#AtoZChallenge Psycho Killers

Since slasher movies weren't all that popular in the 50s and 60s there's not really many of them on MST3K that I can recall.  But there are a lot of them on Rifftrax, as this entry will prove.

Psycho II:  Let's start with the granddaddy of all psycho killers:  Norman Bates.  In the early 80s, after Sir Alfred Hitchcock had died, the studio decided to cash in with a sequel.  Norman Bates is released from prison back to the old homestead.  The motel has since gone to seed under the management of Dennis Franz, becoming the establishment where you pay by the hour while management watches you through a peephole.

Norman is given a job at a local diner where he meets a waitress named Mary played by Jennifer Tilly's sister Meg.  She claims to have nowhere to stay so he invites her to stay at his creepy ass house, where he makes "toasted cheese" sandwiches for her.  A toasted cheese sandwich is what normal people call a grilled cheese.

Soon Norman starts to get phone calls he thinks are from his mother and someone masquerading as his mother kills a couple of teenagers who sneak into the basement to make out, as well as Norman's doctor, played by Robert Loggia.

In the end it's revealed that Mary and her mother are trying to drive Norman crazy to get him put back in jail, but they die.  He has some help in the lady who runs the diner who claims to be his real mother and the sister of Ma Bates.  When she confesses all of this, Norman hits her over the head with a shovel and then sets her up in his mom's room to resume business.

It's not a terrible movie but not as good as the classic original of course.  Some movies don't really need to be a franchise, but I guess with Halloween and the invention of the super killer franchise, the studio wanted to jump on the bandwagon.  Anyway, this is another of those you can't find on Amazon and it was only sometimes on Pluto TV so you'd really have to find it with the main site.

The Psychotronic Man:  In this short, cheap 70s "thriller" a barber in Chicago goes on a long, long road trip until he has an encounter with a UFO or something.  When he wakes up he finds he has telekinesis.  Which he starts to use to murder people for...reasons.  Then there's a lengthy chase with police before he dies.  During the chase through various alleys sometimes you see rats scurry by and I keep thinking I bet those were real vermin not ones planted.  I mean a movie this cheap probably doesn't have a rat wrangler on set, right?  Anyway, if you want to fall asleep this is a perfect movie for it with all the pointless driving and running and undercharacterization.

The Last Slumber Party:  This early 80s slasher movie is a horror movie in the sense it's very, very horrible.  I'm not sure the writer, if there was one, ever really went to a slumber party because the three girls in this movie don't really do anything.  They watch a little TV, eat a couple of apples, and smoke a joint.  A couple of annoying boys come over and get slashed by one of two slashers.  One slasher is their nerdy classmate "Science" who I guess is a copycat of the real slasher, some mental patient played by the director.

It disregards one of the rules of these movies as the sweet virgin is killed while the annoying slut remains to the end.  Then there's a big twist as it's revealed none of the stuff we saw actually happened!  It was the annoying slut's dream.  But then her and her friend go to the virgin's house and the killer sneaks in.  So I guess it's all going to happen this time, right?

With bad acting, shitty editing, and an awful synth soundtrack this is one of those that's so bad it's still bad, which makes it ripe for riffing.  This used to be on Pluto TV all the time but then they stopped showing it but it's still on Amazon.

Fever Lake:  This mid-90s slasher movie features one of the Coreys (the one who died) as a college student who goes to the eponymous lake with Mario Lopez, another guy, and three girls.  It's funny when the girls go to a local diner everyone stares at them like they're aliens.  Oh no, three white middle-class girls!  They're so out of place!

After a lot of boring non-scares people finally start dying.  Then it's revealed one of the girls is possessed by the spirit of the Corey's dead mother--or something.  This is one of those that makes the mistake of some horror movies--even big-budget ones--in being really boring instead of scary.  But still it's fun to riff on it.

Terror at Tenkiller:  Another slasher movie that's not really very scary or exciting.  Made on the cheap in Oklahoma it features two college girls who go to the eponymous Tenkiller Lake for the summer.  The younger of the two has been stalked by an emotionally abusive boyfriend.  Just her luck, a local named Tor starts to obsess about her.  Tor has already murdered a few other women and soon sets his sights on the older of the girls before he tries to make the other girl his bride or something.

One of the funniest things is the girls work at a local diner and are always talking about how busy it is...and yet we never see anyone else in there.  The music is especially bad; like The Last Slumber Party it uses bad synth music--even on the harmonica Tor plays!  It's funny during the end chase when the riffers start making quacking and beeping noises that perfectly fit the soundtrack.  A goofy soundtrack is really the way to increase tension in your movie.

