Tag Archives: gore o’clock

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.

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.

Sub Prime Slash

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DREAM HOME

 3.5 Stars  2010/18/93m

“She’d kill for a harbour view…”

Director: Pang Ho-cheung / Writers: Pang Ho-cheung, Derek Tsang & Jimmy Wan / Cast: Josie Ho, Eason Chan, Michelle Ye, Paw Hee Ching, Chui Siu Keung Norman, Lam Yiu Sing, Derek Tsang, Lawrence Chou, Song Xiao Cheng, Zhou Chu Chu, Phat Chan, Felix Lok, Juno Mak.

Body Count: 13

A weird and gruesome satirical slasher flick which begins with a jolt as a sleeping security guard has a cable tie fastened around his throat. He struggles and tries to cut it off with a Stanley knife, jabbing his own throat instead. Slowly and agonisingly, he dies. Almost everyone dies slowly and agonisingly in Dream Home. “Fun” ahoy.

A non-linnear narrative tells the story of Cheng Lai Sheung, a young Hong Kong professional who is so desperate to buy a penthouse with a view of the admittedly stunning HK harbour, which even I was transfixed by when I visited a few years ago, that she intends to force down prices by killing the neighbours.

In between the time-coded murders, we learn about Sheung’s life: her crummy job cold-calling bank customers, flashbacks to her childhood on a friendly but downtrodden development which has been on the brink of bulldozing for some time. Her growing obsession with providing a prestigious pad for her family is amplified by her inability to get a mortgage and then re-complicated by her father’s illness, which is not covered by his health plan.

The murders in Dream Home are seemingly random and all of them gruesome; eyes are poked out, guts tumble across the floor, dicks hacked off and most uncomfortably, a heavily pregnant woman is suffocated with a vacuum bag. I questioned whether or not I wanted to continue watching but what is horror if not horrific? Elsewhere though, Pang Ho-cheung strives to make things darkly funny: a couple in the throes of sex are attacked by Sheung, who knifes the guy before lopping off his cock, sending a spray of blood over the girls back, which she assumes to be his man-paste while another guy, hanging in there after the contents of his torso have largely been emptied out over the charming laminate floors, decides there’s no better time to light up a joint.

Most of the victims are nameless, unsympathons: a quintet of drugs and sex-partying kids see their gathering go to hell, the cops who come to check on the noise don’t fare any better and, although sometimes seemingly ashamed of her actions, Sheung carries on with her project, more fortuitous a killer than a talented or invincible one: people tend to slip over or fall on sharp things and Sheung succeeds almost by accident.

Explicit nudity, drug-use, a helluva lot of the red stuff, Dream Home is a memorable flick, very nicely made and strangely poetic in its tale of materialism and status, especially when Sheung finally gets what she wants and learns that old lesson that you should be careful what you wish for – you might just get it all.

Hippie Hippie Shake n’ Slash

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THE TRIPPER

3 Stars  2006/18/94m

“Move over Jason. Look out Freddie. Heeere’s Ronnie!”

Director: David Arquette / Writers: Arquette & Joe Harris / Cast: Jaime King, Lukas Haas, Thomas Jane, Paul Reubens, Jason Mewes, Balthazar Getty, Marsha Thomason, Stephen Hrath, Paz de la Huerta, Richmond Arquette, Rick Overton, Redmond Gleeson, Chris Nelson, David Arquette, Courteney Cox.

Body Count: at least 23

Dire-logue: “Sir, will you spank me? My father never spanked me. I’m in desperate need of discipline.”

As actress Marsha Thomason points out in one of the DVD extras, being British, we have limited knowledge of American politics. Furthermore, while I have clear memories of Ronald Reagan being President, all that he did or didn’t do was eclipsed for us by what Maggie Thatcher was doing here.

Therefore, I may have entirely missed the point David Arquette was trying to make with The Tripper, which is essentially about the hippie revellers at a Free Love Festival being indiscriminately chopped up by an axe-wielding loon in a suit and Reagan mask. The why and what-are-you-getting-at? is what prevents things from making total sense – for Marsha and me at least.

Three peace-lovin’ couples in an old Mystery Machine-type van rock up to the event expecting to have the drug-fuelled time of their lives, but shy newcomer Samantha is paranoid that her controlling Republican ex may have followed them there, while her new beau Ivan keeps getting off his face and the others just want to have sex and get fucked up. Meanwhile, local Sheriff Thomas Jane is battling with the corrupt mayor and bogus organiser Paul Reubens and a growing stack of dead hippies. Are they being done away with by the now-grown little kid who went apeshit with a chainsaw in the prologue? Yes. Yes they are.

While Arquette (who has a small role as one of a trio of rednecks) may have mastered his character of Dewey in the Scream films, as a director he’s quite noticeably unfocused, erratically going from scene to scene without any cohesive plotting: we don’t know where characters are or what they’re doing most of the time and many of the scenes appear to be constructed around a target joke rather than have it appear incidental.

That’s not to say The Tripper fails, it’s still quite funny, liberally bloody and doesn’t shy away from jabbing at errors Reagan evidently made during his time in charge but the whole project lacks clarity. Is the objective to underscore the evils of Republicans? To try and reassert the point of the Free Love movement? A comment of capitalism, that nobody can really be trusted? Or is it just a simpleton slasher flick?

