Tag Archives: what the hell!?

It certainly felt like a whole day

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a day of judgment 1981 box

A DAY OF JUDGMENT

1 Stars  1981/15/97m

“The night HE came to collect his own.”

A.k.a. Stormbringer

Director: C.D.H. Reynolds / Writer: Tom McIntyre / Cast: William T. Hicks, Harris Bloodworth, Brownlee Davis, Jerry Rushing, Toby Wallace, Inga Dennis, Larry Sprinkle, Helen Tryon, Careyanne Sutton, Charles Reynolds.

Body Count: 9

Laughter Lines: “If you’re going to kill me, give me time to pray!”

This plodding oddity is notable only for being one of very few period slasher films, being set in a small Southern town in the 1920s, where, after what feels like hours of boring, dull scenes of dialogue, a mysterious cloaked figure has come to lay to waste the nasty folk.

Beginning with the departure of the local Reverend, who laments he has failed to make the local people change their sinful ways, very slowly and boringly we’re introduced to the various characters in town:

  • Greedy, fat bank manager who won’t give anybody debt extensions
  • Nasty old lady who hates children and poisons their pet goat
  • Cheating spouse of department store owner
  • Scheming ambitious boyfriend of said spouse
  • Angry alcoholic man
  • Man who wants his own parents committed for their estate
  • Some solicitor or something?
  • A rotund, but fair Sheriff

It takes almost 40 minutes for the first of these unpleasant reprobates to be taken out, dragged into the earth by creepy hands that spring from the soil. Then some guy shoots himself because fat bank manager tries to foreclose on his farm. Another guy dies during a fight and his wife and her lover cover it up by making it look like a car accident.

a day of judgment 1981

It’s all really confusing and boring. Why aren’t they being slashed up by the cloak-dude?

Some double-crossing crap is revealed, I zoned out. More people are being shot than sickled.

The score sounds like Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.

My God, 97 minutes has never felt so long. This is worse than church.

SHIT A BRICK AND FUCK ME WITH IT – THE TWIST IS THAT IT WAS ALL A DREAM.

This isn’t a slasher movie its a Christian propaganda tale of A Christmas Carol proportions. The film even ends with the Ten Commandments scrolling up!

Blurbs-of-boredom: Jerry Rushing was the coach in Final Exam; Helen Tryon, William T. Hicks, and Larry Sprinkle were in House of Death.

Fashion Fatale

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sorority house massacre 1986 cover

SORORITY HOUSE MASSACRE

2 Stars  1986/18/86m …or 74m

“Who’ll survive the final exam?”

Director/Writer: Carol Frank / Cast: Angela O’Neill, Wendy Martel, Pamela Ross, Nicole Rio, John C. Russell, Joe Nassi, Marcus Vaughter, Vinnie Bilancio, Gillian Frank.

Body Count: 11

Laughter Lines: “What’s with Beth?” / “Her aunt died.” / “But that was weeks ago…”

“It must have all started the moment I entered the house…” says a girl in a hospital bed. FLASHBACK TIME!

Sorority House Massacre – where the fashions are deadlier than any nutjob with a knife. I paid £0.01 for this DVD. Seriously. And I still feel robbed.

This brazen Halloween clone was directed by a crew member from The Slumber Party Massacre, but gone is all that playfulness, replaced by what could well be the most 80s movie of the 80s.

sorority house massacre courteney cox

Beth – Courteney Cox-a-like O’Neill – comes to stay at the sorority house Theta Peter something or other where her friend Linda lives, intent on scoping it out to possibly pledge in the future. But no sooner does she enter than a weird feeling creeps up on her, the feeling of deja vu, and her nightmares begin: Creepy dolls, blood dripping on a china tea set, a trio of little girls warning her away blah blah blah.

sorority house massacre dolls

Across town/state/nation, a guy in an asylum begins twitching and then screaming: HE AND BETH ARE PSYCHICALLY LINKED! Who is he? How does he know her? Why does — oh, fuck it, we all know he’s her brother who flipped and killed the family in that house thirteen years earlier. It takes the cast a good hour to work this out though.

While loon-guy breaks out and steals the station wagon that Michael Myers appropriated and a hunting knife for good measure, Beth tries to fit in with the other sorority girls who are remaining at the house over Memorial Weekend. In between hallucinations of the asylum man in mirrors n’ shit, Beth finds the time to dress in accordance with the others, i.e. awful:

sorority house massacre awful clothes

Final Girl noted the presence of the extra at the back there and declared her ‘Banana Orbison’ in her review, and I can’t come up with anything more suitable. Amazing. It’s all just… so… amazing.

One girl asks Beth: “Do you have anything that will go with this?” Yes, fire. And lots of it.

