The Calgary Underground Film Festival (CUFF) always screens movies from a variety of genres — documentaries and biopics share ground with experimental shorts and bleak, existentialist comedies — but it has always shown a soft spot for bloodlust. Every year, the fest’s programmers make it a point of pride to bring in some of the most bizarre, surreal and graphic horror movies around, and 2008 is no exception. This year, though, the disembowelments have a distinctly comic edge.

As a sample trifecta of the horror flicks at this year’s fest proves, there’s more than one way to make skinning a cat hilarious. Japan’s Machine Girl, Austria’s On Evil Grounds and the American Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer all go after the same audience (i.e. those twisted folks who find decapitations chuckle-worthy), but they each use surprisingly different approaches.

Of the three, Machine Girl is easily the most bizarre. When a Japanese schoolboy is bullied to death by the son of a Yakuza ninja, his sister vows revenge, regardless of what it takes. This apparently includes losing a limb (which naturally ends up replaced by a chain gun) and doing battle with a host of video game-style bosses, from a junior high shuriken club to a team of grieving parents. One of the baddies even makes use of a flying guillotine, sure to please fans of obscure kung fu flicks and general ridiculousness.

Writer-director Noboru Iguchi seems equally inspired by over-the-top anime and the output of New York’s Troma Entertainment, home to such classics as The Toxic Avenger series and Sgt. Kabukiman, NYPD. Injuries result in cartoonish geysers of arterial spray, while ultra-low-budget special effects are still enough to induce squeamishness. If nothing else, Machine Girl deserves credit for its inventiveness and audacity — it’s the kind of film that’s guaranteed to provoke either slack-jawed awe or eye-rolling disbelief.

Peter Koller’s On Deadly Ground is equally likely to have a strong effect on audiences. Koller is clearly a fan of the recent crop of torture-porn flicks like Eli Roth’s Hostel series, but he has his eyes more on the dark humour underneath than the sadism on the surface. Not that he’s lacking in sadism, mind you — there’s more violence, torture and rape than you can shake a meat hook at — but it’s done in a way that borders on zany, if not exactly lighthearted.

As the film begins, a young Austrian couple are looking to buy a rundown house from a slimy real-estate manager. Before long, the young Romeo (yes, that’s the character’s name) finds himself buried up to his neck in the house’s courtyard and at the mercy of a violent madman. It’s hard to feel too badly for Romeo, though, since the film has already established him as a violent sadist.

Though On Deadly Ground doesn’t provide a sympathetic character, it does feature highly kinetic editing, Scooby Doo-inspired chase scenes and a script that gets a surprising amount of mileage out of the whole “guy buried up to his neck” premise. The prospect of a torture-porn parody may sound unappealing on the surface, but Koller’s film is surprisingly enjoyable.

Next to Machine Girl and On Deadly Ground, Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer seems positively wholesome. Director Jon Knautz tries his damnedest to emulate the Evil Dead 2 school of late-’80s horror, and he succeeds admirably. The plot is thin, as is always the case in this kind of flick — a university professor (played by A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Robert Englund) accidentally awakens an ancient evil, and it’s up to rage-aholic plumber Jack Brooks to set things right. All the usual gripes could be made about Brooks — the juvenile humour, predictable twists and entirely useless female characters are all here — but dwelling on this would be missing the point. Better to marvel at the most ridiculous foam-and-latex monster in recent memory, or to share in the hammy glee Englund brings to his character’s transformation from mild-mannered professor to demonic glutton. Thankfully, Knautz never lets Brooks get bogged down in the lame pop-culture references and thick layers of irony that plague so many American horror comedies. It may be tamer than its trans-oceanic contemporaries, but that doesn’t make it any less entertaining.