Happy Death Day (2017)

OCTOBER 16, 2017

GENRE: SLASHER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

Full disclosure: my friend was a co-producer on Happy Death Day. Fuller disclosure: I was so tired when I watched it that I actually forgot about that until it was like halfway over, and I was already a big fan of what it was doing by then. But still, I usually avoid reviewing anything that my closer friends worked on, and I'd follow suit here if not for the fact that HOLY SHIT A SLASHER MOVIE IS NUMBER ONE AT THE BOX OFFICE! I mean, every third review I write probably has some kind of reference to a slasher movie that I love, because let's face it: it's my favorite kind of horror movie, and it's not often my needs are being served by Hollywood these days. The last original slasher film (no sequels/remakes) to come out in wide release from a major studio was My Soul To Take, all the way back in 2010 - that's far too goddamn long (and that one was so crazy it was easy to forget that it was indeed a slasher at heart).

So if you think I'm biased or whatever, too damn bad - I'm too happy to have this kind of movie again and I don't want my raves about it to be limited to a few tweets. It's not a perfect film, but it gets so much right that it barely matters, and that they do it with the limitations of a PG-13 rating is just gravy. Hilariously, I rewatched Friday the 13th: The New Blood a few days earlier and was once again aghast at how bloodless the movie is (thanks to the MPAA), and so when watching this I couldn't help but chuckle that it actually has more on-screen impact wounds and blood - with a PG-13 rating by design - than the *still R rated* bloodless Friday the 13th movie (no actual nudity in New Blood either, for the record - I think it might actually get a PG-13 in its current form if not for a few F bombs). For all the complaints about how these movies *need* to be R rated, it's really just a lot of crap - as long as the killer has a good look (check), there are a number of kills (check, albeit with an asterisk, as I'll explain later), some suspense (check!) and a character you want to see survive (check x2), there's no reason they can't serve their purpose just because the murder scenes lack bloodspray.

Of course, it helps to have a hook to make up for it, and that's where the film really shines. Yes, it has a timeloop gimmick that is identical to Groundhog Day's, albeit with a few key differences - one being that our heroine Tree (Jessica Rothe, who will be an A-lister in 2-3 years if this is any indication) doesn't have infinite lives like Phil Connor did. As she learns after four or five deaths, her body is retaining the trauma of whatever killed her (just as her brain is retaining the memories of what happened) and weakening as a result, so eventually she will shut down for good. Also, we don't see anything of her life prior to the loop day - the film opens on her waking up on that day, whereas Groundhog Day gave us a good 10-15 minute glimpse of Phil's life and demeanor before the first time we heard "I Got You Babe". So while the mechanics are the same, there are enough differences to the presentation to justify borrowing the concept (which is not exclusive to Groundhog Day anyway - it was first done in the story "12:01"), and as a bonus someone even points out that Tree's dilemma is a lot like the movie.

But like Phil, she is also someone who is kind of an asshole and seemingly has to become a better person if she wants to actually see tomorrow. It doesn't take long for us to see all of her faults as a human: she's a drunken mess who looks down on most of the people around her (she's a sorority sister, if that helps clarify what we're dealing with here), treats her roommate like shit, sleeps with her married professor, ignores calls from her dad, and mocks one of her sisters' choice of lunch foods. Basically, in slasher terms, she's the girl you want to die first (and will usually die last; since we've already mentioned New Blood, she's basically Melissa), and the thrust of the movie is split between her trying to solve her own murder, but also learn to become more like a Final Girl. It's kind of genius when you think about it (at least if you're a slasher aficionado who understands and embraces these archetype roles) and Rothe does a terrific job at finding that balance - she has to do terrible things in her first day (or two) but without ever crossing the line into full blown monster.

Another smart move on screenwriter Scott Lobdell's part is to mix up the other deaths so that Tree (which I think is a nickname for Theresa) is the only one we see die multiple times, keeping the body count "high" even though no one dies permanently. So on the first day it's just her, but on the second day she lives a bit longer because she knows when to run in the opposite direction, which allows the killer to off someone at her next location before killing her again. Then on the next day she does a lot of things differently, and someone else gets killed. And so on and so on, so that by the end of the movie we've seen just about every single character get killed - as you would in a straightforward slasher - but without it being part of the repetition. Since the killer is seemingly only after her, only offing other people who happen to get in the way, we are spared any sort of "Tree has to figure out how to save each victim in time" kind of video-gamey scenario (think Bill Murray realizing he's running a few seconds behind and needs to run to save the kid from falling out of the tree on that day). That's a big part of the movie's success, I think, as it allows for constant new developments as opposed to getting a pretty rigid day "right". It also allows the deaths in the third act to have more weight, as Tree is closer to getting it right and thus runs the risk of letting someone die permanently in order to keep herself from inching closer to death by letting herself die again in order to save them.

Unfortunately this results in one of the movies' few blunders, in which a major subplot is introduced too late into the proceedings, severely crippling its ability to look like anything but a big red herring. Seems there is a mass murderer in the hospital that Tree ends up at a few times, and for a bit she believes he is in fact the masked killer who is after her. But since the story was so hastily introduced, no intelligent audience member could possibly believe that this guy might be the killer, as it would be too much of a cheat and writers will know better by now than to pull a Friday the 13th (or I Know What You Did Last Summer) and make the killer in this whodunit someone we hadn't even really met. No, without spoiling anything I can say that the killer's identity is a satisfying one, and it's a shame they couldn't introduce this red herring character earlier/more gracefully so that we might actually buy into the idea for a while. In fact I pegged one character as the killer fairly early on (what can I say, I'm really in tune with these kinds of movies) and the introduction of this generic villain did absolutely nothing to change my original theory, which is a clear sign that it's not really working as intended. Then again, I suppose some of the teenagers in the audience who aren't even aware of the existence of things like Prom Night and Night School, let alone seen them, would be able to spot these "tells" as well as seasoned slasher fans, so maybe it worked like gangbusters on them.

Tree also utilizes a Sherlock Holmes-ian level of deduction on a few occasions, which seems not so much like a character trait but merely the writer wanting to move things along and having no better way of doing it. Luckily, such bumps in the road are instantly paved over by Rothe, as well as Israel Broussard as Carter, the owner of the dorm room that she wakes up in every day with little awareness of who he is at first. Seems she got super hammered on the never-seen previous day and he ended up taking her back to his room, but nothing sexual happened - he's a nice guy who let her stay in his bed while he slept in his roommate's. By the 3rd or 4th day she realizes he's a good guy and tells him about her predicament, but of course he can't remember anything once the reset button occurs. It's through their relationship that you can really see her grow as a person, as she goes from yelling at him and telling him that he isn't allowed to tell anyone that she was there to warmly welcoming him in front of her sorority sisters after six or seven cycles (and of course, he is reset every day and barely knows her beforehand, so none of her behavior seems out of character to him as she always gets a blank slate to start the day from). Lots of slasher films (hell, horror films in general) end up pairing off the Final Girl with the male survivor, but it's rare that you actually see their romance blossom in a believable fashion - it's usually just "well we're both alive so let's kiss" as opposed to the natural progression of two people getting to know each other. How often do you get to say a slasher film is also kind of adorably sweet?

But fear not - it passes the most important test of a slasher (for me anyway), which is simply "Would you want an action figure of the killer?" The answer is yes, I very much would - the school mascot mask (some kind of man baby?) is a perfect fit for this goofy horror blend. And yes, "goofy" is what I'm going with; I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a "horror comedy", as it's dealing with some grim material and rarely opts for jokes or sight gags that might make you laugh out loud, but there's an underlying breeziness and even a few weird moments that make it more than just a teen slasher with a twist. If anything I'd kind of liken it to Princess Bride, of all things, in that it manages to satisfy fans of a number of genres at once (horror, romance, sci-fi of sorts, and coming of age drama) without ever leaning too far in one direction. The few hiccups are of no real consequence in the long run, and I suspect Tree will be a favorite Final Girl among the younger generation the same way old farts like me embrace Ginny from F13 Part 2 and Nancy from Nightmare on Elm Street: proactive and smart, but not so mousy that girls wouldn't want to be just like them (I mean, I love Laurie Strode, but who is like "Yes! I want to be the one all my friends use so they can have fun!"). It's also another win for Chris Landon, who directed the last decent Paranormal Activity movie (The Marked Ones) and the uneven but better than its reputation Scout's Guide To The Zombie Apocalypse, which also offered a surprisingly winning "the hero has to mature" story in the middle of horror carnage. Here's hoping he sticks around in the genre, but I pray neither he or anyone else messes things up with "Happier Death Day" or whatever.

