Tag Archives: after they were famous

Rubbish films that don’t deserve long reviews

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…And no screencaps either, God damn it! They suck, so adding what I believe to be ‘good shots’ from any of them might only pique your interest. And then you’ll go and watch them, realise I was right all along and come back yelling at me.

We’re going in order of what I think looks best.

MASK OF MURDER

1.5 Stars 1985/18/84m

“Who is innocent… Who is guilty… Who is safe… Who is next…?”

Director: Arne Mattson / Writer: Volodia Semitjov / Cast: Rod Taylor, Christopher Lee, Valerie Perrine, Sam Cook, Terrence Hardiman, Frank Brennan.

Body Count: 7

Look at those big-hitters: Christopher Lee! Rod Taylor! The guy who played The Demon Headmaster in The Demon Headmaster!

Lee reportedly turned down the role of Doc Loomis in Halloween and was perhaps therefore under the illusion that taking a clone of that role for this Scando-Canadian production might bathe that wound. How they sucked Taylor in is a mystery. Maybe Lee brought him in. Maybe Lee was already stuck like his legs were in a combine harvester and he held on to Taylor until both were dragged to their deaths career nadirs.

They and Sam Cook are cops in a small Canadian town where a loon in a shitty cotton mask is slicing the throats of young women. They find him and shoot him dead but only a few days later copycat killings begin – but whoooo could it beeeee?

Trouble is, MoM can’t make up its mind over being a slasher film or a cop film. The victims are presented as non-speaking plebs or women who ‘had it coming’ and there’s no heroine to speak of, no chase scenes, nada. We do get to see some frontal male nudity (gasp!) and there’s a boring subplot about an affair going on between one of the cops and the wife of the other one who isn’t Christopher Lee, because he’s in hospital for most of it.

The obnoxious twist ending is smug as can be but it doesn’t elevate this above being a bad combo meal of seasoned professionals surrounded by rank amateurs that has the audacity to rip off the far superior He Knows You’re Alone.

Blurbs-of-shame: Lee was in Sleepy Hollow and the even worse Funny Man.

* * *

TABOO

2002/15/77m  1 Stars

“Would you ever…?”

Director: Max Makowski / Writer: Gary Fisher / Cast: January Jones, Nick Stahl, Amber Benson, Eddie Kaye Thomas, Lori Heuring, Derek Hamilton.

Body Count: 6

Six egotistical Cruel Intentions-type college brats gather at a remote mansion on New Year’s Eve where they engage in a polite game of Taboo, which entails writing answers to some risque questions like Would you have sex with a minor? Would you have sex for money? blah blah blah…

At midnight, a package containing five cards arrives, labelled Prostitute, Homosexual, Infidel, Rapist and Hypocrite (ooh, that one’s gonna sting!) Lo and behold, bodies start stacking up, each found with the appropriate card.

However, all of this happens too early to fool us and it’s all revealed to be a gag at the expense of Jones, the only one not to get a card and has apparently been blackmailing the others. When they seemingly forgive her and move on, Hypocrite flips, takes a shotgun and begins offing the others. Told you it was gonna sting.

With the cheater-weapon in play, Taboo is a very boring stalk n’ shoot with next to no grue and it ends with an entirely dull poison murder-suicide pact thing. But at least they’re all dead.

Buffy alumni Amber Benson is endearing as the ever-wrecked Piper but she truly deserves better exposure than this crap, which fails to impress on any scale, becoming taboo itself for reasons of taste.

Blurb-of-shame: Derek Hamilton was Eddie in Ripper: Letter from Hell.

* * *

BLEED

1.5 Stars  2002/18/82m

“Join the club.”

Directors: Devin Hamilton & Dennis Peterson / Writer: Devin Hamilton / Cast: Debbie Rochon, Allen Nabors, Danny Wolske, Orly Tepper, Laura Nativo, Ronnie Gene Blevins, Julie Strain, Brinke Stevens.

Body Count: 9

Dire-logue: “You wanna see tits? Well here they are and fuck you!”

Another post-Screamie with all the budget of a shopping trip to Aldi that has lonely new girl in LA Maddy (Rochon) seduced by her boss and then inducted into his snobby circle of friends who fool her into thinking they’re all part of The Murder Club and have each offed a stranger to surf the adrenalin rush.

