3 is Family

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WRONG TURN 4: BLOODY BEGINNINGS

2.5 Stars  2011/18/94m

Director/Writer: Declan O’Brien / Cast: Jenny Pudavick, Tenika Davis, Kaitlyn Wong, Terra Vnesa, Victor Zinck Jr., Dean Armstrong, Ali Tataryn, Samantha Kendrick, Sean Skene, Daniel Skene, Scott Johnson.

Body Count: 14

Dire-logue: “Who are they?” / “The cannibal hillbillies my brother told me about – who else could it be!?”

In some ways, it’s really nice that the Wrong Turn franchise overcame the less-than-stellar box office receipts of the kick-ass original to become a sort of straight-to-DVD Friday the 13th of the noughties. The downside is that said kick-ass material from the 2003 original has eroded over time into the crass sort of cliches that burden too many teen horror flicks.

In fact, referring back to the 5 things I wish they’d stop doing in horror films thingy I wrote a while back, Wrong Turn 4 ticks four of the five boxes:

  • Asshole characters? Yes, even nominal final girl Kenia (!?) is a patronising cow who convinces her friends not to kill the trio of redneck freaks even after half their numbers have met gruesome endings.
  • Token lesbianism? Yes. After the requisite pre-credits shock, four of the nine main characters are introduced by way of orgy; a straight couple doing it in one bed while two buck-naked chicks are slobbering over one another about three feet away. Fuck off.
  • No survivors? WT4 is a prequel so you know there’s going to be a sucky ending for the last few people standing. In fact, it’s funny in a sort of splatstick kinda way.
  • Torture-porn lite? I’d give it half a mark, although those done in slowly and horribly are surprisingly male characters. See below where one schmuck is slowly ripped limb from limb while another is filleted and has said removed skin boiled and eaten by the inbreds.

The beginning takes place in 1974 (what’s up with that year?) where the three brothers are locked up in an institution. They break out, cause major carnage and flee. Twenty-nine years later – so a matter of months before the events of the original film – said asshole college kids on a winter break get lost in a snowstorm and end up taking shelter at the abandoned asylum.

The inbreds seem to still live there, so how and when did they relocate to the shack and gather up all those cars? It should’ve been set in the 90s or something. Missed opportunity.

That said, Bloody Beginnings is better than Wrong Turn 3, following a more common body count opus and the kills are grisly and inventive and don’t rely too much on CGI. The teens’ numbers dwindle until there are just four girls left, who attempt to fight back with mixed results but there are too many characters in the first place, many of whom are indistinguishable from one another.

It’s been said for years that Jason should have a snowbound adventure and it looks like the WT team have beaten him to it for the time being. Maybe in Wrong Turn 5 the hillbillies will take Manhattan?

Blurb-of-interest: O’Brien also directed Wrong Turn 3.

Dire-logue’s Greatest Hits Volume 7: Psycho Babble

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Psycho’s have problems too! They might’ve seen a counsellor who asked them “How does that make you feeeeel?” in two dozen different ways before they flipped and decided the best form of therapy was homicide…

If not, there’s bound to be someone about with some valuable insight into the killer’s problems, the final girl’s repressed issues, or what things are responsible for driving someone insane…

Behold the pop-psychological insights of the slasher realm:

CARVER (2008): “Sometimes we’ve gotta cut ourselves just to make sure we still bleed.”

FINGERPRINTS (2006): “A hair test is the only way to be sure that you’re drug-free!”

HALLOWEEN II (2009): “Bad taste is the petrol that drives the American dream.”

HATCHETMAN (2003): “Mommy taking her clothes off isn’t as bad as hurting people.”

HOME SICK (2007): “When a psychopath can invade the sanctity of your home and bleed all over your furnishings… we’ve fallen on dark days.”

THE HORROR SHOW (1989): “I was working on a theory of pure evil as a form of electromagnetic energy…”

THE LAST HORROR FILM (1983): “Many people believe that repeated viewings of these films is warping the minds of you young people.”

