Neon Maniacs is literally an unfinished film. Some of the maniacs are played by two different performers, as financial difficulties shut the movie down for three months and some actors had to be rehired. Plus, a lower budget meant that the ending of the film was scrapped, which resulting in an ending that comes out of nowhere and resolves nothing. And because of bitter feelings and bad memories, no copies of the original script exist and the people who made it either don't know or don't remember why the creatures exist and what their motivations were! Yet I found myself loving this sloppy movie.

Under the Golden Gate Bridge, in scenes obviously shot with no permit, the legions of the dead lay in wait for the night. Then, they can attack teenagers stupid enough to park their van and have sex. Only Natalie survives their initial assault, losing friends dumb enough to give head and smoke weed in the Neon Maniacs' domain.

Those Neon Maniacs look awesome yet have no connective reason to be a group. There's a surgeon (Andrew Divoff from Wishmaster!),a cop, a samurai and even one that looks like a furry cyclops dinosaur. The only thing that can stop them is water, so of course, they choose to live right next to San Francisco Bay because the 80's.

There's also Paula, a girl who is supposed to be the horror loving geek next to the supposedly gorgeous Natalie, but who outshines her in every scene, even wearing a hat that looks suspiciously like it came from the USCSS Nostromo. That said, it's hard to know whether Paula is either 14 or 22, so having a crush on her is problematic. That said, she's totally gonna end up with Tommy Jarvis when she grows up.

If you also like movies that suddenly become more about a battle of the bands than looming supernatural evil, Neon Maniacs also has you covered.

Joe Mangine directed this and while he didn't direct many films, he was the cinematographer for Alligator, Alone in the Dark and I Drink Your Blood.

A motley bunch of garishly made-up malevolent, misshapen, murderous subhuman mutant monsters (biker, surgeon, Native American, Green Beret and other such grotesque beasties) prey upon various hapless folks in sunny, rainy sweet old San Francisco. Naive, virginal teenager Natalie Lawrence (the comely, but extremely vapid Leilani Sarelle, who went on to portray Sharon Stone's mannish possessive lesbian lover in "Basic Instinct" and married character actor Miguel Ferror, who she co-starred with in the first-rate south-of-the-border film noir thriller "The Harvest") survives a socko sanguinary park slaughter in which six of her friends are brutally butchered. Natalie teams up with handsome, but insipid hunk Steven (the bland Allan Hayes) and spunky horror movie loving adolescent misfit Paula (the perky, likable Donna Locke) to kick some serious creature keister.

This thoroughly stupid, but amusing and enjoyable five'n'ten cent "Gremlins" rip-off boasts a hefty corpse tally of 24 (!),plentiful outbursts of gory violence (a grisly gamut from disembowelment to an arrow through the neck to a throat slicing to a hanging to a decapitation to ... well, you get the basic wall-to-wall nonstop graphic bloodshed idea; this baby's anything but dull and uneventful),painfully crummy "blurt the lines and grimace" pseudo-acting from a non-star cast, many uproarious obvious lapses in logic (e.g., the horrible thingofabobbits can be killed with mere water, yet reside under the Golden Gate Bridge and live in 'Frisco, a city which isn't famous for its dry, arid weather!),righteously gruesome make-up f/x, and hopelessly inadequate direction by cinematographer Joseph ("Alligator," "Alone in the Dark") Mangine. Screenwriter Mark Patrick Carducci, who presumably wrote the senseless dead simple script in about two hours (probably with magic markers, no less),later penned the glorious "Pumpkinhead," which only goes to show that one can really get up from off the floor. Hell, this gut-bustingly asinine fright flick clinker even comes complete with plenty of cheesy rock songs and one of those oh-so-80's "it ain't over yet!" sequel set-up anti-climactic endings, but alas said follow-up never got made. Man, now isn't that just an honest shame?

I don't exactly know what it is that makes this film better and more amusing than the overload of similar 80's splatter flicks but it just is! The lady who sold me the ex-rental VHS copy wholeheartedly agreed with me: "Neon Maniacs" is a classic piece of trash! Maybe it's because the screenplay is a bunch of unscrupulous and light-headed nonsense or maybe it's because you have a lot more sympathy for the characters here than it usually is the case in horror films, I don't know. Fact is that you will have a great time watching it. The Neon Maniacs are malevolent creatures (they look like hellraiser Cenobites only....goofier) who prowl at night in their San Franciscan territory, butcher teenagers and leave behind a funky green kind of mucus. The ravishing Nathalie (Sarelle - she'll later star alongside Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct) is the sole survivor of one of the maniacs' nightly attacks and now they're after her. As mentioned before, the premise of this film contains no logic at all. The existence of these Neon Maniacs is briefly linked to the downfall of humanity but, other than this, no background or origin is given. No problem, though, as there are tons of other absurd elements to enjoy. The costumes and make-up effects are great! Every Neon Maniac appears to be a costume designer's wet dream and their killing style is deliciously insane. We have axe decapitations, icky stranglings and several throats are being slit with rusty knives...Yay! whatever this movie lacks in suspense and intelligence, it makes it up in ingeniousness and black humor. The story loses some of its impact around the hour, when the tempo is constantly interfered with lousy rock 'n roll concert sequences (an often-returning problem in 80's horror). The exaggeratedly abrupt ending disappoints too, especially since the obvious sequel never got made. Nevertheless, it remains a highly recommended splatter flick! As long as you've got a sense of humor, an expert eye for female beauty and hunger for gore, you're guaranteed to LOVE this junk!