Friday, August 18, 2006

Remembering some good ole 1980's Schlock!

With it being Snakes on a Plane Friday, I got a little wistful and began thinking about some of the wonderfully cheesy 1980's horror movies I saw as a kid, and I thought I would share a few of them with you.

Now I could mention movies like Tremors and Return of the Living Dead, but where would the fun be in that?

The first movie that I thought of when I started on this little odyssey to the era or Reagan was 1986's Night of the Creeps. Now, the recent Slither took a lot from this movie, but accept no substitutes. I mean, it has all the requisite elements for an 80's horror movie. College kids-Check, aliens-Check, Zombies-Check, a Serial Killer-Check, and yes, a sense of campy humor-Double check. The basic plot involves worm-like creatures that eat people's brains from the inside and it is all good, gory fun from there, and if you love the attitude of Bruce Campbell's Ash, you will really enjoy Tom Atkins take on the burnt-out cop Ray Cameron. (And did I mention that every main character in the movie is named after a horror director).

Now I could try to describe 1985's The Stuff to you, but I think the New York Times does it better than I ever could. I would describe it as 1 part The Blob, one part The Thing and one heaping spoonful of social satire. All in all, it is a frothy and sweet good time, and you will never look at Cool Whip the same again.

And I would be remiss if I didn't mention C.H.U.D., after all, you can't talk about the schlock without it, because C.H.U.D. is a glorious return to the B-movies of the 1950's. There is radiation in them there sewers and where you got radiation, you got blood-thirsty mutants, and of course, mutants got to feed above ground, and in this case, they have a choice buffet that includes Daniel Stern, John Heard, John Goodman, Jay Thomas and Kim Greist. It isn't a great film(though it is award winning), but it delivers some good jolts for bucks. The IMDB has it rated at 4.5/10, but it is better than that.

Of course, I am sure you, my readers, have a few more suggestions that could satiate someone's appetite for some cheap and messy thrills this weekend, so I open the floor to you all.

So, if you don't want to bear witness to the Rocky Horror Picture Show with snakes tonight or this weekend, you can still get your B Horror flick fix this weekend at your local video store or even perhaps from your On-Demand cable system. I am not guaranteeing you will like these movies, only that they bring back good memories for me.

9 comments:

MC said...

I have not seen the sequel, Bud the Chud. I am serious that is a real movie.

MsCarolM said...

How about "Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-a-rama"?

MC said...

Wow, now that is some grade A, Ed Wood-like schlock... I was impressed by the trailer for that.

Anonymous said...

Damn, MC, you always take me back. Love it. Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers. Classic.

Oh funny thing is, David Irving, the director of CHUD 2, was one of my professors and interim chair of our department for awhile. Great guy but it was hard to take him seriously when I realized "dude, you directed that!?!!?!"

MC said...

Sounds sort of like my first impressions of one of the writer/profs where I went to school. He was an award-winning short story writer, but a classmate in high school got him to come in to talk about one of the short stories he had written that we were assigned as part of the coursework, and the guy sitting next to me started telling me stories about how awesome the guy was because he knew him from his partronage at a bar in town.

So he was always "Al" in my mind after that, though I never called him that when I had some of his classes.

T Van said...

Night of the Creeps is a great movie. Definitely a classic of '80's horror.

MC said...

I still remember the sound of those things slithering across every surface in that bathroom scene. *shudder*

niteowl said...

My friends and I rented CHUD back in high school. We all agreed that it wasn't a very good movie...yet we couldn't stop talking about it. That's the sign of a true classic.

MC said...

The weird thing is, for some reason, I keep wanting to say William Petersen was in it when I know that isn't the case.