Monthly Archives: July 2014

“It’s not who you go with, honey, it’s who takes you home.”

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I’m whoring myself again. BUY! BUY! BUY! (this, not me).

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No, it’s not some novelization, more of an homage to the original Prom Night film written out of complete bewilderment of the remake, back in 2008, revised and updated in the last month to be eBook-i-fied.

The story is thus: A gunman opens fire on a service station forecourt (in Britain, gasp!) killing patrons left, right, and center, including several teenagers returning from a school field trip to France.

Four months later, as their final school dance approaches, several of the survivors receive cryptic messages that only studious nice girl Alfie takes seriously. When it becomes apparent the threat is very real, she races to the prom to try and warn the others, who are already being stalked and slain by a ski-masked killer with a grudge to settle.

This is a short affair, my urge to fatten it with character arcs and subplots was stomped by pure love for the revenge-at-the-prom opus.

Eyes peeled for summer camp-set follow up, The Blood Season, soon.

You can buy it in the US here, or in the UK here.

I scream, you scream, we all scream: “Whyyyy???”

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MR ICE CREAM MAN

2 Stars  1991/18/66m

Director/Writer: Mack Hail / Writer: Jim Mills / Cast: Mack Hail, Jim Mills, Cindy Reed, Henry Weckesser, DeVonn Carral, Alisha Lobato.

Laughter lines: “If you get married, can I have a gun?”

This strange little film only clocks in at an our and six minutes (on PAL, at least), and was shot in Las Vegas sometime in the early 90s, with no concrete answer.

Pre-dating the similar Clint Howard flick by a few years, it tells the oh-so-short story of a suburb plagued by a growing number of missing children. What the detective trying to teach the local kids stranger danger doesn’t know is that the goofy-but-creepy local ice cream vendor is the one behind it.

With a Halloweeney beginning that has a trio of kids walking around the leafy ‘burb while the ice cream truck slowly cruises by, you’d be forgiven for high hopes. Meanwhile, the detective asks out the big sister of a kid who we just know is going to cross paths with Mr Ice Cream Man sooner or later. Probably at his upcoming birthday party.

Cheapness aside, things don’t look as bad as they might, with writer/director/star Hail doing the best job as the creepy killer, who lures naive kiddies to their doom, selectively ignoring any subtext about what he might be doing to them, even taking a break from his usual schtick to murder a teenage babysitter who mocks him.

So short that it’s all over before you get too restless, but the killer ice cream dude sub-sub-genre is still untapped for a genuinely good outing.

Blurb-of-interest: Hail wrote and directed Switch Killer and was in Carnage Road – which is a contender for worst film ever.

La da dee da death

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KUCCH TO HAI

2.5 Stars  2003/12/142m

Translation: There Must Be Something

“This winter a chill will run down your spine…”

Directors: Anil V. Kumar & Anurag Bosu / Writers: Rajeev Jhaveri, Anuraag Praparna, Umesh Shukla & Sameer (song lyrics) / Cast: Tusshar, Esha Deol, Yash Tonk, Natassha, Ashay Chitre, Vrajesh Hirjee, Kusumit Sana, Rishi Kapoor, Johny Lever.

Body Count: 7

To sound like some racist asshole – I can’t tell this film and fellow Hindi slasher Sssshhh… (also from 2003) apart. I’ll make the excuse that it’s been years since I’ve seen either, but notes from the occasion suggest this is the lesser of the two projects.

As that other film, and blatant Nightmare on Elm Street rip off Mahakaal (1993), a whole lotta Kucch to Hai is recycled material from North American slasher films of the post-Scream boom. It’s a Bollywood trip down memory lane…

Beginning with an almost shot-for-shot rip-off of Jennifer Love Hewitt’s confessional dream from I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, we quickly move into flashback territory and the story of how college kids Karan and Tanya fell in love, punctuated with ear-melting pop songs and love ballads, as is prerequisite in Indian cinema, even in genres as diverse as horror.

There’s a lot of this…

All of this stuff takes an HOUR. SIXTY MINUTES. At this point, Tanya takes the blame for Karan’s exam faux pas, risking a failure for herself, and thereby prompting a group of her friends to sneak into the creepy Professor Bakshi’s home to change the grade on her paper. However, their mini-heist is interrupted when the Prof comes home and, during their escape, they find his dead, virtually mummified wife in the basement, and duly run him over with their van as they make their getaway. Three years later, the group recongregate at the wedding of two of their friends at a ski lodge and find the party crashed by a figure in a black mack who dons a curved blade.

There’s little attempt to disguise the fact that Kucch To Hai unashamedly lifts its entire plotting from the original Last Summer flick, detouring via another shot-for-shot recreation of the killer-in-the-backseat opening from Urban Legend, albeit with a slightly different outcome and the theme from Mission: Impossible replacing ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ as the song on the radio!!!

A scene stolen from Scream 3 sneaks in once the stalking kicks off in the last twenty minutes, with very little bloodshed and a confusing unmasking twist at the finish line. It’s a tough race as the film grinds on relentlessly towards the two-and-a-half hour mark, taking pauses from the horror for its musical interludes, and far more concerned with the developing love triangle between the main characters.

