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voyeurVOYEUR.COM

2 Stars  2000/18/90m

“The new website everyone’s dying to see.”

A.k.a. BigBrother.com: The Movie

Director/Writer: Miles Feldman / Cast: Jena Romano, Travis Shakespeare, Adam Weiner, Tawnya Richardson, Keri-Anne Telford, Vanessa Nachtmann, Shannon Hutchinson, Laurie Searle, Ryan Boone, Kevin Pass, Iva Hasperger, Eric Adam Wittgren, Rob O’Malley, Scott Berman.

Body Count: 13

Dire-logue: “You’re killing my buzz, Euroboobs!”

Exploitation horror sometimes requires a bit o’ sleaze. Is there anything that bad about a dash of sleaze? Sleazy-sleazy-bo-beazy, banana-fana-fo-feazy, fee-fi-mo-meazy, Sleazy… OK.

Anyway, Voyeur.com, released in the UK under that dog-shit title BigBrother.com: The Movie (!), was one of the earlier attempts to fuse stalk n’ slash conventions with reality TV, which was arguably at its peak in 2000. So, three horny Californian dorks audition a group of nubile airheads who’ll “try most things once…no animals,” to live in a house rigged with cameras, while virginal nerds max out their debit cards to watch and “beat off” over the internet – although watching a girl on the toilet isn’t my idea of titillation.

Shy narrator and bargain-basement Winona Ryder look-alike Mary is worried because she has no personality and doesn’t sleep around like her housemates but facially-inept mastermind Alex likes her and that’s all that matters! Meanwhile, a masked killer begins knocking off the ancillary characters, including a dim-witted gardener-slash-perv. Aside from he and Mary, the others are the usual pick n’ mix of jocks, potheads, bitches and bimbos whose always-sexual conversations limit their vocab to ‘cool’ and ‘party’ and they are thankfully laid to waste, more often than not during the act.

The most memorable sequence (also known as the only one I didn’t forget ten minutes later) is when the aggressive lesbian goes down on a Pammie Anderson-a-like, who sees the killer approaching but is, y’know, unable to get out of the way! There’s also the obligatory Scream-lite opener that doesn’t remotely connect with anything else that happens.

For all these flaws in credibility, acting talent, photography, lighting, audio and plotting, Voyeur.com never became so bad that I wanted to kick the screen in and some of the characters here are still less pretentious, transparent and stabbable than those in Big Brother!

THE HILLS RUN RED

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thehillsrunreddvd3 Stars  2009/18/81m

Director: Dave Parker / Writers: John Dombrow, John Carchietta & David J. Schow / Cast: Sophie Monk, Tad Hilgenbrinck, Janet Montgomery, Alex Wyndham, William Sadler, Raicho Vasilev.

Body Count: at least 19

Dire-logue: “The characters always head out to the middle of nowhere, right? Suddenly their cars, their cell phones, their technology can’t save them and nobody ever brings a fucking gun!”

Mucho hype surrounded this film before it was unveiled at various horror festivals, it’s ‘back to basics,’ ‘gives horror fans what they want,’ blah blah best thing since sliced cheerleaders la la la…

It’s a slasher film about a 1982 slasher film, The Hills Run Red, which was withdrawn soon after its release and never seen again, along with the director and most of the cast. Horror geek Tyler is obsessed with finding the original reels and making a documentary about it, so after tracking down bit-parter and director’s daughter Alexa, now a heroin junkie lapdancer, he and his girlfriend Serina and best bud Lalo (who are secretly screwing), drive off in search of the house where the film was originally shot.

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No sooner than setting up camp, the killer from the film – Babyface – appears and saves the kids from a trio of rednecks who happened by to torment them and kidnaps Alexa, prompting the others to give chase to try and save her. Here, things twist off in to a place that sees the wings splinter off this flight, which sends it into a long nosedive from an altitude of intense slasherama to indulgent torture-porn-lite with a disatisfying conclusion. This also means that character expectations are switched and those we thought would most certainly survive or die…might not.

Until the twist is made evident, The Hills Run Red flirts with four-star truimphance: it’s slick, well-paced, bloody without being stupidly gory and engaging, a straight-up stalk n’ slasher from the days of yore, precisely what the mission statement appeared to be. It becomes another Texas Chainsaw wannabe with an overabundance of psychos, sleaze, unimpressive motives and a downbeat twist ending. And so it ends up in three-star land, a respectable showing for any B-movie of the stomp-and-kill ilk, perhaps a bit of a disappointment for genre aficionados who were hoping for the mooted next great horror icon…who looks a bit like the loon from Dark Ride to me.

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Blurbs-of-interest: bizarrely, the last new slasher flick I watched, Wrong Turn 3, not only starred Janet Montgomery, but was also shot in the same locale of Bulgaria and featured a horde of British actors doing American accents. Alex Wyndham was also in Red Mist.