LIGHTHOUSE (1999): “Two words can sum that up: sick fuck.”

MADHOUSE (2003): “Funny that you’d ask a madman if he’s seen anything unusual.”

NINE LIVES (2002): “Tim wouldn’t turn into a psycho killer over a bobble hat!”

PSYCHO BEACH PARTY (2000): “In the past I’ve had little use for you head shrinks: Ink blot tests, ‘I hate my mother’ and all that crap.”

SCREAM (1996): “She realises that teen suicide is out this year and that homicide is a much healthier therepeutic expression.”

SHRIEK IF YOU KNOW WHAT I DID LAST FRIDAY THE 13TH (2000): “I killed my cousin, my heart’s broken and my sister’s dead.”

SHROOMS (2006): “You can’t fuck up what’s already fucked.”

11.11.11 Ashes to ashes

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bereavement_dvd-2BEREAVEMENT

2 Stars 2010/108m

A.k.a. Malevolence 2

Director/Writer: Stevan Mena / Cast: Michael Biehn, Alexandra Daddario, Brett Rickaby, Nolan Gerard Funk, John Savage, Spencer List, Kathryn Meisle, Peyton List, Valentina De Angelis.

Body Count: 10

Don’t cry for me Stevan Mena, the truth is your prequel’s boring

All through it’s run time, I played Solitaire

I cut my toenails, I trimmed my chest hair…

Internal-Evita aside, Malevolence was one of those weird films, both overrated and underrated at the same time. For a no-budget slasher flick, it wrung loads out of the kind of Asian-influenced photography any big studio horror film would kill for.

As the middle part of a proposed trilogy, six years later came the first bit: Bereavement, which begins with the 1989 abduction of little Martin Bristol, who has a rare condition that means he feels no pain. The local schizo killer takes him from his back yard and spends the next five years trying to teach him to kill young girls.

Meanwhile – in 1994 anyway – recently-orphaned teenager Allison arrives in town to live with Uncle Michael Biehn and his little family. She’s a long distance runner and jogs past the creepy old shut down Sutter abattoir where loon and kid live in harmony, seemingly abducting a new girl every few days without anybody raising an eyebrow.

Allison has adjustment problems, hangs out with the local bad kid, and eventually strays into the old building where she is held captive, escapes, fights the killer and such.

Unlike Malevolence‘s slow-burn homage to the really early days of under-lit slasherdom, Bereavement is more of a character study, setting things up for what will hopefully be a pretty good third entry.

Alas, unlike its predecessor (or whatever we call it considering it came first but follows the story…?), Bereavement is depressing and also kinda dull. For all of Mena’s beautifully orchestrated cinematography of pylons, vast fields and Sutter’s creepy old truck idling along empty roads, there’s long drawn out scenes where little happens (possibly accentuating the lack of life around the small town) or young girls are chained up and knifed to death.

It’s never explained why the police aren’t sniffing around for numerous missing ladies or why the killer only picks them. There’s an unsettling Bundy-esque bleakness to Sutter’s abduction technique (shown only once) and Bereavement only becomes an actual slasher flick towards the end.

And the end is downbeat, drab and a portent of doom. I was happy to see the cute puppy survive but after being impressed by what Mena sculpted out of what little he had in Malevolence, this has an aura of self-indulgence that I hope doesn’t leak into the final film. If it ever gets made.

Blurbs-of-interest: Michael Biehn was in The Fan and Cherry Falls; Alexandra Daddario was later in Texas Chainsaw 3D; John Savage was in Christina’s House.

Cotton Eye Schmo

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TUCKER AND DALE VS EVIL

3.5 Stars  2010/15/85m

“Evil just messed with the wrong hillbillies.”

Director/Writer: Eli Craig / Writer: Morgan Jurgenson / Cast: Tyler Labine, Andy Tudyk, Katrina Bowden, Jesse Moss, Brandon McLaren, Chelan Simmons, Christie Laing, Philip Granger, Alexander Arsenault, Adam Beauchesne, Travis Nelson, Joseph Sutherland.

