Blunt Force Troma: Tromeo and Juliet!!!

"Well we found a peanut all right...a peanut of death!"

- Cop

It's Valentine's Day, and how better to celebrate than with the most romantic movie of all time: Tromeo and Juliet? 

The movie opens with the indelible cinematic image of a dead squirrel hanging from a noose, and features the late, great Lemmy from Motörhead as the narrator, so if you're looking for something to get your partner in the mood for love, you know you've come to the right place.

Tromeo and Juliet concerns two families at war with each other, from forth the fatal loins of which the title characters come. They communicate their feud by means of animal carcasses, but soon escalate to dismemberment and death. For example, this guy gets his fingers cut off.

Then he has his head trapped in a car window and driven into a fire hydrant, whereupon he tries to scoop his fallen brains back into his skull.

But that's not even close to the best part. That honour must go to the context-and-fat-free dream sequence in which Juliet's pregnant stomach is unzipped to reveal a mound of popcorn and a couple of rats. Why? I don't know, and nor does anybody else! Just let it happen to you.

We wouldn't want to scar your mind of course. Note that her nightshirt thing randomly disappears and reappears throughout this sequence, even though you couldn't possibly make that mistake. Based Troma, we salute you.

Despite the similar title, this isn't just a straight remake of the 1597 Shakespeare movie. The ending reveals a left-field twist that changes everything, which I'm surprised William Shakespeare didn't think of himself. Needless to say, this is a cinematic landmark everyone should see before they die (or during). Look out for the great Tiffany Shepis in her first role as "Peter" (top pic). If you watch this movie you will have a fine Valentine's Day (guarantee void outside of Tromaville).

Blunt Force Troma: Graduation Day!!!

Troma is great and slasher movies are great, so how great must a Troma slasher movie be? Well, the director's name is Herb Freed, perhaps in honour of 4/20. The killer stabs someone with a football-on-a-sword, for no fucking reason. And it features one of my favourite, and the stupidest, kills of all time.

Gaze into the armpit of terror.

So Graduation Day opens with a runner at a high school sporting event. She wins her race but keels over at the finish line. The film then cuts back and forth between her boyfriend cradling her dead body and the crowd watching about fifty billion times, perhaps because the editor had freed some herb that morning. We're then introduced to the runner's sister and Final Girl, who's returned home from the Navy just in time for Graduation Day, even though she doesn't go to school and her deceased sister presumably isn't graduating anymore.

The plot involves someone killing off members of the sports team, prefiguring all-time classic Night of the Dribbler, which is a real movie. Who is the killer? Could it be the coach who pushes his athletes to the limit? The principal who's boinking his secretary? Linnea Quigley? Yes, Linnea Quigley is in this movie, replacing some other actress who appears in early scenes they never bothered to reshoot. Or could it be...roller disco?

mfw no roller disco at my graduation: :{

Despite being a roller disco, this scene revolves around a band who wear fedoras and makeup and sing interminably about "The Gangster Rock". The whole scene seems like an attempt to one-up the flamboyant gayness of Prom Night, and it almost comes close.

The saddest thing about this movie is that the killer barely gets to do his own shtick at all before being discovered. He wears a fencing mask and carries a sword, but we only really see him once, carving up a couple of victims outside the roller disco. He hops out from some trees and does this hilarious little dance where he hops from one foot to the other before charging after his prospective mark. I think this guy and Prom Night guy should have a movie of their own, like Freddy Vs Jason.

come back I want to sword you

But the real high point of Graduation Day is a kill so dumb it makes sitting through all seven and a half minutes of "Gangster Rock" seem worth it. One of the last surviving members of the track team, seemingly oblivious to both the murders and the fact it's Graduation Day, goes out by himself to practise his pole vault. The pole hits the floor and we hear a scream, as it's revealed that he's pole vaulted onto a bed of spikes:

Right in the knee.

I love this kill so much I want it to be in every horror movie, even the classy ones like The Shining. How did the killer know this guy would be here on this of all days, and that no one else would be? Where did he get the spikes? Maybe he didn't know, and just put spikes everywhere he thought the team were likely to go: their lockers, the showers, even the track itself. What's even better about this scene is that it comes out of nowhere and is never remarked upon. Ah, Graduation Day killer, you were taken from us too soon.

Blunt Force Troma: A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell!!!

Everyone loves Troma, the studio that brought you such all-time classics as The Toxic Avenger, Surf Nazis Must Die, and the tender Tromeo and Juliet. Well, come with me and I shall take you on a journey to the far future of the Tromaverse. Yes, despite being populated by dinosaurs, A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell is actually set in a post-nuclear future, like a much lower-budget Mad Max meets The Valley of Gwangi.

An appropriate response to everything in this movie.

Some questions may inevitably arise, like "what's a nymphoid?" and "what's going on?" Well, dear reader, let me advise you to leave such dreams of enlightenment in the dust where they belong. You'll never find out because there's virtually no dialogue. Fortunately, the DVD in which I got this movie (along with seminal slasher movie Graduation Day, which I'll be getting to later), contains a trailer that elucidates the post-nuclear scenario, because I never would've guessed this wasn't meant to be some sort of prehistoric budget Hyboria.

The back of this box actually gives away the ending of Graduation Day, for even less value!!!

Perhaps the reason it was decided that the movie was set in the future is because the dinosaurs don't really look like anything in particular, and Lloyd Kaufman cares about nothing if not saving you the stress of worrying what species they're supposed to be (this sentence is literally true, because Lloyd Kaufman does not give a fuck).

This was the family dog before the war (srs).

A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell (a title you'll hear several times if you watch the trailer, which I advise you do because it's better than the film) stars "international cult heroine" Linda Corwin as Lea, the nymphoid barbarian of the title. When we meet her she's in the business of running around in a forest, because her family were killed in the war, and she woke up to find herself in Dinosaur Hell!!! IMDb reliably informs me that she's also credited as "Secondary Reptilian Goon", because this production was damned if it wasn't going to get full value for everyone it had to drag out there and feed. It also informs me the movie came out in 1990, which is a good couple of decades more recent than it looks.

Tromaville would come to regret spending its fallout shelter budget on a giant skull-faced castle. Note that the river in this shot is an effect, for no reason.

Anyway, Lea meets a guy named Marn, and because he's not deformed like everybody else, I guess that makes them a match made in Dinosaur Heaven. Marn spends most of the movie trying to save her from the evil, but inept Clon, with little success. She spends more time being rescued by a masked stranger (who perhaps not coincidentally resembles Toxie), and a giant sandworm out of Dune. There's also a man who reads "The Jabberwocky" and carries a gun, but he is of no consequence, and may just have wandered across the set while they were filming.

This movie is to 1 Million Years BC as Bizarro is to Superman: a weird, malformed imitation. The stop motion stuff is fun though. It's also fun to watch Clon bumble about losing limbs and getting brained all over the place. I don't recommend this movie to anyone, but it meets my criteria for notability, which is a wake-up call I shall choose to ignore as my body continues to decay.