Tag Archives: Scream

Stock Background Characters 101: Unrealistically camp gay

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In this feature, we examine the lesser beings of the slasher movie realm, which, if you’re making your own slasher film, could provide a good cast roster for you.

No killer or final girl profiles here, this is a celebration of those underlings who made the most of their fleeting flirtation with stardom. And usually died.

This month, be catty, yet fashionable and definitely sexless as we look at
THE UNREALISTICALLY CAMP GAY

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Overview: In movie-world, minorities only ever come in two types: threatening and entirely non-threatening. In these PC-centric times we live in, gone are some of the more offensive stereotypes of gay characters, specifically men (we’ll deal with lesbians another day), where the only plausible style of representation was being a drag queen, a child molester, or a repressed psychopath. These days, it’s all about camp humour. Think Will & Grace & Ghostface.

Linguistic Snapshot: “Oh my God, girls, I tell you that killer better not come after me… Unless he’s Jensen Ackles with a donkey dick and doesn’t get blood on my Prada *squeaky giggle*.”

Styling: The camp gay man must wear tight-fitting clothes that make him appear skinny and weak. He can’t be one of the gym-sculpted Adonises that litter the scene, because they might be mistaken for REAL men and we can’t have that! No, be flaming, be stylish, be a functioning hair-gel addict. Hey, why not try make-up too?

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Hallmarks: After it being communicated to the audience that he is gay, the Unrealistically Camp Gay needn’t do much more. After all, that’s all that’s required on the knowledge front. All that’s left to do is hang around in the background and make occasional razor-sharp quips about the depressingly-dull romantic problems of the main boy and girl, as only THEIR love matters.

Downfall: In days of yore, UCG’s would be quite violently slashed up on screen to appease the assumed hoards of homophobic audience members who like to see “them fags get what they deserve!” While social stance may be a little more progressive, gay characters tend to hang around a little longer, neither being the first to go, nor one of the last. He is a midriff victim (possibly to complement the crop-top he’s likely to have been forced to don by the costume department).

In Venom, Ricky is summarily done in relatively early on, incapably running from the killer (remember, gays can’t run, throw, or lift weights in Hollywood) and having his arm ripped off; super-camp Latino-gay Shawn of 7eventy 5ive, miraculously gets laid by a hot cowboy (an unlikely pairing, but, y’know, gays will do anyone) before almost literally running into the killer’s blade; Fame-dancing Asian-gay Ricky (double minority points!) from Hack! attempts ill-advised martial arts on the killer and is, instead, gunned down. Finally, Timmy, student of Cherry Falls High School and victim of evident high-velocity collision with the Boots cosmetics counter, is afforded an off-screen throat-slashing as one of the primary virgin victims.

Genesis: Early slasher movie gay characters were far more commonly found in red herring roles, suspect because of their “deviant” sexual preferences, that, naturally, go hand in hand with psychotic breaks. One early example, though more incidental than intended, was Radish in Final Exam. Whether the geeky character is supposed to BE gay is a mystery, only Joel S. Rice’s performance at least APPEARS angled towards being the fag for heroine Courtney’s hag. He survives most of the film, is picked on by the macho jock-types, and done in when he tries to warn Courtney of the impending danger.

In the curiously named Canadian export American Nightmare (!?), Dolly the transvestite is the sole “male” victim of a razor-toting loon, who encounters him earlier while escaping and yells a hateful remark in his direction, then later returns to finish the job.

Lastly, and most infamously, is boy-hero Jesse in A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: This much analysed entry in the series had an intended subtext of homosexuality, as Freddy Krueger literally “came out” of Jesse’s body at various points to kill schmucks. Eventually, Jesse is saved by the kiss of a girl; hetero-trumps-homo and saves the day. Those who criticise the film for it’s “pro-gay” material are clearly uninformed on what “pro-gay” means… Elm Street 2 doesn’t have much positive to say on the subject. Just check out that S&M-fused gay bar Jesse coincidentally wanders into…

elm2bar2Legacy: In Scream 4, Charlie and Robbie make a point of stating that, in their “rules reversed” theory of modern horror, that the only way to survive a scary movie is to be gay. Nice idea, but yet to be seen in practice.

