Street Trash (1987)
aka. Horror in Bowery Street
½ Has anyone here seen Street Trash? It's been years since a friend brought it over to my house, but the plot's pretty easy to remember: bums drink this stuff called "Viper" and it turns them to goo. Each one melts in a different, spectacular way. And some dude gets his wang bitten off.
Sleaze City (films that make you uncomfortable and maybe wanna take a shower)
Here is my defense of not giving Nekromantik a lower rating. This is like some cinematic Fear Factor, disgusting imagery, with little surrounding it. Bad actors fake their way through terrible scenes with no story to connect them besides the toxic drink, so all you have to look forward to are gross out moments of bodies melting
Blood Diner (1987)
aka. Blood Feast 2
½ Low budget, terrible acting and obnoxious comedy is a combination for a really bad time. Thank goodness I have a lot of work coming up because this Marathon is daring me to quit.
Slugs (1988)
* * Another reminder of what started this Marathon. In Jan. 2016 I watched Frogs (1972), starring Ray Milland.
This post by PeacefulAnarchy and Oldkid captures it well, not good but kind of enjoyable. Slugs is a bit like that. Filmed half in America, half in Spain (sometimes for the same scene), this isn’t a film with tight story structure or even loose story structure. What it has is killer slugs and lots of them. Some of it is amusing, but none of it is trying hard to be funny or campy. Some of it is gross. It could’ve been a lot worse.
Amsterdamned (1988)
* * A fun/sick opening, where school children touring the Amsterdam canal run into a dead body hanging from the bridge that proceeds to streak across the plexiglass roof of the boat. There are some slasher elements, but this is more of a late 80s cop thriller with car and speedboat chases. The canal city setting makes it unique and there are bizarre comedy touches, but the rest of the film is uninspired. Still better than filmmaker Dick Maas’ last horror film, Lift, about the killer elevator.
Dead Heat (1988)
*Towards the end of the buddy cop cycle, filmmakers tried every crazy concept (though Whoopi Goldberg partnered with a dinosaur will never be topped). This one stars Joe Piscopo, whose partner Treat Williams becomes a zombie. The concept comes up with some inspired ideas with the unkillable and slowly decaying partner taking on a mysterious crew of robbing zombies, enough to make me think the idea might work if taken a little more seriously. Unlike Amsterdamned, there’s more than enough scares and gore to qualify this as horror. Piscopo is so annoying, so anti-funny that he drops out of the film after about an hour. The director is Mark Goldblatt, whose editing credits are extraordinary. Too bad he doesn’t know how to direct actors… or scenes.