Tag Archives: before they were famous

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.

Watch a clown break down

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BLOOD HARVEST

1 Stars  1987/18/82m

A.k.a. The Marvellous Mervo

Director: Bill Rebane / Writers: Chris Vaalar, William Arthur, Ben Benson & Emil Joseph / Cast: Tiny Tim, Itonia Salchek, Dean West, Lori Minnetti, Peter Krause, Frank Benson.

Body Count: 6

“The body count alone puts it into Friday the 13th territory,” – what, six? The lowest body count in any Friday is ten. You’re having a laugh! …Well, there is a clown on the box.

In actuality, the entire central cast is made up of only six characters and about two suspects as we “try” to suss out who is hanging out the locals of a small farming town to dry. Hint: the surprise count is zero.

Without question, the mystery has something to do with final girl Jill’s missing parents, who were blamed for sending all the farmers in town bankrupt. Weirdo clown Mervo – played by late Top Toe Through the Tulips songster Tiny Tim, here looking like a fired member of Kiss – is naturally the prime suspect. He hangs around singing to himself after flipping out because of his folks’ suicide. Jill, on the other hand, spends virtually the entire movie in her low-cut, loose-fitting, mini-skirted nightdress or naked.

Blood Harvest was cut by well over four minutes before reaching our shores on video in 1989 but would anyone really care about seeing that lost footage? It can’t make this abortion of a project any more appealing. That said, there are only two on screen murders anyway although the potential eeriness of the small farm town is used effectively enough but this one should be left unfertilized.

As with all lost 80’s horror films, the resident future star here is Peter Krause, most notable for his leading role in Six Feet Under.

Jason takes the slow boat

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FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VIII: JASON TAKES MANHATTAN

3 Stars  1989/18/96m

“New York has a new problem.”

Director/Writer: Rob Hedden / Cast: Jensen Daggett, Scott Reeves, Barbara Bingham, Peter Mark Richman, Kane Hodder, V.C. Dupree, Martin Cummins, Sharlene Martin, Kelly Hu, Saffron Henderson, Warren Munson, Gordon Currie, Alex Diakun.

Body Count: circa 26

Dire-logue: “He’s come back…and you’re all gonna die!”

The first Friday the 13th film I ever saw was ironically – at the time – the last. BBC1 used to play Jason Takes Manhattan a fair bit way back when, due to its comparative lack of grue. Nevertheless, first time I saw it I still almost crapped myself.

This one and Part VII: The New Blood are well suited bedfellows. Both saw declining box office returns where the series’ main competitor, A Nightmare on Elm Street, soared to ever greater heights, leaving Camp Crystal Lake in the dust. By 1989, both franchises as well as Halloween were all spiralling towards failure and it’s interesting to note that all three pretty much gave up for a time, with Freddy returning for his Final Nightmare in 1991; New Line would soon snatch up the rights to Jason to put him to bed (for a while) in 1993 and Michael Myers addicts had to wait six years for the next Halloween instalment.

Jason Takes Manhattan was Paramount’s final word on their shameful cash cow, who’d harvested shitloads of profit but almost as much disdain from moral guardian critics and during production it was intended to be Jason’s final outing. Go out with a bang eh? Well, not quite. But let’s go about this in the same was as The New Blood and examine how things unfold before we pick it apart…

Credits: This was actually the first Friday not to have a pre-credits sequence and also not have block-white font on a black background.

05 min – “We’re right around that summer camp where all those murders took place…” I quite like this part, in place of the campfire tale, Jason has become a real urban legend.

07 min – “Stop screwing around!”

08 min – In Part VI, Jason went to the bottom of the lake with gloves, which he no longer had when Tina resurrected him in VII and now he has them again.

13 min – Peter Mark Richman (McCulloch) played Suzanne Somers’ dad in Three’s Company.

How does Crystal Lake connect to the Atlantic??

16 min – LOVE that dancing, especially the girl with the long dark hair in the white blouse and black skirt. She got it!

19 min – “Don’t be a dweeb, Wayne.”

21 min – This song is Broken Dream by Terry Crawford. Alas, what you hear is all there is. It was never a full track. Shame, because it rocks!

25 min – “He’s undefeated…” – you can tell where that’s going.

29 min – The boxer originally received darts in the eyes but the boring old MPAA kicked up one of their no-fun storms. The scene was finally included on the Deluxe Edition.

39 min – They kill Tamara off way too early. She had a lot more bitching to do.

41 min – Neither Sean nor Rennie got changed into dry clothes after falling overboard!

46 min – Eva’s criss-crossed suspenders are awesome.

