The Movie:

When this strange mix of war time drama, slapstick comedy, and horror-gore effects begins, an airplane crashes on a remote island somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Most of the passengers and crew die in the crash but a group of ragtag survivors manage to crawl out of the wreckage more or less in one piece. While the survivors bicker about what to do and how to get back home, the militant group that lives on the island clue in to their presence and assume they're a commando team sent to attack them.

As the survivors gather their wits and decide to fight for their lives rather than let the terrorists take them, they soon find out that there's a plot to destroy America with AIDS underfoot. A few minutes later, they've killed some bad guys and stolen their weapons and are launching an all-out war against the bad guys that would harm the American way of life. A lot of bullets...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Picking up pretty much where the second Toxic Avenger film left off, Toxic Avenger III: The Last Temptation Of Toxie finds the first superhero from New Jersey bored. It seems that he's basically eliminated all of the crime that previously plagued Tromaville from the city and is starting to feel a little stale. What to do? Well, he sets out to pony up enough scratch to pay for the operation to restore his blind girlfriend's (Phoebe Legere) eyesight. There's only one problem: he's short on dough.

So in order to make this happen, he takes a high paying job with Apocalypse Inc., a massive corporation run by a shifty chairman (Rick Collins). Things get off to a pretty great start but before you know it, things have gone to Toxie's head and he starts to turn into a yuppie! It turns out that Toxie has inadvertently made a deal with the devil, literally, and now it's...Read the entire review

The movie

Class of Nuke Em High II: Subhumanoid Meltdown was made at the very end of the exploitation era, which is part of the reason the film feels so horribly dated. Before the referential, ironic appropriation of the eploitation/B-movie style became more popular in the mid-1990s, Class of Nuke Em High II: Subhumanoid Meltdown was already referencing the 'styles' and mistakes of exploitation, but slipped up by not parodying them as much as simply repeating them as stylistic choices. As seedy, fly-by-night companies that turned out B movies gradually faded away, Troma kept making the kinds of gross horror flicks and softcore porn that were popular during the golden age of exploitation, and used techniques and themes that were rendered bought-out and co-opted when Hollywood began to use exploitation styles of filmmaking by giving A-list budgets to B-grade scripts. Class of Nu...Read the entire review

Class Of Nuke 'Em High II: Subhumanoid Meltdown:
Oh Troma, my Troma. Your films are wildly uneven, and the titles you distribute too. Lots of times I just don't get the joke. But when I do, I love it, and I love Troma, too. Breaking from tradition, I'll mention the extras first, in which Tromeister Lloyd Kaufman outlines his artistic and life philosophies, enough times that even a curmudgeon such as myself is moved. Put plainly; 'find what you are good at, and do it.'

Kaufman is very good at making goofy movies, he's been doing it for 40 years. When he's on, he's very, very good, (Tromeo And Juliet, The Toxic Avenger, etc.) when he's not so good, what you get is aimless buffoonery, with neither enough laughs, sex, or outrageous gore to register more than a few moments of joy. Class Of Nuke 'Em High II: Subhumanoid Meltdown, sadly, is one of those lesser efforts. Clas...Read the entire review

From Asia With Lust Volume 1:
Camp
When it comes to extremes, Japan has much of the world beat. Though Camp could be considered a little mild by some standards, (it's not terribly graphic, for instance) I'm comfortable saying that no-one does the 'Rape/Revenge' flick quite like the Japanese do. Thanks to the Troma Team, those purveyors of weirdness who will release just about anything, as long as it's looked-down-upon, those of us who may otherwise shy away from a geek-show featuring sexual torture and worse, can experience this nasty camping trip.

Well, it's not exactly a camping trip; sisters Akane and Kozue are on their way to somewhere, when their passive-aggressive argument leads them to crash into a berm on a lonely country road. Dang it, wouldn't you know they can't get a cell signal after the wreck, so like any good women in a horror film, (which is essentially what...Read the entire review

Rabid Grannies:
The late, great Chas. Balun had a lot to answer for when, in More Gore Score, he gave 1988's Grannies a coveted '10' on the vomit-meter. "It gets about as gory as the law allows," he says, noting however, that this is not the case with the widely (and virtually only) available Troma Team R-rated release. Now Troma steps up to the plate of puke with this 'newly restored' Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, and hopefully punters wondering what Balun was all frothed up about can see for themselves. This reviewer is not sure whether the included 'Producer's Cut' surgically reattaches all the missing gore, but is convinced that Rabid Grannies is definitely a hell of a lot of gory fun.

