Monthly Archives: July 2012

Field of screams

DARK FIELDS

1 Stars  2003/80m

Directors/Writers: Mark McNabb & Al Randall / Cast: Jenna Scott, Lindsay Dell, Brian Austin Jr., Eric Phillion, Ryan Hulshof, Paul Pinel.

Body Count: 5


You know a film is going to suck when a scene supposed to represent an entire lesson lasts 90 seconds and a student leaves saying “oh my god, I thought that class would never end!”

This is actually from the same individuals who would later give us The Breakfast Club slasher homage Study Hell. Only worse.

Five high school teenagers share a ride to a rock concert (‘The Cryptic Dead’) and run out of gas on an old road in front of a scary farmhouse. One of them goes to ask for gas but never comes back.

The others eventually follow and explore the dilapidated old house. They talk. They walk around with candles very slowly. They flirt. They walk around with candles some more. They possibly have sex. They don the candles yet again.

36 minutes into the film, the first “scary” thing happens (a hand shredded in a piece of farm equipment – not gory) and is followed by mucho shrieking and running from the two female characters, who we’re left with throughout the rest of the film as the guys fall victim first.

Dark Fields is slow and long (despite the 80 minute running time), with stacks of unresolved questions saved for a sequel that – mercifully – never happened: the guy who went for the gas is never heard from again, but likewise never seen dead and doesn’t turn out to be the waddling killer, who sports a wig from Cher’s cast-off collection.

And the killer. Who hell he? Presumably, he’s a kid referred to in a fleeting old-news-clippings discovery scene, but nothing is made clear.

The characters are objectionable twats. Designated driver is kind enough to offer them a ride and they’re nothing but ungrateful pricks, deriding him at every opportunity and sending him to go get the gas when they haven’t so much as offered any money to pay their way.

Both girls survive, bizarrely, as one of them only contributes shrill hollering for most of her screen time. Waiting for her to die – hopefully via blade in the mouth – is a futile plan. Doesn’t happen.

Elsewhere, it’s the usual “this isn’t funny anymore”-style dialogue and eight minutes of credits with added outtakes, as if we were clueless to how amateur it all was from the start!

Blurbs-of-interest: McNabb directed and wrote Study Hell, which featured three of the main cast members. Do you care which ones? If so, write to me and I’ll provide the thrilling answers. Or go to the review of that film and find out for y’self…

Angels with bloody faces

FALLEN ANGELS

2.5 Stars  2002/18/97m

Director: Ian David Diaz / Writers: Julian Boote, Michael Derbas & Diaz / Cast: Esme Elliot, Dallas Campbell, Cassandra Bell, Melissa Simonetti, Elly Fairman, Emma Willis, Michael Ironside, Jeff Fahey, Kai Wiesinger, Max Brown, Emily Booth, Tony Abbey, Mara Derwent, Shawn Graham.

Body Count: 11

Dire-logue: “Cutting the power, cutting the phone lines – he’s planned ahead!”


Nell Fisher was the nominal outcast at the Holy Angels Girls School in upstate New York. Ever since she accused her history teacher of making inappropriate advances towards her, her social life flatlined. Nobody believed her, not even after he returned to attack her, resulting in a fire that killed thirty girls and closed the school forever.

Five years later, Nell and three of her former tormentors are called back to participate in a documentary about the tragedy. Before long, it’s clear that a cloaked and hooded figure wearing night-vision goggles is hell bent on putting a stop to the production by knifing the crew members and the graduates.

This handsome looking film works up a good enough momentum in the first instance, with regular killing to punctuate the less interesting goings-on inside the school, including ghost hunting with a paranormal investigating nerd and some backbiting between the once-popular girls and their victim of harassment.

However, it soon gets its wheels stuck in the muddy rut of chases down long corridors after most of the male characters have been done away with, leaving half a dozen shrieking women to panic and make bad horror movie decisions. Eventually the killer is unmasked and everything collapses in cliché central, with the prerequisite open ending for a sequel nobody would be interested in.

The cast is made up mostly of British actors but also a grizzled, underused bad-movie-fixture Michael Ironside, who appears as the local sheriff, while Jeff Fahey plays the sleazy professor in recurrent flashbacks scenes, but Melissa Simonetti makes the best impression as the catty, says-what-she-wants producer/agent, livening up tedious sequences of breathless dialogue between the bland startlets.

