Tag Archives: Canuck

Field of screams

2 comments

DARK FIELDS

1 Stars  2003/80m

Directors/Writers: Mark McNabb & Al Randall / Cast: Jenna Scott, Lindsay Dell, Brian Austin Jr., Eric Phillion, Ryan Hulshof, Paul Pinel.

Body Count: 5

You know a film is going to suck when a scene supposed to represent an entire lesson lasts 90 seconds and a student leaves saying “oh my god, I thought that class would never end!”

This is actually from the same individuals who would later give us The Breakfast Club slasher homage Study Hell. Only worse.

Five high school teenagers share a ride to a rock concert (‘The Cryptic Dead’) and run out of gas on an old road in front of a scary farmhouse. One of them goes to ask for gas but never comes back.

The others eventually follow and explore the dilapidated old house. They talk. They walk around with candles very slowly. They flirt. They walk around with candles some more. They possibly have sex. They don the candles yet again.

36 minutes into the film, the first “scary” thing happens (a hand shredded in a piece of farm equipment – not gory) and is followed by mucho shrieking and running from the two female characters, who we’re left with throughout the rest of the film as the guys fall victim first.

Dark Fields is slow and long (despite the 80 minute running time), with stacks of unresolved questions saved for a sequel that – mercifully – never happened: the guy who went for the gas is never heard from again, but likewise never seen dead and doesn’t turn out to be the waddling killer, who sports a wig from Cher’s cast-off collection.

And the killer. Who hell he? Presumably, he’s a kid referred to in a fleeting old-news-clippings discovery scene, but nothing is made clear.

The characters are objectionable twats. Designated driver is kind enough to offer them a ride and they’re nothing but ungrateful pricks, deriding him at every opportunity and sending him to go get the gas when they haven’t so much as offered any money to pay their way.

Both girls survive, bizarrely, as one of them only contributes shrill hollering for most of her screen time. Waiting for her to die – hopefully via blade in the mouth – is a futile plan. Doesn’t happen.

Elsewhere, it’s the usual “this isn’t funny anymore”-style dialogue and eight minutes of credits with added outtakes, as if we were clueless to how amateur it all was from the start!

Blurbs-of-interest: McNabb directed and wrote Study Hell, which featured three of the main cast members. Do you care which ones? If so, write to me and I’ll provide the thrilling answers. Or go to the review of that film and find out for y’self…

Angels with bloody faces

2 comments

FALLEN ANGELS

2.5 Stars  2002/18/97m

Director: Ian David Diaz / Writers: Julian Boote, Michael Derbas & Diaz / Cast: Esme Elliot, Dallas Campbell, Cassandra Bell, Melissa Simonetti, Elly Fairman, Emma Willis, Michael Ironside, Jeff Fahey, Kai Wiesinger, Max Brown, Emily Booth, Tony Abbey, Mara Derwent, Shawn Graham.

Body Count: 11

Dire-logue: “Cutting the power, cutting the phone lines – he’s planned ahead!”

Nell Fisher was the nominal outcast at the Holy Angels Girls School in upstate New York. Ever since she accused her history teacher of making inappropriate advances towards her, her social life flatlined. Nobody believed her, not even after he returned to attack her, resulting in a fire that killed thirty girls and closed the school forever.

Five years later, Nell and three of her former tormentors are called back to participate in a documentary about the tragedy. Before long, it’s clear that a cloaked and hooded figure wearing night-vision goggles is hell bent on putting a stop to the production by knifing the crew members and the graduates.

This handsome looking film works up a good enough momentum in the first instance, with regular killing to punctuate the less interesting goings-on inside the school, including ghost hunting with a paranormal investigating nerd and some backbiting between the once-popular girls and their victim of harassment.

However, it soon gets its wheels stuck in the muddy rut of chases down long corridors after most of the male characters have been done away with, leaving half a dozen shrieking women to panic and make bad horror movie decisions. Eventually the killer is unmasked and everything collapses in cliché central, with the prerequisite open ending for a sequel nobody would be interested in.

