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You know Michael and Jason and Chucky and Freddy. But the 1980s weren’t just about these major franchises. After Halloween and Friday the 13th proved that studios could make a ton of money with a simple premise, and with the home video boom upping the demand for more and more content, the Greed Decade was filled with movies about groups of people getting picked off in increasingly absurd ways. And with a tried-and-true premise to work from, even the worst slasher movies end up being pretty watchable.
So if you want to see eccentric weirdos use everyday objects to off some of the dumbest people ever to appear on screen, then check out these 10 lesser-known slashics. But before we begin, let’s make a quick point of clarification. Generally, slashers are about a single person using a weapon to kill their victims. But we’ll use the fact that everyone agrees that A Nightmare on Elm Street is a slasher, even though Freddy’s glove is more of a prop than a tool of destruction, to stretch the boundaries a bit.
Happy Birthday to Me (1981)
First, let’s get this out of the way: the incredible kill depicted on the poster for Happy Birthday to Me isn’t nearly as cool in the actual movie. Yeah, someone gets stabbed in the face with a kabob poker, but it mostly happens off-screen. Still, it’s hard to complain, or frankly even notice, the oversight when you’re trying to keep track of Happy Birthday to Me‘s overly-complicated plot.
Happy Birthday to Me is sort of about Ginny Wainright (Melissa Sue Anderson of Little House on the Prairie), a member of the cool kids at her exclusive private school, a group dubbed the “Top Ten.” When members of the Top Ten start getting killed off, Ginny’s secret past gets revealed, with the help of the legendary Glenn Ford sporting an amazing leisure suit and medallion. Happy Birthday to Me doesn’t make much sense, but that only enhances its absurd pleasures.
Bloody Birthday (1981)
1981 was a big year for deadly birthday parties, as demonstrated by Bloody Birthday, released just a month after Happy Birthday to Me. Instead of making a Little House star into a killer, Bloody Birthday gets even more taboo, building around three murderous moppets. The three kids—played by Elizabeth Hoy, Billy Jacoby, Andy Freeman—were all born on the same day, under a solar eclipse. And as they approach their tenth birthday, the trio gets more and more murderous.
Unlike its fellow ’81 birthday flick, Bloody Birthday doesn’t worry itself with too much plot. Instead, it’s all about the fun of watching three absolute brats do horrible things to the people around them, and then whine when they get caught. Director Ed Hunt, who co-wrote the script with Barry Pearson, doesn’t push things too far beyond the bounds of good taste (this isn’t a Troma production). But one always gets the sense that something truly horrific is about to happen, making Bloody Birthday a twisted type of present to anyone who wants a sleazy slasher.
Student Bodies (1981)
Conventional wisdom would suggest that it takes more than a year for a genre to become popular enough to be parodied. But Halloween and Friday the 13th established the genre beats so clearly that writer/director Mickey Rose could already make Student Bodies in 1981.
Student Bodies stars Kristen Riter (not Jessica Jones) as Toby, a high school senior stalked by a killer known as the Breather. While Toby escapes his wrath, other teens aren’t so lucky, falling prey to paper clips, eggplants, and other unlikely objects that the Breather uses to dispatch them. Student Bodies has a broad sense of humor, and certainly leans more into comedy than horror. But it remains a fun time capsule of a genre that was ready for a take-down just a year into its mainstream existence.
Pieces (1982)
The slasher is essentially an American version of the Italian giallo, a genre that was itself a riff on Psycho and American pulp novels. Pieces further complicates things by adding a third nation, Spain, for a Spanish, Italian, and American co-production that’s a world-class mess. Directed by Juan Piquer Simón, who would go on to make the killer cephalopod movie Slugs, and written by Dick Randall and Roberto Loyola, Pieces is about a kid whose mother yells at him for putting together a nudie puzzle. So, when he grows up, that kid starts making up for lost time, by cutting women into puzzle pieces.
Believe it or not, the premise is the least weird part of Pieces. Each elaborate murder set-piece unfolds in absurd, lurid fashion, of course. But it’s everything else that boggles the mind, from ’80s big dummy Paul Smith as the world’s most pleased red herring to Christopher George and Lynda Day George as investigators, the latter of whom gives a profane line-reading for the ages.
Visiting Hours (1982)
Slashers may be an American phenomenon, but when it comes to the leanest, pluckiest entries in the subgenre, you have to head north. Canada has produced some real gems, such as 1982’s Visiting Hours, which takes the hospital setting of Halloween II and stretches it to feature length.
