Schatten des Todes (1988) Online

"Destroyer" is a low-budget 1988 horror film, with slight touches of comedy here and there. It stars ex-football player Lyle Alzado (R.I.P -- never been a huge football fan), 80s actress icon Deborah Foreman, and Norman Bates himself, Anthony Perkins.

It sort of plays off of the ideas of late 80s supernatural thrillers, which involved supernatural revenge. (Much like "Shocker", "Prison", and "The Horror Show.") In this case, our killer is not necessarily supernatural, he is more pumped up.

It's a fun movie. Yes, it has its issues, it is not perfect, but it still makes for a fun watch when you need to take your mind off of things.

Lyle Alzado does a GREAT job for his original profession at being an NFL lineman. He is incredibly scary and ruthless in scenes, and....we'll just say you wouldn't want him chasing you. Deborah Foreman & Clayton Rohner do a solid job as our main hero & heroine, acting-wise.

Problems with the movie: I think Lyle Alzado could have been incorporated more into the movie, and when he was there, in a more violent, destructive way. In the movie, he kills people with mundane tools. A jackhammer, blow torch, hanging, and off screen decapitation. Nothing that would involve super-human strength as the poster and plot suggest. I also think certain characters should have had more screen time, AND more actions and events they performed. (Including Anthony Perkins, who is fun as the sarcastic director, but his scenes are limited. Rewire, the comic relief, is also someone who should have had more screen time.)

Overall, without spoiling anything; "Destroyer" is a fun watch if you like low-budget movies and movies that are fun. It has issues, and it is not to be dissected. Just watch it for fun, take it for what it was made on, it's a fun time.

7/10

Many people who review this have called it a slasher movie. This is entirely inaccurate, because the killer does not stab or slash his victims to death, he DESTROYS them. It's sort of like wrestle-maniac, in that the killer is maniacal, and Destroys his victims only using his bare hands along with novelty weapons akin to steel chairs used in wrestling. The movie itself licks ass, but within the retarded plot are enough bizarre, hilarious and awesome scenes to make it worth walking. Rent it with a bottle of malt liquor and some pork rinds, scrape the sticky lint coating off of your VCR, and get ready for some low quality junk with brief flashes of greatness (and breasts) between long awkward stretches of crappy videotape.

Best appreciated with one hand on the fast forward button to shorten the rough sections with no boobs or Alzado.

At first glance, Destroyer looks like a very promising film for horror fans on paper. In an era where the slasher flick was in its prime, it looks as if this film sets itself apart from the rest. It features a human enemy who seems to be more of a genetic freak than an indestructible demon who does not target teenagers, as the bad guy usually does in recent entries of the genre. However, all the positive points end there and what we're left with is another excessively gratuitous gorefest that most horror fans won't take seriously.

Beyond Anthony Perkins, there are no seriously notable names in the movie. It's too bad that such the horror icon did not have a notable body of work after his defining performance in "Psycho", making several mediocre "Psycho" sequels and b-movies like this. Nevertheless, he plays his role as skin flick director to a T. Other than the two heroes, everyone else in the movie is either there to get killed or say a few lines. And the heroes aren't even of note either. The only difference they have with everyone else in the movie and in the number of lines they have. There is never any development of their characters, so you don't know what special qualities they possess that make them the good guys in the end other than mere coincidence and serendipity.

If there's one thing the movie has going for it, it's the way some of the characters get dispensed. There's a nice scene with a blowtorch and the movie's best part, involving a huge drilling device (as seen on the video box). However, as the movie goes on, the scenes become a little less graphic though we are treated to some body parts strewn around and some wax-museum quality bodies. Credit must be given to Lyle Alzado, who looks VERY menacing as the main bad guy. He shows a bit of acting ability in this movie. Throughout his brief career acting after football, which was cut short after he sadly succumbed to brain cancer, he was thoroughly underused as a main villain in movies.

In short, the Destroyer is a decent weekend b-movie. Its partly refreshing perspective on the slasher genre and its almost humorously over-gory scenes make it a fun movie to watch and laugh at with a few friends. Look for some nice (if inadvertent) homages to horror classics the Shining (with the blood on the wall sequence) and Friday the 13th (with the gotcha! end of the movie). Finally, be sure to sit through the credits for a very weird name for one of the movie's songs. The laughs are definitely worth a cheap rental.