The House on Sorority Row:  This early 80s horror movie uses sort of the formula from the original Friday the 13th, only in reverse.  In the original Friday the 13th you think it's Jason Voorhees killing the campers but it's really his mother.  In this case you think it's the old lady who runs a sorority house killing the girls after they play a nasty prank on her by throwing her in a pool, but really it's some weird kid of hers who's been locked up in an asylum--except during summers.

This twist doesn't make it better because it's not really clear who this son of hers is.  The kills aren't really that great either.  So it's kind of boring and not all that scary, like those above.

Ice Cream Man:  In this mid-90s movie, an ice cream man played by Clint Howard terrorizes some local kids.  Meanwhile the adults in town are all incredibly stupid because it's so obvious Clint Howard is evil.  I mean, look at him!  And his truck is full of bugs and mice and human body parts.  Doesn't this town have a health inspector?

In an entry about a year ago I talked about a few things that were introduced that didn't really pay off.  Like the kids have rockets on their bikes that never really get any use.  And one girl's mother is foaming at the mouth and talking gibberish at one point, but there's no reason given and it has no significance to the plot.

In the end a kid pushes Clint Howard into a mixer and he dies.  Then the kid goes crazy to repeat the cycle, or something.  It's not all that scary but it is kind of gross, especially when he puts an eyeball in a cop's ice cream cone.  Ick.

Jack Frost:  This is also from the mid-90s and should not be confused with the Michael Keaton movie from around the same time.  This is a bizarrely bad horror movie where some weird science project creates a snowman with the soul of a serial killer.  The snowman then begins murdering people in a small Colorado town.

The dialogue in this is utterly ludicrous.  The snowman speaks in non sequiters, randomly shouting things like, "Made in America!"  Which means...I have no idea.  Along with lame effects, poor acting, and a plot about as logical as the dialogue, this is definitely worse than that other movie with the same name, though a lot funnier.

Terror in the Wax Museum:  This is a recent Rifftrax of a late 60s British TV movie.  It's a pretty tepid murder mystery featuring John Carradine as the owner of a wax museum in 1890s London who's murdered in the first act.  Then some other people are murdered and it seems Jack the Ripper (or his wax version) is killing people.  But really it's the local bartender because he's after John Carradine's buried treasure.  Um, wait, treasure?  There was no mention of treasure before this!  And why would the owner of a shitty wax museum have treasure?  The treasure turns out to be surgical tools made of platinum, I guess.  Because that makes sense, right?  No.  Not at all.

Sisters of Death:  This Rifftrax is a 70s movie about some sorority sisters who 7 years ago "accidentally" killed a pledge sort of in the same way Brandon Lee died on the set of The Crow.  They were supposed to fake shoot her with a fake bullet but instead someone swapped it with a real bullet.  So 7 years later they're all brought to the house of dead pledge's father.  And then these dumb sorority girls start to die in boring, non-gory ways.  There aren't even any great boob shots.  So, pretty lame.  A lot of the movie is the girls and two pervy guys trying to figure out how to get past an electrified fence that's only like six feet tall.  I mean they probably could have found some boxes or something to pile up and then jump over the fence.  Maybe throw some pillows or a mattress over the fence to land on.  In the end it's revealed one pledge killed the other for...reasons.  It really would have helped if the opening scene had given us any idea who these characters were.  Kind of ruins the payoff.

Blood Theatre:  This is a pretty nonsensical, non-scary slasher movie.  There's a vague setup about a theater whose owner decided to kill his audience (somehow) instead of convert to movies.  When was this?  It's not really clear.  How did he kill everyone?  Um...gas or something?

Then it skips to the present day (or 1984) to the most unrealistic movie theater in history.  I guess someone like Rick Sloane wouldn't know what an actual movie theater is like; it's not like his movies ever played in one.  I mean this place has intermissions, almost constant loud speaker announcements, movie posters that look like they were hand drawn by Napoleon Dynamite, and a locker room.  A locker room?  Don't the employees just change at home?  I suppose that was just an excuse for gratuitous nudity; in which case it's surprising there wasn't an employee shower.

Anyway, three middle-aged teenagers are transferred to the theater from the beginning of the movie to reopen it.  And then two other annoying girls.  The one is a total bitch who shows her boobs in a theater and assaults a few customers and yet isn't jailed or even fired.  WTF?

The original owner, now an old man, somehow manages to go around murdering people.  There's a slight attempt to set up a plot of the original owner in love with one of the middle-aged teenagers he thinks is some girl who worked at the theater and didn't return his love or some damned thing.  But the girl stabs him and ends the curse or whatever.  For some reason the movie ends with a freeze frame on two cops we've never seen before entering the theater.  Yay?

A total lack of plot logic, annoying characters, awful music (even for 1984), and sound effects that make no sense like whooshing doors, this is an especially bad example of early 80s horror movies.

I'm sure there are more I haven't covered, but this was certainly a lot of them.