Every time Beth (Lyndsey Craine) dies — at her own hand — she wakes up in another horror movie. This time, it’s a cannibal romantic comedy. And that idea, that Beth wants to die but might learn something from each new film, is a great one. It doesn’t come back into this film at all, which is the first of the misfires that this movie commits.

My enthusiasm for this diminished somewhat when a Troma logo came across the screen. As for the story, well, Beth is the only student at Henenlotter High School — get it? — sees how horrible everything is and tries to do something about. The film seems to nudge you, wink wink you throughout; the same school is also the setting of director Liam Regan’s My Bloody Banjo. Those students not in the know can win the “All You Can Eat Massacre” contest and get a handgun of their own with which they can either shoot their fellow students or kill themselves.

Yet there may be hope. Beth has a crush on English teacher Miss Campbell (Lala Barlow) which seems to play out as a need to consume human flesh. This is the exact opposite of her vegan ethos yet eating one’s enemies is such sweet revenge.

The rest of the film uses teen movie stereotypes from Heathers, Tragedy Girls and Mean Girls to tell its tale of girl cliques and male sexual predators. Of all the imagery and ideas this movie uses, I liked that one of the female bullies favors Road Warrior Hawk makeup.

The movie — well, the evil teacher Nancy Applegate (Annabella Rich) — refers to Beth as “the millennial product of the American high school trope” and that would be an intriguing meta comment were it not so on the nose. Sure, her mother is dead, she has a horrible stepfather and school sucks, but why does she want to end her existence beyond a “woe is me” attitude? Far be it from me to expect good taste in film, much like exploitation, but I demand a character who has a reason, that a character with it is dying.

If she wants to live in a movie life that isn’t nostalgic horror, why does she play into the same cliches throughout? That motivation is never truly explored. Instead, there are endless references to other movies — if this were a Marvel comic, there’d be an editor note in every panel, cluttering this up with reference upon reference — and can you top this gross-out humor. Trust me, I love humor like that. Lloyd Kaufmann saying “Alex Baldwin” and blowing out his brains is anything but wit.

To be satire, one must have some position from which to state why something is worthy of ridicule, lest it becomes precisely what it is deriding. If you want to make fun of direct-to-video horror, that’s not that hard. If you want to make a satire about hot button issues like date rape and teen suicide, go for it. But you better bring your best material. And if this is it, I am not interested in seeing what comes next.

If you do like Troma, you can get this from MVD. It comes with an audio commentary, a making-of, deleted scenes, outtakes, a gore reel, a raw b-roll, cast interviews, a VFX reel, trailers and an introduction from Lloyd Kaufman.

This movie is so important to me. I feel like I’ve talked about it so much, but now that there’s finally a great version of it available, I can’t retire the $1 DVD I have of it that has BUTCH written across it in sharpie.

The director of A Dolphin’s Tale and A Dolphin’s Tale 2, Skippy from Family Ties and one of the stars of A Chorus Line made the most metal film ever. Let that sink in.

I grew up a fat, bespeckled child in a small town with crushing self esteem issues, a love for gore movies and a sarcastic mind that loved the way people treated me when I started dressing all in black. Every single situation that Eddie Weinbauer (Marc Price, the previously mentioned Skippy) endures in this film…I lived it. If a monster Glenn Danzig (Verotika) could take over shop class and kill my tormentors, I would have gladly welcomed such mayhem and menace.

Eddie is a big fan of Sammi Curr, a superstar who went to the same high school Eddie is in, was tormented and bullied the same way Eddie is, became a big star and then died in a mysterious fire. Radio DJ Nuke (Gene “inventor of the devil horns*” Simmons, who played a great transgendered bad guy in Never Too Young to Die while wearing his girlfriend Cher’s clothes) gives Eddie the only vinyl copy of Sammi’s satanic masterwork “Songs in the Key of Death.”

Eddie does precisely what I’d do: he listens to the record and falls asleep. He has a crazy dream about the fire that killed Curr and awakens to the album playing backwards, telling him how to gain revenge on the bullies that torment him.

Eddie chickens out though — he doesn’t want to kill the jocks who have made his life so rough. Sammi takes matters into his own hands, creating an electric surge that allows him to escape the record and return to our reality. Eddie responds by smashing his stereo. Sammi’s response is as fucking perfect as it gets: “No false metal.”

Sammi’s friend Roger gets involved and unwittingly plays a cassette — fucking metal — at the school dance, causing Sammi to leap out of a guitar amp and take the stage. The crowd goes wild before Sammi starts killing audience members, shooting lightning at them and revealing his burned face. Holy shit — I saw this scene at the drive-in this year and the exuberance of hearing Fastaway blasting from car stereos in the fog at 5 AM is an experience I recommend to every single person reading this.