What say you?

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Offerings (1989)

SEPTEMBER 7, 2017

GENRE: SLASHER
SOURCE: STREAMING (YOUTUBE)

A couple years ago, John Carpenter sued the makers of Lockout for ripping off Escape From New York a bit too much for his liking, and actually won, which set a potentially fascinating precedent for future lawsuits. In fact, JC could easily win again if he ever decided to follow suit against Christopher Reynolds, whose debut (and, penultimate) film Offerings is so much like Halloween it's actually kind of jarring when the film does something different. The music is nearly identical, the plot is more or less the same thing (sans the holiday, but that barely played a part in Carpenter's film anyway), there are a number of key scenes recreated... it even has a classroom scene where fate is discussed! Believe me, I've seen a number of Halloween ripoffs over the years, but I can't recall another that was so committed to stealing so liberally from it. It's almost charming.

I could probably fill up the length of a review with a list of examples (such as when the heroine gets a silent phone call, hangs up, then screams at the next caller only to discover it's her best friend), but that'd get boring quick so I'll do my best to stick to what's actually different. For starters, the movie combines the two most classic slasher movie setups: we have a kid who is clearly already evil (he kills small animals, a move later swiped back in turn by Rob Zombie for his Halloween remake), but he's also the victim of a prank gone wrong, which is usually what you do when you want some semblance of sympathy for the guy when he inevitably returns to take revenge x number of years later (it's ten here, for the record). Since he was already nuts I'm not sure why they bothered with the prank thing, but I guess it's one of the few other things to distinguish it from Halloween, in that he has a reason to go after these people. And yes, in case you're wondering, he begins his revenge plan when he escapes from the institute, in fulfillment of the scriptures.

Another change is actually a spoiler, so skip this paragraph if you want the film's few surprises preserved.

Naturally, there's a Loomis type character, his shrink who now works as a college professor (and whose relation to the killer, John Bradley, isn't made clear until later, so it just seems like the sheriff is keeping some random professor in the loop). He makes a few appearances throughout the film, all of them (wait for it) copied from Halloween - finding a dead animal, seeing a disturbed grave - but with about 20 minutes to go, he finally meets face to face with his former patient. It's a scene kind of like Loomis' interactions with Michael in Halloween 5, actually, but Reynolds couldn't have seen that one yet as this movie was released a few months before H5 was, so he came up with the idea on his own or ripped it off from another movie. Anyway, Bradley kills the guy in this scene, leaving the sheriff to be the one to take him down at the end. Whether it was intentional or not it gives the movie its own form of surprise: by copying Halloween so much, this actually comes off as a twist of sorts, kind of like how Savini's NOTLD remake stuck to the exact same thing for an hour and then turned Barbara into an asskicker just when we were about ready to assume nothing else would be different.

If only they copied the pace! Halloween itself is hardly the fastest paced movie ever made, but it's on Michael Bay overload compared to this one, which commits the cardinal sin of slashers: spending a good chunk of the day introducing everyone, then starting to off them all... and then cutting to the next morning, with another half hour or so to go. Plus the heroine and her bestie are already on edge due to a couple of friends disappearing and also finding human remains on their porch, so watching them fart for another day waiting for nightfall is a hugely crippling flaw, in a movie that few will be fully engaged with by that point anyway. The poor acting, shitty kills (none of them are really on-screen), and dull visuals (the killer has a messed up face, but we barely ever see it, though he has no costume either) will have the audience already wanting it to be over with, so hitting pause when the third act should really be getting going was probably the last straw for anyone who rented it back in the day.

Speaking of which, I'm almost positive I did, because the opening scene felt really familiar and I also remembered seeing a slasher with Halloween ripoff music, but nothing else rang a bell. It's possible I rented it, got bored and/or fell asleep and returned it without finishing (I would have rewound it though, I'm not a monster), or there was somehow another movie that did the same thing, but it's just as likely the movie's blandness didn't manage to stick in my memory. Indeed, just this week I was going through a bunch of boxes from my mom's attic and finding essays and the like that I wrote in college (so, not as long ago as this theoretical VHS rental) and having no recollection of writing them - and that was something I was (somewhat) personally invested in! So it's not too crazy to think I'd forget everything about some shitty slasher movie I saw in 7th grade or whatever.

Anyway, if you'd like to see it for yourself, it's on Youtube. You can buy a bootleg quality DVD from Amazon to make yourself feel better if you want, but they are from companies that specialize in public domain stuff sourced from VHS, so none of that money is going toward Reynolds or anyone else involved with the movie. But sooner or later Arrow or Scream Factory or one of their brethren will rescue this thing from obscurity, and I will pick up the special edition right away. Not to watch the movie again, but to dive into the extras and see what the filmmakers have to say about their "homage" to Carpenter's film (dream supplement: get JC to do a commentary as he watches the film for the first time). At least in movies like Hallowed they're going out of their way to acknowledge Halloween's influence (the title, they drive past the filming locations, etc.) while also coming up with their own story. No such luck here; there's no overt reference to Carpenter's film, and while the killer has a clear motive and even a little gimmick (the title refers to the body parts that he gives as presents to the one girl who was nice to him as a kid), it's basically the same movie, albeit a pretty stiff and forgettable one. Hell, it wouldn't surprise me if I already rewatched it for the regular run of this site and forgot again.

What say you?

P.S. All due respect to Carpenter, Lockout is actually a pretty fun movie. And I bet it's better than the remake that they keep threatening.

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Red Christmas (2016)

AUGUST 30, 2017

GENRE: HOLIDAY, SLASHER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

I thought it was a little weird that Red Christmas, an increasingly rare addition to the holiday slasher canon, would be released in August, but Silent Night Deadly Night 2 was released in April, so they're at least closer to the namesake season*. But "weird" was the order of the day with the film anyway, which on the surface is a holiday slasher in the vein of Home Sweet Home, in which our targets are a family of adults and their various partners as opposed to the usual group of college kids or whatever. But the devil's in the details, and I assure you I was not prepared for the number of fairly taboo subjects that were not only addressed in the film but part of frequent conversation, as well as the killer's motive. I'm not in the mood to get into arguments/debates about these topics, so I'll just let you know if you have VERY STRONG OPINIONS! on things like abortion, infertility, religion, and Downs syndrome, this might be a movie (and review) you should skip.

Any film that focuses on a family getting together for the holidays is going to showcase some dysfunction, so when one of the adult sisters (the mom of the family is Dee Wallace, so that should clue you in, roughly, to the ages of everyone involved) chastises another over the latter smoking when she's pregnant, and Wallace's brother mocks one of his niece's husbands over his religious beliefs, I didn't think much of it - par for the course of these things. But this one goes a bit deeper: the aforementioned religious guy might be a closeted homosexual, as he races off to masturbate in a wardrobe (?) after seeing his brother in law's bare ass, and the pregnant sister returns the insult to her sister by mocking her inability to get pregnant at all, which in turn leads into a brief discussion of using scientific methods to get pregnant instead of trusting in God/nature. These are all kind of touchy subjects, and not always handled delicately (and by "not always" I mean "pretty much never"), so when you see the '80s style poster and read the generic plot description, you might not expecting to be confronted with a topic that might be a sore spot.

Then there's the Down syndrome topic, which is actually the least of its worries for a while - no one treats the character (Jerry, Wallace's son - the patriarch of this clan passed away earlier in the year, we are told) any differently or even mentions his situation. But it ultimately ties into the abortion subplot, and that's where things get a bit dicey (SPOILERS AHEAD!), as we learn that twenty years ago, Wallace got pregnant again after Jerry and when she discovered that baby would have Downs as well, she aborted it, because it was hard enough with Jerry and she didn't want double the stress. Combine that with what we've already learned (and isn't really a spoiler as they tell us fairly early), which is that the killer is actually that would-be aborted fetus, who survived and became a mutated killer, and you have a movie that is bound to rile up the folks who like to scream and shout (read: tweet) about how "problematic" our movies are rather than actually do anything to contribute to the good of the world.

