Author Archives: Hud

“It’s worse than dying!”

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WHODUNIT?

 1.5 Stars  1982/18/79m

A.k.a. Scared Alive; Island of Blood

“It’s worse than dying!”

Director/Writer: Bill Naud / Cast: Bari Suber, Rick Dean, Richard Helm, Red McVay, Jeanine Marie, Marie Alise, Terry Goodman, Ron Gardner, Jim Piper, Gary Phillips, Steven Tash.

Body Count: 11

Dire-logue: “Could you shut up? Just shut up ‘cos you’re depressing!”

Don’t you love how the 18 sticker is over the W making it look like the film is called Hodunit? That would be one awesome flick.

Is Whodunit? worse than dying? Would living in a world where Whodunit? didn’t exist be a bad thing? Hmm…well, who knows. We’ll all find out one day I guess. Maybe on my death bed as I recant all my wrongdoings I’ll be reminded of Whodunit? and it’s witty tagline (suited more to the alternate title Scared Alive) and that’ll finish me off.

Anyway, a group of actors are dropped off at Creep Island (where else?) with the director and producer of a “positive youth film” to begin rehearsals for an imminent shoot. Their mortality is soon problematised by the arrival of a maniac killer, who dispatches them in accordance with the lyrics of a terminally awful glam-rock song that is played on a seemingly endless supply of small grey portable cassette recorders that swing like pendulums from trees and telegraph each impending death to the words of the song:

“Boil me, boil me, boil me, face to face…” and so on ad nauseum with ‘boil’ substituted for shoot, spear, burn, saw, chop and nail. Still sounds better than the Christmas X Factor singles though.

Needless to say, the budding thesps soon meet their ends as predicted until only crappy singer-turned-actress BJ (phnarr!!!) remains to duke it out with the person she believes is the killer, who, in turn, believes SHE is the killer, while a third character holding a single candle (outside on a windy night, no less) encounters another suspect and says: “Stay away from me or I’ll burn you!”

With a candle. Ooooh, scary!!

This tangles mess fills in some of its slack with long scenes of people meandering around an old dilapidated building in a bid to create tension – but the murders are quite gory and there are some half-neat one-liners.

Without the ever-reoccurring annoyance of THAT song and some closure on why a totally anonymous and forgotten woman gets shot in the face at the beginning, this might’ve been good in an after-dinner cheeseboard sorta way.

So, no, not WORSE than dying. But that song certainly is.

Crack n’ hack

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A CRACK IN THE FLOOR

 2 Stars  2001/18/86m

“Something terrible awaits underneath…”

Director/Writer: Sean Stanek / Director: Corby Timbrook / Cast: Mario Lopez, Daisy McCrackin, Justine Priestley, Beatley Mitchum, Francesca Orsi, Bo Hopkins, Jason Oliver, Stephen Saux, Rodger Hewlett, Tracy Scoggins, Bill Erwin, Gary Busey, Rance Howard.

Body Count: 11

Dire-logue: “We made a pact to take these trips ’til we’re old and grey, or we die. Whichever comes first.”

Another cheapo attempt to bring Friday the 13th into the 21st century that pits six college kids against a Jason-like hermit who resides in the basement of the standard horror movie cabin-in-the-woods, where you just know these scholars are gonna end up by nightfall. Seems our loner doesn’t take kindly to strangers since two hicks raped and slaughtered his mom thirty-three years earlier.

With a few familiar cast members in the wings, it’s surprising the project came off as cheap looking as it has. Bo Hopkins is the local sheriff who may be on the brink of solving all of the missing persons cases that flood in whenever anybody hikes out into the trees; Gary Busey has about three minutes of screen time as a derange chicken chaser. You get the feeling he was helping out a friend.

Mario Lopez – Slater from years-gone-by’s Saved by the Bell, who also cropped up in the lamentable Fever Lake – leads the doomed pack of off-the-shelf teenagers, including Alicia Witt-a-like girlfriend Daisy McCrackin.

The rest of the characters and plot appear like a second-generation photocopy of Friday the 13th Part III, with two stoners and a newly-pregnant couple. The cabin’s not too dissimilar either… In spite of these flaws and an essential lack of blood (half the murders are off camera or fleeting) it’s not the tragic misfire it could have been. Everything certainly looks like the producers put some effort in and the script flows along quite efficiently even through the kids set up as the heroes are quite casually killed off.

A Crack in the Plot may have been a more fitting title.

Blurbs-of-interest: Bo Hopkins was also in Sweet Sixteen and Uncle Sam; Rance Howard was also in the Toolbox Murders remake; Daisy McCrackin was one of the reality-teens in Halloween: Resurrection.

Pant-Soiling Scenes #19: INSIDIOUS

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Having totted up over 1,000 horror films, you’d think there’d be little scary stuff left to see. Slasher films take place in nicely controlled environments – killer and victims; zombie films have clear cut rules about survival.

Hauntings, however, can do whatever the fuck they want. They can be slow and unsettling or fast and bloody. No rules.

