So you've seen every Bela Lugosi movie ever made. You've had your fill of the latest rehashes of "Frankenstein" and "Village of the Damned." You're bored with Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers and teen-killers in ski masks.
What's new for Halloween? As it turns out, plenty of straight-to-video horror films, including one tricky, well-acted thriller starring Lance Henriksen and written and directed by Victor Salva - the same acting-writing-directing team that created Disney's new fantasy, "Powder," which opened in theaters Friday.Salva's "Nature of the Beast," starring Henriksen as a nervous, pudgy paper-products salesman pursued by a drugged-up hitchhiker (Eric Roberts), was also intended once for theaters, but New Line Home Video is pushing it instead as a late-October video release.
The movie plays at first like a rehash of the 1986 Rutger Hauer vehicle, "The Hitcher," with Roberts in the Hauer role as a vicious drifter who follows C. Thomas Howell around on desert highways.
Gradually, however, Salva's story breaks free of these familiar elements, as both Roberts and Henriksen camouflage their identities during a police manhunt for a serial killer who has taken a fortune from a Las Vegas casino. It turns into a different kind of cat-and-mouse game, with a kicker ending that shocks even if it's not a big surprise.
"Nature of the Beast" is as intriguing as another straight-to-video item, "Jack-O," is lame and amateurish. There's still a wide gap in quality between the best and worst made-for-video movies, perhaps wider than there is between the best and worst theatrical films, and "Jack-O" handily illustrates just how low a tape can go.
It starts out as a campfire tale about a warlock who put a curse on the town of Oakmoor Crossing, where the citizens are being decapitated and otherwise incapacitated by a demonic, pumpkin-headed creature whose grave has been disturbed. But even with veteran scream queens Linnea Quig-ley ("Return of the Living Dead") and Brinke Stevens ("Slumber Party Massacre") doing much of the yelling, "Jack-O" plays like an exceptionally sloppy home movie.
Also new for Halloween:
-"The Haunting of Seacliff Inn." Oscar winner Louise Fletcher ("One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest") plays the helpful neighbor of a young San Francisco couple (Ally Sheedy, William R. Moses) who discover that their Victorian bed-and-breakfast home in Mendocino is haunted by a restless spirit named Jeremiah.
-"Eye of the Wolf." Jeff Fahey, who had the title role in "Lawn-mower Man," plays a government zoologist who investigates the murder of a Mountie in the frozen Canadian north of 1912. The only witness is a snarling creature, half husky and half wolf.
-"Blue Flame." Science-fiction thriller about a vigilante cop who tries to track down two beautiful, dangerous, time-hopping aliens who have escaped captivity in futuristic Los Angeles. The executive producer is David Niven Jr.
-"Relative Fear." M. Emmett Walsh, James Brolin, Denise Crosby and Darlanne Fluegel co-star in this "Bad Seed"-style thriller about the consequences of switching two babies at birth. One of them is the son of a homicidal madwoman.
-"Nightscare." Elizabeth Hurley, best known so far as an Estee Lauder spokeswoman and Hugh Grant's long-suffering girlfriend, stars in this horror film about an experiment in "behavior modification" involving a neurologist, a detective and a psychopath.
-"The Howling: New Moon Rising." No Halloween would be complete without a direct-to-video sequel that's light years away from the original. The first werewolf movie that carried the "Howling" name was directed 15 years ago by Joe Dante and partly written by John Sayles. The latest sequel, about a desert town plagued by mysterious murders, carries no such distinctive credits.