “Valentine’s Day” Joe Bob (that is: horror) movies.

The first is Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge, which is kind of a riff on Phantom of the Opera, only in a mall. It’s a hot mess, just tonally all over the place, and unable to remember from scene to scene what it wants us to think about any of the characters. Like, in some scenes, Eric is supposed to be a good guy, but then also he’s extremely not; similarly, the heroine who is his would-be love interest is just weirdly and instantly dismissive of him once she realizes that he’s her supposed-dead boyfriend. And the inconsistent characterization is matched by nonsensical plotting, so it’s really best if you just kind of let this one happen to you.

If you do, though, it has an amiable charm. It’s set in an ’80s mall, and it’s not a “haha look at the retro” throwback version of the mall, it’s made in 1989 and filmed in an actual mall (sometimes while it was even open and normal people are walking around), and so it gets a level of verisimilitude that deliberate retro can’t quite hit. B. Dalton’s! Sam Goody! Everyone’s clothes! It turns out this is also Pauly Shore’s first acting role (as the frozen yogurt guy). I can’t really recommend this movie, but I don’t regret watching it.

Which is something I can’t say of Nekromantik, a German film made by some punk guy who set out to make something that would be shocking and appalling, like a somewhat downmarket version of Un Chien Andalou. Being deliberately shocking is like the easiest thing in the world to do, and so yeah: We get a scene where two necrophiliac lovers bring a very decayed corpse into their bed for a threesome and like suck on its eyeballs and what-not. We get a scene where the guy later kills his girlfriend and then has sex with her corpse. And most memorably we get the scene where the guy finally stabs himself while his priapic prosthetic dick shoots out… well, prosthetic spooge, I guess. Shocking!

But here’s the irony: None of that is actually the most disturbing part of the movie, because by far the worst part is the part where someone actually kills, skins, and eviscerates a rabbit. This cute little hoppy thing is just literally slaughtered in front of you, and then viscerally reduced down to a hollowed-out flayed carcass. And just when you’re about to say, “okay, fuck, that dude went too far,” it turns out that this was footage from a training video for a company that butchers rabbits for food and fur. Just like in Slaughterhouse, turns out that the deliberate inventions of would-be-shocking horror directors can’t compare to the banal workaday awfulness of carnivorism.