Retro Slashers

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An early SOV series that bridges the cinematic gap between Snuff and Hostel. Gary Cohen, a video store owner back during the Mom & Pop glory days, noticed the glut of terrible horror movies flooding shelves on a weekly basis and decided to make his own cheap fright flick. So Cohen rounded up friends, actors [...]

Prof. Richard Harwell (Tom Scheier) discovers Jack the Ripper’s ring in a Tulsa, Oklahoma antique shop. Wearing the ring unleashes Jack from limbo and allows him to increase his bloody body count. Only horror geek Steve (Wade Tower) and skeletal dance instructor Carol (Mona Van Pernis) can stop the two-hundred-year-old killer from completing his mission. [...]

In 1983 David A. Prior wrote and directed Sledgehammer. After languishing for a year, it found a distributor but slasher fans had a hard time finding copies at local mom & pop video stores. Fortunately, Sledgehammer has been saved from obscurity with a new DVD release from Intervision Picture Corp and Severin Films. The movie [...]

By Richard Mogg for Retro Slashers Was that a severed penis hanging from the woodchipper?!? I suppose I could have saved that line for the end of this review but I, like the filmmakers of this uber-cheap video production, tend to throw the money-shots up head first. Make no mistake, I’ll Kill You, I’ll Bury [...]

By Richard Mogg for Retro Slashers Ahh… the glory days of Shot-On-Video (S.O.V.) horror. With six times the bad acting and ten times the charm, these camcorder classics were the ultimate fad during the up and coming years of the VHS. Think a couple hundred bucks isn’t enough to make a movie? Jon McBride proved [...]

By Richard Mogg for Retro Slashers Oreo cookie delights! Three times I’ve come across this forgotten SOV (Shot On Video) sleeper and three times the tape’s video-box has been covered in mold. The dusty, fuzzy kind. The kind of funk that leaves your hands smelling like garden soil after you slide the cassette into that [...]

As Scream‘s token nerd Randy revealed, there are rules to surviving a horror movie. Although he would cover sex and drugs, there is another important point that he would neglect to mention… never, ever play a practical joke! With very few exceptions (Friday the 13th Part 2’s Ted being the most obvious example), this is [...]

For anyone who has ever been pushed around (and haven’t we all at one point), Slaughter High is a revenge seeker’s wet dream. Marty (Simon Scuddamore) is probably the nerdiest nerd this side of Kenny Hampson (Terror Train). But he’s kind of lovable in that totally annoying way most dorks are. In the first scenes [...]

Exactly twenty-five April 1sts have passed since the release of Fred Walton’s classic “fun” slasher, April Fool’s Day, and the chances of a 25th Anniversary Special Edition DVD are looking increasingly slim. In lieu of a commentary track, then, here’s a time-coded trivia guide to one of the quirkiest horror movies of the 80s… Major [...]

Holy guacamoley, we really outdid ourselves this year with the April fool’s day prank, which consisted of two co-ordinated efforts for a winning result. Our complete and total rule is best exemplified in the comments on Blood Test, where longtime reader Tuzo wrote “I used to [love] the April Fool’s day jokes on this site, [...]