The Crime of Doctor Crespi (John H. Auer, 1935)

The story of a surgeon driven to terrible things by ego, jealousy, and unrequited love, The Crime of Doctor Crespi turns its low budget, limited locations, and relatively simple plot into a dark, dryly funny, and visually compelling little movie with a take on the mad scientist that feels fresher and more modern than many of its '30s contemporaries. Erich von Stroheim deserves much of the credit for his performance in the title role, but director John H. Auer ain't chopped liver.

Dr. Andre Crespi (Stroheim) runs a hospital and is its chief surgeon. He's not an easy man to work for, and his mercurial temper can go from zero to one hundred in an instant, but he gets results. He's brilliant, though he seems to spend roughly 70% of his time in his office leisurely smoking cigarettes (at least fifteen minutes of this movie is Stroheim smoking; if  you're a Stroheim fan, you know that's a good thing), experimenting with mysterious liquids in tubes and beakers, gazing at or thumping the skull of the display skeleton of a baby, brooding, taking shots from the liquor bottle in his cabinet, and laughing to himself about a joke we're not in on. He seems weirdly pleased when he reads a newspaper account of a fellow doctor being seriously injured in a car accident.

The injured doctor, Stephen Ross (John Bohn), was a former surgeon at Crespi's hospital, and Crespi served as a mentor to the younger man. Ross married petroleum heiress Estelle (Harriet Russell) and moved on to bigger and better things in the world of medicine. Crespi was also in love with Estelle (though it's hard to imagine him loving anyone) and asked Ross to step aside. Ross clearly refused, so Crespi concocted a years-long revenge plan. This accident is just what he needs to put that plan in motion, and after a performative refusal to save Ross's life when Estelle calls to request him as surgeon, he eventually relents after she begs him in person. Will those strange liquids in the beakers and tubes have anything to do with the plan? Probably not. Just kidding. Spoiler alert: yes.

Things get wild and woolly, and Crespi's dark plot proceeds as planned. The only spanner in the works, as they say across the pond, is Dr. Thomas (Dwight Frye), a young surgeon at Crespi's hospital. Thomas has his suspicions about Crespi, and the recent vicious tongue lashing he received from the old doc for a minor infraction makes him even more determined to take that sucker down. This may be the only performance I've seen from Dwight Frye where he's not going apeshit the entire time. Frye was the go-to actor in '30s horror if the villain needed an insane sidekick or henchman or the town needed a lunatic, but he plays Thomas as the average Joe he is, though he does get to turn on a little of the amped Frye juice in the film's final stretch.

Erich von Stroheim is hilarious as Crespi. He plays him as a man who commits both evil deeds and complicated surgeries with a calm, quiet confidence and a tiny, mischievous spring in his step but who completely loses his shit when any of his employees exhibit even the smallest bit of unprofessional behavior or when a tiny hitch appears in his careful planning. He punctuates his statements and expresses his inner moods with the way he blows out his cigarette smoke, and he has a sadistic little gleam in his eye. Von Stroheim is probably most familiar to contemporary audiences for his role in Sunset Blvd. He was also one of the great directors of the silent and early sound era, and his complex and visually stunning films include Greed, Foolish Wives, The Merry Widow, and Queen Kelly.

Director John H. Auer is not the cinematic stylist or towering artist Stroheim was, but in his own rough and ready way, he packs a visual punch, from the kinetic opening driving scene to the unsettling shots of the hospital corridors to the powerful closeups to the oddball Andy Milligan-esque (years before Andy Milligan) organization of visual space to the weirdly jarring changes in composition from shot to reverse shot. Auer's camera movements are not that graceful, and many of the striking visual moments are preceded or followed by perfunctory ones, but he does a lot of compelling things within the frame. Auer, born in Budapest, was a child actor in Europe who became a businessman after aging out, but he missed the movies and moved to Los Angeles with dreams of becoming a director. After a failed first attempt to land directing gigs in Hollywood, he worked in the Mexican film industry, and the successful movies he made there got him work at Republic back in Hollywood, where he cranked out musicals, crime thrillers, and war movies for the next two decades.

