11. BREAKING THE MOLD: More than make up, this one is when practical effects masters employ their crafting skills directly to making the whole damn movie.

Hey, Stan Winston directed Pumpkinhead and, well, Michael Jackson’s Ghosts, so a .500 batting average gets you into the hall of fame. Pen Densham and John Watson wrote Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and The Zoo Gang so that seems fine. And there was a rewrite by Parker Bennett and Terry Runte (Mystery Date, Super Mario Brothers), who had come to Hollywood hot.

But knowing everything there is to know about who made this movie won’t save you.

Nothing will prepare you for what you will see.

Also known as Upworld, this has — you knew it — a gnome named Gnorm. According to the incredible Non-Alien Creature Wiki, a gnome in this movie are “… a sapient race of small subterranean humanoids whose society depends upon magical phosphorescent gems called lumens, which provide light in the underground world and allows them to grow their food crops. Their society has individuals divided according to their function, including tunnelers and warriors. Every ten years the warriors bring the lumens to the surface world to be recharged.”

Seeing as how this is a movie about gnomes, you may think that it’s a family comedy. It certainly is set up that way. And then people start getting shot at and there are a lot of cops and the gnome seems like he wants to have sex with every woman in the movie.

Look, 96% of kids said Gnorm was excellent.

Buddy cop movies were so out of control in the late 80s that we ran out of people and had dogs (K9, Turner and Hooch, Top Dog), then kids (Sidekicks, Cop and a Half), then mothers (Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot) and even dinosaurs (Theodore Rex) be buddy cops. Sometimes reincarnated cops as dogs (Poochinski). And then, we got Gnorm.

Gnorm has left home because Rena, the woman he loves, only is into warriors. The warriors all bring the Lumens, a rock that soaks up our sun and powers his underground world, up to the surface to become the rulers of their world. To win the girl, Gnorm comes up here with the stolen Lumens and ends up watching the mob kill someone.

He also looks like something from The Dark Crystal if someone pissed on it.

This movie also dares to make romantic partners — and cop partners — of Anthony Michael Hall and Claudia Christian. Yes, the Geek from Sixteen Candles and Officer Susan Riley from Maniac Cop 2. He’s Casey Gallagher, a rookie who doesn’t even bring his gun to work and she’s hard as it gets Sam, a seasoned cop who keeps covering for Casey when he gets in trouble with their boss, Stan Walton (Jerry Orbach).

Yes, Jerry Orbach is in this puppet movie.

And yes, the bad guy Zadar (Eli Danker) has a henchman named Reggie played by Robert Z’Dar.

Ten people played Gnorm with Rob Paulsen as his voice. He’s also the voice of Pinky, Yakko Warner, Ninja Turtle Donatello, G.I. Joe members Snow Job and Tripwire, and he’s also in Stewardess School. The voice is so weird and upsetting that he created for Gnorm that I have been following my wife around the house saying, “I need the Lumens” until she yells at me.

Anyways, Gnorm and Casey have to team up to get the Lumens back, solve the murder and discover corruption within the police force. There’s a moment where they are both arrested and the cops say, “Strip him,” and we see some near-Gnorm nudity. You can’t even imagine the terror, as this thing looks like the pickled punks that float in sideshow jars except it talks.

There are times when Gnorm is three feet tall. There are also times when he is much taller. He has constantly fluctuating powers, like how sometimes he is a moron and others he can hypnotize people into sleep. He also continually says sexually strange things like how Sam is a pooka with a nice roundie and giant popos.

Kid movie.

At one point, I thought this movie was in Central Park in New York City but then they go to Ventura Beach and you know, that’s the least of this film’s mindblowing things.

Despite reports that Winston planned to end this with a “poignant” ending, it ends happy. That said, there’s a scene where Gnorm gets shot and then we learn that his skin is harder than bullets. I feel like this was edited just like how Duke was supposed to die at the hands of Serpentor but Optimus Prime’s death scarred so many children that Hasbro called at midnight and gave Conrad Hauser a reprieve.

Vestron went out of business, so while this was made in 1988, it wasn’t released until 1990, then again in 1992 — no one saw it either time — then on video in 1994.

I also forgot that there are buddy cop movies with aliens (The Hidden, Alien Nation, I Come In Peace) and zombies (Dead Heat).

This is a film with a hearse chase, everyone not being freaked out at all by a gnome showing up even if he looks like Jar-Jar Bink’s scuzzy cousin who wants to sell you dirtweed, no one being afraid of Robert Z’Dar’s face and my realization that Anthony Michael Hall has done this, said “Evil dies tonight,” was a Not Ready for Prime Time Player and on The Dead Zone.