Can Eddie stop Sammi from being played on the radio and attacking everyone that hears it? Of course. It’s an ’80s horror movie. But man — I’m all from more Sammi Curr (sadly, Tony Fields died of AIDS in 1995).

Oh I forgot – Ozzy is a preacher in this that Sammi attacks. It’s a small cameo, just like Gene Simmons’ role, but that doesn’t stop my DVD cover from claiming they starred in this.

If you’re an 80s metal fan (and if not, man, thanks for reading this far), there are so many band logos and posters to spot in this, from the expected like Anthrax and KISS to the out of left field like Raven, Exciter and Savatage. You’ll also be much more likely to not dismiss this film as a piece of shit.

Me? I quote from this film almost every day. “The bait is you. Let the big fish hook themselves. You’re the bait. The bait is you.”

I really hope that people rediscover this movie or discover it in the first place. It’s probably the most perfect of all heavy metal horror movies, which wasn’t hard to do, but that doesn’t mean it’s not incredible.

*Dio has always claimed that he got the gesture from his Italian grandmother, who claimed it warded off the evil eye.

This movie’s Synapse 4K UHD has a 1080p Blu-ray of a 4K restoration from the original 35mm camera negative approved by Director of Photography Robert Elswit, along with audio commentary with director Charles Martin Smith, moderated by filmmaker Mark Savage. There are also interviews with writer/producer Michael S. Murphey and writer Rhet Topham, moderated by film historian Michael Felsher; an audio conversation with Paul Corupe and Allison Lang, authors of Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s; a making-of featurette; a tribute to Tony Fields; Horror’s Hallowed Grounds: The Filming Locations of Trick or Treat with Sean Clark; the Fastaway video for “After Midnight;” trailers, TV commercials and radio ads; a still gallery with an interview with photographer Phillip V. Caruso; a vintage electronic press kit; a limited edition slipcover and reversible cover art. You can get this from MVD.

A few years ago, I interviewed Quinn Armstrong, the director and writer of a movie called Survival Skills.

He said of this movie, “That’s why Surviving Edged Weapons is so fascinating. It’s like a police department gave some kid like fresh out of film school $30,000 and this kid was like, “I’m gonna make a masterpiece.” I swear to God, so it opens with two cavemen in an argument, and one of the cavemen takes a sharp rock and stabs the other and then the narrator comes in and says, “Since the dawn of time, men have been using edged weapons to kill each other.” It’s so weird. It’s so profoundly weird. I can’t get over it.”

No matter how much he prepared me for it, I wasn’t ready.

According to Calibre Press’ website, director Dennis Anderson and author Charles Remsberg published Street Survival: Tactics for Armed Encounters in 1980. They claim that “this book changed the law enforcement landscape by introducing new tactics, personal stories, and real scenarios.  Within a year of its publication, the Street Survival Seminar was born and quickly grew to become the most popular and respected resource for officer tactical training in the country.”

While they no longer sell this video on their site, they do have a course entitled “Advanced Leadership in a Police Reform Era” that uses children’s building blocks to spell the word “defund.” There’s another called “Surviving Hidden Weapons” that uses a lipstick tube with a blade. I obviously need to see that.

But first, let me explain Surviving Edged Weapons. 

I’ve heard that this was made in Canada and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, even though Calibre is based in Glen Ellyn, IL. They also sell a koozie that says, “One drink away from telling everyone exactly what I think.” Keep in mind that everything else on this site is about police response.

Narrated by Ronald Rolland, this has the production quality of Unsolved Mysteries and I mean that as a compliment. And yes, this begins with a Cain and Abel murder that explains that edged weapons have been with us forever. Then, your jaw will drop as this alternates between police officers showing off their scars and discussing how they’ve been stabbed — including an astounding ending where a cop is brought to tears by the memory and cries the thickest, deepest, saddest tears I have ever seen in my entire existence — and being an action movie, to the point that stuntman Dan Inosanto (who shows up in Game of Death, Sharky’s Machine and Out for Justice) is in it.

So yes, Officer James Phillips may say, “In my mind, I’m never gonna die in no ghetto. Absolutely never. A man turns around and punches me in the head, the fight’s on. If he cuts me, the fight’s on. If I’m shot, the fight is on. I’m not losing no fight to no scumbag out there in no ghetto, period. That’s it. No son of a bitch out there is gonna get me. The only way he gets me is cut my head off, and I mean that. I’ll fight you til I got a breath left in me. I don’t think any of those animals in that street can beat me. I’ve been going that way for eighteen years of street service, street duty, and that’s the way I’m gonna keep on going. You don’t lose the fight.” But you also get a Black Mass being interrupted by the police, a domestic disturbance turning into a meatcleaver going directly into someone’s head and a series of wounds closing with a full-on uncut dead cock on camera.

