Sometimes, a movie will blow your mind in a way that you may never recover. These are ten of our favorites, the ones where we just wonder how they got made, how people reacted to them and how we can convince people to watch them.

1. Son of Dracula: Combine Harry Nilsson performance scenes with a British horror film directed by Freddie Francis and add in some Ringo Starr as Merlin the Magician. This movie didn’t just fade from theaters, it practically disappeared like a vampire at first dawn. The sheer fact that it was made has made me question reality for years.

2. Bizarre: Drink this cocktail in. Start with an Amicus-style portmanteau film. Add Williams Burroughs style cut-up technique. Sprinkle liberally with Page 3 girls. Now, add a mummy as the narrator. This one will melt whatever you have left of your brain, trust me.

3. The Visitor: I’m still trying to unpack this movie and I’ve watched it more than ten times. Let me try again: a gang of bald children from space try to make an evil little girl turn good while her stepfather tries to ensure that she remains evil, all so his basketball team can win the championship. Also, Shelly Winters shows up. And Franco Nero looks like Jesus. There is also a lot of dancing.

4. Pin: Canadians are crazy. Polite, but crazy. Also, when they die, they leave behind anatomy dummies to raise their children. I can’t even do justice to the sheer level of lunacy that this movie contains.

5. Suicide Cult/The Astrologer: This is probably the only film that you’ll ever see that concerns a government agency tracking the biorhythms of the Antichrist and the new Virgin Mary. It is also both immensely exciting and incredibly boring, all at the same time, a rare feat in filmmaking.

6. Harlequin: This is the film that answers the question, “What if someone remade the story of Rasputin in modern day Australia but instead of looking like a hairy bear, Rasputin looked and dressed like David Bowie?”

7. American Tiger: Olympic gold medalist Mitch Gaylord gets mixed up in a battle between a Chinese sorceress and a faith healing televangelist played by Donald Pleasance who is really a warthog, all directed by Sergio Martino. There’s a shower sex scene where the hero doesn’t take off his jeans. If you aren’t racing to find this movie after that last sentence, you can leave this site right now and never come back.

8. If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do?: Exploitation director Ron Ormond survived two brushes with the afterlife and then decided to stop selling sin and start saving people from its wages, along with the biggest Commie hater of all time, Estus Pirkle. This movie is not for the weak, as it depicts what WILL happen when Communists overrun our country, machine gunning Baptists in the street and chopping off the heads of children with thick Southern accents. Rating: ten billion stars out of five.

9. Things: You know how in HP Lovecraft stories, strange colours out of shape descend from space and cursed books drive anyone that read them insane? Those little fairy tales were just warm ups to what will happen when you watch this movie, perhaps the most nonsensical barrage of nothing that will ever obsess you. You think The Room is fucked up? Take off your skinny jeans and grow your Hitler youth haircut out, hipster. You’re about to get mindfucked by the best there is.

10. Zardoz: How do you follow up being James Bond, one of the most recognizable roles in the world? How do you follow up directing Deliverance? If you’re Sean Connery and John Boorman, you make a post-apocalyptic movie all about…fuck, I have no idea how to explain it. There are allusions to The Wizard of Oz, two races warring ala the future in The Time Machine, a flying head and Sir Connery wearing a red thong that he later exchanges for a wedding dress.

These are the films that almost made the list:

Exorcist II: The Heretic: John Boorman almost got on here twice with this follow-up, which puts Regan in a clinic for children while teaming her up with Richard Burton as they struggle against African demons. Audiences had to have been incensed as they hoped for more of the original and were greeted with this utterly baffling — and yet somehow awesome — film.

Cathy’s Curse: You come into this movie expecting that it’s going to rip off The Exorcist and The Omen. Once you see a man crash a car to avoid a rabbit in the first thirty seconds, you realize that you’re now in the strangest place of all: Canada, where people behave in ways that seem human but are as alien as a Man in Black trying to eat with his ear.

