Tag Archives: Euro-horror

Shitty Sequels III: Cash Cows Forever

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Take me down to the sequel city where the grass is green but the films are shitty…

…and I keep watching them like a dick.

Previously – here and here to be specific – we looked at an array of cruddy slasher movie follow-ups over the years. There will always be sequels and some sequels will always be shitty. Hence, round three…

Ripper 2: Letters from Within (2004)

The original Ripper movie in 2001 was divisive enough but I liked it quite a bit. Sure, it’s as flawed as any other collegiate body count film of its era you care to dip-check, but when compared to this truly dreadful sequel, it’s practically Halloween.

Retconning much of the foundations laid by the first one – a lot of which was never fully resolved anyway – carry-over character Molly (now played by Eric Karpluk) is packed off to a European castle for some deep dream therapy and some cloaked-hulk is somehow awakened by these experiments and offs her fellow nubile residents.

Whether this character is supposed to be some incarnation of Jack the Ripper is another question for the blackboard and the only certainty in the whole project is that the film sucks.

A friend of mine auditioned for a small role (one which I could never identify in the finished product) and, to date, it doesn’t seem to have reached distribution in the UK almost a decade after it was made.

Jason X (2001)

I, for one, don’t actually mind this deca-sequel, but it’s clearly crap.

Produced somewhere between 1999 and its long-delayed release, the idea of ‘Jason in space’ might have seemed funny but once it finally got out there, it was clear nobody got the joke and it’s the only film in the whole Friday the 13th canon to have not even broken even at the US box office.

A combination of timing and content is to blame (what else is there?): Scream and the cycle of big-studio slasher films was already over and out by the time the release date for JX crawled around (I remember Valentine and D-Tox (another delayed one) were released earlier in the year to negative reviews) people were sick of slasher movies all over again and poor ol’ Jay barely got a look in.

Otherwise, the film is neither funny enough nor scary enough, seemingly a recurrent theme in writer Todd Farmer’s horror scripts.

Thankfully, he would get another shot two years later battling Freddy Krueger, a film where, in box office terms, they got most things right.

Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman (2001)

No, not a sequel to that schmaltzy Michael Keaton snowman comedy, but to a B-movie of the same name featuring a serial killer who, after getting into an accident with a truck carrying various chemicals, becomes a murderous snowman and takes revenge on the small town where he was captured.

Full of goofy dialogue and sub-Chucky one-liners, the film is amusing enough on a make-fun-if-it level (tagline: “He’s chillin’ and killin'”). This follow up, however, is the as much fun as a sudden attack of diarrhoea in a traffic jam.

Relocating to a tropical island (!?), the titular snowman follows returning actor Chris Allport (also seen in Savage Weekend way back in ’76) and wife on holiday to kill various schmucks. A Tremors sequel-like life cycle element sees small fluffy balls representing baby-Jack Frosts highlights how cheap and rubbish things have become. Ideas about a possible Jack Frost 3 have, thankfully, melted away.

Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence (1992)

I really like Maniac Cop. Tom Atkins! Bruce Campbell is a straight role! Fast paced and high body counted – it’s a great little 80s flick. Maniac Cop 2 carried over the surviving characters and was entertaining enough. The third film though… shoulda been called Bride of Maniac Cop.

Big-faced Robert Z’Dar respectably returns to the role of undead zombie cop Matt Cordell once more after some religious nut resurrects him for no apparent reason. He falls in love with a devoted girl-cop, who has been set up by the media as a Cordell-like super villain. His resolve? To kill! kill! kill! them all!

While more in the slasher mold than MC2, this is one of those explicit cash-in productions that exists for almost no reason. But it’s still better than Jack Frost 2. And Ripper 2.

AND ANOTHER SHITTY SEQUEL I LOVE:

Halloween: Resurrection (2002)

I’m sorry. Really, I am. What can I say? I enjoy it.

Killing Jamie Lee Curtis aside. Busta Rhymes inept acting aside. Tyra Banks thankless and wasted cameo aside. Most ridiculous un-doing of previous movie’s finale ever seen on film aside. I still enjoy Resurrection.

