In the 1985 horror anthology, Tim Ritter created a short called “Truth of Dare” in the movie Twisted Illusions. A year later, he’d expand that story into this slasher.

With a budget of $200,000, this was shot on 16mm film so it’s another one of those “if it’s released on video, it’s shot on video” films. Well, it was made expressly for the direct to video. market and mom and pop shops, so there’s that. Ritter was just 18 when this was made in Palm Beach County, Florida and due to creative differences with the producers he was removed from the film and producer Yale Wilson is listed as the director on the original VHS release.

There are several sequels, all directed and written by Ritter: Wicked Games, Screaming for Sanity: Truth or Dare 3, Deadly Dares: Truth or Dare Part IV and I Dared You! Truth or Dare 5, as well as a bootleg sequel, Writer’s Block, which was sold as Truth or Dare 2.

Mike Strauber (John Brace) finds his wife Sharon in bed with his best friend Jerry and poor Mike has the kind of mental breakdown that inevitably turns one into a slasher villain. He heads off and picks up a hitchhiker and remembering a game of truth or dare where he cut himself with a razor blade, he listens to the hitchhiker’s requests and slices himself up. Except that there’s no hitchhiker. Mike’s lost it.

A year later, Mike gets released from the Sunnyville Mental Institution. Blame budget cuts. Blame too many patients. Blame the fact that Mike is crazy but also smart. His good behavior is noticed and the first thing he does when he gets out is killing Jerry and then go after his ex-wife. When he’s wounded in this murder attempt, he goes back to Sunnyville and is soon back to hallucinating disfigured patients telling him to destroy his face and wear a mask. After one of the attendants is dumb enough to taunt Mike with a photo of his ex-wife, he stabs the orderly with a pencil to the eye Fulci-style and finds a cache of weapons, because that’s exactly what is sitting around a mental hospital.

At this point, Mike just goes wild, committing crimes such as hitting a stroller with his car — the baby launches high in the air — and then going back to roll over the mother; machine gunning an entire bench full of senior citizens; doing a drive-by chainsawing of a Little League player and finally trying to kill his wife all over again. Oh Mike, they’re just going to put you back in Sunnyville.

Ridiculous in all ways and therefore worth watching. I also believe that Rob Zombie completely took the papier mâché first mask that Michael wears in his remake from this movie.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Joe LaPenna did special effects for Tales for the Darkside and Alien Beasts before directing and writing this, his one and only film which was intended as a portfolio for his work.

D’Asaro Michael plays Stanley, a not-so-great magician who mostly does work at parties for kids. Then he gains a magic ring and it brings two female gargoyles — yes, that title was not lying — into his life. One of them, Gwendolyn (Sasha Graham, who is still making microbudget films), is the nice one, kind of like Splash with wings. Her sister, however, realizes that if you’re a demon woman in the modern world, you should probably start to do some damage.

The romcom nature of this isn’t exactly to my liking in inverse proportion to how much I love the actual gargoyle girls in this, which look like they stepped out of the art of Coop or a particularly well-stocked Hot Topic and want to break my heart.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Doctor Wilbur Frank is so passionate about his job that he keeps on doing it even when he gets fired for performing experiments against nature. You have to respect that drive, I mean, other than the fact that he’s started kidnapping women to be the experimental subjects for a human growth serum that as far as I can tell only makes human beings pop out fully grown Xtro style. Well, again, human beings is kind of questionable, as whatever crawls out isn’t human and soon flips out and kills the unkind doctor before heading off into the institute where a cop and two of Wilbur’s assistants have to track it down and destroy it. Or, you know, they could just let it go but then we wouldn’t have a movie.

Director and writer Ron Switzer was a one and done contributor to the world of shot on video — well, 16mm in parts and as you know, if it came out on video and looked cheap, often people just lump it all in — and what an entry he gave us.

Between the droning bleats of the synth soundtrack that are punctuated by breathing, endless breathing there is also editing that at best can be described as inadequate; an eight-minute plus aerobics sequence; a setting that can include not just a mad scientist lab but also a parking garage, a gym, a theater and a chemical weapons company; the creature being named The Fiend; endless repetition of said Fiend wandering down the same hallway again and again; more of that deep breathing (the most Canadian deep breathing since Black Christmas); incredible lighting and shot composition that is soon followed by amateur errors like The Fiend literally walking into the camera and nobody cutting that from the film; The Fiend slow-motion drowning a woman and nobody stopping it because, well, who knows; and again, more wandering down that same hallway.

Either you’re going to love this as it gives you the same feeling of taking narcotics and not having to work for several days and just staring at the same scenes so much that you don’t know where the movie begins or ends or you’re going to hate it and feel like it’s not even a movie.

Isn’t that how it should be?

You can download this from the Internet Archive or order a limited edition DVD from Videonomicon.