As if this isn’t terrifying enough, Sorority House Massacre commits its first big continuity transgression. Now, the American version of the film clocks in at 74 minutes, while the UK VHS I saw in the 90s ran for 86. Terrible cuts? Better gore? No. More clothes. More scenes of the girls talking about clothes. Or hair. Or boys.

In one such scene, soro sisters Linda and Sara meet on their way back to the house and Linda has totally different hair. Like, completely different, only to cut back to a scene clearly shot some time earlier where she’s back to the old style in the blink of an eye.

They congregate and decide to make the most of their rule of the house by… trying on Cindy’s clothes!!!11!!!1!

This is Cindy in an earlier scene:

sorority house massacre cindy

What kind of fashionista? She calls this ‘fantasy in blancmange’.

Sorority House Massacre stamps its 80s card once again as we are dragged kicking and screaming into a fashion montage. While Beth sits on the bed looking pensive, Linda, Sara, and Tracy don Cindy’s wardrobe, a.k.a. the possible Gateway to Hell.

The girls pose and doo-wop to the kind of saxophone music used in any given 80s breakfast TV show. It is pain.

sorority house massacre awful clothes

C’mon, if Satan didn’t send these garments, who the fuck did?

Later, they receive a delivery of weird Native American ware for a party. The guys come over. Here are the guys:

sorority house massacre the guys

‘Swoon’.

The guys stick around, Beth has more dramas and lets Linda hypnotise her to try and work out where the bad dreams are coming from, while one of the guys relays the story of the murders that occurred in that very house! Beth ‘sees’ a knife hidden in the fireplace in her state of hypnosis which turns out to be legit there, and everyone stares at it for a bit:

sorority house massacre

One of the boyfriends leaves and the killer finally shows up and stabs him. Then Tracy and Craig go outside to have sex in the teepee and the killer gets Tracy. Sorority House Massacre returns yet again to the isle of bad continuity:

sorority house massacre 1986 nudity

sorority house massacre 1986 goof

sorority house massacre 1986 nudity

Finally alert to the presence of the killer, it’s soon just the three remaining girls versus the loon, who sees each one in turn as one of his slain sisters, having to re-kill them before getting to Beth, who still hasn’t worked out she’s the surviving sister. Tenants of sisterhood, sororities, woah, deep thematics or what?

An attempt to use the fire ladder to climb down to safety is thwarted, and when the killer starts to come up, the girls throw the ladder hooks out, only for him to JUMP FROM THE GROUND AND THROUGH A SECOND STOREY WINDOW.

sorority house massacre

More teenagers die, Beth is the last girl – duh – and finally sticks her brother where it hurts. Cut back to hospital bed, last second hallucinated shock thingy, credits.

Wow, 74 minutes never felt so long. Imagine being British in the 80s and having to trawl through those extra twelve minutes of clothes and hair!?

A bad movie lover’s dream, Sorority House Massacre may suck harder than a Pittsburgh hooker, but it’s occasionally effective: Beth’s dream of the china tea set is suitably weird, and there’s flashes of decent photography, and O’Neill makes for a capable heroine, even if all her efforts are bogged down by mechanical performances (the shrink is quite good), characters with a collective IQ lower than a spoon, and offering up absolutely nothing surprising.

But you still need to see it. Need to.

Blurb-of-interest: Pamela Ross was later in MoonStalker; Nicole Rio was in semi-slasher The Zero Boys.

Twists of Fury: The Dorm That Dripped Blood

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In this feature, Vegan Voorhees examines those jaw-dropping revelations that the slasher film loves to bat our way from the blue, like a pushy parent tossing softballs at a kid who doesn’t want to learn baseball.

This month, we slide dirgey, cheapo 1981 slasher The Dorm That Dripped Blood under the terrorscope. If you haven’t seen it, beware humongaloid SPOILERS…

dorm that dripped blood ending twist

Set Up: College students who board at Morgan Meadows Hall are closing down the place for its imminent bulldozing. Good job too, it’s a right shitheap. Anyway, the handful of them sticking around during the holidays are picked off one by one by a shadowy killer. But who? And why? Final girl Joanne will save the day!

Twist: No she won’t. Once everyone’s dead and all red herrings off the hook, the real killer – smartmouth joker Craig – reveals himself to Joanne, tells her he loves her and will kill anyone who stands in the way of their love… AND THEN THROWS HER IN THE FURNACE!

The final shot is Craig being led to safety, while smoke billows from the furnace behind him as Joanne roasts away.