No one has any chemistry with anyone in this movie. But it does have a gnome punching people straight in the balls and also directly in the asshole, more than once. Then, at the end, after Gnorm shoves his tongue on Sam, he gets all excited when she kisses Casey. He looks at his buddy cop and says, “Hey slug lips. Something wrong with you? Make her toes curl.”

A movie for the children.

You can watch this on Tubi.

10. NEW YORK NEW YORK: A slice and dice set in the city so nice they named it New York.

Has there ever been a better video box?

Jeffrey Franken (James Lorinz) is a bioelectrical scientist who works at a power plant. His life in New Jersey was going so well until his fiancee Elizabeth’s (Patty Mullen) father (J.J. Clark) gives him a lawnmower as a wedding present. It goes wild — yes, really — and mows down Elizabeth.

Anyone else would move on or kill themselves. Not Jeffrey. He gets into self-trepanation, drilling holes into his own skull to take the edge off, as well as eating dinner surrounded by all of Elizabeth’s body parts that he could find. But hey, he knows circuits. So maybe he should leave New Jersey and go to New York City and kill sex workers to build his wife the perfect body, because that’s worked out so well in so many movies like The Brain That Wouldn’t Die.

Jeffrey rents all of Zorro’s (Joseph Gonzalez) girls for one night but gets second thoughts about giving them the super crack he’s invented. They find it, they smoke it, they blow up real good. And now Jeffrey has to assemble a puzzle of bloody body parts to create the perfect new body for his fiancee. She’s impressed but angry at where the parts came from and that she’s slept with — and blown to pieces — several clients before she got her memory back.

This ends with a monster made of sex worker parts dragging an evil pimp to a dungeon and Jeffrey’s head on another woman so that he and his bride can be in love forever. That’s creative.

Another trip into the hellish New York City of Frank Henenlotter, this was a movie that screamed at you in the horror department of your mom and pop video rental place. Literally. The box could talk. The movie that was inside more than lives up to the marketing.

This has an awesome cast. Beverly Bonner shows up as Casey, the same character she played in Brain Damage, Basket Case and Basket Case 2. Elizabeth’s mother is Louise Lasser, the star of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. Horror host Zacherly is the weatherman. The girls of Zorro are played by Kimberly Taylor (Bedroom Eyes II), Charlotte J. Helmkamp (Playboy December 1982 Playmate of the Month), Jennifer Delora, Lia Chang, Susan Napoli (Penthouse Pet of the Month February 1986, AKA Stephanie Ryan in mainstream movies and Carrie McKayan in adult films), adult legend Heather Hunter, Gittan Goding, Vicki Darnell, Sandy Colosimo, Kathleen Gati and Sonya Hensley.

As for Spike the bartender, that’s the awesome Shirley Stoler from The Honeymoon Killers.

You can watch this on Tubi.

9. BUT AFTER THE GIG: Just because the party has ended, that doesn’t mean the activities have.

The Ain’t Rights — bassist Pat (Anton Yelchin), guitarist Sam (Alia Shawkat), drummer Reece Joe Cole) and singer Tiger (Callum Turner) — are ready to get off tour after a show for promoter Tad (David W. Thompson) leaves with almost enough money to get back home. To make up for it, he gets them booked on a show for his cousin Daniel (Mark Webber). When they get there, they learn that they’re opening for a skinhead band.

As they leave, Pat finds the body of a girl named Emily in the green room, stabbed by the drummer of the band that’s on stage now. The bar’s workers Gabe (Macon Blair) and Big Justin (Eric Edelstein) lock the Ain’t Rights in the green room — they did no favors by starting their set with a cover of “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” by the Dead Kennedys — along with the dead girl’s friend Emily (Imogen Poots).

Darcy (Patrick Stewart) is the owner of the bar and the leader of the skinheads. He manages the situation, which has gotten crazier when the cops come. One skin stabs another as a cover story and then he comes for the band, hoping to kill them and cover this up. As they fight their way out, members of the band are killed off with Clark being torn apart by a dog and Reese killed by a man with a machete.

The reason for the murder is that Daniel and Emily wanted to leave the skins. Darcy has told Daniel that the Ain’t Rights are the killers, but Amber explains the situation just in time for him to be killed by a bartender and the dog to return and kill Sam. Now, Pat and Amber have to decide if they want to escape or get revenge.

Director and writer Jeremy Saulnier has created a movie that keeps a brutal pace while staying true to being in a band. He didn’t want to support white nationalist bands, so instead the soundtrack is a mix of punk and metal, including Slayer, Obituary, Fear and Midnight.

