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Trade-a-Life V

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Let’s play Top Trumps with the lives of a bunch of fictional slasher flick characters yet again.

My confidence in said trades is starting to wane a little now; I’m less passionate about switching this group as the films become less…”important” to the slasher landscape, shall we say. Or maybe I’m just soppy in my old age and want them all to live?

As ever, ma-hoo-sive spoilers lie within…

FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VIII: JASON TAKES MANHATTAN

Rennie Wickham (Jensen Daggett) ranks as the most uninteresting Friday final girl. It’s fair to say that imagination was in short supply by 1989 and the staggering eighth instalment so perhaps the solution was to take a step away from the weepy, good girls of the last few parts and let Saffron Henderson’s punk-tastic JJ have a go at besting Jason.

In one of the many errors this movie makes (not least in its title), JJ is killed off but 20 odd minutes into the film after just one dismal little scene in which she illustrates misfit-solidarity with geeky film kid Wayne, goes off to play her oh-so 80s guitar in the engine room and is ironically killed with it. Sucky.

No offence to Rennie but we’ve seen it all before; JJ’s rocker-in-suburbia approach could’ve been an interesting element to the film. Correction, THE interesting element to the film.

WILDERNESS

Again, I have nothing against Mandy’s survival in this film – she’s one of the tiny handful of non-white girls to make it out alive – but Lenora Crichlow is given little to other than happen to not get in the way of the killer’s vengeance.

Counsellor Louise (Alex Reid), however, is smart, resourceful and puts the kids first, taking a lethal dive over a cliff top to ensure the others get away and later getting her head cut off for the trouble!

WRONG TURN 2: DEAD END

Can I opt for a special offer and trade three-for-two? Hey, it’s my game! I’ll do what I want, damnit!

So, Wrong Turn 2 is a good sequel, albeit very different to the near-perfect original, and Joe Lynch bravely juggled with the expected conventions. At the start, it looked like reluctant nice girl Mara (Aleksa Paladino), who steps into the survivalist gameshow after one constestant fails to show (read: gets chopped in two), would conquer her fears of inadequacy and survive, even after discovering her fiance is cheating on her… But no, she gets an axe in the skull fairly early on.

Final girl duties are passed on to Nina (genre regular Erica Leehrsen), who plays the character a bit more realistically, with a bitchy edge, though she does good in the end, going back to save Jake (Texas Battle) from the cannibal clan. Jake is functional as the nice guy and, for once, doesn’t conform to ghetto stereotypes as the only black guy, but I’d have preferred a different outcome altogether.

The non-white girl we’ve needed to survive all along should’ve been Amber (Daniella Alonso), ex-military lesbian and ever-prepared, who goes out with joker boy Jonesy in a double impaling arrow-through-the-eye gag.

Then there’s presenter Colonel Dale Murphy (Henry Rollins), he kicks ass left, right and center, turning up when needed to save Nina and Jake and is nice to the right people but is done away with at the last hurdle. It seems right given the survival nature of the film but I’d have like to have seen Dale save both Mara and Amber in an unusual capable-people-win for once (well, not Mara, but she didn’t deserve that axeing).

Rubbish films: Heed thy warnings (or don’t)

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A sort of themed return to Rubbish Films That Don’t Deserve Long Reviews, with an emphasis on the films that almost tried to warn you in their titles. Maybe it’s simpler to do nothing.

Among the advice in horror films is not to go in the woods, look in the basement, answer the phone, go to sleep but none have yet ‘fessed up and called themselves Don’t Watch This Piece of Shit Movie…

DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE

1 Stars  1979/76m

“You have been warned!”

Director: Joseph Ellison / Writers: Joseph R. Masefield, Joseph Ellison & Ellen Hammill / Cast: Dan Grimaldi, Robert Osth, Johanna Brushay, Ralph D. Bowman, Kim Roberts.

Body Count: 5

A completely depressing little attempt at stapling a pyromanical theme to the basic plot of Psycho.

Grimaldi is a quiet labourer who lives in a big gothic house with mom, who tried to ‘burn the evil out’ of him as a child. When she dies, he finally realises he’s free to do whatever he wants and so inexplicably decides to pick up women and burn them alive in a specially converted sheet-metal room in his attic.

Considering it was made before Friday the 13th opened the floodgates for the genre, House shows a progression from the sleazier rape n’ torture flicks of the early 70s towards the stalker formula. Consequently, it has more common ground with The Driller Killer than Halloween.

