Watchers (1988)

1988
Directed by Jon Hess
Starring Corey Haim, Michael Ironside, Barbara Williams and Lala Sloatman

Folks, it's time to take a trip back to 1993 for some boring life and times of Jon Lickness.  One of my brother's friends borrowed us a tape containing the the John Candy-Dan Aykroyd flick The Great Outdoors...a favorite of mine from my very, very early childhood.  Little did I know that I would wind up watching the movie that was recorded BEFORE it a whole lot more.  Over the course of three months, I probably watched...um...Watchers a good 15 times.  Something about it just really connected with the fourth grade version of me.

I think what it was then was Corey Haim.  I hadn't seen that many horror flicks before this one, but, kiddie version of Haim's License to Drive costar Corey Feldman in Gremlins notwithstanding, this was the only one I'd seen where the main hero was (a) a dude, and (b) a pretty damn cool dude who shot guns and had a hot girlfriend.  Hell, I wanted to BE Corey Haim in this movie.  I'm fairly certian that I'm the only person in the history of the world who has ever uttered that sentence.

The flick starts in a top-secret government facility, where an explosion and fire sets two experimental animals free.  One is a cute golden retriever, the other is a large, beastly biped that we only see in shadows during these early segments who seems to be tracking the dog.  The dog is eventually able to outrun its pursuer and hide in a barn, where Travis Cornell (Haim) is busy attempting to mack it with his girlfriend Tracey (Lala Sloatman, who had gained a slight amount of traction at the time as a pop star and was dating Haim in real life).  One beast attack later and the dog is in Travis' possession, and this is where the flick gets far more interesting.

Travis discovers that the dog is extremely intelligent, able to understand English, communicate via typing (don't ask), and solve complex problems.  It seems that the dog (which Travis creatively names "Furface") is a kind of government weapon.  Meanwhile, an NSO Agent named Johnson (Michael Ironside, definitely one of the all-time greatest movie scumbags) has been assigned to track down the dog and keep the project under wraps. 

It isn't long before some deaths start piling up.  The animals were designed with a kind of internal tracking device, meaning that the beast (called an "OXCOM" in the film, standing for Outside Experimental Combat Mammal) is able to psychically follow the dog, and since the much smaller, much cuter animal received far more adulation and attention in their government home, the OXCOM decidedly hates the dog and pretty much anyone and anyplace that it has come into contact with.  This idea really is the story's ace, as the dog serves as a death sentence for anyone it comes across.  There are some admittedly suspenseful moments that take place as the game of cat-and-mouse goes underway, as three of Travis' buddies bite the dust (somewhat humorously, when it comes to the requisite "nonathletic" character's attempts to get away on his Huffy) in the woods and the fate of police officers and staff members at Travis' high school.  This stuff scared me as a kid, but for whatever reason, I just kept watching.  The Watcher.  [/tomatoes]

The B story in this film heavily involves Ironside, and his various shady dealings including keeping a sedated Tracey prisoner and outright murdering people who have seen too much.  I don't think that's too much of a spoiler; one look at this guy's face is pretty much all you need to know that he's EEEEVIL anyway.  It's here where the movie loses a little bit of steam.  Whenever the OXCOM and the dog aren't the main focus, we're privy to a bunch of characters who aren't particularly interesting.  Call it a necessary evil.  It might not have been the most logical thing in the world to have this movie be 90+ minutes of nonstop gigantic baboon murdering.  All of it builds to a big showdown at a cabin owned by Travis' late father where he gets to utilize a rifle and all sorts of Home Alone-style traps in an admittedly suspenseful finale where both the OXCOM and Ironside are present.

Anyway...this movie is based on a novel by Dean Koontz.  A novel, it should be said, that I took the plunge in reading many years after my 11-year-old binge-watching sessions.  And it...is...awesome.  It ranks right up there with anything that I've read by Stephen King, and in some respects might be even better, because I can't remember any King book (with the possible exception of Johnny Smith in The Dead Zone) that had lead characters as likable.  A lot of the criticism of this film seems to stem from the idea that it takes the concept of the book and essentially changes everything else, changing Travis from a 30-ish sympathetic widower to a cool teen and his love interest from an emotionally abused, attractive adult to Lala Sloatman.

