Vampire Party (2008) is a vampire flick with young people in it that has absolutely zero angst.

And what a relief that is.

Sam and his two pals Prune and Alice are party animals. They finagle invitations to this infamous Medici Night party, held in a castle accessible only by helicopter.

That’s the good news. The bad news is the party is for vampires, celebrating some similar night in the 14th century where one of the de Medici gals arranged with the local bloodsuckers to wipe out a few thousand Protestants.

So it doesn’t take long before mayhem breaks loose.

Thank God the directors don’t try to explain everything. Instead they go with silly sight gags and bad jokes, rendered worse because this is a French flick.

Arms melt off in holy water. Vampire death by fire. Vampire farts. Vampire toupee. Vampire hairstyling, discussion of. Running dental gag. Incantations that produce amusing results. Two breasts. Plenty of well-timed blood. Honest-to-God vampires that burn up in the sunlight.

Light-hearted and short, this is the perfect antidote to the ghastly “Twilight” nonsense.

Four coils, and a nomination for the iron Coil list

My friend Val hipped me to 1968’s  Pretty Poison, notable to him because it was shot in and around Great Barrington, Mass.

Tony Perkins is Dennis the weirdo, out on parole for a juvenile arson/manslaughter beef.

Tuesday Weld is Sue Anne, the psycho high school babe.

And that chunky guy over there, half asleep in the armchair, is me.

See, Dennis is nuts. He tells ol’ Sue Anne some load of bull about being a secret agent and a sinister plot.

And she turns out to be crazier than he is.

Unhappily for this flick, the craziest of all are those who sit through it without once deploying the fast-forward.

After a long night in the woods, Dennis is menaced by a red newt.

Never mind too much plot getting in the way of the story. For that to be true, you’d have to know which story the plot is messing with.

And there are too many things happening here.

It could be a serious attempt at a topical thriller, except it’s not even a little bit thrilling.

It could be a black comedy, except the humor is unintentional.

Or it could just be a lousy movie.

Val reports that when Perkins arrived for the shoot, he visited the only openly gay men in the neighboring town of Egremont — two German furniture makers who wore tight leather pants. Their dog bit him, which might explain the way he runs in this film.

We’re talking extremely unlikely love scene between Tuesday Wed and Anthony Perkins filmed through the foliage. (Normally this would call of an automatic one-coil deduction but in this case I think it’s a blessing.) Psychedelic freak-out with the full moon, so lamely rendered that it would have me chasing down my dealer to demand my money back. Much examination of little bottles of some red liquid. Many fine character actors wearing bow ties, cardigans and stingy brim fedoras. Cops that say “Shaddap, punk.” Big Tony running festively through a field after being attacked by a red newt. Loud cigarette-smoking mother with shellacked hair. Incidental music by Johnny Mandel that he reused for M*A*S*H, correctly reasoning that no one would remember Pretty Poison.

Only watch this with a South Berkshire County, Mass., old-timer to point out the locations and talk about gay German furniture makers.

Otherwise this is pretty painful poison.

One coil.

(Click one the link for an entirely different take from an art-damaged ninny: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2012/02/another-dose-of-pretty-poison.html)

I had one of those panicky moments recently.After watching yet another uninspired, direct-to-video horror flick, I wondered if I had exhausted the supply of horrible movies.

Not to worry. The folks at Criterion have put out a series called Eclipse. Here is the bumf on that:

Eclipse is a selection of lost, forgotten, or overshadowed classics in simple, affordable editions. Each series is a brief cinematheque restrospective for the adventurous home viewer.

Translation: We have the rights to all kinds of weird stuff, but we don’t want to put it out with our regular flicks. So we decided to package three or four flicks together, add some film critic crap on the liner notes, and sell the thing for $35 to little Tarantino wannabes.

Now then — Series 37, “When Horror Came to Shochiku,” covers that magical time when the Shochiku studio, late to the “man in monster suit destroys scale model of Tokyo” party, decided to go into horror movies.

There are four movies in the set. I have watched three.

After considering The X from Outer Space (1967), I conclude that one way to keep costs down for the adventurous (and impecunious) home viewer is to go cheap on the translators.

Because the title makes no sense. That’s okay, though, because the subtitles don’t, either.

The deal is the groovy space crew is trying to get to Mars, but every mission gets waylaid by some mysterious force which leaves some intergalactic space crud on the propeller.

And the dopey crew scrapes off a sample and sticks it in a jar.

Of course the minute they get back to Earth the thing pops out, gets into some atmosphere and turns into a giant chicken-headed dinosaur with death ray eyes, a very thick skin, and some seriously progressive ideas about urban renewal.

As with all monster suit movies, the sequences starring the beast get tedious. On the other hand, it does look like a chicken. Sort of.

Two and a half coils.

Also in the series, from the same director (Kazui Nihonmatsu) is the far superior Genocide (1968), in which enraged insects, fed up with the lethal antics of mankind, decide to wage their own war, starting with swarming over a B-52 carrying a hydrogen bomb and forcing thee airmen to parachute — with the bomb — to some isolated islands off Japan.

