Halloween is quickly approaching, which means all right-thinking souls are queuing up nothing but horror films. Some are good, some are bad, and most fetch up somewhere in between, but the real horror aficionado knows how to dig for the real gold. This is a genre where the classics stand side by side with the trash classics, and it’s in keeping with the cinematic tradition of the season that a few of the latter find their way into everyone’s horror marathons.
These six films deserve to be seen, not because they’re great, but because they’re bad in very specific ways, and under the right circumstances, that’s just as good as being good.
In a conversation about great trashy horror movies, zombies tend to play a prominent role. Whether they’re supernatural, alien, scientific, or entirely unexplained, zombies have always been a great excuse for low-budget and/or novice filmmakers to get their gore on. Just paint a few friends corpse blue, stock up on Karo syrup, and let the pig brains fly.
While George Romero’s various of the Dead movies are the fathers of the sub-genre, the zombie film as comedy trash owes a lot to Fred Dekker’s Night of the Creeps. It’s a weird ’80s time capsule of a movie, with at least two different screenplays’ worth of plot jammed inside its script. There’s a murder mystery in here, which was the result of what sounds like the aftermath of a slasher movie, and it all ends up taking a right turn to parasitically-induced Zombietown in the end.
There’s no real way that Dekker didn’t know what he was doing. Every character in the film is named after a then-popular horror or horror-adjacent director: Romero, Cronenberg, Cameron, Landis, Raimi. It feels like he started out intending to make a much zanier parody in the style of something like Airplane!, but veered off at the last second and made a relatively straightforward if overstuffed horror-comedy.
Even so, Night of the Creeps deserves to be seen by every horror fan. It’s got frat brother zombies, an early appearance by Shane Black, several different flamethrower rampages, plenty of exploding heads, and what might be the single greatest first date in film history. It’s good clean fun, for very specific values of both “good” and “clean.”
Some movies define all attempts at classification along the good-bad spectrum. There’s who a person is before they see them, and who they are afterward. That’s Society.
Society is undeniably trashy, from a filmmaker who’s known for churning out unique trash. Brian Yuzna’s been on the scene for almost 40 years now, making movies like Re-Animator, Return of the Living Dead 3 (the one with the lady on the poster who’s about 90% rusty spikes), and recent “Best of the Worst” highlight Faust: Love of the Damned. Society is his first movie as a director, and it’s also his movie that has the hardest, sickest impact.
It’s on Shudder, and it’s worth going into it as cold as possible. The simplest possible plot summary is this: a young rich kid in Beverly Hills (Billy Warlock) doesn’t get along with his family, and as a result, is seemingly gaslit into insanity by his parents and sister.
That makes it sound almost quaint and normal, but it really isn’t. As anyone who recognizes Yuzna’s name might have guessed, Society is a body horror movie. It might be the body horror movie. Some of the sickest scenes that 1989’s practical effects could conjure up are packed fat into Society, and the last half-hour or so is absolutely impossible to look away from. It’s hard to call it good, but it’s one of the strangest, least forgettable things ever put on film.
This is one of those movies that has a big cast of reasonably well-known actors, some of whom were even well-known at the time it was released, and somehow is still incredibly obscure. While Portia de Rossi’s role amounts to a five-minute cameo, Dead & Breakfast also features Ever Carradine (Once and Again), David Carradine (Kill Bill), Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Watchmen, The Walking Dead), Bianca Lawson (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Diedrich Bader (Veep), and Oz Perkins (writer/director of The Blackcoat’s Daughter).
It’s one of those movies that’s perfect for any film fan to have in their back pocket, as an obscure, watchable trash fire for a slow night in with friends. A group of twenty-somethings get lost en route to a friend’s wedding, and end up staying overnight in a postage stamp of a town in Texas. That puts them in town at exactly the right time to first get accused of a local’s suspiciously-timed murder, and then to get embroiled in a small-scale zombie outbreak.
The actual zombie action in Dead & Breakfast is competent but unremarkable. It’s a rare example of a horror movie that killed off its own narrator, and in so doing, brought the narrator across the fourth wall to a point where the movie’s protagonists now suddenly notice that he’s there. That’s funny, but it’s not why it’s here.
The entire reason Dead & Breakfast is on this list, without exaggeration, is that it stops in its tracks near its end, at almost the height of its action, for a musical number by a zombie bluegrass band. The song, “We’re Comin’ to Kill Ya” by Zachariah and the Lobos Riders, is clever and weirdly catchy, all the moreso because it predates Jonathan Coulton’s similarly-themed “Re: Your Brains” by two years.
The musical number, which only takes up a little under two minutes of the film and is still in every trailer, is the single best reason to slot Dead & Breakfast into a horror trash lineup. It has a few more virtues, but very few if any other movies feature a zombified band singing about how much they want to eat the protagonists. It’s a genuine must-see.