Definitely a notch above most straight-to-DVD fare, Fallen Angels is worthy a once over, if for nothing else than just to pick up on the references to other horror films, with familiar character names, nods to Ghostbusters and even a throwaway line stolen right out of Alien!

With a little more logic and bloodletting, this could’ve been a great little sleeper.

Blurbs-of-interest: Jeff Fahey was in Psycho III; Michael Ironside was also in American Nightmare (1981), Children of the Corn: Revelation, Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II, Reeker, and Visiting Hours.

Ridiculous scene o’ the month: Dog’s never forget

The Hills Have Eyes Part II (1983) is a real guilty pleasure of mine. Everybody and their dog knows it’s crap. Wes Craven has practically disowned the damn thing. But I like it.

Speaking of everyone and their dog, the dog that graces both original films – a German Shepherd known as Beast (sibling Beauty bought it in the first one) – is one of several characters who has a flashback to events from the first round. Yes, a dog recalls events from six years (or more) earlier, complete with blurry swirl screen effects but not, sadly, with the doodly-doo-doodly-doo-doodly-doo sounds from Wayne’s World.

Still, gotta love a dog that genuinely tries to save the day! We *heart* you Beast!

RSOTM-dog2

Morning gory

KILL KEITH

2 Stars  2011/15/90m

Saw meets Richard & Judy.”

Director: Andy Thompson / Writers: Thompson, Tim Major & Pete Benson / Cast: Marc Pickering, Susannah Fielding, David Easter, Keith Chegwin, Joe Pasquale, Tony Blackburn, Russell Grant, Simon Phillips, Joe Tracini, Stephen Chance.

Body Count: 5

Dire-logue: “I shall be introducing a new man into the Crack of Dawn – it’s a big hole to fill.”


Put simply, if you’re not British, you won’t understand a damn thing that’s going on in this comic slasher film that starts off as a funny send-up of the TV:AM scene but soon descends into weirdness before it becomes simply annoying. And has nothing to do with Kill Bill.

Breakfast TV show Crack of Dawn – presented by pretty Dawn (Fielding) and her slimy co-host Cliff (Easter) – is kissing goodbye to the male half of the presenting team and the shortlist of ‘celebrity’ replacements (due to be announced on Halloween) is being hunted down and killed by a psycho called the Breakfast Cereal Killer by the press.

Studio runner Danny aspires to be a presenter but is thwarted every time by Cliff, his own stupidity, or the presence of the mystery loon who begins by doing away with the producer before targeting the prospective replacements: ancient radio DJ Tony Blackburn, squeaky-voiced comedian Joe Pasquale, camp astrologer Russell Grant, and titular on-the-road co-host Keith ‘Cheggers’ Chegwin. All want the job, all are under threat. …Or are they?

Despite having the presence of the real Blackburn on set, he is curiously referenced to as a lookalike for a much younger actor in a dizzyingly extraneous tangent, which is never fully explained (this is one of the annoying factors). Elsewhere, post-Shaun of the Dead style comedy is at the core of things, though much of it sadly misfires.

A few lip-curling jokes at the expense of the morning television industry (and its IQ-challenged audience) provide some laughs; the multiple choice questions that nobody can get right (“What would you find on a bookshelf?”) and an ongoing series of pokes at the name of the show/hostess. But the superfluous avenues, dream and fantasy sequences only serve to highlight how little is actually going on.

Chegwin himself happily pokes fun at himself but he’s underused and the conclusion is a real flatliner that leaves several questions unanswered. A few more bodies needed to drop and some more explanations added could’ve made a real difference. Or if Richard and Judy actually HAD met Saw.

Blurb-of-interest: Pickering was in Sleepy Hollow.

Stock Background Characters 101: Simpletons & Weirdos

Happy Friday the 13th!

In this feature, we examine the lesser beings of the slasher movie realm, which, if you’re making your own slasher film, could provide a good cast roster for you.

No killer or final girl profiles here, this is a celebration of those underlings who made the most of their fleeting flirtation with stardom. And usually died.

Stare this way and maybe drool a bit, as it’s time to get insultingly stereotypical with
SIMPLETONS & WEIRDOS

simpletons1aOverview: In film world, there’s only one type of mental illness: the retarded pervert. Always male, always middle-aged, never particularly easy on the eye, these Simpletons & Weirdos fall exclusively into the red herring field. They skulk around, glare, say very little and creep teenage girls out.

But they’re never the killer. Ever*.

(*unless they’ve been corrupted by supernatural forces.)

Linguistic Snapshot: “I like teenage girls… you sure got pretty haaaaair.”