I’d been waiting to see this movie for a long time, holding it until it was ready to be watched. It was worth it.

The art for this post comes from Oliver Barrett.

8. POOL PARTY: Is there a swimming pool in your plot? Take a dip, mind the drip.

Look, I never went on a date in high school and missed the prom, so who am I to give advice to the kids, but as I watched this movie, people still under the age of twenty are basing their life decisions on their first relationships instead of realizing life is long and when you’re young, if Madison (Erika Christensen) wants to get her canoe shellacked while you’re trying to teach her to swim, why worry that you already have a girlfriend when you’re both about to go away to college and will break up by Thanksgiving?

The kids are into drama, that’s why. As for me, I was drinking in my room and watching movies all night, which is exactly how I spend my fifties, except I do have a wife now. I get that morality. I don’t get teenage dating morality.

Ben Cronin (Jesse Bradford) is a swimming star who is being worked hard by his coach (Dan Hedaya, who deserves better). He’s good enough to get a scholarship, which may separate him from his girl Amy (Shiri Appleby).

He meets Madison Bell, the new girl in school, by almost hitting her with his car. He gives her a ride home and she leaves her notebook, which is a trick to getting another date. Ben is a bit weirded out to learn that school weirdo Christopher (James DeBello) is her cousin. They have a nice little diner date, she tells him she had a boyfriend back in New York that plays baseball and he tells her he has Amy.

Then he gives her the beans in the swimming pool. They paddle up Coochie Creek. They do some schnoodlypooping. And they also have sex.

Much like every insane woman in every erotic thriller, that night of passion unlocks the killing machine inside Madison’s mind, making her try and force Amy out when all she seemingly wanted was one night of love like in that Heart song. Look, more advice, when you’re having sex and someone says, “I need you to tell me you love me, just for me. It doesn’t mean anything,” it means something. And you’re probably going to lose your friends, rabbit and anything else you love.

Madison then dates and kills his rival Josh (Clayne Crawford), makes it seem like Ben is on steroids and then sets him up for Josh’s murder. Oh yeah, she also runs Amy off the road dressed like Ben.

Our protagonist heads off to the hospital where Amy’s baseball boyfriend Jake is in a coma, a place that Madison still visits. He sets her up and when she confronts him, his jock friends videotape her confessing as she thinks that it’s just her and Ben. The sixteen year old always alive in my old body hates this moment, because the enemy has become the hero and I can’t deal with that, even today when I have compromised so many times.

If you think this is where this movie ends, you have never seen an erotic thriller.

This was produced by Furthur Films, which is owned by Michael Douglas, the absolute lord and master of getting insane women to try and destroy his life while also being a rich jerk that we have to somehow cheer for.

Director John Polson is also an actor and mainly works in episodic cable today.

All these years, I thought this movie starred Julia Stiles. No, that’s Erika Christensen. In the same year as this, she also had sex in a swimming pool in The Banger Sisters. I want to know how her character was able to get Amy into an office chair, perfectly in the center of the pool yet can’t swim herself.

Also: I thought Jesse Bradford was Freddie Prinze Jr.

7. LITTLE DEVILS, BIG SHRIEKS: How much terror can a child really wreak?

Look, sometimes I end up watching devil child movies directed by the same guy who made Wild Things 2. He uses the name Jake Johnson in the credits, but that’s Jack Perez, who was also Ace Hannah when he directed Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus. Benjamin Harvey, who wrote this, also made 666: The Beast, which is the sequel where Donald — the child in this one — becomes an adult Antichrist, getting to where Damien Thorn was in three movies in just two.

Scott (Adam Vincent) and Erika (Sarah Lieving) Lawson get to adopt Donald (Booboo Stewart, who was Seth Clearwater in The Twilight Saga) after his parents die in a plane crash. Donald just walked away. And then I realized, oh man, this is The Asylum version of The Omen, released at the same time as the remake.

The flight number? Pacific Airlines Flight 7666.

Erika is the only reporter at the scene, so it just makes sense that she and her husband get Donald. In days, he’s hit by a baseball by Scott’s bad, which sends him to the dentist, who sees the Mark of the Beast on his tongue. He then shoves the drill into the dentist’s face and kills his assistant, then kills the grandfather the next day. No one suspects anything, even after when he was in the hospital earlier, a nurse had sex in the same room as him and died from mushing her head into a pipe.

A crazy nun shows up, as they do.

Lucy (Nora Jesse) shows up as the Satanic Sitter and gets Scott to comply by sneak sucking him off, which only works so long because it’s kind of hard to ignore that your adopted son is the Antichrist.