This is not the 1976 Donald Jackson film The Demon Lover nor is it the Scott Valentine-starring My Demon Lover. Instead, this is the story of Jenny Harris (Ashlie Rhey, Body of Influence, Bikini Drive-In) and the horrible men in her life: the husband who cheats on her, the boss (Joe Estevez) who talks down to her and the incubus she conjures that kills people.

Maybe I only know that the succubus who appear in movies — Erika Blanc in The Devil’s Nightmare, Megan Fox in Jennifer’s Body, Karen Black in Trilogy of Terror — are uniformly gorgeous. The incubus in this — pardon me while I burst — is a balding, pot-bellied man who isn’t strictly a sexual dynamo but magic being what magic is, Jenny falls madly into his arms and onto his loins.

Reasons to watch: Abundant nudity; Michelle Bauer getting her heart ripped clean out; Robert Z’Dar seeing if a mustache works for him as a cop; Lauren Hayes, who eventually played Cara Loft in the softcore Womb Raider; Gwen Summer, who like direct to video pretty girls was also on Renegade, so Lorenzo Lamas always had a bevy of beauties around him; a fake Necronomicon; the shrill noise that will make your dog lose his mind every time the incubus shows up and, as in nearly every late 80s movie, fog machine overuse.

Director Mike Tristano also directed The Flesh Merchant, Cyber Seeker, Dark Nova, Savage Season and several more films, but today is probably better known for his work as a weapons provider and master armorer. Writer T. Martin Smith also worked with him on the movies Cyber Seeker and Body Count.

Ah 1992. May your movies forever be filled with lengthy foggy lensed love scenes, neon hues, Robert Z’Dar and so, so, so much fog.

In the same way that Bikers versus the Undead exists for those that want more of the Dawn of the Dead end scenes of lawless motorcycle club members against zombies, Zombie Army says, “What if the army guys in Day of the Dead were a bit more heroic?”

Thanks to The Schlock Pit — one of my favorite sites — I learned that the writer of this movie — Roger Scearce — is actually its producer John Kalinowski, who had the actual military mission once of discovering if a former insane asylum could be repurposed as a military facility. While there, he saw that it was the perfect setting for a horror film and the army actually let him use the facility for The Zombie Army. One imagines plenty of the soldiers and the equipment they go into zombie combat with also came from Uncle Sam.

Director Betty Stapleford was actually a drama coach who had several students in the cast. She helped Kalinowski with their performances and to her surprise, she ended up being credited as the director.

The lessons here are that if you’re turning a sanitarium into a military base do a sweep for mad scientists and that an experimental battalion of women soldiers can die against zombies just as effectively as an old fashioned battalion of men and for 1991 that was progress.

There’s also a sex scene that is potentially still going on downstairs in my movie room weeks after I stopped watching this.

Also: If any viewer had spotted the continuity errors in this, they were able to win a Jeep. As far as I know, nobody has claimed this vehicle.

You can download this from the Internet Archive or purchase it from Makeflix.

I’ve extolled the virtues of SOV in that it’s the most democratic of all film formats — well, iPhone movies would be but no one makes them full length all that often and people today would rather make unboxing videos than get their friends together and make a goofy slasher movie — because for the first time, literally anyone could get a video camera and quickly shoot and edit the movie that was in their head. Even more than Super 8, which still demanded that you hand cut and edit film, the VCR changed the world of films. And due to the need for video stores to have products or — in the case of Halloween Party — public access stations allowing normal citizens to create programming, all manner of new voices got the opportunity to be seen.

Dave Skowronski is one of those voices. A teenager when this was made, this was part of The D.J.P. Halloween Special that aired on a Cheshire, Connecticut public access channel. Halloween Party is just part of that whole affair, as Skowronski hosted parody videos, an older movie he had made and even a “Monster Mash” video with the cast of Halloween Party.

What you get is a movie that has only the most tenuous of slasher set-ups — Becky is having a party and that old farmer that killed his family has risen from the grave — but it somehow combines a film that gives you an authentic time capsule of 1989 teenagers — farts and all — with a movie that loves Halloween so much that it Bruno Mattei-style lifts music from the first, fourth and fifth movie. Also: the arrangement of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” from 2001 and the theme from Attack of the Killer Tomatoes also show up, copyrights be damned.

Yet all is forgiven because the farmer has makeup that looks frankly horrifying and when combined with the darker hues and blurry quality of the video format appears even more sinister.

Everyone talks too fast. Most of them showed up probably for the chance to get free soda and Doritos at a suburban house party that was turned into the setting for this movie. There’s also a scene where two girls abuse one another vocally that reminds me that I’ve forgotten the dudes who knocked out my teeth in hockey or broke a bone in wrestling, but have never ever forgotten off-hand comments a mean fourth grade girl said to me.

At once a tribute to the power of the slasher, the joy of making any movie you want and an amber capture of the teenage years of 1989, Halloween Party is true magic.

You can watch this on YouTube.

EDITOR’S NOTE: You can read another article about this movie here.

How did I get this far into SOV movies without more Donald Farmer?

