Tag Archives: slasher

Black cats and Goblins on Halloween night

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satan's little helper 2004

SATAN’S LITTLE HELPER

3 Stars  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 2004

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.

 

Wait for it…

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frayed 2007

FRAYED

3 Stars  2007/15/111m

“You can’t escape your darkest fear.”

Directors/Writers: Rob Portman & Norbert Caoili / Writers: Kurt Svennungsen, Dino Moore, Dana Svennungsen / Cast: Tony Doupe, Aaron Blakely, Alena Dashiell, Tasha Smith, Kellee Bradley, Don Brady, Dino Moore, Colin Byrne, Quinlan Corbett, Tim Evans, Rachel Pate.

Body Count: 11

Laughter Lines: “I know how to warm you girls up – every time I fart, you guys drink.”

This was headed for 2-star city for about 105 of its 111-minute running time. Unavoidable partial spoilers follow, because when I happened to read the five words “if you’ve seen Haute Tension…” I thought I had it all figured out.

In September 1994, five-year-old Sara’s birthday party is hijacked by her annoying older brother, Kurt, who is sent to his room by his mom. She later comes to talk to him and is thanked by being beaten to death with a baseball bat and little Kurt is packed off to an institution.

Years later – thirteen, I’m guessing (yay! it’s not a multiple of five!) – the doctors at the clinic feel he’s failed to make significant progress and arrange for him to be transferred elsewhere. Meanwhile, his father, the local sheriff, allows Sara to go camping with her BFF Vanessa, much to the annoyance of her stepmother.

frayed 2007 tasha smith alena dashiell

We cut to a young security guard frantically searching the woods when he takes a tumble – or is shoved – down an embankment. He’s rescued by a motorist but they are attacked by a clown-masked psycho who kills the driver and accosts him through the woods. In this scene, some 25 minutes through, I figured out that the guard and the killer were one and the same. From this point on, only he sees the loon, yelling about his presence all the time, but nobody else ever reacts to the killer, only ‘Gary’s’ shrieking that he’s coming.

The focus eventually drifts back to the family home where brother and sister will face off. He realises who he is (or isn’t, whatever), lots of “get out of me!”-style antics ensue until Papa comes home brandishing his gun. I confess I yawned, wondering how it had a fairly favourable IMDb rating after extended scenes of girl hyperventilating in their hiding places, off-camera killings, and too much talk, with the big “the call is coming from inside the house!” moment skewered by the fact this revelation was obvious an hour ago.

frayed 2007

But then… Frayed goes one step further and then another step, hurling twists all over the show, ending the film in a very grim, downbeat way, but at least one I didn’t see coming a mile off. It’s as if they used the Haute Tension twist to cover up for the mechanics of the real twist happening underneath. Still, the film is in dire need of a good 15-20 minutes being cropped off, as the midriff is hard terrain and more focus could’ve gone into making the stalk-n-slasher section better, but just about worth it for the eventual payoff.

Wisconsin Mine Syndrome. With Cher.

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trapped alive 1988

TRAPPED ALIVE

1 Stars  1988/92m

A.k.a. Trapped

“There’s evil underground.”

Director/Writer: Leszek Burzynski / Writer: Julian Weaver / Cast: Randolph Powell, Sullivan Hester, Mark Witsken, Laura Kalison, Alex Kubik, Elizabeth Kent, Cameron Mitchell, Michael Nash.

Body Count: 9

Laughter Lines: “Do you realise that just five miles down the road a horde of beautiful and horny young men are panting for our bodies?”

Thank you to @AFinalBoy for making me aware of this… intriguing… product… of film.

Shot in Wisconsin in 1988 and shelved until ’93, the cover image was clearly sought from some adult video store section as the hair styles of the two leading ladies would fool nobody in thinking it was shot anywhere near the 90s.

Three prisoners break out of jail on a snowy night before Christmas and end up car-jacking two poodle-haired party gals on a backroad. Police checkpoints send them careening off the road and literally falling down a shaft at the largely abandoned Forever Mine.

A deputy later shows up to investigate and almost immediately has sex with the clearly desperate wife of the sleeping mine caretaker, who looks like a regional Cher tribute act if ever there was:

"Do you believe in life after Trapped Alive?"

“Do you believe in life after Trapped Alive?”

Down in the mine, the lead prisoner – Face – makes one of the girls do a striptease for him, while locking the other girl in some dark room, and the requisite almost-reformed young inmate tries to get an old generator running. They’ve failed to notice a few human skulls lying around and when the muscle is found with his face chewed off, they grow suspicious. The deputy then enters the cave system and is trapped with them when somebody cuts the rope.

Mucho talking occurs until – almost an hour in – a murder finally happens. A largely goreless, ridiculous slaying, where the victim sounds more like he’s yodelling than shrieking in pain. Deputy guy takes charge, makes almost-reformed bloke continue fixing stuff while he… does something else. Good girl Robin holds a flashlight for the guy and uses the time to fall madly in love with him.