Still, even at a mere 76 minutes (cut from the original 81), it’s flabbergastingly boring, attempting to direct our sympathies to the killer and his cheater work buddy who ultimately saves the day! Conversely, the female victims are hardly given anything to do and (in this version at least) there’s only one on-camera kill.

The effective Maniac-style finale is good but just too damn little, too damn late. This leaves only a squalid, sexist and homophobic addition to the Don’t mini-movement. No sale.

DON’T OPEN TILL CHRISTMAS

1984/18/82m  1 Stars

Directors: Edmund Purdom & Al McGoohan (additional scenes) / Writer: Derek Ford / Cast: Edmund Purdom, Alan Lake, Belinda Mayne, Mark Jones, Gerry Sundquist, Kelly Baker, Kevin Lloyd, Caroline Munro.

Body Count: 16

Dire-logue: “I shall look like a gay old queen!”

There are very few successful Christmas-themed slasher films (Black Christmas excepted of course) and this hopeless London-shot film fucking directed by Edmund Purdom probably belongs at the bottom of the stack. OK, maybe Christmas Evil sucks harder.

Street Santa’s, store Santa’s, Christmas Party Santa’s and anybody else unfortunate enough to have donned Saint Nick clobber are themselves being clobbered by a Christmas-hating psycho (possibly from Tower Hamlets?).

Purdom is the Chief Inspector in charge of stopping the mayhem, whilst dealing with the sulky daughter of an early victim and her mullet-headed boyfriend, who visually epitomises everything wrong with British 80s fashion. This mismatched pair goes about trying to solve the mystery on their own, amidst trips to take part in dodgy photo shoot and busk in the middle of a market with nothing but a flute!?

Meanwhile, Santa’s all over the place are being knifed, burnt, glassed and even castrated in the middle of taking a piss. Who’s doing it? There are several palpable suspects in supporting roles and Purdom himself might even be our guy.

Once unmasked, the killer is reminded by sulky girl that he killed her dad, to which he responds by saying: “That was unfortunate – but he reminded me of Christmas time.” He then kills her! (Possibly offended by the flute).

With the nominal heroine out the window, a peepshow employee who witnesses one of the murders in promoted to the role, kidnapped by the killer and then chased about deserted Soho streets in the middle of the day (!) and her ultimate fate is never really explained. There’s a brief flashback scene fisted in to do with a crappy family Christmas in some ill-conceived attempt to make sense of it all.

Though it looks okay on the surface, this is a real mess. Caroline Munro, whose named is emblazoned all over the video box, has a cameo of about three minutes as herself, probably as a favour to Purdom.

Don’t open ever.

DON’T PANIC

1 Stars  1987/18/90m

“The REAL nightmare is just beginning.”

Director/Writer: Ruben Galindo Jr. / Cast: Jon Michael Bischof, Gabriela Hassell, Helen Rojo, George Luke, Juan Ignacio Aranda, Eduard Noriega, Roberto Palazvelos, Melinda McCallum, Cecilia Tijerina.

Body Count: 7

If you thought Don’t Open Till Christmas was an acid trip into bizarro WTF territory, why not give this completely demented Mexican combo of Elm Street and The Exorcist a spin?

Dorky teen Michael – who sports a sort of permed mullet hairstyle – and friends play with a Ouija board that gets his friend Tony possessed with an evil spirit named Virgil who then kills the others.

The catch here is that Michael has precognitive Laura Mars-style visions, during which he is blind to everything else, illustrated to us with some tacky plastic contacts that look like they’re hurting the actor.

Beyond the bad writing, acting and production, Michael has got to be one of the most embarrassing lead characters on celluloid. He’s 18 but spends the majority of the film in dinosaur pyjamas and whines like a ten-year-old when he doesn’t get his own way.

In its efforts to ape Freddy, mom is an alcoholic and the killer’s face (when seen) is burnt and disfigured. The video box I had bore the tagline: “Forget Freddie [sic] and Jason, Virgil’s the newest nightmare in town.”

The dinosaur PJ’s are far more frightening.

DON’T LOOK DOWN

1998/12/87m  1.5 Stars

Director: Larry Shaw / Writer: Gregory Goodell / Cast: Megan Ward, Billy Burke, Terry Kinney, Angela Moore, William McDonald, Kate Robbins, Aaron Smolinski, Tara Spencer-Nairn.

Bodycount: 5

Dire-logue: “OK, so it’s me against the bogeyman.”

