FOLLOWING FILMS - Podcast, Movies, Music, and More

If you spent any reasonable amount of time lurking in the horror aisles of mom-and-pop video stores back in the VHS era, you definitely know the original cover art for Graduation Day. It had that wild, arresting close-up of a terrified woman's face with an axe shattering right through glass, anchored by that bold red title text. It was pure slasher gold, the exact kind of sleeve art that practically begged a bored teenager on a Friday night to shell out three bucks. The actual movie, as is often the case with early 80s regional schlock, doesn't quite match the insane intensity implied on the box, but it's got a weird, chaotic charm that makes it hard to completely dismiss. Released in 1981, right in the thick of the post-Halloween gold rush, Graduation Day tries to do a few different things at once and mostly stumbles through all of them. The setup is straightforward enough: a high school track star named Laura suffers a sudden, fatal heart attack right after winning a 100-...

The folks at Troma have spent fifty years slinging some of the dirtiest, grossest, and most unhinged cinema in North America. You generally know what you’re getting when Lloyd Kaufman attaches his name to something: cheap prosthetic guts, aggressive camp, and a complete refusal to take anything seriously. Every now and then, though, a Troma release pops up that actually cares about its characters amidst the buckets of fake blood. Sweet Meats , directed by and starring Ricky Glore, is one of those rare surprises. It’s a low-budget, country-music horror comedy that essentially takes the core premise of Sweeney Todd or Motel Hell and drags it through a greasy roadside diner in Kentucky. Troma just dropped the physical release on Blu-ray, and while the movie itself runs a little long at a hundred minutes, the package as a whole is a surprisingly charming love letter to DIY filmmaking. The setup is delightfully straightforward. Bobby Sweet (Ricky Glore) is a delusional, wannabe country si...

The cinematic landscape of Tromaville, New Jersey, has always functioned as a toxic, sludge-covered mirror to our own society. Ever since the legendary Toxic Avenger picked up his first mop back in 1984, Troma Entertainment has proudly flown the flag of uncompromising, low-budget, independent filmmaking. Over the decades, we have seen atomic disasters, mutant high schools, and avian zombies terrorize this fictional town, yet it remains an unyielding beacon of underground creativity. While early internet fans will fondly remember dialing up the old Troma website to see the weekly spotlight on edgy, counter-culture Tromettes, these female figures were often relegated to sidekick status or damsels in distress. With Rise of the Super Tromettes, directed, written, and produced by Mercedes the Muse, the iconic women of this cinematic universe finally seize total control of the spotlight. The film delivers a hyper-vibrant, deeply chaotic, and aggressively low-budget addition to the Troma myth...

The history of independent cinema is cluttered with odd, forgotten mutations that exist at the exact crossroads of high art and low trash. One of the most fascinating artifacts from this twilight zone is Sugar Cookies, a 1973 psychosexual thriller that eventually found a unexpected home in the Troma Entertainment library. Long before Troma became synonymous with toxic mutants, exploding vehicles, and hyper-kinetic slapstick gore, the company’s co-founder, Lloyd Kaufman, was cutting his teeth on a completely different style of counterculture filmmaking. Co-written by Kaufman and director Theodore Gershuny, Sugar Cookies is a sleek, seedy, and surprisingly layered exploration of grief, exploitation, and identity. Originally slapped with an X rating before being re-edited, it stands out as a unique cinematic anomaly: an erotic B-movie that behaves like an art-house homage to Alfred Hitchcock. At the center of this sordid tale is Max Pavell, played with a greasy, manipulative charm by Geor...

Luther the Geek is the kind of regional horror oddity that seems engineered to be discovered on a battered VHS tape in a dusty video store rather than streamed in high definition. Released in the late nineteen eighties and shot on a shoestring budget, the film sits squarely in the tradition of American backyard horror where enthusiasm outweighs polish and sincerity battles incompetence in every frame. What makes Luther the Geek memorable is not that it is good in a conventional sense but that it is relentlessly committed to its own strange identity. It is a movie that knows exactly what it wants to be even if it does not always know how to get there. The premise is deceptively simple. Luther is an escaped mental patient who roams rural farmland and attacks anyone unlucky enough to cross his path. His defining trait is his appetite for human tongues, which he collects with disturbing enthusiasm. The film wastes little time explaining the psychology behind this fixation, and that is part...

#ShakespearShitstorm is an unfiltered explosion of absurdity, a film that refuses to play by anyone’s rules, not even its own. Directed and co-written by Lloyd Kaufman, the founder of Troma Entertainment, this outrageous adaptation of The Tempest blends Shakespearean farce with a torrent of toilet humor, social commentary, and political mockery. It’s equal parts carnival sideshow and angry protest song, dripping in fake blood and bile but strangely committed to its own warped moral compass. The story roughly follows the bones of Shakespeare’s play. Kaufman plays Prospero Duke, a disgraced scientist betrayed by his power-hungry sister and a corrupt pharmaceutical empire. Banished from polite society, he hides away with his daughter Miranda and plots revenge. Years later, when a ship full of his enemies crosses his path, he conjures a storm — or in this case, a wave of drug-induced diarrhea, that leaves them stranded in his bizarre kingdom. The survivors stumble into a world of grotesque...