Yeah, this movie is NOT as good as the novel.  And yeah, a critic who knows their movies will tell you that this flick is pretty bad, but I don't care.  Call it nostalgia glasses or just being a moron.  In my eyes, this concept really is something that is hard to screw up too badly.  Well, if sticking with the VERY rough outline of the novel, anyway, because one of the sequels of this film essentially rips off Predator and might be one of the suckiest suckfests that ever did suck.  This movie, though, has a cool hero, some solid kills, and a main villain in the OXCOM that freaked the holy hell out of me as a kid and still makes me occasionally think about it when I leave my house around 11:45 to go to work.  No joke.

*** out of ****.  Highly recommended if you can find it on the cheap, which is a tall task these days.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

1982
Directed by Tommy Lee Wallace
Starring Tom Atkins, Stacey Nelkin and Dan O'Herlihy

We're still four months away from October, but for reasons known entirely only to the universe, I've been on a real Halloween kick lately.  I've written a little fanfic treatment for a 1998/99-area remake, I've introduced the first two flicks to a good work buddy and I've gotten in a few online scrums with perhaps the most amazing phenomenon that I've ever come across - people who defend Rob Zombie's abominomical (?) bastardizations.  It's safe to say that Carpenter's Shape of Evil plays a pretty big role in my life, and while I hold Jason Voorhees much closer to the heart and am nothing short of a teenage wasteland-esque fanboy for Kayako Saeki, nothing likely ever will hold a candle to the original two Halloween films when it comes to pure atmosphere, suspense, and awesome storytelling in the inner recesses of my mind (/Damien Demento).

Which brings me to the movie in question today (/segue).  I reviewed Halloween III: Season of the Witch many, many moons ago, but that was back when my reviews sucked, as opposed to the pinnachle of mediocrity that I've managed to achieve now.  I'm ready to aim my 50/50 pistol at the most controversial entry in the series now.  Time for some incredibly basic background info:  Much like Friday the 13th Part V, this is a film that people either love or hate.  To say it marked a radical departure for the series is the understatement of the century, because at least the aforementioned Friday flick had a guy who LOOKED like Jason.  This film, on the other hand, is concerned about decidedly everything but Michael Myers, as John Carpenter's plan for the series at this point on was to do a different Halloween-themed story each year and leave the Myers arc closed. 

Having seen all of the films that come after this one, I can't help but think that I wished this particular film would have been more of a success.  It's achieved a very loyal cult fandom in the years since, but at the time, the reaction against this movie was pretty vitriolic.  As for me, I can pretty much take or leave this movie, so let's look at the reasons why and test my memory of the flick's plot.

The movie opens with a toy shop owner being pursued by mysterious figures wearing business suits.  After being placed in the care of Dr. Dan Challis (Tom Atkins), the owner is summarily killed, and Challis takes it upon himself to investigate the man's mysterious death.  It isn't soon after that he comes across Ellie Grimbridge (Stacey Nelkin), the daughter of the shop owner and who also serves as the love interest and the recipient of my all-time favorite mid-love-making line of all time courtesy of Atkins (which would be "who cares?").  The two are able to trace the quickly developing mayhem to the Silver Shamrock Novelties factory and its oh-so-evil head Conal Cochran (Dan O'Herlihy).  Ruh-roh, Shaggy, looks like we've got the makings for a groovy mystery.

Caution: spoilers ahead.  As the movie's second act develops, Challis and Ellie are able to uncover a terrifying plot by Conal that has ties to Samhain itself.  Yes, folks, it's not just a word that Michael Myers wrote on a blackboard.  It seems that Conal and his men have managed to smuggle a fragment of Stonehenge across the Atlantic ocean and have implanted them into its large collection of Halloween masks that it has managed to unload on kids across the country.  When the commercial airs on Halloween night, the chip will activate, killing the poor, unfortunate sap wearing the mask and turning their heads into a kind of snake-filled goo that spells bad news for anyone who just so happens to be around. 

OK, first of all: Ha.  Now, I've seen Halloween III four-ish times in my life, and maybe I'm missing something, but the exact motive for such a thing isn't spelled out very well.  To say nothing of some of the logical misgivings about this most complicated of plots, including sneaking a pretty hefty piece of Stonehenge out of its source and the whole time zone question when it comes to the mask activation.  Then again, I'm also a huge fan of the previous two films in this franchise which proudly features a guy wearing a white mask who is inexplicably impervious to knives and bullets for no discernible reason, so my bitching may just be null and void.  HOWEVER...it is worth noting that the third act of this film gets even more preposterous, with all sorts of twists being introduced about humans being replaced with robots and much more outward witchcraft connotations, so consider that more ammunition.

