If your New Year’s resolution is to waste 90 minutes of your life watching a slasher movie that manages to be neither scary nor particularly slashy, then New Year’s Evil is here to disappoint you right on schedule. Released in 1980, right as the slasher craze was starting to slice its way through Hollywood, this … Read More “New Year’s Evil (1980): Ringing in the New Year with Boredom and Bad Hair” »
If you ever wanted to know what it would feel like to watch a haunted house movie made by someone who’d only heard the idea of haunted houses explained secondhand at a bus stop by a man with mustard on his shirt — Witchtrap is your movie. This 1989 curiosity, directed by Kevin Tenney (of … Read More “Witchtrap (1989): The Ghost is the Least of Your Problems” »
There’s a reason Madman (1981) has mostly lived in the moldy basement of slasher cinema — right next to the busted VCR and that jar of pickles nobody will claim. While its peers (Friday the 13th, The Burning, Sleepaway Camp) carved out their own twisted little niches in the blood-spattered summer camp genre, Madman just … Read More “Madman (1981): Swing Your Axe, Miss Your Mark” »
There are bad movies, there are so-bad-they’re-fun movies, and then there’s Ice Cream Man — a film so confused, so tone-deaf, so blindingly dumb that it lands in a special freezer section of hell reserved for bargain-bin horror. It stars Clint Howard — yes, Ron Howard’s brother, the guy who looks like a melted wax … Read More “Ice Cream Man (1995): Rocky Road to Nowhere” »
Let’s get one thing out of the way: if you walked into Demonic Toys expecting The Godfather of killer doll movies, you’re about to get slapped in the face with a rubber chicken and a squirt of bargain-bin blood. This 1992 Full Moon production is one of those films that makes you pause halfway through … Read More “Demonic Toys (1992): Hell in a Toy Chest” »
You know a movie is off to a bad start when its killer is a 400-pound pig farmer with a greasy apron and a penchant for snorting like he just discovered cocaine in a feed trough. Slaughterhouse (1987) is one of those slasher flicks that oinks, grunts, and squeals its way through 90 minutes of … Read More “Slaughterhouse (1987): Hog Wild and Brain Dead” »
There are bad movies. Then there are movies that take badness, put a scarf and carrot nose on it, and send it barreling downhill with homicidal intent. Jack Frost (1997) belongs to the latter category — a film so ridiculous, so joyfully idiotic, it feels like it was written during a fever dream after someone … Read More “Jack Frost (1997): The Killer Snowman Nobody Asked For” »
Italian horror and exploitation directors from the 70s and 80s often approached filmmaking like a guy assembling IKEA furniture blindfolded while on mescaline. Enter The Wild Beasts, a 1984 animal-attack oddity directed by Franco E. Prosperi, a man best known for co-directing Mondo Cane, which should tell you everything you need to know: exploitative, unhinged, … Read More “The Wild Beasts (1984) Fluoridated Water, Rampaging Zoo Animals, and the Unfiltered Madness of Italian Cinema” »
You know a movie’s in trouble when the most memorable thing about it is Dolph Lundgren’s sidekick saying, “In case we get killed, I just wanted to tell you—you have the biggest dick I’ve ever seen on a man.” That’s Showdown in Little Tokyoin a nutshell: 79 minutes of unintentional comedy, awkward dialogue, and martial … Read More “Showdown in Little Tokyo (1991) East meets West… and then they both crash into a wall of clichés” »
By this point in the Snake Eater saga — and I use the word “saga” the way someone might describe a multi-part dental procedure — Lorenzo Lamas has fully transitioned from mulleted vigilante to walking hair product commercial. In Snake Eater III: His Law, he returns as Jack “Soldier” Kelly, a man with no respect … Read More “Snake Eater III: His Law (1992) His Law, Our Regret” »