The cannibal mutant thingy returns and grabs the other girl, forcing almost-reformed to shoot her dead before a worse fate can unfold. The remaining three try to escape, Robin strips to her bra and panties to dive through a flooded shaft (it’s snowing above, so how cold is this water likely to be?), kills the monster, then Cher rocks up, back-fills the story that the monster is her papa and blows up the mine with deputy dude inside, allowing Robin and almost-reformed to escape, then kiss loads.

trapped alive 1988

As the countdown on my VLC player refused ever to tell me there was anything less than 17 hours of the movie remaining, I felt trapped alive by Trapped Alive, a film so terminally boring they toss in a scene where Cameron Mitchell talks to a photograph for about nineteen minutes just in case you might still be awake. The monster only kills two people and is defeated at first strike and there’s very little grue. However, my main question at the end was did Cher’s husband actually sleep through all of this??

Blurbs-of-interest: Cameron Mitchell was also in The Demon, Jack-O, Valley of Death, Toolbox Murders, and Silent Scream.

Dark night of the scare– Oh no, wait.

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dark harvest 2004

DARK HARVEST

1 Stars  2004/86m

“You reap what you sow.”

Director/Writer: Paul Moore / Cast: Don Digiulio, Jeanie Cheek, Jennifer Leigh, B.W. York, Jessica Dunphy, Amiee Cox, Paul Bugelski, Booty Chewning.

Body Count: 10

Laughter Lines: “This says something about you – you left the black guy and the lesbian to get the bags.”

Yet more college kids versus yet more homicidal scarecrows, but even worse than the usual fare. In the 30s, a sheriff discovers a farmer has been murdering his farmhands and turning them into scarecrows, leading to the only good crop in the region. Seventy years later, farmer’s great-grandson shows up with his fiancé and some other friends, having inherited the place. Grandson learns that the farm is cursed and when the harvest moon (or ‘blood moon’) rises, it wakes three scarecrows each with an axe to grind. Or a scythe.

Crap everything sinks this in a pile of manure from the get-go, with annoying token girl-on-girl scenes, characters who argue non-stop, a questionably-accented “British” girl, and white-bread leads who are more boring than being stuck on a secluded farm with only Keeping Up with the Kardashians to watch.

Unsurprisingly shelved for two years after it was shot, and followed by two sequels that may or may not be related to this one. Avoid please.

“I don’t kill people anymore.”

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psycho ii 1983

PSYCHO II

3.5 Stars  1983/18/108m

“It’s 22 years later and Norman Bates is coming home.”

Director: Richard Franklin / Writer: Tom Holland / Cast: Anthony Perkins, Vera Miles, Meg Tilly, Robert Loggia, Dennis Franz, Hugh Gillin, Claudia Bryar, Robert Alan Browne.

Body Count: 6

Laughter Lines: “I don’t kill people anymore.”

An Australian girl who I used to work with, Tammy, told me a few years back that her father’s girlfriend is the widow of Richard Franklin, and has the knife-in-the-mouth prop from the movie. Envy.

Franklin, who was chosen to direct after his rather awesome Road Games (with Jamie Lee Curtis), and the story picks up 22 years after, as Norman Bates is granted release from his institution, much to the chagrin of Lila Loomis, the kind-of final girl from Psycho, whose sister, Marion Crane, was the infamous shower victim.

psycho ii 1983 anthony perkins norman bates

It’s a bit of an unlikely contrivance that he’s sent back to the very place where he committed the crimes, but, hey, it’s an 80s horror flick. Provided a job at a Fairvale diner, Norman meets young waitress Mary Samuels, who just happens to need a place to stay after her boyfriend trades up. Norman initially offers her a room in the motel but, upon learning the new manager has turned it into a by-the-hour party joint, so insists she lodge in the house.

Before long, weird things start to happen: Creepy phone calls from ‘mother’, a toilet that overflows with blood, spyholes in the bathroom wall – and also some disappearances. First to go is the sleazy manager, then a couple of horny teens stop by to make-out in the basement and find themselves set upon by a woman in a long black dress wielding a scary-ass kitchen knife…

psycho ii 1983

Psycho II is something of an unlikely horror sequel, which, in later years would’ve been shot the year after the original and called for a re-cast, so Perkins returning to the role is a major plus – indeed the film was planned to be a TV-film until he agreed to star. Franklin, a protegé of Hitchcock, liberally peppers the film with visual homages to the original. High angles, aerial shots, and step-zooms echo the style nicely – that awesome crane shot from the attic window down to the basement is everything.

Several revelations uncapped at various points throughout the movie thicken up a slightly convenient plot, but also push it beyond the confines of the average sequel: is Norman blacking out and dressing up as mom again? Is someone else on the scene? The decision to implement more standard slasher clichés of the era was a wise one and results in some inventively grisly murder scenes, the knife-in-the-mouth being the standout, at the same time retaining the classiness of a high-end movie.

psycho ii 1983

The story segues neatly into Psycho III (released in ’86 but set just a month or two later). This should be textbook material when it comes to creating quality follow-ups.

Blurbs-of-interest: Perkins was also in Destroyer; Vera Miles top-billed The Initiation around the same time; Browne and Gillin also returned for the third film.

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