Tag Archives: Canuck

Stock Background Characters 101: The Bitchy Girl

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In this feature, we examine the lesser beings of the slasher movie realm, which, if you’re making your own slasher film, could provide a good cast roster for you.

No killer or final girl profiles here, this is a celebration of those underlings who made the most of their fleeting flirtation with stardom. And usually died.

Get your claws out, it’s THE BITCHY GIRL

bitchygirls2Overview: Every gaggle of teens on vacation has to suffer the endless put-downs and scheming of The Bitch. She’s varies from simply being the nasty – but usually hot – chick who attempts to destroy the Final Girl’s romantic chances with her desired beau, to being the self-centered leader of the pack who gets everyone in trouble in the first place and will do whatever it takes to cover her own ass!

Linguistic Snapshot: “Daddy will get me out of this – I don’t care what happens to the rest of you, you can go to hell for all I care!”

Styling: The Bitchy Girl dresses better than you. Her clothes and her hair cost more than yours. She’s pretty much immaculate in every way and you’re plain or ugly to her. If it’s a high school slasher film, she’ll be stylish where the rest of her class are in jeans n’ t-shirts. If it’s a collegiate slasher film, she’ll be the sorority president in pearls and pastels. She’s always skinny and oft can be found with complacent grin painted on her face.

“I look like Posh Spice and I’m just as evil.”

Hallmarks: Bitchy Girls are always white, almost exclusively from rich families; she’s the Daddy’s girl, the Princess and getting her own way has led her down the path of unrighteousness, though she’s often able to pull the wool over authoritarian eyes or by virtue of her family’s connections. Daddy can buy anyone.

However, behind the snarky comments, the pearls and the immovable hair, Bitchy Girls’ are sometimes products of bad home environments where Mommy is constantly tapping the bottle and Daddy works away so much, screwing his harem of nubile assistants and nobody gives Melissa/Vickie/Kimberly the attention she needs.

Downfall: Almost without exception, The Bitch will die a horrible, fitting death. In fact the only time I can recall a Bitch surviving is the Cheerleader who badmouths Sidney in Scream. Otherwise it’s decapitation for sneering superbitch Tasha in Tormented, sandblaster to the face for light-fingered Tammy in Venom, and it was powerdrill attrition for mean new girl-excluder Diane in The Slumber Party Massacre.

The Bitchy Girl sometimes belittles the situation as she does everything else; Melissa in Friday the 13th Part VII ignores the pleas of Tina and Nick and gets an axe in the head for her troubles; Elsa Shivers in I Know What You Did Last Summer practically laughs off her sisters near-death experience and winds up feeling the business end of the killer’s hook.

Whichever way you cut ’em – arrow in the torso, cellphone rammed down the throat or a good old fashioned throat slashing – The Bitch outlives most of her doomed friends but only so we can ‘enjoy’ her getting her comeuppance.

Genesis: Without doubt the reigning queen bee of slasher movie bitchness is Wendy from Prom Night. Wendy tries to win her ex-boyfriend back from the arms and bad perm of Jamie Lee Curtis and attempts to rig the prom so that SHE will receive the crown – and this is after killing Jamie Lee’s little sister in the prologue! Thankfully, the ski-masked loon gets there first and axes Wendy out of the picture before she can go through with her plan.

Sneering side-ponytailed Judy from Sleepaway Camp tormented poor Angela with the help of equally unpleasant counsellor Meg – they threw her in the lake and Meg even backhanded her. As a result both suffered: Meg was knifed in the shower and Judy was curling-tonged to death.

“She’s a carpenter’s dream: Flat as a board and needs a good screw!”

Then there’s sorority power queen Vickie in The House on Sorority Row, whose revenge prank against stern housemother Mrs Slater goes so badly wrong that it costs quite the number of her college friends their lives as she ropes them into covering up her crime…

The Bitchy Girl is never the killer with possible exception of undead prom queen Mary Lou Maloney from Prom Night‘s II and III and possibly Kristen in Final Stab.

Legacy: Bizarrely, in the Friday the 13th-verse, there were no bitches introduced until the late 80s when Melissa turned up. In the next movie, Tamara – a virtual clone – snorted coke and pushed the non-swimmer final girl off a cruise ship.

