The universe demands balance. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. For every positive there is a negative. Good and evil, courage and fear, happiness and sadness, dark and light: one cannot exist without the other. Likewise, for every really cool '80s horror movie, there's an equally dire turd from the same decade and genre just waiting to be rediscovered.
Death Row Diner is one such stinker, a foetid, almost unwatchable Z-grade crap-fest that attempts to inject some humour into its cheezy proceedings but which proves to be about as funny as an outbreak of Ebola. Set in an abandoned prison, it sees the vengeful spirit of film studio boss Otis Wilcox (John Content), who was wrongfully executed for the murder of his wife, returning from the dead to cause havoc for the cast and crew of a low-budget horror flick being produced by Otis's grand-daughter Julia (scream queen Michelle Bauer).
With a pitiful script that fails to deliver either scares or laughs, an amateurish cast who seem to be improvising most of their dialogue, lousy direction from B. Dennis Wood (who now calls himself D3 and works exclusively in the porn industry), and woeful gore effects, Death Row Diner is truly terrible from start to finish. The film doesn't even manage to deliver that most basic of B-movie horror ingredients, gratuitous female nudity: despite being more than qualified, busty blonde make-up woman Phoebe (Dana Lis Mason) fails to go topless, while star Bauer, who can usually be relied upon to flash some flesh, keeps (most) of her clothes on.
