Tag Archives: calendar carnage

Mistake, indeed

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home sweet home 1980

HOME SWEET HOME

1.5 Stars  1980/18/83m

A.k.a. Slasher in the House

“Be it ever so humble, there is no place to hide.”

Director: Nettie Pena / Writer: Thomas Bush / Cast: Jake Steinfeld, Colette Trygg, David Mielke, Vinessa Shaw, Peter De Paula, Don Edmunds, Sallee Young, Charles Hoyes, Leia Naron, Lisa Rodriguez.

Body Count: 9

Laughter Lines: “Please don’t hurt her – I’ll play my guitar for you!”

Of all the calendar holidays to trigger the homicidal leanings of a madman, Thanksgiving has largely been left to curdle like old milk, with only this and Blood Rage representing.

Your basic asylum escapee slasher – musclebound fitness guru Steinfeld – happens across a ranch on Thanksgiving and decides to go overboard on the carving duties. The family of largely unsympathetic, barely named characters provide the meat content for the first hour, until the floor caves in for supposed ‘tension building’, pending the obvious confrontation and the last few people alive keep going to check if windows and doors are locked in virtual darkness.

Crappy acting abounds as people fail to react convincingly to anything and don’t seem to care about the rash of disappearances. Future ‘name’ Vinessa Shaw made her debut as the requisite small child who is immune to the violence (and, aged 4, out-acts the adult cast), but the most memorable character has to be her teen brother, named Mistake, who wears Kiss-lite make-up and tries to convince the killer to stop on the promise of hearing him play guitar for him.

Bloody and weird, but don’t let that stop you.

Blurbs-of-interest: Vinessa Shaw was (much later) in Stag Night; Lisa Rodriguez was in the even worse Terror on Tour.

Lawnmower Death

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wacko 1982

WACKO

2 Stars  1982/15/83m

“The comedy that takes off where Airplane landed!”

Director: Greydon Clark / Writers: Dana Olsen, Michael Spound, M. James Kouf Jr., David Greenwalt / Cast: Joe Don Baker, George Kennedy, Stella Stevens, Julia Duffy, Scott McGinnis, Andrew Clay, Michele Tobin, Elizabeth Daily, Jeff Altman, Charles Napier, David Drucker, Anthony James.

Body Count: 8

Laughter Lines: “It’s Halloween, it’s prom night, there’s a psycho loose, so don’t open the door. Don’t answer the phone. Don’t look in the attic. Don’t go to the bathroom. Don’t go into the ocean and don’t go into space ’cause no one can hear you scream.”

The race was on in the early 80s to score the first slasher spoof, so Wacko went up against Student Bodies, Class Reunion, Pandemonium, and the misleadingly titled Saturday the 14th but ultimately lands near the bottom of the pack, eventually gaining a release at the start of 1983, by which time most of its content was dated.

Thirteen years after seeing her older sister sliced and diced by the Halloween Prom Night Lawnmower Killer of Hitchcock High, virginal Mary Graves is now being stalked by the maniac as her own Halloween Prom approaches. Oversexed students at the school are joined by ‘wacky’ teahcers, parents, and other fringe characters who disappear and reappear enough to be considered a suspect by the man hunting the killer.

Things get a little interesting by the time the killer starts work on Mary’s fiends, but any excitement worked up is short-lived for the revelation of the killer’s identity, virgin jokes galore, and a pie in the face for George Kennedy at the end.

Blurbs-of-interest: Julia Duffy was in the more straight-laced Night Warning in the same year; George Kennedy was also in Just Before Dawn; Charles Napier was later in Camping Del Terrore and Maniac Cop 2.

Christmasogyny

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all through the house 2016

ALL THROUGH THE HOUSE

2 Stars  2016/89m

“There is a creature stirring.”

Director/Writer: Todd Nunes / Cast: Ashley Mary Nunes, Melynda Kiring, Jason Ray Schumacher, Danica Riner, Natalie Montera, Lito Velasco, Cathy Garrett, Jessica Cameron.

Body Count: 12

Laughter Lines: “Jonathan Curtis ruined my childhood!” / “Strange how you lost your virginity to him…”

Nicely put together but ultimately disappointing chapter in the Killer Santa subgenre, which plays enough like the recent Silent Night remake to make a dog tilt its head in confusion. Spoilers follow.

