5 things I wish they’d stop doing in horror films

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Let’s enjoy a good old moan, shall we?

Asshole Characters

The most crucial problem in low-end horror films (and indeed some high-end ones) is the total inability of scribes to write people we actually give a damn about, save for maybe the ones who’re going to survive (but not always – read on).

Thinking back to the happy-go-lucky teens of the 80s set, there was usually a bitchy girl and a macho dickhead but, for the most part, they were fairly innocent, likeable kids who we feared for and were sometimes even sad when they were slashed to ribbons.

But now? Oh God, it’s just a parade of obnoxious, self-absorbed, hateful characters and the audience virtually cheers on the killer when they die. Is this how people are now? Surely, I can’t be the only one who sees the problem in that?

No Survivors

Sometimes it’s necessary to off everyone in a film, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning for example, but more frequently, and the Final Destination franchise is to blame, as if Asshole Characters aren’t enough, even the survivors aren’t valuable enough to save.

What initially appealed to me about slasher films was the notion of one person escaping to tell the tale. Every now and then there was a last second twist where the killer would leap out from somewhere and grab the final girl and it’d be left to the audience to decide whether or not she got away but seeing the last survivor brutally offed is an overstep into cruelty, i.e. the plain mean end of the super-shitty Splatter University.

Token Lesbianism

It’d be progressive if gay characters were ushered into the genre every now and then but what’s happened instead is that ‘gay characters’ has been translated exclusively to “hot girls making out”, as homosexuality can seemingly only be represented in a way that titillates the presumed low-IQ straight male demographic and any gay male characters are camp, weak and unquestionably doomed and would never be allowed to kiss a guy on camera.

In the last few years, there’s been girl-on-girl action in ever increasing numbers. With the exception of French flick Deep in the Woods, gay girls are always killed off, as if it’s the only logical alternative to them being ‘cured’ with a good hard shag.

No Opening Credits

This is more of a complaint about film in general: Why do 50% of new films completely bypass the opening credits? I like to see who’s gonna be in it ‘cos sometimes there’ll be a recognisable face you weren’t aware was going to be there or a cool cameo. But now…well you’re lucky if you even get the title! Wes Craven’s New Nightmare I’m looking at you.

Torture Porn-Lite

Hostel was a good film; great idea for a horrible tale of grue and in spite of what it proposes is going to happen or has happened, it’s not that gross. The downside of Hostel (besides the fact it had Eli Roth attached to it) is that it caused all manner of slasher films to ramp up the grue.

Gone were the thrifty throat-slashings and quick, sharp skewerings, enter long drawn out sequences of people suffering for extensive periods of time. The ambiguous enjoyment of the kills in a slasher flick moves the audience into questioning if they want to continue watching as the likes of Seed, Carver and Turistas delight in dragging out the demises of (usually female) victims.

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OK, so I’ve seen too many, I’m getting old and cranky, but for fucks sake will the people who write and produce these films at least try to avoid the pitfalls of their predecessors? Who am I kidding, genre comes from generic. May as well just shut up and learn to live with it.

Backtrack Baby

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A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 5: THE DREAM CHILD

2.5 Stars  1989/18/86m

“Freddy delivers.”

Director: Stephen Hopkins / Writers: Leslie Boehm, John Skipp, Craig Spector & David Spector / Cast: Robert Englund, Lisa Wilcox, Kelly Jo Minter, Danny Hassel, Erika Anderson, Joe Seely, Nick Mele, Valorie Armstrong, Burr DeBenning, Clarence Felder, Beatrice Boepple, Whitby Hertford.

Body Count: 3

So I had this dream about A Nightmare on Elm Street 5 t’other day; I can’t remember much of it now apart from ‘being at’ the graduation scene. As it probably stands as my least favourite Freddy flick (including the remake), this subconscious soiree was enough to at least make me go back for a reappraisal…

While it’s still the most disappointing Elm Street (though I love the artwork), The Dream Child still houses just about enough charm to slink by, thanks mainly to that nostalgic drag the late 80s has as all three major slasher franchises began to wane. Seriously.