Therefore, when I finally got around to see Insidious last week, I expected maybe a little tension here and there. I didn’t expect to recoil in fright from some of the ejector-seat shocks, accompanied by thundering “gung” sounds.

The first one was when Rose Byrne went to check on her crying baby and encountered a damn creepy spectre lurking behind the net curtain thingy:

Shudder. It even looks like Michael Myers. That’s some eerie shit right there. However, it almost pales in comparison to Barbara Hershey (nicely cast in a nod to her role in the supremely freaky The Entity), who recounts a horrible dream she had about the haunting and then sees the face from her dream right there, behind Patrick Wilson.

Shudder again.

I don’t care if it was over-hyped, if the final act kinda went silly and ended up a marriage of Elm Street and Poltergeist II, this is one scary film the first time around and a warning to all ye who are astral plain explorers or whatever…

Ra-Ra-Rusky Rampage

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TRACKMAN

2 Stars  2007/18/77m

Director: Igor Shavlak / Writers: Viktor Sorokin & Valery Krechetov / Cast: Dmitriy Orlov, Svetlana Metkina, Aleksandr Vysokovskiy, Yuliya Mikhailova, Oleg Kamenshchikov, Tomas Motskus, Aleksey Dmitriev.

Body Count: 8

There was a certain man in Russia (not) long ago, he was big and strong in his arms a massive pick-axe.

I like Euro-horror, it’s normally really engaging and the subtitles make me feel cultured. Something about the 77-minute runtime of Trackman left me in doubt that it’d be worthwhile though.

Turns out I was right. Not that there’s anything definitively wrong with Trackman, it’s just a bit of a chore to sit through, even at that film-lite duration.

A quartet of guys successfully carry out a bank heist, only for some cops to intervene at the last moment, causing them to scarper and take three hostages with them. Into the old subterranean tunnels beneath Moscow (?) they go to meet up with the fifth member of the group and escape.

Unfortunately for them, the legend of a Chernobyl-affected freak prowling around down there turns out to be true and he likes to collect eyeballs in jars.

trackman

So far, so familiar. The underground setting robs the film of any pretty scenery that contemporary Euro-horror likes to boast and the killer has a habit of turning up and then not doing anything. He seems able to teleport from right behind a lost victim to out of sight, only to return later for the kill.

Strangely, the killer spares one female character, giving her back a lost earring. Sucks to be her though as she gets ‘accidentally’ shot later. I don’t like ‘accidental’ deaths in slasher films (unless they’re part of the event that prompts the loon), they get in the way and tend to happen to people we want to see die legitimately at the killer’s hands. Olga, however, was fine. She was painted as the likely heroine until shrieky Katya steps in to take over.

This is one chick who succumbs to Stockholm Syndrome within hours, seemingly falling in love with the last remaining bad guy. Both go back to save the other at various points despite he threatening to shoot her on several occasions previously!

By the end, there’s been too little grue, next to no tension and a ‘revelation’ that isn’t properly explained; a few good visuals fail to elevate this export above Creep, Stag Night, My Bloody Valentine and the numerous other films it heavily borrows from. I say nicht.

Rubbish films: Heed thy warnings (or don’t)

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A sort of themed return to Rubbish Films That Don’t Deserve Long Reviews, with an emphasis on the films that almost tried to warn you in their titles. Maybe it’s simpler to do nothing.

Among the advice in horror films is not to go in the woods, look in the basement, answer the phone, go to sleep but none have yet ‘fessed up and called themselves Don’t Watch This Piece of Shit Movie…

DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE

1 Stars  1979/76m

“You have been warned!”

Director: Joseph Ellison / Writers: Joseph R. Masefield, Joseph Ellison & Ellen Hammill / Cast: Dan Grimaldi, Robert Osth, Johanna Brushay, Ralph D. Bowman, Kim Roberts.

Body Count: 5

A completely depressing little attempt at stapling a pyromanical theme to the basic plot of Psycho.

Grimaldi is a quiet labourer who lives in a big gothic house with mom, who tried to ‘burn the evil out’ of him as a child. When she dies, he finally realises he’s free to do whatever he wants and so inexplicably decides to pick up women and burn them alive in a specially converted sheet-metal room in his attic.

Considering it was made before Friday the 13th opened the floodgates for the genre, House shows a progression from the sleazier rape n’ torture flicks of the early 70s towards the stalker formula. Consequently, it has more common ground with The Driller Killer than Halloween.

Still, even at a mere 76 minutes (cut from the original 81), it’s flabbergastingly boring, attempting to direct our sympathies to the killer and his cheater work buddy who ultimately saves the day! Conversely, the female victims are hardly given anything to do and (in this version at least) there’s only one on-camera kill.

The effective Maniac-style finale is good but just too damn little, too damn late. This leaves only a squalid, sexist and homophobic addition to the Don’t mini-movement. No sale.