Non-descript girl Rachel (who is she? what does she do?) drops by to see her potty-mouthed wheelchair-bound grandmother during the holidays, and is cajoled into helping the slightly kooky neighbour Mrs Garrett put up decorations later that night, after some last minute shopping with her gal-pals, who tag along to help out.

Meanwhile, a wackadoo in a Santa outfit and admittedly creepy grey mask is slashing and shearing various locals, chopping the dicks off the male victims, both of whom are ambushed while prepping for sex. Most of the slain are scantily-clad women as usual, including yet another pair of yawn-inducing token lesbians. Seriously, when will this fucking annoying trope end? It’s in everything.

all through the house 2016

Rachel wants to find out the truth about her mother, who she believes abandoned her, and also about Mrs Garrett’s housebound daughter, Jamie, who vanished fifteen years earlier. It’s all related of course, people are keeping secrets, blah blah blah. More women are slashed up until Rachel stumbles into the trap the (obvious) antagonist has set, and the overlong final act/chase/exposition tick-tocks by.

By the end it’s the same old same old domineering mother-raises-genderless-child nonsense. Naturally, this makes the killer angry towards women, but not men. How about an asshole Dad for once who makes his offspring pissed at jackass guys rather than bimbo babes? At the start, it looked as if All Through the Night might elevate itself above the pitfalls that plague low-end slasher films, its better-than-usual production unities aiding to some degree, but the gore FX are overdone and the sexism is uncomfortable.

all through the house 2016Blurb-of-interest: Jessica Cameron was in The Sleeper.

 

Ghost of Krampus Past

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12 deaths of christmas 2017 mother krampus

12 DEATHS OF CHRISTMAS

2 Stars  2017/18/91m

A.k.a. Mother Krampus

“Deck the halls with blood and bodies.”

Director: James Klass / Writer: Scott Jeffrey / Cast: Claire-Maria Fox, Tony Manders, Faye Goodwin, Tara MacGowran, Tom Bowen, Michelle Archer, Dottie James, Sian Crisp, Oliver Ebsworth.

Body Count: 13

It doesn’t bother me that some films are made with budgets so low they can only disappoint in the same way that the attractive looking gift under the tree turns out to be a hand-me-down Bible your sister used to own (this happened to me one year).

What royally pisses me off is that more effort appears to go into creating box art designed almost to dupe the casual HMV browser into picking up said film. The DVD cover for 12 Deaths of Christmas is significantly more interesting than the 91 minutes of content. And those 5-star reviews? Two of them I cannot even find anywhere and is ‘mind numbingly terrifying’ really a superlative? Not a good start.

Anyway – let’s breathe, sip some Rekoderlig, and regroup. An overlong narrator-title-card combo tells us that kids were murdered in 1921 in the English town of Belgrave. It happened again in 1992, and the locals blamed and hanged local hag Molly insert-spooky-surname-here. Twenty-five years later, all little Amy wants for Christmas is for her parents to get back together. Classmate Callum has a crush on her. Grandpa’s got a not-so-secret drinking problem.

12 deaths of christmas 2017 mother krampus

A new rash of child disappearances has begun to plague the town (the first such scene stirs up nice echoes of IT), and a group of people who Know What You They Did Last Christmas gather at the church to ponder the possibility that Molly has returned to collect on the hex she put on them before her death. Some say ‘yeah, whatevs!’, others are scared. Children continue to disappear.

There’s an amusing scene where a vile child dares her babysitter to scare her, so said teen girl tells her the legend of Frau Perchta, which is the standard Candyman say-the-name-X-times-in-front-of-mirror gag (fitfully, the girl knows of this and comments on it). But it works, and the hag manifests. Most LOL-ingly, the babysitter sends the child from their hiding place to get to the phone while she stays concealed!

The second half of the film is set pretty much entirely with Amy’s family on Christmas Day, when Dad does come over, but brings his new girlfriend with. Witch attacks. Revelations. Twist. Blah blah blah.

12 deaths of christmas 2017 mother krampus

In spite of the title, the ’12 deaths’ are just about cobbled together from flashback scenes, missing kids who we only assume are toast as they’re never seen again, and otherwise most scenes of violence are directed at younger women, a facet of the genre that irritates me no end. The new girlfriend is clearly destined to die as soon as she walks on set, and although Dad left Mum and daughter for her, he lives on for quite a while longer, while she is stabbed, tied up, and carved to shit with an electric knife. Then there are the non-murder deaths: Accidental kills, those committed by parties other than the killer etc. Fuck, I’ve run out of cider.

