tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-56531476525243574242024-03-14T00:10:37.730-07:00Let's Kill Everybody!One slasher movie at a time.Jimmy Callawayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13725548493403210066noreply@blogger.comBlogger28125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5653147652524357424.post-37221012203676781902011-11-01T16:54:00.000-07:002012-07-22T16:59:51.599-07:00Friday the 13th (1980)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4h2YTfLLUOfMSsBBif50mqOAK-Nk1LPB8uvsE9EP5s6WHxZ2nY_czyS8PfHYff1J7VviBQBfWFE4SPk4uXGtEJBOX3bvxHK_1XWa2kOVuY1udv1CQdr9IqxqthFhYDFJJzWidX3kyR9h4/s1600/friday-the-13th-poster-1980.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear:left; float:left;margin-right:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="320" width="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4h2YTfLLUOfMSsBBif50mqOAK-Nk1LPB8uvsE9EP5s6WHxZ2nY_czyS8PfHYff1J7VviBQBfWFE4SPk4uXGtEJBOX3bvxHK_1XWa2kOVuY1udv1CQdr9IqxqthFhYDFJJzWidX3kyR9h4/s320/friday-the-13th-poster-1980.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<i>by <a href="http://nomoralcenter.blogspot.com">Alec ‘Mama WOULD hurt a fly!’ Cizak</a></i><br />
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Not much has been written about the original <i>Friday the 13th</i> that can actually be called relevant. It’s a thin film, to say the least. An obvious combination of <i>Meatballs</i>, <i>Jaws </i>I and II, and, of course, <i>Halloween</i>, <i>F13 </i>is actually the movie responsible for the wave of slashers that followed. It’s the movie that made money right out of the gate and demonstrated to the studios that a market existed for <i>Animal House</i>/<i>Halloween </i>hybrids. Most critics seem hell-bent on pointing out that the final girl in <i>F13 </i>is “tomboyish,” a claim I’ll demonstrate is ludicrous. There are the usual accusations that it promotes puritanical values. Of course, actually watching the movie reveals those notions to be rooted in ignorance. Oddly, what no one has caught on to is the fact that <i>F13 </i>may be the most powerful pro-post-feminist text ever created.<br />
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A few months ago I discussed <i>Halloween </i>with a feminist film professor from Minnesota. She insisted that <i>Halloween </i>was a sexist text because the survivor was a traditionally matriarchal woman. She pointed out that Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) protected the children and did not engage in the “juvenile” behavior of her female peers. As I listened to this woman froth at the mouth over the notion that a young woman would not feel the need to participate in “hedonistic” activities along with her cohorts, I began to wonder why the idea of a woman as protector was so offensive to old school feminists. I refrained from getting into an argument, from explaining that every now and then, somebody needs to be an “adult.” As I studied <i>F13 </i>to write this article, I realized that Sean S. Cunningham and screenwriter Victor Miller had responded for me. Whether intentionally or by accident, their rip-off of <i>Halloween </i>answers the very concerns feminists have about the slasher genre at large.<br />
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For those who have lived in a cave and not seen the film, let’s do a quick summary:<br />
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Kids gathered around in a circle singing songs in 1958 (a set up taken right out of <i>Jaws</i>). Two of them break off to go someplace private and make their own personal Kumbaya. A stranger emerges from the darkness and stabs them. Cut to roughly twenty years later. The camp where the murders took place is being reopened. A group of young people arrive early to set the camp up. Murders start happening again until the final girl, Alice (Adrienne King), dispatches the killer who (spoiler alert! [really?]) happens to be the mother, Mrs. Vorhees (Betsy Palmer), of a boy who drowned at the camp in 1958.<br />
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Can you already see how radically feminist this movie is?<br />
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Before I make that argument, let’s put a rest to the notion of Alice, the final girl, as either “tomboyish” or a prude. Alice wears pants in the movie. That’s pretty much where the pro-“tomboy” argument begins and ends. Early in the film, she reveals that she does not like doing manual labor. In that same scene, it is hinted that she has been fucking Mr. Christy (Peter Brouwer), the ‘adult’ of the lot who disappears almost right away so that the counselors are on their own. As the film progresses, Alice proves herself more and more feminine. She casually takes over kitchen duties when the cook never shows up (having been snuffed while trying to get to the camp). A snake in her cabin scares the shit out of her. When some of the other counselors decide to go check the generator, a masculine activity if there ever was one, Alice refuses to go with them. To further thwart the claim that her character is a prude, she plays strip Monopoly while drinking beer and smoking pot. And most striking, one of the other counselors, Bill (Harry Crosby), is clearly her boyfriend. Thus, we have a final girl who is fucking two guys!<br />
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What the character of Alice adds up to is a progressive, post-feminist American woman. She is sexually liberated, feminine, and decides on her own what work she will and will not do. Coupled with her ass-kicking solution to the problem of the killer (beheading Mrs. Vorhees on the banks of Crystal Lake), we have a prototype for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Lara Croft and every other butt-whooping heroine Hollywood has been selling for the last twenty years. One begins to wonder why this film isn’t taught in every feminist course on every campus in the nation.<br />
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To cement this theory, the film uses Mrs. Vorhees as a diametric example of the traditional, matriarchal woman, and advances the suggestion that the ultimate mindset of such a woman is not only detrimental to herself, but psychotic and, ultimately, dangerous to those around her. Mrs. Vorhees is a ‘loving’ mother. So much so that she is willing to brutally kill in effort to avenge her son’s death. In addition, she rationalizes her actions in a manner that turns motherly concern into a violent, vicious form of denial (“Oh, I couldn’t let them open this place again, could I?”). Her obsessive tending to her matriarchal duties traps her and her dead son in a roiling, co-dependent relationship that requires the boy come back to life and repay his mother’s vengeance upon her murder, establishing a cycle that spawned eight legitimate sequels, none of which released either mother or son from the horrid grip of pre-feminist societal expectations.<br />
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Discard your Laura Mulvey and Robin Wood diatribes! There is only one feminist text to be studied and intellectually digested. It is the battle between the liberated final girl of <i>Friday the 13th</i> and the enslaved mother who kills and loses her own life to maintain a dying status quo. I fully expect Sean S. Cunningham to be a keynote speaker at a future NOW convention…<br />Jimmy Callawayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13725548493403210066noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5653147652524357424.post-89918316907735216362011-09-07T05:25:00.007-07:002012-03-21T12:28:45.762-07:00Halloween II (1981)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaAMiU1eaw2rOIxl_ZvwMr1TZCR0Y6L_xsBpWuo3cwte18h-D9xKTQXjzUWFNXw6WpJPNjtWHHcy7Qm4aRrHCrfdt3fOCw4ozS7rlT58h5yvSn_JOUmxwdeKlpRHp133EfUb6RSDkXpIZh/s1600/halloween_2_poster_01.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 213px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiaAMiU1eaw2rOIxl_ZvwMr1TZCR0Y6L_xsBpWuo3cwte18h-D9xKTQXjzUWFNXw6WpJPNjtWHHcy7Qm4aRrHCrfdt3fOCw4ozS7rlT58h5yvSn_JOUmxwdeKlpRHp133EfUb6RSDkXpIZh/s320/halloween_2_poster_01.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5722159850891065810" /></a><br /><br /><em>by <a href="http://nomoralcenter.blogspot.com">Alec "Progress? We don’t need no stinkin’ progress!" Cizak</a></em><br /><br />How can you tell when Hollywood has taken over a subgenre of films? One word: Explosions. <em>Halloween II</em>’s got two of them. Early in the film, when it’s clear that the whole exercise is nothing more than an unnecessary continuation of the first movie, a kid in a Shatner mask is blown up when a police car shoves him into a van. It’s Hollywood logic—two cars colliding automatically explode. It’s called production value. Need your movie to look bigger than it is? Hire a helicopter and shoot from the clouds. Or rig something to explode. Then, of course, there’s the big boom in the end, when both Mikey Myers and his goofy doctor go to hell together.<br /><br />Now, the movie poster for <em>Halloween II</em> never promised anything other than ‘More of the Night He Came Home.’ John Carpenter has admitted that, while writing the script with the help of Budweiser, he realized he was crafting the same film as the original <em>Halloween</em>, only, “not as good.” <em>Halloween II</em> kicks off with a retread of the final three or four minutes of the original. The soundtrack is altered and we get a different angle of Mr. Myers dropping from the second floor with six slugs in him (seven, according to <em>Halloween</em> geeks who make me look completely sane). The big problem with <em>Halloween II</em> is that it is, from a narrative point of view, entirely pointless.<br /><br /><em>Halloween</em> ends with some nice, nasty, Kentucky nihilism, courtesy of Carpenter and his bleak view of, well, everything. Michael Myers is evil. Evil never dies. End of story. Of course, the real reason <em>Halloween II</em> exists is because the first film spawned a gold rush of independent filmmakers splicing together <em>Animal House</em> and <em>Halloween</em> to cash in on <em>Halloween</em>’s success. Beginning with <em>Friday the 13th</em>, however, the element of danger—the stalker—became, momentarily, human. This demanded an explanation for the killer’s destructive hobby. The opening of <em>Halloween</em>, the murder of Judith Myers in 1963, morphed into some kind of ‘wrong’ committed against the eventual killer or someone close to the killer. Hence, Jason drowning and his mother then celebrating the (roughly) twentieth anniversary of that special event by killing some horny camp counselors. Every slasher from the golden age imitated <em>F13</em>’s misinterpretation of Halloween’s prologue. <br /><br />The <em>F13</em> template, I’m sure by accident, allowed ‘serious’ critics to view the killer as a symbol of reactionary forces from the past. That the heart of the civil rights movement generally sat between the inciting event and the “return of the repressed” allows an easy comparison to the return of right-wing zeal in the 1980s. Mind you, this was never, ever mentioned in any of the original slashers. It carries weight, however, because, as I have stated in previous reviews, it is appropriate to think of the kids who are stalked and killed as “the Other.” That’s correct, folks. Those smiling, middle class, ivory-faced teenagers (played by twenty and thirty-somethings) took on the burdens of every oppressed group in America and demonstrated their gains with their ‘hedonistic’ dismissal of authority (read as the status quo). <br /><br />Most of these elements were included in the original <em>Halloween</em>. Carpenter and his buddy Debra Hill were young, most of the people working on the film were young. Judging by <em>They Live</em>, a film Carpenter made ten years later, these kids were not Republicans. It makes sense, thus, that their sympathies rested with the ‘progressive’ side of the neighborhood. But the larger issue of evil represented by a ‘shape’ lurking in darkness, toying with its victims before snuffing them, seemed to be lost on the imitators. <em>Halloween</em>, ultimately, was about death. Early in the film, Jamie Lee Curtis sits in a classroom listening to an instructor lecture about fate. “Fate never changes,” she says. That, I believe, was the only message John Carpenter ever intended his film to have: Try as you might, you cannot escape the grim equalizer.<br /><br />The original theatrical trailer for <em>Halloween II</em> echoes the poster’s tagline—“More of the Night He Came Home.” The narrator of the trailer, however, goes on to promise “(t)here is no place to hide. He will always find you.” Whether conscious of it or not, <em>Halloween II</em> slammed the door on the golden age of the slasher by reiterating the fact that Michael Myers represented death and nothing—not a resourceful “final girl” or a demented knight in shining trench coat (Donald Pleasance and his useless pistol)—would stop him.<br /><br />By cashing in on the family ties bombshell that made <em>The Empire Strikes Back</em> (probably) the most effective sequel of all time, <em>Halloween II</em> accidentally predicted the movement of anti-authoritarian sentiment from external symbols (police, politicians, school deans, etc.,) to internal, family symbols. Less than ten years after <em>Animal House</em>, the teenagers in John Hughes’ <em>The Breakfast Club</em> would identify their parents as the prime oppressors in their lives (even with the character of the school’s principal serving as a peripheral reminder that oppression is bred by institutionalized authority). This removed the young people/“Other” in the slashers and mainstream subversive comedies such as <em>Caddyshack</em> and <em>Meatballs</em> from the role of “the Other” and placed them in their proper, white, middle-class demographic. By ‘revealing’ that Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis in a useless wig and hospital gown) and Michael Myers (wielding a tiny, useless medical scalpel) were siblings, Carpenter (and replacement director Rick Rosenthal) demeaned his mystic messenger of death from the status of primordial myth to human, all too human.<br /><br />The fear of the status quo that fueled the great transgressive comedies and horror films of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, was a fear of death converted to a fear of change represented by women and ‘minorities’ demanding equal status in the culture. For whatever reason, bigots all across the land could not cope with the idea of competing for a job with someone whose skin color was not the same as their own. The status quo rested their hopes for a restoration of “order” with Ronald Reagan. The word ‘prosperity’ became code for ‘safety’ and ‘security’ which were, in turn, code for “the good old days.” Revenge movies would thrive under Reagan’s watch. A decade and a half of ‘restoration’ would bring us <em>Forrest Gump</em>, a movie that suggested success in America comes easiest to those who don’t think. Police and hospital dramas would dominate television. And on September 11, 2001, twenty years after Laurie Strode sought ‘security’ in Haddonfield Memorial Hospital, President George Forrest W. Gump Bush would declare America “vulnerable” and call on the people of the United States to prepare for an endless war on an invisible enemy. A little outfit called The Department of Homeland Security would be formed and any hope for civil liberties surviving the reactionary forces of the right vanished.<br /><br /><em>Halloween II</em>, for all its bigger budget trappings (explosions and the most awesome boobs in any slasher ever, courtesy Pamela Susan Shoop), makes one final stab at the illusion of safety and security. By setting the majority of the film in a hospital, Carpenter makes it clear that there is no such thing as security. Shortly after Laurie Strode is brought to Haddonfield Memorial, she begs the staff not to put her to sleep. The audience might echo that sentiment, partly because a “final girl” in a coma makes for an uninteresting film (which, for the most part, Halloween II is), and partly because that must have been what it felt like when Reagan and his regime took power and turned the clock backwards—those who slept through the 1950s, woke up for the ‘60s and ‘70s, surely must not have wanted to go back to sleep.<br /><br />As in the first film, the “final girl” does not actually save herself. In a slight improvement, she ‘helps’ Dr. Loomis dispatch Michael Myers. In pure Carpenter cynicism that I believe is lost on most viewers, Laurie is wheeled out into the parking lot of the smoldering hospital and loaded into an ambulance that will take her to another hospital. No grand story arc here. Nothing learned. Nothing gained. Haddonfield Memorial created an illusion of security. Laurie Strode helped destroy it. For what? To be taken to another hospital, another illusion of safety.<br /><br />1960=1980=2000=?Jimmy Callawayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13725548493403210066noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5653147652524357424.post-60968370732628480962011-08-12T15:49:00.001-07:002011-11-26T05:56:58.208-08:00Pieces (1982)<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc5VgmX78XY4TUkd8apg7C9WCl0VNFa-yxWdZgJNclpugJdLQXt6V6ei7J6cdYOEXB9c9XurugqbI2aoBMWYvFwLPzATAY28UeBIxxyZddiy8IlqLDSuGBKJ1nCbfZokg-vQp-jOHyWW6p/s1600/pieces.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 216px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc5VgmX78XY4TUkd8apg7C9WCl0VNFa-yxWdZgJNclpugJdLQXt6V6ei7J6cdYOEXB9c9XurugqbI2aoBMWYvFwLPzATAY28UeBIxxyZddiy8IlqLDSuGBKJ1nCbfZokg-vQp-jOHyWW6p/s320/pieces.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5679299078938571378" /></a><br /><br /><em>by <a href="http://nomoralcenter.blogspot.com/">Alec “We’re all just meat” Cizak</a></em><br /><br />I have spent the last year searching for the perfect slasher movie. It doesn’t exist. There’s <em>Halloween</em>, a great suspense film, and then there’s a string of imitations that continue to be produced to this day. After reading criticism of the slasher genre, both supportive and hyper-critical (Robin Wood, I’m looking at your pseudo-intellectual, paranoid corpse), I got the notion that there was something very subversive about the early slashers. I wanted to believe that there was some play on “the Other” going on between the kids getting chopped up and their attacker(s) (as well as the adults who were, generally, spared the blade). As with every assumption made about slashers, the patterns simply weren’t there on a consistent basis.<br /><br />For instance, the “Final Girl” in virtually every golden age slasher (pre-1982) is not pure and virginal, as so many critics have suggested. The original “Final Girl” smoked pot (<em>Halloween</em>), another “Final Girl” played strip-Monopoly (<em>Friday the 13th</em>), another boogied like she meant it (<em>Prom Night</em>), another was in on a sexual prank (<em>Terror Train</em>), still another juggled men (<em>My Bloody Valentine</em>), and still another was involved in a seemingly normal relationship the audience had every reason to assume included sex (<em>Friday the 13th Part 2</em>). It wasn’t until psychoanalytic film critics poked their unwelcome snouts in the genre that studios, picking up on both the success of the independently produced slashers and the assumptions of the idiot critics trying to gut the genre, that the virginal “Final Girl” became mandatory. Of course, the moment the studios began backing slashers with their own money (1982 on, though I would make the argument that <em>Halloween II</em>, appropriately enough, put the dagger in the slasher’s independence), the genre was, essentially, dead. And yet, to this day, so-called experts parrot this tired myth about virgins vs. sluts like mindless sheep.<br /><br />Despite my disappointment in failing to find commonalities that would demand the genre be considered subversive, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something anti-establishment was going on in the early films. These movies made the status quo squirm. The goody-goody motherfuckers who cheered on the new president in 1981 pointed to the gore as a reason to hate them. That, I realize, is the clue to understanding why these movies bother those in charge. Violence has always been a part of storytelling. But violence in popular narratives is usually reserved for punishing those who do not fall in line with the status quo. Hence, it was OK for Rambo or any Arnold character from the '80s to slaughter hundreds with a machine gun. They were faceless representatives of the enemy (and here the psychoanalytic critic may substitute ‘enemy’ with ‘the Other’ and I will not protest). Take note that by <em>Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter</em> (part 4), the trend of characters being hacked up without having been introduced in any way, given any personality, becomes commonplace in the studio-backed slashers (remember the obese girl on the side of the road in <em>F14 pt. 4</em>? Her murder was symptomatic of the conformist mentality that gobbled up this country’s conscience in the 1980s: She’s fat. Slit her fucking throat, Jason! There’s a good boy).<br /><br />The victims in the early slashers were people. We got glimpses of their personalities. The filmmakers attempted to generate audience sympathy for those getting sliced and diced. By making them real people, and then showing their bodies mutilated in a manner most Americans like to pretend couldn’t possibly happen, these films were snubbing an unspoken agreement between the masses and their masters (once the government, now corporations)—Your function is to work, consume, and die of natural causes. Sometimes our masters will send the youth off to die in a foreign country to protect local business interests. Mostly, though, you are not allowed to die until you have exhausted your usefulness as a worker who then spends his or her pittance on the very products you waste your life helping construct (today things are even worse as we become a nation of service representatives while poor folks in poor countries are assimilated to the process of work-consume-work-consume…) Why else, my friends, would suicide be considered a crime?<br /><br />In short, your body does not belong to you. Sorry if you thought otherwise. Showing bodies hacked to bits suggests that someone other than our masters may determine when we shuffle off this mortal coil. That’s a no-no. That’s why those wonderful, independently-produced slashers are, indeed, subversive.<br /><br />Look how long I’ve gone without writing something about digression!<br /><br />Enter a small film from Spain. <em>Pieces</em>. 1982. Well into the age of the studio-backed slasher in America. In order to see something remotely subversive in the grindhouse or at the drive-in, you had to rely on imports. Does <em>Pieces </em>stand up to the imitations it intended to imitate?<br /><br />Let’s go back to that bit about your body and who controls it. Ask any woman and she will tell you this is in no way breaking news. Women have known for a long time that the Man, or the system, or whatever the hell you choose to call our collective master, likes to have complete control over all the little kiddies born within their respective borders. The Supreme Court made it legal for a woman to have an abortion in 1973 and fuckers are still trying to reverse that. Why? Not only does that allow a woman to make a serious decision about what happens to her body, she is, according to the opponents of Roe v. Wade, also making a decision regarding another body. A body our master(s) will not be allowed to control unless it is born. I mention this only because the victims in <em>Pieces</em>, unlike most other slasher films, are exclusively women.<br /><br /><em>Pieces </em>doesn’t fuck around with a lot of plot. There’s some sort of psychological bullshit going on—the film opens with a child putting together a jigsaw puzzle of a naked woman. Before he can put the final piece of the puzzle in (the woman’s vagina, hohoho!), his mother busts in and punishes him (A nifty way of showing how women counteract the Man’s attempt to control their bodies by controlling the male libido). She berates him and his absent father. The boy lands an axe in his mother’s skull and is then “rescued” by some law enforcement officers who are too fucking stupid to realize the kid is the killer.<br /><br />The film jumps forty years ahead, to 1982. The killer has decided on this arbitrary moment to put together a human puzzle of a woman and fit it with his mother’s bloody dress (the logic problems inherent in why the son of a murder victim would have access to the victim’s dress is one of many canyon-sized holes in the plot). He cuts off a woman’s head in a park with a chainsaw to start the process. Enter the tragic Christopher George, the near-worthless cop in charge of the investigation. George, the actor, dropped dead from disbelief over how shitty his career had gotten by the early 80s. The awful dubbing in the film, coupled with his casual, uninterested performance, turn almost any scene he’s in into comedy—after a body is found cut up near a blood-stained chainsaw, he asks the coroner, “Could that have been done with a chainsaw?” It’s beyond Ed Wood terrible.<br /><br />There are multiple red herrings. Paul Smith plays a hulking gardener who does everything he can to convince the audience he’s the killer. Then there’s the anatomy professor (hohoho!), Dr. Brown. When all the suspects gather (again, for no logical reason), at the site of an attack on an elevator, the one character who is not set up as a red herring is obviously revealed as the killer.<br /><br />The movie is an absolute farce. It easily competes for the honor of worst slasher ever made. But it gets a few things right, and they’re worth pointing out and they make the movie, for all its incompetence, worth a single viewing:<br /><br />The gore in <em>Pieces </em>is astonishing. It is messy and ruthless. Supposedly the filmmakers decided to use real animal blood. It certainly looks like it. In the movie’s brutal final killing, a woman is cut in half in a shower stall. When the upper half of her torso is discovered, the white walls are drenched in blood, the way you’d expect a healthy massacre to look. The attack in the elevator is graphically realistic. Even the inciting murder of the boy’s mother is shocking. We see the axe hack right into her skull. There’s an acceptable amount of nudity, which I consider essential to a good slasher. Finally, the soundtrack, provided by a band (or, I’ve read, a stock library of music) called Cam, is a simple synthesizer score that could not have come from any other era. But these things only make the incompetence of the film even more tragic. What could have been, had this puzzle been put together by filmmakers who were not merely interested in cashing in on a dying trend?<br /><br />Alas, that is what <em>Pieces </em>ultimately is: A cheap imitation of a slasher film and an insipid entry in the post-golden age where the victims are only women (giving credibility to those critics who believed the slasher was a reaction to feminism). The “Final Girl” in <em>Pieces </em>isn’t even allowed to save herself. She is drugged into paralysis so that the men can save her. Any slasher that denies women in the audience the pleasure of seeing a woman defeat the monster who has been cutting (mostly) women to shreds is unforgiveable.