All right, let’s do a roundup of some horror movies I’ve seen recently that I don’t have much to say about.

First up, Galaxy of Terror. This was a Joe Bob movie, and you can basically describe it as a low-budget ripoff of Alien by Roger Corman. It’s not bad, but it’s also not especially good. A lot of seeming trash/ephemera becomes more interesting with age, but sometimes it remains disposable and forgettable; this is the latter.

Satan’s Little Helper is also a Joe Bob movie, but is substantially more interesting. The premise is that a bratty kid is playing a video game with the movie’s title where you do bad things for points (think GTA). When on Halloween he meets up with a guy in a demon costume, he gets into the “helper” role for that guy… which is awkward because the dude is actually a serial killer. The movie is tonally all over the place — it’s mostly comedic, but it’s sometimes very dark. That should be a negative, but here it works somehow. There is a late moment in the movie, involving a costume change, that perfectly straddles the line between brilliant and demented; that’s the moment I was completely sold. I don’t want to overhype this movie — it’s good, not great — but it is good.

Next is The Church. So when you turn Shudder on, it starts immediately streaming an in-progress movie at you; I think only once or twice before have we just stayed on that screen and watched one, but we did so here, because it was showing something that looked almost exactly like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but appeared to be doing it seriously. Like, genuinely I don’t know how you can film scenes that looked like this without everyone on set just constantly doing little Python bits. It turned out to be the first introductory scene of the movie, so we kept watching to see what was going on.

The concept of the movie turns out to be that in the Middle Ages, a village full of demon-possessed witches was killed and thrown into a pit (this was the Python-style part we saw), and then later a cathedral was built over it. We’re going to spend the movie with that church in the modern day as someone accidentally unseals the pit beneath, and evil starts to escape. The plot is absurd, and it’s made harder to follow by introducing a boatload of characters in the middle for no reason other than to kill them off.

This was apparently supposed to be the sequel to Demons and Demons 2, and okay fair enough that those also didn’t make sense, but they had more of a sense of fun to them. This movie takes itself too seriously for how silly it is, and I’m glad it wasn’t tied to that franchise. It’s not all bad — it’s Italian, so there are some interesting visuals — but on net, the most charitable assessment I can give it is sub-mediocre.

Next is Child’s Play, the first Chucky movie. Like with a lot of horror franchises, the first one is genuinely interesting, because it hasn’t yet locked in to the series formula. The movie toys with the idea that it’s actually about an evil kid who’s blaming his doll; we know it’s not true, because the movie starts off with Brad Dourif as a serial killer getting turned into Chucky by working a magic spell — I genuinely had no idea that Chucky was meant to be a serial killing warlock doll — but Chucky is mostly inert for the first two-thirds of the movie, so “the kid did it” is an obvious in-movie explanation (and I feel like there was an earlier draft/edit that was more ambiguous about this, as some scenes feel like they really want to leave the viewer uncertain about whether Chucky is actually alive, even though we know he is). It’s a genuinely tense movie that rises above the parodic evil doll caricature that I always associate with Chucky.

Child’s Play 2 has a lot of the same elements as the first one — it still has the same child actor (who is very convincingly playing a child), and it has some of the family psychodrama to it. But it starts off a little silly — over the credits, they’re rebuilding Chucky, down to his metal(?!?) skull, as if he were a Terminator — and it stays in a less serious register throughout, all the way to the final showdown in a toy factory. It’s still pretty decent, but it’s starting to become more of a stereotypical Chucky movie, if you follow. (He also looks more like Jon Gruden here.)