Body Count: 14

Dire-logue: “You shouldn’t be smoking anyway, Chloe, it’s not good for you.” / “Yeah, well fucking DYING isn’t good for you either but that doesn’t seem to be stopping anybody.”

Stereotypes. They’re based on real things of course: some black people DO have rhythm; some gay men DO have great fashion sense; and some backwoods hicks are twisted murderers who like to do away with self-centered college kids. Well, all of these exist according to the movies.

In horror, stereotyping is nonnegotiable turf. Time for a change!

Tucker and Dale (not to be confused with Ch-Ch-Ch-Chip and Dale: Rescue Rangers) are just a couple of laid back country guys who like beer, fishin’ and fixing up the dilapidated summerhouse they just bought out in the woods.

However, an SUV-load of nine self-centered college kids cruise into town and take Tucker and Dale to be drooling backwoods pervs who mean them harm when, in reality, Dale is a cuddly bear who just wants to know how to talk to girls and Tucker is his loyal best bud.

When the requisite nice girl of the college group, Allison, knocks herself out whilst skinny dipping in the lake, Tucker and Dale rescue her and the other college kids assume they’ve kidnapped her to torture and eat. While they let her recuperate on their couch, the kids, under the influence of the sociopathic Chad, decide to try and rescue her, so beginning a farcical turn of events that would put any Final Destination film to shame.

While Allison warms to Dale’s charms, her school friends begin killing themselves in ludicrously amusing ways: one, believing he’s being chased by a chainsaw-wielding killer, impales himself on a sharp branch, while another mistimes a lunge and dives headfirst into a woodchipper.

The self-inflicted demises continue as characters succeed in shooting themselves in the face, not moving out of the path of an incoming rotor blade or falling on to sharp things. Tucker and Dale, meanwhile, think the kids are hell bent on offing themselves in some sort of suicide pact and want to get rid of Allison into the bargain.

OK, so the joke soon becomes predictable but the tables are soon turned when the remaining teens kidnap Tucker and up the ante, with Chad eventually fleeing with Allison and tying her to one of those saw-conveyor-thingies you see in saw mills in a black-and-white traintrack type set up. You know what I mean!!! OK, here’s a still:

The end product is a slasher film without a lunatic killer; well, sort of. There IS a killer by the end plus some flashbacks to your off-the-shelf massacre-that-happened-twenty-years-ago, which will mean something later in the film.

Tucker and Dale is a fun movie, one to watch with friends or a big audience to really get the sick laughs but it’s never repulsive in its efforts to be funny, it’s far more sweet natured than you’d think. The only characters who matter are our titular heroes and Allison; apart from the aggressive Chad, the other teens (including a few familiar faces from the genre) have about as much depth as a petri dish and with six guys and only three girls, they blur into one another.

The cartoonishly gruesome demises are funny and there are some great lines, none of which delve particularly deep into the kind of post-modern self-referentiality of, say, Scream 4, which had a lot to say about the state of modern horror.

Just as Shaun of the Dead is best viewed right after Dawn of the Dead, Tucker and Dale would be great in a double feature with Wrong Turn or one of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remakes.

Blurbs-of-interest: Brandon McLaren was in Harper’s Island, Scar 3D and Slasher; Jesse Moss and Chelan Simmons were both in Final Destination 3. Katrina Bowden was in the Adam Sandler-affiliated mess The Shortcut.

Ridiculous scene o’ the month: I won’t survive

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A Ridiculous Scene classic. This moment from 1998’s I Still Know What You Did Last Summer must rank as one of the most inexplicably idiotically deranged moments ever to spew from the mind of a screenwriter.

I mean… how the FUCK is that even achieved!?

In a film jammed full of nil-possibles, Julie and the prophetic karaoke machine of dooooom takes the gold.

RSOM-I-Still-Know2Considering the 90s slasher movies were built on a base of being more believable than their ancestors, it’s mindboggling to consider that just the second film in this series swung a wrecking ball through all the hard work done in the original film to make yer standard slasher plot that little less reliant on clichés.

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