Category Archives: Reviews

Forward to the Past

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In a sort of pre-emptive celebration of the release of Scream 4, March 15th to April 15th 2011 is 90s Horror Month on Vegan Voorhees.

This means that the next few weeks will be solely devoted to the love of Ghostface, The Fisherman, uh… Parka-killer-fiend and all manner of imitations, resurrections, sequels, wannabes and cash-ins. Yes, some have been reviewed already but there’ll be “new” and “exciting” things to say that weren’t said before. Or were and have been deleted by me in an effort to disguise the fact.

We’ll also be cheerleading the various little things that 90s teen horror gave us, from killers with super-personal motives to the total lack of boobs on screen and so-called homages that were little more than blatant rip-offs of films the producers thought nobody had seen.

For the pedants among you, “the 90s” will also include films released in 2000, as they were most likely conceived and shot while the 90s were still about.

So, prepare to get self-referential and in-jokey; 90s Horror Month begins at the chime.

…Chime!

Big trees don’t cry

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THE CRYING TREE

2 Stars  2003/18/86m

A.k.a. Jun-Ka-Por (Thai)

“A homicidal maniac or vengeful spirit?”

Director: Worachet Nimsuwan / Writer: Sonchati / Cast: Pinpin Chanta, Chalad Na Songkla, Preeyanuch Panpradui, Goldie Stanley, Sapanut Chatwibon, Pittaya Na Ranong.

Body Count: 7

Dire-logue: “I reckon it’s the work of some psychopath.”

A ferociously cheesy Thai export with skewered echoes of Friday the 13th.

Sweet natured Pilai is the benefactor and manager of a quiet countryside resort and lives there with her mother, uncle, aunt and some cousins. Nearly all the men in her life are desperately in love with her and will seemingly go to any lengths to win her affection…even kill off the competition.

For every would-be suitor who comes into Pilai’s life – including tour operators, investors, and cops – is soon stalked, slain and relieved of their heart by a cloaked and masked figure who sings the titular song.

The killer’s identity is so blindingly obvious that the script hardly takes any steps to disguise it! But for your benefit, could it be hunky delegate Inthon? Her ill-tempered cuz Suwan? Or someone closer to home? Hint: it’s someone closer to home.

Although cheap and essentially lacklustre, there’s a so-bad-it’s-funny appeal in the discount store production values and zooming close-ups on suspicious facial tics; the score is overblown and really belongs to a high-end disaster movie. The end is a complete rip-off of The Good Son‘s unlikely climactic act, although not nearly as painstakingly overwrought.

With an unexpected twist glued on at the end, The Crying Tree manages to entertain once, but the prospect of returning to this particular resort brings with it the threat of vomit.

Super-hilarious scenes to look out for: a victim-to-be dumb enough to accept a ride in a truck driven by a masked and cloaked figure and the cop who beats Inthon with a copy of the Yellow Pages!

Guttenberg Lives!

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CORNERED!

3 Stars  2009/18/83m

“The face of evil.”

Director: Daniel Maze / Writers: Maze & Darrin Grimwood / Cast: Steve Guttenberg, James Duval, Elizabeth Nicole, Peter Story, Eduardo Antonio Garcia, Ellia English.

Body Count: 6

Dire-logue: “Are we playing cards or sucking dick here?”

A zipper-faced slasher is hacking up convenience / liquor store patrons in LA. There’s a $500,000 reward on his head that a group of employees at a dead end store discuss at the end of their day, including how they’d choose to do away with the psycho if they ever crossed paths with him.

There’s Steve the a-hole boss, his cold-turkey suffering nephew, Jimmy, donut-obsessed Donny, supersized phone-sex operator Mona and local hooker Jess. Steve Guttenberg is Morty, the delivery guy.

An altercation with a local hobo breaks the front door, which is quickly boarded up, thus locking the group in for their late night poker game and soon locking the killer in with them…

In true generic style, each person finds a reason to go downstairs into the store and gets murdered in the same way that they suggested they’d do away with the loon. Ironic. The killer must’ve been listening into their conversation…!

Cornered! has pleasant echoes of 1988’s Intruder, though the run-down store is a lot smaller than Walnut Lane Supermarket and has fewer weapons for the killer to pick from, though he does do away with one schmuch with a pair of Cornettos! It’s as predictable as they come but putting a little effort into the photography and characters makes the world of difference between this and, say, Somebody Help Me, where I just wanted the cast to die quickly and neatly.