Now for some criticism.  Yay.  First things first, this movie has an AMAZING score.  The Myers films are noted for their iconic piano music, but this score is the stuff of legend.  Gritty, memorable, and atmospheric.  Sometimes I throw on the score just for some ambience in those 3-4 hours I spend surfing the web before work every night, it's that good.  It's also got some major points in the acting department, as Tom Atkins is always aces in pretty much everything I've seen him in, including the horror classics The Fog, Creepshow and Night of the Creeps.  You've got to admire any guy who once said that he would love to make a career out of being in just horror films.  Nelkin is also very engaging as Ellie, and O'Herlihy, despite the subject matter of his character, is appropriately menacing as Conal.

What I can't get into, though, is this movie's story.  Unfortunately, that's kind of a big deal when it comes to a 90+ minute feature film.  Everyone's mileage varies, I know, but once the big evil plot of this movie becomes known roughly halfway through, I just think it gets eye-rollingly bad.  There's more than a few laugh-out-loud moments for all the wrong reasons, many of them involving Cochran's army of android soldiers who patrol and guard his mask-making factory (the coup de grace in this theme coming in Challis' car during the movie's twist ending to end all twist endings).  By that token, I'm well aware that there are plenty of people out there who really dig this story for commentary and consumerism and stuff, but all that nonsense is just boring as all get out to me, so I'll leave that particular conversation to the nine million other reviewers out there who enjoy spouting off about the economic implications of horror films from the 1980s.

** out of ****.  There is some good stuff to be had in this film, but you have to wade through a lot of crap to get it.

The Dead Zone (1983)

1983
Directed by David Cronenberg
Starring Christopher Walken, Brooke Adams, Tom Skerritt, Herbert Lom, Anthony Zerbe, Colleen Dewhurst and Martin Sheen

Out of all of Stephen King's novels, The Dead Zone is arguably the very best of the lot.  His original triumverate of books (Google the chronology, kids) followed by the bona fide Moby Dick-style epic The Stand made the guy a superstar, but this is the book that solidified him as not only a megastar but a mega-talented writer.  The story that is presented in this novel is not only scary but also infinitely powerful, boasting one of the most downright likable protagonists in any book I've read in Johnny Smith.  Furthermore, it also contains a scene where a man commits suicide by headbutting a scissors.  Added bonus for the gore hounds out there.

Released in 1983, the film version of Dead Zone came at a time when the film rights for his books were selling at a rate almost as quickly as the novels themselves were released.  It was also the first in a series of King adaptations to be produced by Dino De Laurentiis, and it's easily the best of the five films with his name attached.  Jeffrey Boam writes a very faithful script here, and it's much appreciated.  Lesson learned for the modern-day Hollywood scribes: when your source material needs a fresh coat of paint, by all means, have at it.  When it doesn't, leave it the fuck alone. 

Christopher Walken is Johnny Smith, nice guy schoolteacher in the oft-used King locale Castle Rock.  It goes without saying that Walken is an awesome actor, but this was the dude at the height of his powers and before he essentially became a caricature.  The early portions of this film show his admittedly humdrum life dating colleague Sarah Bracknell (Brooke Adams), going to a theme park, getting invited in to her apartment to wreck that shit but politely turning down the offer...and then summarily getting in a horrific car wreck that leaves him in a coma.  The movie makes the wise move to delete the LONG segue that the novel takes about what transpires in the five years after the wreck, so we not soon after flash forward five years as Johnny wakes up from his coma...and finds out that Sarah has married and had a child in the interim.

It doesn't take long until the supernatural element of this movie comes into full play.  In a physical therapy session with his physician Sam Weizak (Herbert Lom, who is quite frankly an amazing actor and puts on a tour de force performance here), he discovers that he has a gift.  Grabbing Weizak's hand, he sees a vision of incidents from Weizak's childhood as a victim of the Holocaust.  More incidents involving his gift soon follow, and the police eventually come calling, wanting to use Smith to help solve a string of serial homicides involving young women around Castle Rock.  Most movies drag in the middle, but this is a film that serves as one of the glorious exceptions, because a good portion of the middle of The Dead Zone involves the chase for this vicious serial killer.  The scene where his identity is discovered followed by the sequence where the police and Smith raid his home is one of the most memorable things I've seen in any horror film, and the aforementioned suicide scene (recreated pretty much verbatim in the movie) was something that was on my mind after going off to bed the night that I caught this flick for the first time on TNT MonsterVision.