Luckily, I am not one of those people, so I just went along for the ride. The writer/director, Craig Anderson, has a comedy background and has said in interviews he set out to make "a stupid movie", and the trailer also touts its comedic bent. so I don't think it's wrong to not take these serious matters all that seriously. I wouldn't say it's an outright comedy (or even "horror comedy") but it has that offbeat tone like Frank Henenlotter or the Black Christmas remake, where you aren't laughing out loud but just appreciative of the sick sense of humor and a "no sacred cows" kind of approach. That's right up my alley, and you all know how desperate I am for more slashers (especially on the big screen, albeit in as limited a form as this), so forgive me if I wasn't offended by the idea of using abortion as a backdrop instead of the usual "A prank went wrong and now he's out for revenge" kind of killer motive. Like I said, if you have strong opinions on the subject maybe you won't be as charmed by the film, but for what it's worth I think it helps that the movie isn't preaching to either choir - on one hand, the fact that the killer (named Cletus) SURVIVED his abortion (don't ask for details how this worked, the movie doesn't offer any) gives plenty of weight to the "it's a living thing" side of the argument, but if that living thing grows up to be a serial killer...? You can't accuse the movie of picking a side on that one. Plus, the heroine is Wallace's character, who a pro-lifer would probably see as a monster for her actions, but then she spends the rest of the movie doing everything in her power to protect her (adult!) children, so the "bad mother" argument pro-life types often employ doesn't quite work. It's almost like it's a difficult topic with no easy answers!

As an experiment, though, let's say the movie was silent and it was just another slasher where a guy in a costume (a cloak and bandages - he kinda looks like Darkman) wreaks havoc on a group of people, free of any weightier subject matter. Would it work? Well... no, probably not, alas. Some of the kills are pretty great, and Cletus has a late-period Jason affinity for using a variety of objects (including but not limited to a blender, an anchor, and a peanut allergy), but the direction and editing often makes them unsatisfying and in some cases completely confusing. In fact this sort of thing plagues the entire movie; for example, there's a scene where Wallace aims a gun at the killer from a very short distance and fires multiple times, yet whether or not she hits him is never made clear (this follows a scene where it seems like SHE is shot accidentally, but where that bullet landed is anyone's guess since she falls to the ground but wasn't hit). The geography of the house is also puzzling, with the killer seemingly teleporting in and out of rooms at times because there's no other way to explain how he was able to sneak up on a character or exit the room without the others being able to tackle him. At one point we see him using a lattice (nod to Black Christmas?) to get into one particular room, but unless they had the things on every wall of the house it doesn't explain all of the other times he was able to pull off his movements.

The characters often make baffling decisions as well, and I don't mean the usual "running upstairs instead of out of the front door" kind of stuff. Out of nowhere, Wallace decides to collect all of the cell phones (there are only three including her own) so that she can scatter them around the house, and then her son-in-law dials those numbers from his hiding spot - the idea, I guess, is that Cletus will hear the ringing and make his way to those victim-free spots while she carries out a task elsewhere (if the movie wasn't over a year old I'd swear this was a nod to the Friday the 13th game, where you can turn on radios to distract Jason - it doesn't really work). It's weird enough that she comes up with this plan instantly, but then she neglects to hide her own phone, so when it rings she screams (almost definitely giving away her location) and tosses it roughly ten feet away from her and stays in the same spot, self-destructing her own wonky-ass idea and putting herself at more risk to boot. There's also a character with a peanut allergy, something she apparently doesn't think too much of since Anderson decides the best way to convey this information (foreshadowing) to the audience is to have this adult absentmindedly reach into a bowl of peanuts (Wallace sees her and stops her from doing it), as if she was a 5 year old who didn't understand their own medical conditions.

So yeah, it's one of those movies where you get the sense that things were reverse engineered from previously decided upon beats, no matter how convoluted or unnatural they might seem to the audience. At the end of the credits we are told to visit MakingRedChristmas.com, which has a trailer for an upcoming documentary about how difficult it was to make the film, so that might explain some of the confusing edits (if anyone can explain the final showdown between Cletus and his opponent, I'd love to hear it), as there might not have been time/resources to film the proper coverage and Anderson just had to make do with what he had and hope the audience could fill in some of those blanks. But that excuse can only go so far; a lack of funds couldn't possibly be to blame for such headscratchers as a redneck neighbor threatening to put Cletus "out of your misery!" before urinating on him, or why Anderson frequently shows the characters' feet. Outside of their (again, expected) spats none of the characters are hateable, and Anderson did a pretty good job at making it hard to tell who would be the next to die, but their often alien-esque behavior kept any true suspense at bay, as my eyebrows were almost permanently raised during the scant - but still somewhat padded - 82 minute runtime.

But there's really nothing else like it, and it was too damn peculiar to dismiss. I was never bored, it got the basics more or less right, and it inspired a conversation that lasted nearly an hour afterward, which is more than I can say for at least 50% of the slasher films I've ever seen. And even if it made the movie's "point" a bit difficult to pin down, I genuinely like that Anderson wasn't coming down hard on either side of the topics he brings up (though there seems to be very little affinity for traditional Christianity), so pro-life and pro-choice people alike can find something that backs up their beliefs. And that goes for even the smaller things; I might be reading too much into it, but there's a nasty fight between the two older sisters over whether or not a meringue should be refrigerated, and when I went home I looked it up, finding: "let the pie stand at room temperature in a draft-free spot before serving it. After a few hours, however, it will need to be refrigerated", so I guess they're both right, which is like everything else in the movie. If Anderson's saying anything, I think it's that people don't always make the best decisions, but that doesn't mean someone else should be telling them how to live. Which, if that was his conscious intent, is a damn fine message to spread, though I'm not sure why he opted to make it in a film where a blender goes through a guy's eyeball.

What say you?

*I'm not just pulling that movie out at random - there's a clear homage to it in the film (it involves an umbrella), which delighted me to no end as most folks are likely to pay homage to one of the original's kills (the antlers, usually).

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Slaughterhouse (1987)

MARCH 14, 2017

GENRE: SLASHER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REVIVAL SCREENING)

I don't know why I never rented Slaughterhouse as a kid; I distinctly recall seeing it at my usual video store right next to the Silent Night Deadly Night series, and obviously I was all about the slasher genre that it clearly belonged to, but for whatever reason I never gave it a chance. Maybe it was because I didn't hear much about it in Fangoria and such chances rarely paid off (see, or don't see: Iced), or maybe the lack of a mask on the killer's face left me less impressed. Or maybe I just somehow knew if I was patient I'd get to see it in the ideal setting: on the big screen with 200 other horror fans, on a 35mm print that would definitely contain the gore that may have been cut from the VHS*. Alas, as the film unspooled, I realized there was another possibility for skipping it: perhaps I just knew it wasn't very good.

Don't get me wrong, it's not a disaster or anything, and I could name a few worse slashers just from that same year (Open House, The Outing, Slumber Party Massacre 2...), which is worth noting since this was past the heyday of the genre and thus they were a bit rarer at this point, as even indie producers were making more creature/ghost-driven vehicles that could spotlight showy FX as opposed to splattered blood and disembodied limbs. So the slashers that were coming around, like this, weren't so much trying to compete with the Friday the 13ths and the like, but merely just catering to the non-discerning. With slashers only coming around every once in a while (as opposed to nearly every week as they were in the early '80s), there wasn't as much need to be GOOD, just... well, to exist at all for the people who were then like I am now: willing to watch anything as long as it had a big guy hacking up teenagers.

Whether this leeway dawned on its filmmakers or not is unknown, but after listening to their Q&A I don't think it did. The director did mention that he preferred comedies but understood it was easier to get a horror film made/sold than a comedy when you didn't have a lot of money, but I didn't get a sense that they were a bunch of get rich quick schemers - they seemed to genuinely want to deliver a good movie. And to its credit, despite their inexperience (if writer/director Rick Roessler has ever made anything else, the IMDb hasn't caught wind of it) the film actually manages to deliver some effective shots and interesting beats, including more than one wide shot where Buddy (the hulking brute killer) is there but not being heralded with a musical sting or anything like that. There's one terrific one where the heroine - who will be drawing your eye - is at the bottom of the frame looking for her friend, whose corpse is being dragged out of sight by Buddy, walking on the level above her. Stuff like that says to me someone was at least putting in effort to give the movie a little more oomph than required, and not just doing the bare minimum to get the movie finished and profitable.

