PSYCHO III

1986/18/89m

“Norman’s back to normal. But mother’s off her rocker!”

Director: Anthony Perkins / Writer: Charles Edward Pogue / Cast: Anthony Perkins, Diana Scarwid, Jeff Fahey, Roberta Maxwell, Hugh Gillin, Robert Alan Browne, Juliette Cummins, Katt Shea Ruben, Gary Bayer.

Body Count: 5

Direlogue: “I must have left the bathroom in a real mess…” / “I’ve seen it worse.”

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Back to the Bates Motel for Round III, this time directed by Perkins himself and set a matter of months after the events of Psycho II, which saw Norman bludgeon friendly old waitress – and closet psychette – Mrs Spool to death after she claimed she was his real mother.

The local cops are still looking for Spool, who is placed in her window seat in the Bates house, and bolshy reporter Maxwell has turned up, intent to do a story on Norman about rehabilitated offenders.

To further complicate matters, a young Novice (Scarwid) comes to the motel after a dramatic crisis of faith caused the death of her Mother Superior – it doesn’t help Norman’s twitchy state of mind that she looks like a doppelganger of Marion Crane…and is called Maureen Coyle!

Mother, of course, takes an instant dislike to Maureen and decides to do away with her, only to find that Maureen has already tried to do away with herself. Saved from suicide, everyone thinks Norman saved a life, with the exception of the nosy reporter chick, who tells all to the Bates Motel’s untrustworthy new assistant manager, Duke (Fahey).

People soon begin to die: Duke’s one-nighter in a phone box recreation of that shower scene and one very unfortunate girl who comes to party with a truckload of college football players who suffers the indignity of getting her throat slashed while on the can!

Nosy reporter chick’s digging on the vanished Mrs Spool soon unearths a connection to Norma Bates and she decides that she needs to get into the Bates house for answers, where we’ll find out once and for all who’s dressed up in a wig, dress and hefty shoes and brandishing a shiny kitchen knife…

…And it’s Norman. But then, who else could it be this time around? There are no other suspects to pick from, unlike Psycho II, which functions more as a mystery. Although this unmasking is both unsurprising and a tad disappointing, it does allow for us to see Norman dressed up as Mom for the first time in 26 years and we get to witness this once in a lifetime expression of insane glee…

Psycho III is an underrated entry; it’s almost as good as its predecessor and in some ways it’s more fun. At a lean hour and a half, it never becomes tiresome and there’s a defined thread of humour running through it, with some great lines and nods back to the original. Perkins directs more than competently and his cast support him well, with a nice twist on who we expect to become the heroine at the end. Although number four provides some interesting insights, it’d have been better if things were left here.

Blurbs-of-interest: Perkins appeared in Destroyer two years later; Gillin and Browne both returned from Psycho II; Juliette Cummins was Robin in Friday the 13th Part V, Sheila in Slumber Party Massacre II and was also in Deadly Dreams; Jeff Fahey was in Fallen Angels; and most interestingly, Katt Shea – toilet victim – actually directed both Stripped to Kill movies and The Rage: Carrie 2.

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.

THE MACHO ASSHOLE

Overview: The Macho Asshole is the SBC who we want to see die the most – with extreme humiliating prejudice. Usually appearing as a young, muscular dickhead who has no respect for anyone, and thinks he can beat the killer with his fists. When the shit hits, he’s for himself and nobody else.

Linguistic Snapshot: “No faggot killer’s gonna get me! I’m invincible, pussies! Now suck my dick, bitch!”

Styling: Vests and sports gear – MA is the best at all sports. Now swoon over those guns, ladies!

Hallmarks: Short-fused, homophobic, sexist and selfish but normally good looking and athletic – all the things we want to see destroyed in a frenzy of grue.

Downfall: MA has been able to get away with what he wants for now but with uncontrollable temper comes uncontrollable situe and he will discover that being a buff testosterone hive will not help in the face of an axe-toting maniac, who will inevitably be stronger, even if physically smaller.