Destroyer is a prime piece of forgettable 80's horror schlock. Lyle Alzado (YES!) stars as a brutal inmate who somehow survives his execution, Shocker style, and mysteriously disappears. Soon after, the prison closes and a while later, the place becomes the shooting location for a women-in-prison (WIP) film, directed by none other than a lively Anthony Perkins. (Yes, they do shoot a shower scene.) Of course, slasher horror hilarity ensues. Yeah, I knew what I was getting into…the cover shows a buff, gleaming Alzado holding a big jackhammer with a mounted scope! Memorable line: "Could you hang on a second, Officer Callahan? I gotta peepee."

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."

I have not seen Destroyer in many years. I remember thinking this was pretty awesome as a teenager and was a favorite title to rent back in the day. Unlike many other childhood favorites, Destroyer does not hold up as well. This stars former NFL football player Lyle Alzado who plays a vicious serial killer that short circuits his electric chair, causing the prison to lose power and starts a prison riot. There is no trace of Ivan Moser(Alzado) and the prison closes with Ivan Moser's disappearance giving him legendary status. Two years later a film director(Anthony Perkins) uses the film as a set for his low budget skin flick(a women in prison style exploitation movie). Unfortunate for the viewer this stuff is not very interesting. Alzado does pop up and starts killing people off one by one. There is almost no character development on Ivan Moser to explain his back story on how or why he became a homicidal lunatic. Alzado's roid rage rampage is the highlight of the film. While the juice may have helped his performance on the football field, it did not do much for his acting. However, it is Alzado's hulking anabolic presence that separates the film slightly from other slasher films. Alzado was brutal here and there are some good kills here, but the film as a whole is not very good and does little to elevate it from standard slasher fare. Performances range from decent to complete crap and while some of this material is so bad its good, as a whole this is pretty bad. I would not say this film is unwatchable, but now I know why I forgot about this movie for twenty years.

"Destroyer" is a mildly entertaining, routinely written B horror picture that's not without its pleasures. As it opens, a serial murderer named Ivan Moser (football great Lyle Alzado) is about to be executed for his crimes. However, just as he's being electrocuted, a prison riot erupts, resulting in the deaths of several guards and many inmates (not that we ever get to see this). Since Mosers' body is never found, he becomes a legend, and 18 months later the filmmakers behind an exploitation picture are using his old prison as a shooting location. Malone (the always lovely and always adorable Deborah Foreman) is a stuntwoman on the show, who's involved with screenwriter Harris (Clayton Rohner), and Robert Edwards (Anthony Perkins) is the sarcastic director of this movie-within-the-movie. Wouldn't you know it: people start getting killed in brutal ways.

The only real inspired touch lies in the casting of massive NFL lineman Alzado, and it does look like he's having a good time playing a psycho. "Destroyer" only really comes to life when he's on screen, and some viewers may feel that he isn't on screen enough. Of course, Foreman (re-united with Rohner after 1986s' "April Fools' Day") is always great value, as is Perkins, who is able to play his part with a decent amount of wit. Other than our four principals, the supporting cast is comprised of mostly nondescript no-names. Some of you out there might be amused by comedy relief character "Rewire" (actor / writer Jim Turner, 'Arli$$'), but this viewer simply found him annoying. At the very least, this movie has just enough action, just enough gore, and just enough atmosphere to make it reasonable but forgettable entertainment. Alzado, Foreman, and Perkins boost the rating by a point.

Six out of 10.

I thought this movie might be like Shocker or some of the other "electrocuted serial killer comes back to life more dangerous than ever" kind of horror movies, but that's not quite what it was. The "Destroyer", though I don't believe he was ever called that, is electrocuted, and he does seem to come back to life, but since the opening scenes aren't necessarily accurate, what really happened isn't ever clear.

