Author Archives: Hud

Trade-a-Life II

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Sometimes when watching a slasher pic there’ll be a nice person who dies and I’ll be sad about it for ten or twelve minutes. In recent years horror’s insistence that all people bar heroes are tossers has meant this is rarely the case anymore but way-back-when it wasn’t uncommon for sympathetic victims to pile up along with their more promiscuous, pot-smoking, more sinful buddies. It smarts more if someone who damn well should’ve been turned into a giant pin cushion makes it out unscathed.

Hence, here are three such examples where I’d gladly play God and swap one of the survivors for someone who bought the farm… Humongous spoilers follow.

THE PROWLER

Joseph Zito’s nihilistic little splatter movie may be largely a bore-fest punctuated by some excellent grue but it did offer up a strange little moment of trickery where a teen boy and girl, who I’m calling HornySexCouple for lack of a better understanding of their purpose, creep away from supervision to do the dirty in the basement. A classic slasher flick error.

Meanwhile, nice teech Miss Allison (Donna Davis) goes to look for a missing (and in fact dead) student. The camera cuts between both parties challenging us to guess who’s gonna get it. We watch from behind blurry foreground objects HornySexCouple get in on while Miss Allison discovers a bloody pool where the now-dead chick was slashed up.

Alas, Miss Allison is hijacked on the way back to safety by the killer and gets a blade to the neck while HornySexCouple, it turns out, were being watched by the local perv rather than the psycho. A cruel trick on a nice character.

HornySexCouple were just non-dimensional fodder who would’ve bolstered the rather low body count and Miss Allison should’ve lived to twirl another day in her delightful pink-with-black-shapes dress.

SLEEPAWAY CAMP III: TEENAGE WASTELAND

I actually have nothing against eventual Tiffany-lite heroine Marcia (Tracy Griffith, Mel’s half-sis), she who along with Tony (Mark Oliver), are the only campers at Camp New Horizons who make it out in one piece after puritanical transsexual psycho-loon Angela does away with the rest, who are participating in a meeting of the privileged and not-so youths in an “exercise of sharing.”

Tony is from the less-privileged group, while Marcia is middle class all the way, and herein lies my objection: bad guys can survive but final girls almost always have to be good, moralistic and girly. So I champion Arab (Jill Terashita) as the preferred choice to Marcia.

Arab has ‘tude, silky long hair and a bitchin’ leather jacket. She’d have kicked Angela’s ass if she hadn’t fallen for her trick and lost her head in the process. In fact, looking back at the film, Arab didn’t actually commit any particular ‘sin’ of the type Angela is always so keen to act on.

Although, I should point out neither can hold a candle to Sleepaway Camp II‘s final girl, Molly, played by the lovely Renee Estevez.

FRIDAY THE 13TH (the remake)

Were you sad when final-girl-for-most-of-it Jenna (Danielle Panabaker) became nothing more than a bit of meat stuck to the end of Jason’s machete? Even though I saw her demise coming, it was still a rare ‘awww’ moment for a Friday film, where characters seldom graduate beyond well-trodden stereotypes who we don’t care much about.

Why swap her with Clay, you ask? Well, I loves me some Amanda Righetti in The Mentalist so I can’t bring myself to trade her in for Jenna but then I thought, why couldn’t there have been two final girls for like the first time ever (unless you count Bloody Murder 2 or the Scream movies)?

There’s nothing wrong with Jared Padalecki as the lead but in Jason movies, the main character should really be a girl who channels some inner-Xena to kick ass. A 6’4″ buff guy doesn’t quite press the right buttons but on this one I’m fairly forgiving and it’s clear that Chewie (Aaron Yoo) was the best character by a mile anyway.

Yes? No? Still reeling from my inclusion of Alice last time? Leave me a comment and let’s duke it out.

Murder, Midgets & Misogyny

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SLEEPLESS

3.5 Stars  2001/18/113m

Director: Dario Argento / Writers: Argento, Franco Ferrini & Carlo Lucarelli / Cast: Max von Sydow, Stefano Dionisi, Chiara Caselli, Gabriele Lavia, Rossella Falk, Paolo Maria Scalondro, Roberto Zibetti, Roberto Accornero, Barbara Lerici, Guido Morbello, Massimo Sarchielli.

Body Count: 12

This review is dedicated to Ross of the excellent Anchorwoman in Peril!, a real Gift-Horsley who began overseeing his New Year’s resolution of familiarising me with Italian giallo – a resolution made on my behalf by Ross. But if such involuntary resolutions produce free DVDs then bring on 2012.