WRONG TURN 3: LEFT FOR DEAD

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wrongturn3WRONG TURN 3: LEFT FOR DEAD

1.5 Stars  2009/92m

“What you don’t see will kill you.”

Director: Declan O’Brien / Writer: Connor James Delaney / Cast: Tom Frederic, Janet Montgomery, Tamer Hassan, Gil Kolirin, Tom McKay, Christian Contreras, Jake Curran, Chucky Venice, Bill Moody, Borislav Iliev.

Body Count: 15

Dire-logue: “He’s out there… I can feel him. He’s been following us. He’s close.”

How to take one of the best survivalist slasher films in the last few years and drive into an almost aggressively bad DVD series in three easy films…

I watched half of Wrong Turn 3 yesterday and the rest today. In between, I took my dog out for a walk in a close by field. There was a creepy dense fog and, save for my dog’s flashing collar darting about in the mist, all I had to light my way was a blue-strobe LED ghost that squeaks ‘woooo’ when you press it. With mutant inbred cannibals on my mind, every blob in the dark could’ve been a psycho with an axe… Every sloppy thing I stepped in could’ve been gory entrails – but turned out to be cow shit.

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Having just finished the film, there was nothing to fear. The South Downs ain’t West Virginia. In fact West Virginia ain’t West Virginia here either as for WT3 they outsourced the project to Bulgaria and used an almost exclusively British cast!

Things start okay with a quartet of “all-American teens” kayaking down a river. They stop to set up camp and one couple goes to fetch wood while the others get jiggy. Boobs appear within minutes and seconds later there’s an arrow sticking out of the boob and through boob-girl’s boyfriend’s hand. Three of the teens are offed within the first seven minutes, all quite gorily: one guy gets skewered through the gob and the other trips a trap that pays tribute to the hacked-in-half opener from Wrong Turn 2, this time splitting the guy into three pieces. It’s impressive for all of five seconds until the world’s worst CGI kicks in…

wrongturn3splitAfter the remaining girl, Alex, escapes, we move to a prison where officer Nate’s last day on the job (yawn…) is made worse with the news that he has to chaperone several prisoners on a transfer to another facility to thwart a rumoured escape attempt by Mexican gangster Chavez. We know he’s Mexican because he calls everyone ‘Puta,’ which, I learnt, is the equivalent of whore. The route between venues is altered to allow the solo-working inbred to run the bus off the road, let the prisoners gain control and send the group running into the woods, where Alex soon leaps out, all screams and immediate expositions…

The group discover an old armoured truck full of cash and continue yelling at one another and swearing amidst aimlessly wandering into all of the hick’s savage traps, including a sliced off face, a vertical spear impaling and a skull cracked open and its lid removed like a boiled egg… We’re only supposed to care about Alex, Nate and the one trustworthy con who swears he didn’t commit the murder he’s inside for. But I didn’t really. They were such cookie-cutter good guys that they were boring, with none of the situational flair that Eliza Dushku and Desmond Harrington had in the original film.

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Also absent is a sense of futility: in the first film there was a real sense of doom for the teens-in-peril, that they wouldn’t get out of this. Plus they were nice kids out for a good time. The second film at least had the sense to try and make its leads affable enough to root for but all the characters in Wrong Turn 3 blur into a gross soup of I-don’t-care proportions. The only character I cared about the was the police dog and that didn’t end well.

Three-Finger, now working alone after his son (assumedly the grown up baby from the end of Dead End) is done away with by the felons, is played by a Bulgarian stuntman who looks like he’s wearing a third-rate plastic Halloween mask and also has the Hiro Nakamurian ability to teleport after he is ‘killed’ by Nate and Alex, who take his truck and drive for several minutes, finding him further down the road than they’ve managed to get!

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But perhaps the worst thing is like a blast from the past. But the past that came before the 80s, the 70s, before Jesus! Remember in old studio films when there was a character in a car, they drove in front of a screen and lackies rocked the vehicle from either side, that’s what they do in Wrong Turn 3 – the bus, the truck, check that fucking background! How low was the budget?

Sucky story, sucky characters, sucky prosthetics, vile CGI, crap actors, a grand total of three female characters… The sweet memory of seeing Wrong Turn back in ’03 feels like it has been raped by a backwoods inbred.

Blurbs-of-interest: Tom Frederic was the doomed boyfriend in the even worse Blood Trails. Janet Montgomery was also in The Hills Run Red – also shot in 2009, also shot in Bulgaria, also lots of trees. Declan O’Brien returned to direct Wrong Turn 4 in 2011.