The Crime of Doctor Crespi has been criticized for being a little slow, but I didn't mind its relaxed pace and (until the final third) its relative lack of action. Stroheim is always compellingly watchable, and the supporting actors get nice little character moments or funny bits. Auer is also not afraid to get dark and weird, with oddly lyrical images jumping out between the sillier or more routine moments. I don't think this one's a big crowd-pleaser, but if you like Stroheim, tales of revenge and comeuppance, movies that claim to be adapted from Edgar Allan Poe stories but really aren't (I can't believe how often this happened, from the silent era all the way to the 1990s), and '30s B-movies, give it a whirl.

Child's Play 2 (John Lafia, 1990)

Possibly the least Chicago movie ever set in Chicago (other than a shot of a Windy City train track, the entire movie was filmed in southern California and mostly looks it), Child's Play 2 is otherwise a pretty solid sequel with a delightfully grisly final sequence and a character actor smorgasbord of a cast. Yeah, it's a little thin storywise compared to its predecessor, and the animatronic effects are cranked up to such an extent that Chucky gives off serious uncanny valley vibes, but Child's Play 2 retains the first film's sense of humor, unflagging pace, and fun.

Didn't Chucky get burned to a crisp at the end of the first movie, you ask (or were asking in 1990)? Why, yes, he did, but the charred corpse of the possessed Chucky doll is back in the hands of the Play Pals corporation, who decide to scrape all the burned gunk off and reassemble the doll by hand to show the nervous stockholders that it's just a freakin' doll and not some kind of supernatural killing machine, which, of course, unintentionally brings Chucky back to life since his soul is still trapped in the doll. Believe science, people. The Chicago Police Department has decided to stick with the regular doll story, too. The coverup makes Karen Barclay look crazy, so she's been institutionalized, and her son, Andy (Alex Vincent, reprising his role from the first movie), has been placed in foster care. Catherine Hicks, who played Karen, does not appear in this movie. We only learn about her fate through exposition delivered by the other characters. She was on set for most of the shoot, however. She fell in love with special effects man Kevin Yagher on the set of the first movie and was between projects while this one was being filmed, so she decided to hang out with her new husband and his effects crew while they worked. Hicks and Yagher are still married and have a daughter.

Going back to the coverup angle, I appreciate the movie beginning right from the jump with the idea that corporations and police departments are always going to cover their own asses instead of doing the right thing. Too many movies put forth the idea that once the truth comes out, people and institutions will respect that truth. Yeah, right.

Back to Andy. He's in a foster home run by Grace Poole (Grace Zabriskie) and is about to be fostered by a couple named Joanne and Phil Simpson, played by Jenny Agutter and Gerrit Graham. Damn, that is a lot of cult movie star power in one room. These might be the most square characters Zabriskie, Agutter, and Graham have ever played, but they do get to insert a few quirks, and I always enjoy watching all three of them. The Simpsons have taken in a lot of foster kids over the years, but Phil is hesitant about Andy's mental state, though Joanne immediately takes to him. The only other foster child currently staying at the Simpsons' comfortable but frighteningly pink and antique-filled home is tough teenage girl Kyle (Christine Elise), who is a bit standoffish at first but quickly bonds with Andy.

Meanwhile, the newly refurbished Chucky finds out where Andy's staying and tracks him down. He needs to get his soul in the kid's body so he's not trapped in a doll for the rest of whatever the natural lifespan of a deceased killer brought back to life through voodoo and stuck in a doll is (56 years? 20? 300?). I actually felt a little pity for Chucky this time (the voice of Brad Dourif). He's a terrible guy, but imagine being stuck in a doll's body. The franchise would use the human-soul-inside-a-doll story origins to explore gender fluidity and trans issues in later installments, but the queer text of Child's Play is still pretty hidden in the subtext in these first few movies.

Once Chucky makes it to Andy's foster parents' home, the movie turns into a cat-and-mouse chase for most of the second half, moving from the Simpson household back to Grace Poole's foster home to the streets of Chi-california-cago to the Play Pals factory assembly line as Andy and Kyle pummel and get pummeled by Chucky. Cat-and-mouse can be horrendously dull if done poorly, but things are kept brisk and wild and entertaining here. Our boy Chucky really goes through it in the finale, inspiring even more pity despite his murderous behavior. The practical effects work of Yagher and his team gets a nice showcase in this factory scene.

