FRANKENSTEIN ISLAND (1981)

Any movie that starts out with a hot-air balloon crash is just asking for trouble.

FRANKENSTEIN ISLAND was supposedly made in 1981, looks like it was made in 1972, and feels like it was made in 1957. It's all kinds of messed up. If it wasn't so stoopidly fun, I'd say it was one of the worst movies I've ever seen. I mean, it's bad. There's nothing really good about it. But none of it is boring, and being boring is the biggest sin a movie can commit. Every five minutes, it's like it's a whole other movie. You never know what's gonna hit you.

Anyway, four idiots and a dog crash into the ocean in their beautiful balloon, and life-raft their way to lovely Frankenstein Island. There's a bunch of annoying old guys (one of them is Robert Clarke, who's been in TONS better movies than this!) and an annoying Peter Brady-looking tool named Dino. Seriously. And a dog named Melvin. Seriously. You know what you're in for when one of the guys leans onto their life raft -- which there's nothing wrong with -- and says that they need to gather wood to build a raft. SERIOUSLY.

So they wander into a cliffside cave for no good reason, there's a split-second shot of the Floating Head of John Carradine, and they wind up on the main part of the island, which is lucky for them. They could have gotten killed in that cave, and nobody would ever have found them.

Then they find Amazons. Yep, there's a tribe of jungle ladies living on Frankenstein Island, and they all use human skulls as bongs, wear leopard-print bikinis, and are suspiciously white. (Really, you know? Every movie I see where there's a tribe of Amazon jungle babes, they're all white girls. I don't know if there's any science backing this up, but something tells me that isn't accurate.) And the four idiots discover that if you try to say the name of any place that ISN'T Frankenstein Island, something that's "like telepathy" makes your arm hurt really bad. SERIOUSLY. Then there's night-time snake dancing and another appearance by the Floating Head of John Carradine who spouts off about "The Power!!!!" I think they shot all of his appearances in a half hour.

So then there's some zombie dressed up kinda like the Hamburglar that nabs one of the jungle girls, and some grizzled old guys from a pirate movie show up and laugh a lot and say that they should all be friends, and then invite the team of idiots up to "where the valleys rise to the sun." They get there and wait around at a camp outside the main house on the island, and there's a bunch more zombie guys, and then Cameron Mitchell is in a jail cell and believes he's in an Edgar Allan Poe movie, and the whole shooting match is being run by Sheila Van Helsing who's the great-granddaughter of Dr. Frankenstein, and the zombie guys wave around plastic Halloween pitchforks and turn an 8x10" glossy headshot of John Carradine into an 8x10" headshot of a SKULL, and there's a zombie fight where we cut to reaction shots FROM THE ZOMBIES (who don't have emotions), and there's a weird electronic thing that gives Sheila Frankenstein the albino white zombie eyes that the zombies have, but only for a second and it's never referred to again, and the Floating Head of John Carradine who is playing the Ghost of Dr. Frankenstein pops up and says "The Power! The Golden Thread!" a lot, and Sheila's husband is a MILLION YEARS OLD and is in bed and doesn't amount to much, and Cameron Mitchell is the dad of one of the jungle girls, and then the Frankenstein Monster shows up and waves his arms around and everyone escapes, and it was all just a dream OR WAS IT?

See? You get ALL THIS for less than the price of most other movies. Nothing in the movie is related to anything else that happens in the movie, and nothing makes any sense, but I COULDN'T STOP WATCHING. Sometimes just knowing that a movie like this exists makes you glad to be alive.

NIGHTMARE CITY (1980)

Okay, this one is probably even worse than DEMONS, but it’s at least FUNNY. There’s a nuclear accident, and a reporter waits for a plane to land to interview the scientists who researched it. But when the plane lands and the doors open, a bunch of mutated goons jump out and start stabbing and shooting everybody. (Most people might call these guys “zombies,” but THEY AREN’T DEAD. That kind of thing bothers me. You might also wonder how these mutated goons can fly and land a plane. This is one of life’s great questions.) The people attacked by the mutated goons turn into mutated goons, and things go all goony. They attack an aerobics/dance TV show. They use weapons (again, something ZOMBIES DON’T DO, PEOPLE). We wind up somehow up on top of a roller coaster. Then it kind of ends. The makeup is ridiculous (it all looks like masks made out of papier mache and stuck on), the violence is silly (the “flesh eating” is mostly just the goons licking people’s fake-looking wounds, and the “head shots” all seem to use the same 2 or 3 dummies), the story is stupid, and the people in it aren’t worth saving. But it’s lively! And energetic! And it’s entertaining! So I have to give it that. I never got bored, and I laughed a lot, and I’m not sorry I saw it.

DEMONS (1985)

What. The. Hell. This was co-written and produced by Dario Argento. I’ve seen some of his movies, and think he’s great. So I picked this up. It’s not directed by him, and maybe that makes a difference. Like the other movies I’ve seen by him, there’s not a lot of “making sense” going on here, but unlike those other movies, this just doesn’t work. Sure, it’s gory. There’s lots of blood, busting boils with demonic pus, weird transformations of people into demons, and all that good stuff, but NOTHING FITS TOGETHER. It’s about a bunch of people who go see this mysterious new movie in a mysterious new theater, and mysteriously the stuff in the mysterious movie happens to the people in the mysterious theater. Is the theater evil? Maybe, I guess, because nobody can manage to get out. Or maybe that’s the movie’s fault. I don’t know. There’s nobody running the projector, which is weird, but never explained. The ticket-taker at the theater seems mysterious, but she winds up being killed off like anyone else there, so there’s a wasted opportunity. Someone should have asked who hired her! It might answer some questions, maybe! So anyway, nobody can get out of this place, and people try everything. Then, for no good reason at all, a helicopter crashes into the theater. Just out of nowhere. It’s mysterious! Then we find out that the demons are all over the place outside, so you have to ask why we bothered going to the movies in the first place. Then there’s kind of a twist ending. Sort of. You expect it, though. I don’t know, man. I just don’t know.

SLEEPAWAY CAMP (1983)

…Like this one. Man, this is nuts. It’s still a mystery-type slasher set at a camp, but it doesn’t cheat, and it’s really, really messed up. For one thing, there’s actual kids in this. Most of these movies have like 30-year-olds playing high school kids, but having actual kids around makes this a ton more effective. Nobody wants to see kids get hurt! But they do. And it’s all creepy as hell. I don’t want to say too much here, because there’s really only one reason to see this, and it’s the ending. It’s one of the most out-there endings I have ever seen in my life. I literally sat there with my mouth hanging open for like ten minutes. Wow. I don’t really like slasher movies that much (I like monsters a lot more), but this one is something completely else.