Tag Archives: rip-off central

You can’t always get what you want

As Depeche Mode once sang, I just can’t get enough. 500 plus slasher films and I’m still unsatisfied and probably forever will be until some of the films-within-films are made a reality… Do any of them exist? Did they ever? Will they ever? No.

Anyway, in case you can’t get enough either, here are some of the slasher films that will never be. And never were.

Regardé:

GARDEN TOOL MASSACRE (1988) from The Blob

I really love this one… Girl on left: “Did you know a horrible murder happened in this house ten years ago tonight?” Girl on right: “No way!”

Camp Counsellor: “Isn’t it a bit late to be trimming the bushes?” Then: “Wait…hockey season ended months ago!”

In just two clips amounting to about forty seconds, Garden Tool Massacre looked like it would’ve been proper amazing! Shame The Blob ruined it by killing the audience.

Probable star-rating if it was real and as good as this all the way to the end: 4 Stars

___________________________________________________________

HOT BLOODED (1988) from Cut

starring: Vanessa Turnbill, Brad the Stuntman

The title card from the unfinished, cursed Australian slasher film directed by Kylie Minogue’s tyrannical director, who is offed by one of the cast members…

The film’s trademark psycho, Scarman, becomes imprisoned by the cumulative creative energy put into the production blah, blah… Actually, they didn’t have a better idea to explain away the lack of the killer’s identity. But Cut is still awesome.

Probable star-rating if it was real and as good as this all the way to the end: 2.5 Stars

___________________________________________________________

STAB (1998) from Scream 2

starring: Tori Spelling, David Schwimmer, Jennifer Jolie, Heather Graham, Luke Wilson

The movie based on the book The Woodsboro Murders by Gale Weathers premiered to a gruesome murder at the beginning of Scream 2 – but it was only Jada Pinkett so no biggie.

Wes Craven said that the he intended to show how Scream would look in the hands of a talentless hack, which, arguably, he showed us himself a few years later in Cursed.

Stab is one of the few film-within-a-film slashers to have generated its own franchise: Stab 2 based on the events that occur in Scream 2 and then a fictional second follow up that was plagued by the murders in Scream 3, Stab 3: Return to Woodsboro…

Probable star-rating if it was real and as good as this all the way to the end: 3.5 Stars

___________________________________________________________

And the others I couldn’t/didn’t get screencaps for…

MURDER CAMP from Matinee

About the only exciting moment from this dull mystery flick is the virtual shot-for-shot recreation of Kevin Bacon’s demise from Friday the 13th.

Probable star-rating if it was real and as good as this all the way to the end: 3 Stars

___________________________________________________________

SLEEPOVER CAMP MASSACRE XIV from Bloody Murder

These fakies really have a thing for the summer camp subset – and if there were fourteen frickin’ Sleepover Camp Massacre movies I’d so be there! However, for this lame little in-joke, they actually played clips from the dismal Fever Lake instead…

Probable star-rating if it was real and as good as this all the way to the end: 2 Stars

___________________________________________________________

CHUCKY GOES PSYCHO from Seed of Chucky

Jason Flemyng is a Santa who gets a belly full of Chucky’s (and Tiffany’s) knife in a quick scene shown in the last Chucky movie for the time being. Now, had the dream sequence at the beginning of the film been a part of it, it would’ve been a whole lot better.

Probable star-rating if it was real and as good as this all the way to the end: 3 Stars

___________________________________________________________

THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE FACTOR PART III: DEATH STRIKES THRICE from Kolobos

Another largely forgettable flick made better by this amusing little in-joke about the self-absorbed actress and the crappy slasher franchise she stars in. Apparently someone is killed with a tennis racket.

Probable star-rating if it was real and as good as this all the way to the end: 1 Stars

___________________________________________________________

CO-ED FRENZY (1981) from Blow Out

John Travolta is the sound-man looking for a better scream for this lazy looking sorority hack n’ slash affair where the shower victim whimpered like she was on the world’s tamest rollercoaster. Weirdly, it plays almost exactly like Fatal Pulse

Probable star-rating if it was real and as good as this all the way to the end: 1.5 Stars

___________________________________________________________

RANDOM MAN-WITH-SICKLE FILM (1980) from He Knows You’re Alone

starring Russell Todd!!

The old couple-making-out-in-the-car opener is thwarted by a pantyhose-masked loon with a sickle who hangs Russell Todd from Friday the 13th Part 2 from an overhanging tree and chases his shrieky girlfriend to a barn.

However, all is ruined when a young woman watching in the audience is knifed in the back by the sweaty-browed guy in the row behind.

Probable star-rating if it was real and as good as this all the way to the end: 2 Stars

___________________________________________________________

And one I wish existed in any form…

Someone sent this E-Card to me at Halloween – I don’t know who made it or where it came from but it rules! How awesome would Math Camp be? Calculus, fractions, all bound together by a psycho on the loose. Want!

Most wanted: Math Camp Massacre Part XXII notwithstanding, it’s got to be Garden Tool Massacre.