Until that happens, we stand and watch as gay characters become slightly more evident in the genre, ideally less camp and annoying, and aren’t written as pathetic cowards either.

The gay boys in Bride of Chucky, Venom and The Clown at Midnight are, at least, far more incidental in terms of their sexuality. None of them are able to demonstrate anything on screen, merely colour their hair with peroxide, engage in short-lived conversations about not being straight, and, of course, die summarily.

Elsewhere, gay-produced slasher HellBent may have been largely set in a West Hollywood gay club, but it presented characters of varying campness, from the muscle guy who regrets dressing in drag for Halloween, to the testosterone hemorrhaging sex-pest, and the more sensitive final guy.

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In Scary Movie, the revealed killers are made up of a closet gay teenager and his friend who allows him to suck cock, but who has been the subject of endless gay visual gags throughout the film, culminating in their har-de-har-har ‘position of death’; slumping into a butt-fuck position.

Conclusions: Sadly, it’s still widely believed by the people that produce slasher movies that the audience is strictly limited to heterosexual men interested only in seeing girl-on-girl action when it comes to intonations of anything-but-straight sexualities. The sheer number of fansites, blogs, and even books on horror written by gay men is staggering, what the draw of this largely unsympathetic subgenre is remains to be made clear, perhaps the sense of “outcast-ness” shared with the likes of Laurie Strode or seeing the popular (and probably nasty) kids laid to waste are among viable reasons.

Anyway, we wouldn’t have gotten Hellbent in the 80s (Cruising sure don’t count), so tropes are morphing and changing all the time and, perhaps Charlie and Robbie’s reading will be made fact in the not so distant future.

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Scott Pilgrim vs Cinderhella and the Class of ’92

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detention_poster2DETENTION

2.5 Stars  2011/15/89m

“Cancel your future.”

Director/Writer: Joseph Kahn / Writer: Mark Palermo / Cast: Josh Hutcherson, Shanley Caswell, Dane Cook, Spencer Locke, Aaron David Johnson, Parker Bagley, Alison Woods, Jonathan Park, Tiffany Boone, Travis Fleetwood, Marque Richardson.

Body Count: 16

Dire-logue: “It’s so obviously a conspiracy to get everyone to think I’m a total loser making pre-emptive mid-90s pop references.”

Oil and water. Sandals and socks. One Direction and a record deal. Some things just don’t work together. To that we can now add Scott Pilgrim-esque motion comic platitudes with a Scream meta slasher semi going on. Detention is weird.

What there is of a story begins with the murder of high school superbitch Taylor, who commentates to camera about, like, life n’ stuff, the many cliches of the Mean Girls generation with an OD of toxic wit before getting her throat slashed, then stabbed and tossed out the window. Seems one can, like, totally still scream in spite of a cut throat.

Grizzly Lake High loser Riley is soon attacked by the same killer, dressed as fictional slasher flick killer Cinderhella. Another murder follows and eight characters are given Saturday detention (sadly not in Shermer, Illinois). Riley and crush Clapton (Hutcherson, pre-Hunger Games), use a time machine inside the school’s Grizzly bear mascot, to go back to 1992 to stop the end of the world.

Effectively, the detention itself is irrelevant, beginning almost an hour through the film and meaning nothing in the grand scheme of things. Here, where we expect the nine teenagers to start getting whacked, the film branches off down its stupid time travel route. The slasher plot is lost in a loads of gags about body swapping, 90s fashion, music, and is brought back at the end to wrap things up, revealing the killer to be just who the arrows were pointing to and not bothering to offer a motive. Not a clear one anyway.

While the dialogue is axe-blade sharp, the insights into 90s culture (also curiously unexplained) are amusing (“Oasis were the best Beatles cover band”), it just doesn’t go anywhere. The time travel element appears from nowhere and for no discernible reason other than to serve as a basis for more 1992-woz-funny jokes.

