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

A Gripping Introduction to Rural Horror Stephen King's short story Outlaws and Peace Freaks — later retitled Children of the Corn and featured in Night Shift — is a compact, effective piece of rural horror. It tells the tale of a couple whose car strikes a child on a Nebraska highway. This tragic event leads them to the eerie town of Gatlin, where the adult population has been murdered by children under the religious leadership of a boy preacher named Isaac. The 1984 film ada

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 Vicky FastForward | The Scream Queen of Style The Critters franchise was born from the most transparently derivative origins in 1980s horror: New Line Cinema, having observed the enormous success of Gremlins in 1984, rapidly developed a rival project about small alien creatures causing havoc in a rural setting. What makes Critters remarkable is how thoroughly it escaped those origins. The 1986 film is genuinely inventive — its bounty hunter characters, its Kansas farming

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 Vicky FastForward | The Scream Queen of Style Clive Barker adapted his own novella The Hellbound Heart for his directorial debut in 1987 with a budget of £900,000, and produced something that genuinely shocked audiences who thought they knew what horror movies were. Hellraiser is not, at its core, a story about monsters — it is a story about desire and its consequences, about a woman who wants her skinless resurrected lover enough to feed innocent people to interdimension

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.

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Stuart Gordon adapted H.P. Lovecraft's Herbert West — Reanimator with complete faithfulness to the source material's tone of gleeful nihilism and absolutely none of its period setting. Where Lovecraft wrote a fin-de-siècle horror tale about medical hubris and forbidden knowledge, Gordon set his film in 1985 Miskatonic University and made it a black comedy about a brilliant, sociopathic student who has invented a fluorescent green reagen

By Vicky FastForward | The Scream Queen of Style Let's talk about Freddy Krueger — the man with the razor glove, the striped sweater, and the most spectacularly deranged sense of humor in all of horror history. A Nightmare on Elm Street arrived in 1984 like a fever dream designed specifically to ruin your sleep forever, and honestly? It succeeded brilliantly. Wes Craven tapped into something primal here: the idea that the one place you're supposed to be safe — your own dreams

By Johnny Rewind | Nostalgia Navigator Before Full Moon Features became synonymous with cheap direct-to-video horror, Charles Band produced Puppet Master — a film about a Nazi hunter, a seaside hotel, a dead puppeteer's secret formula, and a team of animated killer puppets that murdered psychics for reasons involving stolen Nazi gold and Romanian alchemy. The 1989 film launched what became Full Moon's crown jewel franchise: 15 official entries (and counting), a crossover fil

By Vicky FastForward | The Scream Queen of Style House is a 1986 haunted house film that refuses to be only a haunted house film. Its protagonist, Roger Cobb, is a horror novelist and Vietnam veteran whose aunt has died in her own house under mysterious circumstances and whose young son vanished from the same property. He moves in, intending to write his Vietnam memoir, and discovers that the house is either haunted or serving as a portal through which the psychological dama