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.