<br /><br />No, <em>Pieces </em>is just another opportunistic cash grab. That becomes obvious late in the movie when a cop and a student researching files to figure out who the killer is are shown in a room with a large poster of Ronald Reagan hanging on the wall. To make the moment complete, there is obvious product placement from Wendy’s. The commercialization of the slasher had arrived. Jason would rise from the dead (<em>F13 pt.6</em>) and become the hero, instead of the antagonist, and Freddy would evolve into a stuffed doll appropriate for children. As is often the case with subversive art, the establishment learned that banning it wouldn’t defuse its power. So they appropriated it instead. Like Nike, using “Search and Destroy” to sell tennis shoes, or that SUV commercial from a few years back that played “TV Eye” while some yuppie snowboards over the gas guzzler being peddled.<br /><br />I propose that this will be my last slasher review. May I end on a bit of a digression? That glorious year, 1981, was for slashers what 1967 was for the counter-culture—a brief moment where a little bit of magic happened that irked the mainstream. How beautiful those goofy <em>Halloween </em>imitations look, with their porno-style lighting and synthesizer soundtracks. Their twenty and thirty-something actors attempting to look like teenagers. Their mad rush to execute the most gruesome special effects their low budgets could afford. It can never happen again. I recently watched <em>Hatchet</em>, which had been touted as a return to the old-style slashers. No way. Didn’t even come close. The golden age of slashers was a flash of inspired stupidity that rests in the wounds of nostalgia. There is no way to recreate, remake, or, for shit’s sake, “reboot,” them. Let’s accept the handful of originals as they are and find new ways to make our collective master angry by harming our rented bodies.Jimmy Callawayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13725548493403210066noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5653147652524357424.post-5787417765112647272011-07-08T17:12:00.000-07:002011-07-08T17:30:04.151-07:00Basket Case (1982)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8CBoyk_ZbRJzktirG_7rdjOAVaF30V_i7FkDZmjUQQUBPS7ko0gjfSF-vdHdEezKxZveywvLWrMByKi5Nky_SElQPdbVNHr7AxPjFU3iOYGMwrPSZb3trOtUkPNmXWUkMyFqrK0XTdwZz/s1600/basket_case_poster_01%255B1%255D.JPG"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 212px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8CBoyk_ZbRJzktirG_7rdjOAVaF30V_i7FkDZmjUQQUBPS7ko0gjfSF-vdHdEezKxZveywvLWrMByKi5Nky_SElQPdbVNHr7AxPjFU3iOYGMwrPSZb3trOtUkPNmXWUkMyFqrK0XTdwZz/s320/basket_case_poster_01%255B1%255D.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5627140130340401010" /></a><br /><br /><em>by <a href="http://ericbeetner.blogspot.com/">Eric “What’s in the basket?” Beetner</a></em><br /><br />You’ve been warned that this post will be too much about me, but you must understand <em>Basket Case</em> was a very important film in my life. Stop judging me, we just started here.<br /><br />See that poster over there? Bleeding letters, spooky eyes peering out, teasing tag line? That poster hung over my bed in high school. Not on the wall, on the ceiling so the eyes watched you as you slept, or tried to. Around it were posters for Dario Argento’s <em>Creepers</em>, the original <em>Halloween</em> and <em>Dawn of the Dead</em> (signed by Tom Savini--geek check!). Do I need to go into how hard it was for me to get laid? No? Good, let’s proceed.<br /><br />(As an aside, I should take a moment to acknowledge the girls who were cool and brave enough to get in my bed. Kudos to you young ladies.)<br /><br />You see, I was a mid-80s horror junkie. I attended more than one Fangoria Weekend of Horror. I even spent the night walking the streets of New York and sleeping on a bench on Grand Central Station because our hotel room fell out at the last second but I didn’t want to just pack it in and go home and miss the convention. This, added on top of the insult I suffered the night before by being refused entry to a Slayer/Megadeth/Bad Brains concert at the Ritz because I was too young. You’ve heard of “The Man”? I met him that night.<br /><br />This all ties in together because, as proven, I was a horror movie nerd, I mean nut, and much of my impression of New York City night life was derived from movies, <em>Basket Case</em> being chief among them.<br /><br />You see, <em>Basket Case</em> is not a glossy <em>Nightmare on Elm Street</em> budgeted A-list affair. It is gritty, dirty, ugly and as malformed as the evil twin hiding in the basket.<br /><br />Briefly: Duane is one of a set of twins. His brother, Belial, was born...different. In a tricky flashback structure <em>Pulp Fiction</em> would have been jealous of (and you know Tarantino is a <em>Basket Case</em> fan), we learn that Belial is nothing more than a misshaped blob that hangs off Duane’s torso like a lump of spilled butterscotch pudding.<br /><br />But they love each other. They can communicate telepathically, of course. But when a trio of doctors arrives to finally set God’s mistake right and remove Belial, things take an ugly turn. Duane doesn’t want Belial removed. Belial doesn’t want to be tossed in the garbage like yesterday’s meatloaf, which he kinda resembles.<br /><br />The operation is a bloody, messy and--from the looks of it--highly unsanitary affair. Long story short, Belial isn’t dead. Duane rescues him and keeps him in the titular basket and now that they are grown, they head to beautiful New York City to track down the butchers who separated them. And give them a cupcake and a thank you note? No. To kill, KILL, KILL!!!!<br /><br />The NYC they encounter, on their modest budget that matched my own 15-year-old pocket change, was one of hookers, pimps, grifters, porn theaters, junkies and a flophouse manager who should have been a big star for his mustache alone but suffered from an utterly cardboard line-delivery acting style. Overall this movie is not exactly an ensemble of on-the-cusp stars. More like off-the-floor mannequins.<br /> <br />The film becomes a checklist of revenge set pieces as they hunt and kill, one by one, the three doctors who performed Belial’s really, really late term abortion. Of course anyone who gets in their way doesn’t stand a chance either. (Here’s a tip--do not try to steal the basket. Y’know what? Just don’t open it at all. Seriously, the best thing you could find in there is laundry. The worst is violent shrieking death.) <br /><br />But the plot is certainly not why this film was so influential to me. The execution, however, is.<br /><br />You see, as a horror film nerd and a video store employee (my ticket to discount posters to plaster over my walls and ceiling until not a single chip of the cat shit brown walls remained), I decided I wanted to make movies. When I got to film school they showed us <em>Citizen Kane, The Searchers, Breathless, Battleship Potemkin</em>. They fed us a diet of films they called great in hopes that greatness would inspire us. <br /><br />Yes, I had seen all these films before and still, I didn’t take much inspiration from them. You see <em>Citizen Kane</em> as someone working out with a Super 8 camera and, if anything, it makes you want to give up and go home because there is no fucking WAY you can ever make something that good. Game over, man.<br /><br />But I had a secret. I knew better. My high school years had been spent wallowing in the muck as well as swimming upstream through the classics and the avant garde. Guess what? The muck was much more inspiring.<br /><br />I could watch a film like <em>Basket Case</em>, and specifically the scene where Duane and Belial defy physics and build a death trap machine from a radial arm saw and somehow send it down a flight of stairs to bisect a human torso until all that remains are two freestanding legs that fall, with deft comedic timing, one to each side of a dirty basement floor, and thrill to the giddy joy of it. I watched that scene over and over until I praised out loud the inventor of the rewind button.<br /><br />What did I learn from the slumdog charms of <em>Basket Case</em> and other 80s gems like it? I learned, “Well, shit, I can do that. If this is all it takes to be called a movie, and if I’m deriving this much visceral pleasure from it, hell, I can make a living out of that. <em>Citizen Kane</em> be damned.”<br /><br />The film is not without heart either. As the revenge continues, Duane begins to have some second thoughts, a problem Belial doesn’t have. Granted Belial was the one cut off and left for dead in the trash, so he does have more of a bone to pick.<br /><br />Duane making friends with a hooker doesn’t seem to really bother Belial, but when Duane finds true love, oh look out. He can’t talk, walk upright or presumably wipe his own ass (if he even has one...?), but Belial can feel jealous rage with the best of them.<br /><br />Did I mention the effects? Where should we start? With the stop motion they use when they show any full “body” shots of Belial, like when he trashes the hotel room like a post-nuclear attack Keith Moon? With the gloved hand of the director they use when Belial feels up a tittie? The utter impossibility of a woman’s face getting skewered by approximately 142 scalpels and syringes that were laying flat in a drawer? <br /><br />Glorious, gory mayhem. <br /><br />And the New York City streets have never seemed more dangerous. It’s like the 12th ring of hell. This is when Times Square was a truly scary place, and when I walked from midtown to Greenwich Village that night in 1985, I saw Belial in every darkened alley. His red glowing eyes stalking me from every dead end and under every dumpster.<br />I’ve never walked anywhere, New York or otherwise, and felt the presence of Charlie Kane over my shoulder. <br /><br />Ignore the sequels. They try to cash in on the camp value <em>Basket Case</em> earned after its release. But the original wasn’t intentionally campy. It just happened that way. If it was, it wouldn’t have a downbeat ending right out of the blackest Film Noir.<br /><br />I’m not the only one to see the greasy charms of <em>Basket Case</em>. It has become, since it’s 1982 release, a genuine cult classic. The thing’s got a 75% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. For a film that is technically inept, that says a lot for the earnestness and the gore and--yes, I’ll say it--the characters. It has actual characters. One of them is a mute, rage-filled abomination, and yet you feel a little tug at the old heartstrings for the wrongs done to the mutant and his brother. You even find yourself wanting Duane to find love in the middle of all the bloodletting. Best not to mention the whole "Belial rapes the beautiful girl" scene. I'm trying to build a case that you actually like the little freak.<br /><br />There’s even some great humor. The running, “What’s in the basket?” gag is on par with my favorite running line of all time, <em>Escape From New York</em>’s “I thought you were dead.”<br /><br />Did I say it wasn’t intentionally campy? Maybe I spoke too soon. The way Duane feeds Belial like a zoo keeper, the cheap-ass recycled sets, the way Belial likes to perch on (or hide inside) toilets? Yeah, maybe they knew what they were doing.<br /><br />So, okay, maybe I never hit it big as a director, but I work in the industry and I make a good living. This would have seemed unattainable if not for films like <em>Basket Case</em>, which made movie making so much less intimidating. They made it seem possible. And even now, as we head toward the 30th anniversary of <em>Basket Case</em> (holy shit!), the fact that people are still talking about it, still seeking it out and still seeing the scrappy deformed charms of this kill-happy camp classic makes me think my dream still isn’t dead.<br /><br />And if it is going to die someday, please let it die as gloriously gory and karo-syrup blood soaked as <em>Basket Case.</em>Jimmy Callawayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13725548493403210066noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5653147652524357424.post-50163053894066753812011-06-01T20:07:00.000-07:002011-06-06T05:48:01.396-07:00Graduation Day (1981)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8JRZM8awV5nYLSsllVdXk8zglOQZ5l1mktlEDp7SWp-fcOqT1Zki50Q61IHcX8mo3yZjhM7_Qi7xoorwqPHSCbGxAgyp5E5NHMCgYyRZnXlWYMxO8Fmk23xHK2GdIJND7DAiXSceQLYYv/s1600/graduation+day.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 217px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg8JRZM8awV5nYLSsllVdXk8zglOQZ5l1mktlEDp7SWp-fcOqT1Zki50Q61IHcX8mo3yZjhM7_Qi7xoorwqPHSCbGxAgyp5E5NHMCgYyRZnXlWYMxO8Fmk23xHK2GdIJND7DAiXSceQLYYv/s320/graduation+day.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5613454043004493154" /></a><br /><br /><em>by <a href="http://nomoralcenter.blogspot.com/">Alec "Foiled Rotten" Cizak</a></em><br /><br />The class of the slasher genre emerged in 1981. Not that these movies were that great or classy. They were among the last “spam in a cabin” flicks, as Joe Bob Briggs once referred to them, to uphold some basic tenets of late ‘70s/very early ‘80s subversive cinema. In the case of the slasher, the youngsters represented the Other. This was reinforced any time an adult was present. Adults and especially authority figures, such as police or deans or politicians, were generally safe from the killer because they represented the old order, which was threatened by the new order. There are numerous essays and books that attempt to explain other aspects of the genre. Most of them focus on the idea that sexual activity was the prime cause for the kids being punished. If you watch the majority of the slashers released in 1980 and 1981, which unfortunately, I have, it’s obvious that this wasn’t really true across the board. <em>Terror Train</em>, for example, came the closest to proving the gender critics’ theory about the old switcheroo taking place between the killer and the final girl (i.e., the killer is effeminate, the final girl is masculine). But even <em>Terror Train</em> doesn’t dwell on the notion that sex will get you killed. Jamie Lee Curtis does not play a “virginal-type” in <em>Terror Train</em> or <em>Prom Night</em>. I would go so far as to argue that her character in <em>Halloween</em> is not all that pure either. She smokes a joint, after all, on the way to her babysitting gig.<br /><br />But I digress. You’ll notice throughout this piece that I digress frequently. I’m a digresser. Things might be different were I reviewing any other movie.<br /><br />The slasher genre was already dying by 1981. It was clear that no filmmaker trying to cash in on <em>Halloween</em>’s success understood why John Carpenter’s template worked. A few films got the suspense part, but failed to create any characters worth caring about, so that when the characters got killed, the audience’s emotional response was hinged to the cleverness of the murder or the believability of the gore (which was not a part of Halloween). By 1981, the genre was subjected to “deconstructionist” experiments, such as <em>The Burning</em> and <em>Slumber Party Massacre</em>. And the genre was ready to be outright spoofed. <em>Student Bodies</em> was an example of a film removing any remaining elements of horror and suspense and demonstrating that the genre had become a joke. Quite by accident, ex-rabbi Herb Freed co-wrote, co-produced and directed the silliest slasher ever made, <em>Graduation Day</em>. The title, thus, is more appropriate than Freed might have intended. <em>Graduation Day</em> marked the end of any possibility of taking the genre seriously. After 1981, very few slashers were worth watching, let alone discussing in any critical manner.<br /><br /><em>Graduation Day</em> is bad. It approaches Ed Wood-bad. Throughout the film, a flash-editing technique is employed to no dramatic effect at all. The result is annoying. The opening sequence is a great example of this. The event from the past that will cause the eventual stalk and slaughter of teenagers occurs amidst a flurry of flash cuts between a track meet, the track coach, and the crowd in the bleachers. Most of this is set to a disco song called “Everybody Wants to be a Winner,” which is appropriate considering everybody who imitated <em>Halloween</em> did so not out of respect for the style John Carpenter employed, but the profits the film earned. The winner of the track meet drops dead at the finish line, which is also appropriate, and off we go on an adventure of cinematic incompetence that’s not even coherent enough to warrant the ridicule of an audience at a midnight movie.<br /><br />Things are suspect right away. Paula, the eventual final girl who spends the majority of the film off-screen, has hitch-hiked with a truck driver wearing a purple shirt and yellow ascot. The driver tries to feel her up, tells her he has “enough tongue” for the both of them, and then accuses her of being a “lesbo” when she refuses. She is set up as the first red-herring when she gets out and walks through a forest where the first killing will take place. The killer uses a stop-watch to commemorate the confusing track meet from the beginning of the film. The first victim, like everyone who is actually murdered in the film, is an anonymous member of the track team the audience is never allowed to get to know and generate sympathy for. The coach is then set up as another red-herring in one of many terrible musical sequences in the film. As he walks across campus, we get a "meet the crazy kids!" montage cross-cut to a heavy metal tune called, for absolutely no logical reason, “Lucky Strike.” Oh, yeah: half the “crazy kids” we meet have nothing to do with the film’s alleged plot.<br /><br />Crammed in among all the nonsense and moronic killings (after the first victim, the killer, for no apparent reason, adopts a fencing foil as his or her weapon of choice), we manage to learn that a character named Kevin, who looks like he’s thirty-five-years-old and belongs in a <em>Lord of the Rings</em> movie, was in love with Laura, the girl who dropped dead at the track meet in the beginning of the film. So much for red-herrings. So much, also, for the film maintaining its rep as a piece of subversive cinema. The moment the killer in a slasher turns out to be one of the “crazy kids,” the notion of the teenagers being the Other is pretty much snuffed.<br /><br />One could write a book on the disjointed elements of <em>Graduation Day</em>—there is an inexplicable acoustic “jam” in the middle of the movie. Some guy who has nothing to do with the other characters cross-breeds Elvis and T. Rex for a god-awful performance of a god-awful song called “Graduation Day Blues.” Most notable is the eventual killer singing back up and “jamming” along with a harmonica. Then there is the most notorious musical number in the film—some horrific New Wave band called Felony plays a song called “Gangster Rock” for seven and a half minutes. By the time it’s over, the song’s annoying refrain is stuck in your head for the rest of the movie. Finally, the film’s most memorable line of dialogue is uttered near the end when a detective who is barely connected to the plot asks the final girl, Paula, “Who are you? What’s your stake in all this?” It’s a question that could be presented to every character in the movie.<br /><br />But I digress. Again.<br /><br />It’s my job to extract some sort of meaning from this mess, to come up with a clever take that suggests there is more going on than just an embarrassing narrative failure that still managed to rake in nearly twenty-four million dollars. It took me three miserable viewings to figure out what’s really going on in <em>Graduation Day</em>. Then, of course, in a half-waking state, I realized that the gold nugget of wisdom <em>Graduation Day</em> offers is this:<br /><br />Life ends after high school.<br /><br />For most of the conformist, yuppie clones that litter the American landscape, nothing could be more true. High school is it. Life never gets more glorious than scoring a winning touchdown on Friday night or “finger-banging old Mary Jane Rottencrotch through her purty pink panties” in the back of a beat up Chevy on a Saturday night. It’s no accident that the killer and victims in <em>Graduation Day</em> are athletes (save Linnea Quigley, who gets killed simply because she showed her famous tits to her music teacher. But I digress). These are the shining jewels of every high school, and in most cases, as we all know, they go on to get married; work mindless, routine office jobs; put their fluids together to pump out one or two replacement clones and die without ever having established any meaning to their lives. Depressing? Of course. That’s why God invented suicide. But they don’t even have the guts to do that. So, enter Kevin, the goofy thirty-five-year-old with a goofier white-boy afro. <br /><br />Herb Freed wants us to think Kevin is avenging the death of his true love, Laura. In fact, he is saving his classmates and teammates from entering the adult world and becoming one of the half-dozen jaded, corrupt, dishonest authority figures lurking in and around the high school. Folks like the music teacher, who dresses like Jerry Lewis, talks like Liberace and bangs young girls “just like the old man in that book by Nabokov.” Folks like the principal and his secretary (played by a healthy, pre-bulimia Vanna White), who banter back and forth about doing work, particularly the bothersome task of explaining to parents where their children might have gone off to, before agreeing to meet up later to drink and screw. The worst kind of adult these kids can become (and a great many athletes do, in fact, become) is a law enforcement officer. The school cop is a smarmy fuck who threatens to throw the kiddies in jail for smoking weed before lighting up a joint for himself (read: Adults are hypocrites). The detective who shows up late in the movie to look for the students who have been murdered is the worst of them all. He has no interest in doing his job. When asked where his badge is, he shrugs and says, “Must have lost it.” And he harbors no illusions about his feelings towards the youth (thus, the Other) when he tells the principal, “I hate schools.”<br /><br />The one adult the movie tries to set up for a ninth-inning Gatorade shower of sympathy is the track coach. The film fails, however, for several reasons. The coach is a red-herring right up until the very end. Also, he’s played by the bad guy from <em>El Dorado</em>, Christopher George (who ended his career pretty much the same way Bela Lugosi did, in one bad horror movie after another), who looks like a mean old fuck even when he’s smiling.<br /><br />Nope. There’s nothing attractive about growing up and becoming “mature.” Adults are just teenagers who are allowed to get away with their bad behavior. The message of <em>Graduation Day</em> is difficult to find, but it’s there:<br /><br />Trust no one over the age of twenty.<br /><br /><em>Halloween</em> established, among many other conventions of the slasher genre, the contempt for authority. When Annie’s (Nancy Loomis) father fails to recognize the stench of marijuana in his daughter’s car, the audience knows he’s useless. When he blames the break in at the hardware store on teenagers, the audience knows he’s an enemy. Like most so-called conventions of the slasher genre, this element is used and abandoned throughout the canon of films that picked up the loose dollars <em>Halloween</em> left in its wake. <em>Friday the 13th</em> opens with a truck driver who won’t take a camp counselor all the way to Crystal Lake. That allows Mrs. Voorhees to pick up the unlucky gal and slit her throat in the forest. Like most slasher conventions, the contempt for authority gets twisted around in movies such as <em>Terror Train</em>, where the authority figure is a senior citizen whose demeanor is so friendly the audience can’t help but sympathize with him. This, of course, ruins the convention as it was originally intended. Some films incorporate authority into the band of kids being stalked, an example being <em>The Prowler</em>. The point here, before I digress again, is that the conventions of slasher films, as they have been defined by critics and theorists, are barely conventions since they don’t play out the same way on a consistent basis from film to film.<br /><br /><em>Graduation Day</em>, however, bears the honor of taking the useless, corrupt authority figure to a campy, inept extreme. The film’s cynical portrayal of all adults is, in fact, its only redeeming feature.Jimmy Callawayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13725548493403210066noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5653147652524357424.post-41435624111208968512011-05-02T15:28:00.000-07:002011-05-02T15:48:04.382-07:00The Burning (1981)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin6tFbHLfUVHq4VoWiX_1eUkqM1dkZBDC_lEpfN-1nBuXpPREhKedXulB9bfdcn83GTBhgqv5f4mHhMRYDyGQcZdTwo_T00F_E-KtEFwfCvOiqNgrWhyH8ZICS8Zx9M6bynpnmotCba1KT/s1600/the-burning-movie-poster-1981-1020401951.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 210px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEin6tFbHLfUVHq4VoWiX_1eUkqM1dkZBDC_lEpfN-1nBuXpPREhKedXulB9bfdcn83GTBhgqv5f4mHhMRYDyGQcZdTwo_T00F_E-KtEFwfCvOiqNgrWhyH8ZICS8Zx9M6bynpnmotCba1KT/s320/the-burning-movie-poster-1981-1020401951.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5602249687523300930" /></a><br /><br /><em>by <a href="http://nomoralcenter.blogspot.com/">Alec "Just kill me when it's over" Cizak</a></em><br /><br />I realize <em>The Burning</em> has a cult following that adores it. It features good special-effects make-up work by Tom Savini. It’s notable for its cast, which includes Jason Alexander and Holly Hunter (not to mention Brian Backer, who went on to channel Paul Simon and Woody Allen in <em>Fast Times at Ridgemont High</em>). The truth of the matter is that it is not a very good slasher. At all. I would go so far as to say that the writers and producers tried to get "clever" with the genre, possibly even attempting to “deconstruct” it while the genre was in its prime.<br /><br />As much as I loathe and despise “deconstructionism,” I can set my personal feelings aside as “deconstructionism,” with respect to horror films, rarely, if ever, works. While <em>Scream</em> made a lot of money at the box office and started a trend of slick, studio-produced "post-modern" slashers in the late 1990s, purists pretty much agree those movies suck shit out of a donkey’s ass with a straw. Sarah Trencansky backs this view up in her article, “Final Girls and Terrible Youth: Transgression in 1980s Slasher Horror.” Trencansky uses a lot of later examples, i.e., <em>A Nightmare on Elm Street</em> and <em>Hellraiser</em>, to make the case that 1980s horror movies are subversive in nature (the teenagers representing "the Other") and the polished, nauseating "post-modern" films of the 1990s are more restorative than disruptive of the “dominant culture.” I agree with Trencasky, though I think the movies she’s really talking about, when discussing the 1980s, were made in 1980 and 1981. There are a few examples afterwards, but by 1982, more money is spent in order to make more money and that, by definition, takes the rug out from a low-budget film’s subversive nature. Further, I have a problem including films like <em>A Nightmare on Elm Street</em> in the canon of slasher films because the supernatural element separates those films from the bare-bones model of a human monster stalking young people (and the occasional impotent authority figure).<br /><br />Okay, so maybe I’m kind of a low-budget snob. A slasher movie, to me, is filmed on a shoe-string budget. It has bare-breasts and buckets of blood. It has a soundtrack that places it firmly in the early 1980s, meaning synthesizers, and lots of ‘em! It appears right in that borderland period between the excessive freedom of the Carter administration and the repressive, deadly clampdown (thank you, The Clash) that occurred when Reagan and Bush took over (remember that Reagan doesn’t take office until 1981, giving the country a year or two to adjust to his oppressive, murderous regime, thus, making the appearance of <em>Rambo</em> and <em>Rocky IV</em>, two films Robert Kolker uses to describe how the clock was suddenly turned back to Cold War paranoia, inevitable; I would go so far as to argue that the “puritanical” aspects of the slasher film were not brought to forefront of the genre until Reagan thoroughly took over--but that’s another article for another time...)