I’m not particularly unfamiliar with giallo, I’ve seen maybe two dozen or so films from the slashier end of the subset but I’ve yet to see one that’s, you know, massively converted me into some loose-lipped advocate of Italiano horror. Yeah, even Suspiria – it was okay. But anyway, on to the freebie that was Sleepless…

Compared to the other Argento slasher flicks I’ve seen (Tenebrae, Opera, Phenomena, Trauma), it’s functional in terms of plotting, no more or less so than the others but where it truly succeeds – indeed where all the aforementioned examples succeed – is in the visuals. Slasher films would be so much richer a subgenre were all directors as focused on presentation as Argento is. The plot, however, doesn’t offer much we haven’t seen before, albeit an interesting and engaging little mystery…

A long-thought solved case of serial murder that occurred around Turin in 1983 – credited to dead dwarfed writer of twisted horror Vincenzo de Fabritiis – begin to reoccur seventeen years later when a hooker accidentally makes off with a dossier of the killer’s handiwork. In what’s clearly the film’s best sequence, she is tormented and murdered on the completely empty train back to the city, as is her roommate, and the old killings begin all over again.

Retired and aged detective Moretti (von Sydow) who investigated the original murders is brought back into the fold and contacts the grown up son of one of the previous victims (who suffered a grisly case of death-by-broken-clarinet) and the pair begin looking into the possibility that Vincenzo isn’t actually dead.

More slayings ensue, each of them left with a paper cut-out of a farm animal that corresponds to an old poem while Giacomo (the son) reconnects with his old flame, much to the annoyance of her dorky boyfriend. But who is the killer? What is his motive? Why are all the female characters in the film so fucking stupid?

I mean, really… what keeps me at arms-length with Argento’s work is his portrayal of women as dumbfucks who can’t operate locks on doors, fall over a lot, and drop the contents of their over-stuffed purses, leave their things behind so they have to go back for them, say they don’t require company walking home but then act all skittish and jump out of their skin at every little sound… Meanwhile, the ranks of idiotic male counterparts go largely unpunished despite acting like prize pricks – they’re exempted from the slashes of the killer’s blade. It’s annoying and goes against the the story by crowbarring these unlikely simpletons into the complex nature of what’s actually going on.

This issue brushed aside, Sleepless is an above average slasher film with a nice surprise ending that, for once, isn’t direly predictable, aided by the film having limitless background characters who could be the killer. The connection to the murders two decades earlier is neatly tied off in a believable way and it pretty much all makes sense. How hardcore fans of Argento’s see this alongside his earlier, more famous, more bloodthirsty work is a mystery to me but I can say with certainty that I liked it, I just wish the man himself would turn out a film where the victims were primarily stupid men and the women saved the day, or some gay blokes – hey, it could happen!

One final word on it, there was a brief laugh out loud moment when, almost out of nowhere, this person appeared:

She just…pops up, spinning to the camera before we cut back to something else. Look how happy she is. And she’s a waitress. Isn’t she supposed to be surly and annoyed? It looks like she works in one of those ‘theme’ establishments so at the very least she should be hocking up phlegm globs in the fries. Again, Argento’s talent for representing folk fails on this count.

Pant-Soiling Scenes #17: FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2

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My earliest Friday related memory is seeing a TV spot for a Halloween showing of The Final Chapter when I was in Florida circa 1989: it featured the scene where Jason bursts through the window and grabs Corey Feldman and also the re-used footage of the campfire tale from the opening montage. I was only about 10 so couldn’t watch.

Years later when I became dependent on an almost daily Friday-fix, I kept expecting these scenes to show up. Neither were in Part 1 (and I was also staggered to find that neither was Jason!) and by the time I saved up for my VHS of Part 2 I was to find that that window scene was also absent. The Final Chapter would turn out to be the last of the original films I tracked down. But…the creepy campfire story, it was present along with some of the most effective jump-scares I’ve ever encountered…

And so it comes to this: my favourite scene in any movie ever. I love this moment so much. Sure, it’s predictable now but the first two or three times I watched it, it succeeded in making me jump outta my skin.

Ginny hides from bag-headed (and so even creepier) Jason in a bathroom that can’t be locked. The soundtrack maintains a tense string note that seems to go on forever as she listens through the door and slowly…sloooowly…reaches for the window… As Vera Dika’s dissection of how these films work keyed in on, we wonder where Jason might’ve gotten to in the meantime. Oh, you’ll find out!

The fact that Amy Steel is without a doubt the best final girl in the history of the genre aids this remarkably well choreographed scene and those that follow as she runs past the camera and into another room. These films might’ve been cheap but they were certainly not hack jobs made up of rubbish edits, crappy synths and ketchup squirts – some real craft went into making them tense and, in the case of this scene, downright frightening, something all too absent in todays boardroom-produced box-ticking exercices that pass for horror.

Read my full review for further ranting.

Who killed Cock Robin, possums?

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CASSANDRA

2.5 Stars  1987/18/89m

“Cassandra can see the future, you may not want to!”

Director: Colin Eggleston / Writers: Eggleston, John Ruane & Chris Fitchett / Cast: Tessa Humphries, Briony Behets, Shane Briant, Lee James, Susan Barling, Kit Taylor, Tim Burns.

