Author Archives: Hud

Stock Background Characters 101: The Oracle

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In this feature, we examine the lesser beings of the slasher movie realm, which, if you’re making your own slasher film, could provide a good cast roster for you.

No killer or final girl profiles here, this is a celebration of those underlings who made the most of their fleeting flirtation with stardom. And usually died.

Let us recall with love, THE ORACLE

“There is a force at work here. It is not human and it is unspeakably EVIL!”

Overview: If you are a teenager and you live in a town that has a creepy old house, summer camp, closed down asylum or cemetery with a blood-soaked past, chances are there’ll be some old drunk who remembers what went down X years earlier and never stops rabbiting on about it. Everyone ignores him or her, especially when they begin spouting warnings that history is about to repeat itself and you – as one of the teenagers – are fucked if you go meddling. This person is an Oracle.

Linguistic Snapshot: “You’re doomed if you go exploring the old MacKenzie abatoir… It’s cursed! It’s evil! Nobody who goes in ever comes back again… Mark my words or you’ll be sorry tooooo!”

Styling: Because the Oracle is normally old and generally looked upon with disdain by the rest of the townsfolk, he or she is normally adorned in smelly old-person clothes, maybe a kooky hat or a cloak, oversized glasses and a crooked smile with some missing teeth amidst a cloud of alcohol-scented air.

Hallmarks: Being the only person around who actually has a Scooby about what’s going to happen, the Oracle maintains a sort of creepy aura of foresight and will either rock back on their porch chair with a smug ‘I told y’all so!’ grin or make the error of following the sexy teens to either A). perv or B). be proven right and succeed only in C). getting killed early on.

Downfall: Every oar-sticker-inner gets their comeuppance at one point or another. Take Oracle extraordinaire Crazy Ralph for example; he told the counsellors of Camp Crystal Lake that they were doomed and was right. Five years later – and in exactly the same clothes – he tried to go for a twofer and ended up pissing off JV and getting garrotted to death.

When you think about it, the Oracle is actually trying to help rather than hinder: from Dr Loomis’ cryptic rants about Michael Myers being the devil incarnate to the local psychic Jazelle in Jeepers Creepers, these folk are putting their own lives on the line for the sake of half a dozen stupid-ass teenagers.

However, sometimes the Oracle isn’t so pleasant. Take Happy from My Bloody Valentine, for example, goes off on anyone who dares disrespect the legend of Harry Warden and decides to teach those no-good young folk a lesson with a scary prank, which backfires on his ass big time!

Others give in and try to get the hell outta Dodge, much to the amusement of those around them: the old lady who’s crushed by her own house in Children of the Corn II (though not before uttering the excellent line, “Have you ever seen…evil?”); Estes the handyman from I Still Know What You Did Last Summer – they both at least had the sense to flee, albeit too late in both cases.

Genesis: Dr Loomis and Crazy Ralph are doubtlessly the earliest seers-of-doom in Halloween and Friday the 13th respectively: both went out of their way to warn folk of the impending danger, one out of known-authority and the other as the town crazy, but it’s worth noting they were both right and survived to tell everyone so. Presumably over and over and over as old folk do.

Legacy: The Oracle became a bit of a rely-on cliche in later years, cropping up with cryptic nonsense here and there, from the Ralph-lite Deckhand of Jason Takes Manhattan, to all the bartenders and shopkeepers who eyeball nubile newcomers on roadtrips to their deaths…

The most recent example was a toned-down example in the Friday remake – the old lady who appears to know about Jason Voorhees living out in them there woods. Her policy being that if they leave him alone, he’ll leave them alone. No questions asked. Stupid teens come along and try to steal his pot, he takes action.

And less stereotypically, there was the college kid who appears at the dorm room door of Sara’s in Halloween: Resurrection, who tries to scare the girls with the briefest of retellings before descending into some stoner-comic impression. What was that about?

Anyway, any good old fashioned slasher flick should have a crazy old biddy to warn people and stuff. Cliche or not, it’s always fun to watch the arrogant teenagers shrug off the advice and go to the haunted logging camp anyway. Long live you, Oracle! (unless you decide to follow the kids and end up with a hacksaw in the mouth).

