Author Archives: Hud

Rave to the grave

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SWEATSHOP

2 Stars  2010/18/87m

“One hammer. No prisoners.”

Director: Stacy Davidson / Writers: Ted Geoghegan & Stacy Davidson / Cast: Ashley Kay, Peyton Wetzel, Brent D. Himes, Naika Malveaux, Danielle Jones, Melanie Donihoo, Julin, Vincent Guerrero, Krystal Freeman, Jeremy Sumrall.

Body Count: 21

Dire-logue: “It’s always the quiet ones that cut your dick off when you’re not looking.”

Here’s a film that was due a one way ticket to one-starsville until it pulled a decent finale out of its grimy, dirty back pocket. A rarity for a film to start off crap and get better – usually it’s the other way around.

Young-ish ravers arrive at a dirty old warehouse to fix it up for an illegal rave party. The organiser, Charlie, is a hard-ass, there’s punk-haired spunk-o-phobic Scotty, several of his on-off girlfriends, ‘cool’ DJ Enyx, lollipop-sucking lesbian, uh, Lolli, Scotty’s fat, repulsive brother Wade and a few other less memorable ones.

Their pals who left ahead of them to set up have disappeared and after what seems like an eternity of ‘fuck you’-heavy dialogue, drug use, alcohol use and conversations no deeper than your average Justin Bieber fan’s brain matter, they start dying. Gruesomely.

Sweatshop is a weird film. Several things occur which make no sense. The title itself is as redundant as an ex-Apprentice candidate: it’s a warehouse. That’s it. Call it Warehouse. Add to this a trio or more of bizarre zombie-esque girls who torment the newcomers, all tombstone teeth and scraggly hair like they wandered off the set of the latest Ring sequel.

The killer is a Jason-like hulk who favours a giant war-hammer thing that reminded me of a Buffy weapon she nicked off a troll. It’s a giant steel thing that nobody but your average malformed giant killer could ever hope to lift.

With this implement, he smashes and obliterates the young-ish cast one by one. A girl’s jaw is ripped off, another has her fingers snipped off before getting the hammer to her lower half, a third is smashed through a mesh fence… Most of the preliminary violence is against the girls.

However, before you wail “misogyny ahoy!” and light your torches, the most despicable male characters are held captive and forced to choke on severed cocks, which is supposed to be some funny irony for the guy who won’t reciprocate certain favours to female company.

Charlie is the last one standing and although she’s a nasty pimp we don’t even like, we don’t care what happens to her. Live, die, whatever.

Her survival for the moment leads to the film’s best scene at the end, where she is chased by the killer into the rave (somehow in progress despite the DJ being murdered earlier on) and he goes ape on the drug-addled attendees.

It’s essentially a rip-off of the corn-field massacre from Freddy vs Jason but provides some pretty good moments: glowstick in the eye, handwalker split down the middle (another lift from a Friday), and numerous head-squishings.

There’s a nice moment where a blood-stained disco ball rolls across the floor of an empty chamber and one of the actors is known as Fernando Phagabeefy!!! It’s immature to smirk at someones name but, c’mon, Phagabeefy!?

So it ends better than it starts out, which ever way to cut it, I can’t picture myself ever being drawn to watching Sweatshop again. But if you’re a gorehound who likes to hate characters rather than root for them, this could be right up your back street. (Not a euphemism, I was referring to the area in which one might find such a sweatshop warehouse).

 

Icky ways to go: Time to change the shower head

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From the original cut of the surprisingly vicious My Bloody Valentine (eventually unleashed in 2009, about the only thing we can thank the remake for), the standard one-half-of-couple-finds-reason-to-leave schtick unfurls as usual, leaving poor Sylvia here to be attacked by the creepy miner, who decides to do away with her by impaling her head on one of the rusty, pointy shower nozzles, resulting in her acting as a sort of novelty shower head for her boyfriend to discover a few minutes later. Ouch.

Probably the most inventive demise in the film, which when restored also included a gruesome pick-axe through the jaw and out of the eye. I feel twisted to be so thankful they eventually gave us the extra bloodletting. Oh well, the world still turns…

Remake Rumble: Just let it go to voicemail…

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Less a Face-off, more a comparative analysis between the original and its – ugh – remake/reimagining/reboot/whatever (…delete as applicable), some I liked, some I loathed and some I somehow preferred to the original!

WHEN A STRANGER CALLS

3 Stars  1979/15/94m

“Every babysitter’s nightmares becomes real.”

