Forget him not

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illalwaysknowI’LL ALWAYS REMEMBER THAT I STILL THINK I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER

2 Stars  2006/18/89m

“New summer. New secret. New slaughter.”

Director: Sylvain White / Writer: Michael Weiss / Cast: Brooke Nevin, Ben Easter, David Paetkau, Torrey DeVitto, Seth Packard, K.C. Clyde, Michael Flynn, Clay Taylor, Don Shanks, Star LaPoint.

Body Count: 7

**WARNING** MAJOR-ass spoilers follow

So, news of a third Last Summer stirred around 2003-ish and soon it was confirmed that there’d be no Hewitt or Prinze returning to battle Captain Birdseye’s evil twin one last time and that things would start anew elsewhere.

Well, that’s mostly true. Unfortunately, the decision to resurrect The Fisherman as the choice villain tosses one fucking huge spanner into the works and thus summons up one of the worst reveals in horror movie history.

Far away from the fishing port of South Carolina and even further from the Bahamas, Broken Ridge, Colorado, is the setting for round 3, in which a quintet of teens-about-town share the legend of The Fisherman who hunts down teenagers on July 4th if they’re keeping naughty secrets. This occurs at the top of a Ferris wheel for some reason. About two minutes later, The Fisherman appears at the carnival and chases them away.

iakwydls5No… it’s all a prank, which was supposed to end with their bud PJ ‘falling’ off a building roof on to some pre-positioned mats. Instead, he lands on a tractor and, y’know, dies. His four friends decide to let the police go on thinking that a killer was on the loose, burn the costume and toss the hook into a lake.

One year later, they’re largely estranged in a retread of themes from the original film. Then evident heroine Amber receives fifty I Know What You Did Last Summer text messages, which serves to reunite the group to track down who sent them. More torment follows, one of the four apparently slashes his own throat with a hook and The Fisherman attacks Amber from on top of a moving cable car. Or gondola as they refer to it!??

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Come July 4th, the teens decide to stay in town so that Zoe can mime to Weapons of Pleasure’s admittedly rockin’ Daredevil in the hope of attracting the eye of a talent scout, instead only attracting Mr Slicker, who begins doing away with the rest of them and anyone else who gets in the way.

OK spoiler time: with two major suspects deadified, who is it? Angry girlfriend? Boyfriend? Mom? Dad? Sister? Dog? No. It’s no one. It’s just… The Fisherman. It’s the legend that kills. He’s some mouldy looking supernatural fella who can pretty much teleport where he wants and not die.

Observe the film’s final shot, which I did not do anything to:

iakwydls1Who the fuck thought people would be happy with this ending? The whole winning aspect of the premise is that you don’t know who’s fucking with you, what they might do and when. Screw that, let’s make it a ghost of somebody with no stake in what actually happened. To make things worse, there are a couple of extra girls who appear a few times early on, either of whom would’ve been acceptable over this! One of them’s even on the cover and she doesn’t do anything except say things like; “He’s so cute; oh my God; I love your dress; Facebook!; Jay-Z’s so talented!”

Breathe. Until this disastrous turn, I’ll Always Know functions predictably but passably as a revenge slasher film. It’s palpably cheaper than its fore-bearers and the continual flash edits are annoying attempts to jazz up pedestrian direction and photography. The characters are largely anodyne fodder: good girl, bad girl, asshole jock, nice guy, backed up by a group of red herrings.

Persistent rumours of a fourth film may well have been ass-raped by how maligned this stupid film is. My tolerance for crap means it garnered a more than generous two stars for being just about competent for a once over – but I wouldn’t fork out on the box set if you’re only really interested in Jennifer Love Hewitt’s boobs.

An early draft of the next sequel

The next sequel will see the killer use a time machine to make pre-accident threats

Blurbs-of-interest: Paetkau was the ladder-eye victim in Final Destination 2; DeVitto was in Killer Movie; Don Shanks played Michael Myers in Halloween 5 and was in Sweet Sixteen.

Drink yourself dead

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slaughteredSLAUGHTERED

1.5 Stars  2009/18/76m

“You’ll be legless… Armless… Headless…”

Director/Writer: Kate Glover / Cast: Chloe Boreham, Christopher Tomkinson, Cassandra Angelia Swaby, Steven O’Donnell, James Kerley, Erica Baron, Michael Lewis, Tudor Vasile.