Styling: Older than the primary cast in most cases, S&W’s more often than not overweight middle-aged guys in checkered shirts wielding some kind of took used in their menial job as a groundskeeper or custodian. If they have glasses, they’ll be out of style and held together with tape; hair – if not lost – will be scraggly and far beyond the reaches of fashion. He will also have a neutral expression that is plain freaky to everyone around him.

Hallmarks: In the thankless role of the red herring / social outcast, the average slasher movie Weirdo doesn’t get much to do except lurk and suddenly appear in an empty hall, brandishing a weapon of some sort – or a mop – that makes whomever he bumps into, usually the final girl, peg it outta there in fear.

Weirdos love to appear at windows:

weirdos

On occasion, this character will actually have insight that the threatened group of teens don’t. Like The Oracle, he can see the potential danger that’s closing in but nobody ever listens to Special Timmy.

Downfall: Simpletons & Weirdos don’t always die. It’s about a 50/50 chance of them ambling along to safety because the killer isn’t interested in them and nobody who counts believes a thing they say, or conversely they show up to help the final girl when she most needs it and are claimed as collateral damage. And every now and then they’ll just be done away with early on to bolster the body count.

Genesis: Unless you count Crazy Ralph from Friday the 13th, the first obvious Weirdo to have appeared was Mr Sykes, the school janitor, in Prom Night. Seen floating around in the background a few times while Jamie Lee Curtis and friends pop theories that he “spies on the girls in the locker room” and dub him a wacko. Of course, Sykes had nothing to do with it and was the first person to holler that a killer was on the loose.

Soon after, The Prowler coughed up Otto, a hulking lurker who stepped in to save final girl Pam and was thanked seconds later by being blown away by the resurrected loon. Then 1981 TV movie Dark Night of the Scarecrow featured mentally disabled Bubba, who is cruelly shot dead by a bunch of local bigots and comes back as a homicidal scarecrow to settle the score.

C-movie House of Death coughed up Casey, a child-like, pudgy remedial who creeps around and flees whenever somebody attempts to engage him in conversation. “Oh, he’s harmless,” they all say. Even when he’s seen randomly flailing his arms at smalltown carnivals…

Worse still was Matthew in Twisted Nightmare, a Xerox of Casey, who is teased and tormented by his sister’s friends until he protests; “You’re bad! You’re all bad!” and runs off (in a supposed handicapped style) to a barn, self-combusts, and returns later as the deformed killer.

Legacy: After the initial slasher boom of the early 80s, red herrings in mystery plots became less prominent. Attitudes towards this kind of stereotypical portrayal of all mentally afflicted mercifully blotted out the need for such stupidly drawn characters. When they did appear, it was in low-end efforts (i.e. Dead Girls) that were only ever seen by 23 people.

In more recent films, Weirdos were separated from their Simpleton counterparts: the long-haired Euro-guy who watches the girls’ volleyball game in Slumber Party Massacre III (named in the freakin’ credits as ‘Weirdo’!) doesn’t speak at all and apparently only shows up to return a lost diary. But still dies.

A decade later, Natasha Gregson Wagner mistrusted society’s stereotypes and fled from a stammering gas pump jockey who she believed was trying to attack her, only to learn the hard way that he was only attempting to warn her about Urban Legend concerning the axe-toting loon hiding in the back of her car!

In Simon Says (2006), professional weirdo Crispin Glover plays identical twins Simon and Stanley, one of whom is evil and the other partially retarded. Or are they the same person playing both parts? Stanley (the simple half), is coded as a post-Forrest Gump halfwit that everybody laughs at.

Fortunately, post-modern self-awareness finally twisted the trope on its head for the farce Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, where the gag was switched and the tubby, starey, rednecks turned out to be the heroes.

Conclusions: On a positive note, it’s good that the ill-conceived notions of mentally challenged people have faded away to some degree over the years. While doubtlessly the likes of Mr Sykes, Otto, Matthew and Casey generated and laughs and general suspicion from a generation brought up to believe that murderers looked more like Sloth from The Goonies than they did Ted Bundy, the fact that it quickly became clear that such characters were never really a danger (again, save for paranormal interference), the number of them on screen depleted and were replaced by regular looking weirdigans.

So, if you find yourself and your friends stalked by a loon, perhaps take heed of the ramblings of the local madman, he may well have insight that you don’t. But don’t be mean to them, that’s a one-way, non-refundable ticket to the boneyard.

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