Director: Fred Walton / Writers: Walton & Steve Feke / Cast: Charles Durning, Carol Kane, Colleen Dewhurst, Tony Beckley, Ron O’Neal, Carmen Argenziano, Rutanya Alda, Bill Boyett.

Body Count: 3

Fred Walton made a short film called The Sitter, which was built around one of the most well known urban legends. A babysitter alone in a strange house begins receiving bizarre calls that escalate in their creepiness. She calls the cops and they eventually trace the call, letting her know that they’re coming from inside the same house. Yikes.

These days with the internet and a gazillion reference points it’s old hat but way back in time stories like these that spread through the old friend-of-a-friend-esque method of communication likely kept slumber parties awake at night.

After the success of Halloween, Walton extended his short into When A Stranger Calls, which, had it ended twenty minutes in, would likely score five stars.

Carol Kane is the tormented babysitter, Jill Johnson, whose sitting gig at the home of Dr Mendrakis slowly unwinds into an evening of terror when repeat calls asking if she’s checked the [sleeping] children grow to the caller making it clear he can also see her and that he wants her blood all over him. Eww.

Jill is fortunate enough to escape once informed that the caller is upstairs, but the kiddies ain’t so lucky. We never see them either way. The culprit is caught. La-de-da-da.

Seven years later, the loon – Curt Duncan (Beckley, who died shortly after principal photography) – escapes from his madhouse and returns to terrorize Jill and her family anew, though not before setting his sights on husky voiced bar patron Tracy. All the while, Charles Durning P.I. is after him before he can kill again.

*

2006/15/87m  3 Stars

“Evil hits home.”

Director: Simon West / Writer: Jake Wade Wall / Cast: Camilla Belle, Tommy Flanagan, Katie Cassidy, Tessa Thompson, Brian Geraghty, Derek de Lint, Kate Jennings Grant, Clark Gregg.

Body Count: 6

One of the few remakes that retains character names, sullen teenager Jill Johnson is forced into a babysitting job after her parents ground her and cut off her phone privileges for going 800 minutes over her plan. Elsewhere, she’s mad at best friend Tiffany for kissing her boyfriend Bobby and because of the grounding she can’t go to a big party with all her friends. Life really sucks for her.

Dr and Mrs Mandrakis entrust their two young children to Jill in their frankly massive lakeside house, unlike the first film this one is in the middle of nowhere. Jill explores, tries on jewellery, plays with various gadgets and yaks with her friends on the phone.

After a while, weird calls begin and Jill starts to wig out; Tiffany drops by to make amends; Rosa the housekeeper seemingly disappears and the house alarm keeps going off…

Eventually, the creep factor wins over and Jill pleads with the cops to trace the call – guess where it’s coming from? Before long she and the kids are on the run from the maniac…

* * *

Three stars each? Each?

Yes. Woah, hold it with that claw-hammer, let me explain…

When I first saw When a Stranger Calls and its superior MFTV sequel (the best of the bunch), I always thought they should remake it and base it all on the opening torment rather than skip off down X-years-later-he-comes-back lane.

In the ’79 film, the mid-section is pitifully dull. There’s a brief catch-up on the case when the cops learn Duncan has skipped the asylum and then largely nothing happens for about an hour.

What differentiates When a Stranger Calls from the other slasher films of the era is that we get to know Curt Duncan a little. He speaks, he’s fairly lucid and the film even dredges up some sympathy for his sad, pathetic weirdigan life, whereas the antagonist of the redux is your same-old same-old shadowy loon.

In the end, his resolution is to track down Jill and her own family and torment her. This makes the last ten or so minutes quite tense although nowhere near as good as the opening act.

The film deflates in the centre. Dewhurst, as Tracy, Duncan’s new play-thing of sorts, has little to do other than smoke cigarettes and act pissed off in the dank bar she frequents. It’s really, really boring.

Walton improved on it greatly in the 1993 follow-up, which brought back Kane, this time mentoring Jill Schoelen’s traumatised college girl, who went through an identical experience.

The 2006 remake is what I’d call horror for girls. That’s not meant to be derogatory, I know plenty of girls who love horror but this film and I’d also say the wretched Prom Night remake appear to be directed point blank at young teenagers with an excess of girl-themed subplotting and are positively anorexic when it comes to genuine horror. Let’s re-brand it horror for 12-year-old girls.

