If you love your horror with a side of weird, these horror flicks from the 1990s are exactly what you’ve been missing…
The 1990s were a time when the horror genre evolved. Filmmakers took more risks, new technology allowed for greater innovation, and horror moved further away from traditional frights to explore the psychology of fear more deeply. It added up to some absolutely fantastic cinema, such as Scream, Audition, and Event Horizon.
Some horror movies took a different approach to horror, though, particularly in the early 1990s, and added a dash of ridiculousness. These movies might not be quite as terrifying as others, but they could still offer significant scares while providing serious food for thought. Here are ten horror films from the 1990s that are both ridiculous, and ridiculously fun…
I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle
I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle is likely the most ridiculous film on this list, but despite its silly premise (a guy buys a vampire motorcycle), it’s incredibly fun. Sure, watching an evil vampire motorcycle go around eating people is ludicrous. But because this film is old enough to still be using practical effects, it means that there’s actually a nice amount of gore in the film to offset that. Best of all, though, Anthony Daniels (yes, C-3PO himself) plays a priest who attempts an exorcism on the bike.
Sure, the movie is dated, both in looks and occasionally in concepts, but I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle is the kind of mindless fun that’s a blast to engage with.
Jack Frost
Look, the entire concept of this film — a serial killer being transported to his execution is involved in an accident involving chemicals that turns him into a snowman — is one that shouldn’t work. Yet, somehow, it does, and it’s so much funnier than expected. Most likely that’s because the film understands its absurdity and really leans into the joke of an evil snowman. The actors also understand exactly what kind of film they’re in and play into that as hard as they can.
The result is a movie with some fairly creative kills, a hilarious ending, and a surprisingly decent plot. In fact, this one gained such a cult following that the filmmakers made a straight-to-video sequel titled Jack Frost 2: The Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman.
The Dentist
People with anxiety around visiting the dentist, The Dentist is not for you. Seriously, skip this one. For everyone else, though, enjoy watching Corbin Bernsen (the dad from Psych) slowly lose it until he goes on a murder spree that involves lots of dental instruments. This movie is on the average side, as far as slasher/serial killer flicks go, but there’s still plenty of nonsense to go around.
Our serial killer dentist leaves bodies left and right, and it still somehow takes the police the entire movie to catch him. Two of the three employees at his office mysteriously go missing, yet the third never notices. This film is full of ridiculous plot holes and silliness, but it does provide viewers with some pretty horrific dental torture.
Brain Dead
Wow, we certainly had some unbelievable ideas about what the future would bring back in the 1990s, huh? Brain Dead, starring both Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton, is a film involving a lot of brains. Pullman plays a neuroscience specialist and neurosurgeon who is trying to figure out how to change people’s mental attitudes via brain surgery. Over the course of the film, several people have brain surgery while they’re still awake and talking, and Pullman’s character gets pulled into a spiral of paranoia that blurs the lines of reality.
Most of the ludicrousness here comes from the idea of brain surgery that turns people into who they want to be (surgeries done while they’re not even under anesthesia). However, there’s also some overacting by Pullman and a plot that kind of loses its way, which makes this film ridiculously fun.
Def By Temptation
Def By Temptation was distributed by Troma, but it’s definitely not a Troma film. Starring Kadeem Hardison, plus Samuel L. Jackson in a bit role, this vampire movie offers up plenty of laughs and a few scares. When a minister-in-training goes to visit his cousin in the big city, he gets more excitement than expected when a beautiful vampire sets her sights on him.
As silly as the plot and some of the kills can get, Def By Temptation is actually an incredibly enjoyable watch. Sure, the fake blood is ketchup-red, and the vampire has a habit of slicing and dicing bits off men, but the family drama mixed in is heartwarming, and you’ll actually care about the characters by the end.
Popcorn
Popcorn is actually a nifty little slasher flick with a dash of the supernatural thrown in. The supernatural element is what makes the film more laughable than it would otherwise be, though. Essentially, a group of high school kids in a film club decide to host a movie night showing horror movies from the 1950s and 1960s. To add to the fun, they incorporate some of the gimmicky marketing tactics from those eras, such as Smell-O-Vision and 3-D glasses. Unfortunately for them, someone’s out to stop the fun, and they have a connection to one of the students.
A lot of the horror here is of the cheesy and cheeky variety, but it’s the motives of the killer that really make you go, “Huh, what?” As unbelievable and out there as those motives are, though, the movie as a whole is a blast to watch.
Resurrection
Resurrection is a fairly decent movie altogether. Its ridiculousness comes from the fact that it’s a near direct rip-off of Seven. There’s enough here to make it not a complete carbon copy, but it involves detectives hunting down a serial killer whose murders have a religious bent. Star Christopher Lambert also makes a few acting choices that might leave you scratching your head.
Despite its copycat ways, though, Resurrection has its own flair that makes it an entertaining watch. There are just enough differences from Seven for the film to work on its own merits, and there’s a decent amount of gore to be found (with a particularly shocking image near the end).
Cemetery Man
Cemetery Man is a difficult movie to explain. This film stars Rupert Everett as Francesco Dellamorte, the caretaker of a cemetery in a small Italian town. It might sound like a boring gig, but considering everybody in the cemetery comes back to life after seven days and Dellamorte must kill them again, it’s more exciting than one would think. The absolutely ridiculous part of the film comes along with the respective love interests of Dellamorte and his co-worker. Oh, and Dellamorte eventually begins speaking with Death, so there’s that.
This zombiedy is utterly surreal, wonderfully artsy, and just plain weird at times. People’s theories about the meaning behind the film are wildly varied, too. Cemetery Man is definitely one of those films where viewers should just sit back and enjoy the ride.
In The Mouth of Madness
This John Carpenter film takes the theme that power in the wrong hands can have devastating effects on the world around us and turns it into a topsy-turvy story about an insurance investigator (Sam Neill) looking into whether the author of an upcoming novel has disappeared. The film is fantastic, but throughout it, some incredibly strange and ludicrous things occur. Plus, the way the story and cinematography keep the audience as confused as the main character leaves viewers with the sense that the lines of reality have twisted themselves into something much weirder.
Some of the practical effects get a bit hokey in places, too, making a couple of scenes sillier than they should be. But overall, In The Mouth of Madness is a wonderful watch that will make people ask who should have power and who should not.
The People Under the Stairs
Finally, we have one of the wildest films on this list, Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs. This film is part-horror, part-black comedy, and part-madcap kids’ adventure (think The Goonies) and offers a frenzied ride from beginning to end. Our protagonist is a 13-year-old kid who gets roped into committing a burglary in hopes of gaining enough money to send his mom to the hospital. Once he and the men he’s with enter their target house, though, they find the nice, upstanding couple living there isn’t quite who they present themselves to be.
Not gonna lie, things get super bizarre in places as this kid gets locked into a house of horrors that includes feral children, cannibalism, and more. It’s a quintessentially 1990s film, so things do get absurd at times, but it’s an absolute delight to watch.
Misty Layne
