While you’re all going to be out drinking until you piss yourselves tomorrow I’m going to be working hard for the money picking up plastic glasses and trying to keep dumb fucks from driving home shitfaced. Still, when you find yourself in the witching hour on All Hallow’s Eve, lights off, candles lit, sweetheart dressed up like a sexy barista, you’re going to want some phantasmagoria to get her jumping into your arms every few seconds. Here are some recommendations for gore, schlock, schlocky gore, and gory schlock to waste your time and kill brain cells to on what is everyone’s favorite holiday.

5- Hell Night / Night of the Demons

Hell Night and Night of the Demons are basically the same movie made ten years apart. The former stars my beloved Linda Blair, while the latter features perennial favorite Linnea Quigley in a supporting role. Some college / high school students (depending on the movie) decide to stay all night in a haunted house, screwing, drinking, and dancing before something starts killing them off, one by one. One of the films is a slasher movie, one of them is a supernatural horror. Does it really matter which? Or, alternately, if you want to skip horror and just see Linda and Linnea in one place you can get the classic revenge film Savage Streets.

4- My Bloody Valentine

No, not the remake or the boring Irish goth band. The original Canadian slasher film which (in)famously had 9 minutes cut from it for theatrical release in the States. Fortunately, we live in the time of Director’s Cuts and what nots on DVD so you can see the original in all its uncut, grisly glory. A highly underrated slasher film that often gets forgotten in the wake of more popular and prominent American movies such as Friday the 13th, Halloween, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Really dark scenery makes the blood and gore pop out even more as the body parts start flying around. And don’t forget all the standard slasher tropes like anonymous revenge against the sexually immoral and incredibly stupid victims. This one is a lot of fun.

3- A Bucket of Blood

Often imitated, never duplicated, A Bucket of Blood is, so far as I can tell, the first horror film made about an artist who makes a Faustian bargain for fame. American International Pictures mainstay Dick Miller plays a struggling artist in one of his only starring roles. One night he accidentally kills a cat in a wall setting off a sequence of events that has him killing more and more to maintain his fame. This is the basic premise for The Little Shop of Horrors (the original, not the disturbingly technicolor musical remake) and Comedy of Terrors, and the film was remade by none other than H.G. Wells as Color Me Blood Red. None of the subsequent versions of this tale are quite as fun and funny as this dark beatnik comedy which holds up really well to this day.

2- Bloodsucking Freaks

Allow me to set the scene. It’s 1995 and I’m having a horror-themed vegan pot luck for Halloweeen. Me and my friends head off to the local Blockbuster to pick out of a film for the party and we come back with this gem, originally called The Incredible Torture Show. We all preview it together the night before, mostly horrified by scenes of cannibal women eating dick sandwiches and a guy who looks a lot like Jim Carrey drilling a hole into the top of a woman’s head and then blowing bubbles into it with a straw. By the second time we watch it- now with an audience of 30 or so n00bs, all horrified- we’re all laughing our asses off at the bright red “blood” and the hilarious antics of Ralphus. There really isn’t anything else like this out there… thank “Bob!” Definitely worth checking out for those who enjoy vintage 70s grindhouse schlock.

1- Zombie / Zombi 2

Not another two-for-one here, in this case it’s the same movie with two titles. Originally released in the States as Zombie but in Italy as Zombi 2 because in Italy Dawn of the Dead was called Zombi and Italy doesn’t have much in the way of copyright laws. This is the definitive Italian zombie movie from the master of cinematic gore, Lucio Fulci. Here is not only a film with copious amounts of blood and destruction, but also a statement. A statement about what I’ll leave it for you to decide, but the final shot of the film is one of grindhousedom’s most gripping and horrifying.