Accidents *will* happen…

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FINAL DESTINATION 2

4 Stars  2006/15/87m

“For every beginning there is an end.”

Director: David R. Ellis / Writers: Jeffrey Reddick, Eric Bress & J. Mackye Gruber / Cast: Ali Larter, A.J. Cook, Michael Landes, Tony Todd, T.C. Carson, Keegan Connor Tracy, Jonathan Cherry, Lynda Boyd, James N. Kirk, Justina Machado, David Paetkau, Sarah Carter.

Body Count: 11

Dire-logue: “If Clear was right then Nora and Tim are going to be attacked by pigeons!”

Cementing the decade’s most popular horror franchise (unless you prefer Saw?), Final Destination 2 is probably the most accessible entry in the series, pulling together the elements that have made the series so successful. It’s not as good as the first one but it’s definitive in being the best example of what the FD brand is all about, including the tie-in novels, which borrow much of the lore from what happens in this film.

On the flipside, the beginnings of what drowned the more recent sequels in the cliche tide were pulled in with the same net: tits, short cuts to defining characters and dumb jokes – none of which were present first time around.

Set on the first anniversary of the explosion of Flight 180, the subsequent events that befell Alex, Clear and friends have become a Chinese Whisper, so when Spring Break teenager Kimberly (Cook) foresees her own death and those of many others in a highway pile-up, history looks to be repeating itself. As Devon Sawa did last time, our psychic takes steps to prevent being caught up in the carnage, meaning that the pesky force that is Death has got it in for her and the on-ramp patrons who were denied access to the road.

Final Destination 2 essentially takes the bus-splatter shock from before and repeats it ad nauseum with a whole new array of every day items conspiring to take down the mixed group of death-evaders: this means there is death by ladder, elevator, air-bag and barbecue among others, all of which are more gruesomely played out than before – Death has upped the ante.

You can sort of sense a struggle with its own IQ here. The theories of mortality are absent in favour of a jacked-up body count and more bloodletting, which clashes with some of the smarter aspects of the plot, mainly the good ‘outward-ripple’ theory discovered halfway through. Unfortunately, its effect is dampened by clunky acting and then it’s all but forgotten about in Final Destination 3, which could’ve further explored the consequences of the premonitions. And there’s still no questioning just what force provides these foresights in the first place? Life working against Death? Why don’t they visit a psychic rather than Tony Todd?

Ali Larter’s return as an embittered hard-ass is great and A.J. Cook makes a functional heroine while the very easy-on-the-eye Landes floats around in the background like a spare part. Everyone else fulfills their obligatory pin-cushion bond, becoming targets for every possible piece of flying shrapnel that are hellbent on hacking, slashing, severing and dissecting them.

Effects wise, the car crash is nothing short of sensationally realised though some of the CG that ensues further through the film becomes a bit ropey (especially fire) – though the grue is full on, especially in the first two demises, which make perfect use of our innocuous looking surroundings. You’ll never look at your kitchen appliances or dental surgery decor in the same way again.

The next two Destinations ramped up the sadism in favour of coherent plotting and characters we care about, whether or not the fifth film will revert to the slightly more thought-out fundamentals of the first two films remains to be seen but, to date, FD2 represents the commercial peak of the franchise.

Blurbs-of-interest: A.J. Cook was the final girl, Molly, in Ripper: Letter from Hell; David Paetkau appeared in I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer; Tony Todd cameos all over the show and can be found in both Hatchet films, iMurders, Scarecrow Slayer, Jack the Reaper, Hell Fest, Candy Corn, and will return for the fifth FD movie; David R. Ellis directed The Final Destination which was written by Bress and Reddick (the latter created the original story). Shaun Sipos, one of Kim’s friends in the car, later turned up in Texas Chainsaw 3D.

Is there something you’re trying to tell us?

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Something new today as Vegan Voorhees hands over the writing reins to Ross Tipograph, who looks into some of the most popular horror flicks that seemed to be hiding parts of themselves in a subtextual closet with only a little more subtlety than this:

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The horror and slasher genres are notoriously for carrying weirdly sexual undertones… It’s really unavoidable, when you think about it: One predatory killer (always a man, or for shock value – gasp! – a woman) stalks and obsesses over a group of usually gorgeous, usually young characters, waits for that one dark night or empty hallway moment, gets up to them real close in a one-on-one moment and… penetrates them, usually with something sharp and phallic (if not shooting, decapitating, or creatively terminating them in any way other than stabbing).