The movie also has Martin Sheen as U.S. Senatorial candidate Greg Stillson, whom Sarah is volunteering for.  The sliminess that Sheen exudes in this role must be seen to be believed, and his acting in the "future" sequence when Johnny prognosticates his future is electric stuff.  Suffice to say, this dude has some bad intentions for the future of the country, and the third trimester of The Dead Zone manages to keep the tension going with Johnny grappling with his morals regarding whether or not it is correct to kill a man to save a greater number of lives.

Of the five King films that De Laurentiis trotted out, this one was the only real financial success of the bunch, doubling its production budget, and for good reaosn.  The director here is David Cronenberg, a pretty well-known guy in horror circles for The Fly (a.k.a. the greatest remake of all time not named The Thing) as well as his downright weird sensibilities.  Dealing with a decidedly more human story here, he shows a really good touch with actors, and my guess is that the audience's connection with these characters (Johnny Smith in particular) led to its word-of-mouth success.  It helps when you have such strong source material - the fact that Smith was heavily featured in the admittedly awesome TV series of the same name years later speaks volumes about the foundation. 

If there's one complaint that I can make about this movie, it is that it does drag a bit in the sections where Johnny's relationship with the now-married Sarah Bracknell takes center stage.  These bits are predictable, and by my vantage point not quite as emotional as they should be.  Big deal.  If you're looking for a suspense thriller with loads of genuine tension and great characters, check this one out.  It's a movie that tends to get overlooked in 30-odd Stephen King adaptations that have been unrolled for us, so finding it on the cheap shouldn't be too difficult.

*** 1/2 out of ****.  As Joe Bob Briggs said about it, this is a pretty dang good movie.

The Prowler (1981)

1981
Joseph Zito
Starring Vicky Dawson, Farley Granger, Lawrence Tierney and Christopher Goutman

We're going back to the future with this one.  Nowadays, horror movies are about any and everything but what this movie represents - gritty, non-stylish, non-polished and decidedly non-professional pure slasher.  One of the many, many, many films to come out of the early '80s slasher boom, The Prowler is a movie that is considered a cult classic by some and a forgotten entry in the period by others.  My opinion falls somewhere in the middle.  I certainly didn't hate it, but at the same time, I've always been a little perplexed how there are a lot of people out there who hold this up as some kind of minor slasher classic.

To be sure, if you look up "slasher" in the dictionary, this movie would be a pretty good example.  You've got the past evil, the teaser reel murder scene, increasingly gory stuff thrown throughout the proceedings, a few hot chicks to gawk at, a masked killer.  That should about cover it.  Where this movie goes a slightly different route is going with a genuine whodunnit ending, something that slasher predecessors Halloween (where we knew that Michael Myers was the big bad going into the rounds of mayhem) and Friday the 13th (come on, how much of a mystery was this movie? We didn't even MEET Mrs. Voorhees until the third act) didn't have.  More on that later.

Anyway, let's start with the past evil.  The movie starts off at the conclusion of World War II with a young woman named Rosemary writing a letter to her soldier beau and stating that she can't wait for him anymore.  And I think you know where this is going.  Rosemary and her new boyfriend are summarily murdered at the town's Graduation Dance, and thus concludes the introduction.  Flash forward 35 years, where the same town is holding its first Graduation Dance (capitalized because the movie's signs do the same thing) since the tragedy. 

The movie's main characters are introduced at this point.  Your central protagonist is college newspaper writer Pam MacDonald.  Pam is played by Vicky Dawson, who does a decent enough job in the Jamie Lee Curtis role.  There is an ever-so-slight romantic subplot as Pam goes the through the minefield of emotions (/tomatoes for bad metaphor) with Deputy Mark London (Christopher Goutman), a decent-enough guy who happens to have the misfortune of being pulled away to dance by the movie's requisite slut character.  This is somewhere in the top 20 things that horror film characters should never indulge in.  In between, we meet a few other folks connected to the dance, most of them consisting of Pam's various college acquaintances. 

