Slashers & Psychos

The viewer assumes the role of the killer, an undead geek who returns from the grave to punish the former friends who were responsible for your death, in this gory, interactive DVD game starring sizzling hot scream queens Tiffany Shepis, Joanna Angel, Melissa Bacelar, and Masuimi Max. On the eve of your high school graduation, your best friends are throwing the wildest party of the year. There's sure to be hookers and drugs galore, but at the last minute your friends call up with some bad news: they're one hooker too short, and as a result your invitation has been revoked. Dejected, you run a relaxing bubble bath, fire up the laptop, and prepare to soak with a little internet porn. Clumsily, you fumble the laptop and it drops into the tub. Now you're dead, but this would have never happened had your friends stayed true to their word. Now, after rising from the dead, it's time to take revenge by brutally slaughtering everyone at the party. For every horror trivia question that you answer correctly, another person dies. Each death scene is directed by a different Halo-8 filmmaker, ensuring the blood gushes in geysers and anything goes. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

This standard slasher film from director Dimitri Sotirakis (using the pseudonym "Jom Sotos") is notable only for its fascinating cast. The story is a rather predictable affair as young Melissa (Aleisa Shirley) sees all of her friends being murdered after their 16th birthdays. Her mother (Susan Strasberg) worries, and Sheriff Dan (Bo Hopkins) is convinced that the local Indians led by Greyfeather (Henry Wilcoxon) are to blame, but when the "shock" ending finally comes, it is no surprise. Patrick Macnee, Don Stroud, Larry Storch, and Sharon Farrell lead the familiar cast, which also includes such genre favorites as Michael Pataki, Steve Antin, and Dana Kimmell, who starred in Friday the 13th, Part III the same year. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide

A murderous psychopath is carving up the prostitutes at a ritzy Hong Kong brothel, and as the madam watches her stable dwindle by the day, suspicions soon fall on a recently-released asylum inmate who had previously been imprisoned for a strikingly similar crime. As Inspector Chang sets a trap designed to reveal the killer's true identity once and for all, a macabre mystery winds to its' deeply disturbing conclusion. Tanny Tien Ni, Wang Jung, and Jenny Liang star. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

One year after unsuspecting road trippers Jesse and Nicole were drilled, ripped, and splattered into oblivion, the same psychopath responsible the gruesome deaths of those two young girls returns to refine his torture skills on the three travelers who have come searching for them. Forever roaming the old highway in his Winnebago full of creepy living corpses, the killer finds himself struggling against the forces of the undead when Jesse and Nicole's ghosts return to exact their bloody revenge. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

This shameless knockoff of Last House on the Left even goes so far as to repeat the detail of having the theme song performed by the lead villain. Florinda Bolkan (Non Si Sevizia un Paperino) plays a nun who takes the teenage girls in her care to a remote house where they rehearse A Midsummer Night's Dream. Ray Lovelock and a pair of thugs show up, brutally raping and terrorizing the girls -- killing one by raping her with a cane -- until Bolkan renounces her teachings and seeks bloody revenge. Utter nonsense, but AC/DC and Roxy Music are on the soundtrack, so it isn't a complete waste. Director Franco Prosperi is best known for co-directing Mondo Cane and Africa Addio. Sherry Buchanan (Dr. Butcher, M.D.) co-stars with Laura Trotter. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide

One of the most notorious slasher films of the 1980s returns to terrorize filmgoers with this blood-soaked remake that proves just how horrifying high school dances can truly be. Donna Keppel (Brittany Snow) has survived a terrible tragedy, but now the time has come to leave the past behind and celebrate her senior prom in style. When the big night finally arrives, Donna and her best friends prepare to enjoy their last big high-school blowout by living it up and partying till dawn. But while Donna is willing to look past her nightmares and into a brighter future, the man she thought she had escaped forever has returned for one last dance. An obsessed killer is on the loose, and he'll slay anyone who attempts to prevent him from reaching his one and only Donna. Who will survive to see graduation day, and what will Donna do when she's forced to confront her greatest fear? Scott Porter, Jessica Stroup, and Dana Davis co-star in the slasher remake that will have tuxedo-clad teens everywhere nervously looking over their shoulders as they file out onto the dance floor. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