The sexual is imagery is RAMPANT! So, as a focus, we’ll take a look at an underrated way of observing the horror & slasher genre(s), through this sexual lens:

THE TOP UNINTENTIONALLY GAY HORROR MOVIES

1.  A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985)

This sequel was abysmal, not only because it was following / attempting to cash in on one of the greatest horror movie classics of all time, but also because it was just downright horrible and unwatchable. The entire movie follows one guy, Jesse (played by Mark Patton), as he tries to escape the taunting, phallic knives of predatory Freddy Krueger.

First of all – why the hell is Freddy setting his sights on a teenage boy? In almost every other Elm Street movie, Freddy stalks a luscious young girl, staying true to the weird psycho-sexual stereotypes of movies – a creepy man chasing a girl. So, what is the aggressive, arguably heterosexual genre audience supposed to gain from Freddy chasing a guy? The answer is: nothing. Except for weird parallels to gay porn.

At one point, Jesse has a nightmare that takes place in a bar with his gym teacher… Which leads to a naked shower scene with said character… Which leads to a series of wet and wild ass-whippings. In another scene, Freddy literally emerges from Jesse’s body, tearing through his flesh, coming out from within. Explanations? None.

Why confide in your girlfriend when your unnaturally-hot sparring partner will do?

2. The Lost Boys (1987)

(What is it with these eighties movies?)

A cult classic with some definite gay undertones, The Lost Boys is awesome. It is also, yes, kinda gay. The brooding, buff Michael (Jason Patric), his eager younger brother Sam (Corey Haim), and their cool, single mom (Dianne Wiest) move to a new town on the coast of sunny California. Already, we have a queer vibe of “the outsiders” trying to fit in. And soon, they sort of do, when they meet a gang of snarling, hungry vampire teens – a group of touchy-feely guys with one hot girl (Jami Gertz), whom they virtually ignore.

The girl is so neglected, she’s actually used to lure new boys into this vampire coven. She bounces around and shows off her goods, leading these unsuspecting newcomers to a seriously scary Kiefer Sutherland, complete with bleached-blonde mulleted hair, along with Bill & Ted reject Alex Winter and others. Also, in one scene, Corey Haim has a poster hanging up in his closet of a naked Rob Lowe. Go see for yourself.

The vampire genre has always been pretty gay, drawing parallels to homosexuality with its intense man-on-man eating (seen here in The Lost Boys), secrecy and self-hatred (seen here in The Lost Boys), and post-1980 comparisons to the HIV/AIDS  crisis, passed on through blood, just like vampires (see: The Lost Boys).

"I have so much to show you, Michael..." Never trust anyone with a peroxide blonde mullet.

3. Rope (1948)

Alfred Hitchcock’s notorious attempt at a eighty-minute continuously-shot movie, tied together with a few suave editing tricks (which surely tricked the crowds of the late ‘40s) is so entertainingly, blaringly gay you can’t help but wonder if it was intentional. Taking into account the casting of two closeted Hollywood actors and the rumors of Hitchcock’s own sexuality, anything is possible.

The film opens in a Manhattan loft, where two men… do something sinful, in the dark, with the blinds closed. John Dall, one of the two, is more suave and accepting of it, lighting a cigarette after the deed is done and wanting to open the blinds. The other man, Farley Granger, is much more terrified, disgusted by this act they’ve committed together and wanting to die. What they’ve actually done is kill a man, but with lines like “Don’t open the curtains yet; let’s just stay this way for a minute,” and moments like the killers removing each others’ rubber gloves – you decide.

The movie amps up when the two guys have a dinner party with several guests, trying to keep their secret quiet and acting like nothing is wrong. It’s up to old Jimmy Stewart, their professor from their boarding school days (gay!), to figure out what’s really going on between these two men. A thrill.

"I can't believe you didn't choose orchids for the centre-spread!"