<br /><br /><em>The Burning</em> appears during this time. 1981, which was, in my opinion, the high-point for the slasher genre. <em>The Burning</em> was the first effort by the Weinstein Brothers. That makes quite a bit of sense. They were also responsible for letting Wes Craven unload <em>Scream</em> on a thoroughly impotent 1990s audience of teenagers who had been conditioned to believe that self-consciousness was/is “clever.” It’s not. <em>The Burning</em> proves this.<br /><br />The film starts off great. A group of teenagers at camp play a horrible prank on the camp’s caretaker. It’s an early example of Reagan-era conformity-fever. The guy is different, so he needs to be punished. The prank--surprise--goes bad, and the weirdo gets engulfed in flames. He survives and is released from the burn ward, horribly disfigured, five years later. In a scene that seems out of place, the pissed off, permanently barbecued caretaker follows a middle-aged hooker up to her room and kills her. Feminist critics have used this scene as an example of the genre’s misogyny towards older women as the hooker looks hideous as she realizes she’s let a freak into her apartment. It’s possible. The truth, I think, is that it’s just a cheap way to set up the reality that the man is going to be a permanent outsider and justifies his exacting revenge on a new batch of campers. Another possibility is that the producers realized how much time passes between the establishment of the campers and the first real killing and stuck the scene in after principal photography wrapped.<br /><br />What follows is about a forty-five minute rehash of <em>Meatballs</em>. We meet the jokers, the outcast, the suspiciously Aryan-looking bully, the girls, and the camp counselor who--surprise--was one of the little pricks who caused our killer to get burned up five years previous. Noting the obvious ethnic differences between the Ayran bully and the “good” kids and Brian Hacker’s “weirdo” who--gasp--likes to look at naked girls, one begins to suspect the Weinstein brothers are going to use the slasher genre to make a statement about the holocaust. But that would have been too clever (and, I believe, would have fit the film right in with the anti-authoritarian purpose of other slashers being made at the time).<br /><br />No, instead what follows is just an extended period of character development, which isn’t such a bad thing. It certainly collides with the hypersensitive criticism claiming the victims in slasher films aren’t likeable (that trend, again, evolved with Reagan’s turning the clock back and making individuality a social crime deserving of a machete to the skull). However, the producers simply take too long to get to the slashing. I’m of the Atari generation, so my attention span has not been completely eradicated. I can take story and character development. But in a slasher picture, you need to start carving the kiddies up a whole lot sooner.<br /><br />When the killing does start, it’s not suspenseful. Tom Savini doesn’t get nearly as gruesome in this one as he does in the (my opinion, folks) vastly superior <em>The Prowler</em>. There is no Final Girl, which I believe takes away one of the genre’s most potent weapons of subversion--the woman who doesn’t need prince charming to save her. Instead, it’s two guys who are symbolically tied to the killer, one being the camp weirdo and the other being the counselor who was partially responsible for the killer’s shish kabob routine in the beginning of the film. There is a long, convoluted chase through what appears to be Civil War ruins (turns out to be a mill or something) and then an anti-climactic face off with the killer.<br /><br />One element of the film that made me furious was the treatment of sex. While sex in other slashers appears to be “punished,” the kids at least have a good time while they’re doing it. Perhaps foreseeing the repressive Reagan age, the Weinstein brothers decided to make the sex in <em>The Burning</em> unfulfilling. The Aryan bully fails to satisfy his girlfriend and the experience is presented in such a way as to send a repressive message--Don’t have sex, you won’t enjoy it. I’m certain the producers thought they were “deconstructing” the sex in previous slasher films. All they really did was back the status quo, which during Reagan’s regime, was highly represented by the uptight Christian “right.”<br /><br />That scene alone puts <em>The Burning</em> in the right-wing camp and, by definition, thwarts any other attempt by the film to be radical and subversive. I find it shameful and refuse to recommend this movie to anybody who doesn’t first try to recommend the church to me...Jimmy Callawayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13725548493403210066noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5653147652524357424.post-52441209911882272132011-04-06T13:48:00.000-07:002011-04-07T18:34:46.897-07:00Halloween (1978)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGg0WU2LJxR0z06HK8M2cWJhgNcWubWGEEfU_GqGecVnND5fUlwKjB6YtOvw4CO_W2pGWrxOKMuY_Fq6-53da_AlJVz8g6_nle1-xKzjCNiSnMlyyTIIjWcFx_yGSBYjE4ntUxvVOHeOGB/s1600/halloween_1_poster_01.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 213px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGg0WU2LJxR0z06HK8M2cWJhgNcWubWGEEfU_GqGecVnND5fUlwKjB6YtOvw4CO_W2pGWrxOKMuY_Fq6-53da_AlJVz8g6_nle1-xKzjCNiSnMlyyTIIjWcFx_yGSBYjE4ntUxvVOHeOGB/s320/halloween_1_poster_01.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5592575708469224882" /></a><br /><br /><em>by <a href="http://matthewfunk.net/">Matthew "Latent phase" Funk</a></em><br /><br />Sex is scary. <br /><br />Sure, sex has a lot going for it: biological urge, the romance of bonding with another, all the Red Shoe Diaries hype that society slathers on--we’re soaked with ways sex is a special and positive thing. But every reason that sex is special has a flip-side that’s a reason to be frightened of it. John Carpenter’s <em>Halloween</em> is that fear of sex distilled into a walking, faceless fatality.<br /><br /><em>Halloween</em> was as much as a creation of its producer and co-writer, Debra Hill, as it was John Carpenter. Hill stitched its dramatic beats together from the fantasy frights she had as a teen babysitter, and the film smacks of both a coming-of-age tale and an urban legend. For those of you who’ve just arrived on Earth, I’ll summarize the story: A little boy, Michael Myers, flips his five-year-old wig one Halloween night and stabs his naked sister into oblivion, before ending up in state’s custody. Years later, Myers escapes from the asylum with his far-beyond-driven doctor on his trail, and goes about murdering a flock of babysitters and another hapless boyfriend. <br /><br />But really, it’s all about how sex is scary.<br /><br />It’s stylized, as John Carpenter films tend to be. This also makes it dated. And compared to the latex-happy fare these days, it’s pretty tame. Despite all these expiration dates, <em>Halloween</em> remains a timeless classic. That’s because, like all good myth, it is human experience distilled.<br /><br /><em>Halloween</em> understands that when puberty hits, libido comes barging in and rifling through your darkest places. Sex, as a force in your life, is urgent and fierce and faceless. You don’t know what it is yet but you know it feels like your life depends on it. Like a horror film stalker, it can’t be seen or escaped, but it sure as Dickens has your number. <br /><br /><em>Halloween</em> nails the quintessential quality of its message: its menace is faceless and, for most of the film, seen only as a shape or as the gaze of the camera. Myers isn’t shackled by humanizing elements like motivation or fancy gimmicks. He is distinctive in his lack of identity. His only purpose is to be a deadly power pursuing girls and boys awakening to their sexuality.<br /><br />He does this with supernatural efficiency when it comes to targeting the randy. Myers may have been locked up at Xavier’s School for the Gifted given his ability to vanish from view, detect how scared teens are and invade their dwellings without so much as a busted window. How <em>Halloween</em> is shot drives this home, with Myers’s character being conveyed by the shot’s perspective itself for most of the flick. The Kryptonite to Myers’s baffling powers takes the form of the sexually uninitiated protagonist--whenever Myers goes after the wallflower, Jamie Lee Curtis, he turns into the fourth Stooge. <br /><br />Putting the cinema-studies analysis to this facelessness shows how pure <em>Halloween</em>’s message is: there is a primal force that wants to kill you because you are naked and horny.<br /><br />Legends are rife with this breed of cautionary bogeyman. The Greeks used to personify their fears as fickle gods and animal-human hybrids. Later cultures dropped the whole "Furries of Vengeance" bit and invested terror in the garb of these supernatural Scared Straight programs--Grimm’s fairy tales featuring a scissor-wielding maniac who went after nose-picking children’s fingers. Getting a paranormal punisher on your tail for bad behavior is nothing new.<br /><br />How <em>Halloween</em> made these murderous tales of misbehavior new was by using the medium of film to liberate the vengeful spirit from identity. Myers is just a leering camera shot, stalking his victims, untouchable but all-knowing. Refining the malevolence to perspective itself removes it from the safety of something we can see and face. Myers has no face--he’s just punishment itself: mortality magnetized to teen libido. <br /><br />When his mug finally is spotted, it’s just a Bill Shatner mask white-washed into anonymity. How better to model libido-made-ghoulish than to have him look like the ghost of the star-faring sexual conquistador of the Enterprise? <br /><br />There’s really little worth to <em>Halloween</em> beyond this central motif. Jamie Lee Curtis manages a nerve-gripping performance at times. Donald Pleasance, in the role of Myers’s gun-toting therapist, delivers the dramatic goods. Otherwise, the film is just a study in how stilted slasher flicks can be. At this stage in his career, Carpenter only manages to make his supporting cast marginally less zombie-like than the gangland hordes of <em>Assault on Precinct 13</em>. His shots often look like just what they are: a young director trying too hard to amp up the tension. <br /><br />The real merit is in crafting the antagonist as an archetype: Not an angry human like Freddy Krueger, not a wild animal like Leatherface and not a phantom with a vendetta like Jason Vorhees. Myers is just violence drawn by adolescent sex drive, for no reason other than that’s scary.<br /><br />The fact that this threadbare motive isn’t so flimsy as to collapse the whole plot is a foundational principle of slasher flicks. On a certain primal level, we understand why sexuality incites horror. Whether from fear of emotional vulnerability to another, or performance anxiety or basic carnal repression, we get that sex has an inherent anxiety--it has power. In <em>Halloween</em> and its many misbegotten spawn, that power is a fatal one.<br /><br />The only character who escapes that power--Jamie Lee Curtis--is the “virginal” type. Myers has gone through her pals like Ted Bundy on a crack binge, but he balks during the many attempts to do her in. Faced with her sexual innocence, Myers fumbles like an overanxious geek trying to score with the prom queen. He can’t hold the object of his desire and, try as he might with his handy butcher knife, he can’t penetrate her fatality. Just like in the unicorn legends, only a virgin maid can tame the beast without getting the shaft. Jamie Lee manages to bungle her way into defeating him three times before deus ex machina can arrive in the form of Donald Pleasance with an itchy trigger finger. Penetrated by an older male, our phantom of teen sex falls like the limp dick he is and fades away.<br /><br />Confronted by all these coincidental sex metaphors, Carpenter and Hill have claimed they were unintentional. I only buy that as far as I can throw their ids. They may not have spent weed-fueled late-night brainstorm sessions analyzing why what they were writing was scary, but they knew how scary was supposed to work. Whether <em>Halloween</em> and its host of imitators understood why the ethics of its plot were palatable to the viewing public is irrelevant. That’s like trying to figure out libido itself. They worked because, for the common viewer, they were instinctively understood.<br /><br />That’s what keeps people buying tickets and what keeps the basic motif of <em>Halloween</em> flowering into knock-offs where the nubile die for nookie. Viewers don’t need Freud sharing their popcorn to get that sex has a whiff of death to it and that the sexually innocent should avoid that fatality if the moral universe is to be sane and orderly. <br /><br />Even audiences in the know may roll their eyes, but still tune in to see boobs, and those who dare to touch them, drenched in blood. That dark and restless corner of the libido that never quite exited the adolescence into the light is fascinated with sex’s forbidden thrill. <br /><br />And that’s the sole reason <em>Halloween</em> remains relevant. Out of legions of cinematic exercise, it’s the seminal model--the originator of the modern model for sex as fear. It’s the pure power of the gaze, stripped of all the safety identity grants by clever camera work and minimalist editing. To see it is to stare into the abyss of adolescent libido at its purest and most vulnerable. <br /><br />If you can look past the Farrah hair and overacting, that is.Jimmy Callawayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13725548493403210066noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5653147652524357424.post-31221912026567126422011-03-24T08:55:00.003-07:002012-03-25T10:30:44.257-07:00The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpQGRJCj9qufKmSEqJA0WpjVzO3maPrzukU_-Ina7a0I25-e4oR0FR31nBTOFa922Z2GlM4oFrKV-09RdXgvGFU7qw2aLWgi90mUOQfvSU8MW2-tKQCU3nP9RfHKeGqKCsJEbGhuenPl_1/s1600/TheTexasChainSawMassacre-poster.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 206px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpQGRJCj9qufKmSEqJA0WpjVzO3maPrzukU_-Ina7a0I25-e4oR0FR31nBTOFa922Z2GlM4oFrKV-09RdXgvGFU7qw2aLWgi90mUOQfvSU8MW2-tKQCU3nP9RfHKeGqKCsJEbGhuenPl_1/s320/TheTexasChainSawMassacre-poster.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5584046138624755170" /></a><br /><br /><em>by <a href="http://attentionchildren.blogspot.com">Jimmy "They Took My Baby Away from Me" Callaway</a></em><br /><br />So, at first, I was gonna take critic Vera Dika's formula for slasher films and apply it to this movie, figuring so much has been said about <em>Texas Chain Saw</em> that I might as well just go ahead and say something someone has already said. But that didn't go so well, so I figure I can do that some other time for another flick actually within Dika's very limited time frame of 1978 to 1984. <br /><br />So then what? Well, in my umpteenth rewatching of this flick last night, I felt disturbed and uncomfortable, as I often do when watching this movie, and it occurred to me that the only other movie that makes me feel this dirty and oily is 1972's <em>Deliverance</em>. Really pretty obvious on the face of it, and though I'm far from the first high-minded, penny-ante Roger Ebert to come up with the comparison, hey, it's all I've got. I'm a man who knows his limitations.<br /><br /><em>Deliverance</em> is of course the epic saga of Burt Reynolds and just how downhill his career would go. Burt and Jon Voight and Ned Beatty and New Mexico's own Ronny Cox all decide to go whitewater rafting before the river gets dammed, and find out just how lonely those hillbillies can get. <em>Texas Chain Saw</em>, as the progenitor of the slasher film, took the basic premise of <em>Deliverance</em> and expanded it to include the youth of 1970s America: we dunno where you kids are headed, but it ain't fuckin' pretty.<br /><br /><em>Texas Chain Saw</em> opens with those grisly shots of dug-up, dismembered corpses, and you're not likely to find a more effectively tone-setting opening. Our merry band drive their boogie-van down to Newt (or is it Newton? Mapquest assures me Newt exists, but no Newton, yet Newt is nowhere near Childress, TX, which is also mentioned in this film as being nearby. Can anyone clear this up, or should I just shut up now?) to ascertain that Sally and Franklin's grandpa's resting place has not been disturbed. Right away, we get almost nothing but the keening discrepancy between these youths of the hippie hey-day and the old-boy South. The secondary characters--sheriff's deputies, local citizens, big-headed mute gas station boys--all ooze a friendly disdain for these five kids and their paisley shirts and incredibly short shorts, but it is indirect and non-confrontational. Personally speaking, the time I've spent in Texas has never been anything short of lovely, the people as friendly as they're reputed. But at the same time one can't deny there is a certain near-condescending attitude towards outsiders. Like when the kids show up at the graveyard, and the one deputy guides Sally away, all like, "Hey, you boys don't mind if I borrow the little miss?" He means her no harm, of course, but he wants the rest to know that even if they did have a problem with it, that would just be their tough shit.<br /><br />Once they've all been assured that Granddad was just as they'd left him, the kids bug out and read their horoscopes and just generally be youthful. Franklin, Sally's brother, never shuts the fuck up, a choice for which I take my hat off to director Tobe Hooper: it was like he made the handicapped character the most irritating, as if to challenge us to hate him without then feeling guilty for wishing harm on a guy stuck in a wheelchair. Well played, sir.<br /><br />It's weird to think that there was a time when picking up hitchhikers was a viable option, though I'm certain the release of this film did a lot to un-viable that (actually, I used to live in a hilly rural area, and so would pick up hitchhikers every now and again, just 'cause I knew what it was like being without a car in a hilly rural area. Still no way to not have a creepy, or at the very least awkward, situation when you invite a stranger into your car). Our merry band picks up a hitchhiker out by the slaughterhouse, and he and Franklin immediately get into a heated discussion over current trends in meat-packing. Franklin is well impressed by the captive bolt pistol currently in use, humane and efficient as it is. The hitchhiker loudly shouts that down, hewing instead to the old days of a grated floor and a well-placed sledgehammer. As the first really significant scene, you'd have to be asleep to miss out on the thematic importance of this exchange. <br /><br />The surface stuff is obvious, but I dig what Hooper does next: the hitchhiker takes out a camera, an old accordion-lens model. He points it around, in his generally creepy way (guys with birthmarks on their faces must really loathe this scene--"Hey, I'm a nice person! Just 'cause I have an overgrowth of melanocytes on my face doesn't make me a Texan cannibal!"), and then snaps a picture of Franklin. When Franklin refuses to buy the photograph, the hitchhiker takes some foil and some flash powder out of his roadkill bag and burns the picture in a display of hoo-doo that finally gets him kicked out of the van. So apparently, the hitchhiker can employ modern(-ish) technology if it's gonna make him money. But if/when it doesn't, he resorts to the old, back-country ways. It's almost as though it's this hypocrisy that makes him unsympathetic, rather than his later horrid, violent actions. I guess Hooper knew he'd have a lotta cynics in the audience, y'know, jerks like me who'd make excuses for sociopathy but not for having double standards.<br /><br />Anyways, the kids then stop at the filling station and are warned off by the proprietor, whom we find out later is also the eldest of the Leatherface brood. Given that, it's difficult to figure later if he's genuinely warning them off from exploring their old family home, whether out of concern for their well-being or for them discovering his family's distinctly anti-social ways. Or he could have been inviting them to stay and have some BBQ with the intent of luring them into the oven that way. Hard to say in the context of this movie, though I gather his character is a little more fleshed-out (har) in the sequel. I choose to read the Old Man's character here as being at least a bit sympathetic: as we see later, he has little stomach for actual violence, though he does seem to delight in torturing poor little Sally. So it's like he's saying here, "Look, y'all, I know me and my kin all too well, so please don't put us in a position where we have to slaughter y'all up and have you for Sunday supper." Doesn't make him likable, but it does put an interesting spin on his character, and also will allow Hooper something of a back door for his final girl to escape.<br /><br />And then Leatherface. Oh, Gunnar Hansen, you are truly one of the unsung actors of your generation. I think the fact that Hansen has no dialogue at all in this film really allows him to do the finest acting in the movie. As with most exploitation films, the acting is far from marquee-billing, but the way Leatherface gets to emote by screaming and cross-dressing actually makes his acting the most subtle and nuanced, if you can dig that. First up on the chopping block is Kirk, who never sees it coming, thereby setting the tradition for just about every slasher-victim to follow. When I first saw this flick as a teenager, that first kill was such a release: I'd been held tight in the grip of tension and mostly laughable characterization. Then out pops Leatherface, like he's on some twisted <em>Laugh-In</em> set, quick sledge to Kirk's skull, and then back out of camera range. Tobe Hooper will always remain one of my favorite directors just for the way he set up that shot alone, placing the audience at a distance, helpless. The visceral close-up certainly makes sense, but you'd think after that had been done over and over and over again, some half-assed director woulda gone, "Hey, why don't we try to steal directly from <em>Texas Chain Saw</em> for this scene?"<br /><br />Poor little Pammy is next on the killing floor, and Hooper's early use of the Gaze here is interesting. Kirk, Jerry, and Franklin never really have a chance because, even though Jerry and Franklin actually get to see Leatherface before he dispatches them to the meat-locker, by then it's just too late. Pam is at least given a running start because she actually manages to lay eyes on her killer before he does away with her. It doesn't do her much good, but that shot of her actually making it to the porch of the Leatherface household before he drags her back in probably comes in second-place for my most chilling visuals in this flick.<br /><br />Pam getting the meat-hook here was also probably the beginning of people considering the slasher genre to be largely misogynistic. And though I disagree, it's hard not to see Pam being literally treated as a piece of meat as anything less than non-feminist. But as often happens, the actions of the characters--particularly the antagonists--are being confused with those of the filmmakers. It seems as plain as day to me that Leatherface and his family have got some major fucking issues with the fairer sex, to say the very least, and this is not to be celebrated or empathized with by the audience, but is to add to the audience's revulsion for them.<br /><br />And as long as we're on the subject, let's talk about Leatherface's wardrobe, shall we? Firstly, aesthetically speaking, I have no greater favorite look for a killer. A mask made of human flesh on a hulking man-child who speaks in grunts and shrieks is almost a prerequisite, even at this early stage of the genre. But when we first meet him, he's wearing a shirt and tie and (unless I'm very much mistaken) a butcher's apron. This is day-time Leatherface, hard-at-work Leatherface. A guy who lives in the middle of nowhere and cuts people up with a chainsaw still takes the time to tie a tie in the morning. That alone really sets my mind to reeling, and actually does make Leatherface at least that much more sympathetic, despite it all. That drive to still be normal, despite the fact that normalcy waved bye-bye to you a long time ago--I dunno, would it be completely weird if I said I could fully relate? (Yes.) And then from there, he drags it up, which is just kind of funny on its own, but also speaks volumes as to how far a woman's touch really matters. Even the shittiest grad student in the world could connect those dots for you, especially when Leatherface changes into his more formal dining gown. Man, I'm just prattling on at this point; lemme try and delineate:<br /><br />Leatherface wears a mask made of human skin to simultaneously hide himself from the world and as a (failed) attempt to seem more human. He dresses like a butcher because that way he is one: a nice, normal, friendly neighborhood butcher, who still puts a thumb on the scale, but in a much sicker way. He becomes Suzy Homemaker when it's time to cook dinner and takes the Old Man's abuse because a woman's place is in the kitchen and on the end of the strap. He becomes a glamorous hostess during the cocktail hour, likely because they will be dining with (and on) guests that evening. The perverse logic in play here is only all the more appealing since it's never directly addressed. And this is why <em>The Texas Chain Saw Massacre</em> is truly one of the finest examples of American cinema: for all the exploitative trappings herein, Tobe Hooper's eye for detail in this regard sets him and his work above the bland and the average.<br /><br />Let's talk Grandpa. By this point in the movie, everybody's been killed except for Sally. Leatherface and his brothers are all het up over the king's ransom of fresh meat they've got now, and then hubris rears its classical head. The boys are so excited, so proud of this little blonde side of beef they've got, that they want Grandpa to have the distinct pleasure of slaughtering her himself. Of all the crazy shit these boys get up to, this is by far the craziest. It doesn't matter how out of their minds they are, you'd think one of them would say, "Hey, ol' Gramps is pretty much a corpse at this point. I mean, fun is fun, boys, but maybe we oughtta be a little more careful with our acquisition here is alls I'm sayin'." But like I was kind of getting at before, this characteristic wrinkle allows Hooper a nice out for his protagonist, so much so that one barely blinks when it's suddenly morning, and Leatherface is suddenly in his Sunday-go-to-meetin' suit, and suddenly their house is near enough a major highway that a trailer-truck not only arrives to flatten Brother Hitchhiker, but also a Samaritan pick-up truck can pass by to whisk Sally away.<br /><br />Given the earlier double-standard about the new ways vs. the old ways that we saw with the Hitchhiker, it's a fitting end for him to get mowed down by an 18-wheeler, driven by a black guy, no less. You can try to hew to the old ways however half-assedly you want, but just as Sally and her friends were caught unawares by the back-country killin' culture of Leatherface and his family, so too are the boys so caught up in their mindset that little things like Grampa's inability to hold a hammer or the importance of looking both ways before crossing the street fatally slip their minds. Even Leatherface, clearly the most successful crazy guy in this crazy family, loses control of his own chainsaw, which is like another limb at this point, and slices his own leg open. You just can't have it both ways, fellas, as much as you might not want to hear that.