49 min – Yet again, lose your specs in a slasher film and you’re blind as a bat!

53 min – Gordon Currie (Miles) is sixth billed and doesn’t have a single line of dialogue in the entire movie!

54 min – …Unless “Aaaarrggghh!” counts?

60 min – Toby the dog had run off last time we saw him, now he’s in the boat. How’d he get down the ladder?

66 min – “Let’s split up…” Ugh, do they never learn?

72 min – Why doesn’t Julius at least try to remove the mask rather than punch plastic?

76 min – That’s actually a pretty neat dissolve there!

82 min – Always time for kissing during times of carnage.

87 min – “There’s a maniac trying to kill us!” / “Welcome to New York.”

88 min – The greasy chef is Ken Kirzinger, who played Jason in Freddy vs. Jason.

The film is endlessly problematic. The most common complaint being the cheater title, Rob Hedden was restricted by the budget but had planned on scenes at the Empire State Building and the Brooklyn Bridge. But why are there only two teachers for about fifty kids? And only four crew members? Is there a chef? Bar staff? A DJ? And if Crystal Lake is in New Jersey, who long would it even take to cruise to the Big Apple? Banking on fans of the series having an IQ of about 23, Paramount obviously overlooked these gaping holes and just hoped for the best in this ill-thought out concept. But then it’s Part VIII – how many franchises get that far?

Jason’s apparent new found ability to teleport is grating. Consistency was never a strong point in Friday the 13th Part Anything but such giant changes this late in the game were bizarre, as were the supernatural connotations when Rennie encountered the sometimes-malformed, sometimes-not young Jason.

But for me, what required alot more work was the heroes themselves. Jensen Daggett has the look and the vulnerability but as a final girl she’s dull and pedestrian, standing out only by the amount of screentime she’s allocated and the shortcuts made by the script to establish her as worthy of survival rather than fighting for it. Equally uninteresting is Sean, who, like Rennie, is full of parental pressure broodiness and we learn nothing else about him.

The other characters are pale Xeroxes of those from The New Blood: Rennie’s uncle McCulloch fulfills the Terry Kiser role as nasty authoritarian while the nice female teacher is Tina’s mom; Tamara is a diluted Melissa and Wayne stands in for dorky Eddie but does okay out of his limited role as film geek. It’s almost as if the script from Part VII was handed to Hedden with a post-it stuck on the front that said: Do this again on a boat with the end bit in New York (which will be Vancouver, really).

Even though it’s likely one of the worst in the series (I think Jason X is a tad worse) and runs about ten minutes too long, I’m quite partial to watching this one every couple of years. The late 80’s charm has got it going on from JJ’s great hair and guitar to Wayne’s ma-hoosive camera and memories of the era itself: I can clearly remember the film ‘premiering’ on Cable TV with a shot of Jason in the boat-disco. Good nostalgia, disappointing reality – it’s rare I’d say a gimmicky film wasn’t gimmicky enough.

Blurbs-of-interest: Gordon Currie actually landed the lead – and spoke! – in The Fear: Resurrection. Sharlene Martin played the final girl (under the name Melissa Martin) in the dismal Possession: Until Death Do You Part. After Jason was recast, Hodder donned new makeup to play Victor Crowley in Hatchet and its sequel and can also be found in Behind the Mask, Hack! and Children of the Corn V; Todd Shaffer was in Mirage the following year under the name Todd Schaefer.

“Mmm, Smeat!”

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CHILDREN OF THE CORN V: FIELDS OF TERROR

3 Stars  1998/18/80m

“In a deserted town the terror continues!”

Director/Writer: Ethan Wiley / Cast: Stacy Galina, Alexis Arquette, Greg Vaughan, Eva Mendez, David Carradine, Fred Williamson, Adam Wylie, Ahmet Zappa, Angela Jones, Dave Buzzotta, Aaron Jackson, Kane Hodder.

Body Count: 18

My favourite Corn sequel from the indefatigable series (presently gearing up for an 8th instalment) is stupid, cheesy and has almost no connection to the previous films outside of horrible children, corn, and the ever-invisible He Who Walks Behind the Rows.

This time, a group of college kids drive out into the boondocks to scatter the ashes of a recently cremated friend, who apparently died bungee jumping!? When they crash their car, a group of mouthy little brats emerge from the cornfield to tell them, in no uncertain terms, to fuck off – which is rich coming from them considering they slaughtered a couple of the group who were driving ahead of the others just hours earlier.

After meeting Kane Hodder and spending the night in a seemingly abandoned farmhouse, dreary heroine Alison realises that her runaway brother is actually part of this very sect!!!