You can tell it’s the H-bomb because it’s clearly labeled as such: “H-bomb.” (Also “Handle With Care,” “Fragile,” and “This End Up.”)

See, Joji, local bug nut and married to the lovely and pregnant Yukari, insists on carrying on with Annabelle, the blonde, bikini’d bug nut.

He couldn’t have gotten too far with her, however, otherwise he’d have noticed the Nazi death camp tattoo on her personal chest.

Annabelle, driven mad by her experience, wishes to exterminate mankind. This fits in with the plans of the super-poisonous insects on the remote islands, whose venom drives everybody mad before they die.

There are also Eastern bloc spies and American Air Force nitwits with high water chinos, the better to expose their white socks.

Bug death, with lesions. Hallucinatory bug scenes. Major swarmitation. Sixties bikinis, which I think are sexier than today’s. Rare 19-shot revolver. Grim ending. Three and a half coils.

Iron Sky (2012) is an extremely silly movie that recently got American conservatives in a snit because the President of the U.S. looks like Sarah Palin.

I only knew about this from a post on Michelle Malkin’s Facebook feed, which directed me to her Twitchy website, which discusses Tweets on Twitter.

And if that not’s a good reason for banning the Internet then I don’t know what is.

Anyhoo, this Finnish foolishness is so dumb it shouldn’t worry anybody. Seems in 1945 the Nazis were able to escape and make it to the dark side of the moon, where they set up a colony and bided their time until…

The present day, when a couple of astronauts, sent to bolster the Palin-lookalike’s reelection campaign, stumble into the setup, with unfortunate results — one gets dead and the other gets bleached.

The Nazis discover the astronaut’s cell phone which can power their entire death star thing — until the battery runs out.

Then it’s off to Earth for some iPads and hijinks

This is a truly dumb flick — like an extended Saturday Night Live skit, with spaceships and a set designer that’s into steampunk.

And no nekkidity, which is a problem.

Two coils, for annoying Twitchy people, mostly.

The Devil’s Rock (2011) is much more like it. In this nasty bit of work from New Zealand’s Paul Campion, a couple of British commandos land on one of the Channel Islands just prior to D-Day, to disable a big German gun and generally draw attention away from the invasion.

Seems simple enough, except when the two Tommies get to the castle they can hear all kinds of shrieking, and one of them decides to go in and check it out.

It’s always a mistake to stray from the mission — especially when one of the same bunch of Nazis in charge of getting the Holy Grail is holed up inside with a female demon.

Despite the demon’s habit of ripping the guts out of everybody who gets near, the Nazi still thinks he can control the gal and unleash her on the Allies.

Two demon breasts. Piles of innards, gallons of blood. Brain-eating. Incantations. Book of evil spells. No devil music. Lots of screaming. Claustrophobia. A little long.

Three coils.

In the dubbed version, Weng Weng plays Agent 00, not Agent 3 1/2. I think this is an important distinction.

It’s important because “For Your Height Only” is the greatest film ever made.

You can have your “Citizen Kane” and “Battleship Potemkin.” Spare me your “Rear Window” and “The Third Man.”

Why? Because none of these so-called great films has a midget secret agent who escapes the bad guys by parachuting from a high balcony. With an umbrella.

This flick’s got it all, except breasts. For some reason, the filmmakers demurred in this crucial aspect.

So never mind. It’s the second greatest film ever made. (The greatest is “Zombie Lake.”)

Agent 00 is a big fan of the groin kick, the groin being the nearest area on the personal bodies of his assailants for a man of his height. (Weng Weng was two feet, nine inches tall.)

Although he’s proficient with the mini machine gun and the mini samurai sword.

The real bitch is sitting at the regular person table at the Manila’s fine restaurants. (They have signs that say “Food! You Eat!”)

The flick also features atrocious dubbing in a variety of dialects — Long Island Lockjaw, British dowager, Brooklyn hood.

And the main villain clearly studied at the Moammar Qaddafi Institute of Fashion.

A rare treat, and an even rarer four coil rating, plus consideration for the next all-time Iron Coil list.

The Atlantis Interceptors (1983) is a piece of Italian cheese in which stupid white people go to an island and battle post-apocalpytic biker punks on account of the Soviet nuclear sub they were trying to raise somehow caused Atlantis to rise out the ocean.

Got that?

This movie makes almost no sense. That would be fine if there were breasts, but there aren’t. Beasts, certainly. Magic machine guns that never ever require reloading, check. Plus groovy soul music by the immortal Oliver Onions.

Yes, Oliver Onions. That’s what it said in the credits. I backed it up to be sure.

The flick was chiefly interesting because I thought the female lead would eventually take her shirt off.

Here are some of the interceptors:

Here’s the exciting theme music – “Black Inferno.”

A real turkey. Half a coil, and that’s a gift.

“Erotic (or Sexy) Nights of the Living Dead” (1980) is a zombie porno flick that dithers between being a zombie exploitation flick with some decent nekkidity and being a flat-out hardcore porno flick with some decent zombitation.

I think the jury’s out.

