Monthly Archives: October 2009

SLAUGHTER HIGH

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slaughterhigh1.5 Stars  1986/18/86m

“Marty majored in cutting classmates!”

Directors/Writers: George Dugdale, Mark Ezra & Peter Litten / Cast: Caroline Munro, Simon Scuddamore, Carmine Iannaccone, Kelly Baker, Donna Yeager, Billy Hartman, Gary Martin, Sally Cross, Josephine Scandi, Michael Saffran, John Segal.

Body Count: 12 – or not…

Dire-logue: “We’ll take my car…it starts every time.”

Another one for the filmclub de lá Final Girl…

I saw this film a long, long time ago on a date. Said date frowned and shot questioning looks my way throughout, wondering if there was actually something wrong with me. Explanations that “they’re [slasher films] not all this bad, I promise!” notwithstanding, that was possibly the beginning of the end of that relationship.

Curiously, being that Slaughter High was a UK-US combo project shot in Surrey (albeit pretending to be America), it’s never been given a DVD release here and, due to the bitter memories emanating from my VHS copy, I’ve not seen it again. It took three guys to write and direct this bizarro Friday the 13th pretender, which was scored by Harry Manfredini, thereby allowing those who write things on poster art to state that it was “from the makers of” that film.

Slaughter High sports the now classic revenge opus with a clique of popular kids at Doddsville High School, led by a then 34-year-old Caroline Munro (it was apparently shot in ’84), playing pranks on cookie cutter nerd Marty Rantzen, one of which ends with him being horrifically burned by acid. Caroline is sorry, the others aren’t really.

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“Let’s get physic-aaaaarrgghhh!!!”

A decade on, all ten are invited back to a bogus reunion at the now abandoned school where they are quickly locked inside and picked off by the jester-masked Marty, who does them in creatively with acid-laced beer, a pit of sludge and the usual array of axes and knives. He also manages to ensure one chick – spattered in blood – takes a bath in acid, melting off her skin in all of twenty seconds.

Grisly and gory where it counts but entirely inept in almost every other department, the characters of Slaughter High make time to stray for sex after they’ve witnessed several friends DIE! DIE! DIE! Said horny couple are electrocuted during the act, whilst another guy is crushed by the tractor he’s trying to fix (!?), which has a convenient spinning rotor on its underside…

Sooner or later, it’s down to Marty and Caroline. It climaxes slightly differently than one might expect but then there’s the twist. Jesus Wept, there’s that twist! If the inexplicable behaviour of most of the cast had you scratching your head earlier on, you’ll want to dig your fingernails through your skull and into your brain at the end proper.

As you can tell, I’m not a fan. But plenty are and the film has garnered a weird following over the years, partly due to Scuddamore’s subsequent suicide and the presence of bad-horror fixture Munro and the sometimes uncomfortable vibe the film has on parade, from seeing Marty full-frontally nude to the often sadistic deaths (deserved, I guess…), the film suffers from some of the lesser elements of British 80’s productions: grainy and drained of colour, it’s like a horror episode of Dempsey & Makepeace or a Bucks Fizz video that went askew! But they got it right with the jester mask –  it’s damn creepy.

Though it sucks, it’s kind of a crap-classic that I’ll give another spin one day should I require another date to make a quick exit…

Blurbs-of-interest: Munro and Baker both appeared in the even worse Don’t Open Til Christmas; Munro was also in Maniac and it’s sort-of sequel The Last Horror Film. And check out the pair of covers below, IMDb trivia states Cutting Class is a spin-off. Eww.

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HALLOWEEN NIGHT

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halloweennight

1.5 Stars  2006/18/86m

“In 1982, Christopher Vale was sent away after his family was brutally murdered. 10 years later, on Halloween night, he returned.”

Director: Mark Atkins / Writers: Michael Gingold & David Michael Latt / Cast: Derek Osedach, Rebekah Kochan, Scot Nery, Sean Durrie, Alicia Klein, Erica Roby, Amanda Ward, Jared Michaels, Amelia Jackson-Gray, Nick Daly Clark, Michael Schatz.

