Author Archives: Hud

Where are Brennan & Booth when you need them?

BONES

 3 Stars  2001/18/93m

“This Dogg’s got a bone to pick.”

Director: Ernest Dickerson / Writers: Adam Simon & Tim Metcalfe / Cast: Snoop Dogg, Pam Grier, Michael T. Weiss, Bianca Lawson, Khalil Kain, Clifton Powell, Ricky Harris, Sean Amsing, Merwin Mondesir, Katharine Isabelle, Ronald Selmour, Erin Wright.

Body Count: 13


A sort of Blaxploitation reworking of themes from A Nightmare on Elm Street (and also from New Line, no less) in which a group of ambitious siblings purchase creepy gothic house in a bad neighbourhood where they plan to open a nightclub. The house contains a legend of its own as the murder and burial place of 70’s big cheese Jimmy Bones, who was shot and shanked by a group of drug pushers with whom Jimmy refused to play ball with.

His skeleton is uncovered and, post dog-mauling and rain of maggots, he sets about taking revenge on his killers, who have taken the once progressive berg and turned it into a rotting ghetto.

With almost a full hour before Bones rises from the grave, there’s mucho suspicious padding and hard to follow characters (most of whom die) before things go totally Krueger-ville when the final few parties involved are sucked into a parallel dimension to duke it out with help from Bones’ psychic ex-beau (Grier in a gruesome green all-in-one for the finale) and his unknowing daughter, Cynthia (Buffy alumnus Lawson).

More than anything, Bones stands out from the pack by sgiting the usual white middle-class setting (which is duly referenced a la Jada Pinkett’s ‘exclusion’ rant at the beginning of Scream 2) to the nightmarish streets of a decaying urban hellhole where drugs and guns are plentiful and people have little to lose. However, the out of place middle class brothers and their whiter-than-white sister adequately paint a picture of hope through determination that tries to pass itself off as a subtextual undercurrent…

Not as annoying as most other rapper-in-a-horror-film efforts, listen out for the funny “KFC is run by the KKK” speech.

Blurb-of-interest: Katharine Isabelle was Gibb in Freddy vs Jason and was also in See No Evil 2 and Ginger Snaps (and maybe the sequels, I’ve only seen the first one).

Stock Background Characters 101: The Loyal Best Friend

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’s give it up for THE LOYAL BEST FRIEND

Overview: Every girl needs a best friend – or BFF as “today’s youth” may call it. Every Final Girl really needs a best friend, someone who can make her feel better about that guy she thinks is stalking her. Unfortunately, a true friend’s work is never done and she (or even he) will usually end up making the ultimate sacrifice and dying for friendship.

Linguistic Snapshot: “I know you’re having trouble with Bobby and, even though I don’t like him much and wanted to stay home tonight, I’ll come with you to the party at the old mill to support you. After all, we’re friends aren’t we?”

Styling: The Loyal Best Friend is often a diluted version of the Final Girl, only not was watchful and paranoid and is usually up for a good time, more so than her slightly introverted, awkward best pal. In the 90s, LBF was frequently the outgoing, outspoken, slightly less sensible one of the pair – look at Sidney’s gal pal Tatum in Scream as well as Helen in I Know What You Did Last Summer.

Hallmarks: Being the best friend to the Final Girl means that LBF is a lively, oft-carefree spirit who has a boyfriend that she has next to no troubles with compared to the Final Girl, who is either too shy for boys or is constantly being messed around by her man or pressured to put out.

LBF does not judge, she supports. And sometimes she is more than a single entity, as the little gaggles of friends in Prom Night and He Knows You’re Alone illustrate, although there will always be the one girl who is closer and more understanding of the heroine than the others. Not that it’ll help her much, although she’ll doubtlessly outlive the less important friend.

friends

Downfall: Going where your friend goes when there’s a killer after her is a dangerous manoeuvre as those around her have a habit of dropping dead. Most people would be like, “fuck this shit, I’m off to Hawaii!” but not the Loyal Best Friend – she comes along, plays her part, and is thanked with a knife in the head.