So I got my wish to some extent, Stranger 2006 is all about the babysitter’s torment. And it began so wonderfully with a nicely done credits sequence in which we hear calls plaguing a girl we don’t see while a carnival sparkles, jingles and over-stimulates kids in the foreground.

It’s a genuinely well done scene but serves to unfurl the whole calls-are-coming-from-inside-the-house USP which comes later and is therefore an entirely redundant plot development. We know the calls are going to be coming from inside the house because you’ve showed us the killer was inside the other house!

Camilla Belle also seems to struggle under the weight of being the only real character. Everyone else is a bit-parter and how Brian Geraghty (playing a high schooler despite being born in 1975) manages to get second billing from his less-than five minutes on screen is a mystery.

It’s not that this Jill is unsympathetic but the script gives her little to work with at some points. When the killer makes a run for the kids she doesn’t spring into action like Laurie Strode would have. Therefore, she loses some likeability points.

What murders there are all occur off camera: the sitter and three kids we assume bite it at the start are never seen at all and the non-white live-in maid may as well have offed herself and Tiffany was always going to croak for ‘betraying’ Jill by kissing Bobby – GASP! How COULD she!? See? It’s the Sweet Valley High of horror. Less the spooky-ass twins though.

The film seems at odds with itself over whether to become a slasher film. In hindsight, it should’ve. The house drama should’ve been cut in half and then the killer would come after Jill, killing some of her annoying friends and really giving her something to gripe to her dad about.

The children, cute as they are, have no lines other than whimpering and squealing. Their names aren’t even mentioned until the credits roll and yet the actors’ names still appear in the opening credits!

Nevertheless, Simon West shows some flair as a director here and there, keeping The Stranger’s face hidden effectively and capturing the house in some unsettling moods but you can just picture the studio execs chanting “tone it down” ad nauseum until the horror stayed well on the scale and I’d imagine that more thought went in to what clothes they put Belle in and what products could be flashed on screen above and beyond actually making it scary.

This is a difficult one; the opening twenty minutes of the first film is sensational but also sensationally undermined by just how boring it becomes thereafter. The new film gets points for doing what I wanted it to but panders so cringingly to its desired demographic that as a male adult it’s hard to derive more than short-lived pleasure from. Be careful what you wish for indeed: there’s only so long I can watch a girl wander round a house calling out names, evidenced by the length prologue and pointless last-minute shock attempt.

Stick it in a box-set with Prom Night and some random girly sleepover movie. Carol Kane’s performance swings it, the original wins. Bang the gavel. Disconnect the phone.

Blurbs-of-interest: Fred Walton also directed April Fool’s Day. Carmen Argenziano was in Graduation Day and Identity; Rutanya Alda appeared in several horror films in the early 80s including Girls Nite Out and Amityville II. Katie Cassidy appeared in remakes of Black Christmas and A Nightmare on Elm Street and was also in Harper’s Island; Brian Geraghty was in Open House.


Walk like a Scarecrowey-thing

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DARK WALKER

2 Stars  2003/15/81m

“You were right to fear…Dark Walker.”

Director: Danny Draven / Writer: Dan Jacobs / Cast: Kathleen Susan Taylor, Michael Sage, David DeWitt, Brenda Matthews, Rick Irvin, Emily van Sonnenberg, Brad Potts, Jill Small, Clive Hawkins, Ali Taylor, Ivan Glenn Hall, Chuck Williams.

Body Count: 12

Dire-logue: “You know they call orgasms ‘little deaths’… I want a little death tonight.”

A cursed patch of land in California was the scene of a gruesome beheading in 1878 when a farmer snatched a pumpkin that unleashed a scarecrow-like figure.

125 years later, said land is renovated by a couple who build a sort of mini theme park with a Halloween Haunted House centrepiece and employ several local teens to work inside.

Because the sacred land has again been desecrated, the Dark Walker is given free reign to slaughter those it deems responsible, i.e. the teens.

Throw in psychic heroine Maggie and a ghostly caretaker and it’s a part nobody will forget, least of all because the film knocks off just about everyone, including the nominal hero, except Maggs, and ends with one of those abrupt what-the-fuck shocks that are normally there to paper over the lack of exposition…although in this case the credits promise Dark Walker 2 will follow.

Like all of these “you are SO doomed” flicks, the cast are well aware of the growing body count and still refuse to opt out of returning to the house of death because they need the dough.