Vincent and Elise have good chemistry as foster kids, and, as an audience member, I really bought into their camaraderie and Kyle's growing affection and big-sister/mentor role toward Andy. I also thought the movie did a good job depicting Andy trying to adjust to a home environment he didn't grow up in and never getting the understanding he needed from Phil until it was too late. It never gets too heavy-handed, and there's a nicely understated naturalism to the performances that you may not expect from a killer doll movie.

Don Mancini, creator of the franchise, is back as screenwriter in part two. As I mentioned when reviewing Child's Play, Mancini has written or co-written every installment in the series and directed three of them, and he's the showrunner for the recent TV series. The only Child's Play release he wasn't involved with was the mediocre 2019 remake. John Lafia, co-writer of the first movie, takes over for Tom Holland as director. He's not quite as visually skilled as Holland, but he acquits himself nicely. Lafia is the guy who came up with the name Chucky when he and Holland revised Mancini's original script. Sadly, Lafia, who lived with depression for most of his life, committed suicide last year at the age of 63. A fascinating guy, Lafia was a part of the Los Angeles underground rock scene in the early and mid-'80s, releasing several albums on small indie labels, before his film career took off. In addition to his music and film work, Lafia was a poet, a director of live action video games, a proponent and creator of interactive VR technology, and a television director, and he'd returned to making music full-time in the last several years before his death.

Child's Play 3 followed just ten months later (it was rushed into production after this movie was a big hit) but is set eight years after Child's Play 2. Since 2 was set in the present, does this make Child's Play 3 a science fiction movie?

Color Me Blood Red (Herschell Gordon Lewis, 1965)

Even though Herschell Gordon Lewis lived to be 90, he managed to pack about seven or eight more lives into his time on earth than should have been possible. Before making a single film, he earned bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism in Illinois, was a professor of communications in Mississippi, managed a radio station in Wisconsin, worked as a studio director at a television station in Oklahoma, taught advertising at a night school in Illinois, and worked as an adman in Chicago. That latter job eventually led to him directing TV commercials and promotional films and producing an indie film, and as the '50s turned into the '60s, Lewis decided to direct full-time in the world of cheap, quick, and profitable exploitation film with his new associate, producer David F. Friedman. After making a few movies in Chicago, the pair relocated to Florida, where Lewis settled for the remainder of his life.

Life story over, right? No. Lewis and Friedman made several exploitation movies throughout the '60s and early '70s, but once their audience started to wane, Lewis quit filmmaking to work in marketing and copywriting. He also became a successful author, writing twenty-plus books about advertising and direct marketing, and he eventually founded his own direct marketing company. Oh yeah, he also spent three years in prison in the late '70s for fraud. And he directed three more exploitation movies near the end of his life, one of which was a sequel to his most famous movie, Blood Feast. When did this guy sleep?

As his CV above may suggest, Lewis wasn't in film for the art. He wanted to make money without spending much money, and he figured directing sensationalistic low-budget schlock was a great way to do that. Despite his motives, he was an accidental auteur. His films have a unique look, feel, and rhythm that only belong to him (though you can see some of Lewis' style in John Waters' blend of influences), his color palette is bright and lurid, and his dialogue is funny, ridiculous, and weird. Even if profit was the goal, Lewis' films give you the sense that he enjoyed making them. And I enjoy watching them.

Lewis and Friedman started their film career with the short-lived nudie-cuties genre, which were softcore non-pornographic movies with copious female nudity. Nudie-cutie was the name given to this style of film to differentiate it from nudist camp movies, sensationalist documentaries and pseudo-documentaries about nudist colonies that were popular on the exploitation circuit and filled a gap for people who wanted to gawk at naked women without the stigma of porn.

When the nudie-cutie market declined in 1963, Lewis and Friedman decided to push the gore envelope as the next frontier in you-gotta-see-this sensationalism. The first and best known of these was the aforementioned Blood Feast, a film credited with inventing the splatter subgenre of horror. For the next decade, gore films led the pack in the Lewis and Friedman filmography (Two Thousand Maniacs!, A Taste of Blood, The Gruesome Twosome, The Wizard of Gore, The Gore Gore Girls, the movie I'm about to review), but they also visited nearly every corner of exploitation genre, including the redneck moonshine movie (Moonshine Mountain, This Stuff'll Kill Ya!), juvenile delinquents run amok (Scum of the Earth, Just for the Hell of It), cheapo children's movies (Jimmy, the Boy Wonder, The Magic Land of Mother Goose), musicsploitation (Blast-Off Girls, about a female rock group exploited by a sleazy manager, The Year of the Yahoo!, about a country singer running for Senate), the biker gang movie (She-Devils on Wheels), the western (Linda and Abilene), sexploitation (The Girl the Body and the Pill, The Alley Tramp, Suburban Roulette, The Ecstasies of Women), a straight-up porn (Black Love, which he denied making), and general weirdness (nerdy-professor-builds-sex-robots movie How to Make a Doll, the indescribable Something Weird).

