2002. Co-created by Rozz Williams, singer for the death metal band Christian Death, who said Pig was a cathartic experience. He hung himself in his Hollywood apartment in 1998 when he was 34.
Here's a clip -
Here's a really stupid fan-made video using footage from Pig. It has The Velvet Underground's "Venus in Furs" playing instead of the original soundtrack. I can't think of who in their right mind would think that was a cool idea.
1974. Don't turn this on around your mom. Quentin Tarantino likes this movie because he's a wannabe-rapist. Thriller has hardcore pornographic footage in it. Like... why? I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm all for nudity in genre movies, but that would be like if Uma Thurman boned someone in Kill Bill and we saw the dick going in and out.
"I've come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass... and I'm all out of bubble gum." My favorite scene is the fight in the alley. They Live is John Carpenter at his finest.
1985. Ed Wood but not really. Neon Maniacs is blissful monster nonsense. The corny premise involves eight monsters, each with a unique look (think Village People), who walk around killing people with an assortment of deadly weapons. Their only weakness is water. This movie is watchable.
In the subway scene, there's a long shot where you can see the cameraman's reflection in the window of the subway car for like forty five minutes. Director Joseph Mangine's name reminds me of the word 'Mangina'.
1986. Gnarly. This movie will make you want to barf. Buddy Giovinazzo wrote and directed this flick, the best in the Troma catalogue that's not an in-house production. Buddy got his brother Rick to star in this story of a shell shocked Vietnam veteran walking around an urban wasteland to an insane eighties score. Buddy cites Eraserhead as a major influence to the movie. He's made a few more movies, including the recent Life is Hot in Cracktown, which he adapted from his own novel. From the trailer, it looks like it might have a similar feel to Combat Shock. Troma recently put out a nice 25th anniversary edition that you should order from Amazon.
1980. I'd like to hear what a feminist has to say about this movie. I'll bet Tarantino's got a copy of this mixed in with his porno collection. Watching this movie made me ponder the ethics of filmmaking. The rape sequences are so long and violent that I wondered what the director was thinking. The poor girl in I Spit on Your Grave gets it rougher than any character in the history of movies (I don't care what you say about 'Thriller'). There's barely any music or cuts. The movie almost seems like verite. Off the wall. Bananas. I love it when she hangs the slow guy.
Rats takes place in a post-apocalyptic future. Every character's costume looks like Mad Max's. This movie has bad dubbing, but that's never stopped me in the past. The disappointing thing was, there really aren't that many rats in Rats. The girls in this movie scream so much that their screams become like the sound of a telephone ringing. Somehow I watched the whole thing. Good thing, too, because the very end makes up for any gripes. Think Planet of the Apes makes no sense.
A mysterious plane with seemingly no pilot lands at an airport. Guards with machine guns surround the plane. The hatch opens and a notable scientist with one arm steps off the plane. He has a dead look in his eyes. It turns out he doesn't have one arm! He's just holding a MACHETE BEHIND HIS BACK! He buries the machete into the stomach of one of the guards as a horde of zombies spill out of the plane with knives and attack the guards. Then they eat the guards. A news crew watches from the sideline.
SMASH CUT TO:
Dance class. Women in aerobics-outfits dance to a funky groove.
In this movie, zombies know how to sneak up on people and cut the telephone lines and stuff. The zombies' faces look like they have wet leaves all over them. A typical zombie's costume consists of a v-neck sweater with a collared shirt underneath, as if they were all zombified together at a John Mayer concert. Every zombie has a knife or a machete.
The cover above is what my copy looks like. I got it at a comic convention in the early nineties. Not as great as I thought it would be. I like gore more when there's silly shit going on in the movie, too, like in Troma movies, Hostel, or Saving Private Ryan. Cannibal Holocaust strives for reality, so it's kind of a bummer. I could barely sit through the beginning when I first watched it. The beginning is pretty much just a bunch of footage of tribal rituals, like the filmmakers thought that would make a suitable first act.
The plot is about these documentarians that get chewed up by cannibals and supposedly the footage you're watching was found by archeologists. Sound like Blair Witch? Yep, this was around way before Blair Shit, and Blair Shit ripped it off.
There were different cut-up versions of this but if you got a good one, you were treated to a minor gore-fest. This movie is ultra low-budget. It's not the greatest of all time and the scalping scene looks a lot like the one in Maniac.