Does a cop kill the father before he can kill the son? Have you seen this before too? Or have we all seen the same movie?

At the end, Donald is now living with Erika’s sister Mary Lou (Kim Little), who is Martha Stewart and plans on raising the devil child all alone. If you ask your grandmother for The Omen for Christmas, you may get this movie. She still loves you, but she doesn’t know the difference.

You can watch this on Tubi.

6. MAN’S BEST FRIEND?: This canine is no pal of mine.

Directed by Antonio Isasi-Isasmendi, who wrote it with Juan Antonio Porto and Alberto Vázquez Figueroa, this is the story of political prisoner and mathematician Aristides Ungria (Jason Miller, as good here as he was in The Exorcist). He’s been in jail for years when he gets the chance to escape. Earlier in the movie, we watch as an armed guard and his dog hunt down another prisoner and kill him. The same situation happens to Aristides, who kills the man and lets the dog live. Big mistake.

Yes, I realize, the dog is a tool of a corrupt system. But the dog is nature and a perfect predator and only knows that the man who raised him and commanded him, his alpha, is dead and that he has to kill the man who did this. So every time Aristides seems to get a chance to relax — or have sex with a woman named Muriel (Lea Massari) who helps him hide out — the dog shows up and destroys everything and everyone.

Even when he makes it back to the revolutionaries that he is a part of, there’s still danger. And still that dog, hunting and waiting and ready to kill. Miller looks quite frankly afraid for his life in every scene with the dog and he should be. It’s terrifying and this is coming from someone who had a one-eyed German Shepherd maul him as a child.

This dog is the same as a T-800, an unstoppable engine of fright and decimation. When the movie suddenly becomes told from his point of view, that’s the exact moment that my allegiance changed from the correct political side to the side of the animal. Any time you use a dog POV shot, you win me over, you know?

You can get this from Severin or watch it on Tubi.

5. BROKEN BONES: Snap, crackle, “stop… is it sticking out?”

Dr. Edward Pretorius (Ted Sorel) has created the Resonator, which allows him to see beyond reality. You know, like the title. When Dr. Crawford Tillinghast (Jeffrey Combs) activates it, he sees all sorts of monsters floating around him, including one that bites him. Pretorious, instead of never turning it on again, goes wild and turns it up to 11. Crawford runs, Pretorious loses his head and Crawford is arrested for his murder by Detective Bubba Brownless (Ken Foree).

Dr. Katherine McMichaels (Barbara Crampton) treats him in a mental ward and discovers that his pineal gland has become enlarged. Interested by the machine, she, Crawford and Bubba go back to the lab and attempt to rebuild the machine. When they get it turned on, a nude and floating Pretorius appears, surrounded by monsters and slimy tentacles. Almost everyone barely makes it out alive.

Even after that, Katherine thinks the machine can help people who have schizophrenia and brain damage, so she turns it back on and Pretorius tries to drag her back into his new realm. Gigantic bees eat Bubba and Crawford has his pineal gland emerge from his forehead. Now, everyone thinks Katherine is insane and she’s saved from shock treatment by a brain and eye hungry Crawford, as the two escape and take a bomb back to the house.

The end of this movie upset me so much, as she launches herself out of a window to escape the blast and  her leg breaks into pieces before yelling, “They ate him!”

Shot in Italy at the Dinocitta Studios that were bought by Empire, this was made at the same time as Dolls, another movie by director Stuart Gordon. Between four effects teams and a nearly all Italian crew, they got a lot out of this movie’s low budget. I watched this so many times on cable, always covering my eyes, and even today it still has enough gross moments to make me question watching it.

I love that Barbara Crampton sold her leather BDSM outfit from this movie at a yard sale.

4. FAMILY MATTERS: It takes a family to raise this village.

Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed) has figured out how to get his patients to get rid of mental illness through changing their bodies by psychoplasmics. It sounds ridiculous but it works and its helping Nola Carveth (Samantha Eggar), a woman in a battle with her husband Frank (Art Hindle) over their daughter Candice (Cindy Hinds). Something weird is happening, though, as Frank keeps finding scratches all over his little girl, so Raglan intensifies his techniques to help Nola get custody. That’s when he discovers that eureka moment that some therapists believe is behind every psychosis. Nole was abused by her mother (Nuala Fitzgerald) and ignored by her father (Henry Beckman).

A past patient, Jan Hartog (Robert A. Silverman), tells Frank that the treatments have given him lymphoma. While learning more, he’s left his daughter with his wife’s mother, who is soon killed by something…small. And Candice watches the whole thing. After the same thing kills Nola’s father, Frank kills it, revealing an aesexual toothless man-child. Worse, even with Raglan’s institute closing, now Nola commands an army of these creatures.

