Had Wes Craven cast Lyle Alzado as Freddy Krueger instead of Robert Englund, the result might look a lot like Destroyer, a slasher movie that gave the former NFL defensive lineman/shriveled-testicled steroid user his first leading role following such big-and-dumb turns in the comedies Tapeheads and Ernest Goes to Camp. I’m not sure whether anyone involved with the production had the heart to tell their star this wasn’t a comedy, because Alzado laughs his way through it.

In a premise that predates both The Horror Show and Craven’s own Shocker, Alzado’s Ivan Moser is a death-row inmate who spends his last minutes alive sweating buckets, squeezing a doll’s head like a stress ball and getting angry over a Wheel of Fortune-esque game show because, dammit, no contestant will pick the letter B! Anyway, Moser is electrocuted to a charred crisp, only to return to haunt the place several months later when its cells are used to shoot the women-in-prison pic Death House Dolls. That fictitious flick’s shoot-’em-and-move-’em director (Psycho-tic Anthony Perkins, quite amusing) would do Roger Corman proud.

On-set stuntwoman Susan (Valley Girl Deborah Foreman, adorable as always) is dating the screenwriter (Clayton Rohner, reteaming with Foreman after April Fool’s Day); the two become our heroes as Moser continues his murderous ways, from torching the cowboy-wannabe warden to jackhammering a cop. (Speaking of, Alzado rather phallically brandishing this “tool” became Destroyer‘s key art.)

You know the electric chair will come back into play, but I won’t spoil whose butt is introduced to its 3,000-volt jolt. However, I can reveal without guilt that when Moser corners Susan, he delights in cutting off her hair and then eating it. That gastronomic quirk very well could be the highlight of this serial-killer swiller — inane, but enjoyable in all its overt ’80s-ness, from lingo-laden lines of exposition (“The tungsten element must’ve been bogus!”) to Foreman’s close-cropped hairdo, seemingly modeled after Woody Woodpecker. —Rod Lott

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Parents, as tempting as it is, do not conduct an autopsy on your spouse in front of your 6-year-old boy. He’ll only grow up to be the kind of man who kills prostitutes just so he can slice off their faces and wear them over his own like dime-store Halloween masks. This probably goes double if your last name is Skinner.

In the sleaze-oozing Skinner, Dennis Skinner (Ted Raimi, Intruder) embarks on that low-in-demand career path. (Thanks, Pa!) Drifting into town, Skinner rents a room from a lonely housewife (Ricki Lake, Hairspray).

Meanwhile, almost simultaneously, a smack-addled mystery woman (played by former porn star Traci Lords) checks into a nearby hotel. She’s dressed like Carmen Sandiego at a funeral and her coat hides the fact that her left arm and leg are as veiny and shriveled as an octogenarian who forgot how to get out of the bathtub. She’s “hunting” Skinner to get her revenge for past transgressions, but is obviously terrible at it since she’s already spent five years doing so.

Also terrible: this movie, directed by Ivan Nagy, a large-looming figure in the Heidi Fleiss scandal of the 1990s and a man whose work has gone from an all-American superhero (1979’s made-for-TV Captain America II: Death Too Soon) to all-access porn, so Skinner‘s entirety is tainted with a coat of feculence.

Surprisingly, its most distasteful bit doesn’t even involve a female body part. Rather, it’s a blackface routine — well, so to speak — as an African-American man who upsets Skinner finds himself short one visage. Skinner doesn’t merely put it on — he also adopts a stereotypical shuffle and ebonics dialect! It’s the most racist thing I’ve seen since any email forwarded by my dad to his entire address book during either Obama campaign. Viewers might be able to forgive one line (“Yeah, baby!”), maybe two, but the shtick extends from one scene into another, with Raimi pouring his life into it as if auditioning for a Sanford and Son reboot.

As Al Jolson famously said, “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” —Rod Lott

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