Body Count: 5

Available on video cassette. We’ll never see those words at the foot of a movie poster again, likely. I miss the 80s. Let’s all grow our hair into dried out bouffants and pretend we’re still there. In Australia. Being stalked.

Dream over, this arty export from down under from the producer of 1980’s Stage Fright (a.k.a. Nightmares) mixes wannabe-Argento stylings with the plot of The Initiation, which sounds a bit like swirling bechamel sauce around with ice cream. Ugh.

Things begin creepily enough with the suicide of a young woman as witnessed by a small child, seemingly at the command of an evil little boy to the sounds of a siren-like score, further proving that children are, in fact, inherently evil. This is the dream that torments titular heroine, Cassandra – the daughter of a fashion photographer who is having an affair with his pregnant model.

When Cassandra discovers them together, the family portrait begins to crack. Then the model is murdered, accompanied by a message in her mirror that reads; “Who killed Cock Robin?” – child-like dialogue from the nightmare. Weird. Cassandra finds sanctuary in the company of her friend Robert and later discovers that her parents are, in truth, siblings and the woman who committed suicide in the dream was her birth mum.

Meanwhile, the knife-toting killer does away with a few others, including a good decapitation with a shovel, before we reach the disappointingly anti-climactic finale in which the obvious conclusive elements are revealed to an audience who figured it out twenty minutes earlier. Well, all of it bar the Cock Robin references anyway.

Cassandra is a prime example of those weird Australian horror movies you get every now and then. They make the most of the often never ending landscapes that just ring the dread and fear bells long n’ loud with the abject nothingness of life beyond city limits. It’s ambitious, littered with visual trickery that peaks during the stalking sequences around the photo studio and is let down mostly by a slack first half hour and the predictable ending. They should’ve tried a bit harder to conceal the killer’s identity, which is made all the more glaringly evident by the limited number of characters. Like all arty horror things, nice to look at but a bit skeletal otherwise.

Blurbs-of-interest: Briony Behets was in Stage Fright. Lead actress Tessa Humphries is the daughter of Barry Humphries, better known as Dame Edna Everidge. Colin Eggleston also directed Innocent Prey, which also featured Kit Taylor.

Trade-a-Life

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Sometimes when watching a slasher pic there’ll be a nice person who dies and I’ll be sad about it for ten or twelve minutes. In recent years horror’s insistence that all people bar heroes are tossers has meant this is rarely the case anymore but way-back-when it wasn’t uncommon for sympathetic victims to pile up along with their more promiscuous, pot-smoking, more sinful buddies. It smarts more if someone who damn well should’ve been turned into a giant pin cushion makes it out unscathed.

Hence, here are three such examples where I’d gladly play God and swap one of the survivors for someone who bought the farm… Humongous spoilers follow.

THE BURNING

Yeah, that’s right – let’s switch whiny Peeping Tom Alfred (Brian Backer) – who somehow survives! – for shy, well-meaning but slightly naive Karen (Carolyn Houlihan), she with whom we become acquainted early on, tricking us into believing she’ll be the one to face off with Cropsy. That is, until she disrobes in full view of the camera and gets her throat cut with his pointy shears in a particularly spiteful demise.

I’m all for Final Boys every now and then but Alfred ain’t got it – he is saved by Todd anyway, who does most of the legwork, and adds almost nothing to the mix and should’ve gotten the shear blades through the nuts for his penchant for perving.

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4: THE DREAM MASTER

This could be an unpopular one as Alice (Lisa Wilcox) successfully took on Freddy Krueger not once, but twice and lived to tell the tale. However, after the ass-kicking Nancy and Patricia Arquette’s Kristen, it’s like the writers of The Dream Master dug out an old American Gothic painting and decided the heroine should be all dowdy and feeble. So yeah, she grows a pair and wins the war later on but I’d rather have seen uber-dork Sheila (Toy Newkirk) take that journey.

She of oversized glasses and a sort of Janet Jackson-lite ensemble, Sheila may be even weaker than Alice Plain n’ Tall at the offset but would undoubtedly be the kind of black final girl we’ve been in need of for so many years: smart, sweet and unassuming.

HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION

Conversely, I think a lot of people who watched the eighth Halloween movie through distraught eyes would’ve been happy with anyone surviving in place of Busta Rhymes, who surfs a wave of cliches through the movie until only he and willowy heroine Sara are left alive.

But let us look to Rudy (Sean Patrick Thomas) who isn’t given much to do in the film but thankfully is not turned into a ghetto stereotype by the script. Instead, Rudy and his gal pals merrily join the webcast group and he’s smart enough to toss spices into Michael Myers’ eyes – something that hadn’t been tried before – shame it didn’t work though… In any other movie, the guy who tries to use martial arts or some other physical skill to best the killer (see Julius in Friday the 13th Part VIII for example) is usually swatted away like a gnat – unless he’s a well-known “musician” who probably only signed on with a clause that he wasn’t killed off. Boooo.

Agree? Disagree? Someone I missed? Drop a comment and let me know!

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