Alternatively, it is her carefree nature that gets her into trouble. As the killer is clearly after the Final Girl, why should she be in any danger, right? Look again as Tatum or Heather’s faithful babysitter Julie in Wes Craven’s New Nightmare – both are there for their friend despite perhaps not quite believing in the threat of the killer and then…THWACK! Dead.

Genesis: Slasher films have almost always revolved around groups of happy young women, from the sorority house in Black Christmas to the trio of Annie, Lynda and Laurie in Halloween. There’s almost always been a dependable female character whom the Final Girl can share a heart to heart with when boyfriends, parents and all manner of other people let her down (or die), only to have this friend snatched away so cruelly, giving Laurie, or Jess, or Amy, or Sarah the final push towards violently striking back at the killer when said friend’s body falls out of the wardrobe.

The first all-boxes-ticked Loyal Best Friend was probably Patty from My Bloody Valentine. While best mate Sarah was torn between two suitors and didn’t want to involve herself in festivities, it was Patty who kept things upbeat, sticking by her side through the night and, heartbreakingly, becoming the last victim – getting a pick-axe in her belly right in front of Sarah.

There’s also Mitchy in Terror Train, best friend and roommate of heroine Alana, who protects her friend’s emotions at all costs but is let down by her own drunken antics and hedonistic ways!

Legacy: Unlike some other fad-characters of the genre, the doomed best friend has, ahem, ‘survived’ to continue into the millennium, albeit with a few tweaks along the way. In Bride of Chucky, she became a he, a gay he, no less, who helped out Final Girl Jade and was at least spared being murdered by a thirty-six inch plastic doll, instead getting run over by a truck!

Elsewhere, the best friend has turned out to be not so pally after all and reveals herself to be the master of deception – she’s the killer!!! All the back-patting, kind words and hugging that Natalie received from Brenda in Urban Legend was faked! She hates her and wants her dead in the ultimate betrayal. Hell, if you’re boyfriend turns out to be the psycho that’s bad enough, but you’re confidante?? Harsh, man, harsh.

So the scape for the supporting role as the ‘nearly-heroine’ or the girl-who-would-be-the-final-girl-if-the-final-girl-was-away-for-the-weekend is a vast playing field made up of the ghosts of hundreds of do-gooders who just wanted to be a good friend and make sure everyone had fun.

We salute your memory, Loyal Best Friend, for you were taken from us too soon!

I Best Be Knowin’ What Y’all Did Last Summer

DARK NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW

3.5 Stars  1981/96m

Director: Frank De Felitta / Writers: J.D. Feigelson & Butler Handcock / Cast: Charles Durning, Lane Smith, Robert F. Lyons, Claude Earl Jones, Larry Drake, Tonya Crowe, Jocelyn Brando, Tom Taylor.

Body Count: 6

Dire-logue: “The only official thing you ever done is lick stamps!”


TV movies used to be, y’know, good! No, really! Before the flux of home video in the 80s, more effort went into entertaining the masses via the faithful idiot box and so this slow burn horror from Halloween of 1981 is way more than your average SyFy CG-fest. I mean, hot damn, this film gave me the creeps.

Larry Drake is Bubba, a 36-year-old small town hick with the mental age of a little leaguer, who is best friends with ten-year-old Marylee. They make daisy chains in fields, sing songs, and skip around like all healthy, outdoorsy kids should, much to the annoyance of local mailman and wannabe big-fish Otis, who’s just waitin’ for that day when Bubba is caught undressing the little girl.

When Marylee is savaged by a neighbourhood dog and reported dead, everyone naturally assumes that Otis’s prediction has come true and he gathers a troupe of fat-ass friends who gather guns and bloodhounds and chase down poor Bubba, who hides inside his mama’s scarecrow, helpless when the quartet of rednecks spray him with bullets, literally seconds before a call comes in over the radio informing them that Marylee has regained consciousness and relayed her story of the dog.

The men are put on trial and manage to gain an acquittal based on a fabricated story of self defense but, as Bubba’s grieving mama yells as she’s dragged from the courtroom, there are other kinds of justice in the world.