The Redeemer: Son of Satan: Somehow both a slasher made years before Halloween and an occult freakout complete with possessed thumbs, this film owes more to surrealism than horror.

Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals: I pity anyone that rented this in the 1980’s thinking that they were about to watch a Sylvia Kristel sex romp and were greeted with this Joe D’Amato directed assault on sensibilities and good taste. This movie upset David Cronenberg so badly that it inspired Videodrome. I’ve seen a lot of movies, but this is the only one where the main character has lesbian sex with a cannibal.

Lemora, A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural: If any child ever watched this, they’d be scarred for life. A choirgirl is taken to speak to her dying father before meeting her real mother and an entire town of vampires. Yep. You just read that.

There are so many strange films I’ve sought out that I might just have to make a second list. What are some of the movies that have screwed with your head?

“And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” We’ve been living in the shadow of the nuclear clock since like mid 1940’s, but that wasn’t stopped Hollywood (and Australia, the Philippines and most especially, Italy) from making movies about the end of the world. You may have noticed that we’ve covered a lot of these movies. Here’s our ever-growing list of the ones that we feel just might be the best, yet in no particular order.

1. The Road Warrior series: No movie on this list made post-1979 is without a debt to this series of films. Starting with Mad Max, which presents a society on the verge of collapse and the lawman who tries to make sense of it, this series has one constant: Max Rockatansky. Whether he’s a cop, a survivor, a gladiator or even perhaps death itself, he’s definitely the most enduring character in the post-apocalyptic film genre. So many of the tropes of this genre find their root in these films: graffiti-covered muscle cars,  hockey masked or face painted body armored warriors, large stretches of the desert and/or bombed out cities and gas/water meaning more than money. They could make four hundred of these movies and I would watch every single one of them.

2. Escape from New York/Escape from Los Angeles: As the Italian apocalypse films will soon prove, the second source from which all decent end of the world movies spring from is the fertile brain of John Carpenter. This makes plenty of sense, as there’s a fine line between Snake Plissken and cowboys of American cinema, just as there’s not much difference between the plots of most spaghetti westerns and end of the world films. Well, except for all the mutants and cars, of course.

3. Enzo G. Castellari’s Bronx series: Starting with 1982’s 1990: The Bronx Warriors and followed up with 1983’s Escape from the Bronx, Trash and his gang the Riders face the end of all things head on. From Fred Williamson dressed as a pirate with a girlfriend that uses a Freddy Krueger claw and a whip as weapons to a modern dance troupe gang in silver face paint — not to mention a scene where a drummer randomly shows up at a gang summit — these films are the perfect synthesis of all that came before (The Warriors, The Road Warrior, Escape from New York). You can also kind of, sort of include Rats: The Night of Terror in these films.

4. Willy Milan’s Filipino post-apocalyptic films: You think the Italians have the patent on after the bomb fun? Nope. Let me introduce you to Willy Milan, the creator of two absolute gonzo films: W is War and Mad Warrior. The first starts with the story of a cop who gets his manhood severed and goes after the go kart riding gang that did it. And the second, well, that takes the sheer lunacy of the first and adds a villain who is a cyborg werewolf given to moonlit speeches. No words can contain just how beyond these films are — karate kicks, disco synths, lots of fireworks and plenty of bad haircuts.

5. She: This 1982 offering gives us Sandahl Bergmann as the titular heroine, Nazis, horny werewolves, mummies with chainsaws and Communist mutants who are really into BDSM to the sounds of the Moody Blues, Motörhead and Rick Wakeman. They don’t make movies like this any more. Actually, no one else has really made a movie quite like this.

6. Endgame: I can’t even put my thoughts about this movie into proper sentence structure, so let me just provide why this movie is so great with sentence fragments: Laura Gemser. Al Cliver. Geroge Eastman. A murderous gameshow. Fish mutants. Blinded ninja monks controlled by psychics. Armies of bounty hunters against the government. Mental powers. Sponsored murderers who become celebrities. Seriously, Endgame is one of my favorite movies of all time and yet, no one has released it on blu ray yet in the U.S. Let’s get on that!

