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ALONE

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alone2 Stars  2001/15/89m

“Hear the fear.”

Director: Phil Claydon / Writers: David Ball, Phil Claydon, John Davies, Mark Loughman & Paul Hart Wilden / Cast: John Shrapnel, Isabel Brook, Laurel Holloman, Miriam Margolyes, Caroline Carever, Claudia Harrison.

Body Count: 4

Dire-logue: “So…you’ve got Freddy Krueger as an admirer…”

There’s some real ambition in this arty Brit-flick, which toured European festivals for a full year before it was given a straight-to-video release. Made up largely of point-of-view photography that identifies us to/with the character of Alex: a compulsively clean outpatient who likes to write letters to, and then kill, young women whom Alex perceives to be lonely.

Beginning as a gritty detective drama mixed with the POV work of Alex’s strange existence and visits to caseworker Margolyes, whose advice is to try and romance a girl who is soon after found murdered. However it is her pretty American assistant Charlotte who eventually becomes the heroine when the entire thing morphs into a pedestrian clone of Halloween II as Alex tracks Charlotte down to a local hospital.

The most effective scene is when a girl returns home to find all of her kitchen has been cleaned, her fridge magnets neatly lined up and her spice rack contents faced up. All very Sleeping with the Enemy! We’re never granted a look at our killer, only Alex’s hands make it into the frame.

Alone doesn’t try to be a slasher film, with its miserable, colourless photography and the stupid twist ending that isn’t really a twist at all given the first-person voice used to thread things together. Actually, the ending downright sucks, yanking the rug out so violently that it tears as it goes! Director Claydon later helmed the Horne/Corden “comedy” Lesbian Vampire Killers.

JOLLY ROGER: MASSACRE AT CUTTER’S COVE

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jollyrogerJOLLY ROGER: MASSACRE AT CUTTER’S COVE

3 Stars  2005/18/77m

“Some things should stay lost at sea.”

Director: Gary Jones / Writers: Jeff Miller & Gary Jones / Cast: Rhett Giles, Tom Nagel, Kristina Korn, Tom Downey, Kim Little, Pamela Munro, Justin Brannock, Megan Lee Ethridge, Hajar Northern, Ted Cochran.

Body Count: 16

Dire-logue: “Just drinking a little, smoking a little dope and all your friends got massacred, right?”

This cheap n’ cheesy quickie from the same studio that brought us the Scarecrow films takes many cues from The Fog in a tale of a murderous pirate back from the dead to behead the present day ancestors of his treacherous crew.

Considering the studio’s choppy resume, Jolly Roger nicely outperforms the previous efforts both technically and in terms of its general enjoyability. Other films that are pilfered include Leprechaun and Jason Goes to Hell. The short running time is a plus, as the sky-high body count escalates at a nice pace to outweigh the detective efforts of the boring teen couple who witness Roger’s slaughter of their high school friends – four corpses in the first fifteen minutes!

The killer, meanwhile, yo-ho-ho’s his way through town collecting severed heads to put in his Dead Man’s Chest with pirate-themed one liners at every turn, kinda like the lovechild of Freddy Krueger and Jack Sparrow. The sword decapitations are sloppy but gory and there’s a funny hand-chop thrown in as well. Endless clichés by numbers, with generous T&A, gallons of gore (though rum is nowhere to be found, much to Roger’s chagrin) and characters so thinly drawn that they barely have enough screen time to do much but die! Not for all tastes for sure but genre completists should get a kick out of it.

Blurbs-of-interest: Gary Jones directed Boogeyman 3 and Axe Giant; Tom Nagel directed ClownTown.

TERROR AT TENKILLER

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tenkiller1 Stars  1987/18/87m

“Just when you thought it was safe to go on vacation!”

Director: Ken Meyer / Writers: Claudia Meyer & Ken Meyer / Cast: Stacey Logan, Mike Wiles, Michele Merchant, Kevin Meyer, Dale Buckmaster.

Body Count: 5

Dire-logue: “Somehow…some way, I’ve got to protect myself.”

No-frills Friday the 13th wannabe #623 where another teen vacation ends up with dead bodies all over the place.

Gal-pals Logan and Merchant take time out at Lake Tenkiller to evade the former’s scary ex-boyfriend (who intends to “get even” with her) where they swim and take jobs as waitresses at the local diner where the serving beauties have a habit of ‘walking out’ on their jobs and never coming back.

Of course we know that they’re really being slashed to bits by a local psycho who the film makes absolutely no attempt to disguise in any way – but in a film with a cast of eight people, there ain’t much they could do to distort his identity.

Tenkiller looks like the scraps of a million better killer-on-holiday slashers with tedious scenes and precious little dialogue or bloodshed – the film even has a tacked on voiceover epilogue in a vain attempt to make sense of itself. There’s one good laugh: the road sign for Lake Tenkiller also mentions the next town along – called Gore! Maybe that was going to be the sequel.