Had this a fraction of the amount of Scream‘s attention to detail, it would’ve been approximately 64% better, but it’s like someone wrote a load of funny jokes about shit and decided a half-assed slasher opus would be a viable genre to staple them to, but nobody seemed to give a shit about making the slasher part of it any good… People die and then un-die, and much of the body count is made up of film-within-a-film (and sometimes within-a-film-within-a-film-within-a-film) slayings – only five people are offed in the narrative.

Extra points for featuring two men kissing (gasp!) and NOT punishing them for it for a change, and Parker Bagley’s appropriate eye-candiness. Growl.

The two-and-a-half-stars are 80% for the clever-dick script, which will date faster than, like, an X Factor winner’s single. Watch Detention again in ten years and see how much of it makes any sense. Or is remotely funny. See, unlike the of-the-moment gags, the killer-with-a-knife plot has remained the same for 30+ years, and that’s the part that should’ve been the focus of the exercise.

Rules are made to be slashed to ribbons

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Google “slasher movie rules” and you’ll find no end to the listings of do’s and don’ts of the dead teenager flick: Don’t walk backwards slowly, don’t investigate strange sounds, don’t say “I’ll be right back” and so on and so forth…

Scream may have listed and then broken most of these rules, but it wasn’t the first. Je regarde  how often “Sex = Death” a.k.a. “Only virgins can survive” is broken…

Way back in 1981, when the slasher movie opus was in its relative infancy (and commercial peak), Friday the 13th Part 2 broke the golden rule that said the final girl has to be a virgin, or at the very least, sexually undemonstrative.

Ginny – Dame Amy of Steel – quite evidently gets it on with her on/off shag-thing (and boss) Paul, long before any of the horror unfolds. While she may not be as flaunty as the other girls in the film, who either talk about sex a lot, initiate it a lot, or wear tight little cut-offs, the very fact that Ginny has sex at all is quite the progressive step in a genre often criticised for puritanical representations of pre-marital sex and punishment thereof.

Even further back in time – and before the slasher movie ‘rules’ had been established by clone-after-Xerox of Halloween‘s basic plot structure, Black Christmas (1974) elected a heroine who was not only pregnant by her boyfriend, but planning on an abortion!

One of the many reasons that Black Christmas is so damn good is this risk it takes with the central character, the one the audience is supposed to root for above all others. It’s worth noting that Jess (Olivia Hussey) isn’t all just “I’ma no havin’ ma baaaaybee, I wants to go to Ayia Napa!”, she provides a thoughtful rationale around her choice. If only 5% of modern horror films could be this brave…

OK, so it’s a post-Scream example, but the central concept of Cherry Falls (2000) flipped the entire cliche on its head. As the brilliant tagline told it: “If you haven’t had it. You’ve had it.”

It being sex.

The killer terrorising the tweens of your common-or-garden small town only makes a play for the virgins. The high school population’s resolution? A “Pop Your Cherry” party, where they all just romp around in the most unromantic way imaginable. Despite candles.

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Several of the heroines that came after the late 90s self-referential cycle were that little bit more real: Julie in I Know What You Did Last Summer has off-camera sex with her boyfriend at the start of the movie.

Elsewhere, young moms occasionally step up to the final girl plate: Kara in Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers; Jessica in Jason Goes to Hell; Heather in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare; and whatever Catherine Hicks’ character was named in Child’s Play. They’re surely not girly little virgins. Kara, for instance, is regarded as “paying for her mistake” by her father. She messed up, but she’s all good now. All are single mothers (Heather widowed during the film), so none are having a lot of sex.

But there you have it, not every rule is written in stone. Sometimes you can have sex, but only if it’s the right KIND of sex and you’re not stupid about it.

Next time: Does the black guy REALLY always die first?

Rubbish films IV: Rubbish never dies

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Times may have changed, but people still make rubbish films. Rubbish slasher films included! “No way,” you say, “Way!” I correct you. Then we fight over it some.