DON’T OPEN TILL CHRISTMAS

1984/18/82m  1 Stars

Directors: Edmund Purdom & Al McGoohan (additional scenes) / Writer: Derek Ford / Cast: Edmund Purdom, Alan Lake, Belinda Mayne, Mark Jones, Gerry Sundquist, Kelly Baker, Kevin Lloyd, Caroline Munro.

Body Count: 16

Dire-logue: “I shall look like a gay old queen!”

There are very few successful Christmas-themed slasher films (Black Christmas excepted of course) and this hopeless London-shot film fucking directed by Edmund Purdom probably belongs at the bottom of the stack. OK, maybe Christmas Evil sucks harder.

Street Santa’s, store Santa’s, Christmas Party Santa’s and anybody else unfortunate enough to have donned Saint Nick clobber are themselves being clobbered by a Christmas-hating psycho (possibly from Tower Hamlets?).

Purdom is the Chief Inspector in charge of stopping the mayhem, whilst dealing with the sulky daughter of an early victim and her mullet-headed boyfriend, who visually epitomises everything wrong with British 80s fashion. This mismatched pair goes about trying to solve the mystery on their own, amidst trips to take part in dodgy photo shoot and busk in the middle of a market with nothing but a flute!?

Meanwhile, Santa’s all over the place are being knifed, burnt, glassed and even castrated in the middle of taking a piss. Who’s doing it? There are several palpable suspects in supporting roles and Purdom himself might even be our guy.

Once unmasked, the killer is reminded by sulky girl that he killed her dad, to which he responds by saying: “That was unfortunate – but he reminded me of Christmas time.” He then kills her! (Possibly offended by the flute).

With the nominal heroine out the window, a peepshow employee who witnesses one of the murders in promoted to the role, kidnapped by the killer and then chased about deserted Soho streets in the middle of the day (!) and her ultimate fate is never really explained. There’s a brief flashback scene fisted in to do with a crappy family Christmas in some ill-conceived attempt to make sense of it all.

Though it looks okay on the surface, this is a real mess. Caroline Munro, whose named is emblazoned all over the video box, has a cameo of about three minutes as herself, probably as a favour to Purdom.

Don’t open ever.

DON’T PANIC

1 Stars  1987/18/90m

“The REAL nightmare is just beginning.”

Director/Writer: Ruben Galindo Jr. / Cast: Jon Michael Bischof, Gabriela Hassell, Helen Rojo, George Luke, Juan Ignacio Aranda, Eduard Noriega, Roberto Palazvelos, Melinda McCallum, Cecilia Tijerina.

Body Count: 7

If you thought Don’t Open Till Christmas was an acid trip into bizarro WTF territory, why not give this completely demented Mexican combo of Elm Street and The Exorcist a spin?

Dorky teen Michael – who sports a sort of permed mullet hairstyle – and friends play with a Ouija board that gets his friend Tony possessed with an evil spirit named Virgil who then kills the others.

The catch here is that Michael has precognitive Laura Mars-style visions, during which he is blind to everything else, illustrated to us with some tacky plastic contacts that look like they’re hurting the actor.

Beyond the bad writing, acting and production, Michael has got to be one of the most embarrassing lead characters on celluloid. He’s 18 but spends the majority of the film in dinosaur pyjamas and whines like a ten-year-old when he doesn’t get his own way.

In its efforts to ape Freddy, mom is an alcoholic and the killer’s face (when seen) is burnt and disfigured. The video box I had bore the tagline: “Forget Freddie [sic] and Jason, Virgil’s the newest nightmare in town.”

The dinosaur PJ’s are far more frightening.

DON’T LOOK DOWN

1998/12/87m  1.5 Stars

Director: Larry Shaw / Writer: Gregory Goodell / Cast: Megan Ward, Billy Burke, Terry Kinney, Angela Moore, William McDonald, Kate Robbins, Aaron Smolinski, Tara Spencer-Nairn.

Bodycount: 5

Dire-logue: “OK, so it’s me against the bogeyman.”

A nauseatingly tame made for TV thriller with ‘Wes Craven Presents’ all over the box and “this is the best Wes Craven film I’ve ever seen” written on it. What? Like, seriously? He also lent his name to fucking Wishmaster. And it’s rated 12.

Racked by guilt after she fails to save her little sister from falling over a cliff edge, reporter Ward finds herself increasingly anxious when faced with vertigo-inducing situations and so joins an intense therapy course run by iffy shrink Kinney, who might be the one shoving the patients off rooftops outside working hours.

An impressive opening act that has shades of the Stallone actioner Cliffhanger, a not-entirely predictable exposition from the killer and the fact that the black woman lives are the only distinguishing features in this boring crack at a potentially interesting premise.

The acrophobia angle is played out mainly with psychobabble and boring exercises for the group members, only two of whom are given that fatal push.

This should’ve been better.

*

Overrall blurbs-of-interest: Dan Grimaldi was in iMurders; Caroline Munro and Kelly Baker were in Slaughter High; Munro was also in Maniac and The Last Horror Film; Edmund Purdom was in Absurd and Pieces. Ruben Galindo also directed the far better Cemetery of Terror and Grave Robbers. Fortunately, that’s all.

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