In the ‘for’ column – slim-pickings though they are – there’s a good cast outside of Rhymes. Katee Sachoff in a pre-Battlestar Gallactica appearance; the adorable Sean Patrick Thomas; American Pie player Thomas Ian Nicholas; Alicia Witt-lite Daisy McCrackin from cruddy DVD flick A Crack in the Floor.

The zeitgeist reality TV plot prevents the film from aging well and if that could’ve been removed as an obstacle this might have worked better as an earlier sequel, say between number six and H20. There was internet chatter about what was going to be Halloween 9 (before mainstay Moustapha Akkad was killed in a terrorist attack) might include the revelation that final girl Sara (Bianca Kajlich – what happened to her?) turning out to be Jamie Lloyd! Could’ve been a good way of undoing some of the hurt H20 caused when it pretended the interim films never happened.

All in all, it sucks as a Halloween film, but it’s an enjoyable, well made slasher movie beyond that.

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Break a leg.

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STAGEFRIGHT

3 Stars  1987/18/86m

“The theater of death.”

A.k.a. Aquarius; Bloody Bird; Sound Stage Massacre

Director: Michele Soavi / Writer: Lew Cooper / Cast: Barbara Cupisti, David Brandon, Mary Sellers, Robert Gligorov, Jo Anne Smith, John Morghen, Martin Philips, Piero Vida, Ulrike Schwerk, Lori Parrel, Clain Parker, James E.R. Sampson.

Body Count: 10

Dire-logue: (cowering victim to chainsaw swinging killer) “I’ll do you a deal… you leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone, OK?”

I really need to seek out StageFright again someday. It’s probably worth more than three stars.

Anyway, based on what I do remember many moons after I saw it in the age of big box ex-rental VHS tapes, young stage actress Alicia (Cupisti), injures her ankle, she’s taken to a nearby psychiatric hospital to get it checked by a doctor. High-profile psycho loon Irving Wallace breaks out of his cell at the same time and hides in the back of her car, getting a ride back to the theatre where she’s just been fired from an all-night rehearsal for a play about Jack the Ripper.

When the costume designer gets a pick-axe in the mouth outside, egotistical director Peter decides to change the play to be about Wallace (under the illusion the killer fled the scene) and re-hires Alicia out of sympathy. And locks them all in.

It soon becomes clear that Wallace is stuck inside with the cast and crew and begins offing them with knives, axes, power-drills, and a handy chainsaw – all under the disguise of a pretty creepy bird mask. This gory flick supposedly influenced Argento’s Opera and features some good, intense sequences and downright brutal demises for a majority of the cast.

Alicia’s brushes with the killer as she struggles to find an escape route peak in a scene where she tries to retrieve the key to her escape from beneath his feet. Of course, at the end they engage in one on one combat and she prevails, but the added scene lends a most surreal slant when Alicia returns to retrieve her lost watch and the caretaker repeats the same line over and over for no apparent reason…

The only flaw is the re-recorded dubbing, which disables much of the effect of the original dialogue and, like so many European movies, cannot recapture the ‘in the moment’ performance, drawing laughter sometimes when there should be terror.

Blurbs-of-interest: Director Soavi played the role of a victim in Absurd and was also in A Blade in the Dark; Mary Sellers was also in the super-creepy Ghosthouse.

Absurdsworth

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AbsurdVHS-2ABSURD

3 Stars  1981/X/90m

A.k.a. Anthropophagous II; The Grim Reaper 2; Horrible; Monster Hunter

Director: Joe D’Amato [as Peter Newton] / Writer: George Eastman [as John Cart] / Cast: George Eastman, Katya Berger, Annie Belle, Charles Borromel, Edmund Purdom, Hanja Kochansky, Ian Danby, Kasimir Berger.

Body Count: 7

Dire-logue: “I’m no doctor, but that doesn’t look good.”

An as-yet un-re-submitted (!) resident of the infamous Video Nasties List of the early 80s, this sort-of sequel to the crappy Grim Reaper takes a lot of cues from Halloween, stirs in lashings of gore, and is therefore about 642% better than its predecessor.