UNSPEAKABLE

0.5 Stars  1999/18/81m

Director/Writer: Chad Ferrin / Cast: Roger Cline, Tina Birchfield, Timothy Muskatell, Wolf Dangler, Tamera Noll, Joe Mode, Stephanie Lane, Leigh Silver.

Body Count: 11

Dire-logue: “That is MY pussy! Oh look it’s all dirty and full of shit – that’s mine!”

You may have read the Dire-logue and wondered what the hell that was all about. Well, in a scene that pretty much tells you all you need to know about the aptly named Unspeakable, a male nurse gropes a woman in a vegetated state who has defecated herself. He then rubs his hands over the crap on her thighs and then provides cunnilingus – WITHOUT CLEANING HER UP.

The rest of the movie is thus: Family has car accident. Daughter dies. Wife becomes said vegetable. Father goes mental over loss of daughter. Sees things, hears voices etc. Kills prostitutes and then some pimps-slash-drug dealers.

It’s misogynistic, full of sexual profanity that goes far beyond coarse, offensively homophobic, perverse, badly acted, badly filmed, and, in accordance with the aforementioned scene – simply shit.

 

THE FEAR: RESURRECTION

1 Stars 1999/18/84m

A.k.a. The Fear 2: Halloween Night (UK)

Director: Chris Angel / Writer: Kevin Richards / Cast: Gordon Currie, Stacy Grant, Phillip Rhys, Betsy Palmer, Myc Agnew, Emmanuelle Vaugier, Kelly Benson, Brendan Beiser, Rachel Hayward, Larry Pennell, Byron Chief Moon, Jon Fedele.

Body Count: 8

Dire-logue: “Everything is about getting laid.”

The first Fear movie involved a bunch of talky college kids doing an experiment in fear. Predictably, they all fall victim to their own most dreaded phobias – helped along by a mysterious wooden mannequin known as Morty. It was all supernatural hooey and not very good.

This Scream-influenced follow up revives the wooden one but doesn’t do any better. This time, Gordon Currie (seen impaled on an aerial in Friday the 13th Part VIII a decade earlier) goes to visit his grandparents (Pennell and frickin’ Betsy Palmer, y’all!!) with some friends for a party that will involve some stupid ritual to rid them of their worst fears.

Morty, now a sacred Indian thing that the token Native American character (who is notably the first one done away with) harps on about, is soon possessed by the spirit of a dead serial killer who made his victims tell him their worst fears and just happens to be Currie’s daddy!

What ensues is the slaughter of the only interesting characters, while the boring and morally distorted ones survive – and never appear to be that bothered by finding their dead friends, even managing to make time for sex amidst the unfolding carnage!

A total lack of interest in anyone (the awesome Palmer aside) and a supremely annoying heroine (fittingly named Peg) make this as lively as any other wooden mannequin.

GIRLS SCHOOL SCREAMERS

1 Stars  1984/18/82m

“The finishing school that finished them off!”

A.k.a. The Portrait

Director: John P. Finegan / Writers: Finegan, Katie Keating & Pierce J. Keating / Cast: Mollie O’Mara, Sharon Christopher, Vera Gallagher, Peter C. Cosimano, Marcia Hinton, Karen Krevitz, Mari Butler, Beth O’Malley, Monica Antonucci, Charles Braun, John Turner.

Body Count: 9

How many excuses can be found to send a group of teenagers to another scary house with “a past”? So far, Girls School Screamers wins the award for worst ever reason: Inventory.

Things begin quite promisingly with a Ghost Story-like bride scaring the shit out of a daring brat who ventures into the abandoned Welles Manor. Sadly, once the mansion is inherited by a Trinity School for Girls and they send seven “exemplary” students and a REALLY old nun (amusingly named Sister Urban. Sista Urban would be better) to take inventory of the possessions that remain.