As far as cheap, amateurish DVD horror goes it’s not that bad. There’s enough gore without going overboard, even if it is largely buckets of gunk thrown at the nearest wall by production runners.

8 years and counting and no sign of this alleged sequel!

DVD D.O.A.: Shitty Sequels

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The law of diminishing returns rules hard in horrordom; sequels almost always gradually degrade in a nice neat arc.

See?

Though every now and then there’s a nice kink in the drop off (Friday VI, Elm Street 3, Halloween 4)… Those aside, let’s whatever-the-opposite-of-celebrate-is (mourn?) the sequels that NEVER should’ve happened…

I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer (2006)

This sensationally dumb third entry in the I Know What You Did saga abandoned Jennifer Love Hewitt and her substantial cleavage for pastures new.

Colorado. Lots of slicker-clad fishermen found round there.

A quartet of teens whose prank went askew are literally haunted by the killer Fisherman who turns out to be a ghost.

It’s cheap, offensively simplistic and actually has a couple of surplus characters who could’ve been great mystery killers. But no. A fucking urban legend ghost outcome fills a gap in the script so huge and sucksome that it threatens to pull the whole of existence through it.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

In spite of a so-so idea at its core, nobody wants Halloween III. It’s the Smelly Cat of the Halloween series. It’s Andrew Ridgeley. It’s that guy who left the Backstreet Boys. It’s the fat one from Wilson Phillips*.

An eeeeeevil toymaker creates masks that kill their pre-pubescent owners when activated by the insanity-inducing Silver Shamrock advert and it’s FUCKING HORRIBLE TUNE.

“Three more days to Halloween, Halloween, Halloween…” Aaaarrgghhh!!!

Michael Myers was NEEDED to come and kill whoever came up with that.

What mystifies me more is that when they released the first Halloween DVD box, they omitted Halloween 6 but not this one, even though it has fuck all to do with MM (apart from being seen on a TV screen in an almost-bemusing post-modern manoeuvre).

“The” Final Destination (2009)

Sometimes, people should know when to stop.

Even the artwork for this instalment shows that the franchise was less about characters and more about death by this point, about as far removed from the original concept as possible.

In this one – supposed to be the last word at the time – a retread of Final Destination 2‘s pile-up occurs at a Texas racetrack, leaving a quartet of thoroughly boring ‘teenagers’ (none of whom have parents, jobs, occupations) to stand by while a string of strangers meet grim ends before Death comes knockin’ at their door.

It’s crass, suspiciously cheap-looking and about as deep as a kids’ paddling pool, but also packs a mean streak that has several ‘characters’ who aren’t even given names and it doesn’t matter how nice you might be, something undeservedly nasty is going to happen to you.

The silver lining is that Final Destination 5 was a vast improvement. And it had the awesome ‘Devour’ by Shinedown on it.

American Psycho II: All-American Girl (2002)

Time for a shot of plain weirdness. This made-for-DVD sequel posits that Mila Kunis is a bigger sociopath than Patrick Bateman ever was and actually stabbed him to death after he killed her babysitter years before.

Masquerading as a co-ed, she enrols in a criminology course taught by – smirk – William Shatner and proceeds to kill anyone who stands between her and getting to Quantico.

The tagline “Angrier. Deadlier. Sexier.” pretty much tells you all you need to know: this is nothing more than a moronic attempt to wring some sleaze out of the cult phenomenon of Brett Easton Ellis’ original novel.

Kunis is clearly embarrassed to have been a part of it, but not as embarrassed as you’ll be watching it.

Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead (2009)

This should really have been called Wrong Turn 3: How to Lose All Sense of Credibility in 3 Easy Films.

Wrong Turn 2 may have played for gory laughs but at least it remained interesting and partially invested in its own universe of backwoods inbreds killing cityfolk for grub but the following entry is just the bastard offspring of outsourced cheapness.

There’s only two cannibal loons this time, both looking more rubbery than ever before as they hunt down a group of convicts whose bus went off the road in West Virginia Bulgaria.

Awful reliance on crappy looking CGI, 100% unsympathetic characters and acting out of an infomercial with added profanity and a couple of T&A shots. A box-ticking exercise if ever there was one and Wrong Turn 4 looks to be even worse.

Stay tuned for more sequels from hell. Hang on, that means I’ll be creating my OWN sequel to this… Hopefully it won’t suck nearly as hard.

* I liked all of Wilson Phillips – including Carnie.

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