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.

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!"...

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.

This film is stupid, insulting, and without continuity. IGOR became infamous as a film that, midway through, uses a whole different set of actors to portray the characters, without an explaination as to why! Most of the actors don't even look the same.

With a film as bad as IGOR, though, probably nobody would notice the difference. This is among the worst that Troma has ever released, although as the other comments here have said, there are also some laughs.

But, is it worth it?

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.