…and not much of this

Western audiences will be nothing short of aghast at the stylings, with a veritable rainbow of colour and overdramatic camera work to accentuate the drama, so it’s not possible to tell how technically good the film is compared to other exports from its home country without a good base knowledge of Indian cinema – which I don’t have.

Both dialogue and songs are subtitled, although the actors occasionally cross over into English to make their points.

VIP’s of Slasherdom: Wendy

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While sometimes I wish I was a domestic pet, it’s pretty cool being a human, as a lot of humans are awesome, even those in cheap-ass slasher flicks.

Take Wendy, for instance, the Queen Bitch in Prom Night (played excellently by Eddie Benton/Anne Marie Martin), who stalks the halls of Hamilton High almost as aggressively as the film’s killer. Her mission: Destroy Kim Hammond! She’s pretty much Chris Hargensen (of Carrie) Mk. II.

“Oh, shut up!”

Missive: Humiliate prom king and queen Kim and (ex-boyfriend) Nick, ruining Prom Night for all! No buckets of pig-blood this time.

Attitude: BAD. Wendy tells a changing room full of classmates: “You’re all pathetic!” and plays hardball during a confrontation with good-girl Kim, uttering the infamous line used in all four original PN movies: “It’s not who you go with, it’s who takes you home.”

In her case, the coroner.

Why we love her: Her unrelenting thirst for nasty vengeance and her epic chase scene through the corridors of the school, where she almost out final girl’s Jamie Lee Curtis.

Wendy, though you died and in life were a pain in the ass, you are the first inductee to the VeVo VIP’s of Slasherdom hall of whatever.

Krueger Creek

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WOLF CREEK 2

3 Stars  2013/18/107m

“Mick’s back with a few days to kill.”

Director/Writer: Greg McLean / Writers: Steve Topic, Helen Leake, Aaron Sterns / Cast: John Jarratt, Ryan Corr, Shannon Ashlyn, Philippe Klaus, Shane Connor, Ben Gerrard, Gerard Kennedy, Annie Byron.

Body Count: 17

Laughter Lines: “Mick Taylor’s the name! Pig shooter and general fuckin’ outback legend.”

John Jarratt’s inimitable looney toon Mick Taylor is back for Round Zwei after successfully evading capture or identification over the events of the first film.

Beginning well – as so many of these pictures tend to – with the grisly double-slaying of a couple of asshole traffic cops (one of whom used to be in Neighbours) who pick on the wrong motorist, it’s soon back into familiar territory with a couple of young backpackers – German couple Katarina and Rutger – who hitchhike to Wolf Creek during the tip of their lives. And deaths.

Here, Wolf Creek 2 openly misleads us a good half hour into the film, they finally meet Mick, who narrowly missed capturing them earlier. It’s the Psycho trick and our supposed leads are gruesomely done away with. Really gruesomely in the case of Rutger, as Mick keeps Katarina around with the intention of enslaving her back at his hub. She stirs after what we can assume is a mercifully off-screen rape scenario, and sees Mick dissecting her boyfriend, genitals n’ all!

Katarina escapes and stumbles into the path of lone-British tourist Paul (Corr), who picks her up and finds himself caught up in the terror as Mick now has him in his crosshairs. Wolf Creek 2 switches from channeling Psycho to Duel. After escaping by the skin of his teeth (Katarina was not so fortunate), Paul is now chased down a lonely highway after Mick commandeers a massive rig. Next, he is carless and on foot in the desert until he lands on the doorstep of an outback couple who feed him, only for Mick to come knocking again.

This cat n’ mouse tomfoolery lasts just over an hour into the film and despite it’s familiarity, and the surreal kangaroo bit, is anything but boring. In fact I had visions of a four-star event here, wondering what all the online moaning was about.

It was about the final act.

I won’t go into too much detail, but Mick gets Paul back to his lair and so unfolds one of the weirdest scenes I’ve seen in a slasher film. There are limericks, sing-alongs, a bizarre game of Q&A, and then then obligatory chance of escape, where Paul finds himself in the labyrinthian tunnels of Mick’s place, all packed with bodies in various states of decomp. Then the very end… well, why? is the only question remaining.

The personality shift in the first film seemed likely, as the good Samaritan’s real intentions became clear. This time, Mick is in full Freddy Krueger mode (albeit with Elvis hair), all that’s missing is the sweater and the scars. He has a cocky quip for every eventuality and is endlessly chipper, underscoring his ‘based on actual events’ serial killer with a cheesiness that hasn’t graced a body count movie since the early-90s.

That there are so many bodies found is also a tad groan-inducing: With so many missing backpackers, where are the cops? No outback loon could ever hope to be so successful in abducting, overpowering, and imprisoning this many tourists without being detected. It just makes things look tacky in a sub-Texas Chainsaw, Wrong Turn-sequel way.

The silver lining is that Jarratt is excellent in the role (if a little too chatty), and McLean continues to wring the outback setting for all its agoraphobic-inducing fear: There really is nowhere to hide. Corr is good as the put-upon hero and the doomed German couple evoke a naive sweetness which makes it hard to watch them killed off so brutally.

Rogue remains McLean’s best horror effort, while his potential is still on form with the first hour of this, it’s just a shame it the floor collapses beneath it where it counts to most. Hoping for Wolf Creek 3 to feature a girl (!) who kicks his fucking arse.

Blurbs-of-interest: Jarratt was in Next of Kin and Needle.

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