Igor and the Lunatics

"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.

This movie is downright sick and cheesy but the atmosphere and soundtrack save it from being completely bad...whoever composed that soundtrack had a little bit of Carpenter in them... Just a tiny tiny tiny bit. But yea definitely a low grade film lol. Body count was about 13

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.

In IGOR AND THE LUNATICS, a Manson Family-like cult of drug-addled hippies terrorizes a small town. Bloody, gory nonsense ensues.

One of the cultists, the titular Igor (Joe Niola), raves, howls a squawks his way through the film. He's one of the most laughably absurd characters in horror movie history! Igor is Squiggy from Laverne And Shirley, Jerry Lewis, The Tasmanian Devil, and a rabid hamster, all in one economical package. While all of the characters in this movie are godawful, Igor wins the "Most Convincing Portrayal Of Living Brain Death" award, hands -and feet- down!

Igor's screeching rants are matched only by his two basic facial expressions, rocketing between stunned idiocy and cackling jack-o-lantern!

Dismal, dreadful, and dumber than a boulder with ears, this movie must be seen, since no human could possibly describe its moron-itude! The violence is hilarious! The sounds of punches, and strikes with heavy or sharp objects are like the noises made by sides of beef hitting a barn door!

Smmackk!

EXTRA POINTS FOR: Learning the Igor yowl, "Hrrrhh-Aaaahh-Yaaa!"...

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.