7. 2019: After the Fall of New York: Sergio Martino got close to the end of the world with Hands of Steel, but for my money, this one is everything you want in an end of the world flick. You’ve got George Eastman as Big Ape, the guy who just wants to impregnate ladies. A hero named Parsifal. A mercenary with a hook for a hand. And music by Oliver Onions, the dudes who did the music to Yor, Hunter from the Future. We can’t be friends if you don’t watch this.

8. Warriors of the Wasteland: You though Enzo G. Castellari was done after the Bronx series? Dude — he’s just getting started. This is probably my favorite post-apocalyptic film ever made. George Eastman leads the Templars, a gang of anti-religious maniacs clad all in white, who face off against their former member Scorpion, Fred Williamson and Bob from The House by the Cemetery. This is the kind of movie that needs locked up and kept away from me or I’ll just watch it over and over again on a loop.

9. Death Race 2000: Perhaps even more than Mad Max, Death Race 2000 has put its stamp upon all car based apocalyptic films that would follow in its bloody wake. From the designs of the cars and outlandish characters like Frankenstein to its absurdist sense of humor (and let’s not forget appearances by Mary Woronov and Sylvester Stallone), director Paul Bartel set the bar high for all that would follow.

10. A Boy and His Dog: When legendary crank Harlan Ellison’s Vic and Blood series was adapted for the screen, the results were pretty awesome. The telepathic canine and human duo go up against a biosphere of perfect people who dress like it’s the 1930’s and wear theatrical makeup, all to ensure that the dog gets fed and the human gets laid.

Here are a few more for you to check out: Soylent Green, which gets more true every day; Logan’s Run, where no one lives past Life Day; Zardoz, where the Book of Oz ends up kind of sorta of being the Bible before Charlotte Rampling and Sean Connery hook up and turn into skeletons; and Firebird 2015 A.D., which has Darren McGavin loving muscle cars no matter what a totalitarian government does to him — which is sort of like what happened to Lee Majors in The Last Chase, but we digress.

What are some of your favorites? Let us know, below in the comments section.

And be sure to check out our Atomic Dust Bins, Part 1 and Part 2 for more films, as well as our Ten Post-Apocalyptic Vehicles features.

The best part of comic books as a kid was when one character would meet another. Before it got overdone, it was unexpected and a lot of fun. Movies can be the same way. The criteria for these films was that the crossovers had to take you by surprise and not just be a character from one film graduating to their own sequel, such as Evan Baxter graduating to the lead between Bruce Almighty and Even Almighty or Tommy Lee Jones’ Samuel Gerard character getting his own U.S. Marshalls spin-off. Also, if we listed all the crossovers in Pixar films or Ready Player One, it would just get overwhelming. This criteria belongs to no one but us. Don’t like it? Cool — make your own list!

1. Jay and Silent Bob from Clerks showing up in Scream 3: Your favorite — or maybe not — New Jersey stoners show up to watch the filming of Stab 3 in Scream 3. Yes, things were getting pretty meta in the year 2000.

2. Mortimer and Randolph Duke from Trading Places showing up in Coming to America: Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche’s rich villains may have lost everything — including that $1 they bet — in the first film, but when Prince Akeem gets them back on their feet with an incredibly generous gift.

3. Billy Cutshaw from The Exorcist being a patient in the insane asylum castle in The Ninth Configuration/Twinkle, Twinkle “Killer” Kane: I know that I said above that character spin-offs aren’t going to be on this list, but this one comes from a movie everyone knows and ends up with one that hardly anybody knows. After being told that “You’re gonna die up there,” by Regan in the first film,  this astronaut loses his mind in the second. He’s played by Dick Callinan in former and Scott Wilson in the latter.

4. Paul and Mary Bland from Eating Raoul show up in Chopping Mall: Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov are big favorites here, so when they unexpectedly show up and nearly derail this movie about killer security robots, it’s enough to make me want to stand on my couch and cheer. Actually, that’s exactly what I did. This one also features a cameo from Dick Miller replaying his Walter Paisley character from A Bucket of Blood.

