A Disappointing Continuation

What a freaking movie. So many twists and turns. Absolutely intense from start to finish.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

IGOR AND THE LUNATICS is the usual slice of Troma trash that makes little sense as a proper film. The plot is supposedly about a criminal gang leader who is released from prison and arrives in a small town, seeking revenge by having his goons terrorise the townsfolk. The opening scene is the most memorable part of it, including a topless girl being bisected by a circular saw, although for some bizarre reason this whole sequence is subsequently repeated (a cheap a way of padding out the running time as ever I've seen).The film is the usual mish-mash of bad editing and wooden acting, only coming to life towards the end when it becomes a kind of revenge thriller. Some of the practical gore effects aren't too bad, but IGOR AND THE LUNATICS is definitely a barrel-scraping movie otherwise.

Troma movies are rarely praised for their acting, but you would be hard pushed to find a performance in their entire back catalogue of B-movie trash quite as terrible and as grating on the nerves as Joe Niola's Igor, who is the biggest lunatic in this virtually unwatchable mess of a film. Niola plays the youngest and most violent member of a Manson-like cult led by self-proclaimed messiah Paul (T.J. Glenn), and his screeching and grimacing is so irritating that you'll be longing for him to suffer, which he does, but not nearly soon enough. Worst of all, despite finally getting a blade in the head and a crossbow bolt through the skull, the raving dolt returns for a ridiculous epilogue that shows him alive and well (and still behaving like Bobcat Goldthwait on acid!).Not that any of the other members of the cast in this dreadful film are much better: this is one hell of an amateurish effort with poor performances from almost all involved, the whole experience made even more painful by terrible direction and editing from W.J. Parolini working from a script that is all over the place (or maybe not working from a script at all!). Admittedly, the film is nasty in concept at times, with many vicious killings, which might appeal to splatter fans, but it's all done on the cheap, the result being laughable instead of disturbing (Parolini is so proud of one death scene—a shop mannequin being sliced in half by a huge rotary saw—that he shows it three times).Perhaps the worst thing about the whole film is that it is boring. Movies like this often prove entertaining thanks to their sheer ineptitude, but that's not the case here. Igor and the Lunatics will test the patience of even the most avid viewers of crap cinema (even die-hard Troma fans).

It quickly becomes evident that "Igor and the Lunatics" had more than its share of production problems. The credits have a listing for the direction of "horror, action and suspense sequences" as well as a normal directing credit. I don't know what went wrong behind the scene, but the end results are really bad. The story only makes a little sense, for one thing, and they have the chutzpah to play one lengthy sequence TWICE. There are quite a few times when freeze-frames of buildings are used when cutting to a new scene. There's bad continuity, such as when one scene mixes footage shot in the daytime with footage shot at night. The movie further annoys with a really obnoxious musical score, as well as with really cruddy acting. I'm really amazed that Troma Films' president Lloyd Kaufman (who also produced the movie) thought that the end results were releasable. Though it tells a lot that in his autobiography he makes no mention of the movie anywhere, even in his list of "all" Troma Films at the back of the book.

Whatever can be said about this wretched film, it is utterly UNTRUE that half-way through the movie a different set of actors took over. The same actors who started out in the film, continued through-out. There is a span of many years having passed as indicated in the film (when one of the characters goes to prison and is released years later to restart his murder spree), and of course some of the characters would look different...but they are the same actors in the same parts. A look at the credits will show this. The guy who played Paul (whose look does change after years in prison) is the guy who plays him through out. Same for the guy playing Igor - one of the cops, the guy living in the woods - the girlfriend of Paul - the "hero", etc., etc. It may be notorious for many, many things...but cast changing isn't one of them. THE CAST DOES NOT CHANGE HALFWAY THROUGH THE FILM! Stop repeating false stories.