I shed blood, sweat, and tears to get ahold of a copy of this movie when I was in high school. One day, I rode my bike up and down Woodward Ave in Detroit, hitting every single video store in search of a copy. I finally found one, biked an hour to get home, and then begged my mom to drive me back to the video store to rent it for me. I dubbed myself a copy and the rest is history. Nowadays, if you're searching for a rare movie, all you have to do is log onto YouTube. I remember the days when I walked ten miles to school in the snow.
I watched Meet the Feebles again recently and I was entertained throughout. Peter Jackson is hilarious. This movie was the reason I saw every Lord of the Rings movie in the theater even though I though they bored me to tears.
The part in the beginning where soldiers string a zombie up and shoot him in the head was unforgettable when I was twelve and saw a grainy bootleg at a comic show in a smoky Kingdom Hall. Made me proud to be an American. Directed by Brian Yuzna, who produced Re-Animator and directed The Dentist.
Growing up, I never understood why people loved Eraserhead. I was a Lynch fan, but I kept to his safe movies like Blue Velvet and The Elephant Man. I had a copy of Eraserhead but I never watched it. I'm into weirder stuff now.
I produce a daily video web series called Ricky Shore Sings the Blues. I edit and upload a new episode every night before I go to bed, and I need something to play on the TV in the background. I put in Eraserhead, mute the sound, and listen to music while I edit. I'll look up every now and again and watch a minute of the movie. It's black and white, not much happens, most of it is pretty, it relaxes me. A TV screen is like a canvas, something to look at in a person's home. The beautiful thing about TVs is people can change the image they look at. Probably why flat screens are more popular than paintings. Too bad but oh well.
Someone said to me, "The only movie that's ever scared me was Eraserhead." I don't get that. The baby is gross, sure, and there are a few disturbing images if you look at them cock eyed, but for the most part, Eraserhead is harmless. There's nothing scary about it. It's funny. Or sad.
Bruce Mculloch from Kids in the Hall wrote a song about how sometimes he likes to hole himself up in his apartment for a week with the shades drawn and do nothing but order pizza, get drunk, and watch Eraserhead. So I'm not the only person.
The Class of Nuke 'Em High is Troma's follow-up to The Toxic Avenger. Back in the 80's, Troma was able to move a lot of copies of Nuke 'Em High because video stores were so eager to fill their shelves that they'd buy an equal amount of Nuke 'Em Highs as they would Back to the Futures. I remember finding my copy in the discount bin at a K-Mart in 1990. Nowadays, the major studios provide plenty of wasteful movies for K-Mart to clutter their bins with so a movie like Nuke 'Em High doesn't stand much of a chance. Well, maybe it didn't have a chance back then, either, and we'll all have to figure out Troma's secret. Nuke 'Em High is better than Citizen Kane.
Followed by two all-right sequels that should've been directed by Lloyd Kaufman.
In the trailer, listen for when the narrator says, "THE CLASS OF NUKE 'EM HIGH!" It's my all-time favorite voiceover in a trailer.
Stuart Gordon's follow-up to Re-Animator is amazing. It has disgusting gore, tits, Jeffrey Combs, and a scene where you can clearly tell the actor is wearing a bald-cap. From Beyond is almost better than Re-Animator. Stuart Gordon is an excellent director of actors. If only he could make his FX look realistic. However, part of the charm of From Beyond is the low budget FX, so you better get your suspension of disbelief ready if you want to watch this flick. On second thought, Gordon did a lot with a little, so this movie is absolutely perfect.
Barbara Crampton cranks her performance up a notch from Re-Animator. She must've thought her performance was so weak in Re-Animator that she got embarrassed and became a better actress. Ken Foree (the black guy from Dawn of the Dead) is hilarious in this movie, except I don't understand why they have him run around in a thong for one of the scenes.
Here's the opening scene and titles:
Here's an extended Dr. Pretorious transformation scene -
Frank Henenlotter's second film and also my favorite of his twisted catalogue, Brain Damage features a character with a great voice - Aylmer. I wish I had my own little Aylmer.
A character pulls his brain out through his ear. There's also a scene where a chick goes down on this dude and a dick-shaped monster pops out through his fly, shoots into her mouth, and eats her brain while the guy holds her head like he's giving her a BJ. It's shown in graphic detail, which makes it look like a porno movie gone horribly wrong.