5. Lots of people in She’s Having a Baby: During the end credits, as different real people discuss having a child, Ferris Bueller, characters from TV’s Cheers and Roman Craig and Chet Ripley (Dan Aykroyd and John Candy) from The Great Outdoors all show up in character, connecting all of their various films into one shared timeline (and this movie to the giant wormhole that is the Tommy Westphall Universe).

6. T1000 from Terminator 2: Judgement Day in Wayne’s World: Yep. The knife handed shapeshifting evil cop from Skynet shows up to menace Wayne Campbell and Garth Algar. T1000 also shows up again in Arnold’s Last Action Hero.

7. Michael Keaton playing FBI Agent Ray Nicolette in both Out of Sight and Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown: First, Tarantino asked Keaton to play an FBI agent. Then, when he was asked by Steven Soderbergh to play another FBI agent, Keaton agreed — but only if he could play the same character!

8. Captain Benjamin Willard from Apocalypse Now in Hot Shots! Part Deux: This is about as meta as it gets. Captain Willard is played by Martin Sheen, whose son Charlie Sheen is playing Topper Harley, going through a similar character moment as he enters the “heart of darkness.” The characters’ boats pass one another and they point to each other and mention how much they loved one another in Wall Street, obliterating your reality.

9. Ray Stantz from Ghostbusters shows up in Casper: Sure, he may have a mustache now, but that’s definitely Ray, even if he can’t deal with the Friendly Ghost’s mischief-making. There was also a scene filmed with Zelda Rubenstein reprising her role from Poltergeist which was cut, but hey — Father Guido Sarducci from Saturday Night Live shows up to perform an exorcism and Dr. Harvey turns into the Cryptkeeper from the Tales from the Crypt TV series!

10. Freddy Krueger shows up in the surprise ending of Jason Goes to Hell: At the end of this sequel, Freddy’s claw grabs Jason’s mask, which led to a ten-year wait (!) before these two horror icons finally went claw to machete.

Honorable mentions go to…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBfsQRSiy8w

Doc Brown from Back to the Future in A Million Ways to Die in the West

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jitlJLVQibc

Jason Statham’s Frank Martin Transporter character showing up at the beginning of Collateral

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2feuTpncC_g

Brendan Fraser playing his Encino Man character Link in Paul Shore’s Son In Law and In the Army Now

Gilbert Kane from Alien showing up in Spaceballs

Matt Hooper from Jaws showing up in Piranha 3D

Thanks to Kris Erickson, Jim Sloss, Dan Ayer, Becca and Bill Van Ryn for their help with this list!

1. If you’re the kind of person who is absolutely afraid to spend much time with your family — or the family of your significant other — we have some good news. You can sneak out and watch these movies while still feeling like you’re in the spirit of the start of the season. The holidays are going to get a lot worse before they get better, so start ’em off by watching these, then puking up all that stuffing that you, well, stuffed down your throat. Don’t say we never tried to help.

1. Blood Freak: A Vietnam vet gets addicted to smoking weed and starts working on a turkey farm, where he soon grows a turkey head and begins killing people. Or does he? And why does the director keep showing up to comment on the film?

2. Poultrygeist: Night Of The Chicken Dead: You know what would make my Thanksgiving complete? If I got to kick  Lloyd Kaufman right in the cranberries. This is another Troma jokey affair, so if you like those, you know what to expect.

3. ThanksKilling: Any movie that starts off with a demonic  turkey killing a topless pilgrim is pretty much only going to go downhill from there. Yes — an evil, filthy-mouthed turkey out for revenge. But wait — it gets better. Or worse.

4. ThanksKilling 3: Yep. The turkey from the first movie comes back and the studio cancels the sequel, sending him into a fit of gobbler bouncing rage. There are also only two humans and all puppets in this one.