Where The Tripper unquestionably succeeds is in its cast rota: Arquette ropes in family and friends who gleefully make the best of their roles: Jane is great as the beleaguered man in charge and getting Jason Mewes to do what he does best (having cameoed as Jay in Scream 3) is always good; Courteney Cox has a small bit as an animal loving flower child. Only Lukas Haas and Balthazar Getty seem wasted (not in that sense) by the slim nature of their parts. The latter’s red herring status is completely screwed up by the fact that we pretty much know who the killer is from the outset.

I’ve watched the film three times since I picked it up and each time I’m reminded of how gorgeous California is and how awkward The Tripper plays out. It’s a bewildering film with context perhaps too upfront and deep-rooted for a bodycount pic but serves as a sort of rest-stop between Screams 3 and 4. But then maybe I just don’t get it and when somebody makes a sequel about Thatcher offing miners up north I’ll have an epiphany and give it another go.

At very least, it’s worth watching just to prove that sometimes, sometimes you get full frontal male nudity in these things.

Blurbs-of-interest: Lukas Haas and Marsha Thomason were in Long Time Dead together; Jaime King was in My Bloody Valentine 3D; Jason Mewes played a stoner (again) in RSVP; Paul Reubens was in Pandemonium; Chris Nelson was leter in ChromeSull: Laid to Rest 2; Paz de la Huerta was in The Editor.

Accidents *will* happen…

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FINAL DESTINATION 2

4 Stars  2006/15/87m

“For every beginning there is an end.”

Director: David R. Ellis / Writers: Jeffrey Reddick, Eric Bress & J. Mackye Gruber / Cast: Ali Larter, A.J. Cook, Michael Landes, Tony Todd, T.C. Carson, Keegan Connor Tracy, Jonathan Cherry, Lynda Boyd, James N. Kirk, Justina Machado, David Paetkau, Sarah Carter.

Body Count: 11

Dire-logue: “If Clear was right then Nora and Tim are going to be attacked by pigeons!”

Cementing the decade’s most popular horror franchise (unless you prefer Saw?), Final Destination 2 is probably the most accessible entry in the series, pulling together the elements that have made the series so successful. It’s not as good as the first one but it’s definitive in being the best example of what the FD brand is all about, including the tie-in novels, which borrow much of the lore from what happens in this film.

On the flipside, the beginnings of what drowned the more recent sequels in the cliche tide were pulled in with the same net: tits, short cuts to defining characters and dumb jokes – none of which were present first time around.

Set on the first anniversary of the explosion of Flight 180, the subsequent events that befell Alex, Clear and friends have become a Chinese Whisper, so when Spring Break teenager Kimberly (Cook) foresees her own death and those of many others in a highway pile-up, history looks to be repeating itself. As Devon Sawa did last time, our psychic takes steps to prevent being caught up in the carnage, meaning that the pesky force that is Death has got it in for her and the on-ramp patrons who were denied access to the road.

Final Destination 2 essentially takes the bus-splatter shock from before and repeats it ad nauseum with a whole new array of every day items conspiring to take down the mixed group of death-evaders: this means there is death by ladder, elevator, air-bag and barbecue among others, all of which are more gruesomely played out than before – Death has upped the ante.

You can sort of sense a struggle with its own IQ here. The theories of mortality are absent in favour of a jacked-up body count and more bloodletting, which clashes with some of the smarter aspects of the plot, mainly the good ‘outward-ripple’ theory discovered halfway through. Unfortunately, its effect is dampened by clunky acting and then it’s all but forgotten about in Final Destination 3, which could’ve further explored the consequences of the premonitions. And there’s still no questioning just what force provides these foresights in the first place? Life working against Death? Why don’t they visit a psychic rather than Tony Todd?

Ali Larter’s return as an embittered hard-ass is great and A.J. Cook makes a functional heroine while the very easy-on-the-eye Landes floats around in the background like a spare part. Everyone else fulfills their obligatory pin-cushion bond, becoming targets for every possible piece of flying shrapnel that are hellbent on hacking, slashing, severing and dissecting them.

Effects wise, the car crash is nothing short of sensationally realised though some of the CG that ensues further through the film becomes a bit ropey (especially fire) – though the grue is full on, especially in the first two demises, which make perfect use of our innocuous looking surroundings. You’ll never look at your kitchen appliances or dental surgery decor in the same way again.

The next two Destinations ramped up the sadism in favour of coherent plotting and characters we care about, whether or not the fifth film will revert to the slightly more thought-out fundamentals of the first two films remains to be seen but, to date, FD2 represents the commercial peak of the franchise.

Blurbs-of-interest: A.J. Cook was the final girl, Molly, in Ripper: Letter from Hell; David Paetkau appeared in I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer; Tony Todd cameos all over the show and can be found in both Hatchet films, iMurders, Scarecrow Slayer, Jack the Reaper, Hell Fest, Candy Corn, and will return for the fifth FD movie; David R. Ellis directed The Final Destination which was written by Bress and Reddick (the latter created the original story). Shaun Sipos, one of Kim’s friends in the car, later turned up in Texas Chainsaw 3D.

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