This is about time where the murdering begins, and it's this section of the movie that shines the most brightly.  The makeup in this flick was done by Tom Savini who I've already yacked about endlessly, and not to beat a redundant horse, but he always does a fantastic job.  Savini himself that the makeup FX on this film were his personal favorite batch, and while I disagree, it's very good, sick, visceral stuff.  The highlight is undoubtedly the dude who gets a bayonet directly through the top of his head, the camera lingering and lingering and lingering until his eyes roll back up inside his head, blood dripping out of the bottom of his jaw all the while.  Since the flick's opening murders weren't graphic at all, this really catches the viewer off guard and works well.

The mystery aspect of the movie is handled in a lukewarm fashion by director Jospeh Zito, the guy who also helmed Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (a.k.a. the greatest slasher movie ever made).  There's an obvious red herring in the form of Major Chatham (Laurence Tierney of Reservoir Dogs and approximately 9,000 other "gruff old bastard" roles), who is revealed to have a pretty substantial connection to the murders of 1945.  Suffice to say, it's a pretty safe bet that this dude is not, in fact, the man in the Army fatigues being the impetus behind all the creative murdering.  Thanks to one scene in this movie (and I'll leave it up to you, loyal reader, to discern just what the scene is), the murderer in this movie is telegraphed from a mile away, giving this movie a Roy Burns-style laugh factor that it probably didn't intend to have.

Thus it is with The Prowler.  It's not original in the slightest, but I'm a big proponent of the idea that movies at large and horror movies in particular don't have to break 89 levels of new ground in order to be resonant and effective as long as they are done well.  This movie works on visceral and gross-out level, and has some intermittent sections where the character of Pam MacDonald manages to catch your eye and grab some emotion.  Unfortunately, there are LONG sections that drag in this movie.  Like, worse than Al Pacino's scenes in Gigli level of dragging.  Couple that with the fact that aside from the murders there just ain't a whole lot of memorable stuff that happens in this movie and the flick is middling at best. 

Love the ending, however.

** out of ****.  Get it on the cheap if you're a big slasher fan, pass otherwise.

Five Overlooked Anthology Films

A couple weeks ago, I listed out (in minute detail) five different types of horror movies that I would like to see.  Among them was another theatrically released anthology horror film, the kind that used to see fairly regular release in the 1970s thanks to companies like Hammer and Amicus and perhaps seeing its zenith in the '80s with some of the all-time classics of the genre regardless of the "sub" prefix.  If you're a horror fan and you haven't seen movies like Creepshow, Tales From the Darkside and the original 1972 Tales From the Crypt, well, then what the hell is wrong with you?  In all seriousness, when done correctly, these are movies that truly do offer the best of every world.  Primarily, they're forced to get going already with the story they're trying to tell and cut out every single ounce of extraneous bullshit.  Put it together with a solid over-arching story or theme and you can hit home runs that Star Crystal itself would envy.

What we're going to look at today, kids, are five anthology films that might be known to relatively versed horror fans out there but are most likely unknown to the dabblers who dip into "mainstream hits" packages.  I'd like to say that I'm hoping for something to be accomplished here, but I've long since given up on that crusade.

1.

Kwaidan (a.k.a. Ghost Stories)
It's a mistake to call this movie overlooked or underrated, but I'm genuinely stunned by how many people have never heard of this amazing 1964 Japanese film that just might be among the most beautiful and haunting motion pictures of all time.  Now that the masturbatory gushing is out of the way, Kwaidan gives us a quartet of Japanese folktales involving ghosts and the spirit world.  Of them, the two strongest are "The Black Hair" (that has a simultaneously horrifying and unintentionally hilarious ending) and "The Woman of the Snow," and since they are the first two stories, this is undoubtedly a front-loaded flick.  It loses a bit of steam with the latter two stories, but the overall effect of watching this 3+ hour film is something that every horror fan should experience.  J-horror for realz, and all.

2.

Three Faces of Fear (a.k.a. Black Sabbath)
Mario Bava is a pretty well known guy among horror circles for his contributions to the Italian "giallo" genre as well as his more famous Gothic horror pieces.  For this reporter, however, this movie is his masterpiece, a trio of completely unrelated stories that cover a pretty large territory.  The first, "The Telephone," is an exercise in nonstop tension with sexual deviancy as its theme.  The second, "The Wurdulak," stars Boris Karloff (who also hosts the film) is set in 19th century Russia and deals with a sort of vampire outbreak complete with a completely correct down ending.  The third, though, is this movie's true ace.  "The Drip of Water" might just have the freakiest looking corpse that I've seen in any horror movie, and the use of the reds and greens in the color scheme heighten the oppressive atmosphere that much more.

