I felt greatly let down by this pitiful excuse for a movie. I wasn't under the impression it would be Shakespeare but going by the cool cover art I did think it would at least be something of a monsterfest type film along the lines of "Spookies", which is one of my all-time favourite fun horror movies. But sadly it soon turned out to be nothing but a confused tiresome mess that I found downright insulting in its plain unapologetic stupidity. Like the number one thing that bugged me about it was the most obvious thing: Where, who, and what the f**k were the Neon Maniacs!? Oh they just magically sprung from the scary iron door beneath the Golden Gate Bridge.. Pathetic! I'm not five years old, give me something to go on! You don't know if they're mutants, demons, robots, nothing! So not cool! I hated the music that'd instantly start playing whenever they appeared, it really grated on me. And some of the actors were really awful, like the main guy Steve who played a cheesy rock number near the end, he couldn't have said his lines with less feeling if he'd tried. There was just way too much wrong with it and too many gaping plot holes for me to ignore and I just couldn't enjoy it enough as a result, there was no story! And it's a shame because I really thought there were some interesting themes and the potential for something special buried deep in this hopeless picture that could've been great if the plot had been adjusted and it had been directed better. I think it could have been a classic of 80s horror instead of what it is. I liked the character of the teenage girl who was a horror movie buff not unlike young Tommy Jarvis from Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. I wish they would've done the story so that the Maniacs had been monsters from horror comics that had somehow come to life and they were after the girl because it was her doing - if nothing else it would have offered a passable explanation as to their laughable fatal weakness to water! And the thing with the trading cards when the fisherman gets axed in the back made me wonder if at one point they had considered going for something of a Garbage Pail Kids idea. Yet another neat angle that is just lazily discarded.. Again, shame, there was potential! And I did like the gang of monsters, there was some good eerie moments with them. The scene where the mad doctor chloroforms the poor guy and cuts out his still beating heart is very macabre and scary, and the weird little cyclops alligator thing was so adorable! All of the makeup effects on the monsters was nice, and they each had a distinct look and personality, but you can't build a movie just on that alone, at least not without a little information for the audience to go on, and it just feels horrendously incomplete and unfinished to me, not good enough at all, they should have shelved it. Anyway that's all just my opinion, if you love it more power to ya, but I don't get you man, I don't get you at all! Utter trainwreck, in fact I'd say that if you wanna see how not to make a movie watch this monster!

This film is a ton of fun to watch. Though some lame characters that I hate make the film a little worse. It's still a pretty good movie. Pretty fast paced film with some kick ass monsters. Though after the first 20 minutes of the film the pace really slows down. Original stuff deserves a much higher rating. But still the film has some faults to it. Mainly over acting which really wasn't necessary for this type of film. And I noticed how a lot of people have a problem with the missing plot. I like how a lot of the stuff wasn't explained it makes it very unique and cool. Well I recommend this film to true b movie fans. If you need a movie with a good plot and good actors look else where.

Funny line: Steven says 'I'm not going to let anything happen to you, I just met you' and Natalies' reply was 'I know you won't, that's why I like you'. Typical 80's cheese, that is why I loved this movie! Neon Maniacs has everything you needin a cheesy horror movie; teenagers, super cool bad guys, and really cheesymusic. Personally, I loved the two Rick Bowles songs in the high school dance scene, 'Baby Lied' and ' The Choice You Made'. These two songs werePERFECT 80's songs. I also loved the IDEA for the movie, but as the 80's were, the execution was flawed to the hilt. *SPOILER ALERT* One plot oversight wastoward the ending, where Steven, Natalie and Paula went to the police, telling them that the maniacs had slaughtered their classmates at the dance and theywent back under the Golden Gate Bridge where they dwell, so they go and findnothing... but at the dance, Steven and Paula killed most of them with the water hose. Also, if you were the only survivor after all of your friends were butchered, would you go swimming late at night when you knew the killers were still on the loose? Overall, I would give this movie a *** out of ****, just for originality! I would definately recommend this movie to anyone who loves horror like I do!Recently released on DVD, do yourself a favor, either rent this or buy it, you won't be sorry. Peace out and enjoy!

Very rarely do you seriously come across a movie with no redeeming values whatsoever. I mean, there are tons of movies these days that are so bad that you say something like that about them, but it's a rare occurrence when you can apply that statement literally. Neon Maniacs is the story of a lot of creepy monsters that live under the Golden Gate Bridge, evidently for no other reason than to make people wonder why a lot of monsters who can be killed by water would choose to live so close to it. In thinking back on the movie, is there really any reason at all why they live under the Golden Gate Bridge? Is it just so they can include a couple shots of the bridge at the opening of the movie?Not only do we never find out why these creatures live to close to the one thing that can destroy them on contact, but we also never know where they came from or why they are killing people. Maybe they're upset because they're different. This is definitely an 80s horror film, so obviously you expect the acting to be just as bad as it is, and I think that Neon Maniacs really tests your levels of belief by trying to get you to believe that teenagers in the 80s thought it was the cool thing to do late at night to park their van in the middle of some park and play football and make out in the woods. Oddly enough, as dumb as that sounds, it looks even dumber on screen. I will not waste your time describing what kind of creatures these are, because they are little more than some make-up artists weak effort to make some disgusting monsters for a meaningless horror film and their exact descriptions are beside the point. There is everything from an alien to an ape-man, so you can just imagine for yourself what's in between, if you're lucky enough not to have seen this movie. If you've read any of the other reviews of this movie on the IMDb, you already know that the movie sets up for a sequel that was never made (my good friend and colleague Christopher Brown makes a good point in his review, that the sequel may have never been made because Lightning Video went out of business, but he also makes a shocking miscalculation of the quality of the movie itself – sorry Chris!). It's true that the movie leaves the possibility of a sequel so open that it calls too much attention to the fact that one was never made, but this is not an uncommon way to end movies like this. Little Shop of Horrors, for example, had a very similar ending, with the grinning plant showing up in the cute garden at the end of the film. Personally, I am more concerned with the sheer lack of quality of any kind from top to bottom in this movie (there's a scene at the end, during the `climax' of the film, where the hero and heroine are hiding from the approaching demons, and decide to lay down on the floor and make-out and just not worry about the monsters that are closing in, I guess hoping that they will just disappear – as it turns out, they were right), and besides that, even if someone wrote a sequel to this mess, who in their right mind would want to direct it?