Hellroller (1992)

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Some guy who played bit roles in a few Fred Olen Ray movies decided to make a campy B horror movie of his own. He really shouldn't have bothered as this inept shot-on-video mess is a complete embarrassment. You may also notice a handful of 10-star reviews on here - clearly all written by the same person - trying to pawn this off as some cult film, but don't be fooled. This is as bad as it gets. Wheelchair- bound, constantly-twitching whiner Eugene (Ron Litman) and the woman he always thought was his mother (Mary Woronov under the name "Penny Arcade") go dumpster diving. She says "I should have aborted you!" but then confesses that she's not really his mother but his aunt and that his REAL mom (Ruth Collins) accidentally dropped him on his head when he an infant right before being gang raped and murdered by a set of Siamese twins. After the aunt disappears, Eugene goes to the rotten- toothed "King of the Bums" (David H. Sterry) for help, only to find out she's been raped and murdered, too. Already imbalanced and filled with rage to begin with, Eugene then sets out on a quest to "kick ass all over Hollywood" (i.e. go on a senseless killing spree).Our paralyzed psycho briefly teams up with a mentally-retarded former film director named Donald (played by director Levinson) who was once "the Fellini of horror pictures in Tennessee." I've seen enough cheap horror films by now to realize the retarded director character is a dig at Donald Farmer. Just one month before this was released, Farmer released a documentary called INVASION OF THE SCREAM QUEENS (1992). Since it featured a photo of Michelle Bauer on the cover taken from this movie, Levinson and co-director Stuart Wall later took "Invasion" producer Sy Yudel on the TV show "The People's Court" (!!) and (unsuccessfully) sued him! So anyway, Eugene and Donald go to a gym and get revenge on a guy for calling Eugene a "crip" and throwing his wheelchair in a dumpster. Eugene then gets a knife from a woman and stabs her in the face with it. They then bust into the hotel room of world famous "model slut" Michelle Novak (Bauer), who's in town to promote her new line of swimsuits. During a scuffle, Eugene convinces Michelle to help him kill Donald and then turns around and guts her in the bathroom.The lame murder spree continues as Eugene takes an axe to porn actress Hyapatia Lee after she dances, strips and showers, rams a broomstick through a pair of female muggers, kills a topless hooker by ironing her to death and rips out a guy's eyeballs. Sound gory? Sure, but I haven't yet mentioned that most of the victims aren't actually shown being killed, we just get to see the body afterward, including a hilarious moment where a dead woman holds an axe up to her chest to keep it in place. The staging and editing of these scenes is just pathetic. During the last few minutes, the killer goes to a mad doctor and has him whip up a special potion to turn normal people into bums but this idea goes absolutely nowhere. There are a few other useless subplots in here as well, mostly revolving around a couple of TV newscasters making dumb jokes about Jeffrey Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy and interviewing people saying degrading things about homeless people.Aside from Bauer and Lee's nude scenes, the only other good thing about this movie is the surprisingly good music. Seeing how no one is credited with the score, they probably stole it from somewhere else. As far as the photography is concerned, it's so blurry and poorly lit you'd have to have no understanding of how to work a simple camera for it to end up looking this bad. I set up better-looking shots with a 100 camcorder and a lamp when I was 8 years old.

If you want to see this movie about a serial killer in a wheelchair, you'll have to hunt it down, but it's a search that I found well worth my time. I've been wanting to see "Hellroller" for years, and I finally found a used copy in a video store, and grabbed it. Where do I begin? Most films are ripoffs of other films, or sequels, or remakes. "Hellroller" is original, a serial killer in a wheelchair, outlandish to be sure, but original, and very well made. Despite its low budget, or maybe because of it, this movie has almost a documentary feel to it, as the crippled hero, or maybe antihero? wreaks havoc on the world of "normals." He's mad at the world, but especially at beautiful women, and he slaughters some of the most beautiful women in movie history, including Michelle Bauer, who gets naked in a bathtub, Elizabeth Kaitan, and porn superstar, Hyapathia Lee, in the best shower death-scene ever. The killings are extremely graphic, and shown in every blood-soaked detail. The carnage includes disembowelment, impalement, amputation, and ironing-to-death. The makeup effects are among the very best I've ever seen. I've watched "Hellroller" three times so far, and that doesn't include watching some of my favorite scenes over and over again. The director of "Hellroller" has a pretty lengthy resume, as a producer, and as an actor in "Shock Waves," "Evil Spawn," "Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers," "Cannibal Hookers," "Modern Girls," "Armed Response" among others. "Hellroller" even has redneck Siamese twins! I'm not making this up. It's worth hunting this classic down.

***SLIGHT SPOILERS*** For the better part of two years now, I have been hunting for the worst horror movie ever made. First, I thought it was "The Crawlers" (aka "Troll 3"). Then, I though it was "Horror House on Highway Five", which left "The Crawlers" in the dust in terms of sheer badness. But now I have seen the light, and I recognize the fact that the Absolute Worst Horror Movie Ever Made is "Hellroller".First of all, I'm stumped as to what this thing was actually shot on. It's not film, but it doesn't look like video either. All of the visual effects anybody can do with a standard camcorder and home computer film editor. And it's chock-full of bad blaxploitation-style editing, where it's painfully obvious that a scene was shot at two or more completely different times, and the actors are not in the same place from one shot to the next.The movie itself is about a wheelchair-bound homeless maniac with a bad twitch who wants to get revenge on the 'beautiful people'. I'm all but convinced that most of the cast was played by actual bums and prostitutes, which explains why some of the acting seems actually to be good because the people are just playing themselves. The murder scenes are nothing but laughable, the best being when the 'Hellroller' rams a blunt stick straight through two prostitutes' chests. The opening scene involves a flashback to the Hellroller's childhood when his crackwhore mother gets raped and killed by Siamese twin rednecks (you can probably guess how the twins' 'effect' was done). On top of that, the rest of the movie is supposed to be 20 or so years after that, but the Siamese rednecks are still alive and are servants to another character called 'The King of Bums'. The same actor who plays 'The King of Bums' also plays a mad doctor whom the Hellroller hires to invent a potion that turns ordinary people into bums (I swear I'm not making this up). Hellroller then somehow poisons LA's entire bottled water supply (not tap water, only bottled water because that is what the rich people drink), upon which everyone - even the newsanchors at KRAP 69 - amazingly transform into bums. On top of all this, the movie also includes two extended mindless scenes of a woman (Michelle Bauer) doing aerobics and another woman dancing alone in her room, apparently added in order to push the movie's length past the one hour mark.But that's it. Right here and right now, I announce that my search for the worst horror movie ever made is over, because it is "Hellroller". There still might be a worse movie than this one somewhere out there, but I don't think I have the will to find it, or even to watch it. I'm afraid that if I ever see a movie worse than "Hellroller", it would cause me to lose all the rest of my faith in humanity.

Finally, the first film I would recommend to Adolf Hitler, or for that matter, anyone guilty of committing heinous crimes.Forget death sentences. We should make convicts watch this film over and over again. Maybe that way, the crime rate in this country would lower.This makes my list of the five worst films ever made. Love that two-headed redneck.