If only that sort of elbow grease was applied to the script, they could have had a legitimately solid entry into the slasher canon. The ingredients are all there, but they're let down by a script that is hellbent on focusing on the wrong things, and goes beyond slow pacing into almost surreal territory. For example, we meet our standard group of six teens in the first scene, where they are partying near the titular location. Two of them sneak off to fool around, annoy Buddy, and get killed - perfectly normal stuff. Then we cut to the next morning, and the other four have noticed their friends are missing but don't think much of it. After a full reel of farting around town (I swear a good ten minutes of this movie is just of the male lead driving his orange jeep around), they all go back to the slaughterhouse to film a music video (the '80s, man...). At this point I'm thinking "OK, now things get going!", in that they will show up, do their thing, find something odd (or even one of the bodies), and Buddy could start finishing them off. But no! They leave AGAIN and kill more time around town, only to finally return with about 20-25 minutes to go in the runtime. This is not how one structures their slasher movie!

And like I mentioned, there's a strange focus on things no one would possibly care about listening to. Just as the aforementioned Open House spent a lot of its time explaining the real estate business in detail, Roessler's script has its adult characters (all rival slaughterhouse owners) go on and on about their equipment, their process, etc. One even shouts at another about his tendency to allow 30% fat on his roast, which I guess is bad but I mean, I don't really care much unless I plan to actually buy my meat from this fictional character. There's a fine line between fleshing out the characters and simply boring the audience by spending too much time on irrelevant minutiae. It's like Roessler watched Texas Chainsaw Massacre (a very obvious influence, with a bit of Motel Hell too) and got annoyed that they didn't spend enough time explaining the meat-making process because they were in a rush to be scary, and was determined to correct it. The script also curiously doesn't understand how foreshadowing works; the male lead's poor driving skills are brought up twice (and he almost runs a guy over in a separate incident!), with the sheriff (his girlfriend's father) even getting a close-up as he says that "someday I'll have to scrape you off the highway", which is ironic when he... uh, is smashed in the head by Buddy. Inside the slaughterhouse. When he's not driving.

Luckily the kills are fairly varied; Buddy carries a big axe that could be his Freddy glove (i.e. pretty much the only thing he ever uses to kill someone), but he only uses it a couple times. For the others he mixes it up: the slaughterhouse machinery gets used, and he merely crushes the head of one guy with his bare hands - all presented with minimal (better than nothing!) prosthetics and fake blood spray. Since the blood looks more purple than red in a couple instances, I guess it's fine that this isn't exactly a movie that would give the MPAA a heart attack, but given Buddy's hulking size and the title I was hoping for a little more carnage (that it was showing on a Grindhouse night made me even more hopeful for the sort of stuff we would usually need unrated cuts to see. I mean, next week they're showing Pieces). It's not bloodless, it's just... subdued, I guess would be the best word, with the variety making up for it. Doesn't quite make up for how they're paced, but at least if you were to make a highlight reel of the film it wouldn't be repetitive.

In addition to the kills, the film also offers up the occasional inspired or at least memorable bit that also helps lessen the blow of its stop-and-start structure. The opening credits are set to cheery music played over footage of a real pig being slaughtered (none of the gorier parts of it, thankfully, but we see the poor guy walking to his doom, being hit with the prod, and then being hung up in preparation to become delicious bacon), and there are a number of intentional laughs sprinkled throughout. Buddy has some choice reactions to whatever's going on around him, and I never tired of the awful meat-related puns that accompanied a number of the kills - Arnold as Mr. Freeze would approve of how they never stray from the gimmick. There are also some weird character choices, like the fact that the deputy, who mentions his family for no real reason, is having an affair with the town floozy. He's kind of a goofy guy, so what could have been a simple "He's desperate and willing to settle for the town hussy" note becomes "he's an asshole cheating on his wife and risking losing his kids to a divorce", with no payoff to any of it - we never see/meet the kids and his wife's only contribution is being the unheard other end of a phone call. And he dies, so now we're feeling sad for two fatherless kids, all of which could be avoided if they just snipped the line where he mentioned them. I also enjoyed how we kept hearing about the local radio station's annual jamboree show, and when it finally arrives, it gets shut down after 20 seconds due to a power failure (even better, no one even boos - they just all happily leave as if they had their fill anyway).

So alas, it's just another underwhelming late-coming slasher. Dream Warriors aside, 1987 is hardly a banner year for the sub-genre, so it's not like I'm shocked and stunned to discover this won't be replacing My Bloody Valentine or Black Christmas on my list of favorite non-franchise slasher movies (speaking of the sequel that never came to pass - it's actually set up early in the movie, instead of the end - we are told Buddy has a brother early on, but the finale doesn't establish his return). Maybe I was putting too much stock in its placement as a Grindhouse night selection, but I also kept thinking of the underrated Sweatshop, which also had the "hulking brute killer" scenario but way more of that Grindhouse-y sleaze and attitude. So the lesson to learn here is that if you're a 9 year old looking for something to rent, get Sweatshop and be ahead of the curve when it gets a revival screening in thirty years!

What say you?

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Havenhurst (2016)

FEBRUARY 21, 2017

GENRE: SLASHER, THRILLER
SOURCE: STREAMING (ONLINE SCREENER)

If nothing else, I've made one thing perfectly clear over the years: I enjoy seeing Danielle Harris in my horror movies. So when I saw her name in the cast list for Havenhurst I asked for a review screener, something I almost never do anymore because I lack the time to keep up with such obligations (indeed, this review is like two weeks late). But honestly, I couldn't remember the last time I saw her in a new horror movie*, so my interest was piqued enough to make the exception. Alas, I don't like to spoil anything in the first paragraph, but if you were planning to see the movie just for her, I would advise you to skip this one, as she dies in the first three minutes - before her credit even appears! Not that I thought she was the Final Girl or anything (Julie Benz is billed first), but three goddamn minutes? Even Drew Barrymore lasted a good ten minutes in Scream!

Luckily for the part of my brain that is able to enjoy horror movies even if Ms. Harris isn't around, the movie isn't all that bad. Kind of a blend between Saw and Crawlspace, it takes place almost entirely in the titular building, which is home to several people who are trying (some harder than others) to improve their lives after hitting rock bottom with drugs, booze, sex, etc. But the place is run by the always delightful/creepy Fionnula Flanagan, who insists on obeying the rules (NO drugs, booze, sex... you get the idea) or else they will be evicted immediately. Since this is a horror movie, you can guess what actually happens when someone is "evicted", and while I can't vouch for the logic of a place that is clearly at the center of what must be several disappearances without ever being investigated (until now!), it works for what it is, and at 84 minutes with credits certainly doesn't wear out its welcome, unlike certain other creepy building movies of late.

And while I missed Harris, it's not like Benz is chopped liver, and it was nice to see her playing a more relatable character since her other genre turns tend to be a little more fantastical (Buffy) or unlikable (Saw V). She's a recovering alcoholic who was friends with Harris' character and has moved into her now vacant room at the Havenhurst, and seemingly isn't there for more than 12 seconds before she starts getting suspicious of the sounds she hears in the middle of the night, Harris' sudden disappearance, etc. There's a fun little but of detective business where Benz and a cop/possible love interest discover that the blueprints for the building (found in Harris' things; we are led to believe she was killed for snooping) depict rooms that are bigger than they appear to be in reality, the rare horror film to include hidden passageways that are actually logically implemented, instead of just being there for the hell of it (Black Xmas is a particularly eye-rolling offender). Plus for whatever reason I always just enjoy watching people study diagrams and solve minor mysteries like this in movies; if In The Mouth of Madness spent a full half hour on Sam Neill cutting up the book covers and making the Hobbs End map it'd probably be my favorite Carpenter movie.

