Christopher Lombardo - Death by Umbrella! The 100 Weirdest Horror Movie Weapons

When I was informed that the guys from the Really Awful Movies podcast wanted me, Lloyd Kaufman, to write a foreword for their new book, I said, who are they? But, after Toxie reminded me that Id actually met them on several occasions, always at the same set of urinals in a dive bar in Queens, oddly enoughI tucked in my still erect, famously tiny Little Lloydie, and jumped at the opportunity!

This is what my 50 years of filmmaking experience has been building towards, the climax of everything Ive ever learned, because you see, when it comes to killing people in horror moviesThe Toxic Avenger and I are certified experts. In Troma films, weve killed characters with fire hydrants, weve killed them with radioactive fried chicken, weve killed them with weight-lifting equipment, weve killed them with the void of space, and of courseweve killed them with mops. However, these bizarre implements are just the tip of my penisErThe murder iceberg. Horror movies are filled with all sorts of ghoulish killing tools, which this book endeavors to memorialize and perhaps glorify.

Toxie and I were perusing the gallows of Chris and Jeffs book, Death by Umbrella! when my radioactive friend brought up a good point. Troma movies have gotten a lot of bad press throughout our 40 years of using blood, guts, and baby defenestrations to promote world peace. Instead of being lauded as rollicking, goofy, gory fun, they are often blamed for school shootings, stabbings, strange ritual murders, and other traditional American pastimes. I dont know if you, dear reader, have ever followed Toxies example and tried to murder someone with a milkshake machine, but its almost impossible and leaves a huge mess. Horror movies dont teach kids to kill people! If they did, I suspect wed see a lot more murders committed with magic amulets, nuclear waste, and claw-tipped gloves. Horror films are about exaggerating violence to an unrealistic level, to spook and disgust the audience, to probe the squishy depths of the human condition. In other words, everything provided by the cartoons of Warner Brothers and MGM, and the eye-gouging humor of The Three Stooges. Theres no way that horror films caused the tragedies of Columbine or Newtown. Every scientific study has proven this. We cant blame the failures of our American society on certain genres of art, objectionable as they may seem to some. As the great 18th century rap star Thomas Jefferson once said, Sup dawg, the price you pay for freedom of speech, yo, is the occasional severed penis.

This warm, loving, and sensitive book proves to all the blue-noses, priests, politicians, and putzes in the world that Horror isnt to blame for any of the worldswell, horrors! Its a grand, gripping, good read, and Toxie and I hope you enjoy thumbing through its blood-spattered pages as much as we did, and if you dontToxie and I are coming over to your crib to shove Toxies mop down your fucking throat.

Cheers!

Lloyd Kaufman

President of Troma Entertainment and creator of The Toxic Avenger

If theres any book that deserves such a miserable jeu de mot, its this one.

If youre bored by it, pretend its real; if youre excited by it, pretend its fake.

The Great Sardu (Bloodsucking Freaks aka The Incredible Torture Show)

Its hard to say whether audiences have become more or less sophisticated. On the one hand, Psycho viewers were wowed by what they didnt see, although thought they did, in that infamous motel bathroom. Three years later, in 1963, they were horrified by what they did see: a topless bathroom eye-gouging in H.G. Lewiss Blood Feast, a film that in many respects is just as revolting decades later. To this day, horror has straddled twin impulses of restraint and bad taste.

Whether they pass the aesthetic sniff test is up for debate, but The Conjuring and Paranormal Activity are decently-made softies geared to couples so you can sidle up to your sweetie and comfort them. Then there are those nasty horrors you watch alone or with a group of like-minded sickos and then feel unclean for the experience. Were talking Cannibal Holocaust, Sal, or the 120 Days of Sodom, A Serbian Film, Martyrs or Burial Ground. These are films in which social taboos are tossed aside like so many spent cigarette butts.

Tastes and social mores invariably change. While past audiences were shocked when somebody punched out a horse in a western, theyve come to demand a little more these days when excessive force not seen outside the confines of a corrupt police precinct is doled out on screen.

Pre-1930s, before the entire cinema color spectrum could be used to fully showcase the type of bloodletting not seen since leeches were used to treat practically every human ailment, filmmakers had to rely on a pistols cutaway pop and the victim crumpling over like hed just eaten undercooked beef. Of course, the other way to do the job was the ol knife in the back routine and protracted death scene, extending just long enough for something incriminating to be said or some other death-throes admission.

Things have evolved in horror movies, concomitant with social permissiveness, so that now even the tools of the tree surgeon trade have become pass. Besides, why risk industrial deafness dispatching the town virgin with that chainsaw?

The movies detailed in the following pages are known for going above and beyond the run-of-the-mill slaughtering that the average viewer has grown accustomed to: your guns, axes, or fatal falls onto fence posts not adhering to building codes. These feature truly unique murder weapons.

Weve chronicled death by eggbeater in Pledge Night, death by laundry press in The Mangler, death by pec deck exercise machine in Demons 2 and death by deer antlers in Silent Night, Deadly Night. And thats only some of the arrows in our quiver. Weve got ears of corn, bowling pins, basketballs, curling irons and many, many more in Death by Umbrella! The 100 Weirdest Horror Movie Weapons, a fun-filled romp through the world of gore ordinances.

Yes, some of these films went out of their way to, almost gleefully at times, sicken even the most cast iron of stomachs with wild weaponry. Still, weve decided to pop the antacids, forego natural light for several months, and research a book that would rival any surgical how-to in terms of publications you wouldnt want left out on the coffee table as we present the bloody, unabashedly revolting (but heaps of fun) work you hold in your (hopefully unsevered) hands.

How were they selected? Many have maligned, while others have risen to the defense of our favorite genre, horror, and well leave that ongoing debate to others. However, one thing thats undoubtedly overlooked by armchair critics and pundits both is just how infinitely varied the genre is, not just by subject matter, but also by geography. And weve done our best to get the bases covered, from shoestring indie films to big-time mainstream; from domestic to foreign.