More ‘mo fun to look for:

Jeepers Creepers (2001), in which a mythical man-hungry beast stalks and eats a teenage Justin Long. Written and directed by shady gay filmmaker Victor Salva

Interview with the Vampire (1994), in which Brad Pitt, Antonio Banderas, and Tom Cruise (of course) battle for Most Theatrical Queeny Performance while sucking each others’ necks, wearing corsets and crying

Fright Night (1985), another eighties (and another vampire) entry, in which a guy who can’t have sex with his girlfriend because he’s too distracted by the charming man next door and this neighbour’s creepy, unexplained male “roommate”.

Scream (1996) – there’s always been a thing between Skeet Ulrich & Matthew Lillard. (Ever notice how Stu screams “yeah baby, get it up!” when inviting Billy to knife him? – Hud)

Ross Tipograph is a film buff and Emerson College screenwriting major. When he’s not reviewing movies, he’s writing about Halloween costumes.

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So there you have it Voorheesians, vampires are gay, Hitchcock might’ve swung wider than a pendulum and, well we all knew Elm Street 2 was one big pride parade, didn’t we?

Surgical Spirit

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DR GIGGLES

3 Stars  1992/18/95m

“The doctor is out…of his mind.”

Director: Manny Coto / Writers: Coto & Graeme Whifler / Cast: Larry Drake, Holly Marie Combs, Cliff DeYoung, Glenn Quinn, Michelle Johnson, Keith Diamond, Richard Bradford, Nancy Fish, Doug E. Doug, John Vickery, Sara Melson, Zoe Trilling, Darin Heames, Denise Barnes, Deborah Tucker, Patrick Cronin.

Body Count: 18

Dire-logue: “Get ready to take your medicine, Moorehigh: the doctor is in.”

“The town’s got a doctor and his name is Rendell, stay away from his house ‘cos he’s the doctor from hell…” So goes the jump rope chant that the residents of your common or garden American small-town-with-a-past, in this case a psychotic Doc who offed several patients trying to find a cure for his ailing wife.

35 years after it all went down, Dr Rendell’s son (Drake) – who was never found – is now a fully grown lunatic standing over six feet tall and handily escapes from his institute and returns to Moorehigh for a comedically grisly revenge on the townfolk he perceives murdered his dad.

We’re presented with a few high schoolers and an array of other people who Doc Rendell Jr. injects, impales, saws and sucks to death, always with a witty medical one-liner to accompany their demise. The teen heroine Jennifer conveniently has a heart malfunction that prompts Rendell to stalk her in the hope of achieving with her what pops couldn’t for his missus. On the way, a nosy neighbour gets the nasal probe from hell, a horny couple fail to get their rocks off with each other and a girl is gagged to death with a giant band aid.

By 1992 there was very little left to explore in slasher film territory until Scream came along and shook it all up just four years later. Much of Dr Giggles is recycled from things we’ve already seen and leans heavily on the later Elm Street‘s for its comedic roots and the likes of low-renters like Psycho Cop.

Nevertheless, Drake’s charm and the corny jokes combined with a good cast make it a pleasant diversion and it’s interesting to see a young Holly Marie Combs in one of her earliest roles as Jennifer.

Best moment: Rendell says “it’s time to do what Doctors do best,” and grabs a golf club.

Blurbs-of-interest: Larry Drake was Bubba in Dark Night of the Scarecrow (and has barely aged); Nancy Fish was Mrs Knocht in Cutting Class; Coto also directed weird Yugoslavian flick Playroom.

Hole in your soul

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MY SOUL TO TAKE

2.5 Stars  2010/108m

“Only one has the power to save their souls.”

Director/Writer: Wes Craven / Cast: Max Thieriot, Emily Meade, John Magaro, Zena Grey, Nick Lashaway, Paulina Olszynski, Denzel Whitaker, Jeremy Chu, Jessica Hecht, Frank Grillo, Raul Esparza, Danai Gurira, Harris Yulin.

Body Count: 10

Dire-logue: “If things get too hot, turn up the prayer conditioning.”

Unaninmously slated upon its US release in October 2010, Wes Craven’s first written and directed horror flick since New Nightmare holds the rather prickly honor of having the lowest grossing opening weekend for a 3D movie to date.

