SATAN’S LITTLE HELPER

  2004/15/96m

“Your house is next.”

Director/Writer: Jeff Lieberman / Cast: Katheryn Winnick, Alexander Brickel, Stephen Graham, Amanda Plummer, Wass Stevens, Dan Ziskie, Melisa McGregor, Joshua Annex.

Body Count: 15

Laughter Lines: “His ass is fuckin’ grass!”

Pre-teen geek Dougie (Brickel) is obsessed with the titular computer game, and looks forward to finding Satan when trick or treating on Halloween with his big sister, who has returned from college with her new boyfriend, much to Dougie’s annoyance.

Peeved, he wanders around town on his own and encounters a masked figure propping up bodies on their porches and lawns – but not real ones, right? Dougie believes he’s found Satan and asks the muted maniac if he can be his helper for the night. As the naive accomplice to the loon, Dougie laughs along as Satan dishes out more tricks than treats on the unsuspecting residents of the town.

Confusion as to who is under the mask takes up a lot of attention: Big sis Jenna thinks it’s her actor boyfriend just really getting into the part while Dougie thinks his new friend is just playing it all for laughs. This makes for a good moment when Jenna realises there’s someone else entirely behind the mask.

Satan’s Little Helper comes across like a combo of Uncle Sam and Office Killer – fun in the moment, but nothing you’ll go out of your way to recommend. Lieberman – who wrote and directed Just Before Dawn back in ’81 – wisely goes for the ribs rather than the jugular, so’s to avoid an accusations of pandering to Halloween, and the largely likeable cast assist in making it a fun little experience (sans the murder of a cute cat).

Plummer is a hoot as the kids’ nutty mom, and Winnick is a good final girl, though her little brother is required to seek new depths of stupidity from time to time to prop up the contrived nature of ‘Satan’s’ killing spree, but it doesn’t really harm the film, which is polished off with an unsurprising but inoffensive twist, successfully book-ending it with the kind of unexplained finality that normally sinks other straight-to-video productions.

THE GAS STATION

 1993/18/23m

A.k.a. Body Bags (segment 1)

Director: John Carpenter / Writers: Billy Brown & Dan Angel / Cast: Alex Datcher, Robert Carradine, David Naughton, George ‘Buck’ Flower, Wes Craven, Sam Raimi.

Body Count: 3

Probably about as close as we’ll ever get to seeing John Carpenter direct another slasher film, The Gas Station was the first of three segments to his 1993 anthology Body Bags (the other two concerned Stacy Keach having a bad hair life, and something about Mark Hamill’s eye).

Alex Datcher is perfect as Anne, a college girl starting her first nightshift as the cashier at a Haddonfield (!) gas station, not far from the stomping ground of an at-large serial killer.

Wes Craven is her first customer, a creepy old dude looking for chips, followed soon by a flirtatious handsome guy, then a homeless fellow after the restroom key, a playful couple, and finally silence… but then she spots the car on the mount in the garage going up and down by itself.

At 23 minutes, this is a slasher flick on speed, meta’d right down to a quarter of the usual length, and Anne is soon running and screaming: Windows are bashed in, bodies fall out of lockers… Pretty much everything that happened to Jamie Lee Curtis in the last act of Halloween happens here.

The casting of a black actress as the final girl is refreshing against Carpenter’s retread, featuring some of the same shot composition, and although we don’t get much time with her, we’re quick to support Anne through her ordeal.

It couldn’t be a feature length outing, but it’s nice that Carpenter stopped by to fill up on some stalking goodness.

Blurbs-of-interest: George Buck Flower was also in Berserker and Cheerleader Camp; Sam Raimi (playing a corpse) also acted in Intruder.