Erik Piepenburg

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.

It seesaws between creepy and dippy, although it pulls no punches in its indictment of the American elder care system.

A lackluster horror movie gets points if the leading villain is a real bugaboo. But the Frendos, alas, look like poser versions of Pennywise, Art the Clown and other, scarier horror bozos.

The director, David F. Sandberg (“Annabelle: Creation”) does an exhausting job moving along a script, written by Gary Dauberman and Blair Butler, that’s made slack by mediocre monsters, muddled time loop stuff and underdeveloped characters who seem straight out of a lesser “Goosebumps” episode.

It’s hard to discern who the film is for when it feels as if it’s been passed around genre writing classes in search of an identity.

The problem is that the films, which are in Spanish and English, rely on typical horror movie stuff — a haunted house, angry ghosts, shape shifters, tableaus of corpses — to lift scripts that are across the board mediocre. The result is eye-popping but half-formed, more sketches than fully considered short takes.

Leone’s new “Terrifier” film sags under its predecessors’ trappings: a bloated running time, an unfocused script, uneven pacing

It’s an aspirationally farcical home invasion thriller that never fully thrills, despite a game cast that does its darnedest to liven up an unfocused script — Skotchdopole wrote and edited his film, too — that’s fashioned from genre odds and ends.

The hapless script — written by Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland and based on the original — offers nothing fresh in a tiring 91 minutes, and nothing daring to justify a new “Strangers” film, let alone a new series, especially when Bertino’s formidable film is streaming on Max.

One can only watch Renata, and this film, do so little for so long before yearning for more than naturalism and tenderness to drive the slice-of-life story.

A less sentimental, wish-fulfilling approach to Mexican American identity, gay self-discovery and Reagan-era Texas will wait for another day. Until then, fans of “Heartstopper”-style slow-burn romance will eat up this tender film’s subtle charms.

An innocent gay-indie sweetness courses through this film, especially in the too-short glimpses into Manuel’s romantic cravings and in the final blissful minute, and the young cast’s naturalistic performances make it all feel lived-in and truthful. But Biasin’s script plods.

What the directors Gary Smart and Christopher Griffiths made is a documentary in spirit. But it’s really more of an annotated oral history of Englund’s entire, extensive IMDb page — almost film by film, in chronological order, for more than two hours. It’s exhausting.