Neon Maniacs (1986)

What a waste of my time!!!

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

A motley bunch of garishly made-up malevolent, misshapen, murderous subhuman mutant monsters (biker, surgeon, Native American, Green Beret and other such grotesque beasties) prey upon various hapless folks in sunny, rainy sweet old San Francisco. Naive, virginal teenager Natalie Lawrence (the comely, but extremely vapid Leilani Sarelle, who went on to portray Sharon Stone's mannish possessive lesbian lover in "Basic Instinct" and married character actor Miguel Ferror, who she co-starred with in the first-rate south-of-the-border film noir thriller "The Harvest") survives a socko sanguinary park slaughter in which six of her friends are brutally butchered. Natalie teams up with handsome, but insipid hunk Steven (the bland Allan Hayes) and spunky horror movie loving adolescent misfit Paula (the perky, likable Donna Locke) to kick some serious creature keister.This thoroughly stupid, but amusing and enjoyable five'n'ten cent "Gremlins" rip-off boasts a hefty corpse tally of 24 (!), plentiful outbursts of gory violence (a grisly gamut from disembowelment to an arrow through the neck to a throat slicing to a hanging to a decapitation to ... well, you get the basic wall-to-wall nonstop graphic bloodshed idea; this baby's anything but dull and uneventful), painfully crummy "blurt the lines and grimace" pseudo-acting from a non-star cast, many uproarious obvious lapses in logic (e.g., the horrible thingofabobbits can be killed with mere water, yet reside under the Golden Gate Bridge and live in 'Frisco, a city which isn't famous for its dry, arid weather!), righteously gruesome make-up f/x, and hopelessly inadequate direction by cinematographer Joseph ("Alligator," "Alone in the Dark") Mangine. Screenwriter Mark Patrick Carducci, who presumably wrote the senseless dead simple script in about two hours (probably with magic markers, no less), later penned the glorious "Pumpkinhead," which only goes to show that one can really get up from off the floor. Hell, this gut-bustingly asinine fright flick clinker even comes complete with plenty of cheesy rock songs and one of those oh-so-80's "it ain't over yet!" sequel set-up anti-climactic endings, but alas said follow-up never got made. Man, now isn't that just an honest shame?

Yep, the 80s were so cool I spent the entire decade drunk! 'Baby lied when she told me...' - 'I love the choice you made...' - The battle of the bands ROCKS man. 'We've had enough' sing the grotesque hair-metal band.The ending ruins it for a lot of people. Many of my buddies who I forced this film upon all expressed disgust at there being no attempt at an explanation/resolution. Fair enough. Me? I don't mind.But be honest folks - all the fuss about 'Rosebud' in Citizen Kane!!! Why do YOU think the Neon Maniacs came into being? Maybe some university somewhere will have eggheads debating in pretty much the same manner as the Welles film. :) Donna Locke was a pretty young girl who would have grown up nicely. I wonder where she is now. My investigations tell me she's out of the biz. Shame, because her acting was rather good - as was most of the cast, to be fair.For the record: Archer is my favourite maniac!