Un-spooked by this coincidence, she elects to stick around and try to rescue her bro, prompting the others to stay too and get mauled by the delinquents: star-to-be Eva Mendez reads approximately one page of the cult’s anti-adult bible and decides to join them, willingly throwing herself into a fiery silo. Others are impaled, sickled, slashed with machetes or blow themselves up, taking some of the murderous moppets with them until only sensible-haired Alison remains to take on the uber-obnoxious child leader, who is in need of Supernanny, big time.

Fields of Terror, like the previous and subsequent instalments, makes little sense, adopting a scattergun approach of cult-cum-slasher movie antics: it’s liberally bloody and occasionally brutal and somehow roped David Carradine into playing the adult leader of the sect. There’s some zesty photographic setups but the flames fizzle out with another boring finale and CG-tastic last second gasp moment.

If you can ignore just how remedial all of this is and don’t mind chowing down a big bowl of obvious, Corn V is an entertaining 80 minutes with comfortably predictable scenarios and quite a likeable cast, peppered with familiar faces – even if most of them clearly look like they don’t want to be there.

Blurbs-of-interest: Eva Mendez/s returned to the genre a couple of years later in Urban Legends: Final Cut; Adam Wylie was in Return to Sleepaway Camp; Alexis Arquette was in Bride of Chucky; aside from playing Jason four times, Kane Hodder has appeared in Behind the Mask, Hatchet and all of its sequels; David Carradine was in Fall Down Dead and Detention (2010).

Teenage Dirtbags

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ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE

2.5 Stars  2006/18/87m

“Everyone is dying to be with her. Someone is killing for it.”

Director: Jonathan Levine / Writer: Jacob Forman / Cast: Amber Heard, Anson Mount, Whitney Able, Michael Welch, Edwin Hodge, Aaron Himelstein, Luke Grimes, Melissa Price.

Body Count: 7

The popular, not very nice kids at a high school invite Mandy Lane to a pool party because all the boys lust after her. She takes her friend Emmet with her and he is blamed when an asshole jock tries to impress Mandy by leaping into the pool from the roof of the house, fatally hitting his head on the concrete as he goes.

Nine months later, the popular, not very nice kids invite Mandy Lane away for a weekend at a remote ranch because all the boys still lust after her.

Emmet is no longer a friend so it’s just Mandy, a Barbie-wannabe and her limpet friend, Marlin, who Barbie keeps calling fat, and the boys: Jake, Bird, and rich boy Red. Stupid names for stupid, unlikeable teenagers. Let’s hope they all die.

What’s amusing is that, despite the boys’ lame ass attempts to impress Mandy, she only has eyes for grizzly farmhand Garth (Mount). So the kids pass the time in the usual ways, flirting, snorting coke, drinking loads before they begin splitting off for various reasons. Thankfully, the ostracised Emmet has followed the group to the ranch and answers our prayers by proceeding to kill, Kill, KILL the dreadful brats.

Come daybreak, the group’s attempts to escape are continually thwarted by shotgun-wielding Emmet, who shoots some, stabs others and forces one chick to perform a sort of blowjob on the barrel of the rifle.

With a reported budget south of a million dollars, All the Boys was a festival regular for awhile before being picked up for international distribution but only ever gained a limited release nearly two years after it was made. Reviews were mixed, strange considering the film’s resistance to entertain in favour of pretences of being some form of higher art, thanks largely to the grainy photography and ‘topical’ resolution once the requisite twist is tossed into the machinery, sucking thick cloud-cover over the motive thanks to the charades of said twist.

The plot may have been the stuff of the golden era of slasher film but the fun-time kids who populated those flicks are all but gone, replaced by nasty backstabbers and absolutely no one worth rooting for. Even Mandy is as hollow as an abandoned warehouse, existing only to swish around like a Geisha with nothing particularly interesting to say and while she’s not slutty like the other two girls (one of whom pads out her bra and uses big-ass scissors on her ‘delicate undercarriage’ area), it’s difficult to discern what it is “all the boys” see in her beyond general aesthetic blah.

I got to see All the Boys on the big screen but it’s almost definitely a DVD flick and not one you’d rent for a horrorthon party – it doesn’t want to be a slasher film, but it is, and the fact that it thinks above its station kinda makes it a bit like the clique of high school kids it destroys: they think they’re great but, y’know, not everyone shares that opinion.

Yay!

Blurb-of-interest: Anson Mount was in Urban Legends: Final Cut; Amber Heard was in The Stepfather remake.

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