3.

The Monster Club
Vincent Price and John Carradine in the same movie, and yet so many people haven't seen or even HEARD of this awesome flick from 1980.  The film has a very good framing device, as a writer played by Carradine is bitten by Price's vampire, who then takes him to the titular club where all of the various stories unfold.  The three stories are "The Shadmock," about a demonic creature with a vast wealth; "The Vampires" (take a guess); and "The Ghouls," the strongest of the three and left for the finale, where a movie director is trapped in a town of flesh-eating mutants.  The movie has a very good pace, more than its fair share of cool scares, and the always awesome presence of two of horror's greatest luminaries.

4.

Three Cases of Murder
This 1955 British film also boasts an additional gimmick that can either be a Godsend or an outright disaster on a case-to-case basis: a different director for each story.  Sometimes, it results in really good variety (Twilight Zone: The Movie), and sometimes, it's just disjointed as all get out (Four Rooms).  This, however, is an example of the former, as we're given three relatively straightforward but all very effective scary stories.  Two of them are supernatural, and these bookend segments are where this movie's main coolness factor comes from.  The final segment in particular, with Orson Welles playing a politician seeking to outdo his opponent by entering his dreams and destroying his sanity, is undoubtedly the strongest, with Welles reportedly taking over the direction of the segment before it was over.

5.

4BIA
The most recent film on the list is from 2008 and takes us to Thailand.  This is another excellent example of the "multiple directors used to outstanding effect," as all four stories in this film concern supernatural phenomena, occasionally interconnect, and have twist endings that RL Stine would piss himself over.  Specifics aren't necessary for this particular film; it really is about the experience of taking it all in, piecing it together like a jigsaw puzzle, occasionally being confused as fuck, and overall being entertained by the sheer nonstop creepiness and atmosphere that this film manages to serve up.  And yet most people would rather rent The Conjuring.

Now's about time for my "next time you're about to..." wrap up paragraph, so you know the drill.  Folks, take out the Creepshow and Asylum DVDs and give these movies a look-see, because they're worthy additions to any horror movie library, boast great variety...oh yeah, and they're pretty damn scary.

So Bad They're Good

Just last week, I was flicking channels before work when something caught my eye.  Weirdly enough, it was a SyFy original movie called Bermuda Tentacles (I'll give everyone one guess as to the subject matter), but what really caught my eye was the fact that Mya Harrison was one of the main stars.  Since there was a good portion of my late teenage/early twenty years where this was my dream woman, I had to tune in.

Seriously, how was this woman not a more enduring pop star?

If you're waiting for the epic conclusion to this story, I watched the movie and...it sucked.  And not in the good way.  90 minutes of tedium, horrible CGI, by-the-numbers storytelling and tepid acting.  Even worse, Mya's character is a Navy Sergeant who never once gets to remove those thick fatigues and strip down once throughout the running time.  It was a world tragedy, I tell ya.

If you're reading this, you're most likely aware of a weird kind of subculture within the horror community.  The SyFy original movies that air seemingly every weekend have a rather substantial collection of people who are very attached to them, and not for anything resembling quality.  It really is something to behold.  Every weekend, people gather online to engage in a long round of MST3K-style riffing of the movies in question, the more hokey and CGI-driven the better.  The best example of this was the phenomenon known as Sharknado, a movie that had such a huge reaction on Twitter that it was the #1 worldwide trend for the better part of its running time and attracted media attention from pretty much any large outlet with two minutes to spare.  It still didn't register on the Nielsens, proving once again that Twitter does not equal ratings.

Just ask WWE.

Without a doubt, it seems like a lot fun to revel in the SyFy flicks, but it's a ritual that I've never taken part in.  Millions (well, scores, anyway) of people disagree, but I don't find these movies (from the infamous Asylum studio and otherwise) to be bad to the point of being good.  I just find them bad to the point of being unwatchable, and until recently I couldn't quite pin my finger on why.  On paper, they share so much with a lot of the cheesy masterpieces of my youth, with crappy production values, even crappier acting and a few true WTF cinematic moments taking center stage...the fact that it's all done INTENTIONALLY just removes so much of the fun for me.