Dark Night of the Scarecrow, up until now, plays like a smalltown melodrama with themes of intolerance and blind hate – it’s not difficult to imagine people like this still existing today to hunt down outcasts based on race, creed or what gender of person they sleep with. There’s a sort of wicked satisfaction that they’re going to suffer for this that makes you want to lean in over a single candle flame, rub your hands together and cackle.

The film really gets its creep on at the halfway marker when the first of the guilty party notices a scarecrow, identical to Bubba, in his pasture. Accusations fly, Otis commands his disciples to stay away to avoid looking guilty, and later that evening an ‘accident’ occurs.

Paranoia of the standard ‘someone knows what we did’ subset ensues to great effect: the other men are immediately superstitious, convinced that the scarecrow is Bubba, back from the grave. Otis, on the other hand, is happy to blame anyone and everyone else: Bubba’s mama, the upset prosecutor, even little Marylee – who tells him, in no uncertain terms, that she knows what he did. Yes! Suck on that mailman ‘letter carrier’!

Weird things continue to happen, pushing an increasingly sweaty Otis to desperate measures in order to cover his own fat ass as his pals continue to drop dead in interesting ways. The scene with Philby is super-creepy and the ending… Argh! They really took some cues from Spielberg’s method of keeping the monster off camera and put them to good use here as Otis – naturally the last to believe – is made a believer.

To really review this film would be to ruin it to some degree so you’ll just have to see for yourself how basic common sense in observing what is scary rather than shocking can give a likely thought to be forgotten late nighter something of a cult following. The cast helps too: Durning makes a good, smirking villain and it’s interesting to see a young(er) Lane Smith (he played Chief White in The New Adventures of Superman) and Marlon Brando’s big sis plays Bubba’s protective mama. Drake doesn’t overplay the role of the mentally disabled Bubba either – there’s a heartbreaking fear in his eyes as Otis and his dinosaurs of the apocalypse ready themselves to open fire.

Charles Durning in… When the Mailman who Shot Your Son Calls

It’s a testament to the film’s quality that a ‘meagre’ TV film packs more unsettling content than a dozen big budget features with ten times the cash injection. Dark Night of the Scarecrow is a real product of its time: it would bore a modern audience to death were it new but for jaded oldies who thought everything good from the 80s had already been on DVD for a decade might find something nostalgically great here.

Don’t confuse it with the 1995 flick Night of the Scarecrow.

Blurbs-of-interest: Charles Durning was in both When a Stranger Calls and its sequel and also iMurders; Robert F. Lyons was in Pray for Morning; Larry Drake was Dr Giggles.

Pant-Soiling Scenes #15: THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK

Not a horror film as such than a film with some horror elements to it. I actually really love the JP trilogy – yeah the effects look a bit shoddy these days but Spielberg, as ever, is capable of delivering some heart-stopping moments – and this particular scene from the oft-overlooked middle film of the trio could win an award for best thought-up shit-your-pants-predicament.

Here, as the T-Rex’s take revenge on a super-sized trailer for ‘kidnapping’ their baby, paleontologist Sarah (the lovely Julianne Moore) takes falls face first on to a glass window that’s the only obstacle in the way of a fatal fall several hundred feet to the rocks below. As she comes to, the glass starts to splinter, crack by little crack with every movement she makes to try and reach out for something to grab on to.

This is the standout scene in a movie that spans two hours without as much high-gear excitement as its sister flicks but even a slow script can’t stop The Beard’s perfect handling of a great idea here and, every time I watch it, it’s this very moment that defines The Lost World for me.

The Red Devil

BLOOD NIGHT: THE LEGEND OF MARY HATCHET

2.5 Stars  2009/18/85m

Director: Frank Sabatella / Writers: Elke Blani & Frank Sabatella / Cast: Bill Moseley, Danielle Harris, Nate Dushku, Samantha Facchi, Anthony Marks, Billy Magnussen, Alissa Dean, Mayam Basir, Samantha Hahn, Michael Wartella, Russell Lewis, Rich Ceraulo.