Problems with this revelation: The film is grimy enough without this downbeat ending stapled on, which lets Craig get away with his crime. Not that Joanne was the best heroine, but even so, the attempt at keeping things dark goes beyond the usual killer-is-still-out-there stuff into a place that just doesn’t work. No, I say. No.

Likely Explanation: The Dorm That Dripped Blood has little going for it to make it stand out. It plods along in underlit doldrums, with a few sticky murders chucked in, possibly realising the audience is slowly lapsing into a coma, so the eyebrow-raising coda was thrown on.

Go away.

Never go back

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reunion of terrorROT: REUNION OF TERROR

1 Stars  2008/79m

“Traditions were made to be broken.”

Director/Writer: Michael A. Hoffman / Writers: Meghan Jones, Justin Powell, Bill Cassinelli / Cast: Christian Anderson, L.J. O’Neal, Monique Barajas, Hallie Bird, Mark Carducci, Nori Jill Phillips, John Shumski.

Body Count: 9

Laughter Lines: “I don’t know about you, but I’m harder than Chinese arithmetic.”

The IMDb blurb for this tells us: “a secret is uncovered which reveals one of the most controversial and brutal twist endings in cinematic history.”

In order to investigate this thoroughly, unavoidable SPOILERS must follow.

Six high school friends reunite some years after school at a cabin in the woods, rented by one of them, who is nowhere to be found. Previously, a couple of lesbians were murdered while camping in the same woods.

The game warden keeps turning up, there’s no food, and the hitchhiker one of the party brings along doesn’t get on with the other girls. Then people start disappearing.

The assailant gathers most of them and kills them together, meaning little killing happens for most of the running time.

And that controversial, brutal twist? The killer is punishing the others because they gave his girlfriend a ride home years ago and afterwards she was raped, contracted HIV, and died. Yeah, totally their fault. This is topped by him infecting the lone survivor (a guy for once) and a total misrepresentation of what having HIV means (“it’s a death sentence!”)

Absolute crap from start to finish.

Blurbs-of-interest: Hoffman directed the equally risible Spring Break Massacre, Sigma Die! and Girls Gone Dead. Both Anderson and Shumski were in the former two.

Clone Zone

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sigma die! 2007

SIGMA DIE!

1 Stars  2007/76m

Director: Michael A. Hoffman / Writer: Meghan Jones / Cast: Reggie Bannister, Joe Estevez, Brinke Stevens, Aly Hartman, Christian Anderson, Heather Zagone, Nikie Zambo, Katie Kiefel, Jeff Pride, Nick Bubb, Brian Parillo, Tony DeGuide, John Shumski.

Body Count: 12

Bigots Paradise: “If I ever decide to hire a woman, remind me to check between her legs first.”

A precursor to Spring Break Massacre, which may as well be the exact same film. So much so, I wondered if it had just been repackaged under a different name a year later. Sadly not the case.

Instead, this outdated piece of shit begins with a quick meta-slasher tour through a teen party, crashed by an alien-masked killer who quickly does away with several of them in the space of about ten minutes.

Then we skip back to ‘one day earlier’. Why, exactly? We already know what’s going to happen. There is no cleverly threaded twist going on in Sigma Die! that necessitates a flashback 24 hours. It also means we get to see much of the massacre scene again, evidence that the film probably clocked in at about 63 minutes before this stroke of editing genius came into the picture.

There’s a legend of a twenty-year-old (never nineteen, never twenty-one) murder mystery, after a frat boy was embarrassed to be found dressed in lingerie: “He’s a queer!” they all guffaw.

In the present, ‘he’ is revealed to be Brinke Stevens, back for revenge on the grown frat boys who humiliated her. They never moved away, of course. Any ‘sluts’ who happen to get in the way are fair game.

So in Reunion of Terror, HIV was dumbed down to a death sentence, in Sigma Die! gender dysmorphic issues equate to homicidal tendencies, and all girls are sluts who walk around with nothing on who are willing to have sex for a drag on a joint. It’s okay for hot girls to experiment with being gay, but boys throw around the word ‘fag’ at the drop of a hat.

Not to mention gutter-born production qualities, barely any comprehension of what a decent slasher film requires, this production group should just sidestep into exploitation porn, as that’s all they seem to give a fuck about. Seriously – fuck off.

Blurbs-of-shame: Bannister, Hartman, Anderson, Pride, and Shumski were all in Spring Break Massacre, and Anderson and Shumski were also in Reunion of Terror; Bannister was also in Bloody Bloody Bible Camp; Joe Estevez was in The Catcher, Scar, and Axe Giant; Brinke Stevens can be seen in American Nightmare, Bleed, Blood Reaper, The Cheerleader Massacre, Fatal Games, Jack-O, and most importantly The Slumber Party Massacre.

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