Amount of sense? Nun.

nunTHE NUN

2 Stars  2005/15/102m

“Not all water is holy…”

Director: Luis de la Madrid / Writers: Jaume Balaguero & Manu Diaz / Cast: Anita Briem, Belen Blanco, Manu Fullola, Alistair Freeland, Cristina Piaget, Paulina Galvez, Natalia Dicenta, Oriana Bonet, Tete Delgado, Lola Marcelli.

Body Count: 8

Dire-logue: “So let me get this straight: are you trying to tell me that all this is some sort of I Know What You Did Eighteen Summers Ago or something?”


Some filmmakers must want to tear their own ears off with frustration when studio executives meddle with their creativity. In some cases it might make the film better, but in others it’s sure to render the production a lost cause. Such is the case of The Nun, a handsome looking Spanglish production, which, for 95 of it’s 102 minutes is an interesting, kinda creepy little supernatural slasher – and then comes that twist.

nun1Six naughty Catholic school girls accidentally murder the sadistic Sister Ursula after she goes too far abusing one of them. Eighteen years later, the grown women are falling victim to her ghost, who manifests from water, usually from overflowing baths or sinks. When young Eve witnesses the death of her mother by the nun and then the outcome of another tragic ‘accident’, she agrees to tag along to Spain with her friends Julia and Joel and pick up where her mom left off, meeting the other surviving girls to figure out why they started dying… Eve gets on the trail with her pals and a sexy young wannabe-priest and they all end up at the condemned convent with the final two women in a bid to put an end to spectre-nun for good.

The first third of The Nun is a professional looking mix of Darkness Falls and Final Destination with a sprinkling of J-horror conventions, showing off some good demises and competent CGI work. However, once the action shifts to Spain (despite the fact it’s all evidently been shot there) and the main characters make their way to the old school, things start to drag… There’s a mini-twist about the deaths reflecting those of the girls’ patron saints and if things had ended with the destruction of the nun all would be well.

nun2But no.

The twist that is ‘suddenly’ revealed is so crap and reveals so many glaring inconsistencies that you could fly a Boeing 747 through the plot holes, absolutely shattering what credence the film had amassed unto this point. Given the explanation provided, what they propose to be the truth could not have even happened at all. It will make you want to die your own grisly death because it sucks. Sucks, sucks, sucks!

You want to know? Seriously? OK…

S P O I L A G E

There is no nun, Eve is the killer. So explains a miraculously clued-in Joel at the end, a “traumatic event” made her the killer, i.e. her mom’s death, but wait – according to earlier dialogue, mom was the second victim as the first burned to death in London a few days earlier. Did Eve fly to London and kill her then? If so, she also has the power to walk through walls and manages to oversee the elevator death before she even arrives at the hotel! It’s also apparently possible to impale oneself with a speargun.

Honestly, did they think everyone watching had Alzheimers?

“Everybody die not long time.”

record

RECORD

2.5 Stars  2000/94m

Directors: Gi-hun Kim & Jong-seok Kim /Writer: Chang-hak Han / Cast: Eun-hye Pak, Seong-min Kang, Dal Bae, Chae-young Han, Min Jung, Jae-hwan Ahn, Mayu Loh, Jun-Hyeong Bae.

Body Count: 11


Korea might not have made as big a mark on the horror genre as Japan in recent years but they did discharge this fitfully amusing carbon copy of I Know What You Did Last Summer

Two high school girls invite shy nerd Sung-mook to a wooded cabin one of their parents’ owns and the trio are attacked by three masked assailants armed with a knife and a camcorder. They beat the girls and set upon poor Sung-mook, eventually stabbing him to death on the bed and remove their masks to reveal themselves as the girls’ school friends, making a little horror flick with the intention of selling it (!). Stunned to realise that the knife they used wasn’t fake, the group panic and decide to burn and bury the corpse, only for Sung-mook to leap from his grave in flames and tumble over a cliff edge!

One year later, the gang find themselves stalked by a weirdo in an inconspicuous bright orange suit, who makes it clear he intends to level the score with them. Is it Sung-mook back from the dead? His creepy goth sister? A dressy Hollywood producer anxious to get his mits on the boys’ film? Good girl Hui-jung attempts to put together a plan to trap and unmask the killer before he gets to her first – though why isn’t clear as she wasn’t even involved in the prank.

