The Manor

Seriously bizarre and laughably awful, this low-budget horror movie throws in just about every shopworn idea under the sun, but none of it is scary, alluring, or entertaining. The Manor -- previously titled Anders Manor -- is bad enough to warrant an MST3K episode or a YouTube skewering from someone like JonTron or The Nostalgia Critic. Characters who don't go together wander aimlessly in a plot that makes no sense, as if just waiting to meet the killer and be sliced out of the movie as quickly as possible.

The crude lighting and the cinematography take images like a trail of chess pieces or a demon face -- which might have been terrifying in other hands -- and render them about as scary as a backyard haunted house with the lights left on. To correct this, the filmmakers continually resort to almost subliminal flashes of things like bloody knives, which also has little effect. One of many flashback sequences shows a man explaining the game of chess; it's so disconcertingly strange that it will make jaws drop. It's one of the strangest of many head-scratching moments that will have viewers wishing that this "manor" would be condemned.