Body Count: 21 (give or take)

Dire-logue: “There’s a bond between mother and child that should never be broken. Some say that’s why the evil lives on.”


1978: Mary Mattock is a little girl who goes mad and kills her folks with scissors and an axe. She’s carted off to the psyche ward and, in ’89, gets raped by an orderly, gives birth and is told that child was stillborn. Mary loses it again and attacks the hospital staff, killing an unspecified number, before being shot dead by the cops. Why does she do all this? This chick has premenstrual dysphoria – when she’s surfing the crimson wave, we all gotta suffer! I’ve survived 32 years without really knowing what periods are but they look kinda…icky. I’m not really that surprised they’d drive Mary to kill.

…Plus she wants her baby back.

The legend of ‘Mary Hatchet’ becomes part of local folklore and the youth of the obligatory small town where it all happened celebrate ‘Blood Night’ in a Halloween-lite sorta way: pranks, parties and horror flicks galore. We’re soon introduced to the gaggle of high schoolers who’ll throw a party and suffer the wrath of Mary Mattock – twenty years after her child was born…wonder if one of the characters’ll turn out to be said offspring, eh?

For much of the ensuing hour, not a lot happens in Blood Night: the slightly more rounded group of teens (slightly translates as they were on screen more but I still never worked out who was who) have a seance at Mary’s graveside, are warned off by the groundskeeper Gus (Moseley) – who is dressed to the nines as a Crazy Ralph tribute act. Afterwards, they go back to Nichole’s house to party.

Some spoilers‘re about to follow so read on if you want it all ruined… Ruined, like that party you went to that time when everyone died! ‘Cept you, that is.

About 40 minutes in, Danielle Harris comes to the party. Everyone drinks, people pair off and have sex – complete with some really audible gulping sounds when one sophomore horndog is being ‘seen to’ by the girl he lusts after. Some of the party guests die and the seven remaining kids run screaming from the house only to find Gus trolling by in his pickup. They board and he drives them to the abandoned asylum to put a stop to the madness once and for all. Isn’t it fortunate that nobody ever cleared out all the files from the institute’s office? Now they can find out who Mary’s child is!

It’s Danielle Harris. Colour me totally shocked, ’tis she who turns out to be the adopted child. Some handy flashbacks show her getting some gushy, nasty looking period and then either getting possessed by mom or just choosing to kill everyone as well. It ain’t that clear. Anyhoo, she turns up at the creepy old madhouse and clip-clops up and down the halls, chopping and thwacking everyone else.

Blood Night is a weird one. On the pro side, it’s quite well made with an eye for the kind of visuals that adorn slasher flicks of yore and the teen-scenes are staged as sort of docu-drama Real World thing, which reminded me of the style in The Asylum’s cheapo cash-in flick, Halloween Night. The downside of this approach is that is serves to expose the teenagers as annoying, shallow blade-targets and pretty much nothing more – plus the fact that there’s too many of them to keep track of and almost all the boys look the same.

Sabatella keeps things liberally gory and throws in copious amounts of female nudity. Mary’s spirit appears full frontally nude and it makes me to wonder if the film had had a male killer would we have ever seen the goods? No. Even the boys who get laid miraculously manage to keep it all off screen. Gender inequality in a teen horror film, who da thunk it?

Danielle and Bill are good in their respective, though limited roles. Everyone else fades into a teen-victim blur. Is it a budding franchise? Well, women will probably always get a bit moody when they’ve ‘got the painters in’, so there’s no reason not to expect more of the same…

Y’ever noticed that neither men nor fat girls ever get naked in horror films?

Blurbs-of-interest: Danielle Harris played Jamie Lloyd in Halloween 4 and 5 and Annie Brackett in Rob Zombie’s Halloween and Halloween II, was Tosh in Urban Legend, Marybeth in Hatchet II, and was in ChromeSkull: Laid to Rest 2. Bill Moseley was in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, the 2013 sequel, Silent Night Deadly Night III and Home Sick. Moseley and Harris were later in Natty Knocks together.

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