Halloween is quickly approaching, which means all right-thinking souls are queuing up nothing but horror films. Some are good, some are bad, and most fetch up somewhere in between, but the real horror aficionado knows how to dig for the real gold. This is a genre where the classics stand side by side with thetrashclassics, and it’s in keeping with the cinematic tradition of the season that a few of the latter find their way into everyone’s horror marathons.
These six films deserve to be seen, not because they’re great, but because they’re bad invery specific ways, and under the right circumstances, that’s just as good as being good.
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Night of the Creeps(1986)
In a conversation about great trashy horror movies, zombies tend to play a prominent role. Whether they’re supernatural, alien, scientific, or entirely unexplained, zombies have always been a great excuse for low-budget and/or novice filmmakers toget their gore on. Just paint a few friends corpse blue, stock up on Karo syrup, and let the pig brains fly.
While George Romero’s variousof theDeadmovies are the fathers of the sub-genre, the zombie film as comedy trash owes a lot to Fred Dekker’sNight of the Creeps. It’s a weird ’80s time capsule of a movie, with at least two different screenplays' worth of plot jammed inside its script. There’s a murder mystery in here, which was the result of what sounds like the aftermath of a slasher movie, and it all ends up takinga right turn to parasitically-induced Zombietownin the end.
There’s no real way that Dekker didn’t know what he was doing. Every character in the film is named after a then-popular horror or horror-adjacent director: Romero, Cronenberg, Cameron, Landis, Raimi. It feels like he started out intending to makea much zanier parodyin the style of something likeAirplane!, but veered off at the last second and made a relatively straightforward if overstuffed horror-comedy.
Even so,Night of the Creepsdeserves to be seen by every horror fan. It’s got frat brother zombies, an early appearance by Shane Black,several different flamethrower rampages, plenty of exploding heads, and what might be the single greatest first date in film history. It’s good clean fun, for very specific values of both “good” and “clean.”
Society (1988)
Some movies define all attempts at classification along the good-bad spectrum. There’s who a person is before they see them, and who they are afterward. That’sSociety.
Societyis undeniably trashy, from a filmmaker who’s known forchurning out unique trash. Brian Yuzna’s been on the scene for almost 40 years now, making movies likeRe-Animator, Return of the Living Dead 3(the one with the lady on the poster who’s about 90% rusty spikes), and recent “Best of the Worst” highlightFaust: Love of the Damned. Societyis his first movie as a director, and it’s also his movie that has the hardest, sickest impact.
It’s on Shudder, and it’s worth going into it as cold as possible.The simplest possible plot summary is this: a young rich kid in Beverly Hills (Billy Warlock) doesn’t get along with his family, and as a result, isseemingly gaslit into insanityby his parents and sister.
That makes it sound almost quaint and normal, but itreally isn’t.As anyone who recognizes Yuzna’s name might have guessed,Societyisa body horror movie. It might bethebody horror movie.Some of the sickest scenes that 1989’s practical effects could conjure up are packed fat intoSociety, and the last half-hour or so is absolutely impossible to look away from. It’s hard to call itgood, but it’s one of the strangest, least forgettable things ever put on film.
This is one of those movies that has a big cast of reasonably well-known actors, some of whom were even well-known at the time it was released, and somehow isstillincredibly obscure. While Portia de Rossi’s role amounts to a five-minute cameo,Dead & Breakfastalso features Ever Carradine(Once and Again),David Carradine(Kill Bill),Jeffrey Dean Morgan(Watchmen, The Walking Dead),Bianca Lawson(Buffy the Vampire Slayer),Diedrich Bader (Veep), and Oz Perkins (writer/director ofThe Blackcoat’s Daughter).
It’s one of those movies that’s perfect for any film fan to have in their back pocket, as an obscure, watchable trash fire for a slow night in with friends. A group of twenty-somethings get lost en route to a friend’s wedding, and end up staying overnight ina postage stamp of a town in Texas. That puts them in town at exactly the right time to first get accused of a local’s suspiciously-timed murder, and then to get embroiled in a small-scale zombie outbreak.
The actual zombie action inDead & Breakfastis competent but unremarkable. It’s a rare example of a horror movie that killed off its own narrator, and in so doing, brought the narrator across the fourth wall to a point where the movie’s protagonists now suddenly notice that he’s there. That’s funny, but it’s not why it’s here.
The entire reasonDead & Breakfastis on this list, without exaggeration, is that it stops in its tracks near its end, at almost the height of its action, for a musical number by a zombie bluegrass band. The song, “We’re Comin' to Kill Ya” by Zachariah and the Lobos Riders, is clever and weirdly catchy, all the moreso because it predatesJonathan Coulton’s similarly-themed"Re: Your Brains" by two years.
The musical number, which only takes up a little under two minutes of the film and is still in every trailer, is the single best reason to slotDead & Breakfastinto a horror trash lineup. It has a few more virtues, but very few if any other moviesfeature a zombified bandsinging about how much they want to eat the protagonists. It’s a genuine must-see.
