Author Archives: Hud

Last Chance Sa-Cloon(ey)

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Hey you…yeah you reading this review of Return to Horror High – before you delve in I’d like to thank you for coming by Vegan Voorhees. Your visit is much appreciated.

Google Analytics tells me how many of you stop by daily and I’d be reeeally happy if some of you could leave a comment here n’ there. No one will get bitten or devoured by piranhas but I’d certainly like some feedback – good or bad – on how things are!

Thanks again and enjoy my diatribe on why I didn’t think much of Return to Horror High…

Hud xxx

RETURN TO HORROR HIGH

1.5 Stars  1987/18/95m

“School spirit has never been this dead.”

Director: Bill Froehlich / Writers: Mark Lisson & Froehlich / Brendan Hughes, Lori Lethin, Alex Rocco, Scott Jacoby, Andy Romano, Richard Brestoff, Al Fann, Pepper Martin, Maureen McCormick, Vince Edwards, Marvin McIntyre, George Clooney.

Body Count: 9 – but then, maybe not?

Dire-logue: “You’re dead. Dead people have no motivation. They don’t…do…anything.”

I first saw Return to Horror High on a cable channel back in the 90s. I fucking hated it. Hated it with the fire of a thousand suns.

There’s a book called the Pocket Guide to Slasher Movies where the author gave this 5 out of 5 whilst somehow deciding April Fool’s Day was worthy of but one star. Typesetting error? Maybe I just had a stick up my ass about it so a good decade and a half later, I decided to give it another go to see if it still made me want to punch orphans.

Well, the outcome was slightly more favourable but, essentially, I was right the first time around: Return to Horror High is still a lame ass piece of crap whereas April Fool’s Day undoubtedly rules.

My new viewing did open me up to some “yeah okay”-ness that it’s not a badly made picture by the standards of late-80s and a couple of the gags are funny in light of the post-Scream age that we now live in: Horror High did kinda get there first on a couple of counts. But what still irks me is the story…I mean…what the fuck?

So, scrolling titles tell us that five years earlier some murders plagued Crippen High School. Never solved and the school closed until a film crew turn up to make either a documentary-style thriller or, at the insistence of sleazy producer Rocco, a blood-soaked slasher film with lots of skin. This is all well and good and we all laughed when George Clooney became the first victim but then they decide to start flitting between memories of “what happened” and their filmic interpretations thereof.

The fact that Lori Lethin plays Callie the actress as well as two teenage girl roles in the film-within-the-film soon becomes more annoying than intriguing. These memories are often punctured by someone shouting ‘cut’ or one of the crew doing something that stops the scene. A clever tactic this might be in competent hands but the unclear switches between them and the ‘aftermath’ where Pepper Martin and Maureen McCormick loiter outside the school amidst a load of bodies under bloody sheets is nauseating when someone who just died is now alive again or there’s a dream within a film within the blah blah fuck.

In a similarly obnoxious twist to the one Cry_Wolf tried to pull years later, all is not what it seems. Is anyone dead? Was the person revealed to be the killer actually the killer at all? About five twists are stacked up ready to go at the end, none of them are particularly clever and all just serve to underscore that the screenwriter in the film probably wasn’t the only one continually churning out random extra scenes that don’t fit together.

I gave it a second chance – I’m done now.

Blurbs-of-shame: Lori Lethin was in both Bloody Birthday and The Prey; Pepper Martin was in Scream (a.k.a. The Outing – 1981); Darcy DeMoss from Friday the 13th Part VI is briefly in a flashback scene as Sherry, the cheerleader being lifted up outside the school. The first assistant director was Rachel Talalay who worked on many of the Elm Street films and directed Freddy’s Dead.

Accents & Axings

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RETURN OF THE FAMILY MAN

2.5 Stars  1989/18/87m

“He’s coming home to bury the hatchet.”

Director: John Murlowski / Writers: John Fox & John Murlowski / Cast: Ron Smerczak, Liam Cundill, Michelle Constant, Adrian Galley, Terence Reis, Debra Kaye, Kurt Egelhof, Victoria Bawcombe, Dominique Moser.

Body Count: 33 – yes, thirty-three

Dire-logue: “In England, shagging means fucking.”

Holy homicide, Batman! I’ve seen some weird ones but this South African export might just outdo the lot of ’em.

Beginning with a totally superfluous shoot-out between some drug dealers, pizza delivery boy-slash-witness Alden decides to take an early vacation by joining friends Vickie and Brian, who are going away to try and mend their failing relationship. Turns out that the lush mansion they booked is not only a dilapidated heap that has also been let to another mixed-bag of teenage tourists but also was the childhood home of a cheeky mass-murderer known as The Family Man. ‘Cos he likes the kill families, I guess.

By nothing more than one of those only-in-a-slasher-film coincidences, said killer escapes from his prison bus after a decade incarcerated and immediately heads home to dwell on macabre memories. What ensues is fairly predictable…or is it?

Once the teens discover that a couple of their friends have been deadified, things go all A-Team and they make some gadget-traps meant to give the maniac a dose of his own medicine. Logically, they fail and he bumps off a few more before the survivors get their own back.

It was a while ago that I saw it but I recall it being one of those films that pretends it’s all been made in the USA when regional accents clearly tell us otherwise. However, to further confuse matters (and audiences of a discriminating ear), the tourist teens number among them natives of France, India, Ireland and an English guy who appears to be an early prototype of Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer – complete with peroxide blonde hair, black punk clobber and an attitude to match (see Direlogue).

The sky-high bodycount, a sure runner for the highest ever in the genre, isn’t all down to the killer but serves as a good distraction to the otherwise tried and tested elements of the film, which is pretty much a watch once affair.