There’s a fair amount of stalkery in Record: the killer somehow manages to taunt the group by feeding their tape into the TV broadcast at a road stop and skulks the corridors of their old school in the cat-and-mouse finale. Incoherent at best, some of the translations didn’t make total sense to me:

  • “Everybody die not long time.”
  • “You are a not get. I have found the path to outcome you.”
  • “You are nothing but a hell kite!”

Maybe that’s it… He’s an orange kite from hell that flies up to avenge poor dead Sung-mook. Cooool…

Record is worth seeing not only for the train wreck that is its subtitles but also to see just how influential American culture and horror cliches are on Eastern horror before the whole situation flip reversed for Ring.

Blurb-of-interest: the homeland title is Zzikhimyeon jukneunda – try asking for it at HMV.

Bad cop bad cop

psychocopPSYCHO COP

2 Stars  1989/18/84m

“He always gets his man… And everyone else.”

Director / Writer: Wallace Potts / Cast: Bobby Ray Shafter, Jeff Qualle, Palmer Lee Todd, Greg Joujon-Roche, Linda West, Cynthia Guyer, Dan Campbell.

Body Count: 10

Dire-logue: “Quit being so paranoid – you sound like one of the girls.”


I saw Psycho Cop Returns before its source material and therefore wasn’t expecting miracles. Sometimes it’s better to have low expectations… Like when you’re going to the airport and dread the death march that is boarding your flight. That way, when it doesn’t turn out to be quite so bad, you can skip off at the other end feeling chipper.

By the time Psycho Cop came about in 1989, such slasher flicks were already garnishing themselves with a sort of proto-Scream awareness. They were going for laughs over genuine scares and while a lot suck donkey dick, some are good for a once-in-a-while viewing (Dr Giggles comes to mind). Psycho Cop just about squeezes itself into this category by totally not taking itself seriously. I mean, the title alone sounds like a parody of Maniac Cop, which sounded like a spoof of RoboCop and so on till we all die from laughing too much.

In the film, another convertible load of teens game for “one hell of a weekend” meet their maker thanks to 6’4″ Satanic loon copper Joe Vickers (Shafer), who has been missing from his precinct and is suspected of a murder. That’s it for plot: the first hour is made up entirely of the cheery chap stalking his opaque intended victims, who spurt lines like: “who’s out there? Answer me!” and, when confronted by the axe-toting killer, one victim gasps; “it can’t be!” as if Psycho Cop is her estranged uncle. Elsewhere, a girl looking for her hairbrush concludes it’s somehow made its way to the woods of its own volition…

‘Tis no surprise that psycho cop manages to do away with the dunderheads until the obligatory sensitive (and therefore smarter, but less fun to watch than their remedial friends) kids have to duke it out with him. Aiding it’s general sense of tolerable-ness, Psycho Cop is well put together, has a couple of hair-raising moments and even some of Vickers’ Freddy-lite one-liners bring a wry smile every now and then. One for you lovers of seemingly deliberately bad horror and the killer cop sub-sub-genre.

Singular blurb-of-interest: Bobby Shafer returned to the role for the as-good/bad 1992 sequel.

Return to sender

offeringsOFFERINGS

1.5 Stars  1988/18/94m

“Remember him before he dismembers you.”

Director / Writer: Christopher Reynolds / Cast: Loretta Leigh Bowman, Elizabeth Greene, G. Michael Smith, Jerry Brewer, Richard A. Buswell, Tobe Sexton, Patrick H. Berry, J. Max Burnett, Rayette Potts, Heather Scott.

Body Count: 10

Dire-logue: “How come people in these horror movies do such stupid things?”


As the score tinkers along like somebody held up a tape recording of the theme from The Fog and hoped for the best, while the characters utter inaudible dialogue and we wonder if John Carpenter would sue over it, you might ask yourself just why Offerings was ever made? It’s not as if we haven’t encountered ye olde asylum-escapee-goes-after-group-of-kids schtick before. Well, there’s a dinky hook to this one. Y’see, the killer, obese, slightly deformed remmy John Radley, sends selected body parts from each victim to heroine Gretchen because she stood up for him to the nasty kids X years earlier when they tormented him until he fell down a well!