The 'Producer's Cut' presented starts inexplicably with one-minute-forty-seconds of black screen silence. Maybe it's the European Gore version of the overture from movies of old. At any rat...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Directed by Belgian filmmaker Emmanuel Kervyn and picked up and distributed domestically by Troma, 1989's Rabid Grannies is as goofy and as dumb as you'd expect a movie titled Rabid Grannies to be. It's also a lot of good, gory fun. The story revolves around Victoria (Anne-Marie Fox) and Elizabeth (Danielle Daven) Remington, two sisters of an advanced age that decide to throw themselves a big ol' birthday bash to celebrate their turning ninety. And so they set out to plan the bash and invite plenty of relatives to join in on the presumed merry-making.

On the night of the big event, a whole bunch of people show up but it's obvious that they're all gold digger types. Even the cook can see this. Things take a strange turn shortly after the party is underway when a strange old woman arrives at the home with a gift from the sisters' estranged nephew Christopher...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Directed by Yuri Sivo and released by Troma in 1989, Dangerous Obsession actually began life as Mortal Sins before it was retitled. Like that title, the feature itself is remarkable only in how completely generic and pedestrian it is, particularly if you're even partially versed in the staples of the late eighties ‘sexy thriller' genre inspired by the success of films like Body Double or Fatal Attraction. At least, at eighty-three minutes or so, it's a fairly breezy, painless watch and it's competently made, enough so that getting through it isn't any particular sort of chore. It just doesn't stand out is all, though there are moments where you get the impression that Sivo was at least striving to deliver something more interesting than he actually managed to hand in.

Nathan Weinschank (Brian Benben) is a New York City detective who works the ...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Written and directed by Marc Rohnstock in 2012, Necronos: Tower Of Doom starts off with a prologue sequence that aptly sets the stage for the atrocity exhibition that follows. In this opening sequence a master of black magic named Necronos (Thomas Sender) is all set to sacrifice a virgin witch in order to imbue his army of living corpses with invulnerability. Not only does this go wrong when it turns out his sacrificial lamb has been previously deflowered, but soon after this is revealed his lair is laid siege to by a squadron of Templars. They bring the wizard back to their king (Thomas Kercmar) where he is sentenced to death.

As anyone of faith would imagine, a man like Necronos goes straight to Hell but while he's hanging out with ol' Scratch he's somehow becoming more and more powerful and given that he's had centuries to hang out and think, well, he's also plan...Read the entire review

The Movie:

A low budget anthology film made on 16mm in the late eighties on location in Florida, giving it that quirky local film flavor that makes so many low budget oddities as interesting as they are, Where Evil Lives hasn't ever been easy to see. For better or worse, Troma has picked it up for distribution and now Claude Akins (this was his final film) swansong picture can finally be viewed in all its cruddy, fullframe glory!

When the movie begins, a wealthy man named Blake Rutherford II (James Coffey) meets a female real estate agent in front of an aging mansion called The Spencer House whose history dates back over a hundred years. As she deals with some business he strikes up a conversation with the friendly caretaker, Jack Devlin (Akins), who relays to him some of the horror stories that surround the origins of the building.

The first storyline tells us of one...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Chillers is one of those movies that brings back memories, so forgive me ahead of time while I indulge myself in the first person and stroll down memory road. The movie, as low budget and goofy as it is, had one of those VHS covers that used to leap out at me as a kid while roaming the horror section of Jumbo Video in Niagara Falls. It stuck in this young viewer's mind and made a much stronger impression than it would have if viewed as an adult. Nostalgia is a powerful thing and it does tend to let us revisit certain movies and TV shows as an adult through, shall we say, rose tinted glasses. Chillers was an anthology film that, in my younger days, successfully scared the crap out of me and the half a dozen or so friends who had all gathered in a basement, VCR humming away, to watch it. Revisiting it recently made me realize just how bad my taste was in films whe...Read the entire review

The Movie:
One would think that a film with the monosyllabic title of Kill would be a simple, straightforward film. And this barebones, micro-budget Canadian horror film is certainly that. Unfortunately, the combined strains of its miniscule resources and cast of mostly first time actors cause it to be, though a creditable effort, ultimately a failure.

