One feels like an end of the 80s slasher, the other two are silly sexploitation horror comedies. Are they as fun as they should be?
DEAD GIRLS (1990)
Dead Girls is so totally 80s it gets five stars for nostalgia alone. Hair band hair galore, leather jackets, boomboxes and cassettes, acid wash jeans, chest hair…I longed for my teen years as I watched this low budget slasher.
There is, however, one major flaw; it runs too long. There was no need for this to be 105 minutes long. Other than that it throws in everything it could that screams 80s horror, beginning with kids doing a satanic ritual.
Next we meet the Dead Girls, a rock band that shockingly doesn’t get one song performance scene at all. The main girl has a combination of psychic dreams and nightmares that lead to her running home to her estranged sister, who has fallen ill.
For whatever reason, the main girl decides she and the band need to drag the sick sister to a cabin in the woods. Unfortunately, it takes forever to get to that part (if only all the filler had been edited down).
Anyway, once at the cabin, the main girl’s dreams persist and she gets visions of her band members as they’re killed off by someone in a black coat, skull mask, and black fedora. It’s interesting to note that virtually the same look would be used a year later in the 1991 slasher Scary Movie.
Dead Girls offers up basic slasher tropes, with heavy breathing, killer POV, scantily clad victims, a creepy local dude skulking in the shadows, cheesy good gore…and some surprisingly effective atmosphere and music to set the tone for the “scary” scenes. And the 80s boys are hot.
However, there’s a laughable element—a yellow envelope is the killer’s calling card.
The envelopes seem to predict the ways in which the kids will be killed. When the kids are not accusing each other of leaving them lying around, the killer is shoving them in victims’ faces (what’s the point of giving victims an envelope with pertinent information inside when you kill them before they can open it?). Meanwhile, the last few minutes of this film has so many red herring and twists that it feels like everyone is the killer.
Dead Girls is a treasure as a lost slasher I’ve never seen before, and that includes the fact that it’s an absolute mess (as the best direct-to-video slashers of the 80s always were).
THE INVISIBLE MANIAC (1990)
What can I say? It’s Zapped! with murders (and thankfully without douchebag Scott Baio).
A geeky child is verbally abused by his wicked mother for being a pervert that peeps naked girls with his telescope.
When he grows up and becomes a scientist, he creates an invisibility serum that fails to deliver during a demonstration in front of his peers. So he loses his shit and murders them.
He then breaks out of a mental institution and comes back with a new identity as a teacher. He perfects his serum then goes around ripping off the blouses of female students before murdering them.
It’s silly, sexually exploitative, campy, and only occasionally funny, but there are a few pretty violent deaths. I had the most fun whenever the killer beat up boys in tight 80s pants with the actors attempting to do their best mimed battles against the “invisible maniac”.
Even so, make no mistake—this movie is all about showing as many tits as possible.
WITCH ACADEMY (1995)
This is just a silly sexploitation comedy from Fred Olen Ray about a bunch of S&M sorority sisters that have to contend with the devil as he hunts for a bride.
Scream queen Michelle Bauer and a bunch of other babes show off their tits and spank each other before hazing a geeky girl and leaving her tied up in the basement.
Veteran actor Robert Vaughn, looking for a paycheck, plays the devil, who makes the geek girl into a bombshell minion and also turns her into a rubber costume monster to attack people.
The humor in this weak script is occasionally funny, and it is at its best when Priscilla Barnes of Three’s Company shows up briefly.
Too briefly. She easily could have stolen the show with her campy performance, but her presence wasn’t taken advantage of.
There are some funny, goofy monster moments, but they can’t save this cheap film, which is solely watchable for the nostalgia of living through the direct-to-video indies of the VHS era.