You will learn how criminals place knives in their jeans so they cut up cops hands, discover how the streets are non-stop terror and hear a man say, “Fuck me? Fuck you!” in a way that Bob Odenkirk had to have heard it. The VHS cover of Halloween is shown as part of our country’s knife culture and the narration says it “glorifies the blade.” A man in a Corvette with the license plate KILME stabbing himself. This is at once so much better than it needed to be and more reactionary than you’d expect a cop training video to be, even one made nearly forty years ago.

I’m saying this with no hyperbole. This is one of the most fascinating movies I’ve ever seen and if you come to my house and want to watch movies with me, there’s a really good chance I’m going to suggest we watch it. It’s like the unmade Death Wish 6 but on a smaller scale, shown to real people to prepare them for the thankless job of protecting the lambs from the wolves. It makes me reflect on how liberal real life me is and how jingoistic and needing for carnage movie watching me is, a juxtaposition that sometimes throws me into panic, but there you go. This movie will make you confront things, like how you might not like the fact that we live in a police state, but you certainly don’t want to do that job, and you even step away with some level of respect. Or worry. I can’t figure it out, but I’ll get back to you when I watch this four or five more times.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Directed and written by Ron Ford, this movie sends Trace (Tyrone Wade), the greatest alien fighter of all time, to Earth, where a million alien souls — the worst ones — have been unleashed. He’s to protect Sandy (Roxanne Coyne) and if the first two letters of her name didn’t give it away, she’s Sarah Connor. He’s, well, I guess a Terminator but one of the good ones, working for the ruler of the galaxy, who is Omnipresent Praxima, who is really Burt Ward, who was once Robin.

Does this movie maybe feel like it’s about Scientology? Sure. But it’s also filled with the kind of things that Wild Cat Line callers on Coast to Coast AM would scream about at 4:09 in the morning.

This also has a bad guy named Gorek (Mark Sawyer), who can jump from body to body, so it’s also The Hidden.

I say none of this in a mean way. This is precisely what I choose to watch when I don’t have to review movies that people ask me to or go upstairs where murder porn plays all day and night. A Temu JCVD is in this and he punches a latex masked gray alien in the face. I have always wanted to punch a gray alien in the face, so this is wish fulfillment on the greatest of scales.

Speaking of Coast to Coast and Art Bell, he once had an Anti-Christ Line and asked people to call in but only if they were the Son of Satan. Tons of people called, but the next time they tried this, the actual Anti-Christ was said to have called and he claimed that he was from Pittsburgh. I’m telling you this because I miss that show and being up in the middle of the night either laughing or frightened. More movies should have that energy and be like this, and more people who write about movies online should recognize that not everything has to be perfect.

Directed by Adam Meyer, this film claims that Scream was based on the real serial killer Danny Rolling, also known as the Gainesville Ripper, who murdered Florida college students Christina P. Powell, Sonya Larson, Christa Leight Hoyt, Tracy Inez Paules and Manuel R. Toboda during a four-day period in 1990. He decapitated one and set the bodies up for people to find much like a slasher villain.

Kevin Williamson, the writer of Wes Craven’s movie,  watched an episode of ABC News’ Turning Point and wrote Woodsboro Murders, which changed its name to the title we know these days.

Rolling may have had multiple personalities, which were the result of abuse from his police officer father. He carried that abuse to his wife and son before getting divorced, being arrested for raping a woman who looked just like his ex-wife and going to jail numerous times for robbery. By the 90s, he’d go on to kill Julie Grissom, her eight-year-old nephew and her 55-year-old father before shooting his own father in the stomach and head. Somehow, his dad lived, but lost an eye.

After killing five women and abusing their bodies in August 1990, he was arrested for robbing a Winn-Dixie. Cops found him in jail, identified by one of his teeth that had been extracted while incarcerated. He pled not guilty and even wrote a book with his future fiancee, journalist Sondra London, titled The Making of a Serial Killer.

By 1994, however, he pled guilty and was executed in 2006, not before singing to the 47 people who came to watch him die. They cut his mic off and then his life.

How much of Williamson and Craven’s film comes from this? It was more an inspiration. But hey — we have a Tubi Original about it, so you can watch that.

You can watch this on Tubi.