An entire era of movie-making has quietly passed the world by. The Dead Hate the Living is a hidden gem from a very particular era of direct-to-video horror, made to be discovered during an idle visit to a local rental place. There was something about the entire ritual of wandering down those rows of neatly racked tapes and DVDs, looking for something unusual to take home, that can’t be adequately recaptured by infinitely scrolling through lists of posters in a streaming service.
The Dead Hate the Living was the first zombie movie from Charles Band’s Full Moon Features, a production house that every horror fan in the ’80s through ’00s had a love-hate relationship with. Sometimes that Full Moon logo meant watchable low-budget action, comedy, and/or horror, like the forty different Trancers movies or Castle Freak, and sometimes it meant a cinematic abomination like most of the Puppet Master franchise or David DeCoteau’s The Killer Eye.
Fortunately, The Dead Hate the Living is high up on the “watchable” side of the Full Moon spectrum. It’s a cheap indie zombie flick with a simple premise: a bunch of kids break into an abandoned hospital so they can shoot a horror movie there, only to discover that the hospital was abandoned for a reason. Spoiler: it’s zombies. The reason is zombies.
Long-term, The Dead Hate the Living is most notable for featuring the acting debut of the late Matthew McGrory (Big Fish, House of 1000 Corpses), who held a Guinness World Record for “Tallest Actor.” It’s only intermittently available for streaming, but a DVD copy from Full Moon is only $8 before shipping. It’s worth that, and more. Fans of zombies as a genre won’t find much to surprise them here, but The Dead Hate the Living does a lot with its low budget and has a few fun twists in its last few minutes.
James Gunn has had two distinct arcs as a filmmaker. These days, he’s borderline respectable, as the mind behind the Guardians of the Galaxy movies and the forthcoming Suicide Squad sequel, but he got started as a writer and director at Troma Films. Gunn has B-movie street cred for days, and came on the scene by twisting the mind of a generation of film nerds with the screenplay for 1996’s Tromeo and Juliet.
Gunn’s directorial debut, 2006’s alien zombie movie Slither, is one step up from Troma’s deliberate trashiness. It’s a gory, effects-laden good time with a sky-high body count, made with an obvious affection for the horror sub-sub-genre of “monster depopulates a small town” movies, very few of which had the budget or enthusiasm to go as hard as Slither.
It’s the same old story: an alien parasite rides a meteorite down to Earth and infects a local rich guy (frequent Gunn collaborator Michael Rooker). Ten minutes later, the closest town is overrun by that parasite’s spawn, all of which look like leeches the size of housecats and take over their hosts by jamming themselves down their throats. The only people who can oppose it are the local sheriff (Nathan Fillon) and the first host’s shellshocked wife (Elizabeth Banks), both of whom are way out of their depth.
Slither is a practical-effects master class, full of solid gore and pure gross-outs, all of which is done with a healthy dose of self-awareness–Fillon’s character’s entire arc comes off as “what if the hero in a monster movie, instead of cowboying up in the last reel, was just genially incompetent the entire way through?”–but no more than an occasional wink at the camera. The film earned a 2006 Chainsaw Award from Fangoria for Highest Body Count, and justifiably so, but was a box-office flop. For pure B-movie spectacle, though, it’s hard to beat Michael Rooker marauding around South Carolina in half a ton of makeup and prosthetics, murdering people while looking like somebody left a wax dummy on a heating vent.
An unparalleled trash classic, Killer Klowns From Outer Space is a lot creepier than it sounds. It looks on paper like it’s pure camp: a group of aliens that look like clowns coming to Earth to terrorize a small town with acidic cream pies, cotton-candy blasters, and lethal puppetry. In a lot of ways, it works as a parody of ’50s creature-features, particularly the really ridiculous ones like Night of the Lepus.
Those old black-and-whites were never this gruesome, though. These klowns drop bodies. Those ’50s monster movies used to be able to get away with saying they’d brought terror to a town when they’d killed four or five people tops, but the Killer Klowns have come to zero out this area code. People get decapitated, dissolved, flayed, eaten alive, turned into sweets, turned into puppets, and worse. It’s one of the most sadistic comedies, or maybe one of the funniest sadistic horror movies, ever made.
(If one counts all the corpses in Killer Klowns from Outer Space, there are well over a hundred deaths in the movie, although only about 40 of them happen onscreen. That still puts it comfortably within the top 60 bloodiest films of all time, hanging out in the rarified company of murderfests like Blade and A Fistful of Dollars. Not bad, kult-klassic klown movie.)
Killer Klowns was made by Stephen and Charles Chiodo, brothers from New York who’ve been successful before and since as puppeteers and special effects technicians. Besides their work on Killer Klowns, they’re probably best-known among horror fans for designing the titular monsters in the Critters franchise, and have been steadily employed doing practical effects for years. They’ve been working on a sequel, The Return of the Killer Klowns from Outer Space in 3D, but it’s been in development hell for years.
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