While brave to cash in on the post-Krampus wave (the film is known as Mother Krampus across the pond), the £££ needed to do the tale justice sadly just isn’t there, and the film suffers because of it – although it’s sufficiently well acted (even – gasp! – the child actors do well). Brings to mind the similar-looking Silent Night, Bloody Night: The Homecoming from a few years back.

Blurb-of-interest: Michelle Archer was in the remake of Unhinged.

Lyin’ on a prayer

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cry wolf 2005 dvd

CRY_WOLF

2 Stars  2005/12/87m

“BeLIEve.”

Director/Writer: Jeff Wadlow / Writer: Beau Bauman / Cast: Julian Morris, Lindy Booth, Jared Padalecki, Jon Bon Jovi, Kristy Wu, Sandra McCoy, Paul James, Jesse Janzen, Gary Cole.

Body Count: 2

Laughter Lines: “Tonight you could’ve gotten laid, but instead you got fucked.”

As usual, a young blonde woman runs through the woods at night, heaving in her breaths, a flashlight behind indicating her hunter isn’t far behind. She hides, the mystery maniac loiters, produces a cellphone and calls ‘Becky’. The victim’s phone rings, revealing her whereabouts to the killer. Gunshot.

Like so many other teen horror films of this era, an aerial shot of autumnal trees reveals a posh looking, secluded school: Westlake Prep. Here, we’re introduced to Owen Matthews, a British transfer student. His first encounter is with doll-like flame-haired Dodger Allen, and later inducted into her group of friends, who meet after hours in the school’s chapel to play a game centred around lying: Who can be the most deceptive. This is Cry_Wolf‘s main thing – deception. Spoilers ensue.

cry_wolf 2005

Infatuated with Dodger from the off, Owen and she concoct a newer, better version of their game, selling a big lie to the entire faculty for the lolz. Remember 2000 campus thriller Gossip? Yeah, it’s that all over again but with knives.

Owen, Dodger, and the others invent a campus-cruising psycho called The Wolf, who wears a camo jacket and orange ski-mask, and slashes up students around Halloween. Tying it to the disappearance of the girl from the beginning only helps create an atmosphere of paranoia across the campus. Media teacher Jon Bon Jovi – yes, really – sees through the ruse and cautions serial-school-changer Owen about his behaviour.

cry_wolf 2005

A mystery game player begins sending IMs to Owen, claiming to be the actual killer, and threatens the group, his room in tossed, there’s a stranger following him and Dodger in the library, someone deposits a knife in his bag that tumbles out during class… Who is doing it? Why, etc…

Needless to say, somebody dressed in the camo and ski-mask clobber starts offing those in on the joke in the precise scenarios they dreamt up when they created their work of fiction.

cry_wolf 2005

Cry_Wolf is one of those films that thinks it’s way smarter than it actually is: Some moderate fanfare surrounded its US release that it packed an amazing twist. Well, it doesn’t. Nobody is dead beyond the girl from the start and Bon Jovi, who is Owen’s main suspect and, it turns out, the apparent slayer of woods-girl. The rest is written off as a joke on the new boy.

As it happens, Dodger has manipulated eeeeeverybody to cover up the fact that she is the killer, insanely jealous of an affair between woods-girl and Bon Jovi, she went the long way round to fool Owen into killing him. The rest of the story, The Wolf, the others being in on the gag, is all by the by.

cry_wolf 2005

So it’s ultimately one big lie of a slasher film, not a slasher film at all, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Hey, does that make it über smart? No, it makes it über fake and thus über annoying. At least April Fool’s Day was able to trade on likeable characters, not obnoxious, schemey teens who all seem to hate each other. There’s nobody really to root for: Owen’s not particularly sympathetic and drools after Dodger like a lovestruck puppy, while she is textbook bitchy girl material, and the others fulfil various SBC-101 roles with little to add.

Nicely made and casting a British lead was brave, but the amount of contrivances required for the idea to float is ridiculous to the point it makes Brenda’s big plan from Urban Legend look totally doable.

cry_wolf 2005

Blurbs-of-interest: Julian Morris was also in Sorority Row; Lindy Booth was in Wrong Turn and American Psycho II; Jared Padalecki was in House of Wax and the Friday the 13th reboot; Gary Cole was in The Town That Dreaded Sundown (remake-quel thingy).

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