Igor and the Lunatics (1985)

It’s hard to imagine that everyone who worked on the production of this film didn’t kill themselves upon viewing the final product. Of course, most of the people listed as actors in this film don’t show that they’ve worked on any other films on the Internet Movie Database, so maybe they did the world a favor and did just that.

The first half of Igor and the Lunatics reads like a Charles Manson biography. Paul Byron is a hippie cult leader who moves his followers out of the city and to his ranch which lies just outside of town. He keeps their loyalty by pumping them full of illegal drugs, having sex with all the women in the compound, and pretending to be a religious figure. Somehow he is made out to be the bad guy in the fil. All of this follows Charles Manson’s life story so closely, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see followers named Squeaky or Tex Watson in this cinematic catastrophe. Paul, for the record, is NOT Igor.

Because of a few measley murders that Paul and his followers have committed, pesky local cops begin to investigate, and soon Paul is arrested and serving 16 years in prison. The moment he’s released, his loyal minions (and Jesus, are they loyal or what, waiting 16 years for their leader to get out of prison!!) are there waiting to pick him up and wage war against the town who dared put their leader in prison.

Unfortunately, they never really get around to that. For the most part, Paul just ends up killing people near him or unfortunate civilians who wander too close to their wooden hideout.

This whole story is being told via a flashback by a chick who is reading a book left behind by her husband (Jimmy). Jimmy, who had a run in with these guys years earlier, has now decided he must go kill Paul. No, her husband isn’t Igor either. If all this doesn’t sound dumb enough by itself, Jimmy had a child with his girlfriend that Paul is convinced is his too) — the child is known as “the boy” and he was left behind at the big police raid of the compound. “The Boy” was discovered by “Hawk”, an indian who dresses in camoflauge and runs around in the woods waving a crossbow at people. Soon, the cultists, the people reading the notes, Hawk and his friends and everyone else in the entire cast are out trying to kill each other using knives, swords, machettes, grappling hooks, and anything else these idiots could afford on their shoestring budget.

“How could it be your kid, Paul? Don’t you know women don’t give birth after only five months? You dummy …” – Jimmy.

Igor, for those who are still wondering, is one of Paul’s followers, a mentally unstable fellow who was kept chained to a tree until the day he broke his chains with a rock and became one of Paul’s best killers. Yeah, I know. For that matter, only one person even says the word “Lunatic” throughout the entire film. So, Igor and the Lunatics should have really been called Paul and his Killing Spree — but then again that’s why I don’t work in marketing I suppose.

The opening scene, a murder where Paul and two of his followers (again, no Igor) follow a defecting worshipper to a saw mill where they show her boobies to the camera a lot before tying her to a plank and sawing her in half with a big saw mill saw. The directors must have been pretty proud of the footage, because half an hour into the film they show the entire ten minute scene again as a flashback. ARGH! The special effects here were pretty good, and even though it made no sense and was horribly acted, it was probably my favorite scene in the movie. The first time, not the second time.

Igor and the Lunatic’s 80-something minute running time seemed like 612 minutes — that’s figuring that each minute was so painfull to watch, each minute seemed like five minutes. The scene they showed twice seemed like twenty minutes, each bad killing seemed five times as long as it really was, and every scene where you would ask, “why the fuck is this happening?” seemed three times as long as it actually was. The credits seemed to be pretty much normal speed. (The preceeding joke was roughly based on The Jerk, a film I wish I was watching instead of this one.)

If you were to write down the major plot points of this movie, you would just laugh to yourself over and over. Like, the main couple meet “The Boy” because he breaks into their apartment … to look at her artwork. When he is caught, he runs to escape and twists his ankle. The woman, who was chasing him away from her apartment, carries him (guess) back to her apartment.

The trailer to Igor and the Lunatics (which appears on several Troma DVDs) was much more entertaining than the movie itself. With the scenes placed out of sequence and with no dialogue, the story almost becomes presentable. If you plan on watching the movie and not just the trailer, I would recommend bringing copious amounts of alcohol or other mind altering substances to make the plot more coherent. The special effects are laughable (saran wrap over a window does NOT look like glass, folks), the dialogue is deplorable, the acting reminds me of people trying NOT to seem realistic, … the plot sinks lower than most old Saturday morning cartoons, and despite repeated washings, I cannot rid my hands of the stench of this film.

A must see for all fans of B-horror.

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