<br /><br />And another nice thing about this final scene is that it sets up another slasher tradition wherein the final girl escapes with her life but not any semblance of normality. This final sequence contains what is easily Marilyn Burns's finest acting in the film, if not ever in her career. She is at once hysterical with fear and with joy at her escape, and that particular blend would be difficult for anyone to convey. Before we cut back to Leatherface and his impotent chainsaw/dick-swinging, we can see in Sally's face that, though she's glad to be alive, she also wishes she were dead. There's the rub.<br /><br />To get back to my abandoned <em>Deliverance</em> analogy: when we were in our early 20s, my buddy Craig and I finally rented that flick, and were all a-giggle for the famous rape scene we knew was forthcoming. But when it actually happened, we were nauseated and creeped thoroughly out. This is how I constantly come at <em>The Texas Chain Saw Massacre</em>: it always feels like I'll get a couple beers in me and say, "Hey, ain't watched that in a while, think I'll pop it in." And then I remember, "Oh yeah, this isn't a 'fun' movie. It's a horrible and horribly well-made chunk of cinema which is about as purely transgressive as one can get." <br /><br />Which is obvious to just about everybody but me, it would seem.Jimmy Callawayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13725548493403210066noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5653147652524357424.post-48938318492952255852011-02-07T05:41:00.000-08:002011-02-07T12:41:09.264-08:00The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZsq2F5DRy9ghIKe-49vI3ZeImoIRJ1dHca6LCp68dHe-LgjZI4a5jWnRSrzvsTFUYHeGpZ41vXbr_2nP7L6XadMomG_fXOWczL_A1S9KiFglVoeqISgUeTEZa-bilBF9Chn8lor40_TNw/s1600/the-town-that-dreaded-sundown-movie-poster-1020193683.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 208px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZsq2F5DRy9ghIKe-49vI3ZeImoIRJ1dHca6LCp68dHe-LgjZI4a5jWnRSrzvsTFUYHeGpZ41vXbr_2nP7L6XadMomG_fXOWczL_A1S9KiFglVoeqISgUeTEZa-bilBF9Chn8lor40_TNw/s320/the-town-that-dreaded-sundown-movie-poster-1020193683.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5570942771320788354" /></a><br /><br /><em>by <a href="http://roebeast.blogspot.com/">Brian S. "The Moonpie Murderer" Roe</a></em><br /><br />Charles B. Pierce was an ambitious man. Not content to merely help in the making of films as a set director, Pierce also wanted to produce and direct. And although his films were sometimes successful, they also suffered from many of the constant curses of local independent films: bad acting, lack of direction, and random voice-overs. All of these curses are in evidence in Pierce’s 1977 drive-in background noise <em>The Town That Dreaded Sundown</em>.<br /><br />The movie is based on several real killings and attacks that occurred in Texarkana in 1946. The attacker had all of the gimmicks that would become standard tropes for slasher-movie killers: he was never caught, he wore a mask, and he had cool names stuck to him. The Phantom Killer, The Texarkana Phantom (or simply The Phantom), The Phantom Slayer and The Moonlight Murderer. I mean, come on. Who wouldn’t want to be The Moonlight Murderer? The actual attacks were cruel and brutal with a blatant sexual element that implied a person incapable of getting off and who wanted to hurt people as a form of release.<br /><br />So what a great idea for a light-hearted cop comedy! There’s a severely flawed concept behind <em>TTTDS</em> that everytime the audience sees something nasty happen, give them a little Keystone Kops and they’ll feel better. And the worst offender as an actor is the ambitious man himself, Charles B. Pierce.<br /><br />The movie begins well enough with several slice-of-life set-up scenes describing Texarkana immediately after World War II. These play almost like documentary footage or home movies from a time when people still threw actual rice at weddings (Fuck the birds). Texarkana is described as a decent town where a lot of returning soldiers were going to college on the GI Bill, people were wanting spiffy new cars, and lots of homes were being built. All in all, a pretty snug little burg.<br /><br />Then a really cute 1940s-style girl and her Crypt Keeper-looking boyfriend are attacked in a hidden lovers' rendezvous. The actual attack in this scene is pretty blunt and straight forward. The killer is totally in control of things, and his glaring eyes from beneath his gunny-sack mask are intimidating and iconic. The Phantom’s mask becomes another character in this movie, swelling like an attacking fish as the killer breathes out and contracting to form the shape of his skull as he breathes in.<br /><br />Two brief scenes stand out during this sequence. After the boyfriend has been dispatched, the killer crawls into the car with the still screaming girl. Then the car begins to rock. The implication that something foul is happening here is pretty awful. There’s something vulgar about the rocking of the car as the girl’s screams fade. And this is followed up by some very unkind images of the beaten and mud-spattered girl crawling along the side of road begging for help from passing motorists. <br /><br />"But what about the comedy, Roe?! I needs me some chuckles if I’m going to get through this whole thing."<br /><br />Which leads me to fucking Sparkplug. Fuck you, Sparkplug. Director/producer Pierce loves putting himself in his movies. He thinks he’s an action hero, college professor, policeman, and comedy fucking genius. In <em>TTTDS</em>, he plays Patrolman A.C. Benson, a.k.a. Sparkplug, a pissy little good-for-nothing dickhead who can’t drive and threatens to shoot some old broad’s dog when he comes over to kick the shit out of her son. Sparkplug has two facial expressions both apparently designed to make me want to destroy him. One is angry and slightly unhinged. The other is disbelieving and slightly unhinged. Several times in the movie, he fucks up some simple task and then gives this odd glare to whoever rails on him about it. The guy just seems unpleasant, stupid, and violent. Great choice for a cop, Texarkana! Actually my main candidate for who the killer was is Sparkplug. Except he’d fuck that up too.<br /><br />Wait a minute, back to the killing and assaulting and such. Another couple goes out and gets all attacked while Deputy Norman Ramsey tries to find them on a lonely, rain-deluged road. Again this sequence plays out well, even though it is shot day-for-night and has some of the most awkward and unnecessary Foley work in any movie. While Ramsey is trying to cross a pond in pursuit of the killer, his footsteps in the water are matched with sounds that are obviously someone splashing in a tub. And then just to reinforce that this is a pond, a very out-of-place bullfrog croaks loudly. I’m surprised that this wasn’t followed up by the sound of a cartoon frog tongue-zapping a fly out of the air.<br /><br />The deputy is played by Andrew Prine (one of two actual actors in this film) with a reserve and decency that makes the character likeable and trustworthy. Upon witnessing the aftermath of the first attack, Deputy Ramsey seems truly shaken and pissed off, not in a <em>Walking Tall</em> way, but in the way that actual cops must feel sometimes. There was nothing he could do about the first attack but during this second assault, he might have a chance to stop the killer. But the rain slows his running and he finally gets close enough to the suspect to see him drive away. Justice will not be served on this sad, tragic day.<br /><br />Oh, wait! More comedy, says you? So Sparkplug dresses up like a woman and his balloon tits are different sizes and Jimmy Clem (yes, THE Jimmy Clem) tries to feel him up during a sting operation. And then one totally pops! High-larious!<br /><br />Okay, I’m tired of this bullshit back-and-forth routine, so I’ll just talk about Ben Johnson and be done with it. Ben Johnson is one of those dudes who was born in the real American West and carries it in his voice like iron thunder. The guy just walks into the movie and it starts to swirl around him. Even the simple act of buying cigars just seems powerful somehow. If you haven’t seen <em>The Wild Bunch</em> (which includes so many other powerfully grizzled fucking actors that it should have a monument for it made from hand-carved oak and cast iron), check it out. Or <em>Cherry 2000</em> is good too. So yeah, Ben Johnson, the other real actor in this movie.<br /><br />What else? Jimmy Clem comes off really bear-gay here. There’s a really sad but stupid killing with a trombone. The guy who wrote the movie tries to act. All the black people in the movie are either servants or are getting called “darkie”. Oh and Mary Ann from <em>Gilligan’s Island</em> is in it (How I pine for Ginger).<br /><br /><em>The Town That Dreaded Sundown</em> shares a lot of similarities with the David Fincher film <em>Zodiac</em>. Except that <em>Zodiac</em> had a clear purpose and story to tell. Pierce had the basic tools to make a film that, for its time, could have been somewhat as powerful as <em>Zodiac</em>. There are glimpses here that show something pretty creative at work. But you can’t make two kinds of film simultaneously and expect them to work. Especially the oil-and-water mix of brutal assault and murder and goofy cop humor. Perhaps Pierce was just trying to add some treacle to the brimstone. Instead he made something oddly indigestible and empty.<br /><br /><strong>Charles B. Pierce: A Brief Appreciation</strong><br /><br />For all the foulness that I sling at Charles Pierce, I actually respect him greatly. I respect anyone who can get a single film made, let alone a dozen. When I first started writing this piece, I found out that Charles Pierce had died. Suddenly I didn’t feel like mocking him anymore. The guy had done his time on Earth, had made some stuff, given me some entertainment (even if this was indirectly his doing sometimes), and often worked locally, giving his friends and neighbors parts in the great Hollywood machine that they never would have been a part of otherwise. Besides he was born in Indiana, so I feel for him.<br /><br />Although Pierce worked primarily as a Hollywood set decorator, he still pushed himself to produce and direct his own films locally. With the success of the original <em>Boggy Creek</em>, he helped to create an independent film style that used the grit and dirt of real life to heighten the experience of certain types of films. The horror movie genre would look very different today without the involvement of Charles Pierce.<br /><br />Seeing many of the same actors in <em>The Town That Dreaded Sundown</em> that were in <em>Boggy Creek 2</em> made me realize that Pierce, much like the often but unfairly maligned Ed Wood, had built a group of people around him that liked him enough to be in his movies. Try getting a group of your friends to make a movie in summer in Arkansas and you’ll see what I mean. Dedication to filmmaking is laudable even if the end results are uneven or could have been improved by a little more care, craft, or money. Pierce said, “Damn it! I want to make movies in Arkansas.” <br /><br />And he did.Jimmy Callawayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13725548493403210066noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5653147652524357424.post-25180796066826138462011-01-11T14:05:00.001-08:002011-08-22T19:52:39.330-07:00Cheerleader Camp (1988)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgg2xcpmK3Tm06nQ1MGpF7AYUu-9shWAd5P5qxGH1WTmzlV8UD_GomRsZSmasg7oTeR6G0WoT8nqWxNcbJ39Aml3cHUAF2_K_qAcHsZvZlNd0MxbYybmJCqiJ0QPST51zX0JbNTun-9_ZSN/s1600/cheerleader-camp-1987.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 209px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgg2xcpmK3Tm06nQ1MGpF7AYUu-9shWAd5P5qxGH1WTmzlV8UD_GomRsZSmasg7oTeR6G0WoT8nqWxNcbJ39Aml3cHUAF2_K_qAcHsZvZlNd0MxbYybmJCqiJ0QPST51zX0JbNTun-9_ZSN/s320/cheerleader-camp-1987.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5561055143673226882" /></a>
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<br /><em>by <a href="http://attentionchildren.blogspot.com">Jimmy "Push 'em back, push 'em back, way back!" Callaway</a></em>
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<br />What is it about cheerleaders that holds them fast in the sexual fantasy life of the average American male, age 8 to 88? Is it because they act as a counterpoint to the sweaty, testosterone-soaked sporting events where they are so often found? Is it because they represent wholesome Americana and make us pine for a simpler time, when masturbation was satisfying in and of itself? Is it because we're all really, in our heart of hearts, the oily, creepy music teacher who lingers a bit too much around the lower field during cheer try-outs?
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<br />These are all burning questions for the intelligent pervert, and <em>Cheerleader Camp</em> seeks to answer none of them. The flick does, however, answer the question of why I kinda feel sorry for Leif Garrett. It's certainly not because he got all strung out on drugs. Hell, if anything I envy him that, even if only because he got to go out with Justine Bateman at the time. No, it's because of <em>Three for the Road</em>. That very short-lived show also featured Alex Rocco, better known either as Moe Greene or Roger Meyers, Jr., depending on who you ask. It also co-starred Vince Van Patten, who had the good sense to star in <em>Rock 'n' Roll High School</em> before taking the world of men's tennis by storm. See that? The show that launched Leif Garrett's career also thrust him into the god-awful world of '70s pop music, then left him hanging out to dry in the '80s in shithole movies like this one, while his two castmates barely noticed, one because he's talented and one because he's a Van Patten. I dunno, maybe I'm nuts, but it just kinda seems like a raw deal.
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<br />And trust me, you can see in ol' Leif's cutie-pie face as he slogs through this piece of shit, he wishes he'd never gotten that callback for <em>Walking Tall</em>. <em>Cheerleader Camp</em> is one of the slew of late '80s slasher flicks which, like the last two <em>Sleepaway Camp</em> movies, abandons all pretense of being a creative project. Tits, blood, bad jokes, more blood: that's the formula, and we're sticking to it.
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<br />The movie opens with a dream sequence that sets up one theme purposefully and another quite accidentally. Tonight's final girl, Allison, is dreaming that she's running late for a big cheer competition, and then she falls flat on her face in a mud puddle. Her mother and father are the only ones in the stands and they walk off disgusted as their daughter makes a fool of herself. Right off, you can see the filmmakers wanting to use the dream sequence as a motif to say something about the futility of competition; that empty ambition, a pointless desire to "win," is always going to be frustrated. And I so desperately want to concede that to them, I do. But the other theme this scene sets up is that these guys flat out suck at making movies. Whatever original or interesting ideas that are to be found in <em>Cheerleader Camp</em> are always almost immediately quashed by bad acting or bad hair or bad dialogue. An A for effort, seriously. But a big F-, all around.
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<br />The main kids in the movie are all from Lindo Valley. It's never clear just what sort of institution is Lindo Valley, exactly. Some of the dialogue implies it's not a high school, but is it a community college? A technical school? I dunno. I guess they didn't make it a high school since there's nudity and stuff in the movie, and that might imply kiddie porn of some kind. But <em>Porky's</em> and a ton of other movies never seemed to have a problem with this. Anyways, they all pile in the van and go up to Camp Hurrah, in order to further perfect their cupies and their teddy-sits. Leif Garrett plays Brent, the rarin' go-getter who's in it to win it (if he's in it to win anything except a receding hairline, however, he's shit out of luck) and also Allison's boyfriend. The only other dude in the group is Timmy, the standard big, fat party animal, the sorta guy we could blame on John Belushi if we wanted to (but St. Belushi can still do no wrong, in my eyes).
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<br />What is it with the late 1980s in that every single girl has the exact same hairstyle? It's almost hypnotising. They all have that poofy sorta poodle-cut, like each and every one of them are in Poison. This isn't to say they're not all quite easy on the eyes, especially future porn star Teri Weigel. Man, she's hot. She's got those sleepy eyes and pouty lips and everything. Definitely cold shower material. She still looks good today, even if she's had a bit of work done and mostly does MILF porn, which phenomenon is getting a bit creepy, even for me.
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<br />What were we talking about? Oh, right, tits. Right away, Brent starts making goo-goo eyes at the other cheerleaders at Camp Hurrah, yet somehow they're able to resist his trainer mullet. Allison is upset, naturally, but when one of the other girls ends up dead, Allison starts to wonder just how upset she really was. See, little Allie's been having nightmares and is all looped up on psychotropics, so she thinks she may be capable of anything while whacked on lithium. Cory, the Lindo Valley mascot (which renders her an untouchable by her cheermates), does her best to be a friend to Allison, and Allison returns the favor by having acting skills more wooden than the Black Forest.
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<br />Sadly, Pam as played by Teri Weigel is the next victim. Happily, there's a sex scene with her beforehand (although it is unhappily also with Leif Garrett). Oh well, there's only, like, ten minutes left, right? What? Another hour? Oh, man, this is not gonna be easy.
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<br />Everybody gets killed and they die, the end.
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<br />Now, I get that budget constraints are often going to be an almost insurmountable obstacle. And so I'm willing to look the other way on some things. The mascot costumes in this movie, for example. They all look like they were in the cut-out bin down at Party City on November 1st, certainly not top-of-the-line mascot wear. But hey, I get it, you work with what you have. But I'll tell you what, as soon as you get the screenplay and there's a scene that calls for Leif Garrett to rap, I will go into my own pocket to buy the Liquid Paper to fix that. If you wanna go ahead with it, then I got no sympathy for you.
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<br />Give up your dreams, filmmakers, that's all I'm saying. They're not that big a deal, especially when they seem to mainly involve getting girls to take their tops off. Hell, I've managed to do that more than once without having to tell them I'm a movie producer. Just stop making movies when you suck so hard. You can have all the C-list punk bands (by the way, Sounds of Suksexx, please do not reform) and all the Buck Flowers you want to keep your penny-pinching producers happy. Round up the local Bakersfield High cheer squad as extras, g'ahead. It'll be difficult to make a good movie with that thin a gruel, but it can be done. And if you can't do it, then it's simple: fucking give up.
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<br />How's that for school spirit?Jimmy Callawayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13725548493403210066noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5653147652524357424.post-18380477394794876432010-12-06T06:29:00.001-08:002010-12-06T12:21:22.970-08:00The Toolbox Murders (1978)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhptRgLuvkPY93avvIu9tfm53LBZT0slE42i8ZxVHO0EWW7YpW5opiZdYR0SPyeTxQSpKmZpY0TMUa7THg9HQNC9ENJ5n4JeMvNAfBslOFq6G7Xp-D03bEZEcu7cbUfTJeHQPOtdOozNNai/s1600/toolboxmurd.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 214px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhptRgLuvkPY93avvIu9tfm53LBZT0slE42i8ZxVHO0EWW7YpW5opiZdYR0SPyeTxQSpKmZpY0TMUa7THg9HQNC9ENJ5n4JeMvNAfBslOFq6G7Xp-D03bEZEcu7cbUfTJeHQPOtdOozNNai/s320/toolboxmurd.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547663961835813618" /></a><br /><br /><em>by <a href="http://www.crimefactoryzine.com/main/HOME.html">Cameron “Can Barely Hammer A Nail In Straight” Ashley</a></em><br /><br />I bought <em>The Toolbox Murders</em> on DVD when I lived in Japan and my copy was fucked. I took it back to the import DVD shop in Osaka and, in mangled Japanese and Australian-accented English, had to explain what the problem was. The staff asked me at what point the disc stuffed up, and I had to stand around awkwardly while three of them popped it on and fast-forwarded to a scene featuring a naked redheaded hottie who masturbates in the bathtub, finds a masked killer in her home, runs around completely nude and gets brutally nailgunned to death, all while a horrible country song called “Pretty Lady” warbles onward. My only solace was the fact that I still probably wasn’t the weirdest guy they served that day.<br /><br />A fairly notorious number from 1978, <em>The Toolbox Murders</em> (not to be confused with Tobe Hooper’s 2004....re-imagining...or whatever the fuck it was) is perhaps best remembered for its unflinchingly brutal opening act and the aforementioned naked turn of Marianne Walter, better known as Kelly Nichols, who found Hollywood so awful she turned to porn. Yeah. Hollywood was so bloody horrid she started making fuck films instead. Check out Legs McNeill and Jennifer Osborne’s <em>The Other Hollywood: an Oral History of the Porn Film Industry</em> for some pretty choice words from Kelly on the Hollywood system. What’s interesting to point out is that it was not this incredibly violent, twisted and weird movie that was the tipping point for her to fornicate on film--in fact she veritably gushes about her <em>Toolbox</em> experience in a new interview on the DVD (which, by the way, was replaced post-haste once Kelly’s bush froze onscreen in the DVD shop and refused, in its woolly glory, to budge). In this interview, all Kelly does is beam about how awesome everybody was onset and how chuffed she is that her death scene is Stephen King’s favourite slasher film death ever. Good for her.<br /><br />Directed by Dennis Donnelly, <em>The Toolbox Murders</em> had a writing team of three--two of which were women. Ironic for all the cries of "Misogyny!" that were hurled at it. I’m actually dead curious to know how the scripting of this tonally schizo film, with its three wildly differing acts, was broken down by Neva Friedenn, Robert Easter and Ann Kindberg, as it’s this unique structure that’s the film’s real calling card, and whether you love it, hate it or are bored by it, you can’t deny that its makers actually produced something pretty unique in the genre. It’s almost like three separate movies crammed into a single narrative. <br /><br /><em>The Toolbox Murders</em> also has occasional moments of deliberately disorientating editing (images freeze-framing while the soundtrack rolls on, quick furious cuts between current victims and a past fatality making a weird kind of Ouroboros of death) and the solid development of its central killer (something that subsequently got mostly lost in the slasher wave of the following decade, where lumbering faceless killer after lumbering faceless killer bored us with their diaphanous back stories and weapons-of-the-week). <br /><br />After a bizarre opening sequence featuring our killer driving to the scene of his future crimes, intercut with the some religious fervour on the radio, the sound of a car crash, and flashing images of a dead girl (actually quite crucial plot-wise), we move to a fairly non-descript apartment building where it soon becomes clear that numerous hot chicks, and several not so hot, reside. One of the not-so-hot, clearly sloshed, opens her door to our killer, whom she recognises. She bitches at him for not turning up several days earlier to fix her problems (hey, lady, I’ve been waiting since February to get my doors fixed, so quit your whining) which isn’t such a terrific idea, as he pulls a power-drill from his ominous metal toolbox and gets the thing a-whirring. In a wonderful image, post-kill, the man pops a black ski mask on all skewiff, totally ruining any surprise of who this guy might actually be. But it’s such a cool shot--both eyes peering out through a single eyehole--who really cares? It’s obvious this will be no whodunit. In fact, it’s almost like an anti-giallo: all possible suspense and mystery over the killer’s identity gone in an instant. Humming creepily to himself, our killer heads off to the next apartment and the next with an assortment of tools and dispatches the female occupants with such lengthy cold brutality, it’s actually a bit of a shock when the carnage finally stops and the plot starts. Seriously, the first third of the film is pretty unrelenting stuff and you may well find yourself going, “Christ, is this going to be just ninety minutes of bad pseudo-snuff?” and you may begin to feel a little dirty at the sleaze that unfolds.<br /><br />It’s okay though, because here comes our friend intrigue...our masked killer (pretty obviously identified as apartment block owner Vance Kingsley, played with absolute relish by the weirdly eye-browed Cameron Mitchell) quits his killing of these ageing drunken tramps and young exhibitionist sluts and kidnaps the young Laurie Ballard, played by Pamyln Ferdin, for reasons I’m not sure we should discuss for fear of ruining the film. Ferdin’s all right here. She’s all cutesy and smiley with her brother Joey (Nicholas Beauvy) and helps her barmaid mum and hits the books like all good young American girls should. But I have to digress again, though, sorry. It always amazes me, the strange little real-life titbits of our slasher film actors. Pamyln’s IMDB profile tells us that:<br /> <br /><em>“On January 11, 2000, Pamelyn, a vigorous animal activist, faced up to six months in jail after being found guilty of carrying an elephant "bullhook" at an August 1999 protest of circus training methods. A bullhook is a wooden rod with a sharp hook that is jabbed into sensitive areas of the elephant to keep it fearful and manageable. She received 30 days.”</em><br /><br />For the curious, here’s a bullhook:<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK0DqsOfeLhs6PqvpZP0rxoUhWo_OeGp0BiE2L5Towjk6WEKplwakEQJ0bo_l06s86N692UpEZM2YQYkRlTjdpz3rF9SzMTfmagvbby98frwmxdXQgk80ZSgTt-WFXi7clQES4t_l6SHU3/s1600/elephant-ent-23.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 265px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgK0DqsOfeLhs6PqvpZP0rxoUhWo_OeGp0BiE2L5Towjk6WEKplwakEQJ0bo_l06s86N692UpEZM2YQYkRlTjdpz3rF9SzMTfmagvbby98frwmxdXQgk80ZSgTt-WFXi7clQES4t_l6SHU3/s400/elephant-ent-23.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5547666200171581186" /></a><br /><br />That’s pretty messed up. I feel an animal rights activist slasher film coming on...