User reviews

Pretty incoherent movie about a man who belonged to and left a 1960s superficially hippie religious cult, who fights them sixteen years later. The man has a child with one of the other cultists, who during a raid by the police is hidden away, and taken by another man named Hawk who lives in a small cabin by the river. The cult kills some of its followers or some of the people in town. It's hard to keep track of who characters are, or what time period the scenes are supposed to be taking place. The leader gets paroled sixteen years later (I got that from the box - I missed the amount of time in the movie). Nobody is made to look any older, not noticeably, anyway.

One murder is done with a large circular logging saw, others are done with knives or a crossbow. I never heard the title character's name mentioned in the movie, but he's the one who overacts the most, hooting and hollering.

The movie is patched together pretty poorly, with voice-over helping (not much) to explain what is going on. Some of the sound effects were pretty bad. A man is getting punched, and we hear the sound of a whip cracking. A woman fires a gun, and we don't hear it fire, but hear a ricochet instead! It doesn't seem to have been done for comical effect.

"Igor and the Lunatics" is a totally inept and amateurish attempt at a crazy-hippie-cult-killing-spree horror movie. Apparently even nearly twenty years later, Charles Manson was still inspiring overenthusiastic but incompetent trash-filmmakers. This is a typical Troma production, meaning in other words, there's a lot of boring and totally irrelevant padding footage to accompany the nonsensical plot. There's a bit of random gore and gratuitous nudity on display – which isn't bad – but it's all so very pointless and ugly that it becomes frustrating to look at. "Igor and the Lunatics" is so desperate that it's even using a lot of the footage twice, like the circle saw killing for example. The incoherent plot tries to tell the story of a hippie cult run by the drug-addicted and Charlie Manson wannabe Paul. One of Paul's lower ranked disciples, named Igor, becomes a little bit too obsessed with the Bible stories and drug orgies and gradually causes the entire cult to descent further into criminal insanity. Just to illustrate through a little example exactly how crazy Igor is: he tears the heart straight out of the chest of a really sexy black hitch-hiker girl! There's an annoying synthesizer soundtrack and some truly embarrassingly lame pseudo-artistic camera tricks, like slow-motion footage and lurid dream sequences. Maybe there's one sequence that more or less qualifies as worthwhile for trash fanatics and that' is when a poor girl is cut in half with a machete. For no particular reason, the camera holds the shot of the blade in the bloodied stomach for fifteen whole seconds.

It quickly becomes evident that "Igor and the Lunatics" had more than its share of production problems. The credits have a listing for the direction of "horror, action and suspense sequences" as well as a normal directing credit. I don't know what went wrong behind the scene, but the end results are really bad. The story only makes a little sense, for one thing, and they have the chutzpah to play one lengthy sequence TWICE. There are quite a few times when freeze-frames of buildings are used when cutting to a new scene. There's bad continuity, such as when one scene mixes footage shot in the daytime with footage shot at night. The movie further annoys with a really obnoxious musical score, as well as with really cruddy acting. I'm really amazed that Troma Films' president Lloyd Kaufman (who also produced the movie) thought that the end results were releasable. Though it tells a lot that in his autobiography he makes no mention of the movie anywhere, even in his list of "all" Troma Films at the back of the book.

This movie is truly one of the worst pieces of garbage ever. It really is surprising that something so completely terrible could be made. But, if you can stand the mind-numbing plot, character development, and direction, you may get a kick out of the soundtrack which is so appalling that it is funny. The movie begins terribly and quickly becomes unwatchable. Someone should give anyone involved with this movie some sort of consolation because their career was probably ruined because of involvement in this movie. If you do end up seeing this movie or have seen it already (I feel your pain) then these words have come too late. For anyone else, Stay away at all costs or realize that the movie is so bad that it will waste 2 hours of your life. Then at least you can clean up or something while viewing it.

If this movie had stayed in the sixties, where it started, it might have been a bearable story, but obviously the writers couldn't stretch their imaginations far enough, so they had to fast forward to the eighties to keep the story going with a horrible heap of cliches.