Another thing I liked was that it randomly invoked H.H. Holmes, who in real life had a "murder house" much like Havenhurst that was modified to make victims easier to access and kill. It's an interesting way to use a real life serial killer without going to the trouble of making it a period piece (or a silly supernatural thing like 8213: Gacy's House), and also to allow the audience to enjoy its cheap thrills without it feeling exploitative, as it might if it were recounting the actual murders Holmes committed (which numbered anywhere from nine to two hundred victims, depending on his mood during confessions). There was a wave of indie biopics about serial killers during the '00s (many of which I reviewed here, almost none of which were particularly good) that I don't think ever actually covered Holmes, oddly enough. I assume the 19th century setting would have been too difficult to pull off for those low budget affairs (which, for all their faults, did usually try to stick more or less to the facts, unlike Naked Massacre or Henry, which were much looser versions of high profile murderers), but suffice to say an accurate film about him would be, if nothing else, one of the most colorful, given his cross-country trail and aforementioned architectural shenanigans. Scorsese and DiCaprio are supposedly making one, so hopefully that comes to fruition, especially if Marty's in schlock mode.

My only major issue was that it could have been paced better; we know something's up right off the bat and Benz is front and center for the most part, so it starts to feel a bit repetitive. There's no real mystery to what's going on (we see who the killer is in the first scene with Danielle), so it's mostly just a "how will it ultimately conclude?" waiting game. The murders are gorier than expected (especially the nurse lady) and it's fun to see how many things Flanagan and her sons have rigged up (the bed that tilts and sends its victim down a floor is particularly admirable), but as much as I like Benz I did start to tire of her looking intently at the walls looking for hidden doors and the like after a while. Perhaps letting Flanagan take a more central role and go batshit (think original Mother's Day) would have helped matters, or teasing out the mystery a touch just to give it a little more oomph might have helped.

It also seemed a bit too dark, though that might have been the screener so I can't really hold it against the film. Had I gotten my act together I would have known for sure, as the film was playing for a week at one of the Laemmle theaters (where I've seen a number of similarly independent horror films that play for a week before hitting VOD), but I suck. It's funny, I used to get annoyed when publicists would offer screeners instead of actual screenings, and would even turn down the (free, convenient) option if I knew the film would be playing theatrically. But now that such endeavors would come at the expense of spending time with my kid (or, if he was asleep, my very-close-to-beating copy of Final Fantasy XV), I pass them up in favor of the screener, which I can pause when necessary and tackle on my own schedule. It's not ideal, and I still champion theatrical viewings for those who can find the time for it, but at least I'm coming around a bit on the alternative. But man, even if it only would have been for three minutes, it woulda been nice to see my lady on the big screen again! My bad.

What say you?

*Turns out it was See No Evil 2, which helps explain why I couldn't remember it.

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Lake Bodom (2016)

OCTOBER 23, 2016

GENRE: SLASHER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (FESTIVAL SCREENING)

On the rare occasions I have time to kill, I like to read up on old unsolved murder/disappearance cases, partially to freak myself out a bit (some of them chill me more than any horror movie can, especially re: having a kid now), but also to fill the Robert Stack-shaped void in my heart now that whoever owns Unsolved Mysteries had to be a ninny and take down all of the clips on Youtube. I don't get too interested in alien or ghost stories when it comes to the unknown, but show me a case about a girl who was acting strange and then disappeared off the face of the earth one night (preferably with a weird final clue - there was one where the last time she was proven to be alive was with a ticket stub to American Beauty? Did that movie's pretentious sappiness push her over the edge?) and I'm hooked. It was during one of these (usually Wikipedia-heavy) sessions that I first found out about the case that inspired Lake Bodom (formerly just Bodom), a modern-set slasher film that uses a real life murder as a jumping off point but is otherwise largely unrelated.

But you can't blame writer/director Taneli Mustonen for not sticking to the real case all that much, as one of the more memorable things about it is how vague it is. Four teens (two couples) were camping in the woods, and sometime between 4 and 6 am (a detail that always stuck out - it was close to "safe" daylight time) three of them were stabbed to death, one more viciously than the others. That one's boyfriend was the lone survivor, though he had several severe injuries, including being bludgeoned to the back of the head - a detail I bring up because he was later accused and tried (and acquitted) of the murders, which seems odd when he sustained trauma I don't think he could have caused himself, based on the way the injuries are described. Plus some boy scouts who saw the mangled campsite reported seeing a blond guy walking away from the scene, all but clearly establishing a 3rd party who was in all certainty the one who committed the murders. Alas, the killer has never been found - the case remains unsolved and open.

Given the "campers in the woods slaughtered by a maniac" narrative, it's obviously of much interest to slasher fans, so I'm surprised that it took over 50 years for someone to make a slasher movie out of it (in fact, three different ones all around the same time - this one, the 2014 found footage entry Bodom, and another one titled Lake Bodom that is coming next year). The film only briefly touches on the original murders (complete with a blond guy, not much older than the victims, watching them while sharpening a knife) before flashing forward to the present day, where four teens (not couples, it should be stressed) are trying to find the murder spot so that one of them can do a reconstruction. This element is very poorly explained (possibly the fault of the subtitles - it's a Finnish film), as I was never quite sure what he planned to do - take pictures, I think? - or why he was being all secretive about it, to the point where he described his intentions as "complicated" when pressed by one of the girls (who were rightfully starting to wonder if they were in danger).

Luckily, the slashing begins fairly quickly, and despite the minimal number of victims, the pacing is actually far from languid. Mustonen teases us a bit with a few obligatory moments where the friends try to scare each other, but they work well, and since it's relatively early on you can be forgiven for thinking you're watching another would-be prank when our first teen is killed (it's not until blood starts pouring out of their mouth that we are guaranteed it's legit). Then we get the usual panic and chasing for a while, followed by a lengthy flashback sequence where we discover just why these girls agreed to come out into the woods with these two weird dudes they seem to barely know. It's an unusual structure, I must admit - we spend a good 45 minutes or so hearing these vague references to some racy photos that one of the girls was shamed by, and our natural inclination as viewers is to piece it together in our heads, because why would you think there would be a 15 minute flashback scene at the end of the second act? There were a few scenes set in/around school at the beginning, so there was plenty of time to fill us in on this stuff beforehand - why wait?

Well, because it ties into a twist, one that doesn't take too long after the first death to be unveiled, but still one I wouldn't want to reveal either. It's a tough nut to crack - the key to a good twist is to not clue the audience in that there will be one (Sixth Sense is a good example, at least to people like me who saw it opening day and not after people said YOU GOTTA SEE THIS MOVIE'S TWIST!), so they won't be looking for anything. Here, Mustonen kind of split the difference - he left things clunky and vague so that we knew there had to be more to it than presented, but revealed things around the halfway point, so that it didn't drag down his whole narrative. Once that stuff's out of the way things pick up considerably, highlighted by a terrific scene where the killer has two of the friends trapped in their car, which is being dragged by his tow truck. It feels like the most exciting scene a Joy Ride sequel never offered us, and serves as one of the best standalone setpieces in a slasher movie in who knows how long.

So it's got some clunky storytelling decisions, and I had to laugh at the opening text reminding us that there are several theories about what happened and this is merely one of them, when it's not actually about what happened at all (the original murders are never mentioned again after the first act), but overall I think it works. It delivers some good scares and suspense, and hits the comforting slasher beats without taking the ironic approach that has ruined so many other modern body count films. They could have used the original story in a better capacity, but then again - could they come up with anything as scary or unsettling as the fact that the killer might still be out there? And turning the original tragedy into a slasher movie might feel exploitative, so perhaps it was for the best that they sort of just nodded in the general direction of the real murders before focusing on their own story.

What say you?

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Tell Me How I Die (2016)

SEPTEMBER 6, 2016

GENRE: SLASHER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

The easiest complaint to lobby at the slasher sub-genre is that they lack ideas when it comes to narrative, saving too much of the relative creativity for the kill scenes while giving the killer a motive we've seen in a dozen other films. The new slasher Tell Me How I Die bucks this trend, utilizing a fairly unique idea for a body count flick - a group of college students who are earning extra cash by participating in a new drug study find that what they took (a memory enhancement drug that hopes to combat Alzheimer's) allows them to see glimpses of the future. One sees nearly everyone being killed by an unseen murderer as a result, and thus naturally her visions start coming true. It's a bit Final Destination-y, sure, but by applying the basic concept (seeing everyone die and trying to stop it from happening) to a traditional masked killer/single location scenario is enough to give it its own identity, and beyond the vision scene it's about as much of a Final Destination knockoff as Child's Play is of Magic (which is to say, not really one at all).