Background preamble over, it's time to dive into Lewis' third gore magnum opus, Color Me Blood Red, a classic tale of the eternal struggle between art and commerce and between the artist and himself. Unlike Lewis, protagonist Adam Sorg has no financial motive. He's an artist, damn it, and he's constantly bedeviled by the deadlines and requests of gallery owner Farnsworth, the stinging criticism of art critic Gregorovich, the expectations of buyers, the interruptions of his girlfriend, and the elusive muse itself. Sorg is an obsessive, eccentric, and unpleasant man, but he's the hottest painter going in the beach area of suburban mid-'60s Sarasota, Florida, and that's got to mean something. Farnsworth believes in his potential, but the beret-wearing, cigarette-holder-brandishing Gregorovich doesn't think Sorg's color palette is fully developed yet. This is driving Sorg crazy, until his girlfriend Gigi cuts her hand on a broken frame and her blood drips on the canvas. Eureka! That's exactly the color Sorg's paintings have been missing.

Sorg stays up all night covering an existing painting with the blood from Gigi's cut and self-administered lacerations on his own body, and he discovers that repeatedly cutting oneself and painting with the blood is pretty draining, pun intended. The solution: murder! You get all the blood you need that way, with no negative consequences. And since it's for art, Sorg is morally justified. Why live as a nobody when you can die for artistic immortality?

These blood paintings are a huge hit with Farnsworth and Gregorovich, who seem to think they will end up in the Louvre or MOMA or someplace like that and also in every art textbook in the world even though they don't look so hot to me, but Sorg won't sell them to what the film suggests is the area's only art buyer, the stylish Mrs. Carter. Mrs. Carter becomes obsessed with snagging one of Sorg's paintings when she is not busy soaking up the sun with her daughter April while April waits for her dorky boyfriend Rolf and their beatnik pals Sydney and Jack to pick her up and take her on one of their frequent beach excursions to the deserted part of the beach next to Sorg's beach house, possibly leading to a blood painting beach disaster.

Lewis gives us lots of bright-red blood that never turns brown as it dries, ridiculous paintings, artistic meltdowns, attractive women in bathing suits, leotards, and mid-'60s torpedo-shaped brassieres, murder, beach tomfoolery, a weenie roast, and dialogue like "holy bananas!" and "dig that crazy driftwood" and "she's not squaresville after all" and "I guess she digs the scene even if she doesn't make it." I think you already know if you're the kind of person who needs Color Me Blood Red in your life.

Condemned to Live (Frank R. Strayer, 1935)

This is my fourth encounter with a Frank Strayer film, following The Monster Walks, The Vampire Bat, and The Ghost Walks, and he hasn't won me over yet. The Vampire Bat benefited from a great cast, a weird script, and leftover sets from Frankenstein, but, for the most part, Strayer is an extremely clunky and pedestrian visual stylist (though he usually had to work within serious financial constraints). The 1930s were a golden age for horror, but I wouldn't include Strayer anywhere near the pantheon of legends. To put it in 1980s pro wrestling terms, Strayer is the Bill and Randy Mulkey of '30s horror, and The Vampire Bat was his Mulkeys vs. Gladiators match.

Condemned to Live does have an unusual story with some potential, however unrealized. It's a vampire tale with the vampire not even aware he's a bloodsucker until it's too late. Professor Paul Kristan (Ralph Morgan) is the town doctor, advice-giver, and benevolent figurehead. The other villagers go on and on about what a swell guy Paul is and also how he works too hard. These two points are addressed roughly every three minutes. He's engaged to marry kindly and sweet Marguerite (Maxine Doyle), irritating her previous sweetheart David (Russell Gleason), who is still in love with Marguerite but knows that his broke ass will never get permission to marry her from her old man John (Carl Stockdale). Our other important characters are Paul's foster father and colleague, Dr. Anders Bizet (Pedro de Cordoba), his hunchbacked and devoted assistant Zan (Mischa Auer), and his fiercely protective housekeeper Mother Molly (Lucy Beaumont).