Moral centre Jackie discovers a portrait of the niece of the owner of the house, which happens to look exactly like her. Her dumb friends soon start dropping like flies – as do a couple of boys who drop by to scare them – and are later arranged in a mock-wedding set up in the basement. Then Jackie is possessed by the ghost of her look-alike (the bride from the start) and pokes the killer’s eyes out.

Sadly, there’s no fat hairy bloke with boxing gloves as seen on the cover, but we DO get one chick fried alive but when seen later at the wedding, her skin is back to normal colour.

One note of interest is that GSS is one of the VERY rare occasions in 80s slasher movies that more than one teenage girl survives. As does Sista Urban. Doesn’t matter though, by that point you’ll likely be so confused by all the plot holes you won’t even notice.

THE MOVIE HOUSE MASSACRE

1.5 Stars  1984/75m

A.k.a. Blood Theatre (Australia)

Director/Writer: Alice Raley [Rick Sloane] / Cast: Mary Woronov, Jonathan Blakely, Lynne Darcy, Cynthia Hartline, Barrie Metz, Lisa Lindsley, Terry Taylor.

Body Count: 31

Dire-logue: “Is it a new requirement to have an IQ over 50 to work here?”

According to the sleeve, “this quirky story has all the elements of a John Waters film”. How John Waters would react to such a declaration after seeing the damn thing might make a more interesting read because this is an almost stunningly dreadful film with awful acting, set pieces, no apparent story and a horrible plinky-plonky score.

Spotlite Theaters purchase an old movie house where a fire killed twenty-odd people and the ticket booth operator was stabbed to death by the usher. The sleazy manager dispatches three of his staff to fix up the place where skeletal heroine Jennifer runs into the tux-wearing spirit of the (now geriatric) killer-usher, who knocks off some random cheerleaders who stop by and the rest of the mostly female staff roster.

Woronov has a thankless role as the bitchy manager’s assistant, but her presence is paled into blandness by the two girls who are transferred to the haunted locale after one of them starts a huge fight during a movie (but isn’t fired!?). They wear the most ghastly array of clothes: a pink mini-skirt over purple leggins with black heel boots. Yuck. The badly-behaved one, Selena, is one of the few interesting elements: “I am the main feature!” she squawks during the brawl she incites.

Despite the acid-to-the-eyeball fashion faux pas on display, there are a few laughs to be had and one surprisingly good effect where a phone crumbles into much in Woronov’s hand. But the bad clothes, repeated shots of a vacuum cleaner (!?), the crappest cheerleading troupe ever to grace the screen, a victim dying from sliding down a wall (!? again), this should come with a warning rather than a rating.

SCARED

1 Stars  2001/15/84m

“The only thing more terrifying than watching a scary movie is making one.”

A.k.a Cut Throat

Director: Keith Walley / Writers: John Fitten Goldsmith, Luciano Saber & Keith Walley / Cast: Luciano Saber, Kate Norby, Raquel Baldwin, Cory Almeida, J. Robin Miller, Doug Cole, Bradley Lockerman, Dayna O’Brien.

Body Count: 10

A slasher hacks up the dopey cast and crew of a dopey slasher film (here, titled Death Blade), but with even less appeal than the least inspired moments in Cut, Scream 3 or Urban Legends: Final Cut (all comparative masterpieces).

Stroppy extra Samantha is hired by the film’s writer and director (though the producer doesn’t seem to get a say…) when the lead actress is stabbed in the gut and the stuntman-cum-killer is found with this throat slashed. She also lands a supporting role for her annoying valley-girl bud Heather.

Despite the double murder – and a subsequent third – neither cast nor crew choose to put the project on hold or bail altogether because what they have is “the next Scream“. If they were referring to plagiarism then that would be a very astute observation indeed. This choppy flick swipes reels of used material and recycles it to dreadful effect: the opening scene manages to combine the overused Drew Barrymore set-up with the climactic twist from Valentine.

The remaining characters somehow figure out that there are two killers at work but don’t tell the cops because they think they can bring them to justice first, using a plan seen on an episode of Scooby Doo. Seriously.