Nasty girls began to become more prevalent as the genre slowly evolved towards casting more unlikeable characters than pleasant ones. Macho Assholes and Bitches prevailed, providing adequate fodder for all manner of demises:

  • The sheriff’s slutty daughter, Kelly, in Halloween 4 was impaled with a rifle.
  • Ultra-mean camper Ally was drowned in the world’s grossest outhouse toilet in Sleepaway Camp II.
  • The quasi-remake Sorority Row made über-bitch self-serving Jessica quite humorous with a never-ending list of witty put-downs and carefree reactions to her friends’ deaths. Upon finding a dead guy stuffed upside down in a vent she identifies him by stating “I’d know those ugly ass shoes anywhere.”

Conclusions: And so on and so on… Mean people serve to highlight how nice the nice people are and, hopefully, tempt the killer’s blade away from those of us who try to do the right thing and put others first.

So what I’m saying is that we NEED to take The Bitchy Girl on holiday with us. Yeah, she might make a few people cry and split up some couples but when it comes to stompin’ time, you know she’s got zero chance of getting away. Thank you, Bitch, your acidic commentary and toxic personality makes the world that little bit safer for the rest of us.

Life’s a bitch – and if you are too, then you’ll certainly die a lot quicker. But you could still give those Mean Girls a good going over.

Thou shalt repent thy clichés!

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prom4aPROM NIGHT IV: DELIVER US FROM EVIL

3 Stars  1991/18/93m

“They skipped the prom for a private party. Now it’s the last dance.”

Director/Writer: Clay Borris / Cast: Nikki de Boer, Alden Kane, Joy Tanner, Alle Ghadban, Ken McGregor, James Carver, Brock Simpson.

Body Count: 8

Dire-logue: “Here’s to Jamie Lee Curtis!”

If you’re alright with the entirely predictable then you could do worse than Prom Night IV, the slasher film equivalent of an episode of Murder, She Wrote.

The production team have ditched Mary Lou Maloney and gone back to basics with the only connection to the other films being Hamilton High where, in 1957 – arguably one of the more sucky years for the faculty – two rubbernecking prom attendees are slashed and immolated by psychotic priest Father Jonas, who wants to ‘deliver the souls of sluts and whores’ to God.

After 33 years hidden away by priests in a medically induced coma state, a do-gooder young priest charged with guarding him (Brock Simpson, who played a different role in all four movies) makes the bad decision of not dosing him and is murdered in payment when Jonas awakes, seemingly not to have aged a day in 33 years!

Meanwhile, a couple of Catholic school girls and their HH-alumnus boyfriends take a limo out to the country house of one of them where they plan to have their own little prom. But of course Jonas has found his way to the same locus and, feeling they’ve transgressed various Biblical blurb, proceeds to kill them one by one by one…

There are elements of Hell Night at play, little in the way of claret and the characters aren’t especially interesting. It’s plainly obvious that goody-two-shoes Meagan (de Boer) will be the last one standing but there are some decent riffs thrown into the mix; the police actually call back but Jonas picks up another extension and tells them it’s “in God’s hands.”

There’s also an amusing scene early on where template bad girl Laura is hauled into the Mother Superior’s office after being caught having it away with her boyfriend in his car. While the nun struggles to articulate a summary of the charges, Laura just looks up with a grin and says: “We were FUCKING.” Funniest moment in a po-faced film.

prom-4-2

Prom Night IV is decent, forgettable fare – but still better than the 2008 remake of the original.

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.

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.

Icky ways to go: Time to change the shower head

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From the original cut of the surprisingly vicious My Bloody Valentine (eventually unleashed in 2009, about the only thing we can thank the remake for), the standard one-half-of-couple-finds-reason-to-leave schtick unfurls as usual, leaving poor Sylvia here to be attacked by the creepy miner, who decides to do away with her by impaling her head on one of the rusty, pointy shower nozzles, resulting in her acting as a sort of novelty shower head for her boyfriend to discover a few minutes later. Ouch.

Probably the most inventive demise in the film, which when restored also included a gruesome pick-axe through the jaw and out of the eye. I feel twisted to be so thankful they eventually gave us the extra bloodletting. Oh well, the world still turns…

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