Things would be relatively hunky dory, except villagers are being murdered and drained of blood, and Paul is experiencing brutal headaches and loss of memory. Could these events be connected? Duh. Unfortunately for Paul, and unbeknownst to him, he's a damn vampire. His vampirism origin story is convoluted and racist, and only Anders knows about it. Paul's parents were explorers, and they and a colleague were on an expedition in "deepest, darkest Africa" while his mother was pregnant. Incurring the wrath of the natives, they hid in a cave infested with large vampire bats, one of which bit Paul's mother shortly before she gave birth. She died, and shortly afterwards Paul's father and his colleague died as well. Family friend Anders adopted the young Paul, and kept a close eye on him to see if he would become a vampire. Paul showed no signs of vampirism until the present day, when stress and overwork caused his dormant vampire to bloom. I'm all for suspension of disbelief within a film, but that's a pretty weak (and deeply strange) excuse.

Condemned to Live takes the unusual and fiscally responsible tack of completely foregoing special effects, except for the giant rubber bat in the opening scene. There are no vampire teeth, no transformations, no blood, no makeup effects besides the normal stage makeup for the actors. Morgan just scrunches his face up into a tortured expression whenever he has to deliver Paul's vampire self, and the bodies are placed with their faces away from the camera so we never see the bite marks or the effects of blood drainage. A visually skilled filmmaker could do fascinating things with performance and camera movement in place of special effects, but in the hands of Strayer, it just adds to the movie's lack of punch.

Condemned to Live is full of boringly static shots, stiff performances, and a real lack of suspense, excitement, and terror. I like the angle of a tragic villain who has no idea he's the one killing the villagers, but it's just not that excitingly delivered. In the film's defense, it is only 67 minutes long. Proceed with caution. 

Child's Play (Tom Holland, 1988)

The last major horror franchise to kick off in the '80s, Child's Play is unusual in that screenwriter Don Mancini, who created the characters, has written or co-written every single Chucky movie (with the exception of the mediocre 2019 remake) and directed the last three and is the show runner, head writer, and one of the directors of the Chucky TV series. Except for a few unproduced screenplays, Cellar Dweller (reviewed on this site a few months ago), and episodes of Tales from the Crypt, Hannibal, and Channel Zero, Mancini's entire career is joined at the hip to a killer doll voiced by Brad Dourif. And he's pretty damn happy about that (except for Child's Play 3). I've heard good things about the Mancini-directed Chucky movies but haven't watched them yet, and I haven't seen Child's Play 2 and 3 since they first appeared on home video in the early '90s, but the original Child's Play is a surprisingly intense, skillfully made, exciting, and darkly funny '80s horror movie that held up well to a decades-later rewatch.

Mancini, a UCLA film student with one screenwriting credit under his belt (Cellar Dweller, though he's credited as Kit DuBois because he was unhappy with the changes made to his script), was fascinated with the killer doll subgenre and thought a pretty effective movie could be made with '80s animatronic effects.

Mancini was also interested in how his father's profession of advertising manipulated consumers and manufactured demand, and he thought those ideas could be easily incorporated into a killer doll movie. Additionally, Mancini's difficult relationship with his father made it into the script in an indirect way. Openly gay in the homophobic 1980s, Mancini says his father never accepted him or his sexuality, and he felt like his mother was a single parent to him, so he decided to make the main characters in his screenplay a widowed single mother and her young son. Though these issues are subtext and background detail in the first movie, queerness and gender identity become larger and more overt topics in the later films and the TV series.

Mancini's original screenplay was even darker than the finished product, with the little boy a willing and vengeful accomplice in Chucky's killing spree and with the Chucky doll deliberately marketed as a scary toy with fake blood included, the doll fully coming to life when the boy's blood mixed with Chucky's. Co-writers John Lafia (who would go on to direct the second movie) and Tom Holland (director of this one) decided to make the boy more sympathetic and change the scary doll angle since they figured no parents would buy a doll that comes with fake blood.