This movie is downright sick and cheesy but the atmosphere and soundtrack save it from being completely bad...whoever composed that soundtrack had a little bit of Carpenter in them... Just a tiny tiny tiny bit. But yea definitely a low grade film lol. Body count was about 13

Whatever can be said about this wretched film, it is utterly UNTRUE that half-way through the movie a different set of actors took over. The same actors who started out in the film, continued through-out. There is a span of many years having passed as indicated in the film (when one of the characters goes to prison and is released years later to restart his murder spree), and of course some of the characters would look different...but they are the same actors in the same parts. A look at the credits will show this. The guy who played Paul (whose look does change after years in prison) is the guy who plays him through out. Same for the guy playing Igor - one of the cops, the guy living in the woods - the girlfriend of Paul - the "hero", etc., etc. It may be notorious for many, many things...but cast changing isn't one of them. THE CAST DOES NOT CHANGE HALFWAY THROUGH THE FILM! Stop repeating false stories.

It's unbelievable to see how many amazing films Troma has put out in the past 30 years. I'm not going to pretend that every film they've ever touched has been golden (see I Was a Teenage TV Terrorist, Deadly Daphne's Revenge, Blood Hook, etc...), but more often than not they're always at least worth a watch... and this film is definitely amongst their better productions.

First of all, this is not high-brow entertainment. The whole film is a mess; in fact, the actors in the second half of the film are completely different than the first half (but playing the same characters). Second of all, there isn't much gore in this film (despite the back of the box saying that the film climaxes in the most violent bloodbath in the history of film).

But if you like a little bit of humor, some silly violence, and plenty of Charles Manson homages (which, in all reality, is all that John Water's early films were), then this is for you. The whole film is played very straight and not for laughs, which makes it even better. Trust me, this film is completely hilarious, one of the funniest movies I've ever seen. And there's some rape and torture for those that like that kind of stuff too -- but, again, not too much.

I appreciated the murky, backwoods surrounding of the whole thing, and the hippie atmosphere. And, really, there's not a boring moment to be had in the whole film. So, yeah, of course I recommend it... if you're looking for a serious horror film, though, you won't be pleased.

Also, to let you know what you're getting into here, the leader of the group isn't even named Igor -- he's just a member of the group.

In IGOR AND THE LUNATICS, a Manson Family-like cult of drug-addled hippies terrorizes a small town. Bloody, gory nonsense ensues.

One of the cultists, the titular Igor (Joe Niola), raves, howls a squawks his way through the film. He's one of the most laughably absurd characters in horror movie history! Igor is Squiggy from Laverne And Shirley, Jerry Lewis, The Tasmanian Devil, and a rabid hamster, all in one economical package. While all of the characters in this movie are godawful, Igor wins the "Most Convincing Portrayal Of Living Brain Death" award, hands -and feet- down!

Igor's screeching rants are matched only by his two basic facial expressions, rocketing between stunned idiocy and cackling jack-o-lantern!

Dismal, dreadful, and dumber than a boulder with ears, this movie must be seen, since no human could possibly describe its moron-itude! The violence is hilarious! The sounds of punches, and strikes with heavy or sharp objects are like the noises made by sides of beef hitting a barn door!

Smmackk!

EXTRA POINTS FOR: Learning the Igor yowl, "Hrrrhh-Aaaahh-Yaaa!"...

This movie has virtually nothing to recommend it. What little creative talents the movie makers had was expended in trying to make a bit of gore, usually poorly... except for one scene. It involves a big old buzz saw, a real one, really sawing, and I found it surprisingly disturbing. I wouldn't be surprised if the whole movie was slapped together simply to justify the effort they put into the filming of that scene. For a dollar or less, you might find it worth renting, especially if you want to steal that scene for your own project.

IGOR AND THE LUNATICS is a sorry movie that any horror movie lover would regret spending any money to watch, except maybe for a laugh. The film was fun to laugh at but contained no plot, that was evident, and no character build-up. The movie was altogether more funny than scary, and if I were to rate it on a scale from 1-10, a 2 would have to be giving the film credit.

This film is stupid, insulting, and without continuity. IGOR became infamous as a film that, midway through, uses a whole different set of actors to portray the characters, without an explaination as to why! Most of the actors don't even look the same.

With a film as bad as IGOR, though, probably nobody would notice the difference. This is among the worst that Troma has ever released, although as the other comments here have said, there are also some laughs.

But, is it worth it?