Igor and the Lunatics

Whatever can be said about this wretched film, it is utterly UNTRUE that half-way through the movie a different set of actors took over. The same actors who started out in the film, continued through-out. There is a span of many years having passed as indicated in the film (when one of the characters goes to prison and is released years later to restart his murder spree), and of course some of the characters would look different...but they are the same actors in the same parts. A look at the credits will show this. The guy who played Paul (whose look does change after years in prison) is the guy who plays him through out. Same for the guy playing Igor - one of the cops, the guy living in the woods - the girlfriend of Paul - the "hero", etc., etc. It may be notorious for many, many things...but cast changing isn't one of them. THE CAST DOES NOT CHANGE HALFWAY THROUGH THE FILM! Stop repeating false stories.

It quickly becomes evident that "Igor and the Lunatics" had more than its share of production problems. The credits have a listing for the direction of "horror, action and suspense sequences" as well as a normal directing credit. I don't know what went wrong behind the scene, but the end results are really bad. The story only makes a little sense, for one thing, and they have the chutzpah to play one lengthy sequence TWICE. There are quite a few times when freeze-frames of buildings are used when cutting to a new scene. There's bad continuity, such as when one scene mixes footage shot in the daytime with footage shot at night. The movie further annoys with a really obnoxious musical score, as well as with really cruddy acting. I'm really amazed that Troma Films' president Lloyd Kaufman (who also produced the movie) thought that the end results were releasable. Though it tells a lot that in his autobiography he makes no mention of the movie anywhere, even in his list of "all" Troma Films at the back of the book.

"Igor and the Lunatics" is a totally inept and amateurish attempt at a crazy-hippie-cult-killing-spree horror movie. Apparently even nearly twenty years later, Charles Manson was still inspiring overenthusiastic but incompetent trash-filmmakers. This is a typical Troma production, meaning in other words, there's a lot of boring and totally irrelevant padding footage to accompany the nonsensical plot. There's a bit of random gore and gratuitous nudity on display – which isn't bad – but it's all so very pointless and ugly that it becomes frustrating to look at. "Igor and the Lunatics" is so desperate that it's even using a lot of the footage twice, like the circle saw killing for example. The incoherent plot tries to tell the story of a hippie cult run by the drug-addicted and Charlie Manson wannabe Paul. One of Paul's lower ranked disciples, named Igor, becomes a little bit too obsessed with the Bible stories and drug orgies and gradually causes the entire cult to descent further into criminal insanity. Just to illustrate through a little example exactly how crazy Igor is: he tears the heart straight out of the chest of a really sexy black hitch-hiker girl! There's an annoying synthesizer soundtrack and some truly embarrassingly lame pseudo-artistic camera tricks, like slow-motion footage and lurid dream sequences. Maybe there's one sequence that more or less qualifies as worthwhile for trash fanatics and that' is when a poor girl is cut in half with a machete. For no particular reason, the camera holds the shot of the blade in the bloodied stomach for fifteen whole seconds.

IGOR AND THE LUNATICS is a sorry movie that any horror movie lover would regret spending any money to watch, except maybe for a laugh. The film was fun to laugh at but contained no plot, that was evident, and no character build-up. The movie was altogether more funny than scary, and if I were to rate it on a scale from 1-10, a 2 would have to be giving the film credit.

This movie has virtually nothing to recommend it. What little creative talents the movie makers had was expended in trying to make a bit of gore, usually poorly... except for one scene. It involves a big old buzz saw, a real one, really sawing, and I found it surprisingly disturbing. I wouldn't be surprised if the whole movie was slapped together simply to justify the effort they put into the filming of that scene. For a dollar or less, you might find it worth renting, especially if you want to steal that scene for your own project.