If you scanned the shelves of most video game stores, you wouldn't think that video gaming and Christianity were two things that go together. Most games are filled with all manner of unholy horrors, with their themes of death and destruction, just look at the Sodom and Gomorrah that is the Grand Theft Auto series of games for example.

However there have been a few small game makers that have dipped into scripture and released righteous video games for kids. One such example is Captain Bible in Dome Of Darkness, produced by Bridgestone Multimedia Group in 1994, for PC platforms.

Just what ever child wants, to play a superhero that defeats evil right? Whether driven by the "good book" or not, kids will still want to play it right? Wrong! As Captain Bible is simply dumb, and that's got nothing to do with its theme. Really it says it all at the top of the box, "Educational Adventure", two words that should never grace the from of a video game box. As it's the kiss of death for any piece of software.

Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (力王), is a Hong Kong martial arts horror/gore movie from 1991. Based on a Japanese manga series of the same name. It's well known among cult cinema fans, especially fans of Hong Kong movies for its appallingly brutal and utterly unrealistic gore and violence. As with many Hong Kong movies, it's also badly dubbed, and mixes very earnestly acted drama with weird campy characters and comedy moments. So it pretty much has everything a fan of the genre could ever hope for, in bucket loads.

The story revolves around our titular hero being imprisoned for the murder of a crime lord, who he blames for the death of his girlfriend. Things are now set in place for what is a loose prison drama, with a story-line purely designed to set things up for some laughably over-the-top and bloody fight scenes. Crime, corruption, gangs, back-stabbing, it's all shoe-horned in there.

One particular death scene, that shows one character literally smashing another guys head into tiny pieces, went viral. The scene was shown on TV shows, in particular The Daily Show, and it did the rounds as a meme on the Internet for a long time. Even still it's not unusual to see someone using the animated gif (on the right) as an avatar.

Rather than explain the bizarre brilliance of the violence of Riki-Oh, it's best just to see it. And rather than watch the whole movie (which is available online) you can just watch the death scenes. As violence in movies goes, this one sits firmly and squarely alongside such over-the-top gore genre pieces like Tokyo Gore Police (2008), Peter Jackson's Braindead (1992) and Sam Raimi's Evil Dead 2 (1987). Definitely one for fans of "splatstick" horror. 

Released in 1996, Barb Wire was a sci-fi action flick based on the Dark Horse Comic Book series of the same name, starring Pamela Anderson. The movie bombed, as did any of the potential merchandising that the producers had lined-up to be released as a tie-in to the movie.

In a bizarre confluence the Dark Horse Entertainment and movie distributors Gramercy Pictures struck a deal with the toy giants Mattel, to produce a Pammy doll to merchandise alongside the release of the movie. The "Barbie-Wire" doll never made it onto the shelves of Toys R US, but avid collectors are still searching out prototype versions of the doll that are believed to exist on dusty shelves somewhere in the bowels of Mattel.

Working on a piece about bad rip-off toys (usually from China), I came across these Titanic themed toys. Now back in the 1980s, hand held LCD games were all the rage. But this beauty came out to cash-in on the success of the Titanic movie in 1997. The idea of the game was to avoid the icebergs, by pressing left or right. Surely the point of the game would have been better if you had to steer the ship into the nearest iceberg, and end it all as quickly as possible.

But no, you had to gain enough points so that "the lovers" can have dinner together, and continue to dodge the icebergs so that they can go "dancing on the deck". Assuming after that, you aim the the Titanic head-long into an iceberg, at which point it transforms into a giant robot and flies away. Thus saving the passengers from a fate worse than becoming a bad rip-off toys.

Just when you thought they couldn't make anything else into a Transformer... We present Titanic-Bot. He floats in your bath, he avoids icebergs, he turns into a giant robot, with lethal looking hooked hands. It begs the question though...

I recently wrote about Phantasmagoria the 1995, FMV point-and-click adventure game, that was considered one the most controversial games of its time, due the graphic violence it contained. However a year later, a game came out that possibly trumped it. And if it wasn't for a delay in publishing, it may well have been hailed as the most controversial adventure game of the mid-90s. 

Harvester was designed to shock, to be controversial, it described itself as "The most violent adventure game of all time." Originally scheduled for release in 1994, the game didn't hit the shelves until 1996. The game was an all out assault on the media hype that video gaming made players violent. It was a no-holds-barred bloody gore-fest, where you kill pretty much just kill whoever you wanted. The deaths were brutal and bloody.

Like an exploitation film, much of the game is laughably tongue-in-cheek. Th makers knew who they were offending and who they were entertaining. It's not a great game, it's confusing at times, conversations with NPCs is stilted and seemingly pointless. But hey, aren't they also the characteristics of a good exploitation flick? Take it for what it is, don't take it too seriously, and just keep repeating to yourself... It's just a game... It's just a game!

