BA_Harrison In Destroyer, Anthony Perkins, the star of Hitchcock's Psycho, plays the director of cheesy 'Women In Prison' movie Death House Dolls and utters the line 'Everybody back in an hour. We'll do the shower scene.' That's as clever as the film gets, the rest of the movie being an extremely dumb tongue-in-cheek slasher that offers very little for horror fans to get excited about (except, perhaps, for the aforementioned shower scene, in which several buck naked fitties get sopping wet before having a cat-fight).Beating the similarly themed House III: The Horror Show and Wes Craven's Shocker by a year, Destroyer features a vicious, musclebound rapist and murderer called Ivan Moser (played by ex-NFL linesman Lyle Alzado), who receives the electric chair for his crimes, but who returns from the dead to terrorise the cast and crew of the aforementioned W.I.P. movie (which is being shot in the now abandoned jail where Moser was zapped). For this kind of uninspired trash to work, the killer's quips need to be reasonably amusing (which they aren't: Alzado is no Englund) and the kills both inventive and excessively splattery (which they aren't: the dull deaths either occur off screen or the film cuts away from the gory stuff too soon).Worse still, actress Deborah Foreman, as 'final girl' Susan, puts in a performance almost as irritating as that in her atrocious 1986 'comedy' My Chauffeur. Foreman has proven that she can play cute and sexy in Waxwork (1988) and Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat (1989), and appealing in April Fool's Day, but when she plays overly kooky, as she does here, even her impressive dimples can't win me over. With her horrible hair-do, tomboyish outfits, and supposedly witty banter, Susan is presumably intended to be endearing, but I found her quite the opposite, and would have been quite happy for Moser to have run a few thousand volts through her while he could.3.5 out of 10, rounded up to 4 for IMDb.

Sandcooler For some reason every slasher from the late 80s has to have a quirky, wise-cracking killer, even though a mindless killing machine is usually a whole lot scarier. Our Freddie Krueger rip-off du jour (played by steroid-enhanced NFL star Lyle Alzado) ends every sentence with "bitch", laughs maniacally at his own non-jokes ("I just want to talk you...hahahahaha", did he forget the punchline?) and worst of all is on screen far too long. That whole trope with the villain trying to be funny works when there's actually some decent writing involved and the finale doesn't last forever ("Scream" would be an obvious example of doing it right). In this one the killer plays cat and mouse with the final girl for almost half an hour, the pacing of this movie is very weird. You have a very slow build-up, a somehow even slower third act, and somewhere in between everybody dies (mostly off-screen at that) in a span of ten minutes or so. There's one scene though that almost redeems the film, not too surprisingly it's the one scene that has an on-screen kill. It's the only scene that really warrants the coveted so bad it's good label, and I was hoping to see more of that. Unfortunately, the rest is just stale and generic.

acaciaavenue22 This movie is worth watching (and buying) for one reason: Lyle Alzado!! Of course he plays a maniacal killer-who would expect otherwise? One of his best lines: Girl about to be killed-"Why?" Alzado (with a confused, quizzical look)-"Why not?" Another great scene is when Alzado clothes-lines the guy off his motorcycle, smashing the windscreen for effect! Classic! OK it's not fine cinema, but it is entertaining and interesting if you are an Oakland Raiders fan. Compare to John Matuszak in North Dallas Forty, Caveman, and Weird Science. Too bad those two never worked together on film, they could've provided some over-the-top bad guy scenes in plenty of B action flicks.

Backlash007 Lyle Alzado is...The Destroyer. The box to this movie claims it to be an action/thriller. Nope, it's a slasher flick. It's also an April Fool's Day reunion for Clayton Rohner and Debra Foreman. The late, great NFL monster Alzado is a psychotic rapist and murderer who is executed minutes before a prison riot breaks out. After the riots are over, the prison is forced to close and Alzado's body is never found. Years later, Foreman, Rohner (sporting one of his famous haircuts), and Anthony "Psycho" Perkins are filmmakers shooting a movie in the famed prison. It all makes for an odd little slasher entry. I wouldn't say Destroyer's great, but it does have its moments of hilarity. It's just fun to watch Alzado go to work on people with an over-sized jackhammer...or to hear Perkins say the words "shower scene."