Body Count: 18

If you’re not familiar with chintzy, low-bud production house The Asylum, then they’re the company who work a fast-paced assembly line approach to filmmaking, offering cheapo alternatives to then-present blockbusters, such as The Day the Earth Stopped, Snakes on a Train and recently Monster Shark vs. Giant Octopus! Although what that final one was made in response to is anyone’s guess. Each made-for-DVD film is garnished with overly-familiar artwork in an attempt to trick dim-witted browsers into selecting the wrong film. They also spun out Hillside Cannibals and When a Killer Calls in recent years.

So, Halloween Night then? Timed to coincide with Rob Zombie’s remake of a certain classic slasher flick, the UK box art for this one even featured a strikingly similar font for its title! Anyway, they duly knocked out this rubbish, a film which can’t even get its own story straight. According to both the box and the title cards, the film is “based on a true story” – yawn. Is it though? It is really? It’s certainly based on someone else’s hard work.

What ‘true’ tale this may be remains unresolved by the end, though it’s unlike anything that was front-lined in this seen-it-all-before-and-a-thousand-times-better effort, which sees an escaped mental patient crashing the Halloween party of uber-jerk David and friends. According to the tagline, this occurs in 1992, yet all the characters have cell phones and digital cameras.

Events unfold in a predictably boring style with the killer stealing an early victim’s costume so everybody unquestionably assumes he’s their buddy until he impales them on something. A brief subplot concerning a prank gone wrong fills the midsection and gives the cops an excuse to break up the party and send most of the mob packing, leaving only a handful of morons behind to bolster the body count. What’s becoming a worrying trend in skid row-budget flicks is the totally extraneous lesbian love scene, present and accounted for along with a ‘here we go again’ ending.

Acting wise, the leads go for a naturalistic approach, although David is such an asshole that it’s difficult to concentrate on any positive attributes he might have. Might. The sad fact for all those involved though is that the film exists only to try and fool people into thinking it’s something it blatantly isn’t.

Blurb-of-interest: both leads Osedach and Kochan were in When a Killer Calls as well.

Pant-Soiling Scenes #2: WHEN A STRANGER CALLS BACK

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This gets my vote for the most frightening 25 minutes EVER, pissing over the best parts of the original and its remake combined. And it’s Jill Schoelen! Jill Schoelen!!!

Recreating the opening altogether but without the creepy phonecalls, Jill’s babysitter (Julia) is tormented by a man who claims he’s broken down outside. Is he genuine?

Later, the phone stops working, doors that were locked are now unlocked, notes left by the family have disappeared and the man at the door just won’t go awaaaaay…

Eventually, the voice at the door tells Julia to look into the living room… Seconds later she regrets obeying.


SILENT BLOODNIGHT

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silentbloodnight1.5 Stars  2006/18/84m

“The terror is everywhere!”

Directors/Writers: Stefan Peczelf & Elmar Weihsmann / Cast: Vanessa Vee, Mike Vega, Robert Cleaner, Alexander E. Fennon, Markus Schlotti, Andrea Stotter, Christine Dune, Christina Conti, Andy Freund, Julia Melchor.

Body Count: 13

Dire-logue: “Daddy, the waitress was allergic to bee stings. Why did all the bees sting at the same spot?”

There are times when things aren’t quite real to me, like the time I ate Space Cake in Amsterdam and my brain seemed to be firing so fast I thought it would short out and explode, then I was convinced I’d be run over by a tram. Bad times.

Self-induced trips aside, when watching Silent Bloodnight earlier today, I was struck by a sort of whatthefuckishappening vibe as the events of this supremely weird Austrian export unfolded before my eyes, which is quite possibly the weirdest film I’ve seen in recent memory, and said recent memory includes both Mr Halloween and Ax ‘Em.

The film begins with a girl wandering aimlessly down the middle of a road in the dark, chanting the lyrics to Mockingbird. She hears some splashing and spies on three guys and a girl skinny dipping in the lake and sits there nibbling the corner of a chocolate bar. Skinny dippers emerge from the water and we see something you don’t oft get in slasher flicks: FULL FRONTAL MALE NUDITY!

silent1The girl then finds two naked people having sex and is approached by two clothed guys (possibly the skinny dippers but who knows what’s going on in this film?) She offers them chocolate. Another couple drive up and begin having sex in their car. A different girl goes to the bathroom and finds blood. Whose? Dunno. Her boyfriend staggers in and is then killed with a spade by a dungaree wearing farmer type.