A nauseatingly tame made for TV thriller with ‘Wes Craven Presents’ all over the box and “this is the best Wes Craven film I’ve ever seen” written on it. What? Like, seriously? He also lent his name to fucking Wishmaster. And it’s rated 12.

Racked by guilt after she fails to save her little sister from falling over a cliff edge, reporter Ward finds herself increasingly anxious when faced with vertigo-inducing situations and so joins an intense therapy course run by iffy shrink Kinney, who might be the one shoving the patients off rooftops outside working hours.

An impressive opening act that has shades of the Stallone actioner Cliffhanger, a not-entirely predictable exposition from the killer and the fact that the black woman lives are the only distinguishing features in this boring crack at a potentially interesting premise.

The acrophobia angle is played out mainly with psychobabble and boring exercises for the group members, only two of whom are given that fatal push.

This should’ve been better.

*

Overrall blurbs-of-interest: Dan Grimaldi was in iMurders; Caroline Munro and Kelly Baker were in Slaughter High; Munro was also in Maniac and The Last Horror Film; Edmund Purdom was in Absurd and Pieces. Ruben Galindo also directed the far better Cemetery of Terror and Grave Robbers. Fortunately, that’s all.

More almost but not-quite slasher flicks

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Another handful of horrors that hang out by the dance floor where all the slasher flicks are partying and flirt with them, trying to blend even though they don’t really fit in… See the last lot here.

DEAD SILENCE 2007

“From the makers of Saw” came this seriously underrated and unsuccessful scare flick, in which young couple Ryan Kwanten (later in True Blood) and Laura Regan (from My Little Eye) receive a creepy ventriloquist’s doll in the mail that somehow kills her, sending him back to their hometown of Raven’s Faire, a town apparently cursed by the ghost of Mary Shaw, subject of an Elm Street-like nursery rhyme that states if you encounter her in your dreams, don’t scream or you’ll lose your tongue, just as Regan did.

Kwanten’s investigations, hampered by greasy detective – and ex-New Kid on the Block – Donnie Wahlberg, seem to generate a fresh wave of creepy deaths and there’s one helluva twist at the end that I was totally blind to!

Why it’s not a slasher flick really: it’s a ghost story with a body count really, shades of Darkness Falls as well as Krueger-town (there was an additional murder in the deleted scenes) creep in, but not enough to swap sub-genres and they’re not likely to make a sequel…

DONKEY PUNCH 2008

Three northern gals holidaying in Mallorca hook up with a quartet of private school guys crewing on a luxury yacht and decide to party on the boat. Sex and drugs dominate and one of the guys decides to test a sexual urban legend – the Donkey Punch – which backfires, killing one of the girls. The boys vote to throw her overboard and say she fell and when the girls refuse to go along with it, a series of intensified confronations and misunderstandings lead to a second accidental death, then escalate to murder…

Why it’s not a slasher flick really: most of the deaths are accidents (including a neat outboard demise) and one person commits suicide. There’s a final girl of sorts but this is totally a Brit-grit situation flick.

HOUSE OF 9 2005

Another UK export; in this cut-price Battle Royale, nine strangers are abducted and wake up in a locked down house and informed that when only one remains alive, they will exit with £5million. Dennis Hopper is an Irish priest with a dodgy accent, Kelly Brook a shy dancer, Chardonnay from Footballer’s Wives a socialite, a rapper, an American detective, married couple and so on…

They argue about the situation until it leads to accidental death and murder, whittling down numbers until only one remains and exits. Cue semi-clever twist.

Why it’s not a slasher flick really: as with Donkey Punch, it’s all situational, there’s no one killer offing everybody one by one.

THE LAMP 1987

I love this cheesecake 80s horror film about a killer genie – or Djinn – which inhabits ye olde lamp that dim-witted, dungaree-wearing heroine Alex rubs when it arrives at her father’s museum. A field trip, a dumb teen idea to spend the night there (in a fucking museum…), Djinn-possession and the teens, some staff members and a couple of meathead racists find themselves done in in a variety of proto-Final Destination ways, some of which are suitably gruesome and clever, let down only by bargain basement effects work and a Djinn that looks like a Kinder Egg toy.

Why it’s not a slasher flick really: it’s a close one: there’s a lot in common with the likes of The Initiation and any number of collegiate prank slasher flicks but in the end it varies itself out of the equation.