It’s a slightly alarming flick, because the guy who gets the most action, John Wilson, played by Mark Shannon, looks like Keith Hernandez, the Mets first basemen in 1986.

There’s a scene with two gals and Keith, er, mark, or John, or whatever, that is pornographic in every sense of the term.

And there are a couple more that get close.

Laura Gemser, star of innumerable Emanuelle with one”m” flicks, is the star of this, and gets nekkid, but not pornographically.

Just sleazily.

The plot is about Stupid White People who want to put a hotel on Cat Island, ignoring the fact that the place is crawling with zombies, plus Laura Gemser and her blind grandfather.

Heads, necks, and a penis roll. The de-penising of Keith Hern— er, John Wilson is quite revolting.

Also: Fun in the insane asylum. Aquatic zombies.  Dramatic foreshadowing, leading to a solid if predictable denouement. A lovely mise-en-scene, which is French for long, lingering, and quite explicit shots of nekkid women doing things. With a champagne bottle, in one case. Hunky nekkid men, if you are watching in mixed company.

I give it two coils for not being one or the other.

Did you know that Groucho Marx wanted to call his quiz show “You Bet Your Ass”?

Well, he did. They settled on “You Bet Your Life,” which sounds pretty ominous.

Speaking of ominous, Noburo Iguchi’s Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead is not, strictly speaking, about toilets — even ominous ones. There is an outhouse in the film, and it has dead people in it, but it’s really incidental to the plot, which almost never gets in the way of the story.

Arisa Nakamura plays Megumi, a nice Japanese schoolgirl who knows some kung fu and is heartbroken over the suicide of her sister. She’s with two girls and a dorky guy, plus a skeezy weirdo, and they are going camping, in the best, time-honored, “Stupid People in the Woods” manner.

One of the gals wants to eat a parasitic worm so she can be skinny and become a model. They find a worm in a trout which Megumi catches with a net.

Now here’s where we have some problems. First of all, are there trout in Japan? Second — do they have big worms in them? Third, is it bcause they are wormy that they hang in space, waiting for a kung fu net-twirling Japanese kid to show up and catch them? Fourth — ever hear of cat and release?

I realized at this point in the film that the ol’ suspension of disbelief was going to come in handy.

Anyhoo, as you might guess, there are zombies around, and in trying to get away from them the gang find a little village.

Ko (played by Yuki, or maybe it’s the other way around), is feeling a little under the weather on account of the worm she ate, and she starts farting.

 She poots her way to the outhouse, where, as is often the case in these isolated locations with a mad scientist in  the barn and tapeworms in the trout, there are also zombies in — or under — the outhouse.

Iguchi keeps upping the ante, to the point where the film is utterly disgusting in every possible way.

But never tasteless.

We’re talking the usual exploding heads and popping eyes. Visible farts. Visible farts with demons in them. Zombies walking on all fours, backwards, with demon parasites sticking out of their butts. White panties. Flying parasite queen, in blue sun dress and flowered panties. Two breasts. Eight gallons blood; four gallons assorted glop. One mad scientist, one toothless goober, one skeezy drug addict, one flying trout.

An outstanding piece of work, and short, too.  Iguchi is an instant Immortal. Four coils, no doubt about it.

Rene Cardonas III’s Vacation of Terror (1989) is the film that answers the question “Should We Go to the Country House We Just Inherited, the One Where the Witch Was Burned in Black and White?”

Uncle Fernando, who eats weird food, inherits a country house from his aunt, and packs the whole gang — twin boys, daughter Gaby, pregnant wife, and niece Paulina — into the car to go check it out. It’s pretty much a ruin, but the kids like it.

But darn the luck — Gaby falls into the well where the evil witch’s doll was stashed 100 years earlier.

See, the flick begins with a black and white flashback of some infuriated yokels burning a witch. And instead of burning all her stuff while they’re at it, they stick it all in a well, which as you might guess is just asking for trouble.

You’ll find this lax attitude toward destroying evil in these decadent, post-modern times. They got Anthony Weiner, all right, but did they go after his creator, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)? Nooo.

So the doll starts rolling her eyes and things start going awry – snakes in the fridge, miscarriages, you name it.

Meanwhile Julio, Paulina’s boyfriend, comes down in his old pickup. He has cleverly tied to the mirror another relic of the witch burning, a hunk of crystal that glows in the presence of evil, and of course they don’t get wise to the usefulness of the gizmo until it’s almost too late.

Directed by Rene Cardona III, the grandson of the immortal Rene Cardona (Doctor of Doom, The Wrestling Women vs. The Aztec Mummy), and lacking in the latter’s sense of the absurd. I wonder if the opening flashback is an outtake from one of Grandpa’s flicks.

We’re talking flying crockery as part of a larger pattern of poltergeistitation. Acid-washed jeans on Julio, which makes this a true horror film. Big 80s hair on Paulina. Strongly implied miscarriage. Ham on a plate. Exceptional screaming. Bad driving. No nekkidity (automatic one coil deduction), and a 3.7 (of a possible 5) on the fast-forward button.

Not enough terror, in other words, and no compensating gratuitous nudity. In Spanish with subtitles. One coil.