Genesis: The earliest MA’s were found in the post-Halloween cycle, such as high school bad boy Lou in Prom Night, who makes the fatal error of substituting the nominal Prom King with himself and then gets decapitated.

Then there’s image-obsessed Greg Hellman in Happy Birthday to Me who, it turns out, just doesn’t have the balls to survive a female killer (loser!); dopey jock Wildman in Final Exam has less attitude but also thinks he can out-swing the psycho and is ironically wasted with a piece of gym equipment.

But Macho Asshole honors surely belong to Glazer from The Burning. Glazer bullies the smaller kids and parades around in short shorts trying to impress his object of lust, Sally, eventually getting her into the sack only to disappoint her with a dud shag and deservedly meets the sharp end of the killer’s pruning shears.

Legacy: In the cynical days of, well, now, Macho Asshole has become an almost permanent slasher movie fixture. From uber-dick Barry in I Know What You Did Last Summer (and his pale imitations of both sequels) to Carter in Final Destination, who is so arrogant that he has the sheer audacity to state “I’m never gonna die,” for the audience to chant “oh yeah?”

Other films have traded purely upon hateful figureheads populating the doomed cast: See No Evil pit a group of utterly detestable young offenders against a hulking wacko and Wilderness placed some Borstal-boys on an island with a psychotic ex-SAS maniac.

Most recently, we had Trent in the Friday the 13th remake acting like a jackass until he eventually met the angry side of Jason and Tormented featured a particularly horrible bunch of English schoolkids having the tables turned on them by their undead bullying victim.

Exceptions: Some jocks in the realm might be dumb horndogs but occasionally they turn out to be harmless hulks, such as Arch in April Fool’s Day (played by Tom Wilson, prolific MA Biff Tannen from Back to the Future), the randy jock in Hack! or gym-fit, gay hero David in The Beaten Track - that’s the book I wrote, y’know?

Future: Macho Asshole has become increasingly prevalent and he’s always a welcome resting place for some kind of implement or another, much like his underlings, the nerd, the joker and the slutty girl. He’s more common than ever so best get used to his politically incorrect ways.

It’s another one from the vaults of Fame – Season 2, this time for no other than the lovely Tracy Bregman, merciless Ginny-impersonator and psycho killer from Happy Birthday to Me! In this episode, Words, she plays Jenny, whose mega-strict pop blacks out any suggestive passages in her textbooks, making Miss Sherwood intervene and, if I remember correctly, get told to fuck off. Whatever happens, Jenny is conveniently never seen again. Unless she killed Coco, donned a rubber mask and proceeded to dress like her, talk like her and even walk like her… Cooool.

Whatever, Tracy, if you somehow ever read this, you’re the only thing I remember about the whole damn episode. Just a shame we didn’t get to see you dance.

GOODNIGHT, GOD BLESS

1987/18/87m

“Your nightmare has arrived…”

A.k.a. Lucifer (UK video)

Director: John Eyres / Writer: Ed Ancoats / Cast: Emma Sutton, Frank Rozelaar Green, Jared Morgan, Jane Price, Alan Rowlands, David Charles, Alister Meikle.

Body Count: 12

Dire-logue: “When they put teeth in your mouth they ruined a perfectly good asshole.”

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Britain in the 80s: new romantics, Thatcher, miners strikes, fluffy perms and shit-feeble attempts to recreate the American slasher film – regardless of the evident talent strike also in force…

Things begin brutally: a priest - face off camera – strolls along past a school playground toying with his Rosary beads while kids toss a ball around beyond. Priest enters, stabs a teacher and then shoots a bunch of kids. Little kids. Like six or seven years old. Like the Mini-Pops. Harsh.

Five kids die and there’s only one eyewitness in Mandy, the little girl who saw the whole thing happen and only survived because the gun ran out of ammo. It’s now up to gorky American detective Green to put a stop to the madness and fall in love with Mandy’s mum (Sutton) along the way.

The killer priest, meanwhile, offs a random nightclubber and a poor dog before returning to get Mandy, seeing nowt wrong in stabbing the clueless coppers who stand in between.

