Roddy McDowall and a gang of lab nerds take part in a live action role playing game within the confines of their medical building. Little do they know, a crazed baboon hopped up on a drug giving him super strength escapes from his cage and decides to go on a killing spree. If you have never seen a baboon completely lose his shit, you must watch this. The shrieking fury he unleashes just in trying to open a locked door is astonishing. You will quickly find yourself cheering on Shakma as he systematically hunts these dorks down, leaps into their faces and gnashes and claws at them in unbridled rage. By far the greatest animal acting (and wrangling) job I've ever witnessed.
9. Possession
Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill are the most unhappy married couple in cinematic history. I don't mean they have been reduced to quibbling or a state of emotionless routine, I mean every sentence out of their mouth is an explosive verbal lashing that eventually leads to screaming and all out violence. Neill follows his wife in hopes of discovering if she is cheating on him with another man, only to find that her new lover is actually a gigantic hideous creature that Adjani is sexually enslaved to. The scene where Adjani is walking along a subway station as normal as can be, when all of a sudden, she starts laughing and shaking hysterically, throwing herself against the walls and then kneels down to have a full on miscarriage while puking up milk may be the most fukked up thing I've ever seen. Apparently, the director made this during his own divorce in real life. That dude must have seriously hated his wife.
8. The Be
astmasterThe Beastmaster is a Conan wannabe who is able to telepathically communicate with animals. He teams up with a panther (actually a tiger with his coat dyed black), an eagle, a couple ferrets, the Dad from Good Times and Playboy pin up Tanya Roberts to battle Rip Torn, in his finest role, as an evil priest who is all about human sacrifice. Lots of swords and magic and boobs and mythical creatures, including these things that have flesh that dangles from their arms like curtains that they wrap around their victims to enclose them and then dissolve them.
7. The Toxic Avenger
Billed as the goriest film of all time when it arrived on video shelves, this film delivers on its advertisement. Melvin is a nerdy janitor at the local health club, who gets exposed to toxic waste and mutates into The Toxic Avenger. In his efforts to clean up his corrupted, crime infested city, we get to see a little kid on a bicycle get splattered by a speeding car, a grandma get stuffed into a washing machine, limbs ripped off, hands deep fried in grease, guts ripped out by hand, eyes poked out and a seeing eye dog get blown away by a shotgun. The extreme gore mixed with overt slapstick (there is more hits to the balls in this than just about any other film out there) was a formula that Troma Films rode to a level of success I doubt they ever imagined, eventually turning The Toxic Avenger into a G-rated Saturday morning cartoon (renamed The Toxic Crusaders).
6. Dolemite
In what is easily the greatest blaxploitation film of all time, Rudy Ray Moore is bad ass pimp Dolemite, who fights to get his club back from the hands of rival gangster Willie Green, with a little help from his squad of karate prostitutes, a radical minister and local heroin addict Creeper. '70s jive talk is a thousand times cooler than the current slang that is as accessible as any ad slogan and this flick is filled with more memorable lines than just about any movie I can remember ("You rat soup eatin' no business born insecure junkyard muthafukka!"). It also contains easily the worst action scenes I've ever had the pleasure of watching, a non stop procession of missed kicks, men throwing themselves in opposite directions of punches and actors breaking character before fights are over. The best scene is when Dolemite and his girls capture one of Willie's henchmen who happens to be white. Dolemite exclaims, "I always wanted to see me a honky dance!" and shoots at the man's feet with a machine gun, making him jump, before he turns his gun upward and fills him with bullets. Dolemite and his women turn to walk away when the dying man cries out for help. Their response? One of the girls walks over and lops off his junk with a straight razor.
5. Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment
Police Academy 1 - 4 are all fantastic but 2 is when the series peaked. Academy graduates Mahoney, Hightower, Tackleberry and crew return in fine form to battle a local gang that is terrorizing the city. The gang is led by the legendary Bobcat Goldthwait, one of the greatest screen presences of all time, who sounds like he is constantly in the midst of a nervous breakdown. We also get the addition of Captain Mauser as the head cop who needs the crew to fail in order to get a promotion, along with his sidekick Proctor, comprising the ultimate boss and stooge duo. Mr. Sweetchuck, the Japanese chef tossing shrimp, the gang going grocery shopping, Mahoney as Jughead, The Blue Oyster Bar - scene after scene of prime hilarity.
4. Freddy vs
. JasonIt's hard to describe just how big a deal this was to a kid who grew up watching every Friday The 13th and Nightmare On Elm Street movie the moment he could get his hands on them. The two greatest horror villains finally go head to head to see who is king of the slasher genre. Of course, the audience needs a good guy to cheer for, and the movie arranges this by making us sympathetic towards Jason, who is manipulated by Freddy to provide him with teenage victims as Freddy has lost his ability to do so being stuck in hell and forgotten by the Elm Street residents. But to Freddy's dismay, Jason starts offing too many kids on his own, kids that rightfully belong to Freddy, and the eventual claw vs. machete showdown we'd been waiting two decades for ensues. I honestly thought this film would revolutionize the cinema in that we would forever be treated to heroes and monsters of films past pitted against one another - Leatherface vs. Micheal Myers, Pinhead vs. RoboCop, The Road Warrior vs. Snake Plissken, the combinations were endless. Unfortunately, legal rights won out as they always do and the only other film that came out of this trend was Alien vs. Predator, which they miraculously managed to make boring. Thus, this film stands as the culmination of my favorite movies as a youth and what the future could have been.