The premise is basic and familiar: six young people, three men and three women, wake up in a strange house, with no memory of how they got there. All are dressed in white tee shirts and slacks, with no shoes. At first they are bewildered, unsure of what is going on. Soon, however, they begin to realize that they are trapped in the house, and the subjects of an insidious game in which they must attempt to kill one another. The survivor is promised their freedom, and to be reunited with their loved ones.

While it doesn't take lon...Read the entire review

Thanks to geek culture, references to the things you love has become the most boring element of film. Like a snake eating its own tail, every bit of popular culture that catches the eye of the public at large is consumed and regurgitated to the exact same people. Filmmakers who want nothing more than to recreate the experience of seeing something new and wildly inventive end up robbing future audiences of that very experience by trying to emulate it, without any of the invention or flair that went into the original creation. And B-horror fans have it the worst: not only is horror already a genre that lends itself to amateur filmmaking, given how cheap it is to mix up a batch of fake blood and shoot something in the woods, but now even the potential that someone might d...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Let's face it, clowns are creepy. Even with no John Wayne Gacy associations or murderous intent, the average, walking around clown gives a lot of people the willies. And when you present a fictional world in which, rather than being a tiny percentage of the population, most people are clowns, who never take off their makeup or floppy shoes, and then add in a serial killing clown, the ante is upped considerably. That's exactly what the producers of Klown Kamp Massacre have done, and as fans of the slasher genre might be able to surmise, they do it with lots of boobs and blood, but almost no subtlety.

Klown Kamp Massacre has a large ensemble cast, but if anyone could be identified as the main protagonist, it would be Philbert (Ross Kelly). Philbert is a classic, goofy clown, with big shoes and fright wig, and along with his compatriots, he signs up for a grueling...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Jessicka Rabid can be difficult to watch at times. There's rape, forced incest, more rape, brutal violence, and the constant degradation and humiliation of a mentally retarded young woman. On the other hand, the filmmakers clearly have talent, and have put together an exceptionally authentic looking paean to the grind house exploitation films of the seventies.

Jessicka (Elske McCain, who also produced and helped with the story) is the mentally challenged, but surprisingly beautiful young woman in question. She lives with her cousin Brad (Jeff Sisson) and Marley (Trent Haaga), also apparently a relation, who lock her in a dog cage in the garage when they don't want to be bothered with her, and generally treat her as if she were a semi-annoying pet, complete with dog collar and leash and relieving herself in the back yard. Except that they also each have sex with her wh...Read the entire review

The Movie:
With a name like Not Another B Movie, one would expect the film to be a lowbrow spoof of B horror films. And it is, sort of. But it is also (or at least, tries to be) a thoughtful dramatic meditation on the seamier side of exploitation horror production, and the people who are involved in it. These two themes, literally jammed together by the film's unique presentation, don't mesh very well, and leave us with two disparate halves that don't work as well as they should.

Byron (Byron Thames) is a talented screenwriter who has been forced by circumstance to write horribly clichéd exploitive dreck. He is joined in a restaurant to do some brainstorming on his latest feature by director Larry (Larry Thomas, most famous for playing the Soup Nazi on Seinfeld) and producer James (James Vallo). The film proper is just these three sitting at their table discussing the new projec...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Psycho Sleepover, as one might be able to deduce from the title, is a film long on blood and breasts, and short on substance. That doesn't mean it couldn't be lots of fun for the right audience, but the low budget and schlockiness will tend to restrict its appeal.

Poor Debbie Dicky (Rachel Castillo). First, she has to kill her boyfriend, who turns out to be a serial killer who tries to add her to his list of victims. Then her dad dies, and it turns out he was a serial killer too. She is generally shunned at school after this, and goes slightly goth, but thinks she might be turning a corner a year later when three of the most popular girls in school invite her to a sleepover. But Ginny (Emilia Richeson), Sally (Ariel Teal Toombs) and Ugly Jen (Frankie Frain, a man) might not be as friendly and innocent as they first appear.

The three girls also invite their boyfriends o...Read the entire review

Lloyd Kaufman's Produce Your Own Damn Movie!:
Troma Entertainment presents this third installment in the Your Own Damn Movie DVD series, which can be augmented by a series of books, or even purchased in book and DVD boxed sets. It should be clear these materials are intended to educate Troma fans in the ways of making their own damn movies. As a building block in a nicely packed bag of educational forms, Kaufman's contributions can't be minimized, but even for casual fans of indie films, this 2 Disc DVD set is quite entertaining.