<br /><br />Anyhow, once Laurie is kidnapped, it falls to her brother Joey to play sleuth, as the cops...well. They’re pretty shit. Good guys and all, but man, Detective Jamison actually snaps at Joey when he suggests that this is possibly an inside job, even though it’s clearly established that there was no forced entry into the secured apartment block. Top work there, Detective. Joey, pretty correctly convinced that these cops couldn’t spot the deodorant cakes in a urinal, goes sleuth and here, in our second act...things drag.<br /><br />The scenes with Jamison doing his job are just totally superfluous, considering he’s made pretty much an afterthought not long afterward. The scenes with Joey scoping out the crime scenes under the pretext of cleaning them with his bud, and Vance Kingsley’s nephew, Kent, aren’t terrible, but Beuvy’s such a charisma black-hole, he fails to add any life to the proceedings. I’m fine with the film slowing down after its surreal opening and long, brutal killing sequences, I even appreciate that we know who the killer is and the film refuses to insult us by pretending we don’t, but it’s pretty ho-hum stuff here.<br /><br />Things do pick up, however, once Cameron Mitchell is allowed to take over and overact his way into slasher film fame. It’s a nice surprise to actually see a killer in one of these films actually stop slaughtering because his job is pretty much done and try and establish a bond, however deluded, with his victim. There’s also a great continuity gaffe here involving lollipops that change both size and colour, so look out for that. <br /><br />The concluding twist is perhaps there to add some further nastiness to the film’s final moments and to make up for the fact that we know Mitchell’s the killer incredibly early on. It’s a suitably twisted idea, but really lacking in execution and again, is foreshadowed too obviously. I would’ve been happier if the story just continued to build upon Vance’s relationship with Laurie, and her increasing the manipulations of Vance’s delusions instead of things becoming nonsensical for the sake of a cheap “horror” pop. Having said that though, the film’s closing image is fairly striking, complete with an assurance that what we just witnessed was based on fact (it wasn’t).<br /><br />At the end of the day, <em>The Toolbox Murders</em> is overall an interesting, fairly well thought out piece of trash, made without the aid of a slasher film cookie cutter. Sure, it’s stupid and ugly (what movie discussed here isn’t?) but was at least created with some effort and actual inspiration. This alone should see it put on your Bad Films to Watch list.Jimmy Callawayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13725548493403210066noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5653147652524357424.post-27107847391125553772010-11-09T17:18:00.000-08:002011-11-26T17:16:10.471-08:00High Tension (2003)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj24sOt1t-psOaatlbFoGgX6TM5u_1PygNBkey8e3MX76sGdodEaLNX73cTiks6QDkUY3RdXikDfgbEtZN91ci2wM5LrNz1aqhojS2Khd9gcHhUTrVCvGP-vtYj_x54AoGXaB920SO-Wwjy/s1600/hightensionposter1.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 216px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj24sOt1t-psOaatlbFoGgX6TM5u_1PygNBkey8e3MX76sGdodEaLNX73cTiks6QDkUY3RdXikDfgbEtZN91ci2wM5LrNz1aqhojS2Khd9gcHhUTrVCvGP-vtYj_x54AoGXaB920SO-Wwjy/s320/hightensionposter1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5538453465416002290" /></a><br /><br /><em>by <a href="http://attentionchildren.blogspot.com">Jimmy "Ah, the life of a frog" Callaway</a></em><br /><br />As much as this movie ends up pissing me off, I certainly can't take away the fact that these guys really did their homework. Part of me wants to say this is because they're French, and so they can come at this pretty tired formula with a fresh perspective, not nearly as mired down in the culture that spawned this brand of flick as Americans would be. But frankly, that's too easy an out for American filmmakers and artists in general. I'm sure the cross-cultural discussion has its place here, but mostly I think <em>High Tension</em> came out so well because these guys are just really good at their jobs.<br /><br />In all the reading up I've done on slasher movies and horror in general, the Gaze is a topic oft discussed. Usually male, the Gaze affords certain characters massive power over others, especially those who do not have it. A ten-cent version is like this: the victims in <em>Halloween</em> are seen by Michael Myers, but they do not see him until it is too late. Jamie Lee Curtis' character eventually does see Michael and as such is granted power over him. And you can pretty much cut-and-paste any slasher movie into that formula, and it usually works, to varying degrees of thematic success.<br /><br />Of course, it's assumed that this sub-text wasn't even conscious on the part of the filmmakers. I even read somewhere once where John Carpenter said as much, that the elements and plot progression present in <em>Halloween</em> just made sense to him as both film viewer and maker. Whether or not this is true for Carpenter or anybody else is irrelevant, as author intent does not carry that much weight in a post-modernist reading of any work. But as a fan myself, I will say that once that theory has been posited, you are a slack-ass motherfucker if you're gonna make a slasher flick and not be as read up on the genre as some know-it-all blogger type like me.<br /><br />Director Alexandre Aja and his co-writer, Gregory Levasseur, are far from being slack-asses of any kind. The Gaze is ever-present in this flick and is used to its utmost without calling undue attention to itself. This very fact is another thing that sets <em>High Tension</em> apart from slasher films of any era: it is unforced and natural, yet still declares itself very much a slasher movie by simply having all of the necessary elements in place. It's unbelievable almost: a modern-day slasher flick that is self-aware without being overtly self-referential. What is the world coming to?<br /><br />Anyways. College pals Marie and Alex are off to the south of France to Marie's parents' farmhouse for some quality study-time and, in Alex's case, quality touching-her-naughty-bits time. On their way there through the spooky, moonlit cornfields, we have set up for us through the dialogue a very distinct sexual tension between the two. Again, two major thematic standards: the strangeness of the rural community versus an urban one, as well as sexual tension riding high beneath the surface. None of this is ever overt; the filmmakers trust that you, the audience, has had enough experience with this set-up, as well you probably should by the beginning of the 21st century.<br /><br />Marie introduces Alex to her sweet little family and all seems right with the world. Alex even gets to see Marie taking a shower, and all seems right in my pants. Here again, the Gaze: Alex as the outsider feels powerless here in Marie's innocent little world. We don't know much about Alex's background, but we can assume from her gruff and cynical demeanor that life's been a bit rough on the lass, although if it's helped her keep in the excellent shape she's in, she's got no complaints really. So this seemingly innocuous peep session she pulls on Marie's bathing time is a way for her to sort of lay claim back to power. <br /><br />This parallelism between Alex, the final girl, and the killer (credited only as "Le tueur" ["The killer"] and played creepily brilliantly by Phillipe Nahon) also runs rampant through the movie, and while it's far from the first movie to explore this idea, it is the first of its kind to do so in quite a while, as far as I can tell. And again it all comes down to the Gaze. When Le tueur shows up in the dead of night and begins slashering the hell out of everybody, Alex is only able to spare herself by not being seen (cf. H.M. Government Public Service Film No. 42: "How Not to Be Seen"). Not only that, but she is able to attempt to help Marie escape because she <em>can</em> see Le tueur.<br /><br />This comes up again as the cat-and-mouse continues outside the house. Le tueur throws the shackled Marie into his truck and takes off, not realizing he also has Alex back there. When he stops for gas, Alex attempts to get the gas station attendant to call for help. But she needs to hide as Le tueur comes in to pay for his gas and spread some more of his creepiness around. Now, Jimmy the gas station guy has seen Alex, he sees the blood on Le tueur's hands, he now has the power to stop Le tueur. But unfortunately for Jimmy, Le tueur has seen him see Alex, even if he hasn't himself seen her. It sounds convoluted a bit, I know, but it all equals Jimmy getting an ax to the chest like his name was Scatman Crothers.<br /><br />A bit about Le tueur: the faceless killer is another slasher standard that <em>High Tension</em> does well without making sure we know how well it's doing. Le tueur does not wear a hockey mask or the like to signal to us that he is indeed The Other. But he does wear workman's overalls (watch out for them lower classes, kids!) and a ball cap pulled almost completely over his face. Aja films him from angles so that his face is constantly in shadows, and Nahon's face itself has that jowly yet wooden look that makes him look more like Michael Myers than Michael Myers does.<br /><br />But oh. That plot twist. You couldn't leave well enough alone, could you, movie? <br /><br />To say the plot twist comes across as cliché would not be doing it (in)justice, but that's exactly what it is. And the fact that things were moving along so well only heightens how much I wanna spank this movie for pulling this shit. Yeah, it's kinda clever, but it invalidates a lot of what's happened before and just generally acts as a turd in the swimming pool. Obviously, I don't wanna give anything away, and I also don't wanna take a dump on this movie, as much as I might feel it deserves it at this point. I guess all I can say is nobody's perfect. As well-executed as all the slasher tropes are in this movie, to let one sneak past the goalie like this is understandable, I suppose, or at least not the worst crime to be committed. But man, it really bums me out.<br /><br />All in all, though, <em>High Tension</em> is almost exactly the sort of movie <em>Let's Kill Everybody!</em> has a raging boner for. The murder scenes are unflinching, no fancy camera tricks here. The pace is pitch-perfect; like I said, the whole film moves along at a brisk, natural clip that wholly sucks you in. And it's just plainly and simply really goddamn scary. It's been a while since we've had an actual good movie here at the <em>LKE!</em>, and all complaints aside, this flick has really raised my hopes for more to come.<br /><br />Probably not such a great thing, now that I think about it.Jimmy Callawayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13725548493403210066noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5653147652524357424.post-39744300969149138132010-10-03T10:36:00.000-07:002010-11-12T18:43:09.397-08:00Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh32gSdw-JW6V03aQ3Qew_RUmpUMBo_gaPdWpwUYe55E8VYQN2-L-dVf3Zb-bDkPUE-U9l0BjXCCNmDvRE0tQ8cCEpSdU0nJ-5h-K_X1ptktViUCJjl6-6y1m8T9GHuY0n9Fflv4lMP9kEz/s1600/friday+part+2.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 181px; height: 278px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh32gSdw-JW6V03aQ3Qew_RUmpUMBo_gaPdWpwUYe55E8VYQN2-L-dVf3Zb-bDkPUE-U9l0BjXCCNmDvRE0tQ8cCEpSdU0nJ-5h-K_X1ptktViUCJjl6-6y1m8T9GHuY0n9Fflv4lMP9kEz/s320/friday+part+2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5523875925044667394" /></a><br /><br /><em>by <a href="http://oliverhocanada.wordpress.com/">Oliver "You're all doomed!" Ho</a></em><br /><br />Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger comprise the unholy three of slasher movies in the 80s and personify the genre in its predominant decade. Between them, Jason’s movie history has the strangest start, and in retrospect, it could be the one that best defined the slasher style. Unlike Michael and Freddy, Jason wasn't even the star of the first movie in his franchise.<br /><br />Each had his peculiar proclivities (pro-<em>kill</em>-ities? pro-<em>cleave</em>-ities?): Michael had his William Shatner mask, his family and his doctor, while Freddy had nightmares, wisecracks and that glove. With Jason, it was all about the lake, the machete and the hockey mask. All three preyed on teenagers, and there was an undercurrent of sexual punishment in the way the killers did their thing. All three spawned so many sequels they moved quickly from horror to parody. <br /><br />The second <em>Friday the 13th</em> movie is the first bona fide Jason Voorhees movie, and it contains several elements that would go on to define not only the franchise but the entire 80s slasher genre. In his "lexicon of horror," <em>The Darkening Garden</em>, John Clute describes the horror genre as being exceptionally concerned with creating a particular feeling in its audience.<br /><br />"No other genre has ever been defined in terms of the affect it generates … with the result that critics and writers have found it easy to claim that horror is not therefore a genre at all, but a kind of peculiar sensation that may be generated in the telling of genre stories of any category," he writes. <br /><br />Pretentious as that sounds, it presents a useful approach to examining a decidedly B-grade (to be generous) flick like <em>Friday the 13th, the 2nd</em>. As in most slasher movies, this one is all about sensation. Through the use of red herrings and forced sensations, the "killer-cam" perspective and visual point-of-view tricks, we see things designed to generate a visceral thrill, but that don't necessarily make visual-logical sense.<br /><br />For example, at one point a young couple walks through the forest and past the camera, and a moment later, Jason steps out from behind a tree. From the audience's perspective Jason was hiding behind the tree, but from the opposite side, where the young couple walked, it would have been impossible not to see him.<br /><br />Another example involves Crazy Ralph, a character who appeared in part one and two to tell the camp counselors, "You're all doomed!" Alas, poor Ralph makes his final appearance in this movie. When he dies, standing against a tree, Jason would have to have been above him with his arms already wrapped around the tree, in order to drop down and garrote poor Ralphie.<br /><br />Admittedly, this is nitpicky. Did I mention that this isn't a great movie? While it was a nostalgia-trip (these were the <em>freakiest</em> movies when I was a kid in small town British Columbia), watching it now made my mind wander.<br /><br /><em>Friday part deux</em> came out in 1981, a year after the first film in the franchise. According to Peter Brack's <em>Crystal Lake Memories</em>, the original plan was to have the series of movies tell an independent, unlinked story in each installment. That idea fell by the wayside like so many sex-crazed camp counselors. Instead, producers hit on the idea of bringing Jason back from his brief (apparently unserious, according to Brack) appearance in the first film.<br /><br />In this movie, Jason hasn't yet adopted what would become his trademark vintage hockey mask and machete. At this point in his story, he wears what looks like a pillow case with one eye-hole cut into it, and when it comes off we see that he looks like one of the macro-cephalic radioactive hillbillies from <em>The Hills Have Eyes</em>. According to IMDB, he looks exactly like the killer in 1977's <em>The Town That Dreaded Sundown</em>, which was based on a true story of several brutal, unsolved murders (all together: "Ooooo...").<br /><br />We pick up the story shortly after the end of the first movie, with the "final girl" from part one, Alice Hardy, at home and struggling to recover from the traumatic events that happened to her two months earlier at Camp Crystal Lake. The various camera fake-outs ("Is this the killer's perspective we're seeing? He's getting closer, watch out! Oh, never mind, it wasn't the killer-cam. How about now? Watch out! Oh, it’s just a cat.") make it clear that nothing good will come of her decision to stay home alone and take a shower. <br /><br />After the opening credits, we jump five years into the future, where a new band of horny young'uns arrive to take part in a camp counselor training camp just around the bend from "Camp Blood," as Camp Crystal Lake has become known. Hi-jinks ensue, involving various acts of randiness, skinny-dipping and painful double-entendres. By hi-jinks, I mean they die.<br /><br />The story takes an odd turn when three counselors head into town for a night of drinking (and driving--woo hoo!), and at one point the soon-to-be final girl, Ginny, muses about Jason's psychological motivations. Having spent his entire life living in the woods, he might not even understand what death is, she tells her two friends (because creatures living in the wild never encounter death?). It's a nice gesture towards characterization, at least.<br /><br />One of her drinking companions is a tall, gawky, geeky type of character named Ted, played by Stu Charno (creator of the "<a href="http://www.stucharno.com/">Stuniverse</a>"). His demeanor is very stand-up comic-y and brings to mind a young Michael Richards. When Ginny and her boyfriend, Paul, return to camp, Ted decides to stay and chat up the bartender, and <em>he's never heard from again</em>. No, really. We never see him come back to camp and get hunted down. For all we know, he might still be at the bar. Maybe he was going to take on the mantle left by Crazy Ralph.<br /><br />Paul is another unresolved character. He and Ginny battle potato-sack-head Jason throughout the night, but by the end of the movie, Paul has mysteriously vanished. My guess: he's back at the bar with Ted.<br /><br />After the distinctly odd interlude at the bar, <em>13th the 2nd</em> copies the first movie nearly move for move, with the <em>grand guignol</em> discovery of bodies in quick succession. In place of part one's scene of Jason rearing up from behind a boat, we get Jason crashing through a window.<br /><br />Before that, there's an interesting scene in an altar Jason's built for his dead mom, and even though there's a severed head that is clearly played by an actual actor, we never see the head move in any way. According to IMDB, the eyes were going to open, but the filmmakers thought it would be too "hokey."<br /><br />This is the only scene where Jason gets to "act": Ginny pretends to be Momma Voorhees from the first movie, and we have a moment where his one visible eye seems to recognize her ghost, and he lowers his weapon for a moment.<br /><br />Aside from the single skinny dipping scene, there's not much that would preclude this movie from being shown on TV today. Gorier scenes get played for laughs on an episode of <em>Bones</em>. That's not to say that it isn't worthwhile viewing.<br /><br />"Horror ... is a kind of afflatus, a wind from anywhere," writes John Clute in his lexicon of horror. The second Jason movie is hardly divine, but there’s a kind of creative madness at play. <br /><br />As the first true Jason movie, <em>Part Two</em> holds a key place in the franchise's canon. The emphasis on thrill over logic seems like a style that's still developing here, and the nods towards Jason's psychological make-up are kind of touching, even though later movies would demonstrate how much more effective his character is when he's a faceless bogeyman, with no discernible humanity or off button.<br /><br />There had been slasher movies before this one, but the Jason movies were a phenomenon, and this movie’s emphasis on pure thrill (however clumsy, and at whatever cost to anything like character, consistency and logic) seems to capture the template that so many other slasher films would copy.Jimmy Callawayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13725548493403210066noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5653147652524357424.post-37565515238290242272010-09-06T10:20:00.000-07:002011-11-26T17:16:32.576-08:00A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggInB7SulGhEZDxeDkkDvkAu2MqXjUz6EOysg0ggkQ7hOp_lDhPhzcFZ5f7zKEJdq4AqBa-zqoHcFaCiAhqPD8c9yYaI8sIz2-lkjs7l_27WlF8LHmd6b-_MwQZHsj2QsLYD5933xRpQFQ/s1600/nightmare_on_elm_street.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 208px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggInB7SulGhEZDxeDkkDvkAu2MqXjUz6EOysg0ggkQ7hOp_lDhPhzcFZ5f7zKEJdq4AqBa-zqoHcFaCiAhqPD8c9yYaI8sIz2-lkjs7l_27WlF8LHmd6b-_MwQZHsj2QsLYD5933xRpQFQ/s320/nightmare_on_elm_street.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5513853617517154034" /></a><br /><br /><em>by <a href="http://attentionchildren.blogspot.com">Jimmy “I Can’t Believe They Made a Movie Out of That Fresh Prince Song” Callaway</a></em><br /><br />Yeah, yeah, it’s the scariest one in the series. The most original. The sequels are more “fun,” more light-hearted, but this one: this is the scary one. Your Uncle Jimmy’s heard it all before, kids, and it holds no more water than the million other times it’s been said.<br /><br /><em>A Nightmare on Elm Street</em> is a not very good movie.<br /><br />From the top:<br /><br />Beth from <em>Better Off Dead</em> has a dream about a mysterious boogey-man and his drafty basement apartment. Oh, and a sheep. I want to say that the sheep represents the innocence of the intended victims as well as connotes that easily-slaughtered tendency said victims have, and it’s all very Jungian and everything. But it seems writer/director Wes Craven gives up on this potentially intriguing imagery almost immediately, and thus so will I.<br /><br />Beth tells her friends about it, including tonight’s final girl Nancy, who has one of those unfortunate faces that looks kinda goofy when she’s not wearing glasses. She was much cuter on <em>Just the Ten of Us</em>, if not much of a better actor. Speaking of cute, this is also of course Johnny Depp’s first movie, and while, yes, he looks good enough to eat as always, he has yet to develop any of that patent Depp spark that will eventually elevate him from <em>Tiger Beat</em> to <em>Cineaste</em>.<br /><br />Anyways, slumber party at Beth’s (yeah, I know her character’s name is Tina. I call her Beth). Beth and Rod make some really loud, fakey sex noises, and then, as such is the fate of all who screw, she gets killed. She goes out into the darkened alley of her dreams and, since she’s so easily frightened by a trash can lid, Freddy figures he’ll do the goofy long-arm thing and really scare her. Frankly, I thought the same bit was a lot creepier when Terry Jones did it in the “Find the Fish” bit in <em>The Meaning of Life</em>, but I guess Beth’s probably not as big into Monty Python as I am. <br /><br />Since you can get killed in your dreams and the same thing will happen in real life (that’s a given, right?), there’s a pretty neat upside-down room sequence where Beth’s rolling around on the ceiling. Playing Siegfried to her Roy, Rod watches like a dope as she gets shredded up until her guts are like spaghetti.<br /><br />Detective John Saxon and his usual squad of bumblers hunt down Rod since he was the only one in the room and because he wears a leather jacket with no shirt. This also gives Nancy more excuses to overact, and the look on John Saxon’s face makes it evident that he wishes <em>Mitchell 2: Mitchell Harder</em> hadn’t fallen through.<br /><br />In order to highlight Nancy’s overacting, Nancy’s mom gets drunk and they have lots of screaming matches. It puts me in mind of my old girlfriend and her mom, except these fights are on my TV and not distracting me from the TV.<br /><br />Meanwhile, Freddy and Rod’s re-enactment of the opening to <em>The Goonies</em> gets out of hand and Rod gets hanged. Fortunately, the Springwood P.D. doesn’t post guards anywhere near the holding cells. Even though the adults seem to know more than they are letting on, they insist it’s just Nancy’s time of the month or something and she just needs some rest. Nancy’s mom takes her to see Dr. Roger Rabbit to give us more half-assed exposition on dream-states, until it sounds like Carlos Castaneda wrote the screenplay.<br /><br />Eventually, Nancy’s mom drinks enough bourbon to hip her daughter as to what’s going on. Seems there was a guy, a Mr. Fred Krueger, murdering a buncha kids in town. He was arrested and brought to trial, but walked when it was discovered somebody had neglected to sign a warrant. Given the crack police force in town, this could not have come as much of a surprise (But really, how often does this happen outside of the movies? There’s gotta be some precedent for this movie cliché, right? If anyone knows, give a holler). So the townsfolk decide to dispense some frontier justice and set the dude on fire. Hey, movie, you know you can show us stuff like this through the magic of the flashback sequence, right? You don’t have to just have some drunken country singer tell us all of it in a dramatic monologue. C’mon, movie, you’re a movie, not a Greek tragedy (Also, if they had to get a drunken country singer to play Nancy’s mom, I really wish they’d gone with David Allan Coe).<br /><br />Later, Johnny Depp is wearing one of those really gay half-shirts, so he doesn’t have much longer to live. He gets sucked into his own bed in his famous death scene, and apparently has enough blood in his body for three other screen-idols to spare. Nancy decides she’s had enough and, in a scant thirty-second montage, booby-traps her house more thoroughly than Kevin McCallister. Nancy is going to attempt to bring Freddy out of the noumenal and into the phenomenological where she claims she can kill him, but I think she just wants to give him his hat back.<br /><br />Nancy succeeds in bringing Freddy into the real world, and Freddy succeeds in perfecting his Shemp Howard impression. Nancy finally gets John Saxon’s attention long enough so he can bust the door down, and then stand there with his dick in his hand while Freddy kills Nancy’s mom. Since Freddy is Nancy’s nightmare, Nancy has to be the one to face him down, and so she does, and this would all be very inspirational if I wasn’t so bored by this point. I think this was probably the moment America decided to root for Freddy—he may be unappealing as a big, hammy character, but at least he’s killing off all the other unappealing characters. <br /><br />Yes, there are some genuinely scary moments in <em>A Nightmare on Elm Street</em>. Big fucking deal. It’s a horror movie—should I be okay with just “some genuinely scary moments”? I wish I could go to my job and jerk off all day, and then when my boss begins to chew me out, I could say I had some genuinely work-y moments. Then I could have several sequels made of me and eventually become an icon of late-20th century American pop culture. Then I could laugh my way to the bank.<br /><br />Yeah, right. In my dreams.Jimmy Callawayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13725548493403210066noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5653147652524357424.post-6078714410168105832010-08-09T18:28:00.001-07:002010-08-09T18:28:54.703-07:00Terror Train (1980)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUKWVTHUSaJhYSWgmRIUAtSYX5rq7-1qloDI8qW4n-nHlo94ul1w6ILJgiJuBrxpAJC7lrChzHryonVmA4QviKtXK0oWwYyWTZXAjHpXvHoJ9TNFJJrdUvWa1MARvmEVQWohjBrrKhNxIE/s1600/terrortrain.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 227px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUKWVTHUSaJhYSWgmRIUAtSYX5rq7-1qloDI8qW4n-nHlo94ul1w6ILJgiJuBrxpAJC7lrChzHryonVmA4QviKtXK0oWwYyWTZXAjHpXvHoJ9TNFJJrdUvWa1MARvmEVQWohjBrrKhNxIE/s320/terrortrain.