The key difference is that while the Final Destination movies embrace the nutty concept and make the films a lot of fun to watch, Tell Me How I Die is an interminable bore, running at least 20 minutes too long and barely using the concept for anything interesting. The best death scene is that of a security guard who gets his foot caught in a bear trap and then crawls his way to presumed safety, only to get his damn head caught in one (he doesn't crawl much after that), and he had nothing to do with the experiment or visions. The others are mostly off-screen (even a basic stabbing!), with the film committing the number one cardinal sin of slashers: offing a bunch of people in one fell swoop, which is only acceptable if it's a spectacular death scene (think The Collection). Here, the killer just gases a bunch of the anonymous test subjects (including one girl you'd swear was inspired by Barb from Stranger Things if it wasn't impossible for them to have seen the show before getting this film shot/released), and even that is mostly off-screen. It's funny, early on I actually commented that the movie had too many characters, assuming there would be some mass death scene to get things on track, but I was thinking more on the lines of The Burning - not a friggin GAS sequence in a slasher. I mean, Christ. That'd be like a giant monster killing people by shooting them.

(OK I might like to see that.)

Worse, naturally the gassing doesn't kill ALL of them, but the script takes way too much time to get the body count moving along after that, with the five survivors lasting way too long before any of them are offed. This would be fine if they didn't know they were in danger and engaging in normal behavior, but they see the killer even BEFORE the gas sequence, so they're in hysteric, "we gotta get out of here!" mode the entire time, which gets awfully repetitive and grating - and again, the movie is too damn long as it is. Even at the slasher standard time of 88 minutes, you'd probably get sick of seeing these people run through corridors and arguing about how the visions work long before the ending finally came, so this is almost legitimate torture. Add in the obligatory "We see a thing happen and then snap back to realize it's just a vision of something we're about to watch again with a minor variation" scenes and you have a movie that runs 105 or so minutes with maybe 10 of them offering anything interesting or exciting.

For no real reason, the movie is set during a horrific blizzard - the subjects are told they can't go outside because they need to be observed round the clock (this doesn't stop one character from shrieking "They've been watching us the WHOLE TIME?!?!" when a two way mirror is discovered, by the way), so it could be bright and sunny for all it matters. It's mostly an excuse to give the killer a "costume" (read: a big coat and either a hat or a hood, I couldn't really tell), not that it matters since there's zero mystery to the whodunit angle as its someone we had never seen before anyway. Some of the kids make their way to a car and sit in it for a while debating their next move, but the cold doesn't play much of a part - the car works, so they just turn on the heat, and even when they're outside they barely seem to notice the elements. The entire movie was apparently shot in Los Angeles, which would explain why the snow and cold didn't bother them (because it was either fake or CGI), but for the life of me I can't really see a point to why they bothered going to all that effort. There's a nice shot of the heroine driving up to the isolated study building, surrounded by snow-covered trees, but you can see that in the trailer anyway so it's hardly a selling point for the film.

" If the movie DOES have one saving grace, it's William Mapother as the doctor running the test. He's a bit "off" (I don't want to offend anyone by labeling him with the wrong disorder, because the movie doesn't name it, so let's just say his character seems to fall on a certain "spectrum" and leave it at that), and it's fascinating watching that kind of person deal with the usual horror movie cliches. When he's on the safe side of the door and the kids are banging on it asking him to open it, he casually explains that he won't do that because he's safe and they're not, which is hilarious. Plus he's kind of a villain, so it doesn't really matter to him if any of the kids get killed as he's only concerned about his drug test - not exactly a unique plot point in itself, but seeing those sentiments expressed by a guy who might as well be asking if anyone has any gum as opposed to a sneering/sleazy villain (think Burke in Aliens) gives those moments a little more life than they'd usually offer in this day and age - and certainly more than the rest of the movie can bother to provide. I wish I could say Mark Rolston (the only other person in the movie I recognized) offered the same sort of reprieve, but he's tasked with a silly accent that does him no favors. Good job, movie, you made me dread another scene with a great character actor like Mark Rolston.

I guess I should mention the "Youtube superstar" of the movie, the Asian guy on the poster (I won't use his name so as not to attract his fans - I've already seen some of their over-exaggerated fawning and I want no part of it). He's pretty terrible, trying to be the comic relief with lines that aren't funny, and sits out a large chunk of the middle section until stumbling out as a would-be red herring (if anyone buys this for a second, they sure picked a shitty slasher movie to be the first one they apparently ever saw). So despite his poster presence, he's not really that big of a character - I'd compare him to maybe Ted in Friday the 13th Part 2 in terms of significance, and then I'd just continue sighing that people with lots of social media followers are considered draws for modern horror films. Silver lining: it didn't work, as besides myself and my friends, there was only one other guy in the theater... for a movie showing once a day at one theater, which presumably should be drawing in bigger crowds since all potential Los Angeles viewers are being funneled into this one screening. Good tactic, producers!

It's a shame that the movie didn't work for me at all; I love to champion slashers, and to its credit it's at least well-made on a technical sense, and despite spending a lot of the time yelling the characters aren't THAT obnoxious (no one's cheating on their spouse, so they're already ahead of like half of modern horror movies with college-aged characters in that department). But when the hook is a total bust, the deaths are almost all off-screen, and we never get a really good look at the killer (let alone enjoy a nice stalking sequence or anything like that), it's just a total failure in the departments that count. A bad book doesn't get saved because they chose a nice font.

What say you?

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Fender Bender (2016)

JUNE 2, 2016

GENRE: SLASHER
SOURCE: DVD (SCREENER)

Thanks to the existence, and, far as I'm concerned, UTTER PERFECTION of Halloween, you can't ever really fault a filmmaker for mimicking any part of it for his own slasher film. Sure, it probably won't be as good, but a slasher fan will have to find something else to complain about unless he wants to sound stupid. Case in point, Fender Bender has a low body count compared to many other slashers, but it's also identical to Halloween's (even the sexes are the same - three girls, two guys) and not a lot of motivation for our murderer, but to consider these things a detriment is to say Halloween is also wrong in those departments. You can't have it both ways; either a slasher flick is allowed such behavior, or it's not.

And actually, we do get a "motive" of sorts, one that actually made me smile as it almost seemed like writer/director Mark Pavia was making fun of the very idea of explaining everything. I wouldn't dare spoil it for you, but if you can honestly tell me that it's worse/stupider than what we ultimately learned about Michael Myers, or even any number of one-off killers with shockingly silly motivations (Urban Legend 2 and Shredder come to mind), then I'll quit reviewing slasher movies. However, I ask you to think about it for a few minutes - yes, what we see is goofy (in a charming way), but even real life murderers have odd "traditions" - phases of the moon, shared birthdays, etc. (not to mention the so-called "Alphabet Killer"), and his thing fits in just fine with those. I'll take simple over complicated any day of the week.

The reveal also erased one of the problems I had with the movie, which is that he didn't use his car enough. Again I don't want to get into the killer's particular MO, but it works out, if perhaps a bit too late. I mean, the killer is called The Driver and the movie is titled Fender Bender - I was hoping for a little Highwaymen/Death Proof-esque vehicular manslaughter. He only uses a car for one kill (and it's a good one), which until we know why he prefers to be on foot seems like a waste of a killer/concept. Luckily, Pavia makes up for it with a pretty sweet costume, accentuated by a black leather mask that gives him a Prowler/Harry Warden-esque appearance - it definitely passes my "Would I want an action figure/model kit of him?" test, always a big plus for me with a modern slasher. Especially for one where we know who the killer is - we see him unmasked early on when the eponymous incident occurs (and it's a recognizable actor too - Bill Sage from We Are What We Are and the "other" The Boy), so there's no reason to mask him for the audience's benefit - it's just cool, dammit.

