PRIME CUTS

This sick little puppy may not have set the slasher blueprint, strictly speaking, but it's sure as hell a movie about horny teens getting slaughtered, one by one. The movie's 'saw-wielding psycho Leatherface has become a slasher icon - one of the masked bunch. While Texas is surprisingly short on bloodshed, what it evokes in your brain is far more powerful. A grimly diseased atmosphere pervades throughout - helped in no small measure by the creepy music. Slasherama salutes it.

God bless John Carpenter for cementing the winning concept of an emotionless, super-powered, masked killer with a butcher's knife. There may have been other masked killers before him, but Michael Myers was the first to truly become a horror icon. Without Myers, we wouldn't have had Friday The 13th's Jason Voorhees, or indeed a host of other blade-wielding maniacs. Halloween is also one of the best - perhaps the best - examples of great direction in a slasher movie, often subtly revealing Myers in the frame. Best watched in widescreen, for sure.

If you want sleazy, then Maniac is the movie for you. The late Joe Spinell is excellent as Frank Zito, a man madder than a goose on a skateboard. By day, he's a sharp-suited smoothie - by night he's a raving lunatic who scalps prostitutes and blows people's heads off with a shotgun. The aforementioned head explosion happens to Tom Savini's character. And yes, he handled the effects once again. A very nasty film, cut in the UK by almost a minute, but at least it's available.

While derided by many, The Burning epitomises the nasty feel of the '80s slasher movie - right down to its old UK pre-cert sleeve which you see here. The plot is simplicity itself - Cropsy, a school gardener gets torched when a prank goes wrong, and wreaks bloody vengeance on a group of campers, many years later. Tom Savini's effects are excellently gruesome, and the movie also has the distinction of being one of the few slasher flicks to kill off several characters in one go. Has appeared in various versions, over the years, but remains an absolute scorcher whichever way you slice it.

Tom Savini was clearly busy this year, providing some superb make-up effects for this cult shocker. The movie kicks off with an American G.I. coming home to a 'Dear John' letter in 1945, before we flash forward to 1980. A killer - strangely, dressed like a G.I. - is stalking and pitchforking teens, and he does so in particularly nasty ways. One of the most unsettling deaths sees a character stabbed downwards through the head. As if that wasn't enough, his eyes flick open and appear to be minus pupils. A classic, if occasionally slow, slasher.

If ever there was a golden year for slasher flicks, it was 1981. This one sees the killer kitted out in miner's gear. A small US town is gearing up to celebrate Valentine's Day - even though it's 19 years since one Harry Warden went on a murderous rampage with a pickaxe. This is a lot of fun, even though the fully uncut version seems to still be languishing in Paramount Pictures' vaults. The ending makes no sense whatsoever, whether you're watching the cut version or not. Which is almost a pre-requisite of slasher movies...

This is a foolish, badly-conceived piece of work in many ways, but remains a guilty pleasure of Slasherama's, largely because of its extreme unpleasantness. The plot doesn't hang together at all - kid accidentally kills his mother; the dad waits a decade to wreak his revenge - but the kills certainly deliver. The stabbing and decapitation of a cop is particularly effective, as is an often-censored scene in which the killer hooks a young lady in a most painful fashion... brilliantly OTT.

The final chapter, you say? Clearly, this was nothing of the sort, but certainly saw Jason Voorhees going on perhaps his goriest rampage. We start off in a morgue, where our dead 'hero' reanimates himself and twists an attendant's head around 180 degrees. Tom Savini was back on board for this one, and you can tell. The plot may offer up few twists on the series' established formula, but as a slasher movie it's a winner. Is now fully uncut in the UK, you'll be pleased to hear.

Yes, you're reading this right - it's our website and we can say what we like. The New Blood is often discounted, but is a great, relatively imaginative slash-fest. Jason (played for the first time by Kane Hodder) is inadvertently freed from the bottom of Crystal Lake, by the telekinetically-charged Tina Shepard, and goes on the expected killing spree. He has a fantastically zombie-esque look in this - you can see his bones through his back - and when the mask comes off, the face is no disappointment. Why they ruined that face so badly in Part VIII is a mystery on a par with the Easter Island statues...

Some more underground-minded horror fans may see this as commercial gloss, but to Slasherama's way of thinking it's one of the slasher genre's few out-and-out '90s classics. Besides being extremely clever in its highly affectionate, knowing take on stalk 'n' hack flicks, it functions brilliantly as a scary, jump-filled ride, and an excellent whodunnit to boot. Drew Barrymore's opening sequence is sheer genius, as a horror movie-literate killer torments her via the telephone. Excellent mask, too. The rest of the trilogy rocks too, even if Scream 3 ultimately didn't have the courage of its convictions.