Not For the Faint of Heart: Movieline's Halloween 25 Brings on the Slasher Films

The weekend is upon us, so it's time for Movieline's Halloween 25 to get messy. The slasher-movie edition, which includes electric guitar drills and the only horror movie (to my knowledge) where the killer uses a flamethrower, will make Freddy and Jason look like kid's stuff. Once the screaming is over and the killer has died for the fifth and final time, chime in with your own picks.

· Bay of Blood AKA Twitch of the Death Nerve (1971)

Italian horror master Mario Bava influenced decades of slasher films with this whodunit about friends and relatives of a wealthy heiress getting murdered one by one. In fact, the method of kills and structure is almost identical to Friday the 13th and all of its clones. Only this one is more violent, erotic and stylish than any of those films; the oft-copied spear-through-the-mid-coital-couple tradition began here. And the psychedelic trailer below is a work of art on its own.

· Don't Go in the House AKA Pyromaniac (1980)

At a special screening once, Quentin Tarantino declared this to be the most disturbing film he had ever seen. That should give some indication of how insane and totally demented this forgotten '80s film is. The film follows a young, geeky guy whose mother abused him with fire as a child. Naturally he grows up to become a sexually repressed psycho who burns women with a flamethrower and then talks to their corpses. The film veers between a pop-psychological horror movie that owes more than a little to Psycho and a slasher movie with fire. Some parts are so silly you want to laugh while others may make you feel sick and a little angry at yourself. This one will scare you, but it's for adventurous viewers only.

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