An entire era of movie-making has quietly passed the world by.The Dead Hate the Livingis a hidden gem from a very particular era of direct-to-video horror, made to be discovered during an idle visit to a local rental place. There was something about the entire ritual ofwandering down those rowsof neatly racked tapes and DVDs, looking for something unusual to take home, that can’t be adequately recaptured by infinitely scrolling through lists of posters in a streaming service.
The Dead Hate the Livingwas the first zombie movie from Charles Band’s Full Moon Features, a production house that every horror fan in the ’80s through ’00s had a love-hate relationship with. Sometimes that Full Moon logo meant watchable low-budget action, comedy, and/or horror, like the forty differentTrancersmovies orCastle Freak,and sometimes it meant a cinematic abomination likemost of thePuppet Masterfranchiseor David DeCoteau’sThe Killer Eye.
Fortunately,The Dead Hate the Livingis high up on the “watchable” side of the Full Moon spectrum. It’s a cheap indie zombie flick with a simple premise: a bunch of kids break into an abandoned hospital so they can shoot a horror movie there, only to discover that the hospital was abandoned for a reason. Spoiler:it’s zombies. The reason is zombies.
Long-term,The Dead Hate the Livingis most notable for featuring the acting debut of the late Matthew McGrory(Big Fish, House of 1000 Corpses),who held a Guinness World Record for “Tallest Actor.” It’s only intermittently available for streaming, but a DVD copy from Full Moon is only $8 before shipping. It’s worth that, and more. Fans of zombies as a genre won’t find much to surprise them here, butThe Dead Hate the Livingdoes a lot with its low budget and has a few fun twists in its last few minutes.
Slither(2006)
James Gunn has hadtwo distinct arcs as a filmmaker. These days, he’s borderline respectable, as the mind behind theGuardians of the Galaxymovies and the forthcomingSuicide Squadsequel, but he got started as a writer and director at Troma Films. Gunn has B-movie street cred for days, and came on the scene by twisting the mind of a generation of film nerds with the screenplay for 1996’sTromeo and Juliet.
Gunn’s directorial debut, 2006’s alien zombie movieSlither, is one step up from Troma’s deliberate trashiness. It’s a gory, effects-laden good time with a sky-high body count, made with an obvious affection for the horror sub-sub-genre of “monster depopulates a small town” movies, very few of which had the budget or enthusiasm to go as hard asSlither.
It’s the same old story: an alien parasite rides a meteorite down to Earth and infects a local rich guy (frequent Gunn collaborator Michael Rooker). Ten minutes later, the closest town is overrun by that parasite’s spawn, all of which look like leeches the size of housecats and take over their hosts by jamming themselves down their throats. The only people who can oppose it are the local sheriff (Nathan Fillion) and the first host’s shellshocked wife (Elizabeth Banks), both of whom arewayout of their depth.
Slitheris a practical-effects master class, full of solid gore and pure gross-outs, all of which is done with a healthy dose of self-awareness–Fillion’s character’s entire arc comes off as “what if the hero in a monster movie, instead of cowboying up in the last reel, was just genially incompetent the entire way through?"–but no more than an occasional wink at the camera. The film earneda 2006 Chainsaw Award fromFangoriafor Highest Body Count, and justifiably so, but was a box-office flop. For pure B-movie spectacle, though, it’s hard to beat Michael Rooker marauding around South Carolina in half a ton of makeup and prosthetics, murdering people while looking like somebody left a wax dummy on a heating vent.
Killer Klowns From Outer Space(1988)
An unparalleled trash classic,Killer Klowns From Outer Spaceis a lot creepier than it sounds. It looks on paper like it’s pure camp: a group ofaliens that look like clownscoming to Earth to terrorize a small town with acidic cream pies, cotton-candy blasters, and lethal puppetry. In a lot of ways, it works as a parody of ’50s creature-features, particularly thereallyridiculous ones likeNight of the Lepus.
Those old black-and-whites were never this gruesome, though. These klowns dropbodies.Those ’50s monster movies used to be able to get away with saying they’d brought terror to a town when they’d killed four or five people tops, but the Killer Klowns have come tozero out this area code. People get decapitated, dissolved, flayed, eaten alive, turned into sweets, turned intopuppets, and worse. It’s one of the most sadistic comedies, or maybe one of the funniest sadistic horror movies, ever made.
(If one counts all the corpses inKiller Klowns from Outer Space,there arewell over a hundred deathsin the movie, although only about 40 of them happen onscreen. That still puts it comfortably within the top 60 bloodiest films of all time, hanging out in the rarified company of murderfests likeBladeandA Fistful of Dollars. Not bad, kult-klassic klown movie.)
Killer Klownswas made by Stephen and Charles Chiodo, brothers from New York who’ve been successful before and since as puppeteers and special effects technicians. Besides their work onKiller Klowns, they’re probably best-known among horror fans for designing thetitular monsters in theCrittersfranchise, and have been steadily employed doing practical effects for years. They’ve been working on a sequel,The Return of the Killer Klowns from Outer Space in 3D, but it’s been in development hell for years.
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