The grown up kids are now Gretchen’s pals and provide John with his quarry as they die by rope, vice and, uh, flashlight. So much if pilfered from Halloween that even John’s shrink is tailing him around the small township in a poor cover version of Doc Loomis. And why is Gretchen friends with the horrible kids? Is she that dumb? There’re a couple of decent giggles as the script tries to poke fun at itself and the scene where one guy is being hanged outside the lounge window while his folks are entranced by the TV is golden, as is the vice-death guy who tries to ‘do ghetto’ and ponders aloud in the street why girls only want him for his brain while clasping his package. In spite of these offerings, Offerings doesn’t offer up much else.

July Face-off: ‘Comedy’ porno slasher vs. ‘comedy’ porno slasher

Long ago, before I’d polluted my delicate mindset with the body count details of 496 slasher films, I was watching Caroline in the City, remember that? There was a scene I’ve always remembered where Caroline’s maneater gal-pal went to the video store where she encountered Matthew Perry in his Chandler persona. He made a big deal out of the store not having The Piano and said to her, as some kinda lame line, that he didn’t like all the guy movies with sex and violence and then queried maneater girl as to what she was renting. ‘Sorority House Massacre II,’ he reads and the scene ends in some other way I’ve now forgotten.

I always thought they’d made up that movie title. But no, when I got my first film almanac, there it was in print, together with its entirely unrelated predecessor. That book was a 1997 guide to video (them were the days) and twelve years have elapsed between the realisation that the film is, in fact, real and me seeing it.

CONTESTANT ONE

shm2

1 Stars  1990/77m

“It’s cleavage vs. cleavers and the result is Delta Delta Deadly!”

A.k.a. Night Frenzy; Nighty Nightmare

Director: Jim Wynorski / Writers: James B. Rogers & Bob Sheridan / Cast: Robyn Harris, Melissa Moore, Stacia Zhivago, Michelle Verran, Dana Bentley, Jurgen Baum, Karen Chorak, Bridget Carney, Peter Spellos.

Body Count: 5

Dire-logue: “Oh my God, our clothes! They’re still upstairs!”


Five “teenage” girls purchase ‘the old Hockstatter place’ for their new sorority house and find out that the patriarch of the family murdered his wife and daughters there, which we are shown through flashbacks, which are actually murder sequences from The Slumber Party Massacre! The girls disrobe, have showers, we see all of them naked and then, one ill-advised seance later, one of them is possessed by the spirit of Clive Hockstatter and begins hooking the others to death. The girls, in their panic, believe the killer to be freaky neighbour Orville Ketchum, who intercedes, takes a lot of damage from knives, bullets and what have you but still survives.

CONTESTANT TWO

hardtodie21 Stars  1990/77m

A.k.a. Tower of Terror

Director: Jim Wynorski / Writers: Mark McGee & James B. Rogers / Cast: Robyn Harris, Lindsay Taylor, Debra Dare, Melissa Moore, Bridget Carney, Peter Spellos, Forrest J. Ackerman, Don Key.

Body Count: 7

Dire-logue: “I just wanna get my clothes on and get the hell out of here!”


Five young agency employees are sent to take inventory of Acme Lingerie’s stock in an office tower. When a parcel containing a strange box is mistakenly delivered to them, it unleashes the Hockstatter spirit, which takes control of one of them and the inevitable occurs. The girls find an arsenal of firearms in the tower and begin shooting the place up. In their panic, they believe the killer to be freaky janitor Orville Ketchum, who takes a lot of damage from crossfire but still survives.

OK, so how on earth do you decide which is the better film out of two films that are pretty much photocopies of one another, but, you know, when someone copies the copy over again it looks worse and worse… Arguably, there’s not much wrong with the production values in either. As they hail from the Roger Corman library, both take footage from The Slumber Party Massacre for their own foul use and have bad intercut footage of grainy lightning.

Quite who these films are aimed at is a mystery: in both, virtually all female characters appear – at the very least – topless, with gratuitous shower scenes and odd squidgy-rubber sound effects as they soap themselves. Nudity and slasher flicks are like conjoined twins and that’s fine so long as the filmmakers remember they’re supposed to be producing a horror film and don’t keep forcing the nude scenes, they should appear incidental like in the good ol’ days. 77 minutes of tits, rubbish gore effects and fucking Orville Ketchum (…it just isn’t funny) makes for a tedious experience in both cases. I think Sorority might have been slightly more tolerable and it was nice to see northern lass Harris as the final girl (if one could call her character such) in both films, still, both were crap I never want to have to sit through again.

WINNER: NEITHER!

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