The band Rikk-O-Shay is trying to get big in the heavy metal business and you know what would help? If their lead singer Michelle Shock (Carol Carr) wasn’t biting off their male groupies’ cocks and draining them of their blood. She tries the same thing to Derrick (Nikki Riggins),  who is one of the band’s two backup singers and let’s just stop there and say that no other hard rock or metal band seemed to ever have dedicated singers outside of Motley Crue and their Nasty Habits backup singers and dancers (the fact that I knew they were named Donna McDaniel and Emi Canyn maybe says something about how much I read Hit Parader as a teenager). This already seems unrealistic.

Well, Michelle invites Derrick over for some demonic fellatio and he ends up nearly dying too, so they replace her with a new singer named Jamie Summers and she’s neither the Six Million Dollar Woman or the Brat. She’s played by Melissa Moore, Glaze from Vice Academy Part 2 and Angelfist. She’s soon overcome by the same demonic possession thanks to Michelle.

The fact that a full demon-suited monster is coming after a band because they screwed with their demonic leader, well, this is the kind of movie that seems like a Jack Chick pamphlet come to life. As I watch years after I was a Rip! obsessed lover of metal, well, I found it all so very charming. So much blood, so many puppet demons, Tennessee instead of the Sunset Strip, video in the place of film. This is at the center of so many of my loves — devil movies, SOV, heavy metal, gore — all within one great compilation. Rock on.

You can watch this on YouTube.

First off, major points for the title, which you can guess has nothing to do with Meir Zarchi’s movie.

Twenty five years ago, a chainsaw killer was wiping out young lovers and you know what would be a bad idea? To open a research station on the grounds, right in the upper peninsula of Michigan, top of the mitten. The grounds were supposed to be sold to a man who was just back from Vietnam, but his father sold it from under him to his brother who soon died. None of this sounds safe. Nor does leaving your van miles from the cabin because of mud. Just turn around.

There’s a jerk local cop — I should have just said local cop and you’d have added that adjective in your head — as well as scientists doing what they do, which in this is having lots of sex. There’s also a protective butch character named Terry who deals out Tarot cards and is good with a shotgun and if you think I was sad that she got killed you have been reading my words.

You can also tell that Alex Black, who played Shelly, is the actress most comfortable with nudity, as she’s naked more often than not. I guess she’s a naturalism expert. If a scene had her playing volleyball like a 60s nudie cutie I would not be surprised.

The box art has nothing to do with this movie, promising so much more than is delivered, which I respect, but then again, the end of this movie makes up for everything as it has an appearance by Chekov’s woodchipper.

You can watch this on Daily Motion.

No, this isn’t the other title for Fernando Di Leo’s 1980 home invasion slasher Madness. I mean, that one has Joe Dallesandro in it.

This one was directed by Brian Labuda when he was just a teenager and had access to a family video camera, but go with me on this. It’s not bad. I mean, the kid was in eighth grade when he made this, his friends all seem so much younger and yet they were able to come together and make a forty-minute SOV horror movie complete with early 2000s punk touchstones like a nearly brand new Ramones shirt and yes, a Goldfinger tee.

Better than it has any right to be, this film puts you dead center into a 2000s version of “do you want to see a dead body” except that it’s “do you want to see several dead bodies and perhaps even be one of them?”

We all had hobbies as a kid like drawing comics or playing in bands, right? No one is ever going to see my scribbled remixes of comics like Grips and Mr. A. They will also never hear my horrific high school hair metal band Nasty Habitz or Pretty Boy Floyd or even my 2000s rap rock outfit Mr. Blonde. Yet everyone in this movie has been trapped in amber and we can see their past fun and marvel at not only how entertaining it is, but how much of a joy it had to be to make.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Joey and Toby are doing what all delinquents did in 1991 and that’s racing their BMX bikes instead of learning in school. Soon, they discover a miniature coffin with a statue of the demon Asteroth inside and even when a spirit that looks like a younger Reverend Henry Kane appears and tells them to just stop, then laugh and keep it. Where do you find a coffin in the Nevada desert? Anyways, later that night, Joey’s brother Josh has a seance party — seriously, what else is there to do but try and drive into the middle of nowhere to find a generator-powered Kyuss performance? — and like a bunch of kids playing Sabbath in their garage and sounding not that bad, this movie decides to riff on a cover of Night of the Demons.

Joey also is cool enough to have a poster of the remake of The Blob in his bedroom, so I was on his side.

Then this movie delivers what its body and eyeball-strewn credits promised: demonic possession and relentless gore. Seriously, a Fulci-worshipping eyeball decimation, heads literally rolling, a saw through the crotch and bodies literally shredded in half.

Director and writer Charles Lang also made High Desert, in which partying teens run into a biker gang. Also, IMDB lists the wrestler Taz in this and honestly, you’d think I’d remember if Taz was in this. I think whoever did the IMDB saw that a character named Rocky is played by someone named Tazz and went with it.

Stick through all the 90s dude talk and basketball scenes. You are about to see something special.

You can watch this on YouTube.