Director Eyres later went on to make Ripper: Letter from Hell, which is about as far removed from this piece of festering turd as you can get. It’s horribly put together, with scenes so padded and inconsequential that the dialogue is often muted in favour of coma-flirting elevator muzak. The romantic sub-plot is lousy: detective dude ‘fesses his love for Mrs Mandy after two dates, to which we are cordially dragged along kicking and screaming. And the police ‘investigation’ looks like The Bill made several casting redundancies.

After battling through enough tedium to put a can of Red Bull to sleep, the killer is cornered and shot out of a window, the sting in the tail being that we get to see his face, which is pretty pointless as it’s already on the cover of the video box.

Do we ever find out who he is? No.

Why did he shoot up the school? Don’t know.

Well, what can you tell me? I miss Caramac.

There’s piss-all resolution and time that could’ve been used setting up potential suspects was instead wasted on the long date sequences, overdubbed by a jaw-droppingly atrocious ballad sung by Eyres himself!

Eject it and say Goodbye, Fuck Off Forever.

Back when M. Night Shyamalamalan was churning out effective scary flicks, I went to see Signs in a super-crowded cinema and the jump shocks worked a treat. One girl screamed so loud during a fake scare that she apologised to everyone around her. Oh, how we laughed. Mel Gibson though…meh…I’m fairly indifferent to the man but I’d have to say this is my favourite film he’s been involved with. The girl with her water needs was better though. Oh, and why does he go back to being a Priest at the end? Surely having come face to fucking face with a spaceman totally contradicts the Bible!? Grow the mullet back, Mel, your brain needs insulating.

The best ice-down-the-spine bit is this though, those creepy long fingers that snake under the door. Ugh… I shudder thinking about it.

OK, so it doesn’t look scary here. But it so is on a gigantic cinema screen – the fingers…they’re coming for you! Argh. Run. Run now!

PSYCHO SISTERS

1998/18/97m

“Stay together… Slay together!”

Directors: Pete Jacelone & Michael L. Raso / Writers: Pete Jacelone & James L. Edwards / Cast: Theresa Lynn, J.J. North, Anthony Bruno, Mac Winslow, John Knox, Nancy Alison, Edward Burrows, Michael Devin, Stacy Mathewson, Matthew Fisher.

Body Count: 28

Dire-logue 1: “These bikers have been killing all these kids and sacrificing their dorks to some kind of penis god!”

Dire-logue 2: “Just because I hate men does not mean I wanna munch carpet!”

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A man confesses to his Mrs that he once raped somebody so she shoots him and then cuts off his dick before turning the gun on herself.

Their three daughters, Jane, Jackie and Janice, are later gang raped and Janice is killed by one of the assailants, sending her older sisters off to the asylum for X years.

Jane and Jackie are eventually released and pass their time by kidnapping and killing college-age boys and keeping their cocks in jars in a cupboard. All goes well until Jackie begins to develop feelings for some of the captives and, under the advice of the ghost of Janice, decides to give a chance to nice guy Todd, who she meets at the sperm bank where a sign reads: “We’re glad you came.”

Jane is less than happy about this and will do anything to ensure that the sisters who stay together, slay together. Meanwhile, local cops trying to solve the College Boy Slasher case (which, at the beginning of the film has amassed 35 victims!) and a group of greasy bikers are out to avenge the deaths of two of their own.

Psycho Sisters is a rubbish film. Really, it sucks some big castrated cock – but I think it knows that. At the beginning I went in under the assumption-slash-fear that it was going to play it straight or attempt to make me laugh with crap Scary Movie-level comedy. Fortunately, it soon became an amusing so-bad-its-good film with the genuinely amusing moments, such as Jane abusing a neighbour who is aroused by being beaten by a woman (“what the hell is wrong with you!?”) and a scene where the girls can’t decide what weapon to pull out of Jane’s handbag to off a couple of horny bikers.

There’s a hack reporter who keeps calling the cops to inform them that they’ve solved the case and it’s the ghost of a sitcom character and Jane’s attempts to get the attention of a victim who can’t hear her are also pretty funny. Meanwhile, the bodycount goes ballistic, with a huge shootout between bikers and cops at the end and a foreseeable but fun twist ending.

