Nikos the Impaler

You've got to admire Andreas Schnaas: despite no discernible talent for film-making, he's been churning out low-budget gore movies since 1987. I first experienced his bargain basement horror 15 years ago with the abominable 'Zombie 90' , and I recently picked up 'Nikos the Impaler' in the hope that maybe he had improved somewhat over the last decade and a half. No prizes for guessing that he hasn't!

This tale of a bloodthirsty 11th century barbarian brought to life in present day New York features some of the worst direction, editing and acting it has ever been my misfortune to witness. Schnaas and his team seem to have no idea how to piece a film together, but somehow, despite this (or because of this), 'Nikos' turned out to be fairly entertaining—a case of a film being made bearable due to its utter crapness. Of course it doesn't hurt that Schnaas loads his film with joke-shop gore and includes a gratuitous shower scene for the blokes (albeit one featuring a skanky woman with bad tattoos).

Schnaas's first film to be made in America, 'Nikos' starts off slowly, and the first half an hour is a real chore to sit through. After that, the blood starts to flow and fans of no-budget gore-fests will love the OTT death scenes. The unrealistic no-frills splatter FX come thick and fast and are good for a laugh, if nothing else.

Nikos, the big bad Romanian who is resurrected when blood is accidentally splashed on his mask at a museum/gallery, slices and dices his way through the cast, splashing blood and body parts all over the place. After slaughtering the people in the gallery, he continues his killing spree on the streets of the Big Apple, wasting the occupants of a cinema, the staff of a gym and finally some people in a video shop. At this point the movie goes completely bonkers, and Schnaas throws in some ninjas, a vampire and Hitler for good measure!

Sounds like fun, doesn't it? Well, for a while it is, but the lack of a decent plot and any evidence of technical ability from the makers ensures that proceedings become tedious before long. There's only so many inept beheadings you can take before you start longing for the end credits to roll instead.

Prepare to laugh like you've never laughed before, people. Andreas Schnaas is the new Ed Wood! He can barely line up a shot, and whoever edits for him acts like he just bought his first iMac and is trying to puzzle his way through iMovie without reading the manual or even the onscreen tutorial. This is absolutely glorious cheese, a one-movie festival of filmmaking ineptitude, with performances that wouldn't pass muster in a high school play. The gore scenes will have you rolling on the floor in such convulsions of hilarity that EMS might have to be called in to feed you oxygen. When Nikos is brought back to life and promptly hacks off the head of the grandmotherly museum curator (with a totally "plywood spray-painted silver" sword), I thought I'd wake up the whole block with my laughter. This movie is fecal beyond the dreams of proctologists, but I swear, if you want to have an MST3K movie party at your place one night, your guests won't need to get wasted or toke up to appreciate this comedy of errors!

Actual worth as a film: 0/10 "Cracking up all your friends at a party" value: 10/10

This movie is ridiculous. Let me add that it is fun to sit around with a bunch of friends and watch, and there's two ways to go about it. You can either put it on mute, and make up your own lines, or turn it up and listen to the ridiculous dialogue and hear people with no talent (for the most part) deliver lines. Nikos is a Romanian Barbarian or something who gets killed or something and some buffoons bring him back in modern day New York. He then proceeds to run rampant around awful sets and the few places that the film makers were allowed to shoot. Bloods flows. Much blood. I think the f/x are fantastic for what the $3.50 budget allowed. The team does a great job with what they had, and I'm guessing it was not that much. Then there's your lead characters. The guy that plays Frank has got to be kidding me. Ham is not the word. He seems to stumble throughout the film as though he's in the worst cartoon to date. Get a paper route my man. Felissa Rose, the one with the mouth from Sleepaway Camp, has her moments. But they're generally not when she's talking. Darian Caine skanks up and gets naked. There's a girl in this film, I think she's supposed to be Velma from Scooby-Doo, but she's a bit less believable than the cartoon character. There's also a bunch of doofy college kids and some dude with huge clownish hair. As for the people I have mentioned, I'm surprised they can read. Congrats. Then there's a dozen or so cops walking around this picture. I think they had 3 costumes between them all. My heart bleeds for the two officers in the movie theater, as their goofy uniforms almost take away from the fact that they're amongst a handful of people in this movie who actually belong on a screen. The short cop throws in some ham for us, the tall cop actually shows concern for the situation(he probably got fined for actually acting) and then tosses in some blatant Schnaas plugs. What does all of this mean? Rent it, buy it, steal it, whatever.....get a group of friends and watch the blood flow. That's why you get this movie. Schnaas obviously had a lot of fun throwing this together, using what he had, stretching it out, and Schnaasing it up as Nikos.

NIKOS THE IMPALER is not actual moviemaking. It's really nothing more than a group of people wondering how much carnage they can orchestrate with a limited budget. Even for those who enjoys gore, as I do occasionally, NIKOS doesn't offer enough COMPETENT gore and blood and guts to satisfy.

Perhaps the real audience of NIKOS is those who doesn't require their gore to be well done. If so, then NIKOS is for them. It's mostly childish gore, and most of the killings come by way of decapitations. Really, once you've seen five characters getting their heads badly chopped off by a big sword, do you really need to see 10 more?

4 out of 10

(go to www.nixflix.com for a more detail review and reviews of films in this genre)

Wow, I'm rather amazed I've seen a lot of bad horror movies in my life, but this one is probably the worst yet. I haven't seen any of Andreas Schnaas' other movie, but from what I've read this is his best movie. So I might just have to see the rest to see if it's really possible to make anything worse then this one. The acting was crappy, not really the biggest surprise this is after all a low-budget B-movie. But usually B-movie know how to make fun/interesting killing. This is not the case in Nikos. Basically Nikos is just a crappy Jason-clone who walks around killing people with his big-ass broadsword. and that's all he does! A guy walking around killing people with a big sword can actually make a decent movie, if the killer does it in new and interesting ways. Nikos doesn't do that, he just lobs of people's heads (with a few exceptions not may though).

I wouldn't recommend this money to my worst enemy, no one should be made to watch this movie, it's simply too crappy.