Twenty years after the brutal slaying of five students at an abandoned resort hotel, a group of fearless students return to the site of the original crime only to discover that the murderer is still on the loose and waiting to strike again. The year was 1984: A group of five students broke into the Royal Crescent Hotel as part of a local rite of passage. Days later, their bodies were found mutilated. The killer was believed to be a local drifter, though no one was ever caught or convicted of the murders. At the time, the press made no mention of the fact that the bereaved parents insisted that the police hire a psychic to locate the murderer, and that after handing one of the student's personal objects the clairvoyant claimed to have seen the killer's face. Though the psychic had claimed that the killer was still inside the hotel, a comprehensive sweep of every floor yielded to clues to his whereabouts. Later that same night, the psychic died in her sleep, effectively rendering the case cold. Flash forward twenty years later, and another group of students conducting a so-called "Tour of Fear" break into the hotel on a mission to visit each of the five rooms where the high schoolers had been slain. Upon discovering a severed hand in one of the rooms, the students unleash a terrifying force that has haunted the hotel grounds for nearly a century. Now, if they can only solve the mystery of a world-class hotel that once hosted royalty before mysteriously plunging into disrepute, perhaps that can escape with their lives and save their immortal souls from eternal damnation. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

Resident Evil: Extinction director Russell Mulcahy takes the helm for this tense domestic thriller concerning a young couple who believe they have found the perfect live-in nanny, but discover just how wring they are when she begins to methodically destroy their picture perfect suburban lives. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

Poltergeist-purger Zelda Rubinstein toplines this interesting, twisty psycho-thriller from Spain, which makes clever (though repetitive) use of its movie-within-a-movie premise. As the star of the horror film "The Mommy," Rubinstein plays a mother who hypnotizes her son (Michael Lerner) into seeking more victims to supply her growing collection of human eyeballs. "The Mommy" seems also to exert a weird hypnotic effect on the audience watching it, particularly one impressionable fellow who mirrors Lerner's actions by stalking fellow movie patrons... just as the onscreen murderer is entering a movie theater to do the same thing. If this sounds confusing, that's probably because it is. The interesting premise wears thin about halfway through, with the relentless attempts at viewer disorientation becoming more tiresome than frightening. ~ Cavett Binion, All Movie Guide

Directors David R. Williams and Mike Bohatch collaborate on this grisly low-budget shocker shot in Eerie Production's Frightworld - a state of the art, horror-themed amusement park consisting of five separate haunted house attractions. Frightworld is open from the first week of September through Halloween of each year, and draws over 25,000 steely-nerved horror hounds from both the US and Canada. When a group of unsuspecting teens become trapped in a warehouse containing the remnants of an old haunted house amusement park attraction, they fall prey to a supernatural killer who won't stop the slaughter until everyone has been butchered. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide

Jack Hedley of The Anniversary stars as a hardbitten police lieutenant tracking a sadistic sex-killer in this gruesome thriller from splatter-maven Lucio Fulci. The misogynistic script (by Fulci and prolific collaborators Gianfranco Clerici and Vincenzo Mannino) posits a femme-hating psycho (who talks like Donald Duck) slashing beautiful women with a switchblade and a straight-razor because his daughter is in the hospital and will never grow up to be beautiful. Fulci was apparently trying to work in a statement about American competitiveness by making his heroine (Antonella Interlenghi) an aspiring Olympic athlete, and having a killer who is concerned that his daughter will never be "the best," but the point gets lost amidst the buckets of blood and gratuitously kinky sex scenes. Pandering to the lowest common denominator as never before in his career, Fulci showed with this blatant play for the sicko slasher crowd that the days of well-plotted, stylish Italian horror were gone, replaced with the most vicious sort of sexual violence and perversion. Despite all of that, there is one fairly masterful sequence in which the suspect's S&M sex partner learns his identity from a radio broadcast and must untie herself and escape while he sleeps. This scene is tense and nerve-wracking, a high-point of genuine fear amidst a nauseating collage of metal blades slicing female flesh. A shameful piece of work that makes Mario Landi's Giallo a Venezia look positively liberated, it co-stars Renato Rossini, Andrea Occhipinti, and Paolo Malco, with cult figures Alessandra Delli Colli, Daniela Doria, and Barbara Cupisti on the chopping block. Cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller, editor Vincenzo Tomassi, and composer Francesco De Masi have all done better work. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide

His mind terminally warped due to years of abuse, a disturbed young man adopts the persona of his father's circus act, Purvos the Clown, and sets out to satiate his deceased mother's insatiable bloodlust murdering unsuspecting prostitutes and escorts. As a young boy, Max was relentlessly abused by his mother and father. These days both of Max's parents have long since passed, yet his mother seems to be calling out to him from beyond the grave. Unable to maintain his thin veil of sanity due to constant nightmares and troubling visions, the tormented Max begins to prey on the dregs of society before vowing to end the vicious cycle by slaying Kelly, his niece and his last remaining relative. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide