Category Archives: Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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.

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