Where are Brennan & Booth when you need them?

BONES

 3 Stars  2001/18/93m

“This Dogg’s got a bone to pick.”

Director: Ernest Dickerson / Writers: Adam Simon & Tim Metcalfe / Cast: Snoop Dogg, Pam Grier, Michael T. Weiss, Bianca Lawson, Khalil Kain, Clifton Powell, Ricky Harris, Sean Amsing, Merwin Mondesir, Katharine Isabelle, Ronald Selmour, Erin Wright.

Body Count: 13


A sort of Blaxploitation reworking of themes from A Nightmare on Elm Street (and also from New Line, no less) in which a group of ambitious siblings purchase creepy gothic house in a bad neighbourhood where they plan to open a nightclub. The house contains a legend of its own as the murder and burial place of 70’s big cheese Jimmy Bones, who was shot and shanked by a group of drug pushers with whom Jimmy refused to play ball with.

His skeleton is uncovered and, post dog-mauling and rain of maggots, he sets about taking revenge on his killers, who have taken the once progressive berg and turned it into a rotting ghetto.

With almost a full hour before Bones rises from the grave, there’s mucho suspicious padding and hard to follow characters (most of whom die) before things go totally Krueger-ville when the final few parties involved are sucked into a parallel dimension to duke it out with help from Bones’ psychic ex-beau (Grier in a gruesome green all-in-one for the finale) and his unknowing daughter, Cynthia (Buffy alumnus Lawson).

More than anything, Bones stands out from the pack by sgiting the usual white middle-class setting (which is duly referenced a la Jada Pinkett’s ‘exclusion’ rant at the beginning of Scream 2) to the nightmarish streets of a decaying urban hellhole where drugs and guns are plentiful and people have little to lose. However, the out of place middle class brothers and their whiter-than-white sister adequately paint a picture of hope through determination that tries to pass itself off as a subtextual undercurrent…

Not as annoying as most other rapper-in-a-horror-film efforts, listen out for the funny “KFC is run by the KKK” speech.

Blurb-of-interest: Katharine Isabelle was Gibb in Freddy vs Jason and was also in See No Evil 2 and Ginger Snaps (and maybe the sequels, I’ve only seen the first one).

Somebody Hostel Me

somebodySOMEBODY HELP ME

1 Stars  2007/18/98m

“There are worse things than dying.”

Director/Writer: Christopher B. Stokes / Cast: Marques Houston, Omari Grandberry, Brooklyn Sudano, Alexis Fields, Sonny King, Brittany Oaks, Chris Jones, Jim Wilkey, John Wiltshire.

Body Count: 6

Dire-logue: “I didn’t expect this when I came here.”


Wow…there was so much wrong with this one. That tagline is spot on, there are worse things than dying, and watching Somebody Help Me – surely a hidden message regarding You Got Served director Stokes’ incompetent storytelling ability – is one of them.

In fact, when I sat down to watch it last week, it induced one hell of a headache that Ibuprofen couldn’t combat. When I caught the second half a few days later, I realised that some higher force was simply trying to warn me.

The only notable aspect of this film is that the primary cast members are black. And there’s this cliche that “the black guy always dies first” in slasher films. Now, I thought about this while the film ground on in the background. Somebody Help Me was my 530th slasher film and of all of those, the only occasions I can think of where this happens are Elm Street 4 and Scream 2. That’s not to deny the mortality rate for black characters in the genre – they rarely survive, but they also rarely buy it first. Same goes for slutty cheerleaders.

Anyway, two couples head out to Lake Arrowhead to celebrate nauseatingly sweet Serena’s 21st birthday. They meet some friends and party overnight and into the next day. Then they all disappear until only two guys are left standing. Everyone else has been nabbed by a loony surgeon who keeps them in cages and carries out various fatal procedures on them one by one… Yes, it’s Somebody Hostel Me, For I Am A Lost Turista.

My dog has a cage like this. He can escape from it in 5 minutes.

My dog has a cage like this. He can escape from it in 5 minutes.

An ear is cut off (fatal?), eyes are plucked out, a girl is scalped, another seemingly dies from being denied her inhaler. It’s soon down to Brendan (Houston, the now-grown-up twins’ neighbour from Sister Sister) to save everyone, aided by a freaky little blonde girl who sings “Ring Around the Roses” whilst on swings.

Final boys rarely work and this is no exception: we just don’t worry about a big guy hiding behind trees or under tables, there’s no fear attachment to his plight. One of several fatal errors the film makes.

Somebody Help Me goes on to pour out cliche after cliche and bothers to explain next to nothing. Who is the little girl? How can the killer survive being stabbed and shot with absolutely no impediments? Why was the phone out of order but working five minutes later?

The “race switch” ensures that all the black kids survive and their white friends all die (bar one who was alive but absent in the obligatory wrapped-in-blankets-outside-ambulance epilogue). The film attempts to make this some kind of running gag: when asked by the sheriff what their missing friends look like, one of them replies “white” having previously been against calling the cops because “we a bunch of black folks in a white town, we don’t want to scare everybody.” Like, seriously, that’s the pinnacle of your creative aptitude?