Most of the murders occur off screen and several other people vanish from the story altogether, without being heard from again, and when the killers are finally unmasked to the surprise of nobody bar Samantha, it serves only to rub salt into the gaping plot wounds this waste of shelf space has brought upon itself.

Blurbs-of-interest: Unspeakable: Chad Ferrin later directed Easter Bunny, Kill! Kill!, which also starred Timothy Mustkatell. The Fear: Resurrection: Emmanuelle Vaugier was also in Ripper: Letter from Hell and Return to Cabin by the Lake. The Movie House Massacre: Mary Woronov was previously in Silent Night, Bloody Night.

Beards, Borgnine, and “Boys”

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DEADLY BLESSING

3.5 Stars  1981/18/98m

“Pray you’re not blessed.”

Director/Writer: Wes Craven / Writers: Glenn M. Benest & Matthew Barr / Cast: Maren Jensen, Sharon Stone, Susan Buckner, Ernest Borgnine, Lisa Hartman, Lois Nettleton, Doug Barr, Jeff East, Colleen Riley, Michael Berryman.

Body Count: 7

Dire-logue: “She’s so dumb she couldn’t pour piss from a boot if [the] instructions were printed on the heel.”

All hail this entry for Final Girl’s Filmclub, another of Craven’s early ones that gets little attention. But at least nobody’s remade it. Yet.

Set in a region of Texas inhabited by the sub-Amish ‘Hittites’: Bible-bashing, God-fearing folk who make the devotees of He Who Walks Behind the Rows look like 60s flower children. 70s disaster movie fixture Ernest Borgnine is Isaiah, their leader, and wears a dodgy stick-on beard. They brand all outsiders as followers of the Incubus, and the more naive members of the tribe enjoy tormenting the few non-Hittite locals at nearby farms, including Isaiah’s son, who was shunned for marrying outside the religion.

When said sonny boy is suspiciously run over by his own tractor (hey, it can happen – ask Brian Harvey), his widow Martha (Jensen) invites a couple of gal-pals from the city to come and stay. One of them is Sharon Stone. Whoop. The other… looks… sort of… “special” in this pic. Actress Buckner previously played prissy Patti Simcox in Grease. Therefore her “specialness” is allowable just this once.

Creepy incidents soon begin and gradually escalate to a series of stabbing murders of both Hittites and outsiders alike. Naturally, puritanical Isaiah and da crew believe it’s the work of the Incubus and his/her followers, but Martha and friends think otherwise…

Titanic composer James Horner conducted the lush score and the film is dotted with familiar faces from other Craven films, as well as scenes that he seemed to later recycle in other work:

Baths are bad places to be in Craven flicks

The slasher sub-plot appears as more incidental than anything, as Craven does his best to avoid replicating moves already made by Carpenter and Cunningham. Though it should be noted the identity of the killer seems at least partly indebted to Friday the 13th and predates the shock finale of a certain other summer camp slash-fest, but it works against the peculiar cultural landscape.

In a way, it’s sad that Wes’s later achievements have overshadowed this very competent and occasionally out-and-out terrifying film. Who hasn’t encountered a blindly religious person yelling in their face with such ferocious belief before? In fact it’s let down only by a bit of a cheapo last second shock that unravels the tight ball of credibility he’s wound over the previous 90 minutes.

I’ve only seen this the once and quite a long time ago, so here’s hoping we get a Region 2 release at some point.

One weird thing I noticed while researching the film is that while it was one of megastar-to-be Stone’s first films, neither Jensen nor Buckner acted in any subsequent movies, according to their IMDb pages. Sad face.

“The Incubus… It capsized the Poseidon, ye must know! I was there!”

Blurbs-of-interest: Doug Barr was also in The Unseen; Michael Berryman was in both of Craven’s Hills Have Eyes films, Penny Dreadful, and more recently, Mask Maker; Colleen Riley was also in The Hills Have Eyes Part II. Craven’s other slasher outings include A Nightmare on Elm Street, the Scream movies, and My Soul to Take.

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