Poor naive Maddy takes it the wrong way and kills a woman she has a ruckus with. The others regroup and decide what they should do but by then the white-masked psycho who, until now, has been chopping up various extras starts doing away with them in their homes.

Is it Maddy? After all her mom (Brinke in a flashback) and dad chucked her out years earlier? No. It’s someone else.

The trouble with Bleed is that it’s an out and out retread filmed almost entirely in back yards and apartments with dialogue exchanges used to staple the plot holes together; for instance, Maddy goes on one date with her boss and is invited to a party the next day where a group of complete strangers decide to let her in on their “big secret!”

In spite of some production polish and the ever-lovely Rochon, Bleed sucks out more tolerance than claret.

Blurbs-of-shame: Rochon has also been in American Nightmare, Blood Relic, Final Examination and Head Cheerleader, Dead Cheerleader; Julie Strain was in Psycho Cop Returns.

* * *

SMALL TOWN FOLK

2007/15/87m  1 Stars

“Welcome to Grockleton.”

Director: Peter Stanley-Ward / Writers: Natalie Conway & Peter Stanley-Ward / Cast: Greg Martin, Chris R. Wright, Simon Stanley-Ward, Hannah Flint, Dan Palmer, Jon Nicholas, James Ford, Sophie Rundle, Tamaryn Payne, Warwick Davis.

Body Count: 16

Cheap shows for pre-schoolers often include effects work that looks like a crayon drawing has been scanned into a Mac and then actors are superimposed over the top of it. Fine. Baby Susie isn’t going to get angry with crap production values at her age. But in a horror film…? Just… No.

Had it not taken four years to create and been funded by the cast and crew, this would unquestionably be a native of half-star city.

Unexplained men near the town of Grockleton in the New Forest kidnap women to procreate ‘their kind’ and murder any men who get in the way. Enter a married couple “on an adventure” and some local teens fooling around in the woods and… and… and fuck it, I don’t know what was going on.

As it was originally intended to be a short, there just ain’t enough her to justify history’s longest 87 minutes. There are more than half a dozen killers running around cracking misfired jokes, tormenting Grockles (non-locals) and talking in a bizarre thespian sub-language.

I’d wager 95% of the budget went on securing the three-minute Warwick Davis cameo that bookends the story. Britain’s Got Talent – yeah? Where is it when you need it?

Blurb-of-shame: Dan Palmer was in the marginally more amusing Freak Out.

* * *

URBAN MASSACRE

1.5 Stars  2002/15/84m

“A real life horror.”

Director: Dale Resteghini / Writers: Dale Resteghini & Carl Washington / Cast: Demetrius Gibbs, Erin O’Donnell, Badia Stewart, Ross Filler, Leroy Jones, Rosario M. Gancitano, Wayne Mogel, G-Flex.

Body Count: 9

In the 80’s, mucho slasher filmage associated itself with hair metal and, in several examples, featured doomed rock bands pitted against a loon with a blade. So time (sadly) moves on and thus this millennial slasher centres around the fortunes of growing rap quintet The Supernatchrals, who find various members of their entourage are being knocked off by a maniac dressed as a clown – as they always seem to be in urban bodycount pics.

For a shot-on-video feature, Urban Massacre doesn’t look bad but, unless you’re well versed in rap and hip-hop (safe to say I’m not), much of the dialogue – largely consisting of ‘fuck you’, ‘fuck him’, ‘fuck that’ – will be lost on you.

While intermittent rap numbers and “statements” on the companion culture to downright racism are testing, at the end the feisty fivesome (three guys, two gals) literally have the killer pinned down, stop, look at the camera and tell the audience they will not unmask him as we will have to wait for ‘Part Two’.

FUCK THAT.

Given this 11th hour atrocity – especially when the pre-credits practically spelt out the identity and motive – all points gained immediately return to zero. It’s insulting and hypocritical, especially as the characters have spent eighty minutes whining about racial injustice and forcing their shit brand of “music” on us, yet they’ve seen fit to halt the film completely and cut back to another cruddy rap number.

For slasher-but-not-rap fans (me), the chubby white MC in the group occasionally spouts pointless horror movie trivia but everything else is about as memorable – and credible – as Vanilla Ice’s last album.

Puerile / Perfect

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CUT

4 Stars  2000/18/79m

“Warning: movies can kill.”