Crap film is rarely this funny.

HARPOON: REYKJAVIK WHALE WATCHING MASSACRE

2009/18/84m

“Hunting humans in the cold Icelandic waters.”

Director: Julius Kemp / Writers: Sjon & Torsten Metalstein Hvas / Cast: Pihla Viltada, Nae Yuuki, Miranda Hennessy, Terence Anderson, Helgi Bjornsson, Guorun Gisladottir, Stefan Jonsson, Aymen Hamdouchi, Gunnar Hansen.

Body Count: 12-15

Dire-logue: “I might be disgusting to you, but this fag here is the only hope your tight Bible-belt ripped Church-going ass has of getting out of this alive!”

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Iceland. Bjork, bankruptcy and that volcano-ash crisis that you don’t hear much about now… Despite being responsible for great Eurovision entries the past three years, they’ve not really made themselves synonymous with the international horror scene – until now…

Julius Kemp’s Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre, pre-fixed with Harpoon for the lazy semi-literate audiences of yonder, is therefore an interesting movie for this reason alone, as well as being a mix of shameless bloodletting, amusing (if stereotyped) characters, post-rape Bjork sing-song and ‘the strange’…

German tourist Annett wants to see the whales. Her travel pal Hannah is more interesting in getting laid and so Annett goes along on the trip herself alongside two American singles, a trio of grumpy middleaged women, a drunken Frenchman and a Japanese couple and their assistant.

Perhaps they should all take heed of the fact that the boat’s captain is Leatherface himself…albeit 35 years older and now posing as a harmless whale tour operator.

Things gradually deteriorate for poor Annett: after leaping from the dock to the departing ship she bangs up her knee, which is patched up by the handsome deckhand who then tries to rape her. While this is going on, the drunk French guy climbs the mast and stumbles, accidentally skewering El Capitano – who, we can now assume, will not brandish a chainsaw and kill everybody.

As the tourists panic and the deckhand flees in the tender, Annett stumbles onto the bridge and decides to serenade everyone with her rendition of Bjork’s ‘It’s Oh So Quiet’, just what I’d do in the same situation. Although I’d most likely opt for ‘Army of Me’.

With Captain Petur dead and nobody else around to take them to safety, the group are happy to be picked up by a local who takes them back to the whaler he inhabits with his mother and brother, who like nothing more than hacking up Greenpeace activists and friends of the whales.

No sooner do the outsiders come aboard, the killing begins and they flee in every possible direction: one guy dons a lifejacket and attempts to swim away but is shot with the harpoon and hauled back and poor Annett is captured for the second time by pervy little bro Siggi who strips her and pours paint and innards all over her body for reasons the film mercifully did not go into.

With the killers busy hunting the tourists, we begin to learn a bit more about the characters: the Americans stick together while the Japanese couple’s assistant proves that she is not one to be fucked with as she loads up one of her employers with explosives and convinces her to be a human kamikaze before escaping in the tender, leaving the others to save themselves.

Harpoon becomes something of a grisly comedy midway through. The American characters remain serious while the killer’s casually go about their business, taking them out with hammers, spears and knives, ill-prepared for the fact that their captives will retaliate with fire and emergency flares.

What makes things interesting is picking who will die and how: Annett is not a kick-ass final girl by any means, staggering about and being lucky enough to simply not die so far, while beareaved American Marie-Ann appears to fit the bill but gradually transforms into a selfish bitch who will gladly kill a whale to ensure her own survival and there’s a nominal black and gay hero (!) who pretty much does all of the legwork and is responsible for that excellent piece of Dire-logue.

So we’ve got the original Leatherface, suicide bombers, merciless Japanese survivalists, a demented Nazi psychopath family and plenty of grue: what’s not to enjoy? Perhaps only the absence of any whales beyond the depressing stock footage that adorns the opening credits and that of the killer whale that decides the survivors haven’t quite been through enough at the climax. Europe’s where it’s at!