Child's Play was director Tom Holland's third feature, and he got the job after Steven Spielberg, pleased with Holland's episode of Amazing Stories, recommended him to the producers. Holland had already worked in film for years as an actor and a screenwriter, and he wrote the screenplays for The Beast Within, Class of 1984, Psycho II, Cloak & Dagger, and Scream for Help before kicking off his directing career in a big way with 1985's Fright Night, one of my favorite '80s horror movies. He followed that up with a Whoopi Goldberg action-comedy, Fatal Beauty. A bit of a curveball, but at least he met Brad Dourif. After Child's Play, Holland's directing credits include The Temp, Thinner, the miniseries The Langoliers, and several episodes of Tales from the Crypt.

Child's Play begins with serial killer Charles Lee Ray (Brad Dourif) running from homicide detective Mike Norris (Chris Sarandon, reuniting with Holland after Fright Night) on the mid-winter Chicago streets. The chase concludes in a toy store, with a mortally wounded Charles performing some voodoo-like ritual to transfer his soul into a Good Guys doll. This ritual also makes lightning strike the toy store, exploding most of it. That's one hell of a ritual, my friend.

Meanwhile, it's little Andy Barclay's (Alex Vincent) birthday, and all he wants is a Good Guys doll. Sadly, his mother Karen (Catherine Hicks), a single mom working the jewelry counter at a department store, didn't find out about the doll until after she bought Andy's gifts. I like how the movie doesn't beat the viewer over the head with the dead father/single mom business. We just get one line of dialogue about it and a few details, including how Andy is a bit spoiled even though his mom is a working-class single woman and a few glancing shots of a man's picture in a frame. This also makes Karen's intensity in getting her hands on a Good Guys doll believable without belaboring the point.

Karen's coworker Maggie (Dinah Manoff) sees a homeless man in the alley behind the department store selling a Good Guys doll out of his cart. Karen snaps it up and brings it home to Andy. Yes, it's the same doll that got a non-factory upgrade in the form of a serial killer's soul during a toy-store shootout/explosion. Oh shiiiiittttttt! As the movie progresses, Chucky gets Chuckier; Andy goes from Chucky buddy to manipulated Chucky accomplice to Chucky enemy; crazy doll-based hijinks, rituals, murders, attempted murders, and foul-mouthed one-liners abound; and any sane audience is reasonably entertained.

Holland does a good job making all this killer doll action creepy instead of silly, and the horror and action scenes are skillfully accomplished without swallowing up the characters. Andy and Karen's Chicago apartment building is a great movie location, and Brad Dourif is the perfect voice for a killer doll, though his involvement almost didn't happen. The producers initially wanted John Lithgow for the part, but he turned the role down, and Holland, who had just worked with Dourif, recommended him. Dourif was available to shoot the opening scene, but he had already committed to another movie and couldn't do the Chucky voice-over. The producers brought in Jessica Walter (Play Misty for Me, Arrested Development) to do the voice of the doll, but that didn't go over well with test audiences. By that time, Dourif was available again, and Chucky's dialogue was rerecorded.

It's a little surprising that a killer doll movie from 1988 has continued to be a viable franchise for three decades plus, but something about it just works. It's a good movie. I'd say check it out, but you probably already have.

Class of Nuke 'Em High (Richard W. Haines & Lloyd Kaufman, 1986)

It warms my heart to know that Troma still exists, and the company has distributed some quality indie movies in addition to cranking out their own brand of lovable slop, but only a masochist would make it a point to watch every movie with Troma's logo on it. Often the titles are more inspired than the finished product (Surf Nazis Must Die, A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell), and a little of the Troma-brand shtick goes a long way. Having said all that, I genuinely feel sorry for you if you go through life without watching at least one Troma movie, and my recommendations include The Toxic Avenger, Troma's War, Sgt. Kabukiman N.Y.P.D., Tromeo and Juliet, and the movie we're talking about today, Class of Nuke 'Em High.

Co-directed by screenwriter Richard W. Haines and Troma head Lloyd Kaufman (under the fake name Samuel Weil), Class of Nuke 'Em High combines the post-apocalyptic, post-Mad Max mutant-gang-running-amok movie with the '50s homage anti-nuclear monster movie with the '80s teenage party/high school/sex comedy, with Troma's distinct brand of low-budget sludge, toilet humor, and offend-everyone tastelessness holding it all together.

