“Carrie,” the return of downtown’s camp-revering Theatre Couture after a six-year hiatus, and “Evil Dead: The Musical,” the would-be cult hit dousing audiences nightly with stage blood, differ wildly in budget and target audience. But these two winking adaptations of horror-movie classics have plenty in common beyond each overstaying its welcome.

Both lean heavily on dumb-blonde gags until said blondes are incinerated, shot, and/or chainsawed. Both have an inexhaustible taste for terrible puns. And while “Evil Dead” has a much larger budget, both shows delight in their blatantly fake gore effects. (On the somewhat haphazard opening night of “Carrie,” the actor playing the title role had to tiptoe backward to get within dunking range of the fake blood. At “Evil Dead,” getting doused won’t be a problem for anyone sitting in the front three rows, also known as the “splatter zone,” for which plastic ponchos are provided.)

A little background: Brian DePalma’s 1976 film of “Carrie,” based on Stephen King’s first novel, featured a young Sissy Spacek as a repressed misfit whose adolescent urges manifest themselves in bursts of telekinesis, much to the horror of her holy roller mother. A cruel prom-night prank involving a bucket of pig’s blood sends Carrie into a vengeful killing spree. Broadway devotees know the title best from a 1988 musical adaptation; its five-performance run spurred theater historian Ken Mandelbaum to name his eminently readable history of flop musicals “Not Since Carrie.” (The dragloving Theatre Couture, which was at one time positioned to follow in the high-heeled footsteps of Charles Ludlam’s seminal Ridiculous Theater Company, tried and failed to get the rights to the musical version of the story before going back to the original text of the novel.)

1981’s “Evil Dead,” meanwhile, was the “Blair Witch Project” of its time, only far more gruesome. Director Sam Raimi put together a cheap, nasty tale of five college kids reading from the Book of the Dead in a secluded cabin, which leads to long, brutal scenes of demonic possession. Both “Evil Dead” and “Carrie” spawned movie sequels; “The Rage: Carrie 2” is best forgotten, but the gloriously over-the-top “Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn,” which features its square-jawed hero Ash (Bruce Campbell) affixing a chainsaw to the bloody stump where his severed hand had been, is referenced heavily throughout the stage version, which was a big hit in Canada.

Both shows use music extensively, although neither derives much in the way of genuine emotion from the material. “Evil Dead” features a new score, produced by no fewer than four composers and made up almost entirely of pastiche numbers that evoke everything from “Grease” to “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” (the piece it clearly hopes to replicate) to “Thriller.” “Carrie,” by comparison, uses a hit parade of actual 1970s songs: “The Things We Do for Love” is heard right after a lunkhead bludgeons the pig to death as a favor to his girlfriend, while Van Halen wails away during the prom scene.

“Carrie,” which features drag superstar Sherry Vine (aka Keith Levy) in the title role, stretches to give the original story a gay overlay. (When Carrie is banished to her “prayer closet,” you can expect a gag or two related to closets of a different sort.) But too many gags are lazy and shopworn: “Telekinesis? I wouldn’t have figured her for a ‘Star Trek’ fan!”

Luckily, Theatre Couture has once again drawn upon the skills of puppeteer/effects creator Basil Twist, best known for his beguiling “Symphonie Fantastique.” His low-tech effects are frequently funny — he uses scale particularly well in the scenes involving cars — but underused. A few more of Mr. Twist’s flying kitchen knives would have been nice, but playwright Erik Jackson and director Josh Rosenzweig opt instead for the book’s far less flashy final confrontation between Carrie and her mother. This does, however, give the terrific Kate Goehring a chance to shine as the mother.

If it’s flying knives (or flying heads or flying brain matter) you want, “Evil Dead” is the way to go: Practically every square inch of David Gallo’s set gets into the malevolent act by the end. Author George Reinblatt — also credited as lyricist and one of the four composers — and co-directors Hinton Battle and Christopher Bond were wise to bring Ryan Ward over the border to repeat his role as Ash; Mr. Ward looks alarmingly like Bruce Campbell and manages a heroic tenor even when geysers of stage blood are shooting directly into his mouth. (A month into the run, he was still going strong at 1 a.m., during the cult-crowd-friendly late performance on Saturday night.)

Lyrics like “I got some Shelly on my shoe” don’t come along very often, but the show’s casual misogyny and weak score result in a good hour of biding one’s time until the Grand Guignol finale, when effects wizard Louis Zakarian takes over, creating a blitzkrieg of stage violence that necessitates the aforementioned “splatter zone.”

During the forgettable “Do the Necronomicon,” one high-kicking zombie sings, referring to the most famous song from “Rocky Horror,” “It’s just like the Time Warp / Only better.” Nice try, guys. Aiming for cult success almost never works, and the hard-sell approach of both “Carrie” and “Evil Dead” ultimately gets in the way. It’s understandable — heck, it’s required — that we see ’em bleed in each of these shows. Letting us see ’em sweat, though, is a frightful error.

“Carrie” until December 30 (150 First Ave. at 9th Street, 212-352-3101).

“Evil Dead” open run (340 W. 50th St., between Eighth and Ninth avenues, 212-239-6200).