The cast is made up mostly of British actors but also a grizzled, underused bad-movie-fixture Michael Ironside, who appears as the local sheriff, while Jeff Fahey plays the sleazy professor in recurrent flashbacks scenes, but Melissa Simonetti makes the best impression as the catty, says-what-she-wants producer/agent, livening up tedious sequences of breathless dialogue between the bland startlets.

Definitely a notch above most straight-to-DVD fare, Fallen Angels is worthy a once over, if for nothing else than just to pick up on the references to other horror films, with familiar character names, nods to Ghostbusters and even a throwaway line stolen right out of Alien!

With a little more logic and bloodletting, this could’ve been a great little sleeper.

Blurbs-of-interest: Jeff Fahey was in Psycho III; Michael Ironside was also in American Nightmare (1981), Children of the Corn: Revelation, Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II, Reeker, and Visiting Hours.

Oh, how we laughed. Then died.

3 comments

Happy April Fool’s Day.

Have you woken up to a pie in the face? Been told some bizarre fact about someone that you naively took as gospel? Or did a group of your peers play a joke on you so damaging that at this very moment you’re sketching out ideas for a gruesome revenge scenario?

Hey, it happens! Just take a look at these five gags that went “a bit wrong”…

Kenny Hampson and The Corpse Lady of Terror Train (1980)

Why: Prank-loving med student Doc (a yet-to-be-semi-famous Hart Bochner) masterminds a cruel initiation gag on shy, magic loving dork, Kenny, to induct him into their fraternity.

The Joke: On the promise that if he ventures upstairs to the bedroom of a (frat?) house, Kenny will pop his cherry with campus hottie Alana (Jamie Lee Curtis), who’s only been clued in a little ways in the plot. She hides behind a veil and says things like “kiss me, Kenny,” while the skinny lad disrobes and climbs into bed with a figure whom he believes to be Alana. And Alana and her gal-pal Mitchy think it’s just a friend of Doc’s.

Instead, the girl in the bed is a dismembered corpse pilfered from a hospital morgue. Kenny almost gets down and dirty with it before she quite literally falls to pieces in his arms and then freaks out in some weird disco spinning motion that sees him entangled in a veil while his frat-brothers-to-never-be burst in and laugh and point.

The Revenge: Three years later, Kenny’s back from the mental hospital and he’s still understandably pissed and homicidal. Doc, Alana, and friends have boarded an excursion train to celebrate their graduation costume-party style and it’s not long before members of their clique start disappearing until only Alana is left to fight off Kenny…

The Learning: Pick your victim carefully. If he appears to be your typical introverted nerd, chances are he’s a raging ball of anti-populous fury who might snap if he’s rejected and ridiculed one more time.

Marty Rantzen and The Naked Shower Humiliation of Slaughter High (1986)

Why: Marty (Simon Scuddamore) is the requisite bookish nerd at Doddsville High (which looks suspiciously like Surrey, England), who annoys the wrong group of popular jocks and their bitchy girlfriends.

The Joke: In retaliation, they decide to play an April Fool’s prank on him by setting him up with campus hottie Carol (Caroline Munro) – seeing a theme? – only to find that after he strips naked in a shower stall, the curtain is ripped back and her group of friends are there with a camera and hose him down. On this occasion, the group are caught and given detention by the coach and so nasty leader Skip sets about resetting the scales and this ends up with Marty getting doused in acid that disfigures him.

The Revenge: Ten years later, the popular group receive invites to a bogus reunion party at the now abandoned school, where Marty – donning a suitably eerie jester mask – soon locks them in and unleashes a veritable cornucopia of fatal ‘jokes’ on them: Poisoned beer; an acid bath; electrified bed… until it’s just him and Carol left alone in the old school.

The Learning: Similar to Terror Train, hell hath no fury like a nerd scorned – or, in this case, scorched. And that groups of jocks are unbelievably stupid.