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5465031582462269010" /></a><br /><br /><em>by <a href="http://scenesfromgroundlevel.blogspot.com/">Josh "Lounge Car" Converse</a></em><br /><br />All aboard! This train bound for murder, mayhem, and morbidity. The conductor will be making his way--ah, fuck it. It’s a slasher movie on a train, peeps. <br /><br />Trains have long served as a means of creating tension in cinema, as in masterpieces like <em>Murder on the Orient Express</em> and <em>Under Siege 2: Dark Territory</em>. A train comes equipped with all the elements required for a good white-knuckle ride into terror: speed, noise, claustrophobia, and a crew not quite sharp enough to handle baggage for any of the major airlines. <br /><br />Our story begins at a frat party, where the pledges of Sigma Phi Omega are being mocked and jeered and forced to wear silly hats until they lose their virginity. For that matter, the whole damn movie exists within the frat party dimension, which is so 80’s it makes me wonder how the 80’s were already in full swing as early as 1980. <br /><br />Mega-dork Kenny Hampson is on deck, and pre-med heartthrob Doc and the gang have something special in store for him.<br /><br />Using Alana (played by AARP spokesperson and purported hermaphrodite Jamie Lee Curtis) as sexual bait, the Omegas lure Kenny up to a room full of flashing construction lights and 16mm porno ambience. Hiding behind the headboard, siren Alana beckons Kenny closer. Scrawny Kenny strips down to his skivvies and hops in the sack, only to find himself in a liplock with the rotting, dismembered cadaver of what looks like Anne Ramsey of <em>Throw Momma From The Train</em>, provided by wacky pre-med prankster Doc.<br /><br />Flash-forward a few years. It’s--you guessed it--party-time again, and this time the Omegas have chartered an excursion train for their last hurrah before graduation, which in this curriculum apparently takes place in the dead of winter. And guess what--it’s a costume party, buster! <br /><br />Hey, who booked the magician? Nobody seems to know, but who cares--am I right, ladies?--when that magician is walking head-shot and perennial creep David Copperfield, sailing through his only film role on lapels of finest satin.<br /><br />Did you know Copperfield taught magic at New York University? He’s, like, the Marty Scorsese of magic. And hair dryers. <br /><br />Nearly viewable work from a non-actor, but then again, master of terror Roger Spottiswoode (<em>Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot!</em>) has made a name for himself squeezing the best out of non-actors like Phil Collins in <em>And the Band Played On</em>, and Michael Rapaport in <em>The 6th Day</em>.<br /><br />The carnage starts before the train even pulls away from the station. Right off the bat, unbeknownst to his frat mates, fellow Omega and general roustabout Ed is skewered with a sword and left on the tracks, where he is promptly bisected by the departing locomotive. <br /><br />Or is he? Anyone seen Ed? <br /><br />Oh, never mind, he’s over there in his Groucho Marx get-up. Why is he wearing the only Groucho Marx get-up in history that consists of a full latex head mask, you ask? And why so quiet all of the sudden? Ah, who gives a shit. Pass me that doobie, smart-aleck, and knock it off with all the questions.<br /><br />The voice of reason is the kindly old train conductor, inexplicably named Carne, who, in an odd digression, offers an impromptu thesis on the future of train travel in the late twentieth century economy versus the relative convenience of RV’s. He runs a tight ship, Carne, and the discovery of the dead black dude in the latrine is no reason to divert a train that is running otherwise right on schedule. Best keep the ongoing slaughterfest under wraps, just until we see how things play out.<br /><br />From here, the flick chugs its way into some familiar territory. There is a killer among us, and all the girls are dressed like sluts. Except for Curtis, of course, who has never looked less attractive as she shrieks her way from car to car in a baggy swashbuckler outfit. Way to waste a rack, Spottiswoode. <br /><br />The train provides the claustrophobic tension, Copperfield shoves a cigarette through a quarter, and about an hour in, a pair of random tits finally find their way into the frame, possibly by mistake. Very little actual mystery involved in this one. You know from the very outset that Kenny is your killer, though it is only around the eighty minute mark that it is revealed that poor Kenny was, like, way into magic. This little twist, which seems ham-fisted at best when introduced, actually turns out to be something of a masterstroke. The image of Copperfield popping out of vestibules and luggage compartments with a slyly raised eyebrow before promptly running his victims through with a sword is one that many people probably hold within their subconscious to begin with.<br /><br />All due snarkiness aside, the twist does get you in the gut a little when it fully manifests itself. I must also admit that for someone who loathes magicians as much as I do (in my realm of preferred entertainment, the magician resides somewhere between the ventriloquist and, on the low end, the person charged with rallying the sales department at any given Volvo dealership), there is a special kind of glee to see this man, who would go on to make the Statue of Liberty disappear, with a sword stuck through his head.<br /><br />Ta-da!Jimmy Callawayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13725548493403210066noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5653147652524357424.post-53400901147723883142010-07-01T06:23:00.001-07:002014-03-06T11:31:54.486-08:00Urban Legend (1998)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgQq2RhaAeadi0Lcf1d5QtInwHQTQX2G02bNZ500WRwy65xeGn1YnwaqLAqNhhUfiBmf_2aYCE68sL8yHuzbsSrMrIIukugU3CLvO4maPyo8ofESBUGYnf6imWWP8cRYNgQh92zViEIMHX/s1600/urban+legend.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 229px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgQq2RhaAeadi0Lcf1d5QtInwHQTQX2G02bNZ500WRwy65xeGn1YnwaqLAqNhhUfiBmf_2aYCE68sL8yHuzbsSrMrIIukugU3CLvO4maPyo8ofESBUGYnf6imWWP8cRYNgQh92zViEIMHX/s320/urban+legend.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5489516166713510146" /></a><br />
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<em>by <a href="http://attentionchildren.blogspot.com">Jimmy “The Vanishing Hitchhiker” Callaway</a></em><br />
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A lotta my friends grew up out in the Imperial Valley, a big farm community about 150 miles east of San Diego and a stone’s throw from the Mexican border. Every one I’ve asked grew up hearing about La Llorona. A legend going back to the time of the invasion of Cortés, possibly further, the story goes that a woman drowned her kids so she could be with another man, who went ahead and took a pass anyway, causing her to then drown herself. Or something like that—there are always variations in how the story’s told. The important part is La Llorona’s ghost haunts the waterways of the American Southwest, and if you hear her mournful cry, that means you are marked for death.<br />
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Clearly, this is all bullshit. But in a place where there are miles of open aqueducts and canals that are deceptively deep and can suck an unwary kid to a watery grave in the blink of a cliché, cautionary tales of this sort, it can be argued, do far more good than harm.<br />
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Even a cursory glance at the rich tradition of urban legends shows that many of them hash out this way: Kids, it’s a scary world out there. The one about the hook in the car door is obviously meant to keep kids from parking out at Reputation Road. The one about the call coming from inside the house sends the dual message to young women to remain wary while simultaneously relying on male authority figures. And the one about the deadly spiders in the beehive hairdo is a strict warning about emulating the fashion stylings of the Ronettes.<br />
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Maybe these connections aren’t as obvious as all that, but once seen, they’re hard to dispute, not unlike my make-out skills. So it’s all the more strange that the slasher movie took so long to pick up on it. After all, the slasher film itself acts as a modern-day morality tale and seeks to impart these same sorts of lessons. Why it was nearly the turn of the century before this particular connection was exploited is beyond me.<br />
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It is just this concept of intertextual themes in American popular culture and their reflections of society’s mores that I’m gonna use as the reason that I really liked this movie when it first came out. It’s a much better excuse for liking this stinkburger than the actuality, which was that I was a horny twenty-year-old hoping for a glimpse of Tara Reid’s boobs (which I was unapologetically denied. Y’know, it was cute in <em>Scream</em> when they played with that notion of the audience's expectations of on-screen nudity. But why did none of the rest of the derivative second-wave of slasher flicks choose to carry on this tradition from the golden years of full-frontal? I dunno, but I’d wager to guess the revival mighta lasted a bit longer had they done so. I digress).<br />
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Yeah, this movie sucks really hard. But let’s accentuate the positive first. Right off the bat, if Brad Dourif shows up within the first five minutes of your movie, I will do you the courtesy of sitting through the rest of it, and with a smile if you think to make him stutter like Billy Bibbit.<br />
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The killings themselves are a lot of fun, if damn near impossible to pull off. Of course, they’re all based on urban legends, most of them familiar, but one in particular I’d never heard of. Apparently, word around the campfire is when the Ohio Players were recording “Love Rollercoaster,” a scream heard on the vocal track was reputed to be the dying breath of a woman murdered in the studio. The Ohio Players, displaying great wisdom in the face of being in such a crappy band, kept mum on the subject in order to fuel the fires of publicity and cement their place in pop culture (although I bet you a million dollars most wouldn't know the band that recorded that song if you asked them. Hell, I had to fuckin’ Wikipedia it). How this particular legend is incorporated into the movie is pretty retarded, but I am certainly grateful for that addition to my general fund of knowledge.<br />
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But the best contribution this flick makes to the sub-genre is the character of Reese Wilson, played by the appropriately named Loretta Devine. In most of these flicks, the authority figures are almost always old white men, who either value social standing over public safety (cf. <em>Sleepaway Camp</em>) or who swoop in at the last moment to save the day (cf. <em>Halloween</em>). This is kind of a weird standard to defy, but <em>Urban Legend</em> decides to include an authority figure who is not only black and a woman, but who is neither a moron nor a savior on a white horse. Seriously, all the sassy black mama jive-talk aside (and really, who doesn’t love that anyway?), this is probably the most well-defined character I’ve ever seen in a slasher flick. Part of me wants to be cynical and say the producers just included this to avoid accusations of racism and/or sexism, but the rest of me tells that part to shut up and quit being such a poopy-pants.<br />
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But everything else about this movie is pretty gay. The cast is a veritable who’s who of late ‘90s WB shows, which means it's also now a who’s who of who gives a crap. Tara Reid gets a pass for anything she does ‘cause she was Bunny Lebowski, so that’s fine (I just kinda hope she doesn’t read this and decide to set my house on fire because, obviously, I would not be able to alert the authorities). That Pacey kid is all over the place with his bad highlights, the future Lex Luthor hams it up right alongside of him (although I really liked his turn on <em>It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia</em>), Jared Leto gets to act all pretty, and that Noxzema commercial broad gets to chew as much scenery as she can fit into her oddly large mouth (and of course, a reference is made to those same commercials in the film. Oh, ironic late-‘90s self-referentialism, what did we ever do without you?).<br />
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The pacing towards the end is always a tricky bit to pull off, and <em>Urban Legend</em> fails to do so with flying colors. If you like saying “Huh?” aloud and looking at your roommate (or your cat, if you’re a shut-in) quizzically while watching movies, then this is the third act for you. The dénouement is kinda interesting, but by then you’re thinking more about the nap you’re gonna take later and all the subtlety goes pretty much ignored.<br />
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So the main reason you should watch this is to compare and contrast and see if you can decide if fashions were goofier in the late ‘70s or the late ‘90s. Beyond that, you’d be better off looking for spider’s eggs in Bubble Yum as a way to kill an hour and a half.Jimmy Callawayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13725548493403210066noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5653147652524357424.post-40180406411695826722010-06-01T05:59:00.000-07:002010-06-01T16:00:47.219-07:00Happy Birthday to Me (1981)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAg_b3nu7Vfya3XclnO0zhTI99Mkx_FCMQ_NGt1Sykm-plMgeXGccMGHEPeEcrUMmWeQ_Y8FqvBbkRCrnKHZoLzv524V53m0qeO6-nORB3IMIMD8xV7FJ6yXlXZBT9i_HIUjxX8KwO0Ou1/s1600/happy_birthday_to_me_poster_01.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 234px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAg_b3nu7Vfya3XclnO0zhTI99Mkx_FCMQ_NGt1Sykm-plMgeXGccMGHEPeEcrUMmWeQ_Y8FqvBbkRCrnKHZoLzv524V53m0qeO6-nORB3IMIMD8xV7FJ6yXlXZBT9i_HIUjxX8KwO0Ou1/s320/happy_birthday_to_me_poster_01.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5456139098187781986" /></a><br /><br /><em>by Kevin "Pees in the Astro-Jump" Dillon</em><br /><br />Like an obligatory birthday run through an overzealous spanking machine, 1981’s slasher exercise, <em>Happy Birthday to Me</em>, is a silly gauntlet of repressed resentments and creative violence that leaves you feeling a little sore, a little disoriented, and just a little violated for having experienced it. Even worse, at the end of your cinematic spanking, instead of cake and presents, the only gift this film got you is extended shots of an old-ass Glenn Ford with his shirt way too unbuttoned for a man his age. Happy birthday, indeed.<br /><br />A fairly by-the-numbers knife-kill flick peppered sparingly with a few surprisingly good moments, <em>Happy Birthday to Me</em> centers around a rather large circle of friends called the “Top 10” at the Crawford Academy. I can’t confirm that Crawford is in fact a high school, as it looks like one of those old east coast colleges and its students all frequent a local bar, down brewskies together with nary a fake ID in sight, yet are still given detention for misbehavior. It’s confusing. This much is for sure though: Crawford is populated by rich, snotty, white, trust-fund babies, and the Top 10 (the top ten academically ranked students at school) are truly the snottiest as well as the whitiest.<br /><br />For a group whose deep connections to each other mainly consist of similar grade point averages, and of course their bland, upper middle class-ness, this clique hangs out together an awful lot. Over the span of this movie, the gang enjoys a dirt bike race, a night at the movies, multiple visits to a local inn called The Silent Lady, they attend a soccer game, boogie down to some leftover disco music at a school dance, and smoke a doobie beneath the school’s pool. Seriously, over the handful of days the story takes place, they share more time together than cellmates doing a long stint in lockdown.<br /><br />Hanging hard with her Top 10 buddies is this slasher film’s stereotype “final girl” candidate, Virginia, played by <em>Little House on the Prairie</em>'s older sister to that bucktooth girl, Melissa Sue Anderson. Virginia, it seems, has a dark past, secret even to her, but definitely involving the death of her mother, and a traumatic accident/brain injury which has left her prone to blackouts but, sadly, not prone to nude scenes in horror films. Alas, my perverted Little House fetish will have to wait for the release of the porn spoof <em>Little Mouth on the Prair-Rear</em>, I guess. (Apologies.)<br /><br />Virginia’s shrink, played by Glenn Ford (Pa Kent himself from the Christopher Reeves’ Superman movie), is trying, albeit in a slow, highly ineffective manner, to help Virginia to overcome her plot-convenient amnesia and come to grips with her dark past. Unfortunately, he only ends up traumatizing her and the viewers of this movie further with his oh-so-casual dress shirt, unbuttoned to near nipple level, revealing pink man-flesh, adorned with a gaudy gold chain that meanders quite naughtily through his sparsely haired chest. The horror. The horror.<br /><br />When the Top 10’s lily-white membership starts to mysteriously decline due to even more mysterious disappearances, Virginia begins to wonder if there’s any connection between the suspicious disappearances and her possibly violent past.<br /><br />Of course, we the audience are privy to what’s happening to her friends and it ain’t pretty. Veteran director J. Lee Thompson (the original <em>Cape Fear</em>, and many of the <em>Death Wish</em> and <em>Planet of the Apes</em> sequels) decided quite wisely to mix and match his killing methods, so there’s almost a pleasant anticipation in awaiting the next teen’s demise. In no particular order, and with no guarantees you’re actually watching a definite death and not a red herring/fakeout, you’ll see: a straight razor kill, a hedge clippers kill, a barbell kill, a fireplace poker kill, a cake knife kill, a drowning, a bell tower rope kill--and my two favorites--a scarf caught in the spokes of a dirt bike’s wheels face rub-off, and best of all, the image used in the movie poster itself, the infamous shish kebab kill. A shish-KILLbab if you will. Or maybe Fon-DIE?<br /><br />As good as the kill scenes are, and some are doozies, the remainder of the film is filled with lulling scenes of the Top 10 bickering amongst themselves, interchanging romantic partners in the group, and generally not noticing that their ranks are quickly depleting. Add to that plenty of plot dead ends, red herrings, and worst of all, fake kills later revealed as pranks and hallucinations and the achingly slow spectacle that is Virginia slowly piecing together the incident in her past that somehow ties it all together, and an hour and a half of movie has now past.<br /><br />Finally, when a more lucid flashback reveals that Virginia’s life-changing incident involved a terrible car accident, and worse, a poorly attended birthday party, it becomes clear as we head into this movie’s home stretch, that she might be harboring subconscious resentments and possibly played a part in the ever growing rich-kid body pile.<br /><br />The scene is now set for a climactic birthday party of gruesome, near epic proportions. And what a birthday bash it is. Unfortunately, even amidst a sequence that appears to promise brilliant payoff to the erratic meanderings of this overly long movie, the filmmakers decide at this very moment to drop the ball, gang rape the referee, and walk off the field giving the entire crowd the finger, with their miserably conceived, extremely flimsy ending. <br /><br />Normally, I give any somewhat clever movie a little leeway if its conclusion is not entirely satisfactory, but this movie really screws the pooch and then quickly rolls the credits while you try desperately to boo and hiss through your unswallowed vomit. It’s one of the most tacked-on, Scooby-Dooiest, bullshit endings you’re ever likely to experience. Imagine <em>Psycho</em> ending by revealing Martin Balsam was the killer all along because he had access to both a time machine and a Star Trek teleporter. Imagine that Rosebud was really Citizen Kane’s cutesy name for the clitoris. Imagine Stephen Baldwin’s Siamese twin (separated at birth) revealed as Keyser Söze. Imagine hating orgasms, democracy, kittens, laughter, kindness, decency, crispy chips dripping with piping hot nacho cheese, and everything else even remotely good in life, because that’s how this movie’s slap-in-the-face ending will make you feel.<br /><br />Now, who wants cake?Jimmy Callawayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13725548493403210066noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5653147652524357424.post-48262040392631240192010-05-04T06:22:00.000-07:002010-05-07T19:54:49.046-07:00April Fool's Day (1986)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdsBws_Cz9DaYvstSoXQNMJ0rheGRwVaNFVMMTwTjVtXdbEMs6PhrRqHq0_5-mEApDuG80a5tt-nUTh_pC6kGOUQ9GyeiVarj-AxFhNeJcwI4SLJ-o9ToHNF0xIIdG9EbT2QfS3_SjXDdP/s1600-h/april+fool%27s+day.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 210px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 320px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5376606163656036466" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdsBws_Cz9DaYvstSoXQNMJ0rheGRwVaNFVMMTwTjVtXdbEMs6PhrRqHq0_5-mEApDuG80a5tt-nUTh_pC6kGOUQ9GyeiVarj-AxFhNeJcwI4SLJ-o9ToHNF0xIIdG9EbT2QfS3_SjXDdP/s320/april+fool%27s+day.jpg" /></a><br /><br /><em>by <a href="http://attentionchildren.blogspot.com">Jimmy "The Joke's On Me" Callaway</a></em><br /><br />The best thing to ever happen to planet Earth was <em>Mystery Science Theater 3000</em>. Those wacky Midwesterners took horrible movie after horrible movie and made them a hilarious and life-affirming experience. I could go on for days as to how important this show is to me, but I'll spare you. But even given all of that, some episodes are simply unwatchable because the movie is just so bad, a point the writers themselves make at the end of episode #423, <em>The Castle of Fu Manchu</em>. Then there's <em>Mighty Jack</em>, <em>Space Travellers</em>, the Russo-Finnish movies--there are more of these god-awful episodes than I care to admit. And <em>April Fool's Day</em> is my episode 423. No matter how witty I think I am, no matter how many salient points I try to come up with for this essay, it's no use. Deep 13 has won.<br /><br />The worst part about <em>April Fool's Day</em> is not, for a change, the plot, dialogue, acting, clothes or hairstyles. Those certainly don't help matters, but the absolute worst part is that this may be the one that finally breaks me. I am Apollo Creed, and this movie is Ivan Drago. If Dr. Forrester were monitoring my mind right now, he'd be ecstatically doing his swing-choir victory dance because he'd finally found a movie he could wield like a blunt instrument and use to finally take over the world.<br /><br />This little slasher-movie criticism project has been gathering steam over the past year or so, and now I think I can finally crystallize my reasons for writing this much about and generally putting forth this much effort into a genre of movies I never really cared all that much for, when you get right down to it. What really got the ball rolling was science-fiction author and over-all curmudgeon Harlan Ellison and his essay, "The Thick Red Moment," wherein he derides the slasher film as merely a hateful exercise in misanthropy and, worse yet, misogyny. He considers the rise in popularity of these types of movies to be a low watermark in this culture.<br /><br />And maybe he's right. But as much as I love the guy and his work, Ellison can be a real opinionated blowhard who will let his emotions cloud his thinking. Not that I'm immune from such behavior, but that doesn't mean I can't still recognize it and call bullshit. Even if he is right, that's no reason to dismiss out of hand an entire art form, however low-brow it may be. So I suppose in my own high opinion of myself and my abilities, I sought out to write not just a rejoinder to Ellison's diatribe, but to write about every slasher movie ever made in an effort to inject each and every one with some sort of relevance. Even if that relevance was as minor as providing to me an insight into my own personal life, or even just a couple of laughs, I was gonna stick to it. If Ellison wanted to generalize an entire genre from a few examples, I was gonna go the opposite direction and narrow things down by watching every example, and show that the genre was worthwhile as a whole.<br /><br />Clearly, I had no idea what I was doing. I mean, things were going pretty good, but then I watch this flick and, all of the sudden, the rules start to change. Maybe Harlan's right, after all. Not with all his high moral outrage and deep personal offense at the anti-humanism he finds in these movies, but with the seeming fact that the makers of these films hold their audience in the lowest possible regard. The argument one often hears for movies this stupid is that it's all in good fun, just some harmless thrills. And really, that's fine. But what happens when the harmless thrills are also totally lame? How do you defend that most cardinal of sins, lazy fuckin' writing? You can't, not as far as I'm concerned.<br /><br />Not unlike <em>Sleepaway Camp II</em> or <em>III</em>, <em>April Fool's Day</em> front-loads a bunch of two-dimensional knife-fodder characters within the first ten minutes. They're all college kids spending the weekend at their friend's island villa. So we've got the guaranteed sex scenes and isolated setting, check. They all talk about how great it is to be young, so we've got the irony that they're not gonna get any older, check. Yeah, I know, every slasher movie has all this garbage, but (and again, maybe I'm just burnt out) even the filler in this movie feels like filler for the filler.<br /><br />But the underlying theme, as should be clear from the title, is pranks and hilarity and it demands not to be taken seriously (hence, my difficulty in taking it seriously enough to write about it, I would guess). So for every plot point, every twist, every iota of implied suspense, the filmmakers have the escape hatch that it's all a big gag anyways (an escape they use over and over again). It's just for fun, right? A harmless thrill?<br /><br />Man, fuck you.<br /><br />I really can't discuss this any further without blowing the ending, and that's still something I'm unwilling to do. Suffice it to say, it's clear that everybody involved with this movie hates me and you and anybody else who watches this flick, not to mention joy and love. After already including not a single redemptive quality to the entire enterprise, the filmmakers come right out in the last ten or fifteen minutes and say, "Hey, thanks for your hard-earned money and precious time, assholes. You're even dumber than you look." And after voluntarily sitting through this movie twice, I'm hard-pressed to disagree with that assessment.<br /><br />If there's anything salvageable from this movie-going experience, perhaps it's that now that I've scraped the bottom of the barrel, there's nowhere to go but up. Since this writing, I've begun soliciting submissions from my other writer friends, and so not only have they taken some of the weight off my shoulders, but now I'm guaranteed new material by writers I was already a fan of. It still breaks my heart that Thomas F. Wilson was in this stinkburger, but I think I can pick up the pieces and move on. I can't control where the movies begin or end. But I'll try to keep my sanity by watching #1007 <em>Track of the Moon Beast</em> again.Jimmy Callawayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13725548493403210066noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5653147652524357424.post-56703252807319828512010-04-05T05:53:00.000-07:002010-04-05T05:54:15.289-07:00A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuMS8hDUdKlSTJHv1LfAuV4s4M9h7MfoWaCQm5IlXgisWgsf_UpgvAJZAfbe3JoIABf9sK267pfMDR7uZu1uQz4QZbTEixaWa4KzyLS9q1aEWtk4sl90pRtn7myU8bmam3ysK4qScvIO6b/s1600/nightmare_on_elm_street_three.