Our friends at the 92YTribeca and the film bloggers behind Not Coming to a Theater Near You have put together a Fright Night VHS Double Feature of two of the cheesiest, most ridiculously horrible horror films of ’80s. Killer Workout consists of slayings around an aerobics gym, and Chopping Mall is the brilliant combination of horny teens after hours in a mall teemed with killer robot security guards.
The movie’s pun-tastic tagline is “where shopping costs you an arm and a leg,” and its amazing trailer is not to be missed.
The films screening at the 92YTribeca on Saturday night are far from isolated gems of the decade; below find five of the cheesiest ’80s horror movies we could dig up.
1. Slumber Party Massacre is the incredible tale of a high school slumber party where girls are conveniently naked at home (and freshly showered), for your terrifying pleasure. Written by a bisexual feminist activist, Massacre contains such great lines as, “You’re not going to eat the dead guy’s pizza?” to which a girl doing just that responds, “I feel better already, really I do!” It’s a sexy, scary time for all! Warning: The trailer contains lots of bare barely legal girl parts.
2. Gene Simmons is a radio DJ in Trick or Treat. He gives a kid the only copy of the last album of a recently deceased rocker who he was a big fan of. From this record, the rocker speaks from beyond the grave and possesses the boy to kill high school bullies, before eventually coming out of the record and doing the dirty work himself (only traveling through electronic devices). The tagline is “His fans won’t let him die. He won’t let them live.” We won’t let you down – Ozzy Osbourne appears as a televangelist against heavy metal music.
3. Return to Horror High stars a young George Clooney in a story about a murderer returning to the high school where he committed his crimes. The highly original tagline is “Return to Horror High. It’s a scream.” Which is really all you need to know, as everyone in the trailer basically just screams their head off.
4. In 976-EVIL, a film by none other than Robert “Freddy Krueger” Englund, dialing the eponymous number ostensibly gets you to a novelty fortune phone line, but really, it’s controlled by Satan! He entices humans to enact his will, and slowly two cousins turn against each other, with an opening to Hell itself popping up right in front of their house. Like Buffy’s Hellmouth, but way more lame. “Revenge is on the Line” is the official tagline, but doesn’t “When you call, Satan answers!” sound better?
5. In The Stuff, a newly discovered delicious no calorie ice cream-like substance either turns people into zombies, or kills them, from the inside-out or through suffocation. Sweet! Its tagline is fittingly “Are you eating it… or is it eating you?” The film’s actually a supposed satire on consumerism, so you can explain this to your more high-minded friends & still satisfy your tasty horror craving.
We hope you get a kick out of some of these (we know we did). What are some of your favorite cheesy ’80s horror movies?