5. Blood Rage: Terry is the kind of kid that gets so upset that his mom is banging her boyfriend at the drive-in that he kills a bunch of people with an axe and sets his twin brother Todd up to take the fall. Also: Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman star Louise Lasser plays their mom.

6. Kristy: This movie is why you go home over Thanksgiving break. If you don’t, an army of Satanic killers will ritually murder you. As if finals weren’t hard enough…

7. Home Sweet Home: This is the only female-directed Thanksgiving horror movie that I could come up with. It’s also the only one that stars Jake Steinfeld. Yep — Body by Jake — is the slasher.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ys2wjByC3zU

8. Boogeyman: Yes, someone remade Ulli Lommel’s 1980 Halloween ripoff, The Boogeyman. And they also set it on Thanksgiving. I wonder if they used all leftovers like Lommel did in his footage recycling sequels?

9. Intensity: Based on the Dean Koontz novel, this TV movie finds a disturbed young woman avoiding a friend’s feast to rescue a child from the serial killing John C. McGinley. Seems like a plan, I’ve been through some awkward meals myself.

10. Prisoners: While not technically a horror movie, just see how long it takes to upset your entire family when you start watching this movie about a child abduction that occurs while the parents are preparing the big meal. It’s also more frightening than every other film on this list.

Honorable mention goes to…

Thanksgiving: This is kind of a cheat, but during Grindhouse, one of the fake trailers is for this Eli Roth film, which he keeps hinting will become a full movie. If you love slashers, this one is going to reward you with non-stop bursts of arterial spray. Perfect for the kids!

Blood Harvest: If you watch one slasher that has someone coming home from college for the holiday, the savings and loan crisis and Tiny Tim in it, well, this is the only one that was ever filmed.

Do you have a favorite turkey-related horror film? Guess what — other than North by Northwest, Don’t Say a Word and Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County, I can’t think of any. Maybe you know one though! PS: Movies like Dutch, The Big Chill and Hannah and Her Sisters — while personally frightening to me — don’t count.

There really hasn’t been a horror movie that has taken over people’s minds quite like The Exorcist. That doesn’t mean that plenty of movies haven’t tried! The power of the internet compels you to read through this list, share it and comment on your favorites!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0Rw35pL3jA

1. Cathy’s Curse: Bill from Groovy Doom and Drive-In Asylum remarked to me the other day just how much he wished this movie was based on a true story. Let’s just start telling people it is, that never stopped Earl Warren! Any movie in which a young Canadian girl is possessed and starts swearing before she torments old people with her rudeness must be witnessed!

2. Amityville II: The Possession: If you talk to me any longer than ten minutes, chances are I will bring up how much I love this piece of schlock. When I was a kid, the Catholic Church gave this movie an O rating for morally offensive. It achieves that mark in a little under ten minutes and then uses the rest of its running time to batter you senseless.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dw42pGwJhh8

3. Enter the Devil: Also known as The Eerie Midnight Horror Show, this spaghetti Satanic possession film is, of course, based on a true story. It also features a statue of one of the men crucified next to Jesus getting off its cross and making love to the film’s heroine before she becomes the tool of Satan, played here by the steely eyes of Ivan Rassimov. Pure scumtastic joy herein. Beware.

4. Evilspeak: You don’t get on the Church of Satan’s list of approved films by half-assing it. Clint Howard stands up and says, “Boys can be possessed too” after a lifetime of getting treated like a dog (and having his dog murdered). The last ten minutes of this film are every Catholic school gone metal kid’s twisted dreams come true.

5. The Car: With this movie, we learn that cars can be possessed too. But not just any car. No, this is the car that Anton LaVey used to drive around in. You will believe that a car wants to murder a marching band!

6. Magdalena, Possessed by the Devil: The German exploitation community stood up and said, “Why do the Italians have the trademark on Pazuzu ripoffs that are in horrible taste?” It’s as if someone was having a contest to see how much blasphemy they could fit into one movie as young actress Dagmar Hedrich goes absolutely verrückt im Kopf, spends most of the movie nude and screams “I despise the dead!” at her own grandfather’s funeral.