WELCOME TO SPRING BREAK

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welcometospringbrak3 Stars  1988/91m

A.k.a. Nightmare Beach

Director: Harry Kirkpatrick / Writers: Umberto Lenzi & Vittorio Rambaldi / Cast: Nicholas De Toth, Sarah Buxton, John Saxon, Rawley Valverde, Lance Le Gault, Michael Parks, Fred Buck, Luis Valderama, Yamilet Hildago.

Body Count: 11

Dire-logue: “Welcome to spring break: the annual migration of the idiot.”

The leader of a biker gang is sent to the electric chair in the same week than 100,000 students descend on Venice Beach for their annual Spring Break knees up, sparking a series of intertwined events that begins with the electrocution of a pretty hitcher by a dark-visored biker…

Best buds Skip and Ronnie, meanwhile, have arrived for the week and start it off by upsetting The Demons, the biker gang to whom the recently departed (?) belonged, while pervert cop John Saxon skulks about threatening to send everyone to prison. Electrocutions continue with the leather-clad killer doing away with young vacationers and the odd local who gets in the way, including a girl who’s using her room to earn some college cash by screwing older men and the slasher movie fixture, the prankster, who pretends he’s dead one too many times…

Ronnie gets himself burnt beyond recognition and Skip teams up with waitress Gail, twin sister of dead biker’s victim, and they discover that the Mayor, Saxon’s ropey cop and a local doctor are covering up the truth and will do whatever they can to prevent the feisty duo from bringing it out into the open.

Lenzi, was actually fired from the movie at the start of production but stuck around as an advisor for his replacement, Kirkpatrick. Sadly, this leaves only a hell of a lot of unanswered questions and should-be victims who simply disappear from the story when, by rights, they should be frazzled to DEATH!!! There is, however, a sense of Nancy Drew fun to it all that doesn’t appear in contemporary mystery-slashers, marred only by the ridiculous outcome of the plot secrets and some cheesy 80’s music to top it off.

Blurbs-of-interest: B-movie fixture John Saxon was also in Elm Streets 1 and 3 and the New Nightmare; Tenebrae, The Baby Doll Murders and Black Christmas; Nicholas De Toth became a film editor who worked on some big Hollywood productions such as X Men Origins: Wolverine, Die Hard 4.0 and Terminator 3; Umberto Lenzi directed giallo gem Eyeball.

THE CARETAKER

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caretaker2.5 Stars  2008/18/82m

“Not all love stories have a happy ending.”

Director: Bryce Fridrik Olson / Writer: Jackie Linder Olson / Cast: Kira Verrastro, Jennifer Freeman, James Immekus, Andrew St. John, Jennifer Tilly, Victoria Vande Vegte, Diego Torres, Judd Nelson, Jonathan Breck, Will Stiles, Lola Davidson.

Body Count: 9

The Zone Horror channel has given me the opportunity to see quite a few slasher films since I first had access to it about a year ago. Plenty of these films are bad – The Gingerdead Man, Crazy Eights – and some have been pleasant surprises – StagKnight, Pray for Morning. The Caretaker lands somewhere inbetween. It’s one of those instantly forgettable B-movies populated by fresh faced, enthusiastic thespians and a couple of has-beens signed on for the pay-cheque…

Here, Jennifer Tilly and Judd Nelson graduate from their 80’s teen roles to being “the adults” – namely a nympho teacher with a penchant for low-cut tops and a concerned father of the obvious final girl respectively. Elsewhere, Jonathan Breck (The Creeper from Jeepers Creepers) has a limited, but effective role as a questionable limo driver taking three teen boys and their dates to an abandoned house at a grapefruit grove (orchard?) where an old legend about a psychotic caretaker who kept his beautiful wife shackled in their house, then murdered her family and eventually her when she tried to leg it with their newborn daughter.

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In a sort of diet-Hell Night evolution, it turns out those sent to make scary noises from outside have already been murdered and now those inside are to fall victim to the disguised killer, who uses a tweaked fruit picker to skewer everyone to death. One girl says she is bored by everything and opts to walk back to town – and survives! Another girl – in her prom dress – attempts to take off on a quad bike before she is clothes-lined off of it. There’s also fruit-picker to the dick, grapefruit asphyxiation and an overdose of juvenile fart-gag humour. Squeaky Tilly plays it charismatically, further cementing my theory that she and Cyndi Lauper are in fact the same person.

The outcome is pointedly obvious when you make a quick reckie of Judd Nelson’s overall screentime and the number of years between the past murders, all equating to a resolution that’s about as difficult to establish as a three-brick Lego set. Tame, passable teen horror for a boring evening you don’t mind forgetting about.

Blurbs-of-interest: Breck later played the loon in Mask Maker. Jennifer Tilly was in 1989’s Far From Home and several of the Child’s Play films (and TV series) as Tiffany; Will Stiles was also in Circle.

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