Halloween 5 was a subplot-scuppered mess, Jason Takes Manhattan tried to light a spark that fizzled out seconds later and as for Freddy, well Freddy’s problem was that he’d become way too big, way too recently…

If you’ve watched the excellent 4-hour documentary Never Sleep Again (and if not, what the actual fuck?) you’ll know that the fifth trip down Elm Street was rushed out in no time at all, with an unheard of four week pre-production schedule and the same time again to edit the film, it was done and dusted less than a year after The Dream Master, which probably highlights New Line’s then-greed with the franchise as the fourth film raked in an unprecedented $50million and favourable reviews.

Freddy’s worldwide fame notwithstanding (the TV series had begun, he was being namechecked by Ronald Reagan, he released a rap LP…), the producers made the error of attempting to back-pedal to the gritty, gothic feel of the first film, keeping Mr K pretty much out of sight for most of the film as he returns to torment Springwood teens through the dreams of an unborn baby. Desperate? Yes. Clever? Kinda.

The foetus in question belongs to Alice, who returns from surviving the last film along with boyfriend Dan and also her recovering alci dad. Now, I never really liked Alice in The Dream Master, she was all willowy and enfeebled, like some simpering Jane Austen chick who then went kick-ass. It was a by-the-book heroine that grated me. Thankfully, she’s a lot more resolute and likeable in The Dream Child.

No sooner than do she and Dan conceive, Freddy is able to enter the bub’s dreams and using Alice’s ability to suck other people into hers, eliminate her new circle of friends one by one. Or rather one, then two, then another one and no more.

A measly three victims are served up this time around, giving FK little to do and Alice and dwindling pals too much to do. Inexplicably, nobody seems to remember nor mentions the spate of deaths at Springwood High what, a year earlier? When Alice tries to convince her buddies of Freddy’s existence, they shut her down. Hello? Dead brother Rick? Kristen. Sheila. Debbie. Have they all developed amnesia?

A recycled subplot concerning Amanda Krueger and her lost remains is tossed in rather haphazardly (the producers admitted the end was not even written until the shoot was half over) and all manner of visual effects are wheeled in to try and divert the attention: Freddy as a chef who feeds one victim to death; cartoon super-Freddy; loads of gothic shit.

To be fair, the effects work – for its day – is excellent. One of the last films to make extensive use of claymation before the CGI dawn, The Dream Child at least puts effort into killing what few doomed teens there are. The MPAA, however, was not impressed and subsequently all grue scenes were cut back, rendering the film rather impotent on the gore stakes. Thus, it also became the lowest grossing entry, turning a decent profit but falling far short of the dizzy heights of the two former entries, which are arguably the best sequels.

Fortunately, they cut back on the comic one-liners as well – eventually going into overdrive in Freddy’s Dead two years later – to aid the reversion to Scary Fred Krueger. But it doesn’t work. By ’89 the brand was too ingrained in pop culture and no matter how off-screen you keep Englund, no matter if you bring back the finger-blades screeching along steel surfaces, he’s still the guy every other kid dresses up as at Halloween. Freddy fail.

Essentially, the rush-job that was the movie hurts it. Director Stephen Hopkins produced a good looking flick with no real surface issues but the drained ideas tank shows and is almost bone dry come the third act, which makes almost no sense at all. A couple more victims, more made out of the don’t fall asleep keystone that the whole series should pivot on might’ve drastically improved things but who can say?

But the black girl didn’t die – hurrah! Progress.

Blurbs-of-interest: Kelly Jo Minter later starred in Popcorn; Stephen Hopkins also directed Dangerous Game; Robert Englund can also be seen in Behind the Mask, Hatchet, Heartstopper, The Phantom of the Opera (1989) and Urban Legend; Whitby Herford was in Mikey.

Erotic dancers. Trannies. Razor psycho. Canada.

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AMERICAN NIGHTMARE

3 Stars  1981/87m

“Pray you never have one.”

Director: Don McBrearty / Writers: John Sheppard, John Gault & Steven Blake / Cast: Lawrence S. Day, Lora Staley, Tom Harvey, Neil Dainard, Michael Ironside, Lenore Zann, Larry Aubrey, Alexandra Paul, Mike Coperman, Claudia Udy, Page Fletcher.

Body Count: 6

Dire-logue: “Somebody tries to kill me, I get a little nervous.”

Good old Canada, making a film called American Nightmare. Who did they think they were fooling, eh? Well, me I guess but I was only 3 in 1981 so it wasn’t a difficult feat.