Permanently offline

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voyeurVOYEUR.COM

2 Stars  2000/18/90m

“The new website everyone’s dying to see.”

A.k.a. BigBrother.com: The Movie

Director/Writer: Miles Feldman / Cast: Jena Romano, Travis Shakespeare, Adam Weiner, Tawnya Richardson, Keri-Anne Telford, Vanessa Nachtmann, Shannon Hutchinson, Laurie Searle, Ryan Boone, Kevin Pass, Iva Hasperger, Eric Adam Wittgren, Rob O’Malley, Scott Berman.

Body Count: 13

Dire-logue: “You’re killing my buzz, Euroboobs!”

Exploitation horror sometimes requires a bit o’ sleaze. Is there anything that bad about a dash of sleaze? Sleazy-sleazy-bo-beazy, banana-fana-fo-feazy, fee-fi-mo-meazy, Sleazy… OK.

Anyway, Voyeur.com, released in the UK under that dog-shit title BigBrother.com: The Movie (!), was one of the earlier attempts to fuse stalk n’ slash conventions with reality TV, which was arguably at its peak in 2000. So, three horny Californian dorks audition a group of nubile airheads who’ll “try most things once…no animals,” to live in a house rigged with cameras, while virginal nerds max out their debit cards to watch and “beat off” over the internet – although watching a girl on the toilet isn’t my idea of titillation.

Shy narrator and bargain-basement Winona Ryder look-alike Mary is worried because she has no personality and doesn’t sleep around like her housemates but facially-inept mastermind Alex likes her and that’s all that matters! Meanwhile, a masked killer begins knocking off the ancillary characters, including a dim-witted gardener-slash-perv. Aside from he and Mary, the others are the usual pick n’ mix of jocks, potheads, bitches and bimbos whose always-sexual conversations limit their vocab to ‘cool’ and ‘party’ and they are thankfully laid to waste, more often than not during the act.

The most memorable sequence (also known as the only one I didn’t forget ten minutes later) is when the aggressive lesbian goes down on a Pammie Anderson-a-like, who sees the killer approaching but is, y’know, unable to get out of the way! There’s also the obligatory Scream-lite opener that doesn’t remotely connect with anything else that happens.

For all these flaws in credibility, acting talent, photography, lighting, audio and plotting, Voyeur.com never became so bad that I wanted to kick the screen in and some of the characters here are still less pretentious, transparent and stabbable than those in Big Brother!

PARANOID

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paranoid-copy2 Stars  2000/18/87m

“Look behind you, he might be there.”

A.k.a. Frightmare

Director/Writer: Ash Smith / Cast: Shanda Lee Besler, Shawn Wright, Summer Sloan LaPann, Brandon O’Dell, Michael Short, Denny Zartman, Tyler Thebaul.

Body Count: 9

Dire-logue: “If a serial killer was stalking me, I think I’d know.”

I couldn’t find a good enough scan of the DVD cover so I had to draw it with Paint. That’s a bloody face and a knife instead of the ‘i’ in Paranoid. Yeah, I even drew the knife.

Anyway, let this not distract you from learning that this Australian film is an out and out Scream clone, which pretends to be be American. It begins with a girl and her parents being wasted in Sugar Hill, Georgia – “the most boring town in the world” – by a famous serial murderer known by the media as The Conscience Killer, who dresses scarily similar to the loon from Cherry Falls.

A slaughter subsequently begins after an article about the killer is printed by budding high school journo Sarah, whose twin sister Laurie, we learn, was murdered. Yes, nothing ever happens in Sugar Hill. Four murders!? Move away, man! Move to Tazzie. Laurie had a bit of a Maureen Prescott reputation going for her. Let us stroke our chin and utter a big ‘hmmmm’…

Meanwhile, Sarah’s schoolfriends have staged a Halloween funhouse in order to raise money to send the senior class to the Cayman Islands. Why, I wasn’t sure, possibly to open a bank account. To the surprise of nobody bar the cast: the killer stalks Sarah, kills some extras and then goes for a homicidal home run on the last night of the funhouse’s operation – is it the Conscience Killer?? Is it fuck.

This roughtly demonstrates a choice scene from 'Paranoid'

A thrilling screenshot from ‘Paranoid’.

The resolution is far from satisfying and about as convincing as Arnold Schwarzenegger in drag, but apparently “no one suspected a thing!” In all fairness, the young thesps do quite well with the sub-par script but gaping plot holes claim any credibility that happened to be driving by and the score sometimes completely ceases during moments of ‘high drama’ only to return later as if nothing had happened.

But it’s just so lazy… Scream was successful everywhere so why bother trying to pass off a third generation photocopy as anything but a big pile of pants? The Gale Weathers wannabe is even called Kate Windsail!! Windsail!!?

Blurb-of-interest: Michael Short was Chet in The Greenskeeper.

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