Trash Or Terror Tuesday: Movie House Massacre / Blood Theatre (1984)

It’s time for #TrashOrTerrorTuesday

…when I examine a film that’s been languishing in my personal library to determine if it is #Trash or #Terror

– or more importantly, if it deserves to stay in my collection.

And so, out from the dusty shelves of #VHS tapes comes…

The VHS box for Movie House Massacre / Blood Theatre (1984)Movie House Massacre / Blood Theatre (1984) by #RickSloane

w/#MaryWoronov

An old movie house plagued with a history of unexplained tragedies is reopened with bloody history repeating itself.

“When the movie starts … the terror begins!”

#Horror #Slasher
#TrashOrTerrorTuesday

 

Movie House Massacre (1984) got panned in every movie review book I read back in the days before the internet rendered those books somewhat obsolete (although I still love to flip through them and read the opinions of reviewers I trust). As a result, I avoided renting this one for a number of years – but when I found a cheap VHS copy for sale in a bargain bin, I simply couldn’t resist buying it. For one thing, it had Mary Woronov in it, and I’ve been a fan of hers since first seeing Eating Raoul (1982). For another thing, I believed it to a be a slasher film, and I’ve always thought that slasher films are kind of like pizza: even when they’re bad, they’re still pretty good.

Of course, the older I get, the more I prefer good pizza to bad pizza – and yes, there is such a thing as bad pizza that really isn’t good at all. More to the point, watching Movie House Massacre for the first time in decades has to led me to question whether or not it is in fact a slasher film. It seems to be more of a weird supernatural story. There are some slasher-like killings, but not enough to sustain it – and most of them happen in the very final moments of the film. The first two thirds of the story seems more like a bad attempt at comedy. Mary Woronov is the best thing in this film, and she did make me laugh a couple of times, but she really doesn’t have enough to do (just like Linda Blair in last week’s #trash-fest).  

So what’s the verdict?

Movie House Massacre / Blood Theatre (1984) is #Trash. It’s certainly not scary – and that would be perfectly okay if it was funny, but it only manages an occasional laugh or smile. Mary Woronov completists might want to see it, but… I enjoyed it much more the first time I watched it, after my expectations had been sufficiently lowered by all of the bad reviews I had read. Perhaps if I am negative enough here, I will give other people the same opportunity to be pleasantly surprised by it. So with that in mind…

Don’t watch this movie. It’s a “grindingly bad slasher” — James O’Neill, Terror On Tape. Not only that, it’s “too sophomoronic and leadenly unfunny to work.” — L.A. Morse, Video Trash & Treasures. If that isn’t enough to dissuade you, it currently rates a 2.9 on the IMDb. This movie is bad pizza bad. Don’t waste your hunger on it, when there’s much better bad pizza to be had.

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