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Powerful

One of my all time favorites.

As Good As It Gets

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

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.

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.

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".

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.