Director: Kimble Rendall / Writer: Dave Warner / Cast: Molly Ringwald, Jessica Napier, Geoff Revell, Sarah Kants, Kylie Minogue, Frank Roberts, Simon Bossell, Stephen Curry, Cathy Adamek, Matt Russell, Erika Walters, Sam Lewis, Steve Greig.

Body Count: 15

Dire-logue: “There is a force at work here… It is not human and it is unspeakably evil. You must destroy that film at once – or you will all die!”

If the worldwide appeal of Scream could ever be doubted, then look no further than this Australian reactive export. Actually, Australia is quite far to go to look.

Self-referentiality, sharp dialogue and comic reflections on the genre abound, but Cut is a wildly misunderstood and consequently vastly underrated film. I had the privelege of seeing it at FrightFest, which turned out to really be a stroke of luck as, to date, it has only ever received a very limited rental release on VHS on these shores. Region 1 DVD it is, then!

Things begin on the set of 80’s slasher film Hot Blooded, where the kill scene of Molly Ringwald’s character’s character is fucked up by the stuntman/actor playing the killer – Scarman – forgets to rip off her blouse before slashing her throat, inducing an explosive outburst of anger from highly-strung lady director Hilary Jacobs, played by the ever-lovely ‘smiley’ Kylie Minogue (not smiling much here, though).

Humiliated by her diatribe in front of the crew, stuntman Brad (who sports a pair of nice, meaty sideburns) kills her and cuts out her tongue before Ringwald’s Vanessa shows up and manages to introduce him to the business end of his modified shears, effectively shutting down production on the film altogether.

For 12 years.

A group of film students with a final assignment to deliver bug their teacher – who was a runner on Hot Blooded – about finishing the movie, which is rumoured to carry a curse that killed the original producer and a director who attempted to complete it some years earlier. Defying their professor, they purchase the rights and get an investment from the producer’s widow, doing enough to tempt Vanessa Turnbill back down under to star in it.

Of course, you can’t keep a good curse down and shortly after the surviving footage is screened, people start to die. Could the professor still be scarred by damaging memories? Or has the interim decade turned Vanessa into a homicidal Hollywood hacker?

Once the group of students are out of the city and on location, just about everybody becomes a plausible suspect, with suspicious close ups of ambiguous facial expressions or questionable utterances and there’s always a few absentees when a murder occurs. Although one would think that Bobby, playing the killer, is the most likely candidate if for nothing more than being the long lost twin of Billy Loomis:

bobby-billy2The outcome of the ‘mystery’ is that there is no mystery killer at all. Cut‘s killer is Scarman himself, as Professor Lossman attempts to explain, the curse is the product of the creative energy put into the film itself – created by belief and emphasized by the rantings of a requisite old person (see Direlogue). Thankfully, such a rubbish resolution is met with perfect sarcasm from Ringwald: “Believe me, there was no creative energy put into that piece of shit!”

This is where Cut likely divides the audience. On one hand it’s a cheat, leading you on a merry game of who’s the killer? only for none of that to count, fobbing us off with a frankly dreadful explanation. As Hot Blooded was a late 80’s film, so the whatthefuck ending of Cut suits that era down to the ground: Shocker anyone? The later, increasingly ridiculous Elm Street films? Bad Dreams? The Horror Show? Dreamaniac?

The tail end of the slasher genre was a dumping ground of stupid ideas such as this: Killing from beyond the grave or through appliances, possession, dreamscapes and the like… It usually sucks, but the forces behind Cut make the right move of fusing their dumbass idea with the all-knowing attitude of Scream, resulting in a great fun flick – but probably only if you view it in the knowledge that it’s sort of deliberately rubbish.

Even outside of the divisive finale, there’s some good stuff in the film and it’s liberally bloody with a high bodycount for a sub-80 minute (PAL timing, people!) production. Jessica Napier is an effective stand in for Neve Campbell as the ambitious young directorette with a couple of secrets and Sarah Kants impresses as the producer with a crush on the former. Ringwald plays with her bratty has-been persona with relish and most of the meat-on-legs backgrounders do enough to elevate themselves from non-dimensional stabbing objects.

Cut wasn’t a particularly lucrative film, scuppering any hope of a pitched sequel with a killer robot (I think, I saw some artwork for it years ago) and will probably go down as one of the many international attempts to duplicate Scream‘s formula, in spite of the fact that it’s better than most of the contemporary efforts. Much was made of Kylie’s involvement in the “Drew Barrymore role,” which coincided with her commercial comeback but considering she appears rather fleetingly, it was a bit of a stretch to try and pivot the marketing on her presence. This is one for genre fans

Blurb-of-interest: Molly Ringwald was in Office Killer.

