By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Dracula II: Ascension is a 2003 Patrick Lussier film that serves as a direct sequel to his Dracula 2000 and was shot back-to-back with Dracula III: Legacy. Medical students in New Orleans acquire what they believe to be Dracula's corpse and keep it in a warehouse while conducting experiments on it. This goes exactly as well as you'd expect. Jason London leads a cast doing genuinely committed work in a film that takes its mythology seriou

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Chupacabra: Dark Seas is a 2005 Sci-Fi Channel original in which a chupacabra — the legendary Latin American cryptid rumoured to drain the blood of livestock — gets loose on a cruise ship. John Rhys-Davies is the ship's captain. He delivers every line with the gravity of a man who has been in Lord of the Rings and is absolutely not going to let a chupacabra film change his standards. The creature is CGI and looks like a confused iguana.

Black Mask is a 1996 Hong Kong action film starring Jet Li as a former super-soldier from a secret government program. This guy has had his pain receptors removed, making him immune to physical suffering. Sounds wild, right? He’s hiding out as a librarian, living a quiet life. But wait! His old unit goes rogue and starts assassinating drug lords. What does he do? He puts on a mask and fights back. The action sequences? Oh boy, they are choreographed by Yuen Woo-ping — the sam

The Origins of a Cult Classic Before Rachel from Friends graced our screens, Jennifer Aniston was busy being terrorized by a murderous Irish leprechaun in the wilds of North Dakota. Picture it: the year was 1993, the budget a mere $900,000, and nobody involved in the production of Leprechaun had a clue they were kicking off a franchise that would span eight sequels over 25 years. Aniston's performance as Tory Reding is classic early-nineties horror heroine material — she scre

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Solarbabies is a 1986 MGM film that cost $25 million, bombed catastrophically, and was quietly buried. It is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland where water is controlled by a totalitarian government and orphaned children are raised in institutional compounds where they play a sport involving rollerskates and a ball. One group of orphans finds a glowing orb called Bohdai that has magical healing powers. They escape the compound on roller

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator In 1981, three friends with a camera, a rented cabin in Tennessee, and approximately $90,000 made one of the most influential horror films in history. The Evil Dead — shot by Sam Raimi, starring the impossibly square-jawed Bruce Campbell, and powered entirely by creative desperation — is the kind of film that should not exist. The budget was held together with borrowed money and sheer insanity. The crew slept on the set. Campbell was cov

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Robot Jox is the 1989 Stuart Gordon film that asked: what if geopolitical conflict was resolved by giant manned robots punching each other? The answer is a film that takes its premise completely seriously, delivers impressive practical effects for its budget, and somehow ends up being a genuinely moving story about sportsmanship, sacrifice, and the ethics of spectator violence. It is also a film where a giant robot punches another giant

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Death Bed: The Bed That Eats was filmed in 1977 by George Barry, who had no distribution deal, no industry connections, and no clear path to release. He finished the film and it sat in a vault for 27 years. A bootleg copy circulated in the UK. Patton Oswalt did a comedy bit about it in 2004. This led to Barry discovering his film existed on bootleg VHS, which led to a proper DVD release in 2004. Death Bed: The Bed That Eats is about a be

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Deadly Prey is a 1987 film in which a man is kidnapped from his front garden while taking out the trash wearing only shorts and no shoes, and proceeds to defeat an entire private mercenary army in the California wilderness using nothing but his own mullet and whatever sticks are lying around. It was directed by David A. Prior, who cast his brother Ted Prior in the lead role. Ted Prior spent the entire shoot without a shirt. It was the ri

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Hard Ticket to Hawaii is a 1987 Andy Sidaris film featuring drug smugglers, diamonds, a mutant snake infected with cancer from contaminated lab rats, a blow-up doll used as a decoy, a frisbee with razor blades, and a rocket launcher used against a skateboarder. It was shot in Hawaii with a cast of Playboy models and takes none of this seriously and all of it completely seriously at the same time. It is a perfect film. The Plot (Barely Re

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Jon-Mikl Thor is a Canadian bodybuilder and rock musician who decided in 1987 to make a horror film starring himself as the leader of a hair metal band who battles actual hell demons in a farmhouse. He wrote it, produced it, and cast himself as the hero. The budget was approximately nothing. The demons are rubber hand puppets. The climax involves a plot twist so spectacularly stupid that it circles back around to being genuinely inspired

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator In 1980, Israeli director Menahem Golan made a disco musical set in a dystopian future 1994 where a corporation called Bigsound controls the world through pop music. He cast unknowns, commissioned an original soundtrack of approximately 20 songs, spent $8 million, and produced something so completely disconnected from normal human experience that it has to be seen to be believed. The Apple is not just a bad film. It is an act of deranged

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator In 1987, Y.K. Kim — a Korean-American taekwondo master and motivational speaker with no filmmaking experience whatsoever — decided to make a movie about friendship, martial arts, and the dangers of cocaine ninjas. He financed it himself. He starred in it himself. He cast his actual taekwondo students in the lead roles. He had no script supervisor, no experienced crew, and no clear understanding of how films were structured. What he had w

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator By the year 2000, the Leprechaun franchise had already sent its killer Irish myth creature to space (Leprechaun 4: In Space, 1996) and Las Vegas (Leprechaun 3, 1995). The logical next destination was the hood. Nobody involved in this decision appears to have questioned it. The result is one of the most gloriously committed pieces of direct-to-video nonsense ever produced — a film that takes its ridiculous premise with complete seriousnes

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator There is no troll in Troll 2. There is also no connection to Troll (1986). What there is: vegetarian goblins, a family on a house-swap vacation to a town called Nilbog, green slime that turns people into plants so the goblins can eat them, and one of the most unhinged pieces of cinema ever committed to VHS tape. Troll 2 is not just a bad movie. It is the Everest of bad movies. The benchmark. The one against which all others are measured.