Anyway, this little known flick (produced by Prom Night directed Paul Lynch) has quite a lot going on for such a timid creature. Day is a pianist who goes looking for his missing (read: murdered) little sister in ‘the city’ after she left home a year earlier, became an erotic dancer-slash-hooker and, well, vanished.

Seems that a razor-wielding psycho has it in for the girls who dance at Club 2000. Nothing’s called Blah 2000 anymore, is it? Feels like we live so futuristically. High on the killer’s list is the beautiful Louise, who reluctantly joins forces with the out-of-towner, who more than proves he can take care of himself in the big bad city.

The real ‘American nightmare’ comes in the form of the tone; almost exclusively set in the sleazy world of pimps and pornography. The camera exploits its victims as society and, ultimately, the killer has – putting them on show for the voyeuristic pleasures of the slobbering men who come to the shows – and then brutally slaying them.

The film holds more than a hint of misogyny and homophobia to it as all the female characters are shown nude and the only male victim is a gay transvestite – dubbed the ‘degenerates’ of society. The only victims are the girls and the gay – not even the pimps and pervert motel owners fall victim to the razor.

Thankfully, once the mystery has agreeably unfolded, the ‘sleaze’ and ‘degeneration’ binds itself neatly to the so-thought upstanding members of the city who have deep involvement in the murders.

There’s an amusing scene where genre-regular Lenore Zann is stalked by the killer, who hisses her name – Tina – from the shadows, just as Freddy Krueger would do in a few years’ time.

A very interesting and unfortunately rare piece of horror with a cringetastically good twist and a cast of good soon-to-be’s, including future Baywatch hottie Alexandra Paul.

Blurbs-of-interest: Michael Ironside was also in Visiting Hours, Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II, Children of the Corn: Revelation, Fallen Angels and Reeker; Zann was also in Visiting Hours, Happy Birthday to Me, and PrettyKill. The 2000 movie of the same name is not a remake.

When wrong is right

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WRONG TURN

4.5 Stars  2003/18/81m

“It’s the last one you’ll ever make.”

Director: Rob Schmidt / Writer: Alan B. McElroy / Cast: Desmond Harrington, Eliza Dushku, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Jeremy Sisto, Lindy Booth, Kevin Zegers, Julian Richings, Ted Clark, Gary Robbins.

Body Count: 10

If you venture on to the IMDb message boards on the Wrong Turn page, there’s plenty of “this is the worst film ever ra ra ra…” declarations, which plague most slasher horror films on the site. Why people can’t distinguish between fact and their opinion is a continuing mystery as far as this is concerned. There’s no way one could see every film in existence to make a sound judgement.

Also, they’re twats. Because in the arena of be-forested body count films, Wrong Turn is fucking awesome.

A sort of inbred cousin of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre‘s antics mashed up with 70’s cannibal features into one of the best back to basics horror films of its era. What Wrong Turn does and why the idiots who continually dismiss it on the IMDb are stuck in a sort of perpetual motion twat-wheel that they can’t get out of (coooool!!) is to ignore comic relief, over-intellectualisation of the product and just tell the story of what happens when city folk are thrown together with admittedly ridiculous looking backwoods freaks.

After the requisite opening slaying of a couple of luckless rock climbers, we swoop in and meet Chris Flynn (Desmond Harrington) on his way through West Virignia to an interview, persumably for some medical post from his banter, when he is caught in tailbacks that thwart his tight deadline. He doubles back and finds a turn off and a map at ye olde ramshackle gas station (complete with snaggle-toothed hick for an attendant) that shows him Bear Mountain Road will serve as a good shortcut. This, as we might’ve guessed, will be the wrong turn from hell. Or to hell if we’re going to get pedantic about it.

Some way down the road, Chris rear-ends a stranded SUV belonging to five teens on a camping trip who’ve fallen foul of some barbed wire tied across the road. With both vehicles totalled, Chris and the kids hike off to find help, leaving a couple of their friends to babysit the cars and, quite quickly, get murdered by whomever lives in them thar woods.

Lunch is up

Their friends, perky to-be-weds Carly and Scott and evident final girl Jessie (the lovely Dushku) and Chris come upon a shack-of-a-house in a clearing and go inside to look for a phone but find jars of questionable meat-products, pots full of car keys and other belongings and a body in the bathtub but before they can flee, the inhabitants return with their vehicles in tow and, as the group hide, flop a dead friend on the table and saw off her leg for lunch.