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 210px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuMS8hDUdKlSTJHv1LfAuV4s4M9h7MfoWaCQm5IlXgisWgsf_UpgvAJZAfbe3JoIABf9sK267pfMDR7uZu1uQz4QZbTEixaWa4KzyLS9q1aEWtk4sl90pRtn7myU8bmam3ysK4qScvIO6b/s320/nightmare_on_elm_street_three.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5453165822932074626" /></a><br /><br /><em>by Alexander "Their world is full of Elm Streets" Kraft</em><br /><br />I racked my brain for weeks to find something to say about <em>A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors</em>. My first impulse was to talk about the subjective nature of reality: how the diegetic blurring of lines between dreaming and waking, like when a boy walks through a locked door or a girl gets her head inside a television mounted seven feet off the ground, mirrors the blurred line between one's internal model of the world and the objective world “outside” of our consciousness, and the children banding together in dreams to combat Freddy likewise comments upon the way collective, intersubjective agreement can reify imaginary threats and likewise provide tools to cope with them. <br /><br />My next thought was to examine the film from a feminist perspective: after all, it is in this installment of the series that Freddy is revealed to be the spawn of a hundred vicious rapes, Freddy refers to women exclusively as “bitch,” and in one scene he turns into a sort of gigantic penis-creature that tries to eat a girl. Nancy, our returning heroine, has been recast as a woman who is being marginalized in a “man's field” and struggling to be taken seriously. It is only when she refuses to play their game and takes matters into her own hands that she achieves self-actualization and the respect of the men in the film. The children in the hospital can likewise be interpreted as marginalized voices (like those of women) struggling to be heard.<br /><br />But the reality is that neither of these perspectives is compelling. Do you want to know why? Because this movie is a turd. Don't let the high production values, Laurence Fishburne's panty-drenching animal magnetism and your love of the franchise blind you; this film is not just a waste of time, it literally corrupts the time spent watching it, infecting it with a black ichor that rots the rest of your time, giving you a kind of time-necrosis that will slowly destroy you. Yes, literally. I am not speaking figuratively. This will actually happen. <br /><br />“But wait!” you cry, “Of course slasher movies are bad! Therein lies the fun, and furthermore, you're killing the delicate balance of irony required to enjoy them by pointing out that they're bad, baby-killer.” My rebuttal is twofold: First, that last bit about my being a baby-killer is uncalled-for and kind of mean. That was an accident, and you know it. Second, what makes <em>Nightmare 3</em> so bad is that it kind of isn't. It's just glossy, mediocre dreck. What makes a slasher flick fun? Sometimes, they break new ground, pushing the limits of taste and acceptability in film in a way that makes them shocking even to today's audiences. Sometimes, the limits of budget force filmmakers to explore innovative and experimental techniques that are sometimes brilliant and often hilarious. Sometimes, there is a delight in discovering an underappreciated gem of a film that has been ignored because of its location in a genre that has been largely dismissed by critics. And often, of course, none of this happens, and we are left with a “film” so screamingly bad that it reaches heights of comedy undreamed-of by earnest comedians.<br /><br />But alas, <em>Nightmare 3</em> is none of these things. It is the product of a crank-operated prolefeed machine. Released in 1987 as a sequel to a successful franchise in a successful genre, the formula had been set and it would have been business heresy to suggest that it be deviated from. The guy kills the kids, the kids get scared, nobody believes them, they fight back. The production is nice enough not to be funny (except the giant cock-Freddy! Hoo-boy!) but modest enough not to break any new ground. The acting is wooden, but not enough to be quotable, and the scares are predictable, within the context of a <em>Nightmare</em> film. This is the film equivalent of a Hot Pocket. You pay for it, you consume it, you have no complaints. But if asked to articulate what about it was satisfying or pleasing, you are left searching for an answer. “Well, I ate.” Well, you've watched a movie. I guess you had to do something with your 96 minutes, and this is more engaging that staring at an ashtray, an almost-empty bottle of bourbon and a framed photo of your ex that you've been meaning to get rid of for the past year and four months. For an hour and a half. Again.<br /><br />This film specifically disappoints <em>Nightmare</em> fans for a couple of reasons, as well. First, someone has apparently tipped off the producers that by 1987 most people are laughing at American horror movies, not being terror-stricken. Accordingly, Freddy (no longer the shadowy “Fred” of the first film) has begun cracking wise and mugging for the camera--the vanguard of the postmodern '90s self-aware meta-slasher of <em>Scream</em> and <em>Urban Legend</em>. The first <em>Nightmare on Elm Street</em> was clunky in ways, and certainly a product of the American horror tradition of its time, but Wes Craven was doing what he then did best: tapping the horror and menace implicit in seemingly innocuous activities--in this case, dreaming. Perhaps we chuckled at the cardboard sets and hackneyed dialogue, but we were engaged by the workmanlike telling of a legitimately scary story that made us look at something mundane in a new way. <em>Dream Warriors</em> tells essentially the same story, the retelling of which weakens its power. But worse, it does it with a wink and a nod that completely strips away any gravity, leaving us with a comedy. But if this is a comedy, why do so many scenes drag so damn much?<br /><br />Secondly, <em>Nightmare 3</em> disappoints because of Wes Craven's involvement. Sure, he only shares co-writer credit with three other dudes, but nonetheless, his involvement raises a fan's hopes and contributes to the impression that an uncritical viewer may take away that they have just watched a film that was somehow worth watching. In the same way that <em>Dream Warriors</em> marks a shift from a movie about the uncontrollability and potential danger of dreams to a movie about Freddy Krueger, it also marks a shift in Craven's career, from movies about scary things to movies about Wes Craven movies. Which, well, sucks. It is difficult to view <em>Last House on the Left</em> and <em>Scream 3</em> in the same week without wanting to kill yourself, or at least write about how sad what happened to Wes Craven is. Which is, well, never mind.<br /><br />Honestly, the only thing this film leaves me with that approximates a burning, unanswered question is this: why in the world is Heather Langenkamp still here? Of all the mediocre performances in this film, she is the only one who stands out as being downright <strong>bad</strong>. And this is not only our star, but our <strong>returning</strong> star? This casting decision really underscores the fact that the filmmakers were on vacation when they shat this brick. Why look for a new actress? We got a perfectly good one right here. And by perfectly good I mean, you know. One. That's here. Like this movie.Jimmy Callawayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13725548493403210066noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5653147652524357424.post-49728233042578695072010-03-14T12:30:00.000-07:002010-11-12T19:09:12.121-08:00My Bloody Valentine (1981)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2YCjDNePyhv9J5he9BunQmByaeMWrIp-_kXVks5bEYrQuhrjcDwk4fhQx0SnAbrgFAp_zwD-OPqaHqAUsmlB4lZDcYOqCpz1xTDBlS5_w9BpKAhWU8Euugg7JNroCAkfzXOBGSgwa-5ra/s1600-h/my_bloody_valentine.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 210px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 320px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5351472586695844210" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2YCjDNePyhv9J5he9BunQmByaeMWrIp-_kXVks5bEYrQuhrjcDwk4fhQx0SnAbrgFAp_zwD-OPqaHqAUsmlB4lZDcYOqCpz1xTDBlS5_w9BpKAhWU8Euugg7JNroCAkfzXOBGSgwa-5ra/s320/my_bloody_valentine.jpg" /></a><br /><br /><em>by <a href="http://attentionchildren.blogspot.com">Jimmy "The Anti-Cupid" Callaway</a></em><br /><br />On Thursday, February 14th, 1929, soldiers of Al Capone’s, disguised as police officers, marched seven of Bugs Moran’s gang into a garage on Clark Street, lined them up against the wall and gunned them down. That’s the ten-cent version of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, probably the most famous organized crime story in our country’s history. Nowhere in my reading on the subject have I come across any reason why Capone picked that particular day to up the ante in his turf war with Moran, and I have the feeling that if Bugs Moran had tried to muscle in on the action at one of Big Al’s dog-tracks later on in the year, we’d probably be still hearing about the Arbor Day Massacre. Or more likely, if it hadn’t happened on an ironic holiday, we wouldn’t be hearing about it at all.<br /><br />That’s real life, though. Real life is pretty dull, so we’re forced to make tenuous connections between celebrations of romance and a mass murder of men who referred to others in the plural as “youse.” Y’know, just to liven things up a bit. Art, however, allows us to make these connections freely without having to completely ground things in reality. Therefore, we can have a story about, say, alien visitors coming to Earth, but have it really be about apartheid. Or a story about the dead rising from the grave to feast on the living, but it's really about race relations in America. Real life has no sub-text, and it can be really difficult to work it into any kind of literature as well, but it’s much more rewarding to stretch the imagination rather than credibility.<br /><br />Or you can just try to cash in on the trend of naming slasher movies after holidays.<br /><br />Again, I hate to impinge on the motives of any filmmaker (in print, anyways), and so I say this as objectively as possible: if you’re gonna have a slasher movie that takes place on Valentine’s Day yet has fuck-all to do with Valentine’s Day, then you’re a big hacky jerk with whom I will never be best friends.<br /><br />Yes, yes, yes, the town is called Valentine Bluffs. Yes, the killer sends his victims’ hearts to the police chief in heart-shaped candy boxes. Yes, the first victim in the movie has a heart tattoo above her boobs (the only boobs in the whole movie, as I recall. Also, the only victim to not even get an actual character name. Draw from that what you will). But these are all entirely superficial to the story, complacent nods to the title.<br /><br />Look, I’ll give you the synopsis really quick before we get back to this: the mining town of Valentine Bluffs finds itself under siege by an unknown killer. It’s believed to be Harry Warden, perpetrator of a string of murders twenty years prior. It seems way back when, a bunch of miners were left in a cave-in because their bonehead foremen were eager to get to the Valentine’s Day dance before all the punch was gone. Harry survived, though, and wreaked his revenge, thereby passing into urban legend status as some sort of boogeyman who’ll kill anybody celebrating Valentine’s Day.<br /><br />I mean, it’s not a bad premise, but what does it really have to do with Valentine’s Day? Change the name of the town to Lincoln Heights and you could call the movie <em>Presidents Day</em>. If the foremen had been on their way to a 4th of July barbecue, I’d be writing about <em>We, the People...Will Be Slaughtered!</em> right now. Put it in an office setting and we can make it into <em>Bring-Your-Daughter-to-Die Day.</em><br /><br />On a similar note, once it’s revealed who the killer is, the reasons as to how this person became a homicidal maniac are even more boring than the movie itself. One of the things that draw us (or draws me, anyways) to these movies is the tendency on the killer’s part to totally confuse sex and violence to the point where they’re inseparable as concepts. A kid goes through an especially traumatic experience—like, I dunno, he sees his parents boning and then get killed at the same time—the kid is completely warped by this, he is in no way able to handle all the grief the world can give him nor can he appreciate the beauty in the world, and then he snaps. That’s a story I never get sick of, but <em>My Bloody Valentine </em>couldn’t be bothered apparently.<br /><br />Another thing about the big reveal is that anyone even halfway paying attention will notice that not only was the killer without motive in several killings (not anything new there, but still), but also could not possibly have killed at least two of his victims, unless the laws of time and space have been suspended.<br /><br />But this movie does have a couple things going for it. For one, it was filmed in Canada, so everybody talks like Bob and Doug McKenzie, and that’s always fun. For another, most of the characters are pretty likeable. All the twenty-something miner dudes and their chicks seem like they’d be fun to hang out with. I wouldn’t mind shotgunning a Coors Light with Hollis and then arm-wrestling. Howard pre-dates Chris Parnell by about fifteen years. So that’s all right.<br /><br />The other thing is something that I’m sure is painfully obvious by now, but it still interests me, and that is the red herring. For those of you not in the know, a red herring is a literary device with which the author tries to throw you off the scent of the real killer. So in this movie, it’d be Harry Warden. As I was watching this, it occurred to me how completely pointless is the use of the red herring in these movies since, without fail, the guy any of the characters think is the killer never is the killer. Not only are the filmmakers not fooling anybody, but they actually reinforce who it must be by effectively eliminating a suspect from the list. I find this pretty funny, I guess, or at least noteworthy: by utilizing the same tool again and again, these guys have all but dulled it into uselessness. Way to go, exploitation film producers. Thanks for churning out another boring-ass movie.<br /><br />As if I don’t have reason enough to hate Valentine’s Day.Jimmy Callawayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13725548493403210066noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5653147652524357424.post-8176141598793115802010-02-15T06:18:00.000-08:002010-03-26T22:42:37.656-07:00Black Christmas (1974)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQvn8H5CKZpRyrZlyeOoCd-idmsHRbS5vlrerK8l5WO3b8JUByNiP5bPaH2nkjTmdLRlhZOXLsgc7ZwoeRe1Podo5AMoIWfc8uv4gsWu8NLLMq8V8NUfxJzps9b6ziCJoG3w8BqtYDdkcZ/s1600-h/black+christmas.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 234px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQvn8H5CKZpRyrZlyeOoCd-idmsHRbS5vlrerK8l5WO3b8JUByNiP5bPaH2nkjTmdLRlhZOXLsgc7ZwoeRe1Podo5AMoIWfc8uv4gsWu8NLLMq8V8NUfxJzps9b6ziCJoG3w8BqtYDdkcZ/s320/black+christmas.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5424992452018277858" /></a><br /><br /><em>by <a href="http://cathodeangel.blogspot.com/">Chad "I Am Not Dreaming of a White Christmas" Eagleton</a></em><br /><br />Bob Clark’s name may not mean anything to you. But you know his work. There was a time when HBO or SkinaMax aired the shit out of <em>Porky’s</em>. And unless your parents were too cheap for premium channels or, like me, you grew up in the sticks before cheap cable, there’s no way you made it through December without seeing at least five minutes of <em>A Christmas Story</em>.<br /><br />But Clark’s real impact lies in another Christmas tale. <em>Black Christmas</em> set the stage for the slasher films to follow. If you haven’t seen it (though please, please skip the unnecessary remake), you’ll still recognize the set-up.<br /><br />A sorority house Christmas party. A stranger climbs through the attic window. A phone call all heavy breathing quickly turns creepy and menacing.<br /><br />One of the girls goes upstairs to pack as the party hits full swing. No one hears her murder. And later, when they began searching for her, none of them knows that she’s rotting in the attic. The attic where the Killer, who refers to himself as “Billy,” makes his lair.<br /><br />That’s right…he’s in the house and, like everything of any real worth, this premise will get ripped off by cheap imitators.<br /><br />The set-up, however, doesn’t make the film. Clark’s directing is so well done, unless you’re someone who pays close attention to credits, you probably won’t associate this film with <em>Porky’s</em> or <em>A Christmas Story</em>. Four years later, Carpenter would use widescreen in <em>Halloween</em> for the horror of The Shape—giving every corner, nook, cranny and shadow menace. Clark takes a different route, shooting <em>Christmas</em> in tight close-ups. Even the shots leading out into a hallway, or up the stairs, are at these angles that make everything seem narrow and cramped. The film is claustrophobic. As the minutes tick away, the girls’ home becomes a coffin.<br /><br /><em>Christmas</em> walks the line that, unless we’re dealing with the outright supernatural, barely separates horror from thriller. Billy doesn’t wear a mask. Clark manages to conceal his identity in a series of trick shots that somehow doesn’t feel like cheating and adds to the creepiness. The question of Billy’s identity serves as a plot point and furthers the suspense. While searching for the missing girl, their numbers dwindling, all eyes turn suspiciously to the male characters.<br /><br />The cast is classic. There’s the lovely Olivia Hussey, whom you’ll recognize from that version of <em>Romeo & Juliet</em> you watched in English class and actually paid attention to because you had heard there were bare boobs. Margot Kidder looks pretty damn hot in this one. Far better than she ever did later as Superman’s love interest. You might remember Andrea Martin from <em>SCTV</em>, while Lynne Griffin acted in a different classic—<em>Strange Brew</em>. For the male roles, you have Dave “Open the pod bay doors, HAL” Bowman and John Saxon, who seemed to be in everything ever made for at least a decade.<br /><br />Unless you haven’t taken your Ritalin, the pacing is good. Quick enough to keep boredom at bay, but slow enough to build suspense. Fans of the plotless gore porn Hollywood now calls horror will probably be bored since cheap buckets of blood don’t try to hide the lack of script or make up for the lack of real horror. Like I said, the women are attractive, but if you’re socially retarded and seek out these torture-fests as replacement for real-life conversations with women, you should probably skip it. <br /><br />But none of that is the real strength of this film. Its resonance comes from a very simple idea that’s been forgotten. The true horror in watching someone murdered on screen only comes through attachment. All too often in the latter films of the slasher genre, the victims are cardboard and ripped to pieces just as easily. Without a sense of identity, without the sense that this girl who just got ran through with a fireplace poker has a name, a personality, and loved ones there is no attachment from the audience. Without attachment, there is no sense of reality. The whole purpose of this brand of horror is then undercut and reduced to the punch of sixth graders playing, “What’s grosser than gross?” Even the first victim, killed at the very beginning of the film, achieves a life beyond a scream and a gurgle. Her father won’t stop searching for her. Her sorority sisters can’t just let her go. <br /><br />In a lesson Rob Zombie would do well to learn, Olivia Hussey’s character is even given an entire subplot involving an unintended pregnancy. All the girls of <em>Black Christmas</em> are actual characters and not just big breasted bimbos jiggling toward the next novelty death. You’ll have a scene of suspense, or just a scene to deliver a plot point, also giving characterization. <br /><br />Every year someone mentions how the spirit of Christmas has been ruined. They don’t know how right they are.Jimmy Callawayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13725548493403210066noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5653147652524357424.post-19516947625605152822010-01-13T05:55:00.000-08:002010-05-07T19:55:53.818-07:00Prom Night (1980)<div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIKFdMpWUkziXf5Y67MUgf4N9rBC2e4i11FDTwYk0KsQqbboQp18dNKHQ_sX3zmd-77xl9BlQDE0bZPu0GBfum2zxB0mztqaAOB1nUA8hc3QTNtd1xxoxwPQlZliPOACQ9EFFKfoGheROM/s1600-h/promnightposter.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 210px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 320px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5348117142652308642" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIKFdMpWUkziXf5Y67MUgf4N9rBC2e4i11FDTwYk0KsQqbboQp18dNKHQ_sX3zmd-77xl9BlQDE0bZPu0GBfum2zxB0mztqaAOB1nUA8hc3QTNtd1xxoxwPQlZliPOACQ9EFFKfoGheROM/s320/promnightposter.jpg" /></a><br /><br /><em>by <a href="http://attentionchildren.blogspot.com">Jimmy "Goin' Stag" Callaway</a></em><br /><br />Now, I don’t know about you, but prom night was simply magical for me. I bought the new issues of <em>Cerebus</em>, <em>The Demon</em>, and <em>Starman</em>, and then David Duchovny hosted <em>Saturday Night Live</em> with musical guest Rod Stewart. While the rest of my classmates were at the yearly promenade ball, I listened to The Vindictives a bunch and fell asleep with the TV on. A night I’ll never forget.<br /><br />As though I didn’t have few enough regrets about missing out on another bullshit rite of passage, along comes this movie, starring Jamie Lee Curtis before she was taken seriously and Leslie Nielsen before he wasn’t. All the grisly murders not withstanding, I was left with a feeling of relief after watching this movie, not just because I missed my prom, but also because I missed the late 1970s. Close call, that one.<br /><br />Yes, if there’s one thing we can say about knife-kill flicks, it’s that there’s nary a childhood experience full of joy, wonder, and happiness that any halfway capable filmmaker can’t exploit for his or her audience’s bottomless appetite for mindless sex and violence. And we’ve also learned that I’m all for it. The sex and the violence, obviously, but more important is the thwarting of these overblown ideals of innocence.<br /><br />The innocence of childhood is largely a myth, as far as I’m concerned. Call me cynical if you want, but doesn’t anybody else remember what little bastards kids can be? Sure, they’re cute, but so are leopard cubs until they tear the jugular out of your neck. I remember being a little kid and seeing most of my peers as these horrid little monsters, all teeth and snot and inexplicable brutality (Not to paint myself as an angel, mind you. I’m reasonably sure there’s at least one person out there saying, “Man, remember what a little shit-stain that Callaway kid was?”). It’s no accident that when one of your friends is acting like a tithead, you say to him, “What’re you, a fuckin’ kindergartner?”<br /><br /><em>Prom Night</em> asks of us much the same thing. The flick opens on one of the best places for small children to play unattended: an abandoned building. Young Nick, Kelly, Jude, and Wendy are playing a rousing game of hide-and-go-seek, only in their depthless naïveté, they’ve re-named it “Killers Are Coming!” Aw, that’s precious.<br /><br />Along comes young Kim, with her younger siblings, fraternal twins Alex and Robin, but they’re not welcome to join in any reindeer games. Whatever: Kim’s got better stuff to do, and Alex wants to get home so he can change out of the outfit his parents made him wear, the one that matches his twin sister’s (I’m certain many a swirlie was handed out that day). But Robin can’t seem to resist the allure of running around in a darkened ruin with four brats who have already made clear their dislike for her.<br /><br />So, as kids will do, they kill her. Not on purpose, I guess, but they chase her around, chanting like savages, and Robin takes a header out a second-story window. Oops. Nick, Kelly, Jude, and Wendy instantly make a pact to split out of there and never speak to anybody of what happened. But as the lovable little scamps flee the scene of a fatal accident, they don’t realize there’s been a witness. We, the audience, don’t get to see who this witness is, but we can safely assume, from the title, that he or she is willing to wait until these four snotnoses have almost graduated high school before meting out any sort of justice. Patience is a virtue, after all; only a panicky idiot would do something rash like call a paramedic or report what happened to the police.<br /><br />Conveniently enough, a perverted psycho killer is on the loose in the neighborhood, so the cops decide to pin Robin’s death on him. Trying to escape, the guy flips his car and ends up in a coma, so it’s case closed as far as anybody else is concerned (At least, this is what I think happens, after two consecutive viewings. Attention, all directors: no flashbacks without visual support, please! Footage of Leslie Nielsen thinking really loud with bad reverb is not sufficient to move the plot forward. Thank you).<br /><br />Jump to six years later: although the Hammond family still grieves for little Robin, time marches on, and the prom looms large for our little band. Naturally, the anticipation of puking up warm beer in your dad’s car and engaging in awkward and dissatisfying sex is enough to eclipse any such sad memories. And so here’s where we are now: Wendy and Nick used to date, but since she’s even more of a bossy-boots than she was when she was in pigtails, Nick is now courting Kim, which makes sense since most dudes are into chicks whose sisters they’ve accidentally murdered (I know I am). Alex still has a goofy white-boy ‘fro. Kelly is reluctant to go all the way with her beau, no matter how well he wears the dry look. Vicki was not in the first segment of the flick, but she’s got a really very nice ass, so we’ll keep her around.<br /><br />And Jude has as her prom date my main man Slick, who is instantly in the top 3 most likable characters in film history. Slick is a short, pudgy Jewish kid with glasses, who by all rights shouldn’t be able to get laid in a funeral parlor, but since he’s got a boatload of charisma and balls of solid brass, he of course gets all the ladies. If there’s one guy in this movie to pattern your life after, it’s this guy (now that I think about it, I believe this explains Jonah Hill...).<br /><br />But life isn’t all pep rallies and spirit ribbons. A menacing pall is spreading over this happy day. Kelly, Jude, Nick, and Wendy each receive a phone call from a raspy-voiced stranger who whispers threats, chilling in their opacity. Who can this be? Is it Leonard Merch, the long-comatose psycho perv, now suddenly up and at ‘em and on the loose? The cops seem to think so, but true to form in these types of movies, the cops couldn’t find north on a compass, much less a killer-at-large. Is it Mr. Sikes, the creepy janitor with the patented tape-around-the-bridge brand creepy-guy glasses? The kids seem to think he’s up to something, all right, although it seems to me the only thing this guy gets up to is <em>Penthouse Forum</em> (and as a glasses-wearer, I always bristle at this sort of characterization. Like tape on my glasses is all I need to make me a creep. Talk to me for five minutes, and you’ll clearly see the myriad other traits that make me a creep).