Title: Neon Maniacs (1986) Director: Joseph Mangine Cast: It really doesn't matter, trust me Review: Oh my god. Lovers of extreme cheezyness and bad B-movies rejoice! I've discovered a truly cheezy, utterly bad film that you lovers of z-level entertainment can totally immerse yourselves into! Neon Maniacs! The story goes something like this. A group of high school kids decide to hang out a the local park, you know, the usual teenage stuff: beers, making out, bad eighties music. So in the midst of this little party they are having 12 psycho killers pop out of their underground layer and decide to kill the 12 kids in the stupidest ways possible. But wait! One of them escapes! And the killers cant have a witness running loose, so they decide to go after her at all cost! So thats where our movie begins.When I popped this film into my DVD player, I was ready for what was coming. I knew that this movie was going to be cheezy beyond all hope and that the acting and music was going to be terrible. Yet in spite of all my mental preparation...I still could believe how terrible this movie was! And I've seen some bad films in my lifetime! And I've managed to enjoy a few of them precisely because they are so bad like for example Troll II or Demon Wind, but Neon Maniacs was just too god awful.I thought, well its got a cool premise. Twelve different creatures killing off people left and right? I thought there were some possibilities for cheezy, trashy entertainment. Something maybe along the lines of The Toxic Avenger films or something. You know, the type of movie that you KNOW is low grade but you can have some fun with. Well, sadly that was not the case with Neon Maniacs.First off, we get the creatures. Heres the thing about them. They look stupid! I mean, there's one thats supposed to be some sort of jungle boy and his got this little bikini on...there's one thats supposed to be a samurai...one is supposed to be a war veteran. But heres the thing, you can never really get a good look at them. It seems the budget was so low that they hid the make up and their faces in a lot of shadows.So you can never really connect with any of these creatures or monsters. They are just a bunch of undefined shadows, and I mean this both literally and metaphorically. Heres the worst part: these villains are weak! They have absolutely no motivation as to why they kill! They have no origin story to accompany their sad existence! They are just there! And they kill! Thats it! You'd think that with such a wide range of characters appearing in a movie you'd have some sort of cool reason for them being who they are. I mean as it is, they are these crazy ass cartoon characters Samurais, war crazy veterans, Indians, biker dudes who we know absolutely nothing about! They just pop up from their underground layer with their crazy Halloween costume get up and kill people. What is this a reunion for the Village People? As far as we know, there's no mutants, no alien invasions or toxic waste being spilled anywhere...these guys just exist. And it didn't matter to the filmmakers to explain to the viewers why.Anyhows, aside from the villains looking absolutely ridiculous and giving me a few reasons to giggle, we also get some of the worst characters in the universe! Girl survives the killers attacks, so what does she do after 11 of her best friends are murdered? She goes to school as if nothing had happened! Then, when one of the characters knows where the villains hide out and what kills them she decides to go to the local battle of the bands show instead of trying to get people to help her and kill the creatures? Come on! Where are her priorities? One of the characters is a horror movie director wannabe...and shes filming her vampire movie in a graveyard. The vampire in her little film is about to suck the blood from a virgin. But there's one little problem, shes filming this during the daylight! Heellllooo? Anyhows, there's many little things like this that let you see that a bunch of idiots were the ones in charge of making this movie.The movie has some of the worst music ever committed to a motion picture. Ever seen one of those crappy ass wedding videos with that terrible syntheziser music on the background? Well thats exactly what they used through out this whole movie! And it really really blows! Trust me on this.Aside from all this, I found some mild enjoyment in the 80s nostalgia trip that the movie is. It reminds you just how bad the fashion and fads from that decadent decade were. In one scene there's a "battle of the bands" going on...but just between TWO bands! One band is a Chicago wannabe (we get to hear not just one but TWO of their god awful songs!) and the other is a mix between every other hair band that existed in the eighties.Anyhows, I found this movie only to be good for a giggle. You'll only enjoy it if your previously warned of how bad it is and you are ready for it. Or if your really into this type of bad film and enjoy watching a film thats so bad, that you just have to watch it to see where films can go when handed to complete incompetents. Watching Neon Maniacs only works if you know that this is just a huge piece of cheeze thats meant to be laughed at instead of taken seriously. You've been warned! Rating: 1 out of 5

~Spoiler~ Neon Maniacs-where do I start? We've got an archer, a samurai, an indian, a doctor, a biker, a soldier, a hangman, an ape-man who reminded me of Lou Ferrigno's Hulk, and one guy who looks like the Toxic Avenger's ugly brother. They comprise the Neon Maniacs. The problem with the film is that we're given no backstory on the creatures. "Neon because they can only be seen in the dark; Maniacs because they kill at will." That's what the box reads. What I want to know is where in the hell did this motley crew come from? Why do they each have a spooky tarot card in their likeness? Also, If these monsters can only be destroyed by water, then why in the hell would they live inside the Golden Gate Bridge? Real geniuses, huh? Alas, these questions will never be answered. In fact, the problem we're presented with is never even resolved. The film is very open-ended and there is no sequel. I'm willing to forgive this I suppose because the writer went on to draft a screenplay for some little movie called Pumpkinhead. It also had some standout scenes including the first appearance of the maniacs in the park. Lots of gore here and good make-up. Neon Maniacs reminded me a lot of The Spookies in that in made no sense, but it was still enjoyable in all it's ridiculousness and fun to watch. "Neon Maniacs-just add water for edge-of-your-seat suspense and terror!" Note for genre buffs: Andrew Divoff is credited as the Doc and it's his first movie role.