Bad Movie Club: Shreck

1990 historical horror movie

Bad Movie Rating: 3/5 (Fred: 2/5; Josh: 2/5 or maybe a 3/5 because of its name)

Rating: 4/20

Plot: Three Nazi-and-horror-obsessed idiots stupidly bring infamous Nazi Max Shreck and some ghosts to life after a seance and then have to try to get rid of him as he causes problems.

No, this is not the whimsical animated fractured fairy tale with the ogre and talking donkey. That's Shrek. This one has a C in it. This is a low-budget video trash classic that was the first and last movie directed by Carl Denham, a name I could have sworn was familiar but apparently isn't. I'm actually amazed that this movie wasn't written and directed by the actors. It just feels like a movie that three stooges decided to make over a series of weekends after they finished up their shifts at their 7-11's or whatever gas stations they were working at. Two of the three were in a handful of other movies--mostly the same movies--while the third guy came to his senses and got out of the profession. Big Joe Mueller, the guy who lumbers around (well, mostly stands around) as the resurrected killer and looks about as menacing as a guy with a gas mask and hockey gloves can look, was in another movie 11 years later. I'm intrigued by the writers of this movie. Don Adams and Harry James Picardi (because it took two whole human beings to write this) have directed some straight-to-video things that look like future Bad Movie Club picks--Vengeance of the Dead and Jigsaw, especially. The story was actually fairly interesting although I might be in the minority in thinking that. There are some nearly-clever twists involving time travel and ghosts in this mess that accidentally give away the writers' secret--that they might actually be creative!

The movie's stuffed with this weird angst. There's some really weird violence including, for the second BMC in a row, an attempted murder by cleats. There's also a decapitation with a swastika fan blade because the makers of this thing were obsessed with Nazis. The story's got a weird clash of all these historical tidbits, a love for cheap horror flicks, and crappy heavy metal. Maybe one of the writers--probably Picardi--was the history buff and could provide all these small details about how German grenades were shaped like flashlights and the other guy was the horror guy? And maybe the three characters were actually a band called Dogs of Gore and provided the score? Well, actually Hell Hound did the score. I'm sorry that I'm dwelling on this, but I'm just shocked so many people were involved in the making of this movie.

Where can I get myself one of these shirts, by the way?

Those would look great with my Zubaz actually. Unfortunately, I doubt I'll ever find these shirts available anywhere since I wasn't even able to find a poster for this movie and had to use one for Shrek instead.

This would be more good-bad-movie watchable if it wasn't for one thing. Outside shots, for whatever reason, usually look like this:

It appeared as if we were watching a copy of a copy of a copy on Youtube, and I was having technical difficulties again, but most exterior shots were tinted with this dark blue that really looked pretty hideous. There was other weird tinting, too, so it seemed like a stylistic choice that Carl Denham made, almost like he said, "If I'm only going to make one movie in my life, I want to make sure that a lot of the movie can't even be seen."

Anyway, this is a bad movie I'd almost recommend because of general weirdness, bad acting by the three leads, a goofy and completely non-intimidating monster, Scooby-Doo inspired ghosts that actually had sheets, and a couple really gruesome deaths.