Having not read the books, I can't comment on their content, but I can say that this voluminous collection of interviews with producers and directors - both established and upstarts - is jammed with useful information and inspiration. From David Cronenberg to Roger Corman, and to the Duplass Brothers, with stops on the way for visits with guys like H.G. Lew...Read the entire review

Debbie Rochon Confidential: My Years in Tromaville Exposed:
It's hard not to approach a Troma DVD without at least a little gee-whiz cynicism. Head Honcho Lloyd Kaufman practically insists on it during his 'Crazy Larry' introductions, or most any other time he appears on camera. But how does this forearming play out when watching something like Debbie Rochon Confidential: My Years in Tromaville Exposed? Can you be Tromatized by a Troma career retrospective? Well, of course you can!

Since 1974, Kaufman and Michael Herz have been New York's answer to John Waters, sorta. Producing and distributing independent horror films, mostly, the company has been known for pissing all over every possible taboo, and pushing the envelope by cramming it with 10 pounds of stinking pig intestines, before shoving the whole thing into an orifice on some poor, underage Southeast Asian sex slave. But Troma ...Read the entire review

The Movie:
It's difficult these days to put a fresh spin on the tried and true slasher genre. Independently produced Killer Yacht Party makes the attempt, but other than being set on a yacht, as the title implies, there's not much that's original here.

Lacy (Becky Boxer) is an experienced L.A. party girl, wearing the right slinky dresses and stiletto heels, knowing the right people, on the right lists. Her frumpy friend Jane (Maggie Marion) is an aspiring song writer who has just moved to L.A. from the boring Midwest. Lacy wants to show Jane the ins and outs of the party scene, and drags her along to every party she can think of. While at one of these soirees, Lacy catches the eye of club promoter Brock (Eric Clark), and gets the pair an invite to an exclusive shindig on a yacht the next night. There is something of a problem, however. On the yacht's maiden voyage, there was a fire, ...Read the entire review

The Movie:
A name like Eyes of the Chameleon calls up images of the Italian giallo genre, with its blood drenched serial killers pursuing oversexed young women. While its title hints at such a relationship, and there is indeed much blood and a few oversexed young women, Eyes of the Chameleon doesn't really do justice to the genre, and ends up rather weak.

Sara (Ann Teal) is a Las Vegas bartender who seems lost in the world. Her relationship with boyfriend Steve (Danny Countess) isn't going anywhere. She's listless and bored, perhaps tired of life. On a lark, she goes to visit a fortune teller with her friend Rachael (Laurie Zetts), and somehow manages to get cursed. Things begin to decline from there, and Sarah's life really goes off the rails.

One by one, Sara's friends start to get murdered, slashed with a knife, sometimes tortured prior to death. And Sara is strange...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Piotr Uzarowicz's Killer Yacht Party started life as Dead In The Water, a better name by anyone's standards but Troma has picked up the title and released under the more sensationalist moniker on DVD. The film follows Jane (Maggie Marion) who relocates from a small town in the Midwest to the bustling metropolis of Los Angeles where she hopes her burgeoning music career will get the shot in the arm that it needs. Here she hangs out with her friend Lacy (Becky Boxer), a party girl who knows all the clubs and who is determined to use that knowledge to get her friend a man. Jane's not all that interested in being set up, but Lacy isn't taking no for an answer and when Lacy is invited to a fancy party by one of the club owner's she knows that's taking place on his yacht, there's no way she isn't dragging Jane along for the ride.

The girls arrive at the destina...Read the entire review

There's a fine line between greed and business savvy, and Lloyd Kaufman is a man who knows how to walk that line. In the grand tradition of DVDs starring recently deceased actors immediately materializing in Wal-Mart $5 bins and selling commemorative plates, Kaufman has unearthed an obscure 1989 drama by Adam Rifkin called Tale of Two Sisters with voice-over narration by the one and only Charlie Sheen. Designed to capitalize on his fifteen minutes of fame (in the truest sense, too -- has anyone risen and fallen from the top of pop culture faster?), the DVD cover art is nothing but Sheen's face, despite the fact that the movie really is a tale of two sisters reuniting for the first time in years.

Digging a little deeper, the boastful claim that the movie is "from the mind, poems, and DNA of Charlie Sheen" is actually slightly less dishonest than it sounds. Although Sheen never appears on screen...Read the entire review

REVIEW
When a DVD has the names "Troma" and "Herschell Gordon Lewis" on the cover any seasoned film fan should have precise and clear-cut expectations of what the content will be like.

