A South African slasher set in a Catholic girl’s school. The Stay Awake has a killer that is either a cat or a rat headed human being and you know, that’s the first time I’ve seen that in a movie, much less one where the slasher is felled by a thrown javelin. So, you know, despite the ineptitude of the film, the bad acting and the goofiness of having a title that invites headlines for negative reviews, I soldiered through this and finished my tour of duty.

Also: the rat/cat/lizard thing is the ghost of serial killer William John Brown, who is killed in America in 1969 but for some reason goes to Europe for these murders, despite making Elm Street claims of tracking down the children of the people who put him in the gas chamber.

Also also: a stay awake is like a lock in and you raise money by working out all night.

You can watch this on Tubi.

2000 years ago, two African tribesmen walking through a forester killed by a masked man wielding a spiked club, the same weapon that is being used to murder prostitutes. Then, the killer uses the spikes on his fist to paint pictures.

Chief medical examiner Dr. Joe Hendersen is now obsessed with researching the murders, but then he’s told to shut it down. Why? He’s also dealing with pressure to falsify a death certificate to keep a race war from happening. This could honestly be the entire plot of a different film.

Actually, this movie is a bait and switch, because the description and the opening have you ready for a police movie mixed with a slasher and then it becomes a political film and forget that it was sold as a slasher.

South African director Darrell Roodt has made a ton of movies from the Ice Cube-starring Dangerous Ground to Dracula 3000 and Lake Placid: The Legacy.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Four college coeds are on their way to Florida for vacation and pass through a small Georgia town where one of their number watches a couple have sex in the woods, argue and then the man kills the woman. It just so happens that he’s the town’s sherriff, which means that they’re trapped in the town overnight and perhaps headed to an early demise.

This is the kind of movie that starts like a comedy and progressively gets meaner, nastier and much sleazier as time goes on and any hope of a happy ending starts running out.

Director Richard Styles has going to be the film’s producer and never intended to actually be directing, but he did and turned out something unique in the slasher genre; the killer shows signs of remorse, but he knows that if he wants to keep his position in town, everyone in his way must die.

You can get this from Vinegar Syndrome.

Directed and written by Paul Hunt (Wild, Free & Hungry, The Psychedelics, The Clones) and shot by Gary Graver, which is pretty much the whole reason I picked it, Twister Nightmare comes very, very late to the slasher cash-in year of 1981, but oh well, right?

Look, if you get a letter telling you that you won a weekend at Camp Paradise and at some point in the past someone whose mom may or may not be a friend of the Christy’s died there and all sorts of rumors of doom keep smacking you in the face, you should probably not go.

That said, there are a lot of dudes in half shirts and Graver knows how to shoot a monster in the woods, all blue lights and fog. If this movie were just those scenes on a loop, I would probably like it more.

This movie is so thirsty to be a Jason movie that it was shot on the same set as Friday the 13th Part III and even has homage, err, rip-off of the pitchform 3D kill from that movie. It also takes a kill from Silent Night, Deadly Night and then decides that its killer can call down lightning as if it were Christopher Lambert whitewashing a movie role.

That said, not many movies have their slasher use hot stones to beat someone to death.

Donald Cammell reportedly spent his childhood on the knee of Aleister Crowley, he went from a painter to a writer to a director. While a good chunk of his career was confounded by trying to make multiple movies with Marlon Brando, he did leave us with Demon Seed, Performance and this movie before killing himself with a shotgun.

Rich young women keep getting killed in Globe, Arizona and this movie in no way skimps from the horrific carnage that they are treated to. Even though this is from 1987, it’s still shocking. The first kill has an incredible 55 cuts in two minutes and twenty seconds, making it seem even more violent than it is.

Detective Charles Mendoza to visit Paul White, a sound expert to the rich and famous that is able to make an echo that he hears inside the air cavities of his head — yes, Cammell definitely made this — and that’s how he picks where the speakers go in each room.

Paul stole his wife Joan from an old friend Mike on a hunting trip in which he mutilated a deer and covered his face in its blood. Again, Cammell definitely made this movie. Oh yeah — and Mike is haunting the couple, ten years older and walking. the streets constantly eating peanut butter and claims he has the ability to see the past and future, which may come in handy because Paul has definitely been murdering women and hiding them in his bathroom, explaining to his wife when he’s caught that the universe has picked him because its heart is female and destructive like a black hole and demands destruction. And also because…you know who made this movie.

Paul then decides to lock his wife in the basement, dress in Kabuki makeup with a vest covered with explosives and chases his wife, daughter and even Mike into a cave where he keeps making his echo sound to please himself and further explains how the universe wants him to kill women.

Yeah — you know that I totally loved this absolutely berserk movie.

For all Brando screwed with Cammell professionally, he did take the time to write a letter to the MPAA to ensure that this didn’t get an X rating. So there’s that, I guess.

You can watch this on Tubi.

This movie is so delightfully strange that I wondered, “Who would have made something this odd and tone deaf?” That someone would be Andrea Bianchi, the director of Cry of a Prostitute, Strip Nude for Your Killer and Burial Ground, three movies that pretty much set the strandard for either sleaze, strangeness or a combination platter of both.

Made for French distributor Eurocine — just like Bianchi’s co-directing effort with Jess Franco Angel of Death — this movie piles on the weirdness and the sleaze in equal measures in story that may be about a devil cult that kidnaps prostitutes and tortures them to death to clean them of evil. It’s also about the pimps coming to the country to kill the cult and get their ladies back. And it’s also about a man coming to save his girlfriend.

Between Bo Svenson, Robery Ginty and Chuck Connors, the actors of this movie are all gruff and weathered. Ginty is the lead villain, a man who uses torture to take the bad morals out of these women by making them admit that they love Satan, which would seemingly be a good thing, right? Their aims are somewhat confusing.

I also have no idea why Connors is working in a lab across town and teaching Matthieu, a mentally challenged teen, how to speak with the aid of computers. These scenes show all the nuance you’d expect out of a Eurohorror/slasher film made in 1987.

What I do know is that this movie is on Tubi and that means that at any moment, someone unsuspecting could put this on and be confronted by its utter inanity. That alone makes me love this movie, along with a healthy helping of Satanic rituals, outdated computers and a shootout conclusion that wipes out nearly the entire cast.

Glenn R. Wilder is a stunt guy. Maybe he thought he could be Hal Needham and direct. This movie is the result, one of the few slashers that has guns in it — at least on the cover. And until Paintball Massacre came out in 2020, this was the only paintball slasher I could think of, unless you count Hostile Intent, Backwoods, Gotcha!, Rampage, The Zero Boys and Tag the Assassination Game.

Jeremy Hawk (Jeff Moldovan, who also wrote this) is a PTSD-having Vietnam vet who wants to win the Master Blaster Grand Championship — the movie can’t decide if it is Master Blaster or Masterblaster which drives me crazy — and get the $50,000 prize, which is big enough that someone is killing everyone else to win.

There’s also a scene where a bunch of dudes accuses our hero of having AIDS and then try to beat him up, reminding me that 1987 was many thousands of years away from being non-problematic.

The other players — and maybe one of them is the killer — are martial arts expert Yamada the Shadow Warrior, bodyguard De Angelo, headshrinker Laura, rocker Lewis and a cop named Samantha whose last partner didn’t just die…his head got blown up real good and she tried to put it back together.

Can one find love, money and meaning through paintball? Or Masterblaster? Or Master Blaster? I watched it and believe that it can be yours, my friend.

You can watch this on YouTube.