Cropsy the Janitor and The Wormy Skull in The Burning (1981)

Why: Mean-spirited summer camp custodian, Cropsy, ritually torments the kids of Camp Blackfoot. We don’t see any of this but it’s related later around a campfire. He used to freak them out with his oversized pair of pruning shears. Either way, the campers hate his ass.

The Joke: A group of teenage boys decide to get their own back on the Crospter by creeping him out, possibly in the hope of inducing some sort of coronary. One of them sneaks into his on-site shack and deposits an item at the foot of his bed before going back outside where the group begin tapping on the window. Gently at first and then louder until the man awakes and is greeted with the sight of a worm-infested skull with a candle inside it. Freaking as required, he spills the skull on to his sheets and is soon engulfed in flames. Turned into a “fucking Big Mac” with no hope of skin graphs restoring his appearance, he’s finally released from the hospital five years later and the only thing on his mind… is MURDER!

The Revenge: Crospy crashes another summer camp in the vicinity and stalks and kills various teen campers, using his trademark shit-scary shears to slice, dice and snip shrieking teens to death, including the memorable five-for-one raft scene.

Strangely, Cropsy’s revenge is of the scattergun approach. He targets campers. The particular group responsible get away Scot free (bar one who happens to be a counsellor at the new camp) and the unknowing, innocent, holidaymakers of Camp Stonewater become is hapless new prey.

The Learning: Think through your prank logically. Is there a chance it could go awry and end up maiming somebody? ‘Cos if it does, odds are they ain’t gonna be pleased about it. Also, some victims go so batshit crazy that they’ll take revenge of anyone they can…

The College Kids and The Fake Campus Massacre of Final Exam (1981)

Why: Why not? it seems. The brothers of “the wildest frat house on campus – yeeeaaaahhh!!!” decide to fake a fucking MASSACRE just so their lazy president can cheat on a test and keep his car.

The Joke: So, while a group of masked assailants “gun down” random students at the front of the school, walking bouffant, John, oh-so-cleverly marks his own test paper with the perfect score and hides it in the completed pile while everyone’s attention is focused on what’s happening outside.

The Revenge: Weirdly, in this case, the prank doesn’t affect the killer at all. Instead, it serves to prevent the local cops from taking seriously his arrival on campus when the bodies start piling up – fortunately those of Lazy John and a couple of his idiotic frat brothers included.

However, sucks to be one of the other poor schmucks stuck on campus with an anonymous, unmotivated psychopath.

The Learning: You might think your little joke is a victimless crime, but the joke’s on you if you need help further down the line and nobody believes you! At that point, you become the boy who cried wolf and, frankly, you deserve to be throttled with gym equipment.

The Frat Party and The Photo of the Creepy-Voiced Priest in Happy Hell Night (1991)

Why: Again, getting into the fraternity/sorority of your choice trumps all semblance of sense and rational thought in the American – or Canadian – college system. Fuck the consequences, I want in!

The Joke: Two pledges, cool, calm, collected Sonny (Franke Hughes) and his dorky friend whose name I’ve forgotten, are tasked with breaking into the local mental asylum and taking a photograph of imprisoned legendary Satanic priest, Zachary Malius, who had murdered several frat brothers 25 years earlier.

The Revenge: Of course, Malius escapes – after killing the dorky one – and heads straight back to the frat house where a big party has just finished, leaving a handful of amorous couples alone in the dark. One by one, they all get offed in various ways, each time left with a little fortune cookie style quip from the E.T.-voiced loon: “No TV! No sex! No way Sam Rockwell is ever gonna live down being in this!”

The Learning: A simple frat joke can still be a deadly one. Responsibility is key. In fact, Sonny almost does the right thing and considers the whole shebang an immature waste of time as it is. But when your dad is Darren McGavin, there’s a little bit of pressure applied to conform. So, suck it, horny teens!

