Way back during the Giant Monstershow in 2018, I wrote of Bill Rebane’s Giant Spider Invasion, “Great films have been made with bad film stock, cheap lenses, and muddled sound. This ain’t one of them.” Not too long afterwards, I saw a restored print of the movie, and was reminded that often there is a big difference between a VHS transfer formatted for CRT televisions, and what was new when it actually hit theaters. The difference between the restored print and what Mike and the bots screened on MST3K is night and day. Still, restoring it was only polishing a turd.
I bring this up because this evening’s film is Rana: The Legend of Shadow Lake, also from Wisconsin-based auteur Bill Rebane. Like The Giant Spider Invasion print that I watched in 2018, this print looks and sounds like garbage. The picture is mud and the sound is AM radio-quality. Specs for the film are sparse on the internet, but I suspect this film has been treated with the same lack of archival care as Rebane’s earlier film. At some point, someone is going to make the bad decision to restore this film, as well. Until then, the poor quality print only adds to this film’s shitty bona fides. That, and because it was distributed by Troma. Continue reading “October Horrorshow: Rana: The Legend of Shadow Lake, aka Croaked: Frog Monster from Hell”
What a pair of titles. Video Demons Do Psychotown and Bloodbath in Psycho Town. Both are great titles for a sleazy drive-in horror flick featuring the three ‘B’s’ — Blood, Breasts, and Beasts. Well, there are two of those, which doesn’t make this flick a total bust, but viewers have been subjected to that all-too common feature of shitty filmmaking: the misleading title. Titles like that above promise something extreme, something visceral, something that satisfies the basest desires of the depraved horror movie fan. But, in truth, this flick is just cheap.
Blood, gore, low production values, a little gratuitous nudity, and charm out the wazoo. That’s Nightbeast, the 1982 sci-fi/horror flick from b-movie filmmaker Don Dohler. It’s a simple film with a simple idea: an alien passing by Earth runs into a stray asteroid and crashes in rural Maryland. It’s an angry beast, and it wastes no time slaughtering the locals with its laser gun.
What a shitty movie. From Troma Entertainment, a production company well-versed in churning out b-movie fare (most famously the Toxic Avenger series of films and its spinoffs), Class of Nuke ‘Em High is self-aware schlock. From the opening scene to the end, the filmmakers never miss a chance to remind the viewer that what they are watching is not meant to be taken seriously. But the way they choose to draw attention to this fact, with overwrought characters and performances, only serves to make the film feel forced. It revels in cheapness, and this would be a good thing, if only they weren’t trying so hard. At every step of the film, Troma seeks to establish its brand, reveling in its ineptness at putting together something that is watchable.