7. Abby: Warner Brothers seized all prints of this film and I’ll never forgive them. Imagine if a good churchgoing girl was possessed by Eshu, the West African trickster god. Dream no more — this is a reality! Carol Speed is Linda Blair here, if Linda wasn’t confined to a bed and out and about picking up and killing men all over Louisville, Kentucky’s finest after hour clubs. I have this on a double disk with Magdalena, Possessed by the Devil and when life gets me down sometimes, I just stare at the cover art and hug the box and everything ends up being OK.

8. The Witch: If your kids tell you that the goat in the backyard is Satan, you should listen to them. This is probably the only movie on this list where the heroine makes the right move by giving in to the dark, as her life is pretty horrible otherwise. After all, who wouldn’t love the taste of butter in one’s mouth?

9. Beyond the Door: This film rips off The Exorcist with such shameless zeal that the most evil of all beings, copyright lawyers, were called in to take the profits for Warner Brothers. And if you loved TV’s Nanny and the Professor, well, Nanny is having some real problems in this movie!

10. Alucarda: And this is what the devil does. If you think Italians have the copyright on sacrilege (actually Italians hate copyrights, if we’ve gleaned anything from their movies), allow the Mexican contingent to speak on this. This isn’t just a strange film about Satanic nuns; this is a fever dream from another dimension that will engulf your mind.

Honorable mention goes to the Italian sleazefest/b-roll travelogue The Return of the Exorcist, the giant penis having demon and shock ending fun of The Incubus, Jamie Lee Curtis’ sister Kelly avoiding giving birth to the Antichrist in The Sect, Joan Collins’ baby being possessed by the little person she spurned in I Don’t Want to Be Born, mirror possessing goth oddball Rainbow Harvest in Mirror Mirror, Fulci’s borderline incoherent melding of Egyptian lore and American possession films Manhattan Baby and the hand of a demon possessing people in Demonoid. Then there’s Spain’s Paul Naschy with Exorcism, aka Exorcismo, from 1975, that he claims isn’t a ripoff because he wrote it before the release of The Exorcist.

What’s your favorite? Did we miss it? Did you notice that we didn’t really feature any modern possession films? Dare we say…the devil made us do it!

There’s nothing like a street gang in a movie. The more colorful, the more insane, the better. Here are some of our favorites. What are yours?

1. Every gang in The Warriors: The Warriors spend just about the entire running time on the run, pardon the pun, from gangs like the Gramercy Riffs, the Lizzies, the Punks, the Boppers, the Satan’s Mothers and everyone’s favorites, the Baseball Furies. If you’re going to fill your movie with gangs, fill them with ones that will influence every single other movie on the list.
   

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   2. The gangs of 1990: The Bronx Warriors and Escape the Bronx: I’ll never pass up an opportunity to talk about Enzo G. Castellari’s magical world of post-apocalyptic mayhem. The Riders, led by Trash, team up with The Tigers, led by Fred Williamson and his Freddy Krueger claw wearing girlfriend Witch, as they go to war with everyone from the rollerskating Zombies, a gang of show tune dancers (I’m not making that up) and the evil Manhattan Corporation.

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   3. The Templars from Warriors of the Wasteland: I’m not above listing two post-apocalyptic movies in a row. And the Templars, an all gay gang of punk rockers in all white body armor that are out to purge the world of all life are an amazing gang. Actually, this entire movie is beyond belief. I want more people to watch it so that it can be part of everyone’s casual conversation.

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   4. The Lords of Death from Big Trouble in Little China: In the middle of the sorcery and mysticism in this film, there’s a very dangerous gang wearing 80s sunglasses that have no issues with kidnapping wives right in the middle of crowded airports.