Where are Brennan & Booth when you need them?

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BONES

 3 Stars  2001/18/93m

“This Dogg’s got a bone to pick.”

Director: Ernest Dickerson / Writers: Adam Simon & Tim Metcalfe / Cast: Snoop Dogg, Pam Grier, Michael T. Weiss, Bianca Lawson, Khalil Kain, Clifton Powell, Ricky Harris, Sean Amsing, Merwin Mondesir, Katharine Isabelle, Ronald Selmour, Erin Wright.

Body Count: 13

A sort of Blaxploitation reworking of themes from A Nightmare on Elm Street (and also from New Line, no less) in which a group of ambitious siblings purchase creepy gothic house in a bad neighbourhood where they plan to open a nightclub. The house contains a legend of its own as the murder and burial place of 70’s big cheese Jimmy Bones, who was shot and shanked by a group of drug pushers with whom Jimmy refused to play ball with.

His skeleton is uncovered and, post dog-mauling and rain of maggots, he sets about taking revenge on his killers, who have taken the once progressive berg and turned it into a rotting ghetto.

With almost a full hour before Bones rises from the grave, there’s mucho suspicious padding and hard to follow characters (most of whom die) before things go totally Krueger-ville when the final few parties involved are sucked into a parallel dimension to duke it out with help from Bones’ psychic ex-beau (Grier in a gruesome green all-in-one for the finale) and his unknowing daughter, Cynthia (Buffy alumnus Lawson).

More than anything, Bones stands out from the pack by sgiting the usual white middle-class setting (which is duly referenced a la Jada Pinkett’s ‘exclusion’ rant at the beginning of Scream 2) to the nightmarish streets of a decaying urban hellhole where drugs and guns are plentiful and people have little to lose. However, the out of place middle class brothers and their whiter-than-white sister adequately paint a picture of hope through determination that tries to pass itself off as a subtextual undercurrent…

Not as annoying as most other rapper-in-a-horror-film efforts, listen out for the funny “KFC is run by the KKK” speech.

Blurb-of-interest: Katharine Isabelle was Gibb in Freddy vs Jason and was also in See No Evil 2 and Ginger Snaps (and maybe the sequels, I’ve only seen the first one).

“Mmm, Smeat!”

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CHILDREN OF THE CORN V: FIELDS OF TERROR

3 Stars  1998/18/80m

“In a deserted town the terror continues!”

Director/Writer: Ethan Wiley / Cast: Stacy Galina, Alexis Arquette, Greg Vaughan, Eva Mendez, David Carradine, Fred Williamson, Adam Wylie, Ahmet Zappa, Angela Jones, Dave Buzzotta, Aaron Jackson, Kane Hodder.

Body Count: 18

My favourite Corn sequel from the indefatigable series (presently gearing up for an 8th instalment) is stupid, cheesy and has almost no connection to the previous films outside of horrible children, corn, and the ever-invisible He Who Walks Behind the Rows.

This time, a group of college kids drive out into the boondocks to scatter the ashes of a recently cremated friend, who apparently died bungee jumping!? When they crash their car, a group of mouthy little brats emerge from the cornfield to tell them, in no uncertain terms, to fuck off – which is rich coming from them considering they slaughtered a couple of the group who were driving ahead of the others just hours earlier.

After meeting Kane Hodder and spending the night in a seemingly abandoned farmhouse, dreary heroine Alison realises that her runaway brother is actually part of this very sect!!!

Un-spooked by this coincidence, she elects to stick around and try to rescue her bro, prompting the others to stay too and get mauled by the delinquents: star-to-be Eva Mendez reads approximately one page of the cult’s anti-adult bible and decides to join them, willingly throwing herself into a fiery silo. Others are impaled, sickled, slashed with machetes or blow themselves up, taking some of the murderous moppets with them until only sensible-haired Alison remains to take on the uber-obnoxious child leader, who is in need of Supernanny, big time.

Fields of Terror, like the previous and subsequent instalments, makes little sense, adopting a scattergun approach of cult-cum-slasher movie antics: it’s liberally bloody and occasionally brutal and somehow roped David Carradine into playing the adult leader of the sect. There’s some zesty photographic setups but the flames fizzle out with another boring finale and CG-tastic last second gasp moment.

