William Malone wanted to be a director and decided that a horror movie was the way to go. After all, he’d made monster masks at a factory so he could make the monster himself. And by that, I mean spend three months making an H.R. Giger clone. Then he sold his car, mortgaged his house and somehow got Rick Springfield to be in this, but he dropped out the night before shooting started, which feels like a total kayfabe story.

This might seem like a slasher, but then you learn that the killer is drinking spinal fluid and this woman just shows up and says, “Oh, I worked at the lab where we made a creature named the Syngenor that lives off spine juice. And in case you wonder, the name means SYNthesized GENetic ORgansism.”

Yes, the very same Syngenor that Re-Animator villain David Gale goes absolutely full-on bonkers within. That’s why when this movie was released to DVD, it got the new title Scared to Death: Syngenor.

Malone would move on to make Creature, House on Haunted Hill, feardotcom and Parasomnia. If we let him make another movie, I really worry what the title will be. I have no idea who let him make a film again after feardotcom because not even my steady diet of Franco and Mattei could get me through that movie.

You can watch this on Tubi.