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   5. The Golden Lords and The Junior Lords from Meteor Man: When TV’s Riddler (Frank Gorshin) and Simon Caine are your leaders and you have Don Cheadle, Big Daddy Kane and Another Bad Creation in your gang, you’re tough enough to battle the Bloods (Naughty by Nature), the Crips (Cypress Hill) and your neighborhood’s new superhero.

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   6. The Lords of Hell in Adventures in Babysitting: Sure, they may get smacked down by a teenage babysitter and a little girl dressed as Thor (his first movie appearance and man, were Marvel fans dying for any crumb back in the day), but they’ve got a great name.

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   7. The Street Punk Gang from Death Wish 3: As we learned this week, this gang may not be well organized, but they cause plenty of problems. Manny Fraker. Hermosa. The Giggler. Their names are forever etched in bad movie infamy and love. And you will know them by the trail of the dead…and the black lines with two red lines drawn through it that they each have painted on their faces.

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   8. Packard Walsh’s gang from The Wraith: Is there anything better to do in the town that this movie takes place in than to steal people’s cars in illegal drag races? Well, if you ask Skank and Gutterboy, drinking gasoline is up there. Bonus points to any gang that will allow Clint Howard to join up.

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   9. The Man-Eaters from She-Devils on Wheels: This movie exists in an alternative universe where a female biker gang is strong enough to destroy a police force, a rival gang and an entire town. “All men are mothers!” they yell as they roar off. You have our hearts, ladies. Be careful with them.

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   10. The Voodoo Posse from Predator 2: We wouldn’t have such an awesome Ice Cube sample if it wasn’t for their leader, King Willie, who says, ““There’s no stopping what can’t be stopped. No killing what can’t be killed.” after smoking what I can only imagine is all of the weed in Los Angeles.

Honorable mention goes to Tarzan’s gang from Intrepidos Punks and La Venganza de los Punks, the Foot Clan from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies, the gang in Return of the Living Dead, The Living Dead from Psychomania, the Scars and the Satins from Savage Streets, the Bombers from Streets of Fire and the Boddicker gang from RoboCop.

What do you do when you see a film series succeed? Applaud it? Or try to outright ape it and make your own version? Well, the ten folks on this list did the latter. Would you really want to enrage Freddy Krueger?

1. Bad Dreams: Let’s get it straight: I love this movie. But I am also willing to admit that a film about a burned maniac haunting the dreams of a mental ward full of teenagers seems like the Dream Warriors all over again. The producers of this film doubled down by putting Jennifer Rubin, Taryn from its inspiration, into the main role.

2. Night Killer: Imagine this: Claudio Fragasso wasn’t content with writing an Aliens/Terminator ripoff like Shocking Dark or blowing minds with Troll 2. Nope, he created this film, which takes the Italian title of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Non Aprite Quella Porta 3 or Don’t Open the Door 3) while giving us a killer with a bargain-basement Freddy mask and claws. Pure Italian scum movie-making magic.

3. Satan’s Bed: Have you just wanted Freddy to dress up, throwing on a white button up and stonewashed jeans while he throws up fireballs? Good news. This movie has you covered.

4. Mahakaal: A killer becomes a demon that torments the family and friends of Anita in revenge for his death, which was caused by her police-officer father. In other words, A Nightmare on Elm Street, India – The Mix Tape, with bits and pieces of all of your favorite series moments, plus, you know, dance numbers and a Michael Jackson impersonator.

5. The Fear: No, not Fear with Marky Mark. No, this movie, about a professor gathering kids with major phobias along with a wooden doll named Morty, who kills them with those fears. Sound like Freddy? Well, at least they gave Wes Craven a cameo, possibly as a way to apologize or ensure that he wouldn’t sue them.

6. Shocker: Speaking of Wes Craven, he was expressly trying to make a new Freddy when he created Horace Pinker, an electrocuted convict who comes back from the dead for revenge and one-liners. No, this movie isn’t House 3 or Prison. But I get how you could be confused. Freddy uses dreams. Horace uses TV. The fact that I didn’t just spend three days discussing all the sequels to this movie should tell you how well it all worked out.

