Creepozoids (1987)

My best friend - and fellow crappy horror movie aficionado - Paul popped down from London the other day for one of our semi-regular film nights.

His viewing suggestion, 1987's Creepozoids, turned out to be an hilariously awful, low-budget, Alien  mockbuster-style B-movie treat.

Set in a "futuristic" 1998, six years after a nuclear apocalypse, war is still raging and five of the most useless military deserters find themselves hiding out in a mysterious, abandoned laboratory, unable to leave because of a sudden downpour of acid rain.

Remember when "acid rain" was ubiquitous in sci-fi and post-apocalyptic movies, as shorthand for manmade environmental destruction? Ahh, those were the days!

The "big name star" of Creepozoids is the delightfully scruffy Linnea Quigley (of The Return of the Living Dead and Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers fame) as Blanca, who pairs up with a walking slice of ham called Butch (Ken Abraham).

They are accompanied by the nominal leader of the pack, Jake (Richard Hawkins, who would go on to play an air traffic controller in Close Encounters of The Third Kind), his girlfriend, Kate (Kim McKamy aka adult movie star Ashlyn Gere, whose character quirk appears to be an inability to sit down during meal scenes), and anxious, tech "wiz" Jesse (Michael Aranda). You know he's the "brains" of the group because he wears glasses... and looks a bit like Shane Black's Hawkins from Predator.

Except for a short spell of exterior work to get the characters into the underground bunker, Creepozoids is shot entirely in a warehouse, with a budget of around of £15 (none of which, seemingly, went on the script).

Very quickly our heroes realise they are trapped in the laboratory complex with a large humanoid monster that is clearly a man in a bargain basement xenomorph Halloween costume.

As amusing as that creature is, it's nothing compared to the giant rats that are obviously oversized stuffed toys which the poor actors are having to shake around to simulate the vicious attacks from these killer rodents.

Impressively plotless, what passes for a story in Creepozoids (and, no, I don't know why that's the title) is a series of random encounters that rapidly whittles down our protagonists without really explaining what the creature actually wants.

Bizarrely for a film that barely clocks in with a 72 minute runtime, there's also a lot of padding in writer-director David DeCoteau's film (co-written with Dave Eisenstark under the pen name of Burford Hauser). 

Paul and I lost count of the number of times various characters crawled up and down the same, short, piece of gunge-splattered passageway.

Then the final showdown between the last man standing and the big bad monster just felt interminable. 

This climactic confrontation also took a strange turn when the monster was injected with a randomly acquired syringe of something-or-other, seemingly killing it only for - moments later - a freakish puppet baby to sprout from its head and continue the aggression.

To add insult to injury, Creepozoids doesn't even deign to have a proper conclusion - instead just suddenly ending on a freezeframe of the mutant baby. Presumably this was to set up the proposed sequel that never materialised.

Perversely, this isn't the worst film we've ever seen - that honour belongs to either Shark Exorcist or the entire Camp Blood franchise - Creepozoids almost gets a pass because it's really an extended vignette rather than an actual movie. 

And you can't really knock anything that stars Linnea Quigley.

Hobo With A Shotgun (2011)

If Camp Blood and Shark Exorcist set a new low in crapness that I will endure on DVD, then Hobo With A Shotgun has become the new benchmark by which all future OTT, Grand Guignol, splatterfests will be judged.

Inspired by a fake trailer from the Tarantino/Rodriguez Grindhouse double-bill of Death Proof and Planet Terror, Hobo With A Shotgun  is the charming tale of an ageing vagrant (Rutger Hauer), pushed over the edge by the violence and lawlessness run amok in Hope City, who turns vigilante - with aid of a pawn shop pump-action, 20-gauge shotgun - and delivers "justice one shell at a time".

In a Taxi Driver-esque development, he saves - then teams up - with a young prostitute, Abby (Molly Dunsworth), to take on the city's out-of-control crimelord The Drake (Brian Downey) and his two Tom Cruise-inspired sons Slick (Gregory Smith) and Rip (Nick Bateman).

This is Robocop meets Braindead (Dead Alive for Americans) with all the slick, sick, black humour and ridiculously over-the-top gore you would expect from such a pedigree.