This movie is about junkie depravity and what it would be like to have the ultimate hallucinogen. Sometimes it's slow, but in the end this story comes together more beautifully than any of Henenlotter's other films (which are all A+).
The acting in this movie is excellent. Whoever directed Sleepaway Camp knew how to bring the fire! This is like Wet Hot American Summer except not intentionally funny. I honestly think Michael Showalter was inspired by Sleepaway Camp specifically when writing the screenplay for Wet Hot American Summer. On the downside, the violence in Sleepaway Camp is lazy and bad. The final shot makes up for any gripes, though, so I'm a happy camper.
THE LAST PART IS MISSING! BOO! WATCH THIS ABRIDGED VERSION TO FIND OUT WHO THE KILLER IS:
1978. The Toolbox Murders makes no sense to me. It begins with twenty straight minutes of unruly, awesome gore, and then it switches gears to tell a story of a blowhard that kidnaps an ugly teenage girl to keep her barely tied to a bed. He delivers long, pointless monologues to her while she looks scared. The murders in the beginning have nothing to do with the girl that's been kidnapped.
The acting and production values are lower than the budget of my blog. The cop in the beginning of the movie switches to being the killer halfway through and someone else steps in to take on the cop role. This role-reversal is explained by the first cop saying, "I'm tired. I need some rest" or something like that. I think they shift the plot because the producers shot the beginning as a short and then didn't know where to go, so they added on another hour. The other hour is written by someone that doesn't know how to write a movie. Characters come and go for no reason and the plot barely goes anywhere. In the end, the kidnapped girl murders her captor and walks through a parking lot. God bless Stephen King who lends the quote from, "generates some genuinely scary moments." Notice the word "some". That's like saying, "This accomplished what it was supposed to accomplish."
I sought this out because I thought it was a Troma movie and then I figured out that the only thing it has in common with Troma is Mayor Belgoody. Street Trash is about NYC homeless people turning into this nasty liquid or something. I don't really remember it that well, just that the cover rocks.
1985. If Jeffrey Combs weren't in this movie, it would suck, but because his performance as Herbert Ross is so nuanced and hilarious, this movie is CLASSIC. Don't get me wrong, the plot is okay, taken from a silly HP Lovecraft story about a scientist that develops a serum that he injects into dead things to bring them back to life, but the real show is Combs.
There's some good gore in it, too, like when Combs' character decapitates some dude with a shovel. There are also some weird titty scenes that aren't fun at all - just creepy. Normally, I'm all for naked chicks in a horror movie, but the nude scenes in Re-Animator are so weirdly staged that I feel like director Stuart Gordon isn't all there. But maybe that's a good thing. Or it isn't. He directed Robot Jocks. Remember that pile (maybe it was Charles Band's fault).
The end of Re-Animator does this thing that I hate. Sometimes in zombie movies, when the zombies have the main characters cornered, the main characters somehow have all this time to talk and move around and settle conflicts. Why are zombie such killing machines in some scenes, but then in others, they let the characters chat while they stand two-feet away moving their arms around and growling? This happens at the end of Shaun of the Dead for like forty five minutes. Shaun and his friends might as well be kicking back and watching TV while the zombies close in on them. I hate that!
This was Brian Yuzna's first foray into producing, and he later went on to direct such curiosities as The Return of the Living Dead 3 and The Dentist.
Demons 2 is exactly like Demons. It even features characters that died at the end of the first one. It's like Demons and Demons 2 are supposed to take place in separate dimensions simultaneously.
My favorite Troma movie. A dog is shot in the belly, a baby gets a shotgun pointed at its face, a fat dude gets lard pulled out of his stomach, girls in lingerie dance in the background of certain scenes for no reason, a kid's head bursts all over the pavement as it gets run over by a car, the list goes on.
Director Lloyd Kaufman was originally going to call this "Health Club Horror". He wanted to make a horror movie because Variety ran a story proclaiming "The horror movie is dead." Instead of making a horror movie, Troma made an epic. The Toxic Avenger was followed by three sequels. None of them were as good as the original.
A Blockbuster Video in my neighborhood hung The Toxic Avenger poster over their counter when the movie first came out. That shit freaked me out! It's one of my oldest memories. I shit you not, but I must've been two or three years-old at the time. That shit SEARED into my consciousness. That's how powerful The Toxic Avenger is.
Here's the first head-crushing scene (one of my favorite sequences in film history) -