And I think that's why I dug the movie - Pavia clearly has respect for the slasher genre, even though he is actively aware that doing the usual thing just doesn't cut it anymore. I've ranted over and over that we need more slashers, but the simple fact remains that you can't really DO those kind of movies anymore - the locations (and holidays) have all been used over and over, and the simplicity of the older ones can't be replicated anymore, as we just expect too much from our modern films. Add in cell phones and GPS and all of the other things that didn't exist when the best slasher movies were made, and you realize that filmmakers have to adapt - with a sub-genre that has a pretty rigid formula. Pavia has found a way to straddle that line, making a "throwback" (most of which suck) in some ways but not shying away from modern touches - our characters have and use cell phones, and our heroine learns about the killer's previous misdeeds within hours of reporting their accident to her insurance company. I think about movies like My Bloody Valentine, where an important plot point hinges on the lack of information being available at one's fingertips (namely, Harry Warden's current living situation) - that wouldn't fly today, so you can't do that kind of storyline anymore unless you compress it to a couple hours, max. In his own little way, Pavia found a way to live up to old-school slasher standards without a bunch of contrivances (we can generalize it with the "no signal" approach), and in a way even using technology as a tool to tell his story without it being intrusive.

I do wish the accident was as drastic as its outcome for our heroine though. The Driver rear-ends her, and basically just scrapes up the paint on her rear bumper, but she acts as if the car was totaled. And she's also grounded; while to be fair the grounding is technically for taking the car without asking, it all still feels like her whole world was thrown into upheaval for the sort of accident that you'd forget ever happened (and, again, wasn't even her fault). The parents' punishment is also a bit odd, as they decide not to take her to a show they're planning to go to as a family, and go away for the weekend without her. A 17 year old girl being "punished" by not having to hang out with her parents and getting the house to herself for a night or two doesn't exactly track - perhaps they should have reworked it a bit to have it so she pretended to be sick or had too much homework to do or something so that they'd leave her behind and she could get the car fixed before they noticed (it's her mom's car that's damaged and the parents take the dad's, I should explain). It'd feel a bit more realistic, I think, instead of leaving me kind of puzzled about everyone's reaction to a pretty simple, not particularly damaging bump on the road.

WARNING: this next paragraph is MAJOR SPOILER TERRITORY so please do not read it if you don't want part of the film's ending given away!!!

But ultimately, same as with the "motive", the film's conclusion made it easy for me to overlook its occasional lapses, because it didn't commit one of my pet peeve "sins" for this kind of movie - our heroine does not survive against this veteran serial killer. I don't need every movie like this to end on a grim note, but I've always been annoyed when they establish that our killer (or family of killers!) has been doing this for years without incident, but our protagonist manages to off them or at least escape by doing pretty standard things like "run away" or "fight back". You're Next is one of the few I can think of that actually gave an explanation for why THIS hero/heroine succeeded, because we learn Sharni Vinson's character has had extensive survival training - I loved that! But our girl here hasn't been so fortunate, and when she discovered that The Driver had like dozens of licenses of his previous victims (most of them older than her) I had to roll my eyes, assuming she'd somehow overcome this guy when none of the others had ever been able to. So when I was proven wrong, I was pleasantly surprised - sure, it's a bummer, but it's not really nihilistic or anything - Pavia doesn't want to send you on your way laughing, but he doesn't seem to want to depress you either. It's just how it is.

Long story short, it gets more right than wrong, and is another winner for the Scream Factory/Chiller partnership that also yielded Bite. I wish it had one surprise in its narrative earlier, because until the last five minutes or so it's kind of basic (not BAD, just pretty meat-and-potatoes), and it would have been nice to have been won over sooner, but as I've said in the past - better an OK movie has a great finale than a great movie sputtering out of gas and ending on a shrug. And it's a modern slasher where the heroine's boyfriend isn't fucking her best friend (he IS cheating on her, but with some random we don't see/care about, and she takes her revenge on him to boot) and the group of pals seem to genuinely like each other, so even if it DID have a shitty ending I'd probably recommend the movie on the strength of that alone. Enough with the toxic friendships in these things! Let us LIKE the people, even if most of them are gonna end up dead!

What say you?

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Murder In The Dark (2013)

APRIL 20, 2016

GENRE: SLASHER, SURVIVAL
SOURCE: CABLE (SHOWTIME)

One of the reasons I really hate the shift toward streaming over physical media is how it will limit our access to bonus features like commentaries and deleted scenes, as those things aren't usually part of the package (Netflix, on very rare occasions, will offer them, but I don't think I've ever seen them on a cable on demand service). Clearly, the filmmakers behind Murder In The Dark also lament that folks might not have access to their behind the scenes material, so they've offered it during the end credits in the same manner you might see outtakes or a music video or something. I don't think I've ever seen anyone take that approach, and as a bonus features (and credits!) aficionado I have to give them props for their novel idea.

Unfortunately, the sad truth is that if they DIDN'T include this material, we'd never know why the movie wasn't particularly involving (and also likely why it was never scary). As it turns out, this movie was not traditionally written or shot - the filmmakers opted for a Blair Witch-esque improvised "script" where they'd give each actor an idea/motivation that none of the others were privy to, and then let the cameras roll as the actors more or less made it up as they went along, with the notes to guide them. It wasn't SHOT like Blair Witch, thankfully - there's a lot of hand-held and shaky tracking shots, but it's not a POV movie - though it shares that very loose, unstructured approach. And, unfortunately, is also guilty of almost everything happening off-screen.

Now, in Blair (or any other found footage type movie), things happening off-screen is fine, even preferable if you consider the logic - why would someone stand there and film their friend being murdered? But this is ostensibly a slasher movie, and it gets fairly tiresome to keep finding bodies while being denied the chase/kill itself. As it employs a whodunit approach, there's at least some justification for having to keep things vague (finding a body of someone killed at an unknown/offscreen time allows everyone to remain a suspect), but that doesn't change the fact that without those scenes the movie itself offers little more than an endless (and ultimately grating) string of scenes where our protagonists find the dead body of one of their friends and then spend the next few minutes angrily accusing one another of being the culprit. Variations of "Empty your pockets!" or "Take off your shirt!" (to see blood or other marks of a struggle) come up pretty often - it's good we learn eventually that it was all improvised.

Of course, that doesn't make the movie any easier to enjoy in the moment. It's watchable enough, and in retrospect I can assign it some more respect and consider it an interesting approach (as opposed to a woefully generic slasher), but shouldn't the movie be compelling on its own? What if I didn't watch the credits? I'd be oblivious to the only notable thing about it, unless you count the pretty wacky twist where the over protective dad to an 18 year old turns out to be not her dad, but a guy she's having an affair with. I mean, that's pretty novel with or without thinking about the possibility that it was something the actor(s) made up on the spot (if it was supplied by the filmmakers we can almost guarantee that they didn't know about that reveal too far in advance), but that's one exception in an 80 minute movie. Besides, the movie spends very little time on character development before the first person turns up dead (in a scene with the one instance where finding a dead body works in the movie's favor), so I must say I don't really have much investment on how they really relate to each other. I mean if Armageddon sprang that twist on me right before Bruce Willis went into space ("By the way, Affleck, Liv Tyler isn't my daughter - she's my girlfriend and you're cuckolding me you asshole") that'd be incredible, but here it's like "Oh, OK. Fine."

On the plus side, the movie has a damn good setting for this sort of thing - a crumbling Italian ghost town, giving it an almost Anthropophagus feeling at times and impressively milked by the filmmakers. There's a healthy balance between day and night scenes, too, allowing them to show off the free production value throughout the film instead of cramming it all in the beginning before it gets dark and they might as well be on a sound-stage. The cast is multi-national (no "token" anyone - there's basically 1-2 of each!) and they're all introduced more or less at the same time, making it harder to guess who will die first and/or who will be the "Final Girl". And that goes for the killer too - I admit I didn't guess who it was (in fact the person I had pegged turned out to be the lone survivor! It'd be like guessing Alicia Witt was the killer in Urban Legend), but again - these aren't characters we have any real attachment to. There's an obvious appeal to getting things going early, but unfortunately the trade off is that the audience won't care as much about the endgame as they might for a film that gave us 20 minutes or so to really get to know/love these folks. The movie had a standard opening scene kill, so I don't know why they felt the need to rush to get to the scares again.