But then, by that October, there was barely a cinema on the planet that didn’t have at least one 3D feature playing at any given time. Piranha 3D didn’t rake in the wads that they expected and for reasons unknown, My Soul to Take was stuffed into the post-production 3D-ifying machine seemingly to bolster its chances of doing any business.

Time was, Wes Craven’s name attached should get bums on seats but the last Scream flick was a decade earlier (the fourth movie’s imminence notwithstanding) and remember if you will the mess that was Cursed? His last semi-successful output was 2005’s Red Eye, which was a pretty good distraction, if barely a horror film at all. So what went askew with My Soul to Take?

The story goes like a combo of Elm Street and 1989’s clunky Shocker: in the small township of Riverton, a family man has a schzoid-psychotic break and discovers he is the Riverton Ripper, the serial killer who has been terrorising the locale of late. He flips, slays his pregnant wife and is gunned down by the cops but won’t seem to die. In a true Halloween 4-style ambulance crash, his body disappears into the (Riverton?) river and is never seen again. Simultaneously, six women in the town go into labour – hmmm.

Sixteen years later, a group of kids known as The Riverton Seven who were all born that night gather for Ripper Day, an annual sorta rite-of-passage event. One of the kids was predictably born to the Ripper’s dead wife and seems to have inherited dad’s schizophrenia and so could just be the one who starts knocking off the others throughout the course of the day.

In the first instance, My Soul to Take plays out like any other slasher flick: we meet the meat: five boys and two girls who all turn sixteen together. Bug is instantly singled out as the lead, a quirky brooding sort who has a history of mental unbalance but is strangely the object of lust for several girls at school, including his two female birth-mates, devout Christian Penelope (who can sense something bad coming) and valley girl-lite Brittany, who bows to every command of the school Queen Bee, Fang. There’s also jock bully Brandon, token Asian Jay, blind black guy Jerome and Bug’s bestie Alex.

The high school melodrama is entertainingly surreal: Fang dictates almost everything, from who gets hit and how hard to who her following of airhead girls can and can’t have the hots for. And Bug is off the list.

There’s an amusing show-and-tell scene where Bug and Alex present a piece on the Great American Condor and get some semblance of revenge on Brandon and then things shift into horror gear proper as the teens start piling up dead, stalked and offed by a loon dressed as the Riverton Ripper (mangy coat, plastic mask and dread-like hair) who eventually decides to pay a visit to Bug’s place.

Considering the film nearly reaches two hours, it’s amazing how few scenes there are: after it gets going, we jump from murder to murder for a time and then everything else occurs at Bug’s house, where a midriff revelation about his and Fang’s relationship opens up some questions about the past before we find out just who is possessed by the Ripper’s vengeful spirit.

Up until this point, I was wondering why everyone viewed My Soul to Take so harshly. Then came the ending. I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced such a flaccid, rookie climax as this – it just…happens. Craven didn’t put the strongest finale on Elm Street and I’ve never minded that but it’s as if he got to the last page of the script and thought “bollocks! I’ve completely forgotten to think up an ending for this!” and just grabbed the nearest feasible character to make the possessee.

The gravity of how flat the ending is easily robs a star from the rating but even so, Craven’s direction feels restrained and almost pedestrian when we’re all too aware of what he’s capable of achieving on a tight budget. The film looks better than most but there’s nothing – visually or scripted – that has his stamp on it and some of the characterisations leave a lot to be desired.

Curiously, the most intriguing character is Penelope, who speaks to God as if he’s beside her and has some idea of the storm that’s coming and yet she’s rather heartlessly killed off early on. It would’ve been easy to turn her into a parody of the middle-American religious zealot but Craven succeeds in drawing out her personality, which is probably the most appealing on show, but then elects bitchy Fang as a sort of secondary hero? What gives, Wes?

Elementally, a frustrating film that seems to have arrived about fifteen years too late and a bit of a bum note for Craven, although not as dire as many have cited.

Blurbs-of-interest: Frank Grillo was in iMurders; Harris Yulin was in the Elm Street cash-in Bad Dreams; Music was by Marco Beltrami, who worked on all three Scream movies. Craven’s other slasher flicks include The Hills Have Eyes Part II and Deadly Blessing.

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