Directed by Jean-Claude Lord, who would later make the pleasing Terminator knockoff The Vindicator, and written by Brian Taggert, Visiting Hours stars the great Michael Ironside as Colt Hawker, a serial killer who gets his feelings hurt when commentator Deborah Ballin (Lee Grant) calls out his misogyny. After she survives his first attack, Colt follows Deborah to a hospital, where he plans to finish the job, killing a lot of other people—including Deborah’s boss, played by William Shatner—in the process.
The Mutilator (1984)
Many low-budget horror movies have multiple titles, changed up as the studio or distributor tries desperately to get people to pay attention to their movie. The Mutilator is no different, having originally been called Fall Break. Believe it or not, that safe, upbeat title actually fits much of the movie, which follows a bunch of college kids on a fall break trip to a beach house, and even begins with a sitcom-style theme song called, you guessed it, “Fall Break.”
Yet, in between the guileless good times, writer/director Buddy Cooper and co-director John S. Douglass insert scenes that definitely earn the title The Mutilator. The killer in The Mutilator dispatches his victims in cruel, slow-paced sequences that emphasize the suffering of victims (usually women in states of undress) who were goofing around just moments ago. The combination doesn’t make for a coherent film, but it does make The Mutilator a memorable movie, no matter what you call it.
Slaughter High (1986)
Fundamentally, all slasher movies go back to Psycho, which means that even the trashiest entry needs to have a psychological reason that the killer went nuts. In many ’80s slashers, that original sin involves a prank gone wrong, but few do it better than Slaughter High, written and directed by three people: Mark Ezra, George Dugdale and Peter Litten.
Are three heads better than one? Maybe not in terms of innovation, as Slaughter High follows a fairly rote plot. Ten years after a prank gone wrong kills one of their classmates, a group of young adults reconvene at their high school, only to be menaced by a slasher called the Jester. But one does get the sense of three guys egging each other on, as Slaughter High does contain some incredible death sequences and a truly gnarly shock ending.
Slumber Party Massacre II (1987)
To Detroit sports fans, the members of the Ilitch family, who own the Red Wings and the Tigers, are real-world villains. On the screen, the scariest Ilitch is Atanas Ilitch, who plays the rockabilly Driller Killer in the smart slasher Slumber Party Massacre II.
Like Amy Holden Jones, who directed the first film, Slumber Party Massacre II writer and director Deborah Brock uses a Roger Corman slasher movie to make a feminist film about women fighting a dangerous man. Where the first movie keeps things in the real world, Slumber Party Massacre II borrows a page from A Nightmare on Elm Street, making the Driller Killer a supernatural slasher who can pop out of anywhere to impale some woman on his guitar and then do a rock and roll number.
Death Spa (1988)
Okay, we’re stretching things a bit to call Death Spa a slasher. The culprit behind the deaths of various hardbodies at a trendy gym might be a ghost, it might be ’80s AI gone mad, or it might be a fitness nut who’s lost their mind. The script by James Bartruff and Mitch Paradise isn’t terribly clear, and director Michael Fischa cares too much about the shocking deaths and inexplicable romance scenes (did you know that celery is the most sensual of marsh plants?) to sort it out.
Yet, we still contend that Death Spa belongs on this list, because it features that most important quality of the genre: gratuitous death scenes involving unusual objects. Weight machines rip apart their users, spears launch from unexpected places, and, uh, a diving board comes undone. Okay, that last one isn’t great, but the others all more than justify Death Spa‘s status as a slasher and an under-appreciated great.
Nightmare Beach (1989)
Given the slasher genre’s debt to giallo, it’s fitting that we end this list in Italy. Well, Italy’s version of Miami, specifically a Miami beach overrun by Spring Breakers. Directed by Umberto Lenzi, who also made the mondo film Cannibal Ferox and the inexplicable Evil Dead/Poltergiest rip-off Ghosthouse, Nightmare Beach has oodles of style, making it the coolest entry on this list.
Nightmare Beach mostly follows former football star Skip (Nicolas de Toth) and local bartender Gail (Sarah Buxton) as they investigate a series of murders conducted by a mysterious motorcyclist who kills people by enticing them to touch his bike. Throw in the always great John Saxon as a police chief with a dirty secret and an inappropriate but funny subplot about a young woman scamming local men, and Nightmare Beach is a perfect piece of slasher excess.
The post The Best Underrated Slashers of the 1980s appeared first on Den of Geek.
