A shaggy-dog story with restless leg syndrome, “John Dies at the End” may not amount to much, but there’s no denying its sheer entertainment value. Mixing slacker laughs with inter-dimensional creepy-crawlies, it’s a zing-packed horror comedy that coasts by on sheer bravado, twisted wit and endless adrenaline.

Cult writer-director Don Coscarelli (“Bubba Ho-Tep,” “The Beastmaster,” “Phantasm”) drolly adapts the novel by David Wong (a pen name for Jason Pargin), and even if the story’s rules and logic seem to be ever-shifting, it never feels like the movie is cheating or pulling the rug out. We’re...

No one was expecting former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s return to the big screen to be a collaboration with Whit Stillman or Lars Von Trier. But even by the big, loud standards of a big, loud Schwarzenegger movie, “The Last Stand” feels like a succession of pitches that never amount to a script.

One minute, it’s a high-speed chase movie, lovingly showing off the Corvette 01, and then it’s a heavily-armed showdown with a bunch of faceless goons. Sometimes the movie avoids credulity and operates with tongue firmly in cheek, but then we’re supposed to actually care when one minor character dies and another one gets a...

It’s well into “A Haunted House” before the cast of idiots finally reaches the foregone conclusion that the spirits and demons haunting the place were brought in by the hero’s girlfriend — or, as jailhouse priest Father Williams (Cedric the Entertainer) notes, “It’s in the bitch! … Sorry, the ho’. No disrespect.”

But disrespect is the name of the game for this flat, by-the-numbers “Paranormal Activity” spoof, which suggests that letting your girlfriend move in with you is pretty much tantamount to opening the gates of hell.

“Haunted” gets the “PA...

“Texas Chainsaw 3D” brings one interesting new facet to the nearly 40-year-old franchise — and it’s not the half-hearted 3D, which adds up to little more than the occasional shot of the titular implement bursting out of the screen. What the movie does do, which horror buffs may or may not go for, is turn the terrifying, bloodthirsty Leatherface into a maligned and misunderstood monster.

He doesn’t throw daisies into a lake with a little girl, mind you, but we’re still meant to feel his pain and to side with him against the local redneck vigilantes who have hounded him and his kinfolk. Beyond that curveball, however, “Texas Chainsaw 3D” is a dreary slog through the dreadfully familiar. You’ve seen it all in a million movies: attractive victims doing stupid things, foreboding secret passages, bifurcated corpses.

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