Going against it, the identity of the killer is evident from the off but it allows for lines almost as corny as those in Intruder: “Clean up in aisle 3!” There’s also a thick wad of conveniences (well, it is a convenience store) and dumb reasons for people to split. When one guy finds a lengthy blood trail where the previous victim’s corpse has been dragged away, he calls out: “I see you shithead… I followed your trail of ketchup!”

A nice one-off with the is-it/isn’t-it appeal of seeing Guttenberg back on screen, you could do a lot worse than this. And I have.

Blurb-of-interest: James Duval was in The Clown at Midnight and May.

More rubbish films that don’t deserve long reviews

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Would you believe that quite a lot of slasher films suck? No, me either. I expect brilliance in everything. But as before, some slasher films have failed me. Failed miserably. And thus, they don’t warrant any more of my ludicrously precious time than they’ve already sucked away with their suckiness. Sucks to them!

BLOOD TRAILS

1.5 Stars  2006/18/87m

“You can’t outride death.”

Director/Writer: Robert Krause / Cast: Rebecca R. Palmer, Ben Price, Tom Frederic, J.J. Straub.

Body Count: 7

A terminally dull German film masquerading as American by casting British actors effecting bad accents.

Moody bicycle courier Anne is approached by her estranged ex, Michael, and agrees to get out of the city for some fresh air after a particularly bizarre sexual encounter with unhinged traffic cop, Chris.

Now, if you were a fisherman by trade, would you go on a fishing holiday? No. Still, Anne being a bit of a simpleton, she and Michael decide to go mountain biking deep in the woods. Guess who shows up and manages to cut Michael’s throat with a bike tyre via a nifty Matrix-style in-air skid?

After this development, about twenty minutes in, the rest of Blood Trails consists of Anne pedalling away; Anne sitting on rocks; Anne crouching behind trees on lookout… Everything takes forever to unfold, supposedly in the name of tension building but, if anything, if there was ever an excuse to fast forward, this was it.

At one point, Anne comes across two forest workers, neither of whom utter a single word despite the obvious fact that the woman is traumatized and that the tree they were sawing down fell on her! It matters not, as Chris soon floats in and kills them.

Minimal interest kicks in as Anne attempts to escape but it all goes out the window with a stupid finale in which the unarmed killer manages to shoot two cops who turn up out of the blue for no reason.

It looks like helmer/scribbler Krause was trying to create a ‘true’ survivalist horror but the film spends too much time with an unsympathetic simpleton of a heroine who makes some of the most ridiculous decisions in slasher movie history, i.e. you have a car at your disposal, which you could run down the killer with but instead get out and cycle away. Says it all.

Blurb-of-shame: Tom Frederic was in Wrong Turn 3.

WHISPERKILL

 1988/15/90m  1 Stars

“Shhh… You’re next.”

A.k.a. A Whisper Kills

Director: Christian I. Nyby II / Writer: John Robert Bensink / Cast: Loni Anderson, Joe Penny, June Lockhart, James Sutorius, Jeremy Slate, Joe Leter.

Body Count: 4

It’s great that this made-for-cable “mystery” doesn’t give away the killer’s identity on the DVD box, isn’t it? Oh look, it’s obviously a female in a film with only two female characters.

Bad-movie-fixture Loni Anderson is the owner-slash-editor of newspaper in the small town where a ski-masked fiend is first making murmured phone calls to the people who later get stabbed.

Like others of its ilk, Whisperkill is laced with stock soft-focus erotic scenes between Anderson and leading man – and suspect – Joe Penny. Meanwhile, the real killer knocks off a few of her male acquaintances and the rest is fattened up by crummy sex-scenes until the identity of the “mystery killer” is revealed for us all to go “oh, for fuck’s sake!” at.

Commits the unforgivable sin of being boring as well as crap.

THE DEADLY INTRUDER

1 Stars  1986/18/84m

“Someone out there is watching you… Don’t unlock your door.”

Director: John McCauley / Writer: Tony Crupi / Cast: Molly Cheek, Chris Holder, Tony Crupi, Danny Bonnaduce, Laura Melton, Styart Whitman, Danny Greene, Marcy Hansen, Santos Morales.