Eastman is the beardy-loon on the run from Purdom’s priest Pleasence-clone when he is injured atop a spiked gate at the home of the “all-American” Bennett family: mom, dad, aggressively punchable brat-of-a-son Willy, and paralysed teenage sister Katya, who is confined to a cot-contraption upstairs until she can summon the strength to walk again. You can guess what’s coming later.

Beardy-loon is rushed to hospital where the doctors working on him comment that it’s “absurd” how his body repairs itself against the laws of science. He later wakes up and thanks the staff by driving a drill through the temple of a nurse and then feeding some other poor idiot’s bald head into a saw.

Naturally, he gravitates back to the Bennett house and does away with the stand-in babysitter before going after poor Katya and the replacement babysitter. All the while, Willy stands around like a tool and whines about things as everybody watching hopes that the reason this film found its way on to the Video Nasties List is because it did away with the insufferable little prick with extreme prejudice.

Alas, it doesn’t come to be. But Absurd is full of gratuitous violence all the same: the first two kills are the most splatterific, and things DO get tense towards the end as Katya – as we suspected – finds that inner strength to hobble around and takes on the maniac with a compass of all things and a game of hide and seek ensues.

Of all the Halloween Xeroxes out there, it’s certainly one of the most obvious, full of “I’ll go look, you stay here” dialogue, but it does pack some interesting moments, including a funny final shot, rendering it a fair retread through familiar surroundings and a mini Holy Grail for gorehounds and masochists who like to endure the presence of bad child actors who won’t fucking die.

Look out for Stagefright director Michele Soavi as the young biker victim.

Blurbs-of-interest: Purdom was also in Pieces and Don’t Open Til Christmas (which he also directed some of); Soavi also acted in A Blade in the Dark.

The Blind and the Bloodthirsty

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JULIA’S EYES

4 Stars  2010/15/113m

Director: Guillem Morales / Writers: Morales & Oriol Paulo / Cast: Belen Reuda, Lluis Homar, Pablo Derqui, Francesc Orella, Julia Gutierrez Coba, Boris Ruiz, Andrea Hermosa, Daniel Grao.

Body Count: 6

Dire-logue: “My father is lonely and you’re hot.”

Guillermo Del Toro’s name on anything seems to sell it internationally at present. But if he’s not careful he might fall victim to The Wes Craven Syndrome, whereby any old shite that passed over his desk somehow gains endorsement as ‘executive producer’ credence. I wonder if Wes has even set eyes of Don’t Look Down.

Fortunately for Del Toro, Julia’s Eyes is a great little foray into the world of the blind. It’s not entirely original, mind, echoes of Blink with Madeline Stowe (whatever happened to her?), The Eye, and some tawdry made-for-TV thriller with Victoria Principal (Blind Witness?) abound.

A sightless woman goes to hang herself, only to have the job done for her when a stranger kicks the stool from beneath her legs when she has second thoughts. Her twin sister Julia (Reuda, previously seen chasing ghosts in The Orphanage) and her husband, Isaac, are the ones to find her. Julia is almost instantly dismissive of the suicide explanation but, suffering from the same degenerative sight disorder, Julia wants answers before her vision fails the same way as Sara’s.

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Julia becomes convinced Sara had a boyfriend who, at the very least, ‘assisted’ the hanging but nobody seems to remember him. An old hotel custodian describes him as ‘invisible’ to the world around him before being electrocuted in the tub as Mr Invisible appears to be able to cover his tracks before Julia can find out who he is.

The stress of the situation followed by Isaac’s apparent suicide accelerate Julia’s loss of sight and her doctor forges ahead with a transplant operation and Julia faces two weeks beneath a blindfold before she will find out if she can see again. Her care worker Ivan becomes her rock and Julia eventually develops feelings towards him that are thwarted by the apparent return of Sara’s killer, who can seemingly be anywhere at anytime…

The resolution isn’t entirely unpredictable, after all Ivan’s face is kept off-camera for the most part, despite the fact we saw him earlier on with another patient. But does that make him a killer?