Things take a turn for the (even) worse when the group are caught creeping away and madmen give chase, which is essentially what the rest of Wrong Turn is. The simplicity of the opus makes for easy viewing (unless you’re squeamish) and a bunch of sequences that aren’t altogether original play out nicely and have you rooting for the kids – surprisingly all of them – to either get the fuck outta the woods or fight back with gusto. Working from a what-would-you-do perspective, the group don’t make too many idiotic decisions that get them killed. They try to hide and create diversions that don’t go to plan but it just seems like luck ain’t on their side.

While it’s content is pretty inconceivable, there’s an awesome scene where the fleeing protagonists come upon a clearing chocka with discarded vehicles, most of which have blood splattered all over them and recognisable belongings spilling out of them; climbing ropes, picnic hampers, shoes, sunglasses, a child’s doll. It’s jarring and upsetting, far more than most slasher flicks manage to be because they trade only in offing the kind of hateful twats that say “worst movie ever” and nobody in the audience cares. But the belongings found in the Wrong Turn parking lot of death are everyday things; luggage of the missing. And it is sad.

The characters gasp and question how the psychos been getting away with it for so long? Yeah, it’s a bit dumb to think so many families could disappear in one region and nobody fly a chopper over and spot a massive clearing full of cars! Hey-ho.

Later on there’s a great tree-top cat and mouse game and then finally the last ones standing – pretty damn obvious from the moment it begins and the DVD cover – get to dish up some sensational revenge. The scene is sadly a bit short lived as I was almost yelling for them to hit, punch, kick, poke, scratch harder first time I saw it, but the city people channel enough primal inner guts to let the cannibals have it and walk away largely intact.

Wrong Turn is short, punchy and to the point. No legacy and no pretence, it’s a rare ‘honest’ production that surfaced the same year as the suspiciously similar Texas Chainsaw remake. If I had to find fault, it’d be the excesses taken with the trio of inbreds; their malformations taken to the extreme that it becomes a bit of a joke, which was pushed to new levels of stupidity in the sequels. Nevertheless, it’s fictional – who cares? Suspend your disbelief and cynical “that would never happen” mindset and get into it. It rocks.

Blurbs-of-interest: All three cannibals have been in slasher movies before – Julian Richings was the creepy caretaker of Urban Legend; Ted Clark was the gorky newscaster-frat in Happy Hell Night; and Garry Robbins was the loon in Humongous. Lindy Booth was in Cry_Wolf and American Psycho II; Jeremy Sisto was in May; Kevin Zegers was in The Hollow. Writer McElroy earlier scripted Halloween 4 and the Wrong Turn reboot in 2021.

Dire-logue’s Greatest Hits Volume 5: Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby – Part II

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It’s been a while since we “celebrated” the sonically idiotic verbal diarrhoea of the common-or-garden slasher movie character.

As expected, teens talk a lot about sex, so continuing on from our last instalment, here’s more of their inspired insights into the carnal world…

BLACK SERENADE (2001): “It was a question of survival: my dick or my life.”

BLEED (2002): “You wanna see tits? Well here they are and fuck you!”

DARK WALKER (2003): “You know they call orgasms ‘little deaths’… I want a little death tonight.”

FRIDAY THE 13TH (2009): “I have a better shot of fucking a penguin than that girl.”

HONEYMOON HORROR (1981): “It’s the biggest piece of meat I’ve ever seen!”

LOVERS LANE (1999): “You are gonna fuck me right now or I’m gonna kill your faggot ass!”

MONSTER MAN (2003): “‘Fucking virgin’? Isn’t that an oxymoron?”

NAIL GUN MASSACRE (1985): “I’m as horny as a rooster in a Chinese henhouse!”

A NIGHT TO DISMEMBER (1983): “Vicki felt as though someone faceless was making love to her in bright flashing colours that were changing from one second to the next.”

SCAR (2007): “Hey altar boy! Come up here and take my virginity – I’m not graduating with it!”

SLAUGHTER HOTEL (1971): “Your desire to make love is obsessive; compulsive. Go and take a shower.”

THE TOYBOX (2007): “I just want someone to notice my breasts.”

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