7. Sleepstalker: Another death in the electric chair, another killer that comes back. Except this one is made of sand. Like a sandman. Who brings sleep. Really.

8. Khooni Murdaa: India really loves A Nightmare on Elm Street. This is the third entry on the list and the only one where Freddy stops killing kids to take a dump. Also, it totally rips off the bathtub scene and the ending of Dream Warriors. Also, Freddy’s name in India is Ranjit and he spends the first 40 minutes of this film as a stalker who gets caught, tried and convicted before escaping jail and interrupting our heroes’ Bollywood dance number at a campfire before they shove him into it. You can guess what happens next.

9. Brainscan: Ed Furlong, the former John Connor, is obsessed with horror movies and video games, including Brainscan, a game that takes over his life and brings murders into the real world thanks to The Trickster, the first Freddy ripoff who lives on a CD-Rom.

10. Slumber Party Massacre II: The killer from the original gets reincarnated as a 1950’s rockabilly dude with a drillbit guitar weapon. Dream warnings. Dreams that warn about sex. Dreams within dreams. Complete insanity and a movie that’s better than every Elm Street movie after 4.

That’s our list! Do you have some that we missed? Let us know!

UPDATE: Since writing this list, I’ve discovered this movie.

Don’t Panic: A truly out there mashup of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Saved by the Bell, complete with Ouija boards, demons named Virgil and a hero who wears pajamas covered with dinosaurs for the entire movie.

Update #2: Then, as our October 2021 “Slasher Month” arrived, we discovered:

Stones of Death: An aborigine-styled Freddy is disturbed when a new housing development is built on an outback ancient burial ground. As derivative and boring as it sounds.

Hopefully, you’ve seen the new Halloween by now. Either you’re feeling a little letdown or are excited to see some more carnage. Either way, we’ve got you covered.

Of course, your first move should be to watch the original or the incredibly great sequel. We covered the entire history of the franchise last year, so you can read all about that here.

Now, based on nothing more than my personal choices, here are ten other movies that you’ll either find much better than 2018’s Halloween or will keep your bloodlust sated. For now.

1.  Bay of Blood: If you’re gonna watch a slasher, start at the beginning. After all, so much of the Friday the 13th films were ripped off scene for scene from this one. Plus, few movies of this ilk have a director as established as Mario Bava at the helm.
2. The Prowler: While not the finest stalk and kill movie you’ll ever watch, it may have the best special effects in the history of the genre, thanks to Tom Savini. From the very first scene, you know that you’re watching a movie that has no interest in playing nice.
3. Terrifier: Art the Clown may be a new character, but nearly everyone who watches his first solo film walks away freaked out and ready for more (if the sheer gore contained within doesn’t send them screaming for the door).
4. Blood Beat: The only movie I’ve ever seen where a samurai spirit kills people in time to a sex scene. Perhaps the strangest movie on this list.
5. Happy Birthday to Me: You’ve seen the poster, but you may not have seen the movie. Trust me — this one is an underrated piece of bloody magic.
6. Terror Train: Can’t get enough Jamie Lee? How do you feel about costume parties on trains and David Copperfield?
7. Popcorn: Sure, it’s a mess of a film, but it’s also original and packed with plenty of great murders. It’s finally easy to find, too!
8. Don’t Go in the Woods…Alone!: This is a poorly made, sloppy and scuzzy piece of goofball goredom. And I’ll watch it over nearly everything made in the last five years.
9. Stagefright: An owl masked maniac takes on an entire theater full of actors in a movie where blood literally sprays like geysers.
10. Pieces: The movie that goes all the way, this one can upset even the hardiest of blood lovers. It’s also one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen, perhaps not intentionally.

It’s hard to keep this list to just ten, because I could have also picked Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, Absurd, The Comeback, The New York Ripper, Black Christmas and even the strangest slasher I’ve seen lately, the Bigfoot starring Night of the Demon.

What’s your favorite? What would you recommend that someone else watches? I’m interested in your feedback!