There's so much to say about the movie Troll 2, that it would take up a whole page of its own. However those "goblins", what were they about? "Designed" (loosely used) by porn actress Laura Gemser, more well known for a slew of "black" Emanuelle movies in the 1970s. The costumes were no more than burlap sacks, and dime store Halloween masks.That's it! Look at them, they're awful beyond belief. But some how their true awfulness was lost among the rest of the hideousness of the movie. 

"Monster Julie" isn't an official name for the zombified character of Julie Walker in the movie. No, it's just the name my little lad used to give her whenever he asked me to rent the movie from the video store. At 4 years old, it was his favourite movie. Julie was hot, before and after she breaks her neck in a motorcycle accident and is turned into a zombie by her boyfriend. Surely the first zombie sex fetish movie monster.

It could be the first time I've wanted to slap someone the size of a child, but Warwick Davis as the Leprechaun makes me want. The star of Willow and an Ewok in Empire Strikes Back, is just annoying. Not scary, not creepy, just so annoying you want to shout at the screen for him to stop. So what did they do? They made two more bloody movies in 1994 and 1995. And thankfully this list stops at the 90s, so we don't have to endure number 4, and In The Hood, and Back 2 Tha Hood!!!

I've had this movie for ages, just hadn't got round to seeing it until a few nights back, to my shame. What an excellent darkly comic piece of Italian zombie horror. Known as Dellamorte Dellamore, in Italy, it's one of best films I've seen Rupert Everett in, as he delivers subtlety sardonic dead-pan line after another. Everett plays Francesco Dellamorte a caretaker of a cemetery in a small Italian town, along with his assistant Gnaghi. Their easy life at the cemetery is thrown into turmoil, as the the dead start to rise up seven days after they have been buried. Dellamorte who loves to read the telephone directory, and cross out the names of the dead does his best to keep a lid on the "returners" wandering around the cemetery at night. Treating the zombies as a minor inconvenience to his generally easy life.

As a "zombie" movie, the zombies are a minor part of Cemetery Man, as the main theme although being one of "resurrection", it's thematically wider than a simple zombie movie. As is explores recurring love, impotency (or lack of), and life and death.

Much has been said about the choice of calling the movie "Cemetery Man", in English, in that it misrepresents the themes of the story that the original Italian title Dellamorte Dellamore play with. Using the antonyms of "death" and "love", that are at the same time one letter away from being homonyms. Thus tying closely together two of major themes of the movie, of love and death. And even with the tag-line "Zombies, Guns And Sex, Oh My!" The English advertising for the movie misrepresents it's true greatness. 

Pretty much everyone is aware of The Toxic Avenger, the camp over-the-top schlock horror movie released in 1984 by Troma. The movie was initially all but ignored by the mainstream cinema in the beginning, yet soon found a cult audience in the mid to late 80s. But how many people are there that remember the short-lived kids TV animation spin-off? Called Toxic Crusaders, the animation featured the eponymous Toxie and a gang of new mutants heroes. 

The stories all revolved around Toxie and his band of misfit mutant superheroes saving the planet from pollution. First appearing on TV screens in 1991, the show mirrored other popular animations with an environmental message of the time, such as Captain Planet and the Planeteers, and mutant themed superheroes like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And like the aforementioned animations, Toxic Crusaders spawned a whole range of kids action figures, despite only lasting for 13 episodes before it was cancelled. Playmates, the same company responsible for Ninja Turtles action figures, released a line of similarly styled Toxic Crusader figures in 1991.

As well as the heroes, the company produced the cartoon villains from the series, that hailed from the planet of Smogula. Dr. Killemoff and Czar Zosta were cockroach-like extraterrestrials, who wanted to turn Earth into a polluted planet, like their own. Killemoff, like most bad guys in animations at the time, also had a seemingly endless army of useless sidekicks called Radiation Rangers. Similar to Shredder's Foot soldiers in the Turtle animation series.

In the early 90s Street Fighter II swept the world, eventually destined to become one of the most famous video game series in history. With the release of the arcade game in 1991 and its subsequent console release in 1992, Capcom licensed its characters for a wide range of toys and related items. Tiger Electronics made a number of badly done hand-held LCD versions of the game, but in 1993 they took the well known Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robot concept and made a Street Fighter II version, featuring the characters of Gulie and Ryu, with an added electronic scoring system.

Unlike the original version of the game, where the robots just punched each other, the plastic action figures of Ryu and Guile could be controlled with both punching and kicking actions. It even had cool fighting sounds when the figures were hit in the chest, groin, or head.

Weird Retro Fact: Read about the urban myth of the character that never existed, in You Must Defeat Sheng Long To Stand A Chance.