David Cronenberg said, “The Brood is my version of Kramer vs. Kramer, but more realistic.” He was going through a divorce and even cast Hindle and Eggar as they looked like him and his ex-wife. Eggar went all out, even cleaning one of the strange children after it was born, saying “I just thought that when cats have their kittens or dogs have puppies (and I think at that time I had about 8 dogs), they lick them as soon as they’re born. Lick, lick, lick, lick, lick…”

As for the critics, Leonard Maltin said, “Eggar eats her own afterbirth while midget clones beat grandparents and lovely young schoolteachers to death with mallets. It’s a big, wide, wonderful world we live in!” and rated it an outright “BOMB.”” Roger Ebert said, ” “Are there really people who want to see reprehensible trash like this?” And Vaughn Palmer stated, “The people who made The Brood do not like people. They do not even appear to like themselves. They just like money.”

Man, what were those guys watching? While I know this is in no way a comfortable watch, it feels like it came from Cronenberg’s heart and soul. I mean, as much as any movie with killer genderless miniature people murdering a teacher in front of her class can be.

3. BLURRING THE LINES: Magical realism is the key for today’s witnessing.

Dora (Dora Postigo) has been raised by her father Diego (Hovik Keuchkerian) but has always heard that she looks nothing like him and everything like her mother Piral. Yet she has no memories and asks her father for his. She decides to seek out her mom and learn where she came from.

This brings her to a hospital where she meets her grandmother Maribel (Carmen Machi) and her lover Coco (Carmen Maura), who is married to the richest man in Capital City, whose coma is interrupted with a bullet and the blame is placed on Dora.

The journey that Dora takes is much like this film’s inspiration, The Wizard of Oz, only the scarecrow character, Muneco (Ayax Pedrosa), is a skinny drug abuser and Jose (Luis Bermejo) is a man in a grey suit driving a silver car. And there’s also a lion as well as a frightened man who goes by the name of Akin (Wekaforé Jibril).

I like the idea that when Dora hears music the world hears it with her, but there’s so much in this movie, too much, and it just seems to meander around when you want it to fly. At least Toto looks super cute and that’s a big part of this story, at least to me.

I know what director Paco León is going for and I wish he hit his lofty goal. But this just takes the ideas of the story and kind of seems like it takes forever to get somewhere, anywhere.

2. DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS: Mad scientists never seem to follow the rules…

Jane Marvin used to be Joyce Webster and they’re both played by Beverly Garland. She has amnesia because of something that happened in her past, something that scientists plan on getting to the bottom of.

She used to be married to Paul Webster (Richard Crane), a man who disappeared on their train honeymoon and ran back to the Cypresses Plantation in Bayou Landing, Louisiana. She follows him there and gets treated horribly by Lavinia Hawthorne (Frieda Inescort), who runs the home. There’s no train until the morning, so she stays in a room that she must not leave. That night, Joyce watches a shadowed man play piano before running out of the house.

Dr. Mark Sinclair (George Macready) wants to tell her the truth before Lavinia reveals that she is Paul’s mother. He had been torn apart in a plane crash and Dr. Mark had used a special formula to regenerate his body parts. That medical miracle has since turned Paul into, well, an alligator person.

There’s also a swamp man named Manon (Lon Chaney Jr.) who has already rescued Joyce from a snake before trying to assault her. He busts into the doctor’s lab just as they blast Mark with cobalt radiation. As the two fight, the lab is decimated and explodes. Mark is now a straight up alligator with an actual reptile head and he looks amazing, like the Gorn but way cheaper. He runs hard into the swamp and, yes, dies in quicksand while his wife watches.

The scientists decide not to tell Jane that she was Joyce. I mean, how would you?

Directed by Roy Del Ruth and written by Orville H. Hampton Charles O’Neal and Robert M. Fresco, this has a great look thanks to cinematographer Karl Struss, who won four Oscars for his work over his career. This was the other feature for Return of the Fly, which was in CinemaScope and needed another horror movie in that format. It was an independent movie purchased by 20th Century Fox.

What’s really wild is that there was almost an Atari 2600 game for this movie. 20th Century Fox had commissioned it and when collectors found the ROMs, for years they thought they had the actual game. Instead, in 2002, the real Alligator People game was discovered and it was learned that the other game was Planet of the Apes.

The game is similar to Pac-Man, with Jane being a syringe. You must save her friends who have become Alligator People before they eat you.

You can watch this on YouTube.