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!

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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