So Bad It’s Good: Horror Movies That Were Saved By a Casino Setting

Casinos offer interesting visuals and unique opportunities for smart screenwriters and enterprising movie directors to strut their stuff. As a result, there have been genuinely amazing horror films that came out of such efforts, like 13 Tzameti or Army of the Dead.

The ones we will be discussing today, however, are nothing of the sort – even if they are immensely entertaining.

Leprechaun 3 (1995)

I suppose you could say the original Leprechaun still had a veneer of seriousness and prestige around it, featuring Jennifer Aniston and all that. That was no longer the case by the time the third movie came around: by that point, the franchise was firmly in B-movie territory.

It was clearly made with the direct-to-video release in mind. The camp factor went all the way up to eleven as Warwick Davis’ rampaging leprechaun makes its way through Las Vegas locales, granting twisted wishes along the way. The top IMDb review of Leprechaun 3 calls it “the best and worse one so far,” making the interesting observation that all of Davis’s dialogue is spoken in rhyme, which is genuinely cool. Calling Act One “unwatchable” and Act Two and everything that comes after “nothing but a good time,” this all but confirms that this 1995 gorefest is clearly in the “so bad it’s good” category.

The Haunted Casino (2007)

Where do you even start with this one? At least it makes good use of the setting and the games you find in a casino. Originally titled Dead Man’s Hand: Casino of The Damned, it’s a Full Moon Features flick, where the protagonist inherits a casino and it turns out to be, as the title suggests, well, haunted. So, the heroes end up having play some actual, rigged and creepy casino games to save their lives. Such casino slots games with haunting themes can also be found online, with some horror and Halloween offerings mimicking the real eerie nature of the movie’s spooky games.

The villains are not any usual ghosts, mind, but the souls of 1940s gangsters, which does at least add one funny idea to the whole. Unlike Leprechaun 3, this has no redeeming quality: the premise was likely based on the available shooting venue rather than any artistic intent, the plot is haphazardly constructed in an extremely convoluted way, and the less is said about the acting talent on display, the better. And yet, the casino somehow makes it fun to watch.

Remains (2011)

You’d think this movie has legs. A lesser-known Steve Niles graphic novel is its inspiration, Lance Reddick of The Wire fame (and later John Wick) gets top billing, and the kid from Pet Sematary also features in a small role. A nuclear incident turning Nevada into a zombie-infested wasteland sees survivors bunch up in a ran-down casino, and as is common in scenarios like this, human nature proves to be a bigger threat than the zombies do.

You could genuinely make something interesting about people with a wealth of experience in calculating the odds trying to make do in a horror post-apocalypse, but these thought experiments, rather than what is on the screen, are the most interesting part of Remains. After all, Reddick disappears after a couple of minutes of screentime.