Body Count: 9

Dire-logue: “Cooking without garlic is like making love without foreplay.”

Another escapee from an asylum arrives in another small town (Midvale, pop. 18,000) and begins laying the locals to waste. This truly horrible film has the audacity to declare itself “in the Hitchcock tradition” on the back of the box but could not be further from Hitch’s style if it boarded a rocket to Jupiter. And I wish it had.

Things kick off in a fairly pacey Friday the 13th way with seven murders in the first 35 minutes before the rot begins to set in. The rest of the plotless plot centres around screechy heroine Jessie, who throws a party for some friends (two of whom never make it) where she is introduced to Bob, a magazine writer from Canada working in a local clothes store to “get the working man’s perspective.”

And while nobody but Jessie and friends believe him, there’s a homeless drifter loitering outside the windows, wandering aimlessly with a sickle, looking like a psychotic Paul McCartney. Said hobo abducts Jessie that night and ties her up in a shack about 30 feet away from her house!

A good third of the film is taken up by this senselessness that never goes anywhere as we decide who is now more likely to be the killer: Wino McCartney or Bob? The outcome is anything but a surprise and the obnoxious twist that somehow anticipates the sequel-that-never-was is the only scary thing that happens in The Deadly Intruder.

There is no merit to this film with the possible exception of seeing Danny Bonaduce of The Partridge Family murdered with prejudice. Add this to the ghastly repetitive synth score and it hurts like fingernails down the chalkboard OF MY SOUL!

SNAPPED

2005/15/80m  1.5 Stars

“Picture yourself dead.”

Directors: Jeffrey Prosserman & Julian Van Mil / Writers: Steve Abbott, Michael Bien, Prosserman & Van Mil / Cast: Tiffany Knight, Michael Bien, Joe Costa, Natalie Van Rensburg, Peter Soltesz, Sara-Jean Villa, Brett Rabinowitz, Lindsey Veenendaal.

Body Count: 10

Dire-logue: “So, you’re solution to my dilemma being ‘all men are dicks so stick yours in me’?”

I like weird things: cold toast with Vegemite, sideburns, Dr Pepper and Eurovision. Snapped is a weird film, really weird. But I didn’t like it. Sorry, Snapped and all ye affiliated with you.

Tiffany Knight is the curiously named Amy Mechanic, a struggling photographer who lands a well-paid new job for a mystery client. Without any credible explanation, Amy begins bludgeoning and hacking up bystanders in her life and taking pictures of the bodies to win the praise of oddball gallery rep Virgo.

Much of the build up to her ‘snapping’ (get it?) concerns the split from her junkie painter boyfriend and moving into the basement of bitchy best friend, Rose, whose own boyfriend is getting visits from an ass-kicking female loan shark. None of these things are of much importance, merely devices to bring more pitiless victims into Amy’s path.

Like so many post-millennial slashers, Snapped suffers from an overabundance of assholey characters we don’t care about, rather than nice folk battling for survival, rendering it the kind of picture you shouldn’t stop to gaze upon, let alone attempt to figure out the ridiculous twist ending, which makes even less sense!

BLOOD REAPER

1 Stars  2004/18/80m

“The legend has just become a bloody reality…”

Director: Lory-Michael Ringuette / Writers: Douglas Hensley, Ringuette & Michael J. Stewart / Cast: Cameron McHarg, Alison Moon, Jerri Badenhop, Mark Siegel, Charlene Amoia, Lory-Michael Ringuette, Brinke Stevens, Bernard Mann.

Body Count: 10

As if the barrel-scraping of Camp Blood and its shoddy sequel was actually a challenge to other filmmakers, here’s another shot-on-video campers-in-peril quickie with equally abysmal results.

More youngsters ignore warnings of a mythical killer living in the woods blah, blah, blah. They go camping anyway, blah, blah, blah. Even Brinke Stevens – who gets top billing for her seven minute cameo – looks glazed with disappointment that it’s come to this.

Long, boring sequences of individuals milling silently amongst trees while the camera bobs behind branches pad out the eighty minutes, while the audience pleads for someone to put us out of our misery. There’s an almost eye-opening innovation of electing the chubby girl as the heroine but, alas, they make it not so and kill her with a sharp log.