Body Count: 10

Britain and Australia share a pub culture like no other, different from trendy bars in the city, “the local” is the choice meeting point for all kinds of folk to sup on a pint, or – in the case of many – down so much that you fall asleep and later stagger on home.

A local pub is the setting for this Australian indie flick, which couldn’t have cost much more than a round of beers. With a plot so simple it was doubtlessly scripted on the back of a beermat, Slaughtered‘s got some problems alright with amateur night acting, a crap sound mix and an obvious killer who has absolutely no motive.

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Yeah, that’s right! There’s no big unmasking or soliliquy of why-I-killed-y’all at the end, it just pretty much stops! Where are the cops? Why aren’t they clearing up bodies and collecting evidence? Why did everyone keep working despite the fact they’d found bodies strewn all over the joint?

If it was intended to be a parody, it doesn’t work. It’s funny but not in the right way and suffers from a major case of predictablosis with a second string of budgets disease. Although it must be said the gore jobs aren’t bad at all, despite that in the scene where a girl is forced to ingest shards of broken glass it’s clear as day that there’s nothing in the liquid!

Silly but inoffensive stuff, notable only for being one of the few slasher films directed by a Sheila.

Just another Naomi Campbell tantrum

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bikini-island-prism-vhs-front

BIKINI ISLAND

2 Stars  1991/18/82m

“Sex, sun, and murder…”

Director: Anthony Markes / Writers: Emerson Bixby, Diana Levitt & Anthony Markes / Cast: Holly Floria, Alicia Anne Kowalski, Jackson Robinson, Sherry Jansen, Kelly Pool, Gaston Le Gaf, Cyndi Pass, Shannon Stiles, Cathleen McOsker, Terry Miller.

Body Count: 9

Bikini Island…where the moon is out during the day and the girl on the cover is in a one-piece swimsuit. How can it fail?

‘Based in part on a true story’, five swimsuit models duke it out for cover-star status and a $100,000 prize. Trouble is, somebody is expiring their modelling contacts earlier than expected. The pesky killer likes to do away with victims primarily with a fucking sink plunger to the face or, later on, a bow and arrow.

There’s more nudity and sex than there is horror in this translucent tat, a carbon copy of which was created by near on the same team and cast a year later in the slightly more watchable Last Dance – in which the killer had pretty much the same motive.

Here though, the fiend’s identity is thinly disguised by ‘suspicious’ zooms and the sound of a cello around various supporting characters, including a bitchy assistant and a freaky hotel custodian who appears to be the only member of staff.

It takes a good (read: not good) 40 minutes before the action takes flight, struggles, and ditches into the sea, culminating in the killer’s archery massacre in the last five minutes that ups the body count significantly before a short but amusing chase scene when the bimbo heroine confronts the killer but in the end I felt sorry only for the VW Camper Van which sails over a cliff edge.

Blurbs-of-interest: director Markes and actor Kelly Pool were involved with Last Dance; The director of Psycho Cop Returns had a small role.

Before you die you see…The Cow

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psycho98PSYCHO

3 Stars  1998/15/100m

“Check in. Relax. Take a shower.”

Director: Gus Van Sant / Writers: Robert Bloch & Joseph Stefano / Cast: Vince Vaughn, Julianne Moore, Anne Heche, Viggo Mortensen, William H. Macy, Philip Baker Hall, Robert Forster, James Remar.

Body Count: 2

With all the horror community hoo-hah over the endless stream of remakes n’ such ruining our favourite classics, it’s easy to forget that the most classic of classics got refunked back at the arse end of the 90s.

Although calling Psycho ’98 a remake isn’t strictly true, it’s more like a cover version without any stamp of ownership. You know when Simon Cowell drones on about “you made that song your own” (even though they quite clearly bastardized it), Gus Van Sant’s strangely hollow project to simply re-shoot Psycho in colour with very few modifications of era is similarly perplexing. Cowell, of course, would’ve made it into a musical and cast Leona Lewis as Marion Crane so she can keep bleeding, keep, keep bleeding… OK, crap joke. I’ll slap myself in the face with a custard pie for that one.