If you can ignore just how remedial all of this is and don’t mind chowing down a big bowl of obvious, Corn V is an entertaining 80 minutes with comfortably predictable scenarios and quite a likeable cast, peppered with familiar faces – even if most of them clearly look like they don’t want to be there.

Blurbs-of-interest: Eva Mendez/s returned to the genre a couple of years later in Urban Legends: Final Cut; Adam Wylie was in Return to Sleepaway Camp; Alexis Arquette was in Bride of Chucky; aside from playing Jason four times, Kane Hodder has appeared in Behind the Mask, Hatchet and all of its sequels; David Carradine was in Fall Down Dead and Detention (2010).

Stock Background Characters 101: Black Girl with Attitude

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In this feature, we examine the lesser beings of the slasher movie realm, which, if you’re making your own slasher film, could provide a good cast roster for you.

No killer or final girl profiles here, this is a celebration of those underlings who made the most of their fleeting flirtation with stardom. And usually died.

Today we salute… BLACK GIRL WITH ATTITUDE

Overview: BGA – black girl with attitude – is the character, often close to the heroine, who provides sassy insights into the goings on in the world created for the movie, commenting on the situation and offering advice. Yet, in a cruel twist of fate, despite usually being right, BGA rarely survives. It was my BFF Grace – who once auditioned for a role called ‘Black girl with attitude’ for Ripper 2 – who pointed out that the black girl’s boyfriend has to be darker than she is. She can’t date a white guy, interracial romances are yet to reach the shores of the slasher movie realm.

She is sometimes even played by a pop or R n’ B singer, probably under the illusion that she’d be allowed to beat the crap out of the killer before “script changes” necessitated her death instead.

Linguistic Snapshot: “Girl! Did you see the way that guy was lookin’ at chu? Mmm hmm, you need to get yo white ass on that befaw this psycho killer comes-a-callin’, girl.” (clicks fingers and bobs head left and right)

Styling: Because slasher films are plain lazy, BGA varies only very minimally from film to film. She’s into her looks, so hair and make up will be immaculate. She is almost always called something beginning with K: Keisha, Kia, Kally, Kenda and sometimes Tameka, LaShonda, Quantinisha. Uh, and Maureen in Scream 2.

Hallmarks: Black girl is usually the heroine’s best friend, but occasionally a total bitch. Sorry, bee-yatch. However, she is often the one who first announces that everyone should just get the hell outta dodge before they end up chopped, but the white people vote to stay “in case Susan is alive” and thus BGA’s cards become marked.

Downfall: Usually an inflated sense of self-defence agility is what bests our girl here, she either tries to talk the killer away (Kia in Freddy vs Jason) or her own don’t-shit-me outlook fools her into thinking she’s not in any danger anyway until it’s too late (see Monica in The Clown at Midnight; Maureen in Scream 2).

Genesis: Black characters rarely appeared in the earliest slasher films and, when they did, were often marginalised to early victims, hence the birth of the “black guy always dies first” cliche…  Although excluding films with all black casts and Elm Street 4, I can’t think of a film where this actually applies.

Demi in Sleepaway Camp II packed a little bit of ‘tude but it was in the late 90s that BGA became a popular fixture, Brandy’s turn as Karla (with a K!) in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer being a role that ticked all the boxes but miraculously allowed her to survive!

Elsewhere, there was the nasty “oh no you di’uhnt” girl from The Curse of El Charro; the girls of ‘The Crew’ who OD’d on sass in 7eventy 5ive; the heroine’s doomed best friend, Lisa, in the dismal Prom Night remake; mountain of attitude Bella in Return to Sleepaway Camp and the particularly irritating Kimmy in Somebody Help Me, who wore the ‘annoying girl’ shoes perfectly and was allowed to survive!

Legacy: I, for one, await the day that we get a black girl without attitude who not only saves the day, but also kicks the killer’s ass in the process. Even in the all black cast productions, the girls are usually relegated to the damsel in distress part. And Jen from Camp Daze doesn’t count as she was an obnoxious cow.

Until that day (and it surely must happen soon?) it looks like we’re going to see more of Kantonisha and her gal pals pointing out the obvious while the white folk dim-wittedly go and look for their already dead friends. Bring it, girl, mmm hmm! Click, bob.

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