If I didn’t know differently, I’d have guessed it was the other way around, and that “Scare Me” had been adapted from a live theater show.

Ironically, having nothing better to do is how people ended up making this movie in the first place.

If “Aliens” is letter A, and a $900 DIY-er shot on a cellphone in a cardboard tube passing for a tunnel is letter Z, then “Death Valley” is somewhere around P.

“Venom: Let There Be Carnage” turns into a real ripper exploding with cool creatures, hilarious laughs, and a Hallmark holiday movie’s worth of heart that’s unexpectedly charming.

Not only is it one of the best thrillers of the year, “The Advent Calendar” might have a prime place on the list of perennial holiday horror hits to revisit every December too.

“Black Friday” settles for being a hollow horror-comedy that just acts slightly silly instead of actually loading up on sharp jokes and good gags.

Set your standards to meet the movie’s lowered level and you might find its occasional kookiness to be intermittently captivating.

When I exited at the other end of a finely tuned yet relatively ordinary haunter, I found myself asking, “That’s all?”

“Apex” is like watching cellphone video of average H&R Block employees playing paintball while lightly jogging around 40 square feet of forest.

Flashes of clever creativity lead me to believe if it didn’t fight so hard to be ordinary, bigger risks might have paid off with an “extra-” to put in front of that word.

The Theatrical and Extended cuts of “Escape Room: Tournament of Champions“ make for a fully fascinating watch purely from a filmmaking “what if?” perspective.

There are those who will try to tell you these “Don’t Breathe” movies creatively upend audience expectations and blur the lines between black and white. No, they really don’t.

“Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin” isn’t overly exciting to watch, so maybe “well, whatever” says more about the movie than 750 more words possibly could.

I’d rather talk about anything else, even if that anything else is an analogy that stretches to connect a medicore Kate Siegel vehicle to the worst fans of “Star Wars.”

In the end, “The Deep House” doesn’t do things all that differently, and settles solely for submerging its standard spooky stuff in seawater.

“Night Teeth” delivers another mediocre Netflix thriller that people can’t really forget because it’s unlikely they’ll ever remember it in the first place.

Stick with it for the first 30 minutes and you’ll be rewarded with an unexpectedly novel twist that only a liar would ever tell you he could see coming.

If you just want a heavyweight horror icon going for broke in a traditional slasher, “Halloween Kills” serves up that feast on a splattery silver platter.

Who in their right mind would willingly watch a no-budget werewolf indie with the word “Amityville” in its title expecting anything other than B-grade badness?

“Aileen Wuornos: American Boogeywoman” can best be summed up with that “Beyond Belief” meme of Jonathan Frakes smiling. “Never happened.”