Not for the feint-hearted, closed-minded or humourless, Hobo With A Shotgun is in a class of its own for tongue-in-cheek shocks and taboo-bending casual violence (Torching a packed school bus? A human piñata?) but it's also a straight-up revenge story with a mix of great, quotable, dialogue balanced with deliberately campy dialogue and a brilliant central performance from a grizzled Rutger Hauer.

Hobo is pretty much review-proof. It wears its grindhouse credentials with pride and the chances are you're going into this with a good idea of what kind of entertainment you can expect.

And if any sensitive, serious, cineastes should stray into a screening of a film called Hobo With A Shotgun they're going to get what they deserve.

Shark Exorcist (2014)

Let's be honest for a moment: in our time, Paul and I have watched a lot of shit films.

But Shark Exorcist takes this to a new low.

I'd bought the DVD for Paul's birthday, in March, as a joke present. It had both "shark" and "exorcist" in the title, so surely it was a film we needed to see.

Without even watching it, Paul had loaned it to a mate who - after viewing it - had decided to take it to Cash Converters before I foolishly suggested to Paul that it might be a good candidate for one of our horror film nights.

Paul and I finally sat down to watch it one weekend in 2017... and are both still reeling from the psychological trauma of the experience.

To put it politely, it makes The Asylum's output look like Alfred Hitchcock or Werner Herzog; it is unbelievably poor. Really, really, really awful.

Shark Exorcist gives Camp Blood a run for its money for the title of worst film ever to pollute our viewing history.

Possibly produced on a dare, or a student film that has escaped into the wild, 2014's Shark Exorcist was clearly made by someone who has never studied how a film actually works.

The movie's full of scenes that start too early and then run on for too long; extended sequences where the filmmakers were clearly unable to record the actor's speaking, so we get to watch a lot of miming and pointing; a script that tears up the basic concept of a three-act story (or any form of coherent narrative); and not one but two painfully redundant post-credits scenes.

This is before we even consider the universally abysmal level of acting, not helped by the fact that several of the actresses look noticeably bored or simply don't want to be there any more.

As well as lacking a protagonist (even the titular exorcist is only in a handful of scenes), what passes for a story in Shark Exorcist is risible nonsense, all over the place, and totally confused.

There's an evil nun who sacrifices someone to Satan... or a demonic shark. Which lives in a lake.

It's a crappy CGI shark that looks like it was designed on a ZX81 by the work experience kid during his lunch break.

Then a year later three women visit the lake and one, Ali (Angela Kerecz) gets bitten by the shark (her wound looks like she was eating a hot dog and spilled ketchup on her thigh).

She goes to hospital, but then miraculously recovers from her life-threatening ketchup spill... because she's now possessed by the demon shark (or is a wereshark?).

The girl starts attacking random people (maybe she shapechanges into the shark, maybe she summons it, the film isn't clear on this topic).

Unfortunately, she makes the mistake of killing the brother of a priest (Bobby Kerecz - husband of the actress playing Ali), who then tracks her down and decides to exorcise her (even though he admits he isn't a trained exorcist).

There's a ridiculously comical exorcism scene, which features the best line in the movie: "You're going to need a bigger cross!"

After which things get even weirder. The priest becomes possessed and bites another woman, but then the demon shark drops out of a portal in the sky (WTF?), and what passes for a story goes totally off the rails.

There's an assortment of oddities in and around all this, such as the "ghost hunting" TV show that's tracking the demon shark, some wannabe witches in a nearby churchyard, a sorority initiation (where something happens off-camera that's never addressed), a bizarre and prolonged sequence of a perv spying on a woman sunbathing (in the most miserable conditions), the return of the killer nun etc

If you enjoy bad movies then this is hilarious, and we were laughing out loud for large portions of its blissfully short 71-minute duration, but there are also moments of mind boggling bewilderment where you have no clue what's going on (and I don't mean in a trippy 2001: A Space Odyssey way).

Now, I'm worried that I'm making it sound better than it is. Trust me. Shark Exorcist is dire. As I write this, it has a rating of 1.4 (out of 10) on IMDB, from 2,100 reviews. Camp Blood has a 3.1 rating, from 1,300 reviews.

I also think Sharxorcist would have been a better name.

Oh, and there was also (somehow) a sequel, Shark Exorcist 2: Unholy Waters (which we haven't seen... yet):