If you're wondering what the title refers to (it sounds like an Agatha Christie title, no?), it's a game where someone is assigned to be the killer (via secret draw - whoever picks the marked paper out of the bag is "it") and everyone walks around shaking hands, with the killer wiping a finger against the other person's hand to "kill" them - the goal is to figure out who the killer is before everyone is dead. Seems like a perfectly fun party game for 12 year olds, not sure why these college-aged kids (and one's "dad") are doing it, but the hook is that the real killer starts offing everyone off in the order they were killed in the game. It's no better/worse than any other "game turns deadly" setup you've seen, but for the gimmick to work they have to spend quite a while on the game - and in retrospect it's kind of obnoxious. We get to see these "kill" scenes but everything else is off-screen? WEAK.

The movie was an After Dark release; I didn't keep tabs on their last fest (released via Fox instead of the usual Lionsgate) but I assume it was part of that pack. The series has never been known for its outstanding and classic horror movies, obviously (though there are a handful of really solid ones), so I wouldn't say I was really "disappointed" with the movie - it was more or less what I expected, in that it didn't make me angry or anything but didn't really draw me in, either. It was "fine", and I'll forget everything about it in a few days - except for the fact that the most interesting part of the movie was a behind the scenes video playing alongside the end credits. As one of the biggest champions of supplementary material for our films, I feel it's my duty to also stress that they should never be a requirement for the audience to take anything away from their experience.

What say you?

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Iced (1988)

FEBRUARY 23, 2016

GENRE: SLASHER
SOURCE: STREAMING (YOUTUBE)

I rented Iced when I was 14 years old, and I'm pretty sure it was the first movie I ever hated. I had seen some movies I didn't care for as much (even then I knew The New Blood was a lesser Friday entry), but this one actually made me angry, partly because as a budding skier I was so excited about a ski-based slasher movie. I had visions of a chase where the victim couldn't run because they were in those awful (leg-saving) ski boots, and then fumed that the movie never bothered to have anything like that. Why was I coming up with better ideas than this "real movie" that I had rented? I was still in 8th grade for Christ's sake!

Watching again now*, my opinion didn't change. I mostly wondered how I even managed to get through it in 1994, coming to the conclusion that since I rented it with my own money (and probably didn't have anything else new to watch) I was hellbent on seeing it through to its conclusion. To be fair, the last 10 minutes are the only interesting scenes in the entire movie, as we get the "twist" reveal that slightly apes My Bloody Valentine's switcheroo (far less successful) and one of the most ludicrous final jumps in slasher history. They're not GOOD, mind you, but there's a slight whiff of batshit craziness that, had the movie offered all along (or at least before the point any sane person would have given up hope on the movie), it would probably be better received today. In fact, I suspect the only reason the movie has two defenders (that I know of, are you a third?) is because their memories are formed by the final moments, not the interminable 80 minutes that precede them.

What's incredible is how it can't even get the basics right. It's one of those slashers where someone dies accidentally in the opening scene and x number of years later (four here, I believe) the prankers are all punished for their crime by being offed one by one, but the guy who dies (OR DID HE?) went off by himself and got himself killed while skiing. None of the others were there and most of them didn't even know he was going out there, so there's really no sense of justification that a Terror Train or Prom Night offers you - their hands are clean! The twist makes a little more sense out of it (albeit in a clumsy and ridiculous way), but if we're using My Bloody Valentine as a comparison - Harry Warden had a beef with the general idea of Valentine's Day, so if there was no twist and it was Harry all along, that'd be fine, and he didn't need any reason to specifically target these "kids". Here, it's presented as the dead guy coming back to off them all for his accident (he even has broken ski glasses for POV shots), so you spend the whole movie thinking that the killer is an emo crybaby instead of a formidable antagonist. The reveal that it's not him but his friend doesn't help - it's STILL blaming a bunch of folks who were inside and didn't really care one way or another about the guy.

But even if all that stuff was airtight, the movie would still be a chore to sit through, as he only kills one of the group in the first hour or so, and then wipes out four more in a span of like five minutes. Until then, we watch these mostly terrible actors go through the reunion motions, making the film as much of a half-assed Big Chill ripoff as a half-assed slasher. We hear about old dates at the drive-in, work issues, enough romantic hangups for like three movies, etc. To be fair, this DOES give the characters some more dimension than slasher victims are usually afforded, but when the dialogue and acting is this bad you want them to just spare themselves the embarrassment and simply move on to getting themselves killed. Indeed, there's even a bit where one guy is talking about an old drive-in date at some monster movie, saying it's the sort of horror movie no one cares about unless someone is naked or dying, and I had to laugh at the lack of self-awareness. Unless it was intentionally mocking itself, but if so - was it really worth making such a bad movie just to make a joke about how it's a bad movie? I can't imagine a scenario where that would make sense.

The editor does the movie no favors, either. There's a scene early on with Debra De Liso (one of two Slumber Party Massacre vets; the other one has a smaller role and also wrote this stupid thing), her husband, and their single friend driving up to the ski lodge, and it's almost like they went out of their way to ensure no audience member could possibly believe that the single girl in the backseat was ever in the car at the same time as the others. No master shot of them all, completely different lighting on her in the back than the two in the front... even the audio changes a bit, as if she was added to the scene months later. One guy has either fantasies or premonitions of the girl he wants (she's not interested) having sex with others, and later on he apparently rapes her but it's unclear if this is just another of his fantasies (she doesn't seem too bothered by it if it happened, as the next time we see her she's freely disrobing and taking a nice hot sauna bath. And then gets killed). The killer seemingly teleports during a crucial moment in the climax, and none of the kills are worth a damn - the most inspired is an icicle (this is pre-Die Hard 2, remember) but they do one of those ironic cutaways to someone tossing an ice cube into a glass just before the money shot.

There's also a curious lack of skiing. The minimal footage we do see is pretty bad (the skiers seem to be going about 2 mph when we see close-ups of their feet "racing" by), but once they arrive they pretty much just stay inside the lodge and yammer on and on. The one death in the first hour is of the obligatory guy who gets killed along the way so that the others can wonder where he is (and also, when strange things start happening, assume he's the one behind them), and after that there's barely even an OPPORTUNITY for a kill scene since they're all hellbent on sticking together. Sometimes the girls go off together and leave the guys elsewhere, and I think there's one scene of a couple in their room as they unpack, but otherwise they're all accounted for and obnoxiously huddled together. Split up, dammit! I want to see you all get killed!

Nothing else works, either. The music has a vague Manfredini-esque quality to it during the climactic "chase" but like the killing itself, it's too little, too late. Otherwise it often sounds like what a bad comedy might play on the soundtrack to introduce a Chinese restaurant scene. Gore is minimal (I couldn't find the trailer so the clip below is of all the kills in their entirety if you don't believe me), and they even manage to screw up the cool "broken glasses" POV by showing the glasses totally intact when we see the killer in full view. The only reason I'm not listing this thing as "crap" is because it's worth seeing for how to NOT go about making your slasher movie, seeing as it gets just about everything totally wrong (beyond the basic concept, which is fine). It's a shame that on paper, the idea of reteaming some Slumber vets in a whodunit slasher (and given a rather novel location, to boot) would seem to produce slasher gold, but Iced is so dull and shoddy that it doesn't even qualify as "so bad it's good" entertainment. 14 year-old me may have been wrong on a couple of things (that was the same year I first saw, and thoroughly disliked, Halloween III) but he was dead on with this one, and I apologize to my younger self for the bit of doubt I extended by giving it another chance.

What say you?

P.S. I was partially inspired to watch again because I took a few shots at the movie over the years and again in Horror Movie A Day: The Book, so I kinda figured I owed it to myself and you guys to actually have a review up, same as I did for (fellow punching bag) Dark Ride in the early days. If I come across any others like that maybe I'll give them a look - should I give Shredder another try?

*On Youtube, which is technically a bootleg, but as I've explained before - when a movie has never come to DVD (let alone Blu-ray) and can only be seen by buying a used VHS tape, my money's not going to the filmmakers anyway (unless the filmmaker happens to be VHSCollector23 or whoever is selling it on ebay), so Youtube views are, I think, acceptable. There is literally no way to purchase the movie through a channel that would provide income for the film's makers or distributors, so it's either Youtube or lining the pockets of some guy who wants 70 bucks for it (seriously). If whoever owns Iced ever gets off their ass and releases it on a new format, I'll buy a copy to make up for it, promise. Then I'll throw it away, also promise.

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