What is definite is that sometime after his execution or attempted execution, a film crew directed by Anthony Perkins' character is shooting a women-in-prison type film. Unfortunately for him, there's a killer or killers on the loose. The killer is not a big jackhammer fan as the cover suggests. One is used, though it has a much smaller tip and no scope on it. At least one person is killed with a welding torch of some kind, and there are other sorts of deaths, none particularly memorable or graphic.

The movie starts off OK, but it rapidly become boring to me. The special effects guy "Rewire" sounds like the 1980s MTV character "Randee of the Redwoods" and as it turns out, it was him. There's several scenes where characters go into the basement of the prison, and inexplicably it is full of flashing yellow roadblock lights. The explanation is that the prisoners used to make them - OK, why weren't they removed from the prison after it closed and sold? Why are they all on? Just to make the scene more colorful?

Perkins has a few marginally funny lines, and he does a good job in his small part.

I can't recommend this movie at all.

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.

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.

This film has a crew making a movie in a abandoned prison. The problem is one of the prisoners is still there and he is angry.

This had Lyle Alzado playing the psycho. This guy was awesome but his career got cut short when just four years after making this he died of brain cancer. The whole concept of the film is cheesy but you still watch all the mayhem. One scene has Lyle chasing someone with a jackhammer which is the scene depicted on the cover. They don't show how much air hose he has or explain even why a working jackhammer would be left at the prison but it doesn't matter. He also likes to eat hair (maybe the person still had that Body On Tap shampoo that was enriched with beer). Overall he played a good nut job. Playing the director was Anthony Perkins who was always whining and grabbing his head. His best scene was when he sizzled and popped on the electric chair.

A fun little film. Put your mind in neutral and enjoy.

Yeah i love this movie, lots of people will say its terrible but those are also the same people who try to take this movie seriously which you can not. Its funny as hell, now was it meant to be funny? Yes and no i think, i am thinking they were looking for some laughs but not nearly as many as you will get from watching it. My favorite part is where Lyle is dressed as a cop or security guard, something along those lines and this guy comes up to him and asks him about the outfit and Lyle says "its a disguise" and the guy says "disguise from what?" and Lyle says "From You!!" and i think thats the part where this real big jackhammer comes out. Real funny stuff there, also there was a cool part with Anthony Perkins in the electric chair trying to get out before the current cameup to get him. Great stuff, now if only i could find this somewhere to buy since its getting very hard to find now.

Totally obscure slasher/action "thingie" from the late 80's that really doesn't have such a bad basic premise, actually. It's just suffering slightly from an overall clumsy execution, like pitiably written dialogs, lousy acting performances and not enough usage of great set pieces. "Destroyer" opens with the pretty awesome electrocution of a beefcake serial killer Ivan Moser, whose last wish was to watch an episode of Wheel of Fortune. It's a bit of a weird sight, but later it becomes clarified that the show's hostess was one of the killer's last victims. The first attempt to barbecue Ivan fails, and then riots break out in prison and the killer mysteriously vanishes. Years later, the abandoned prison is used as the setting for a sleazy and so-called "women-in-prison" flick; although the writer is convinced his film is a drama based on true events. Mr. Beefcake killer comes back to life and apparently one of the film's crew member, stunt woman and girlfriend of writer Susan Malone – has a psychic link with him. "Destroyer" is a very uneven horror effort. The film starts off very slow with a few extended and gradually build up towards murder sequences, and then suddenly shifts in high gear with multiple off-screen killings. The few on screen kills are disappointing and the giant jackhammer illustrated on the VHS cover hardly makes an appearance. Thanks to the film-within-film structure, however, there are some very welcome gratuitous nude sequences to enjoy. There isn't any real tension to detect in "Destroyer" and the beefcake dude, regardless of how ugly, isn't menacing at all. The guy, Lyle Alzado, apparently was a famous American Football player during the 70's and 80's. Hey, I'm European so I never heard about him before. To me, he's just a lousy wannabe actor who looks like the bodybuilder version of Luciano Pavarotti or maybe even Dom DeLuise on a really bad day. There's also a miserable little supportive role for washed up superstar Anthony Perkins as the director of the sleazy WIP-flick. At times, you can actually see him think back about the glorious days of "Psycho".