Julia’s Eyes takes a bit of a commitment as it passes the 90 minute mark with a lot of stuff still left to cover. Even though it eventually conforms nicely to some cut n’ dried slasher movie shenanigans, it could easily lose 15 minutes or so as the gripping nature of the first half dissipates into a sort of “how will she get out of this one?” scenario that is repeated several times over towards the finale.

The film would be redundant if at least some of these cliches went unchecked: Julia’s doctor advises she recovers at the hospital but she insists on going it alone in her late-sister’s unfamiliar house, yet she’s the only one who truly believes there’s a killer running about. It’s forgivable as otherwise the final third would just be a retread of the Halloween II hospital slasher opus.

That said, there’s little slashing: two people are hanged, another zapped in the bath but there’s a decent knife-in-the-gob and a cringeworthy needle into the eyeball, shown in all its clear yukkiness.

Some scenes work just perfectly: Julia’s visit to a resource centre for blind people is creepy for varying reasons as she unwittingly finds herself in the middle of a conversation between a group of blind women who don’t sense she’s there for a couple of minutes, then there’s a chase through the drippy back tunnels of the building when one of the blind women declares that “there’s someone else with you – he’s right behind you.”

The climax is a little drawn out and familiar but an almost heartwarming twist is added on at the end – the biggest mystery is Julia herself: she quite literally appears and replaces her dead sister. We learn almost nothing about her life up to this point, where she lives, who her friends are… Husband aside, it’s as if she never met a soul.

Again, forgiven due to the tasty Spanish vibes on show: you only need to see this once to appreciate how good it is.

Blurb-of-interest: Daniel Grao was in Killer Book Club.

Cold Prey-garism

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BLOOD RUNS COLD

2 Stars  2011/15/74m

“Hell just froze over.”

Director: Sonny Laguna / Writers: Laguna, David Liljeblad & Tommy Wiklund / Cast: Hanna Oldenburg, Patrick Saxe, Andreas Rylander, Elin Hugoson, Ralf Beck, David Liljeblad.

Body Count: 6

Sweden: Land of Volvo, saunas, ABBA, and Roxette. Norway: Land of herring, fjords, and famously coming last in Eurovision countless times.

Sweden shouldn’t really be jealous. But then Norway got Cold Prey – hands down the best slasher, neigh – best horror – film in a long time. Sweden was all like “yeah we can do that.”

So out came Blood Runs Cold, shot on a minuscule budget of about $5,000, and boasting a plot staggering similar to Sweden’s next-door neighbour’s celluloid prize possession.

Winona, a singer of some such, drives into the snow-covered turf of her old town for a couple of months away from the stress put on her by her manager. Unfortunately for her, she gets the wrong house and beds down in a twee, but dilapidated shack of a place.

She drives into town and runs into an old boyfriend and invites him and a couple of his friends back to the house to party. This is where Blood Runs Cold trades in some of its admittedly impressive style for some dumb ass character behaviour… It seems the house has no bathroom as people keep going outside to piss and one of them sees a figure in the upstairs window but doesn’t bother telling the others about it. The other guy finds that Winona’s van has been tampered with, picks up a torn out spark plug, tosses it into the snow and doesn’t bother telling the others about it.

Before sun up, all three of the invitees have been murdered and eaten by the hooded, goggled freak living in a series of secret rooms and caves beneath the house. Winona assumes they just went home and, upon finding a large paddle of blood on the living room floor, simply cleans it up and goes about her day as if it meant nothing…

“This film is snot what I signed on for.”

When it’s just Winona and the loon – who appears to be deaf, blind and made of dust!? – all dialogue is gone and as he hangs her up to serve up some chick-meat, she escapes, he catches her, she escapes, he catches her and so on until the credits suddenly spring up out of nowhere, several minutes earlier than the box promised!

There’s some good looking photography on parade and the house geography supplies a few good hidey-holes for Winona to crawl around (could’ve provided some Kleenex for her Heather Donahue moment too, I guess) but even at 74 minutes this drags and isn’t nearly a quarter as tense as Cold Prey.

Curiously recorded in English – which also seems to inhibit the acting – with a higher wad of cash at their disposal, this could’ve been much better but seems lazily written with an almost purposely dumb cast and a stack of unanswered questions, not least of all who the dude at the beginning is?

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