Hotel California

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PRAY FOR MORNING

3 Stars  2006/88m

“Fear the night.”

Director / Writer: Cartney Wearn / Cast: Jonathon Trent, Jessica Stroup, Dennis Flanagan, Ashlee Turner, Udo Kier, Robert F. Lyons, Jackson Rathbone, Brandon Novitsky, Kip Martin, Rachel Veltri.

Body Count: 7

A closed-down mansion hotel with a curse on it! Ooh, I loves me summa that.

June 5th, 1984: Five high schoolers spending the night in the long since closed Royal Crescent Hotel are murdered, ending the tradition of young graduates taking this rite of passage into adulthood…

Twenty-something years later, fascinated teen Jesse and seven friends decide to break in and explore the premises for the sheer thrill of it. They’ve got crime scene photos and want to visit every murder site in the old place. Once inside, it becomes clear that all is not right with the spooky place. Decomposed body parts are found, apparent vortexes make navigation impossible, spectres appear and every time a strange shimmery light turns up, someone dies – their bones broken, the ends poking gruesomely through the epidermis.

Pray for Morning is like taking a playdough effigy of Hell Night in one hand and one of The Shining in the other hand and squashing them together until the colours merge and you can craft a mix of the two. There are some genuinely creepy visuals early on and it goes in a different direction to what’s expected, electing a supernatural villain who has magic powers at his disposal.

However, when the story knocks on the door of reincarnation we skate on to thin ice and it risks collapsing under its own weight of suspension of belief. This negative effect is lessened with interesting teen characters and some good dialogue, making it better than many other recent efforts and plus we get to see a Disney presenter’s neck broken, always a treat.

There’s essentially a degree of care here that’s often absent in low-rent body count films but it’s perhaps just that tiny bit too pretentious for its own good.

Blurbs-of-interest: Robert F. Lyons was in Dark Night of the Scarecrow; Jessica Stroup was in The Hills Have Eyes II and the horrible Prom Night remake, making this her best foray into horror thus far. Udo Kier was later in The Editor and Fall Down Dead.

Dire-logue’s Greatest Hits Volume 4: Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby – Part I

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There are so many conversations about sex in slasher films that feature perfect put-downs, epic vernacular failures and splendid stupidity that the fourth volume of Dire-logue’s Greatest Hits will have to be divided into THREE sub-volumes, kinda like if Madonna put out an entire singles collection… But no, she, Bon Jovi, Kylie, MJ et al all pike out on what their record label “believes” everyone wants to hear.

Anyway: Sex. Let’s see how funny it can be… Warning: post contains lots of naughty sex words.

AMSTERDAMNED (1988): “No more money means no more pussy… And I won’t go Dutch.”

CRY_WOLF (2005): “Tonight you could’ve gotten laid – but instead you got fucked.”

DESTROYER (1988): “Hey this is the 80’s, doll, nudity is required of everyone!”

THE GAY BED & BREAKFAST OF TERROR (2007): “You will no longer yearn for the engorged penis of a well-muscled man in uniform. From this point on you will embrace the light of God and dream of the sugar-sweet Holy vaginal walls of your soon-to-be wife…”

THE HOLLOW (2004): “Teach me the meaning of the word BONEyard…”

KILLER’S MOON (1978): “Look…you were only raped. As long as you don’t tell anyone about it you’ll be fine.”

A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 4 (1988): “Hey honey… You’re sucking on the wrong nozzle…” / “Hey-yo Needledick! I bet you’re the only guy in school suffering from penis envy.”

PIECES (1983): “The most beautiful thing in the world is smoking pot and fucking on a waterbed.”

RETURN OF THE FAMILY MAN (1989): “In England, shagging means fucking.”

SCARECROW SLAYER (2003): “You know, you have a real small penis for a guy who’s a real big dick!”

SNAPPED (2005): “So, your solution to my dilemma being ‘all men are dicks so stick yours in me?'”

TRAIN (2008): “Screw you, you un-circumsized little fuck!”

Watch a clown break down

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BLOOD HARVEST

1 Stars  1987/18/82m

A.k.a. The Marvellous Mervo

Director: Bill Rebane / Writers: Chris Vaalar, William Arthur, Ben Benson & Emil Joseph / Cast: Tiny Tim, Itonia Salchek, Dean West, Lori Minnetti, Peter Krause, Frank Benson.

Body Count: 6

“The body count alone puts it into Friday the 13th territory,” – what, six? The lowest body count in any Friday is ten. You’re having a laugh! …Well, there is a clown on the box.

In actuality, the entire central cast is made up of only six characters and about two suspects as we “try” to suss out who is hanging out the locals of a small farming town to dry. Hint: the surprise count is zero.

Without question, the mystery has something to do with final girl Jill’s missing parents, who were blamed for sending all the farmers in town bankrupt. Weirdo clown Mervo – played by late Top Toe Through the Tulips songster Tiny Tim, here looking like a fired member of Kiss – is naturally the prime suspect. He hangs around singing to himself after flipping out because of his folks’ suicide. Jill, on the other hand, spends virtually the entire movie in her low-cut, loose-fitting, mini-skirted nightdress or naked.

Blood Harvest was cut by well over four minutes before reaching our shores on video in 1989 but would anyone really care about seeing that lost footage? It can’t make this abortion of a project any more appealing. That said, there are only two on screen murders anyway although the potential eeriness of the small farm town is used effectively enough but this one should be left unfertilized.

As with all lost 80’s horror films, the resident future star here is Peter Krause, most notable for his leading role in Six Feet Under.

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