The intermittent gory murders are sloppy and unrealistic, reproducing everything we’ve seen elsewhere in better films and they even try to recreate the famous Ki-ki-ki ma-ma-ma sound of Jason and toss in a plinky-plonky Halloween-style theme to lighten proceedings but all it does it remind us that Blood Reaper will never live up to those standards.

Hippie Hippie Shake n’ Slash

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THE TRIPPER

3 Stars  2006/18/94m

“Move over Jason. Look out Freddie. Heeere’s Ronnie!”

Director: David Arquette / Writers: Arquette & Joe Harris / Cast: Jaime King, Lukas Haas, Thomas Jane, Paul Reubens, Jason Mewes, Balthazar Getty, Marsha Thomason, Stephen Hrath, Paz de la Huerta, Richmond Arquette, Rick Overton, Redmond Gleeson, Chris Nelson, David Arquette, Courteney Cox.

Body Count: at least 23

Dire-logue: “Sir, will you spank me? My father never spanked me. I’m in desperate need of discipline.”

As actress Marsha Thomason points out in one of the DVD extras, being British, we have limited knowledge of American politics. Furthermore, while I have clear memories of Ronald Reagan being President, all that he did or didn’t do was eclipsed for us by what Maggie Thatcher was doing here.

Therefore, I may have entirely missed the point David Arquette was trying to make with The Tripper, which is essentially about the hippie revellers at a Free Love Festival being indiscriminately chopped up by an axe-wielding loon in a suit and Reagan mask. The why and what-are-you-getting-at? is what prevents things from making total sense – for Marsha and me at least.

Three peace-lovin’ couples in an old Mystery Machine-type van rock up to the event expecting to have the drug-fuelled time of their lives, but shy newcomer Samantha is paranoid that her controlling Republican ex may have followed them there, while her new beau Ivan keeps getting off his face and the others just want to have sex and get fucked up. Meanwhile, local Sheriff Thomas Jane is battling with the corrupt mayor and bogus organiser Paul Reubens and a growing stack of dead hippies. Are they being done away with by the now-grown little kid who went apeshit with a chainsaw in the prologue? Yes. Yes they are.

While Arquette (who has a small role as one of a trio of rednecks) may have mastered his character of Dewey in the Scream films, as a director he’s quite noticeably unfocused, erratically going from scene to scene without any cohesive plotting: we don’t know where characters are or what they’re doing most of the time and many of the scenes appear to be constructed around a target joke rather than have it appear incidental.

That’s not to say The Tripper fails, it’s still quite funny, liberally bloody and doesn’t shy away from jabbing at errors Reagan evidently made during his time in charge but the whole project lacks clarity. Is the objective to underscore the evils of Republicans? To try and reassert the point of the Free Love movement? A comment of capitalism, that nobody can really be trusted? Or is it just a simpleton slasher flick?

Where The Tripper unquestionably succeeds is in its cast rota: Arquette ropes in family and friends who gleefully make the best of their roles: Jane is great as the beleaguered man in charge and getting Jason Mewes to do what he does best (having cameoed as Jay in Scream 3) is always good; Courteney Cox has a small bit as an animal loving flower child. Only Lukas Haas and Balthazar Getty seem wasted (not in that sense) by the slim nature of their parts. The latter’s red herring status is completely screwed up by the fact that we pretty much know who the killer is from the outset.

I’ve watched the film three times since I picked it up and each time I’m reminded of how gorgeous California is and how awkward The Tripper plays out. It’s a bewildering film with context perhaps too upfront and deep-rooted for a bodycount pic but serves as a sort of rest-stop between Screams 3 and 4. But then maybe I just don’t get it and when somebody makes a sequel about Thatcher offing miners up north I’ll have an epiphany and give it another go.

At very least, it’s worth watching just to prove that sometimes, sometimes you get full frontal male nudity in these things.

Blurbs-of-interest: Lukas Haas and Marsha Thomason were in Long Time Dead together; Jaime King was in My Bloody Valentine 3D; Jason Mewes played a stoner (again) in RSVP; Paul Reubens was in Pandemonium; Chris Nelson was leter in ChromeSull: Laid to Rest 2; Paz de la Huerta was in The Editor.

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