3. Thrashin'
Pre-fame Josh Brolin is a good clean skater kid who leads a skate gang called the Ramp Locals, whose territory is the white suburbs of the Valley. He meets this blonde chick at a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert and they become lovebirds. Unfortunately, the chick is the sister of Hook, leader of the skate gang The Daggers, who rule Venice Beach and they ain't about to have some Valley kid getting busy with their relatives or moving in on their turf. The Daggers are completely awesome, composed of real life skating legends Tony Alva and Christian Hosoi, hot as hell Sherilyn Fenn and a bunch of long hair, earringed, hot pink shirt and ripped jeans wearin' bad asses. The best scene is when tension between the gangs reaches its breaking point and a joust is called for. Brolin and Hook must battle it out with homemade maces while riding on skateboards in a pastel graffitied drainage ditch. This was the first film made to cash in on the mid-'80s skateboard craze and any kid at the time who could pull off a solid boneless will defend this film to the death.
2. Death Wish 3
Death Wish 3 is the perfect realization of mid-'80s white Republican paranoia. Instead of Stallone or Schwarzenegger and their bulging biceps, we get Charles Bronson, a mustached, cheap suit wearin' man in his 60s, who comes off looking like your average plumber. But make no mistake about it, Bronson is as bad a mutherfukker as you'll find. He's the only one of the three who has most likely actually killed somebody as the gun he uses in this flick, his .475 Wildey Magnum, was Bronson's own personal handgun. And trust me, he's got plenty of reason to be upset. The Death Wish movies follow a certain form and repeat it much like any other action series, except the only way for the Death Wish form to be remotely credible, it must stay within the confines of a single movie (thus, the first Death Wish is considered quality filmmaking). Why? Because the entire premise is built around Charles Bronson taking revenge on criminals who rape and / or kill one of his family members or close friends. How many times can this happen to one person? According to the Death Wish universe, A LOT. In the first film, Bronson's daughter is raped and his wife is murdered, in 2, his maid gets raped and his daughter, who is now mentally retarded due to her violation from the first film, gets raped again, and in this film, a good friend of his is raped and his girlfriend is murdered (the series goes up to 5, but you get the picture). And these aren't off screen, implied rape scenes, they are some of the most brutal, intensely disturbing scenes ever put on film, all perpetrated by different criminals, albeit Death Wish criminals. You see, in real life, criminals certainly exist, but 99.9% of the time, they have their reasons for causing crime. They need money for food or drugs or they feel the need to protect their turf. In the Death Wish series, criminals will randomly assault little old ladies and families just trying to take home their groceries simply out of boredom or because they can. And of course, these criminals are based on typical stereotypes of the times - the white punk, the black street hood, the Hispanic mugger, except in real life, these people don't mix, they are in separate gangs, usually in separate parts of town. In Death Wish 3, the gangs are wild packs of all these stereotypes banded together, just abstractions of the filmmaker's idea of "hooligan kids". And the leader of these roving multi-racial gangs is Manny Fraker, a giant redheaded, freckled dude with a reverse mohawk, one of the greatest screen villains ever. The film (the entire series) is simply one long body count, murder after murder by a variety of weapons, all played out with a completely deranged synthesizer score in the background by none other than ex-Led Zepper Jimmy Page. I'm not making any of this up. See this.
1. Trick Or Trea
tSkippy from Family Ties is Eddie "Ragman" Weinbauer, a long haired metal kid who can't seem to get any girls to notice him and is bullied on a regularly basis by the school jocks. Even worse, Ragman's idol, metal singer Sammi Curr, dies in a hotel fire during a Satanic ritual. But Eddie's best friend Nuke, a radio DJ played by Gene Simmons of Kiss, has Curr's final unreleased record and hands it over to Ragman, his truest fan. Eddie is doing some headbangin' to Curr's lost album, when he decides to play the record backwards and starts noticing some strange messages coming from the grooves. Eventually, Curr's ghost is released upon the real world from the record and he helps Ragman get revenge on the jocks who have made his life miserable. A perfect Faustian revenge fantasy for all metal kids out there with some solid death scenes, including a girl who is sexually assaulted by a goblin and has her ears melted off. Sammi Curr is a complete bad ass as we get to see him rip the head off a snake on stage and shower himself in its blood, continue to worship Satan while burning to death and basically try and kill anyone that comes across his path. The soundtrack is by underrated metal outfit Fastway and there's even a cameo from Ozzy Osbourne as a TV evangelist who reads metal lyrics on air in disgust. This is Rebel Without A Cause for those of us who used to wear our Iron Maiden shirts with pride and can remember the PMRC and the local church burning piles of metal records. This is my best BAD movie of all time.
