Erik Piepenburg

What’s left is a movie with few discernible stakes and little sense. It should have stayed a podcast.

De Fontoura, 86, has an assured hand for both hand-to-hand combat and queer aesthetics. (Ângelo de Aquino’s high femme costumes are scandalous.) But the more character-driven scenes drag, at times stopping the film’s pleasures cold with slack dialogue. Still, Gonçalves — a rageful, heartbreaking gangster — and the film he dominates are must-sees for fans of under-the-radar queer movie history.

A demon won’t take no for an answer in Andre Ovredal’s tense but confounding supernatural thriller.

Barker shows real promise as a horror storyteller; his instincts about when to hold back and when to plunge the knife are scalpel sharp. If only the sexual politics at play in Obsession didn’t feel so callow.

It’s too much yet not enough.

As an exploitation pastiche, Rod Blackhurst’s new sicko fairy tale is a knockout. Made entirely on Super 16-millimeter film, it oozes grindhouse sleaze that almost reeks through the screen. Ashley K. Thomas’s special makeup effects are distinctively stomach-churning. There’s not much to it beyond that, and for lots of horror fans, that will be enough.

When it comes to this Dumpster’s worth of horror nothingness, that’s the inescapable question, translated into English: What is it?

Now that the third and mercifully final film has flumped into theaters, this empty trilogy offers few worthwhile returns other than well-duh horror lessons that should (but won’t) sink in: Leave good horror alone, and relentless cat-and-mouse games do not a movie make.

This is assured horror filmmaking. Heartbreaking too: Anyone who’s held a pet as comfort from pain or despair should have tissues at hand.

The film is naturalistic enough to be convincing and sick enough to be disturbing, even if the acting falls scattershot on the persuasiveness scale.