Agenda or not, I wanted them all to die: black, white, old, young, male, female, transgendered. Save for the weird girl, nobody evoked the slightest bit of interest or empathy and Stokes’ dreadful screenwriting seems only concerned with issues of skin colour over tension, credibility or coherence – it’s like he rented a handful of slasher films and banged out a script in a spare afternoon. Somebody needed help alright and it’s pretty clear it was Christopher Stokes.

Knock, knock, knockin’ on psycho’s door

butcherTHE BUTCHER

2 Stars  2005/15/84m

“Rest in pieces.”

Director: Edward Gorsuch / Writer: Ellis Walker / Cast: Catherine Wreford, Tom Nagel, Myiea Coy, Alan Ritchson, Bill Jacobson, Nick Stellate, Ashley Hawkins, Tiffany M. Kristensen, Anne M. Mackay, Leila Garvyier.

Body Count: 8

Dire-logue: “Leave her – she’s dead now, she’ll be dead when we get back.”


When road trips go bad… Don’t they always? Even if you don’t run afoul of hillside cannibals, motels run by transvestite mama’s boys or rusty old tankers hell bent on running you off the road, the people you’re stuck in the car with will inevitably piss you off and make you wish for any of these distractions, as will local radio and the dull scenery that tumbles by.

In this instance, six teenagers on their way to Las Vegas to celebrate their graduation take the short cut from hell and, whilst fooling around, have an accident that kills one of them: they hit a tree while one of the girls is dancing out of the sunroof. Needless to say, they end up calling on the local malformed psycho’s house for aid.

This no-budget second-gen photocopy of Wrong Turn is competently enough put together and has a handful of decent, likeable characters as well as traces of what could have been a nightmarish sequence of events had it been in more professional hands or in possession of more moolah but it ultimately moves too slowly and looks too cheap to leave a lasting impression.

It also has a mean streak with all black or gay characters meeting particularly nasty ends at the hands of the truck-driving loon but this kind of minimalist approach is usually pretty effective, it just leaves very little to say about it.

Blurbs-of-interest: Catherine Wreford was in the similar (and slightly better) Wrestlemaniac; Tom Nagel was in Jolly Roger: Massacre at Cutter’s Cove and directed ClownTown.

Return to sender

ripper3RIPPER 2: LETTERS FROM WITHIN

1.5 Stars  2004/86m

“Back from the grave to redeem his soul.”

Directors: Lloyd A. Simandl & Jonas Quastel / Writers: Evan Taylor, Jonas Quastel, John Sheppard & Pat Bermel / Cast: Erin Karpluk, Nicholas Irons, Richard Bremmer, Mhairi Steenbock, Jane Peachey, Daniel Coonan, Colin Lawrence, Myfanwy Waring, Andrew Miltner.

Body Count: 6


My BFF Grace auditioned for a role of “black girl with attitude” in this movie. “Cool!! Ripper‘s a really good little film!” I cawed. She didn’t get it. We were sad. Sometime later, sadness blossomed into a joy of relief. And there was no sign of “black girl with attitude” anyway.

The 2001 Anglo-Canadianian original was a neat little knock-off of Urban Legend with a confusing ending that sort of nodded in the direction of a possible sequel, which resulted in this dismal British feature, the quality of which is alluded to by virtue of the fact it’s never been released in the UK in any way, shape or form to date.

This hackneyed marriage of ideas from A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and the left over jetsam from the previous film sees Molly Keller (now played by Karpluk) in an institution following the intangible twist ending(s) from the first round. Her shrink recommends her for a trip to a specialist clinic near Prague where Egor-like doc Bremmer carries out questionable treatments on a group of troubled youths by exploring their subconscious while they sleep – how or why he does this is something we’re apparently not meant to ask about.

Molly’s schizoid brain transmits a cloaked fiend – possibly Jack the Ripper, who we’re told is an ancestor of hers – into the groups’ collective dozing and he begins doing away with them one after the other while they roam about in their fantasies / nightmares.

Even with two directors and four scribes, the creative team fail to even muster the most basic of chills given the gothic castle setting and while away the running time with endless ‘dream’ sequences, including some sexual deviant ambling around a fetish club, serving no purpose other than to visualise soft-core lesbianism and an excess of tits.

Otherwise, criminally undeveloped sub-characters are blandly killed off before Molly confronts the dream stalker (though not before aping Jennifer Love Hewitt’s “what are you waiting for?” moment from I Know What You Did Last Summer) and the film ends as confusingly as the first one did, with absolutely no confirmation of who did what or if any of it happened at all to a group of people who might not have even existed.

Nothing but a mass of empty shells and no gun powder, Ripper 2 is the equivalent of Root Canal Surgery: The Musical, starring Justin Beiber.

Blurb-of-interest: Lloyd Simandl had already directed the even worse Possession: Until Death Do You Part back in 1987; Erin Karpluk later had a role in the TV series Slasher.

1 6 7 8 9 10 13