Troma consistently provides a maniacal catalog of subversive films awash in blood/gore/boobies and Mr. Lewis, well he's an icon, a genre god known reverentially as "The Godfather of Gore" responsible for some of the most memorably twisted films of the 1960s and early 1970s (The Wizard of Gore, anyone?). The required lather-rinse-repeat formula of blood, gore and humor - seemingly shot as cheaply as possible - will be the order of the day. There is a faithful film cult that naturally gravitates towards this kind of specialized material, and if it's not you then I'll come right out and say that The Chainsaw Sally Show: Season One from director Jimmyo Burril is not for you, nor will it ever ...Read the entire review

The Movie:
The revenge narrative is one of the most powerful archetypal stories in literature. Variations abound, and if done well, there are few tales more emotionally satisfying. Writer / director Adrian Santiago tries his hand at the genre in the low budget, Texas produced film Grim, but handles it clumsily, and fails to achieve anywhere near the impact it could have had.

Nicholas Grim (Christopher Dimock and Jack Pinder, who plays the young Grim) saw his parents murdered before his eyes by members of the United American Brigade, a group thugs who take it upon themselves to restore order in Texas after an economic apocalypse has collapsed the government. Mostly, they just pimp and fight and carouse, and extract protection money from the hapless citizens. Grim is taken in by Alan and Emma Rose (Todd Gable & Mary Winchester), and raised as their adopted son, teaching him ab...Read the entire review

As far as true crime stories go, it's got a good hook: it's 1988, and a naked man wearing a dog collar is found wandering the streets of Kansas City. When questioned, the man, Chris Bryson, leads them to the home of Bob Bedella, a serial killer who kidnapped, raped and killed several victims before one managed to escape. The documentary itself has a good hook as well: true crime writer James Ellroy, the author of L.A. Confidential and The Black Dahlia will be the host. Sadly, the end product, Bazaar Bizarre, is hampered by a schizophrenic tone that stems from indecisive waffling between graphic re-enactment footage and solid documentary thrills.

The film opens with Ellroy, coldly talking about the psychology of serial killers and psychopaths. Ellroy's contributions are almost hilariously bombastic, insisting that the viewer have no remorse for Berdella in an almost insistently pu...Read the entire review

The Movie
True story: Two months ago, I joined nine friends on a weekend getaway for the New Year holiday. We headed to a semi-secluded cabin in the woods, nestled in the outskirts of the metropolitan Washington, D.C. area. It was a destination I had no part in choosing, my reasoning made clear as I commented upon entering the rickety wooden house for the first time: "Which one of us gets slaughtered by a machete-wielding murderer first?"

It drew laughs from my friends, but I was actually half serious. My fear was personified at night when I had to sleep on a couch (my reward for being single), which faced the giant window by the pathetically "secured" front...Read the entire review

The Movie:

Benjamin Meade probably had the best of intentions when he set out to make a film about a serial killer named Robert Berdella, famous for raping, torturing and killing at least a half a dozen men in Kansas City, Missouri in the mid eighties. The facts surrounding the case are certainly salacious enough to make for a pretty interesting movie and given that, unlike certain crimes, it hasn't been done and done again in the movies, there was ample opportunity for a low budget filmmaker like Meade to put together a pretty interesting movie on the subject. Getting famous crime writer James Ellroy onboard also seemed like a plus, but the decision to basically just shoot him on the couch rambling kind of takes the excitement out of his participation.

When Berdella was caught by the cops, they found all manner of evidence in his possession that linked him to a whole lot of other nas...Read the entire review

The Show:
The Chainsaw Sally Show isn't exactly high art, and it isn't intended to be. Barely sketched plots, mediocre acting and silly dialogue aren't considered important when there's gratuitous nudity and arterial spray to showcase.

Based on an earlier film, the show consists of eleven episodes of around twenty minutes each, and one "very special episode" that runs at fifty two minutes. Written, directed and edited by Jimmyo Burril and starring his wife April Monique Burril as the eponymous Sally, and the couple's daughter Lilly as Poe, Sally's assistant at the library. Yes. Chainsaw Sally, multiple murderer and scourge of tiny Porterville, Maryland, is the town librarian. Of course, she brutally killed the previous librarian, essentially for rudeness, in order to get the job. She is Chainsaw Sally after all.

The series chronicles the shenanigans and violent fun that Sall...Read the entire review