Big Bad Richard Tyson doing what he does best…

Playing the big bad boy, the way I’ll always remember him thanks to Three O’Clock High back in 1987. It may not be a horror film, but I blog about it here because it was sexy scary for sure.

Since then, Tyson has gone on to appear in plenty of horror, much of which I’ve blogged about, including Flight of the Living Dead, Hayride, Hayride 2, The Black Waters of Echo’s Pond, The Ghost of Goodnight Lane, The Dead the Damned and the Darkness, and the Playing with Dolls films. And then there are these three movies…

THE FEAR CHAMBER (2009)

After an uber gory opening, with Richard Tyson slitting a woman open and ripping out her organs with his hands, this film becomes a bit of a yawnfest!

The hot detective that tries to stop him fails miserably, ends up in the hospital, has some sort of spiritual episode involving the hospital room’s bathroom, and is then suddenly psychic. He can now see the women who are about to be murdered by Tyson.

The detective sets out to use his powers for good. He gets help from another psychic he meets in a bar, because she has the same ability to see Tyson’s victims. OK…. The entire film jumps between quick editing of flashy visions and nightmares the detective has of the victims (an attempt to deliver some scares and horror) and him investigating while trying to hunt down Tyson.

Tyson’s role is rather minimal, but he’s perfectly psychotic, provides the one genuine jump scare when he shows up in creepy makeup, and cuts open one more girl (who barely screams) for some last minute gore before the end of the film.

Really, this one isn’t even horror enough to appear on the Chiller network.

BOUND TO VENGEANCE (2015)

The concept is cool. This is essentially a revenge scenario, but it begins with the main girl escaping the lair of her captor (Tyson), overpowering him, finding photos of his other victims in his house, and then dragging him from one location to another to release all the girls he has chained up.

Where the concept falls apart? The girl escapes her captor, overpowers him…and doesn’t take him directly to the police to let them handle it.

Instead, she runs around town trying to get the girls she releases to jump on board and join her cause of dragging a dude around by a BDSM collar to the seediest places on earth. I can’t. Really.

Aside from learning things aren’t as cut and dry with these imprisoned girls as we would think, we are delivered the big twist. Problem is a) you can see the twist coming from a mile away because it’s rather obvious from interspersed clips of videos the main girl took with her friends before being kidnapped, and b) early in the film, Tyson basically says to the main girl, “Just wait to see how shocked you’ll be when you find out that the big twist is that_______.” Seriously, he TELLS us the twist.

BIG BAD WOLF (2006)

As damaging as it is to my OCD, I’ve refrained from making this blog chronological by release year. Instead, I’ve saved the best for last, because you’ve gotta end a Richard Tyson blog on a high note.

What I love most about horror comedy Big Bad Wolf is that whenever I watch it, it’s still SO watchable and I STILL love it. It’s got everything: a cheesy werewolf monster, campy comedy, raunchy situations, gore, plus shirtless guys!

A geeky kid sneaks up to his asshole stepdad’s (Richard Tyson) cabin in the woods to party with his friends. The Big Bad Wolf doesn’t hesitate. He strikes as soon as the fucking starts in the woods, and it’s a bloody good time. It’s also not what you’d expect from a cabin in the woods movie, because it’s over pretty fast!

The movie is actually about the main geeky kid and his goth female friend (Kimberly J. Brown of the Halloweentown movies) trying to prove that the asshole stepdad is actually a werewolf. It becomes a game of cat and mouse—or, werewolf and kids—as they unravel the truth.

Along the way, the Big Bad Wolf fucks a girl, rips off limbs, rips off heads, rips off genitals, and even talks! Yes, he growls out some good one-liners as he taunts and terrorizes the kids. Plus, I can’t forget to mention the um…”DNA” sample that needs to be gathered.

And finally, a whole bunch of annoying school newspaper kids looking for a cabin massacre scoop are thrown into the mix to ensure a body count when we return to the cabin for a final battle with the werewolf.

There are moments of light suspense, and the one real good jump scare is a dream sequence, plus the gore is great, the Big Bad Wolf costume is b-movie creature feature perfect, and a CGI transformation scene is cool until it suddenly turns into really bad cartoonish animation at the end. And naturally, Richard Tyson rox as the big bad pervy werewolf. Speaking of pervs, I finish things off with a little peepshow of Tyson…