Back in the sex-car, the girl – Sabrina – sees a terrified girl at the window but doesn’t stop the sex for now. When she chooses to, her boyfriend Matt thinks her screams are climactic and continues humping her. The terrified girl hides in some reeds but spade-farmer comes and kills her. Another guy called Jacob appears and asks Sabrina and Matt – done with sex-car – if they’ve seen a girl called Nina. No. He goes to the lake and cries “nooooooo” for some reason.

The mysterious transvestite-eiderdown killer!

The mysterious transvestite-eiderdown killer!

Sabrina, we learn, is the local news anchor who presents her show in only a bikini. There’s some blah about a discovered piece of jewelry and Sabrina wants to investigate the girl-at-the-window but nobody else cares, including her cop dad. Some more teens turn up to stay at a house or help open a boy scout camp (I couldn’t work it out) and a couple of them die by spade when they go off somewhere. Meanwhile, after being attacked by a clodding transvestite, Sabrina investigates Jacob’s sister Nina, who has escaped from an institution and she and Jacob discuss it over the world’s biggest jug of OJ.

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Jacob confided in Sabrina the truth about his Vitiman C deficiency.

The killer eventually comes to the house where the teens are staying a kills some of them, including another frontally nude guy, whose frontally nude girl ran down the hall straight into a knife… Sabrina’s dad appears to save the day and we learn something to do with Nina being raped and dying somehow. In a handy flashback, mid-rape, one of the guys just says she’s dead and leaves… How did she die? Chocolate intolerance? What? Help! To make matters worse weirder, the killer appears almost straight away at the scene and spins with his spade in hand as if competing for Gold at The Hammer in the Olympics and takes the guy’s head off!

silent3Silent Bloodnight makes little sense and two of the girls look exactly the same so I had no idea who I was dealing with at any one time. Also, the film stock may well have been left out in the rain for a fortnight as it’s so damn blurry, giving it an early 80’s look akin to trash like Satan’s Blade or Honeymoon Horror. It’s actually better than those films though, mainly because the Austrian cast all talk in English. Better than subtitles? Well…yes and no. I respect anyone who can master a language as we English-speaking natives are just too damn lazy to most of the time, but both pronunciation and choice of adjectives constantly had me smirking as Sabrina would try and make points during her terror: “something unexplained has happened!” she caws. Elsewhere, a cop assigned to protect her suggests she order a pizza, to which she responds: “what a mouth! I will complain about you!”

Bless them for trying but I had little to no idea what was happening, who most of the cast were, what they were doing there and why dungaree-farmer killed most of them. Or who the tranny-killer was. Or what became of dungaree-farmer at the end.

If you like tons of mixed-gender nudity, incomprehensible plotting, incidental stingers that sound like you’re receiving a text message, translations assumedly advised by Google and slightly blurry visuals then Silent Bloodnight is for you and nobody else. Stick it in the box under your bed with your porn, it’ll be happy there.

NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU

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noonecanhearyou2.5 Stars  2000/15/95m

“True love never dies…”

Director: John Laing / Writers: Ian Coughlan, John Laing & Craige Cronin / Cast: Kelly McGillis, Kate Elliott, Emily Barclay, Tom Huntington, Kieren Hutchison, Barry Corbin, Daniel Gillies, Craig Parker, Jaime Passier-Armstrong, Joanna Morrison.

Body Count: 10

A killer is carving up families in the small town of Riverhead. It appears the perp is after the gal-pals of high schooler Lisa, whose mum Trish (Kelly) is a local radio journo and trusted media outlet of the bumbling police force. Suspects include teenage hormone bomb Dirk, the aggressively sexual boyfriend of the victims so far and also a hitchhiking visitor to town, who repeatedly tries to contact Kelly and her daughters to ‘give her a present’.

There’s not much to this after-school-special-type export from New Zealand, which masquerades as an American production with a bit of stab and drip added towards the finale, which sees several possible culprits and Kelly’s sprogs hauled up in their remote home during a thunderstorm while mum’s remedial driving skills mean she might not be home in time to stop the carnage.

Points are deducted for showing a picture of the killer on the DVD box (differing to the one above), even if his identity is pretty damn obvious from the first time he appears on screen, but otherwise No One Can Hear You is an inoffensive shelf-filler that few people will ever see. Kelly deserves a better showcase than this.

Blurb-of-interest: Daniel Gillies was later in Evil Remains.

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