<br /><br />No, the true villain in this movie is none other than that scourge, Disco Fever. The admittedly intense chase scene, where Wendy is doggedly pursued by the killer, holds no candle to the mind-searingly painful sight of Jamie Lee Curtis and what’s-his-name who plays Nick shaking their well-choreographed booties down to the ground, accompanied by the sizzling sounds of some generic Donna Summers knock-off. How people ever got laid back then is a mystery to me. Or why they’d even want to, given those goofy clothes everybody wore.<br /><br />Oh yeah, the killings. So, Kelly’s the first to go, ditched by her date when she refuses to help with his blue balls. Sure, she gets gruesomely stabbed to death, but having seen the Leif Garrett look-a-like she had pawing her, I still think she made the right choice.<br /><br />Jude and Slick are next to go while enjoying a post-coitus joint in Slick’s boogie-van. Obviously, I was sad to see ol’ Slick go (he’ll live on in my heart forever), but what was even more disconcerting here was the lighting. The official DVD release I have was apparently transferred from an old VHS copy. But even allowing for poor picture quality, it still looks like all of the night shots in this movie were lit with a Timex. At one point, Slick tries to escape by jumping behind the wheel and flooring it, but the killer is right behind him, and they wrestle around while Slick is trying to drive. Thing of it is, the killer’s wearing all black, so I couldn’t even pick him out at first, and I spent a good chunk of this sequence thinking Slick was just being a big spaz (which would certainly not be in keeping with his character). Maybe since this was shot in Canada, I dunno, maybe they spent all the lighting budget on Elsinore beer, eh?<br /><br />Then, as mentioned, Wendy gets hunted down and sliced up. Eddie Benton (better known as Anne-Marie Martin of <em>Sledge Hammer!</em> [one of my favorite shows as a kid] and the former Mrs. Michael Crichton) does a really good job making her character extremely hateful, so I spent the whole movie just itching to see her get an axe in the face. But then, true to that pushy loudmouth character of hers, she perseveres to elude her pursuer to the point where I almost thought she was gonna make it. And, y’know, had she made it, I wouldn’t have felt ripped off. Good job there.<br /><br />Next, the movie decides to rip <em>Carrie</em> off even more than it already has. Lou, the monobrowed juvie thug, knocks Nick out just before he’s about to be crowned prom king. Lou’s gonna go out there and show ‘em what a real prom king looks like. Thing of it is nobody bothered to explain to Lou that you don’t get to be prom king by defeating the current prom king in combat. This isn’t <em>Richard III</em> here, buddy. But Lou does end up taking Nick’s place as murder-victim king, and as Lou’s severed head rolls out onto the stage, everyone screams and runs. So, disco is fine and dandy, but a severed head is going too far? Whatever you say, late ‘70s.<br /><br />So, the killer’s revealed, and ooooh, it’s a big surprise. Mainly because there is little to no connection between the identity of the killer and all the clues to which were peppered throughout beforehand. It’s like the filmmakers were so determined not to let anyone figure it out, that any and all hints they dropped were either really vague or just flat out didn’t make sense. A pretty disappointing end to what was shaping up to be a pretty average slasher-flick.<br /><br />Okay, so I guess <em>Prom Night</em> exploits, but not much else. There aren’t as many layers to be found as there are in the original <em>Sleepaway Camp</em> or <em>Silent Night, Deadly Night</em>. But it still had Slick. So, as soon as my Chevy van is done being custom painted, you know where to find me: cruising the senior parking lot, waiting for cheerleading practice to end.<br /><br />(God, what a fucking creep I am sometimes. Excuse me while I go put tape on the bridge of my glasses.) </div>Jimmy Callawayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13725548493403210066noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5653147652524357424.post-85633027309877800622009-12-16T15:58:00.000-08:002010-03-26T23:55:50.703-07:00Return to Horror High (1987)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZ3ZWFgJBvRHwUWWYmzPjxf9Auru7PUCbosxT6DXJKMyPRSF_LSuWrhrbElLKVJ-UNnDmvbWaDhvQ0MSL1y9umsUnho-U6ZvLkC1buEYeQSm72E8xDL7lR2b1azhE15WYqycoh_sQZW8qq/s1600-h/return_to_horror_high.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 210px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZ3ZWFgJBvRHwUWWYmzPjxf9Auru7PUCbosxT6DXJKMyPRSF_LSuWrhrbElLKVJ-UNnDmvbWaDhvQ0MSL1y9umsUnho-U6ZvLkC1buEYeQSm72E8xDL7lR2b1azhE15WYqycoh_sQZW8qq/s320/return_to_horror_high.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5395970820697591906" /></a><br /><br /><em>by Brian S. "Peaked in High School" Roe</em> <br /><br />Within the first five minutes of watching <em>Return to Horror High</em>, I understood completely why it was in the dollar bin. As a rule when Marcia Brady is given second billing on the cover, a viewer should put the DVD down and walk away. Or better yet throw the disc away and use the case to hold something of value, like a ripped version of <em>Captain Kronus</em> or <em>Blacula</em>. Instead I sat through 94 minutes of boring, choppy blandness that was strongly flavored with the stink of smug “ain’t we clever” nonsense smeared all over it.<br /><br />Okay, I can get my head around a horror/comedy. There have been a few decent ones, but this one ain’t it, my kiddies. It’s like someone’s mom wrote the script based on what she thought slasher movies were about, basically tits, blood, and dry ice fog. I am not against these three things in any way. However when female nudity is clumsy and forced, including the classic line “No exploding tit shots!” followed seconds after by an exploding tit, I am dubious as to the aesthetic value of showing it. It’s as if the producers had a recipe for a horror movie but didn’t know when to add the ingredients. <br /><br />But this was the 1980s, right? Mobile phones took up entire briefcases, glasses used lenses the size of TV screens, and every movie had to have a softcore sex scene. And this one’s no exception, finally kicking into a soft rock soundtrack for our soft lead characters to rub themselves softly against each other. Goddamnit! That’s the whole fucking problem with this movie! It is soft, and bland, and pointless. White-bread-with-mayonnaise-and-Kraft-American-singles-style soft and bland. Even the grueling dissection scene is only notable for the truly odd squeak that comes out of the male victim. That’s no sound for a man to make, ever!<br /><br />This softness seems intentional, like the filmmakers wanted to have murder, sex, and dry ice fog but didn’t really want to offend anyone. I can’t help but compare this to the superior <em>Slaughter High</em> as a more mean spirited yet more effective movie.<br /><br />What, the story? A film crew goes to a high school where murders happened to film a movie about the murders but then get murdered. Maureen McCormick looks like a relatively sexy policewoman-themed stripper (the black gloves are a nice touch), um, the producer is a dick, the director is a weakling, the janitor talks about his dick, the special effects guy has a lame rattail coming off the side of his head, the fake blood looks worse than the stuff that comes from the dollar store, the producer talks about his dick, George Clooney is in the movie for two or three minutes and looks like he’s sixteen, and then it ends and ends and ends. Four fucking sequel hooks including the line “They always make sequels.” You self-referential jackasses!<br /><br />This kind of know it all smart-ass crap is the reason why I never want to watch <em>Scream</em>. And when it’s handled as badly as <em>RTHH</em>, it makes me crazy. I don’t want to be reminded that I’m watching a movie. Try to act like suspension of disbelief might be an option. I wanted to punch this movie until it quit moving.<br /><br />There are some oddly disturbing moments in the film. Maureen McCormick gets strangely turned on by all of the carnage, even getting to the point when she rubs blood into her breast while talking about someone’s intestines full of feces. She eats a chili dog while her captain is looking at a corpse and some of the chili drips onto his coat. But the most unsettling scene is when she is drinking out of a paper cup of soda without a straw, but the cup makes a straw slurp sound! It boggles the mind! And then she sips out of the straw while it is out of the cup and it makes an even more odd straw suck sound, like she was slurping Jell-O through it. Here the filmmaker decided to exploit the full use of Foley to convince the audience that something was amiss. All through strange sounding straw slurps. <br /><br /><em>Return to Horror High</em> has all of the atmosphere and sense of dread of an ABC After School special and the erotic tension of a farm report. I only watched this because my VCR broke and all my good movies were on tape. Time to start buying more DVDs pronto. Don’t watch this movie. You’ve been warned.Jimmy Callawayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13725548493403210066noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5653147652524357424.post-65757424176773056602009-11-17T13:58:00.000-08:002010-05-07T19:56:15.432-07:00Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland (1989)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZaCRZcXfs0KeqWHBDOk7wbO81zgrxoA8mO7sUu7HEZ2Rz3xMdWu-aF1GDcXfoyGFakeGxer0XHHhvKrf53p3HC9BFn5H4AgvF8FRl_jm1U41oU6808wHXKHAHYjXRgQhudaVQ6078XZgV/s1600-h/sleepawaycamp3.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 190px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 320px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5348117035104816290" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZaCRZcXfs0KeqWHBDOk7wbO81zgrxoA8mO7sUu7HEZ2Rz3xMdWu-aF1GDcXfoyGFakeGxer0XHHhvKrf53p3HC9BFn5H4AgvF8FRl_jm1U41oU6808wHXKHAHYjXRgQhudaVQ6078XZgV/s320/sleepawaycamp3.jpg" /></a><br /><br /><em>by <a href="http://attentionchildren.blogspot.com">Jimmy "Snipe Hunt" Callaway</a></em><br /><br />This movie’s a lot like a guy you kinda know, like you see him out a lot, he’s friends with some of your friends, and he’s an all right guy and all, but simply put, you can’t stand him. You realize a lot of it is because you went to high school with his older brother, <em>Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers</em>, and that guy was a total shithead. But you know you shouldn’t let that wholly influence your opinion of him, especially when he even goes out of his way to be nice to you some times, like buying you a drink every now and again. But the whole time, you’re still like, Dude, shut the fuck up.<br /><br />Begin with the sub-title. Right off, I’m way more into a Who reference than I am a cheap one-liner like the last subtitle. It’s also not as lazy a reference as most are in this, the downward spiral of the <em>Sleepaway Camp</em> series and the misadventures of Angela Baker; it remains pertinent to what can be construed as the theme in these (as well as most) slasher movies of the ‘70s and ‘80s: the dissatisfaction of the American youth taking physical form in brutal sex and mindless violence, not unlike the 1950s juvenile delinquent movie (I guess the phrase “Unhappy Campers” does that in a way as well, but in a much more cutesy, oh-those-wacky-teenagers way).<br /><br />This becomes a leit-motif for the movie to me: it hovers at being as hateful as the last one, but manages to pull itself back and show some intelligence. Therefore, I actually do like it more than the last one, although I’d still rather take a ball-peen hammer to the face than sit through it again.<br /><br />The plot of the movie mostly seems to revolve around how lukewarm and unerotic the director can make breasts seem. Right off the bat, we’re treated to two of the smallest, mosquito-bite boobies to ever grace the silver screen, tattooed with the words “Milk Shake” (“Milk Shake”? More like half and half! Ba-dum-bum-bum!). Fortunately, Angela runs her over with a garbage truck, and the movie has officially begun.<br /><br />Camp New Horizons, on the former grounds of Camp Rolling Hills, is a social experiment meant to pair upper middle-class kids with kids who have had it rougher and to try to bridge the gaps between their social strata. It’s also a major tax dodge for its founders, Herman and Lily Miranda. Why the <em>Munsters</em> reference there, I don’t know, nor why the filmmakers didn’t follow through more on these characters’ overt hypocrisy (not to mention that of the newscaster who’s quickly done away with), except to suppose that splatter-as-usual is always going to take precedence over everything else in these movies.<br /><br />But there is a spark of ingenuity in naming the rich kids after the cast of <em>The Brady Bunch</em> and the wrong-side-of-the-tracks kids after the cast of <em>West Side Story</em>. Of course, that spark is quickly smothered, as there turns out to be more depth to the characters in <em>Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol</em> (for the record, one of my personal favorites). Then to round out the inconsequential pop culture references, we also have camp counselor Barney Whitmore, who is also a cop (huh? huh? get it? <em>The Andy Griffith Sh</em>—aw, never mind) and the father of Sean Whitmore, who was killed in the previous movie along with his acting career.<br /><br />Barney’s out to avenge his son, but even his keen police instinct can’t detect Angela, disguised as camper Maria. In Barney’s defense, Angela is wearing a wig that is about as convincing as your Uncle Sid’s toupee. Then, when Barney finally puts it all together, he immediately takes his chance at vengeance and whizzes it down his leg. No wonder he had to keep his one bullet in his shirt pocket.<br /><br />Anyway, back to the tits. Now, I’d like to make it clear at this point that I love breasts. They’re two of my favorite things. But this movie, not unlike <em>Sleepaway Camp II</em>, ends up treating them like wallpaper. They’re nice at first, they really brighten up the room, but after a while, you’re wondering if you shouldn’t have just gone to the trouble of painting instead. There’s a scene early on where all the girls are in their cabin, naked to the waist as any group of three or more girls is likely to be. And it’s not that these breasts aren’t lovely in themselves, but cinematically, they’re just kinda...there. They’ve got no charisma, no personality, no on-screen chemistry. They don’t make love to the camera; they don’t even give the camera a cheap hand job in the bus station men’s room. I defy even the most rabid tit man out there to get turned on by this scene.<br /><br />And speaking of sexploitation, <em>Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland</em> holds the rare distinction of depicting the most awkward and uncomfortable sex scene in movie history. BAFTA-winner Michael J. Pollard portrays head counselor Herman in this flick, and it's clear he was cast for his imp-like roguishness. But it would seem the director wasn’t happy with that, and had Pollard ramp it up, mugging for the camera at Rip Taylor-like proportions. Now, I’ve enjoyed Pollard in other stuff, even tearing up more than a little during his death scene in <em>Scrooged</em>. But his constant eye-rolling swagger and hitching up of his Playboy-bunny belt buckle makes me want to give him a good, hard slap to the face.<br /><br />But it doesn’t end there, oh no. Herman eventually gets little firecracker Jan into his tent, and we’re subjected to Pollard rolling around with a half-naked girl easily 30 years his junior. Stacie Lambert, who plays Jan, has discomfort rolling off of her in waves as this little elf man, who showed such promise in <em>Bonnie and Clyde</em>, paws at her boobs like a blind frat boy. The rape scene in <em>Boys Don't Cry</em> is light and romantic compared to this. Ms. Lambert (according to my research) never acted again, having most certainly walked off the set of this movie and into a convent.<br /><br />And that really about does it for this movie. Everything else is about as by-the-book as you could please. To recap, Angela kills everybody because they like sex and drugs and rock and roll, and so on. There’s no end to the god-awful one-liners. The acting makes Ed Wood’s stable look like the Coen brothers’. There’s a big, padding flashback to Angela’s happier days, and I will say there’s at least some character development there. Angela’s unbridled optimism from the last movie has finally been deadened some, so now when she kills, there’s not so much joy in it, like it’s become more of a chore now than a career. So that’s all right.<br /><br />But y’know what, movie? Too little too late. So whenever I run into <em>Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland</em> at the bar, we might talk a bit about records and TV shows. Just a little polite, casual conversation before I go over and sit with my real friends. But if it doesn’t leave me alone after a while, I’m like, Dude.<br /><br />Fuck off already.Jimmy Callawayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13725548493403210066noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5653147652524357424.post-21826653041515003202009-10-13T15:50:00.000-07:002010-05-07T19:54:00.460-07:00The Prowler (1981)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2fyan6SnlGy_cKfnsXg18R4qjYbWoyAuxNuL5bJ4V_7v7zQ8X-0OxTeHhQKYAqz6Jn1oDAQMMtP3Wa_WoJSr93fnHxNbad5Ot1IvZ8W9VUF1CczucSiy378R5HFiHEYtOOIxxHxSqiiH-/s1600-h/the_prowler.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 210px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2fyan6SnlGy_cKfnsXg18R4qjYbWoyAuxNuL5bJ4V_7v7zQ8X-0OxTeHhQKYAqz6Jn1oDAQMMtP3Wa_WoJSr93fnHxNbad5Ot1IvZ8W9VUF1CczucSiy378R5HFiHEYtOOIxxHxSqiiH-/s320/the_prowler.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5392221234272595186" /></a><br /><br /><em>by <a href="http://trashclassic.blogspot.com/">Cameron “I woulda got away with it if not for those pesky kids” Ashley</em></a><br /><br />The history of horror movies is in many ways the history of missed opportunity. For every <em>Friday the 13th</em> and <em>Black Christmas</em>, there’s some trash that, despite some seriously awesome moments, just fails due to either low budget, low creativity, or lack of talent. We’ve seen the proliferation of remakes of iconic horror brands, brands with in-built fan-bases featuring characters already burned into the popular consciousness. By and large, they have been remakes of films that already worked. By and large, these new efforts have sucked. If we have to have remakes, what I’d like to see is more remakes of the contenders of the genre, films that didn’t quite get over the line but are armed with enough potential for decent creative personnel to prove that you can, indeed, polish a turd. <br /><br />Which brings us to <em>The Prowler</em>.<br /><br /><em>The Prowler</em>, not to be confused with James Ellroy’s fave film noir of the same name, came out in 1981, during the Golden Age of slasher films. Directed by Joseph Zito, who went on to score big time in 1984 with <em>Missing in Action </em>(plus filming <em>Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter </em>that same year) and <em>Invasion USA</em> in 1985. <em>The Prowler</em> has a terrible score, overlong scenes building little to no tension, an unattractive final girl and a total non-twist conclusion. Its killer isn’t menacing enough; we get one pair of tits and what passes for beefcake kind of looks like Christopher Walken’s illegitimate half-brother. It’s a shame <em>The Prowler</em> doesn’t rock your face off. With a premise like the following, there’s little excuse:<br /><br />It’s 1980. The kids of Avalon Bay are rolling joints and hoarding booze, getting ready for the first graduation dance since 1945, when a returning soldier stuck a pitchfork through his ex-girlfriend and the asshole she dumped him for whilst he was off fighting Nazis. The killer was never caught and the girl’s wheelchair-bound father, now more anti-dance than the preacher in <em>Footloose</em>, sits at the bedroom window of his gothic mansion perving at the chicks in the neighboring dorm. There’s a violent criminal from another town heading towards them. The local voyeur is out and about and on the make. The sheriff’s gone fishing and his deputy is out of his depth. Out in the cemetery, Rosemary’s grave has been dug up. And a psychopathic, heartbroken former GI has dusted off his uniform, sharpened his knife and is ready to learn these kids good for their loose ways.<br /><br />How could this be anything but awesome? It’s got the kind of batshit-pseudo urban legend mythology that good slasher films thrive on. It’s got a girls dorm. It’s got legitimately good to great locations. It’s got Lawrence Tierney as Rosemary’s dad, Major Chatham. It’s got the legendary Tom fuckin’ Savini rocking the gore make-up! Why is <em>The Prowler</em> so...boring?<br /><br />The problem lies chiefly with the screenplay which really just plods along right from the very opening (a 1940’s newsreel of soldiers returning home, into a flashback where Rosemary--the killer’s ex--gets hers), perhaps written with the expectation that Zito had the chops to bring the tension.<br /><br />But here’s where things get a little strange. Neal Barbera and Glenn Leopold are the writers responsible for <em>The Prowler</em>. Barbera, unless there’s an IMDB cock-up, is in fact the son of the legendary Joseph Barbera and penned, believe it or not, episodes of <em>Yogi Bear</em>, the all-star team-up of <em>Scooby’s Laff Olympics</em>, <em>Pebbles and Bam-Bam </em>and the god-damn <em>Banana Splits</em> (one of my favourite shows of all time). <br /><br />Leopold is another cartoon writer and sports a resume just as impressive as Barbera’s with episodes of the <em>Godzilla</em> cartoon (!!), <em>Scooby-Doo</em>, <em>The Smurfs</em> and, fuck me, <em>Super-Friends</em> under his belt. <br /><br />You’d think these guys could pace a slasher film, which, when you think about it, is basically formulated like a pornographic episode of <em>Scooby-Doo</em>: small towns, gothic settings, masked criminals, meddling kids, and the fact that pretty much anyone over 30 is either creepy, touched in the head, wheelchair-bound or a combination of all three. <br /><br />Sadly, what we get is a pretty laboured set-up and the let’s-look-down-this-hallway-for-looong-stretches-of-time repeatedly and it wears pretty thin pretty quickly. Adding to the woes is the grating score that just goes: <br /><br /><em>Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.</em><br /><br />It’s the sound of my inner writer having a mental fucking breakdown at the waste.<br /><br />The slightly frumpy Vicki Dawson plays our final girl Pam, and although she’s not the prettiest scream queen ever, she is at least sensible. She doesn’t bother to try and engage our prowler in any stilted horror film conversation, she just fucks off out of his way as quickly as she can, proving herself to be fairly capable even if she can’t figure out how to open locked doors very well. She takes no shit from boyfriend Deputy Mark London (the kinda-sorta Walken-esque featured Christopher Goutman) when he tries to shake her loose from his half-hearted hunt for the killer, and she proves to be an adequate sleuth, not on the Velma level by any means, but not bad. <br /><br />Our killer, garbed in full army gear, complete with some camo mask on under his helmet is properly stoic and silent. He’s good with a knife and, for some reason...a pitchfork...but he’s really just not very scary, despite how he appears on the cover. He is, however, extremely violent. The gore in this film is crazy for the period, up there with the bloodiest (which perhaps is William Lustig’s <em>Maniac</em>, another Savini-spattered flick, but this is certainly debatable and I’m not the type of guy to re-watch things just to see which has the most viscera). It feels like Savini realized that this was a pretty boring affair and that he really needed to bring his entire supply of fake blood to salvage things. <br /><br />He very nearly does. <br /><br />If Zito lingers on the boring bits, he also lingers on the gruesome bits and there are some pretty unflinching death scenes here, cameras fixating on slashed throats and pitchforked torsos. The death sequences are far from classic or innovative, but they are effective and, combined with the strength of the film’s premise, are enough to drag The Prowler over the line into ‘Watchable.’ But why doesn’t our soldier have more weaponry in his arsenal than a knife, a gun and the random pitchfork? Why can’t he do crazy commando shit like tear throats out (RIP, Dalton) or McGuyver his surroundings into death traps with only a match stick and a pubic hair? Why does he just lumber around like Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers instead of springing out or rolling about to give us a real spook? Come on, guys! <br /><br />I realize that the guy must be pretty old, but he’s always right where you think he’s going to be and quite obviously never where Zito wants us to think he is. You can argue that audiences are now both accustomed to this shit and jaded by it, but (for example) <em>Black Christmas</em> was made in 1974 and that is still perhaps the creepiest thing ever filmed (digression: how hot was Margot Kidder back then? Seriously. What happened between <em>Black Christmas</em> and <em>Superman</em>?). <br /><br />Our GI-prowler is neither creepy nor imposing nor creatively brutal, all of which adds up to him being a total D-lister on the cinematic spree-killer scale. His legend isn’t built up enough either--it should either permeate the town or poison those trying to bury it. The only person presumably still affected by it is Rosemary’s dad (Tierney) who has no dialogue, nor any scenes of any merit. It’s a befuddling waste of a potentially crucial and interesting character as well as an actor with serious presence. If you’ve got Lawrence Tierney and you’re only using him in longshots, you’ve got fucking rocks in your head. The revelation of the killer’s identity is a real groaner as it’s telegraphed pretty much from the start, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and the writers can’t be bothered building up their red herrings whatsoever. Must’ve been some <em>All-New Popeye</em> scripts in bad need of a story-edit.<br /><br />Whilst relevant for slasher completists and Savini freaks, for the rest of us, <em>The Prowler</em> is perhaps best viewed either out of a curiosity to see what happens when two cartoon writers and a Chuck Norris director go “Hey, let’s do a film where a chick gets a tit cut off,” or with an eye toward the squandered potential in much of this genre. <em>The Prowler</em> could have and should have been a classic. Instead, it’s one of the cleverer ideas for a slasher film squandered, put together by a creative team who, at the very least, should have given us some thrills outside of just ultra-violent slaughter. <br /><br />Ultimately, no amount of bloody Scooby Snacks can make this dog hunt. A remake, however, perhaps under the original Australian release title of <em>Rosemary’s Killer</em> or its other alias, <em>The Graduation</em>...well, it’s not the worst idea I ever heard. That would be the idea of a <em>Videodrome</em> remake. Don’t get me started...Jimmy Callawayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13725548493403210066noreply@blogger.com5