THE UGLY 1997

A defence psychologist appointed to reassess a murderer, who proceeds to fill her in on his traumatic childhood and the slayings that followed. Despite warnings from the creepy institution doctor the shrink is soon sucked into his tragic tale of a nasty mother, school bullies and his one friend. All the blood on show is like black motor oil from a bunch of extras who are slashed up with a straight razor. Things go all Se7en with a downbeat twist ending, but it’s typically arty in the Australasian way.

Why it’s not a slasher flick really: a serial killer flick with grisly murders peppered throughout; no busloads of dense teenangers here.

Lightmares and Nighthouses

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LIGHTHOUSE

 3.5 Stars  1999/15/91m

“The brightest light. Your darkest fears.”

A.k.a. Dead of Night (U.S.)

Director: Simon Hunter / Writers: Hunter & Graeme Scarfe / Cast: James Purefoy, Rachel Shelley, Chris Adamson, Paul Brooke, Don Warrington, Chris Dunne, Bob Goody, Pat Kelman, Pete McCabe.

Body Count: 13

Dire-logue: “Two words can sum that up: Sick. Fuck.”

Some films should only be watched once. Such is the case with this leftover from 90s Horror Month, which I frankly ran out of time to review.

In typical British horror tradition, the UK was pretty much the last country to get the film despite producing the damn thing. I saw it about a decade ago after importing an American video copy and thought it was very good but, if memory serves, not likely to hold up on repeated viewings. Watching it t’other day, I was right.

Psycho member-of-public cutter-upper Leo Rook escapes from incarceration during a transfer on a prison ship, offing a couple of guards as he goes and then rows to a nearby lighthouse-isle, slays the keepers and disables the lighthouse, which subsequently causes the ship to hit nearby rocks and sink.

A gaggle of survivors make it to the isle and hobble to the lighthouse where the remaining guards try to keep hold of their power before the group realise that something ain’t right. Attempts to fix lights, generators and radios are all thwarted by Rook, who likes to collect the severed heads of his victims. Eventually, the prison staff and shrinkologist Kirsty (Shelley) admit to the others who was on board and who might’ve escaped and who might be killing everyone. That’s the same person for all three of those categories, by the way.

Lighthouse excels visually and some scenes are precursors to the likes of Haute Tension: sequences where victims know the killer is close by and hide themselves away in tiny spaces while the music is muted and nobody is sure if Rook knows they’re there. Lots of work is done with reflections in puddles and weather beaten windows and shots are angled to maximise the claustrophobic feel of a scene or, elsewhere, making the interior of the building appear like a swirling nightmare. Another great scene involves two prisoners shackled together, one of whom is unconscious while the other decides between spending ages attacking their chains with an axe or hacking through something easier as the killer approaches…

There’s a weird and off putting flashback that links Rook to Kirsty that’s never wholly explain and made fuzzy by strange editing as the film lumbers awkwardly towards it’s overwrought climax, which unfortunately scrutinises the setpieces into looking a bit staged and cheap. There’s no prizes for picking who’ll live and who won’t but the cast is dotted with familiar faces, most of whom (nearly all the victims here are male) die quite gruesomely by the killer’s handy machete.

One of the better British slasher efforts hampered possibly by it’s almost-high-art-but-not approach to a generic opus; parts of it that look beautiful juxtapose clumsily with low-end effects work, but if you can see your way to ignoring that, there are some gripping situations to level the playing field and Lighthouse is definitely worth seeing for a touch of classiness.

Strangely, someone asked me if I thought the film was gay. Gay? Well, a load of men – some shackled together – scramble to salvation on an island with a big phallic penisey lighthouse. But no, I don’t think it’s some big cock metaphor.

Blurb-of-interest: Rachel Shelley was in The Children.

Pant-Soiling Scenes #16: 28 DAYS LATER…

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Is it a zombie film? Is it not a zombie film? I’d say it’s a zombie film but without zombies. Per se.

Regardless of how you look at it, it’s still shit scary. Well…was – it’s been duped to death now, the whole man-wakes-up-after-the-event thing. The Walking Dead just started practically the same.

Anyway, 28 Days Later‘s pant-soiling-scene comes when our recently-awoken hero Jim looks for help and hope at the nearest church but instead finds a pile of bodies and a couple of The Infected, who were peacefully dozing until he hollered, thus resulting in a super-eerie moment when what looks to Jim like other people is evidently anything but…

Although why Mr Infected has a sheet tucked into his collar like some massive napkin is a mystery… Dining in?

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