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And so it came to be… Various filmians moaned before the project even went into pre-production and now it’s all but forgotten and it’s easy to see why – it’s been asked a gazillion times but, Mr VS – what was the point?

Besides being in colour, and updating some dialogue and the amount of money Marion Crane makes off with, Psycho ’98 re-treads the boards down the composition of shots, angles, effects work (Arbogast’s backward tumble down the stairs) and characterisations. All I remember of the “new-ness” was that Norman Bates cracks one out watching Marion take a shower and Julianne Moore utters the batty line “hold on while I get my Walkman,” upon which the audience decided to start laughing.

Curiously, Van Sant adds a surreal little montage right before Marion is stabbed, which, I assume was supposed to represent life flashing before her eyes, which included a cow (or possibly a sheep?) in the road. Whassat about? Did she run it over? Was it a foreshadowing? Is it Psycow?

Norman's moo-ther? Har-de-har-harrr

Norman’s moo-ther? Har-de-har-harrr

Otherwise, things otherwise clunk along in a Xerox of 38 years before but the dialogue now sounds out of place (Walkman line excepted) and the almighty cast of players is reduced to imitation rather than expression, making me wonder why any of them would’ve signed up to star in something where there’s so little ‘acting’ for them to do…

Vince Vaughn wasn’t the big star he now is (and possibly now was) back then and does okay with the role but is simply too hulking and broad to play a cross-dressing mama’s boy convincingly. While les hasbian Anne Heche (where’d shego?) is acceptable as Marion and the always lovely Moore is equally fine with being Lila, as is Macy as the detective. Herein lies the blandness of it all – they’re all just fine. Nobody’s gonna win anything for tracing a masterpiece and then painting by numbers.

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That said, a ‘re-imagining’ would’ve only incited more wrath. I recently read an amusing analogy on the IMDb where somebody wrote: “If I put balls on Grandma, that doesn’t make her a ‘re-imagining’ of Grandpa!” I’m not sure what his point was but the carbon-copying does not make the story any less intriguing – it’s still a good yarn and therefore I award ye, strangely pointless remake, three stars.

Blurbs-of-interest: Heche played Missy in I Know What You Did Last Summer; Viggo Mortensen had been in Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III; Robert Forster was also in Uncle Sam and Maniac Cop 3; James Remar (Dexter’s dad!) was in coma-inducing med-stalker Exquisite Tenderness.

Curse of the geriatric viking-bear thingy

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berserker1BERSERKER

1 Stars  1987/18/79m

“It’s too late to run. There’s no time to scream… Just close your eyes and pray to die.”

Director/Writer: Jef Richard / Cast: Joseph Alan Johnson, Greg Dawson, Valerie Sheldon, Rodney Montague, Shannon Engemann, Beth Toussaint, John Goff, George ‘Buck’ Flower.

Body Count: 5

The video box says that it’s based on “an old Nordic Legend.” Wow… that’s like saying it’s based on an urban legend – you know it means nothing. But given the final product, working the promo for this film couldn’t have been easy…

According to the stock-nerd character, a Berserker is some kind of Viking dude who has a bear mask, eats human flesh and has coincidentally been reincarnated in a descendant to “terrify” a group of “teenagers” who go on a camping trip where an elderly couple were shredded at the start. So far, so The Prey. But somehow even less engaging.

Who is the ancestor likely going to be? Mike, Josh, Kathy, Larry or Pappy Nyquist? I’m going for Josh.

Berserker barely qualifies as a slasher film at all, with a dismal body count and only two of the “teenagers” actually dying – both female, while the complete and utter dickhead guy is spared, as is the nerd, the cry-baby jock and a girl who does or says next to nothing.

Good opportunities to create tension slip right through writer-director Richard’s fingers and the lack of any strong, central heroine loses marks also. 79 minutes never felt so long.

Blurbs-of-interest: Flower turns up here and there in Cheerleader Camp, The Gas Station and Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-a-Rama; Joseph Alan Johnson was not only in the original Slumber Party Massacre but also wrote and starred in Iced! But the true before-they-were-famous star here is Beth Toussaint – and she gets naked!! She supplied the voice of the female caller in Scream 3 and has appeared in numerous soaps and TV shows.

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