* * *

There we have it, just SOME of the jokes that didn’t go as planned. Other notable examples include breaking into old buildings with bloody histories to steal ornaments n’ such, pretending to be dead, pretending to be alive, tricking your friends, scaring your parents/siblings/housemother…

The list is endless so stick with whoopee cushions and custard pies.

Leave a comment

Scared of boredom?

Leave a comment

PHOBIA

2 Stars   1980/15/87m

“What happens when your psychiatrist goes out of his mind?”

Director: John Huston / Writers: Ronald Shusett, Gary Sherman, Lew Lehman, Jimmy Sangster & Peter Bellwood / Cast: Paul Michael Glaser, Susan Hogan, John Colicos, Patricia Collins, David Bolt, Robert O’Ree, Alexandra Stewart, David Eisner, Lisa Langlois, Marian Waldman, Kenneth Welsh.

Body Count: 6

Thaasophobia is the fear of boredom.

Atychiphobia is the fear of failure.

Thaasophobia + Atychiphobia = 1980 horror movie Phobia.

If you can buy the concept that John Huston – JOHN HUSTON!!! – directed this miserably disappointing Canadian flick that barely got released, then you can buy freakin’ Starsky as a shrink who experiments on a group of ex-cons with varying phobias – two of whom would make up members of the Crawford Top Ten in Happy Birthday to Me the following year.

When the agoraphobic member of the programme is blown up in the doc’s apartment, suspicion falls on her fellow patients that one of them was intending to kill him instead.

Predictably, the other members of the group start dying in increasingly suspect ways, of course relating to their respective fears: One is drowned, another squashed by an elevator, and a third bitten by a snake.

Solving the mystery isn’t hard (‘specially thanks to the tagline), with the most ‘likely’ perps out of the way, there aren’t many other avenues to explore and the climax fizzles out with a boring revelation and a motive, which will leave the audience needing more therapy than any of the patients ever did.

Attempts to make the characters slightly more dimensional than contemporary horror films of the time are never followed through, resulting in a bunch of people we don’t really understand, much less care about. Phobia is one of those above-its-station efforts that thinks its not a slasher film and so contains less blood than your average pebble.

Quite deservedly, it tanked at the movies – even in the big horror year of 1980 – teaching Huston to steer clear for a while.

For a better example of the hoards of “ironic” death-by-phobia films, try Boogeyman 2. That one, at least, knew what it was and had a bit of grue.

Blurbs-of-interest: Langlois and Eisner were two of the teens who DON’T die in Happy Birthday to Me; Marian Waldman was Mrs Mac in the original Black Christmas.

Leave a comment

The Horror Calendar of Doooooom

11 comments

It’s February 29th. It comes but once every four years. And nobody’s written a horror movie about it. It could be about a killer who returns every fourth year to kill teenagers. For some reason.

But if that was so, would it be safe on any day of the year? Ever? No. Any road trip or camping vacation can end in gruesome death by sharp things. Other days are, thankfully, easily avoidable.

See?

(I must say I’m proud of that turkey)

January is usually death-free by proxy, unless you go skiing, like in Cold Prey, Iced, or Shredder. It’s a Certain-Death free month.

But February… Ugh.

There’s the HELL of Valentine’s Day, heavy contributing factor to any number of senseless massacres. There are the spurned suitors whose romantic gestures should be taken seriously indeed: There’s Jeremy Melton in Valentine, who waited years to wreak his stabby revenge on the quartet of girls who refused to dance with him. Oooh.

val5a

Then little Harold from X-Ray (a.k.a. Be My Valentine… Or Else) whose card to Susan was laughed at, prompting him to hang her brother and then go on a killing spree at a hospital twenty-odd years later when she happens to check in.

It’s advisable not to party too hard either, as it could easily be crashed by a pick-axe toting miner whose homicidal predilection is kick-started by candy boxes, paper hearts and happy youngsters. This happens in My Bloody Valentine. And My Bloody Valentine 3D as well.

