It’s time for two nightmares from the 1980s!

Zombie Nightmare and Nightmare Weekend were the types of films you rented at the video store when you’d seen every other horror movie in the place. And when you were done, you wished you’d just rented Friday the 13^th for the 40^th time.

Zombie Nightmare (1987)

Heavy metal god Jon Mikl Thor had a great horror year in 87! Not only did he star in Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare, he starred in Zombie Nightmare…for the first few minutes before he turns into a zombie killer, played by someone else.

So there are these punks. A black girl walks through their town, so they try to rape her. This nice dad walking home from a baseball game with his wife and son stops them…but they kill him. His little son watches on in horror then grows up to be Thor!

Thor plays baseball. Thor has lush heavy metal hair. Thor shows off his tits and nipples in a tiny, super gay tank top. When two thugs hold up a convenience store, Thor play fights with them—I mean, overpowers them and they run off. But they soon get their revenge.

Once Thor is dead, his mother calls on the black girl her dead husband saved years before, who has grown up to be a voodoo master. She brings Thor back as a big old zombie with a baseball bat. Hey, at least the killer is cool. He goes on a rampage and kills all the baddies. It’s very Maniac Cop.

There are a couple of cool chase scenes, not much blood, a hot guy in tighty whities, and another hot guy working out all sweaty and shirtless. Oh. And there’s Adam West as a detective on the case. It all comes to a head in a cemetery, with a smoke machine and a classic 1980s red-glowing grave.

Zombie Nightmare has a total metal soundtrack, including songs by Girlschool (awesome!), Motorhead, Fist, Virgin Steele, Thor, and Pantera.

NIGHTMARE WEEKEND (1986)

You’ll have a nightmare weekend like I did if you watch this one. The good news is it features hottie Dale Midkiff from Pet Sematary, and he gets shirtless. The bad news is everything else.

There’s this man and woman doing scientific experiments. There’s this girl who has a computer with a puppet that controls people’s cars when the girl plays Colecovision racing games. There are killer panties.

We also get repetitive scenes involving hookups at nightclubs, sex, and men being killed by girls who are unknowingly a part of the experiment. They get deep throated by these silver orbs then kill the men who try to have sex with them. All this set to a combination of 80s Euro horror synth music and some of the worst muzak ever.

Oh wait. There is good news. There is an endless parade of amazingly hot guys in Nightmare Weekend, including a furry, shirtless stunner with a pornstache.

Also, for a split second near the end, things get freakishly creepy, with women turning all gnarly and terrorizing the final girl. If they had looked like this throughout the whole film, it would have been such an awesome piece of straight-to-VHS trash.