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.

Ivan Moser (Alzado) is an evil rapist/murderer who is in prison and about to receive the death penalty by electric chair. The authorities start the proceedings, but then a prison riot breaks out, diverting their attention. They assumed they fried Moser...but they were wrong! Meanwhile, a movie company begins shooting a film in the abandoned prison where Moser was. Seems like a smart idea. The movie is called "Death House Dolls" and is a women-in-prison flick. Edwards (Perkins) is the forever-frustrated director, and David Harris (Rohner) is the screenwriter and ideal 80's coolguy. His girlfriend Susan Malone (Foreman) is also working on the film. Harris wants to capture the utter realism of the prison experience, despite the fact that he's working on what seems to be a lightweight exploitation film, so he ends up butting heads with Warden Karsh (Mahoney) who was there on the night of the riot. But Harris also ends up getting some good info from local chef Fingers (Kristin). Will Moser, who has been presumably living at the prison for the past 18 months, we know not how or why, end up killing everyone in sight? When we saw the VHS box cover for Destroyer, with a hulking, oiled-up Alzado brandishing a giant drill of some sort, we thought "how can we lose?" - maybe it's our frame of mind, or maybe it's due to lack of research on our part, but we thought Destroyer was an action movie. Hopefully one where Alzado "Destroys" the baddies. Not such a bad assumption, but an incorrect one. Destroyer instead is a dreary, inane slasher with problems as seemingly endless as the vast corridors a lot of the movie takes place in. What the movie has going for it are its individual characters. Alzado was great as the psycho killer who's usually shirtless, Jim Turner is noteworthy as the techie on the film named Rewire, and David Kristin steals the movie as Fingers. The warden, the janitor Russell (Anderson), the young couple portrayed by Rohner and Foreman - who previously were together in April Fool's Day (1986) - a far more entertaining horror film - together, pretty much any of the individual personages were good, it's just that the writing and structure of the movie were slow, bleak, and not up to par. And nothing is worse than when they try to be funny. We blame the writers and director, not the actors.

The movie also falls into the typical trap of making the warden supposedly unlikable because he's an authority figure, but the screenwriter dude supposedly sympathetic because he's so cool and the warden's not. Rohner, who has kind of a Johnny Depp meets Charlie Sheen kind of vibe, does indeed have awesome hair (there's even a fairly substantial scene where he's washing his hair) - but we were rooting for the warden. There's also a pretty surprising lack of Alzado - like a lot of movie monsters, you don't see a lot of him until the end of the movie. There should have been less Anthony Perkins directing the movie-within-a-movie and more Alzado on a rampage. While Deborah Foreman never looked closer to Belinda Carlisle than she does here, Alzado was never closer to John Matuszak than he is here. They have similar builds and facial hair. Maybe it's a football thing.

As for the boxcover that so entranced us, it can proudly go into the "we pasted the main star's head on someone else's body and hoped no one would notice" file. As for the movie itself, it's not action, and it's not very horrifying. The individual characters are good, and there maybe a few decent lines here and there, but it's unlikely too many people will come away very satisfied from Destroyer.

The novelty of this picture is it takes place in an out of use prison, which is being employed as a movie set. Perkins, who was interestingly filling in for the originally cast Roddy McDowall - who was sick at the time of shooting, plays the unscrupulous director, and admittedly is about the films only real asset, because he has a few rather amusing scenes poking fun at the industry. I suppose Alzado is also of some note also, because he undoubtedly has an imposing disposition which works well for his role.

Besides the parts when this movie is parodying itself, the usual slasher cliché's and inept dialogue routinely ensues. The photography here is fairly ordinary, where constant close-ups of eyes aren't terribly effective in creating tension. The pace can be quite lethargic at times, and the film is somewhat overlong, and seemingly doesn't know when to quit. As a movie that spoofs itself, it remains largely better than Boogeyman 2, but needless to say, this is still just trash.

How can anyone give this movie a good rating???????? This was by far one of the two worst movies I have ever experienced!!!!!! This movie is the tragedy that time has thankfully forgotten and hopefully by the grace of god this movie will never appear again!!!!!!!!!