March is another chancey month but no sooner is it over than you reach April 1st – a day of pranks and jokes, some of which can upset people to the point of murderous vengeance…

Do not arrange upscale, multi-level, humiliation-based pranks on smart nerds. They WILL formulate an intricate revenge plot and kill you all in gruesome ways. Hey, it happened in Slaughter High.

Even getting away from it all for your Spring Break could end badly. Rich friends with island homes might not be as safe as you once thought. Muffy St. John made that untakebackable error in April Fool’s Day.

Or you might vacation in the wrong place. If you’re not stalked by a psychotic motorcyclist at the beach in Welcome to Spring Break or a loony friend in Do You Wanna Know a Secret?, or a reanimated voodoo scarecrow, you’ll get devoured by crummy looking 3D Piranha‘s in Nevada or be run off the road driving home a là Jeepers Creepers.

A lot of American high school hold their senior proms around May, which means that there’s a heightened chance of somebody from the past coming back to take revenge for some years-old incident that probably left a good few people dead. It’s happened twice in history: Prom Night and, uh, Prom Night. A supernatural variant of this may involve the ghost of a dead prom queen returning to kill people. This happened in Prom Night‘s II and III. Skipping your prom for a private party is also inadvisable, see Prom Night IV: Deliver Us From Evil.

Come June, seniors will celebrate Graduation Day; their step from adolescence into adulthood. Take care, this joyous day could be thwarted by another killer with a grudge to settle. Finishing college can also be murder, evidenced by the girls who live at The House on Sorority Row and its redux, Sorority Row.

June is also dangerous if the 13th day happens to fall on a Friday. This being the birth date of a scary super-killer means that a Friday the 13th in June – or indeed any of the summer months – is a good time to stay at home while your friends go camping. Don’t go to camp if there’s a Friday the 13th either.

f13-1a

Independence Day falls on the 4th of July. Remain patriotic or Uncle Sam might get you. Additionally, any accidents you have should be duly reported and the accountable parties before you ruin your year and receive a threatening note the following annum that says I Know What You Did Last Summer, because that’ll ruin the next few July 4th’s as well.

It’s back to school or college in September, which means pledge week, Rush Week, or whatever it’s called regionally. There’ll be all manner of initiations and hazings. For hell week, particularly Hell Night, avoid creepy old houses. Shopping malls too, as seen in The Initiation, can be dangerous places when there’s a loon on the loose. Sororities seem to be more dangerous than frat houses; Pledge Night and Happy Hell Night are small exceptions to this rule. Blood Sisters made the error of hazing in an old whorehouse and the girls of Sorority House Massacre didn’t even get the chance to take on any new pledges.

October might well begin with the as-yet un-blood-drenched homecoming (that is, until, Jake Helgren’s Bloody Homecoming is unleashed sometime this year) but soon brings forth all manner of ghoulish wrongdoings in the run up to Halloween, as shown in all the sequels as well as Hack-O-Lantern, The Hollow, Jack-O, Dark Walker, Halloween Night and various other time-stamped horror fests.

November brings Thanksgiving and with it mucho meat-carvery, as seen in Home Sweet Home.

Finally, the year rounds out with the festive season, but that features a tide of Killer Santas and Yuletide-hating psychos who punish anyone who’s naughty: You’ve made it through Halloween – now try to survive Christmas!

True words. See Silent Night, Deadly Night (all parts), Silent Night, Bloody Night, You Better Watch Out! (Christmas Evil), Santa’s Slay, Santa Claws, Christmas Season Massacre, Black Christmas and its remake, Don’t Open ‘Til Christmas, A Deadly Little Christmas and oodles of others all gift-wrapped in entrails.

The final night of the year, the stepping stone into the next year, it’s time to celebrate but watch out for New Year’s Evil, in which a psycho offs a broad for every midnight in the time zones of the US.

So, there you have it – the year is rife with deadly threats and even outside of those easily-avoidable dates, there are plenty of birthdays, parties, pranks and faux pas’ that can end in Death! Death! Death! for teens everywhere!

Leave a comment

1 … 6 7 8 9 10 … 14