A couple of elements are pretty unfortunate (one of the mutant gang members sports a punk version of African tribal stereotypes, is in semi-blackface, and carries a bone; another gang member constantly says "faggot"), but Troma is an equal-opportunity offender, spraying bad taste in every direction, and the characters exhibiting these racist and homophobic accoutrements are not meant to be likable. It still sucks, and it's yet another example of straight, white people in the '80s not thinking about this stuff for more than a few seconds before putting it onscreen. Just to both sides this further, I think people are hyper-aware of offending the audience now, which also kinda sucks and leads to a bunch of bad art and entertainment without any edge and too much overt moralizing and lesson-imparting. I think what I'm inarticulately getting at is hoping for a world with free and fucked-up art and entertainment that exists without marginalizing or dehumanizing specific groups of people while also avoiding moral scolding and self-congratulatory back-patting for showing off the progressive bona fides.

I'll get off the soapbox now and head to Tromaville, whose high school is dangerously close to an unsafe nuclear power plant that is leaking green sludge the color of recently expired pea soup. Plant owner Mr. Paley (Troma regular Pat Ryan) is in favor of covering things up, fixing problems quietly, and keeping the plant humming along. This seems to be working for Ryan, though the school's honor society members have abruptly and suddenly turned into a gang of mutant punks called the Cretins.

The rest of the student body primarily consists of party animals, excepting goody-two-shoes couple Chrissy and Warren (Janelle Brady and Gil Brenton) and classic nerd Dewy (Arthur Lorenz). Dewy accidentally chug-a-lugs some toxic waste at the drinking fountain, and, a few hours later in class, he twitches, foams at the mouth, oozes green slime, and chucks himself out the window, whereupon he melts to his skeleton. The death is ruled a suicide, which the other students seem to buy even though he melted after hitting the ground.

The Cretins, besides terrorizing nerds and faculty, also have a lucrative side hustle as the high school's pot dealers, which they score from one of the nuclear plant workers (it grows wild in a highly restricted outdoor section of the plant). One day, the Cretins decide to throw a little toxic waste in with the weed and raise the price of this new atomic high to ten bucks a joint. Meanwhile, a local frat is holding an indoor bikini beach party with live entertainment from the Smithereens performing doo wop songs (you can't make this stuff up), and the high school party animals cajole Chrissy and Warren into joining them at the frat bash.

Chrissy and Warren also take their first toke on a joint at the party. Unfortunately for them, it's radiation-laced Cretin weed. This initially makes them super-horny, and they finally go all the way, much to the delight of their party animal peers. Then, after a period of radiation sickness, Chrissy gives birth to a turd-shaped mutant monster baby in the toilet at school while Warren morphs into an Incredible Hulk-like monster/man hybrid when he gets angry.

Hulk Warren starts kicking some Cretin ass, setting up a nuclear-charged final showdown between the Cretins and the rest of the school involving giant mutated monster babies, map defacing, globe smashing, hallway motorcycle riding, improper giant laser handling, and a new character who just shows up out of nowhere and who is treated by the other characters as having been there the whole time. It's a hoot and a holler.

Class of Nuke 'Em High is stupid in all the right ways (and a few of the wrong ones) and keeps the momentum going and the pace from dragging all the way through, which can be a problem in some of the weaker Troma films. There are so many hilariously goofy reaction shots and ridiculous background performances throughout (the extras are often breakdancing or doing their best '60s dance moves for no apparent reason), and the cheesy effects are pretty good by Troma standards. We even get a classic '80s theme song with delightfully idiotic lyrics ("Nuke 'Em High" by Ethan & The Coup).

This movie and The Toxic Avenger pretty much set the template for the classic Troma house style. Class of Nuke 'Em High is top-notch dumb '80s fun and led to four sequels (Class of Nuke 'Em High 2: Subhumanoid Meltdown, Class of Nuke 'Em High 3: The Good, the Bad and the Subhumanoid, Return to Nuke 'Em High Volume 1, and Return to Return to Nuke 'Em High AKA Volume 2). I haven't seen any of them, but giant mutant squirrels, nuclear sludge-filled tacos, secret love affairs between bloggers, and the Tromaville Institute of Technology (T.I.T.) are all part of the action. Proceed with caution.