I believe that is what's missing from today's bad horror films.  They're not bad in the epic way.  They're just bad in the BORING way, where the countless remakes that littered the landscape throughout the latter half of the '00s were just simply too bland to be anything resembling entertaining one way or the other, while the SyFy original films and other assorted direct-to-video crapfests actually try to be bad and instead come across as unwatchable.  Folks, I just miss the days when horror movies aimed big and fell hard without doing it on purpose.

Thus, I present my picks for the five best horror movies that are so bad they're good.  Criteria for these include at least a somewhat serious tone, infectious sense of fun, and a heart and soul at their core, no matter how much they might fly off the rails.  Give any of these five movies a rental, grab some friends and commence playing like Mike and the Bots.

5. Troll 2
This is one of those movies that just quite simply has to be seen to be believed.  Produced by Joe D'Amato, the guy behind the '70s "black Emanuelle" movies and several other sex-drenched exploitation films, the movie is a sequel in name only to the original Troll and concerns a group of vegeterian monsters attempting to turn a family into plants in order to eat them.  Which begs the question of why not just eat plants to begin with, but whatever.  In between, there's all kinds of nonsense about druids, perhaps the most banal score in the history of horror and the most life-saving bologna sandwich in all of moviedom.

4. Creature
There were a ton of movies in the early-to-mid '80s that ripped off Alien, and none of them are more hilariously inept than Creature, a movie that stars Klaus Kinski, Marie Laurin and Ferris Bueller's father.  Yes, really.  The plot is about an alien that has the ability to telepathically manipulate victims before assuming their identity, making it a sort of weird cross-hybrid between Alien and The Thing.  It's no less hilarious in how seriously it takes its preposterous subject matter, especially the bit where a dude sees his naked girlfriend outside in the enormous atmospheric air pressure and falls for the simple ruse of removing his space helmet.  And then said naked girlfriend in alien form still bangs him.  Yikes.

3. Silent Night, Deadly Night
No, it's not THIS Silent Night, Deadly Night.

Yes, it might have the most infamous rampage scene ever, but when it comes to yuletide hilarity with slasher-style kill scenes, I've gotta go with the original film in this franchise, and not just because the sequel is essentially half of the first movie played in repeat.  The saga of Billy Chapman is one of those things that words don't do justice - the tender, tragic, and always fun saga of a kid who sees his parents murdered by a guy in a Santa suit only to be raised in a Catholic orphanage and grow into a psychopathic killer himself.  Couple this up with some way over-the-top kill scenes and some questionable acting by Robert Brian Wilson and you've got a real winner that gets regular airtime in my DVD player every Christmas season.

2.  Friday the 13th: A New Beginning
For a lot of folks, this is probably the mother of them all.  Of all the movies in the legendary Friday the 13th franchise, this is the one that truly holds up a lot of the tried and true tropes of the series and effectively went "no such thing as overkill" with them, giving us a ridiculously high bodycount, gratuitous sex and nudity by the mouthful and enough stock characters to choke a donkey.  What else is there?  Well, we've got Miguel Nunez singing his Top 40 hit "Ooooh baby," the insane scenery chewing of the guy who plays the Sheriff, and the hilarious non-mystery that is this movie's mystery killer.  Yeah, uninitiated horror fan, it ain't Jason.  This entry in the series might not be anything close to good, but it's never boring and easily the best flick for comedic purposes.

and finally...

1.  Star Crystal
Of all the horror movies I've seen, nothing can top this one when it comes to the sheer level of ineptitude that it manages to achieve.  Yeah, it's got a low budget, but the problems of Star Crystal go beyond anything that a studio didn't feel like shelling out.  For the first 20 minutes, we get to know a varied group of astronauts only for them to summarily die, the narrative sputtering and giving us ANOTHER group of numbskulls to get behind.  From there, the new protagonists are picked off one by one by the strangest-looking aliens I've ever seen in this type of film, only for the twist to be that alien is really...the hero.  Yes, really.  Take my word for it, this is a movie that is worth seeking out and paying some decent money for on Amazon, because it is bad.  Gloriously, wonderfully bad, and I love every minute of it.  Don't believe me?  Watch for yourself.

Long live Gar!