(1985)
Dir - Krishna Shah
Overall: GOOD
Bollywood filmmaker Krishna Shah's Hard Rock Zombies is the type of deliberately absurd "bad" movie that seems as if it was made on another planet. Part Ed Wood incompetence, part John Waters offensiveness for the sake of it, part rock musical, part accidental avant-garde film, and all with Troma-style anti-production values, it has cult movie written in bold, garish handwriting all over it. Predating Jackie Kong's similarly hilarious, rotten taste masterpiece Blood Diner by two years, this is a much more shoddy and even more nonsensical endeavor with a front-to-back mangled tone. It is difficult to tell what exactly Shah was going for as opposed to what ends up coming off on screen, which of course is a great deal of the fun. While it occasionally drags and becomes monotonous just like most terrible, z-grade movies do, there are plenty of head-scratchingly ridiculous moments to laugh at/with. Any movie with Hitler raising a Texas Chainsaw worthy dysfunctional family with two midgets in masks and a hot babe, plus the world's worst pop rock band in corpse paint should probably be experienced at least once.
(1986)
Dir - Tobe Hooper
Overall: MEH
Dumb and awkward at regular intervals, Tobe Hooper's Invaders from Mars continued the 1980s trend of B-movie sci-fi remakes, this one with mediocre yet at least forgivable results. Dan O'Bannon and Don Jakoby's screenplay adheres to the same silliness as the original where a twelve-year old boy collaborates with the US military in defeating the hostile alien intruders, but at least Hooper is in on the joke and seems to be managing the proceedings with an innocent, sentimental agenda. It is a shameless throwback vehicle in this sense, but fans of 1950s monsters from outer space movies will have little to complain about since the updated special effects by John Dykstra and Stan Winston plus the quicker pace are both more user friendly, let alone certainly less dated. The first two acts are somewhat suspenseful and moody, yet things collapse into dullsville once everything degenerates into a big, loud, exploding spectacle at the end. James Karen, Laraine Newman, Louis Fletcher, and Karen Black give the knowingly goofy material a solid go, but Hunter Carson makes a typical annoying movie kid just as Jimmy Hunt did in the 1953 version.
(1988)
Dir - Paul Golding
Overall: MEH
The only directorial effort from screenwriter Paul Golding, Pulse is a pretty bog-standard, PG-13 horror film that is mostly of note for containing an early performance from child actors Joey and Matthew Lawrence. On paper, the concept of malevolent poltergeist activity via electricity might seem interesting enough to make a movie out of, but in actuality, the result is pretty consistently low on chills or much of any pizzazz whatsoever. The strained father/son dynamic provides a fine emotional backbone for when things become mildly threatening and one could perhaps see this as a cautionary tale of man's over-reliance on modern conveniences representing some kind of vague threat. Hardly the most profound or even amusing angle to take for a run-of-the-mill genre film, yet Golding plays everything remarkably straight. This is often the kiss of death when it comes to technological horror, but comparing this to something like Maximum Overdrive which took the schlock factor and rammed it full-tilt into the wall, merely throwing sinister music over shots of electoral circuits sparking and melting will hardly get the viewer's heart-racing. At least there is a scene where the Lawrence brothers play with the Cobra Terror Drome though.
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