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The Vegan Voorhees Pre-Halloween Horrorfest Part III

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So Groupie was mediocre and The Collector depressed me – next it was on to A Night to Dismember, which I’d heard “things” about, the same way you “hear” “things” about Camp Crystal Lake. Well you would if it existed.

A NIGHT TO DISMEMBER

1.5 Stars  1983/69m

Director: Doris Wishman / Writer: Judith J. Kushner / Cast: Samantha Fox, Diane Cummins, Bill Szarka, Saul Meth, Miriam Meth, Frankie Sabat, Chris Smith.

Body Count: 15

Dire-logue: “Someone was calling her – the voice seemed to be coming from the hat box.”

According to the IMDb, according to director Doris Wishman – according to the DVD commentary, the main reason A Night to Dismember sucks harder than a Portsmouth hooker is that a disgruntled lab employee burnt most of the negatives, leaving Wishman to spend some years re-shooting and re-cutting the film into the 69 minute end product.

If you could ever get a headache on to celluloid than this is surely it. There is no original sound, it was all re-recorded and dubbed back on with the haywire plot strung together (or attempted to be) by a narration leaving next to no dialogue for the people on screen.

So the story goes, in October 1986 the Kent family pretty much all get murdered after daughter Vicki (Samantha Fox – no, not that Samantha Fox) is released from an asylum where she had been residing for the past five years after murdering two local boys. Her brother Billy hates her and tries to make her crazy by dressing up in cheapo masks and emerging from a lake to follow her like a zombie.

Some people die pretty much from being lightly tapped by either a machete or the preferred axe. At one juncture, a loving couple are slain with the former weapon, their decapitations seen as shadows against a wall, both are quite literally prodded by the blade and their heads just tumble off. Then, in the next shot, their killer places the featureless plastic head of a mannequin in a fireplace, which we are asked to believe is the noggin of the woman! It’s plain white! It has no hair! Later, a decapitated head actually gets stuck to the axe blade.

Narrator man – supposed to be a detective – babbles on and watches Vicki through a window:

– “Vicki saw me through the shades and started to dance. It had been a long time since any man had paid any attention to her.”

And then he tells us about Vicki’s dream:

– “Vicki felt as though someone faceless was making love to her in bright flashing colours that were changing from one second to the next.”

nighttodismemberSome other people are murdered and then Vicki’s immediate family members begin dying. Here, the actor playing Billy’s hair changes from shot to shot. And I mean changes. It’s a short back and sides one second and then flopping around his shoulders the next, clearly after at least a year’s growth.

The killer is revealed to be Mary shortly afterwards and she is almost immediately haunted by the ghosts of her murder victims. So she runs into the woods. Then into the cellar where she hears a voice coming from a hat box (see Dire-logue). Then she packs a case and leaves and murders a taxi driver. What was her motive? Fucked if I know!

So Vicki was innocent after all but ends up getting strangled by the detective when she starts tapping him with the axe in self defence. Things end with the narrator telling us he knew all the juicy details because the entire family kept diaries.

Wow. 69 minutes has never dragged as much but if you’re really hunting for bad, bad movies then drop anchor here, it’s truly unbelievable. Everything seems to have gone wrong: the music changes completely in a snap from sort of jazzy gameshow theme to tuneless stringy shrieks but almost never attuned to what’s supposed to be happening on screen; the effects work is horrible and the camera work all over the place. Considering the title is a play on A Night to Remember, you’d be hard pressed to ever forget this. Technically speaking the worst film I’ve ever seen but at least it wasn’t a completely uninteresting experience…

The Vegan Voorhees Pre-Halloween Horrorfest Part II

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With Groupie down I turned my attention to The Collector, as sent to me by the folks at Lovefilm. Now, I wasn’t sure if I’d even count this as a slasher film for much of the running time but I guess it adheres enough to the general opus, even if I’m totally against seeing animals killed on film. Disapprovingly, while it’s a pretty good flick, I’ve not a lot to say about it…

THE COLLECTOR

3 Stars  2009/18/87m

“He always takes one.”

Director: Marcus Dunstan / Writers: Patrick Melton & Marcus Dunstan / Cast: Josh Stewart, Michael Reilly Burke, Andrea Roth, Madeline Zima, Karley Scott Collins, Juan Fernandez, William Prael, Daniella Alonso, Alex Feldman.

Body Count: 8

Heavily debted ex-con Arkin works honestly by day in construction and moonlights as a thief. When working on the home of a rich jeweller and his family – who are about to go away for a few days – Arkin sees an opportunity to meet the deadline of a loan shark and sneaks into the house after hours to break into the safe.

Unfortunately, not only does it seem that somebody else is in the house, but said somebody has the family captive and is intent on torturing them to death, thwarting any escape attempts with numerous well-thought-out traps around the place. Yes, it’s Home Alone by Jigsaw.

What ensues for a while is a tense game out cat and mouse between Arkin and the hooded killer – The Collector – until the kind-hearted thief decides to try and help the family, if no one else than their pre-teen daughter Hannah, who is hiding somewhere, with whom he struck up a rapport earlier in the day.

Naturally, the killer’s pre-set traps are all used and all of them work exactly as they should, to squish, skewer, snap and slash the family members, a boyfriend and anybody else who happens by. Nothing is shown that is not used in some way and when the killer is more hands-on, luck is always on his side when spinning a blade at some more schmuck. But there is success in the potrayal of the killer – he’s a genuinely unsettling fellow with eyes that, when caught at the right angle, glow green like when you take a picture of your dog. He has no particular motive and it’s not even clear what his purpose is, to kill or ‘just’ torture?

Now, the ranty bit…

It would be hypocritical to denounce a film for being too brutal when you make a habit of watching and blogging about them but The Collector, like some of the scenes in, say, Hostel: Part II, goes further than what I’d find entertaining. Gruesome ways to kill people – fine, this does share some production credits with the Saw franchise – but the prolonged suffering of people and animals isn’t where I want to get my kicks and, like it or not, there are people who get off to that kinda stuff, it’s a losing argument to say otherwise.

Adam Green made the point at FrightFest that horror fans are often viewed as weird or sick in some way prior to the premiere of Hatchet II but comparing the cartoon violence of that film to a domestic cat pretty much melting into an acidic composite is pointless – you can laugh at the stupidity of Victor Crowley taking out two burly guys with a phallic chainsaw but at recreations of genuine pain – blecch. Even the quote from Gorezone on the front is worrying: “Good, twisted fun.” Good and tense as parts of The Collector were, there was absolutely nothing fun about it.

One final weird thing was the presence of Madeline Zima as the teenage daughter, Jill. She played the little girl in the a fore mentioned The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. In the same way Danielle Harris grew up from her little kid role in the Halloween sequels to go topless in Rob Zombie’s remake, it feels a bit perverse to see Zima disrobed here, able to remember clearly her squawking “you’re not my Mommy!” at Rebecca DeMornay what feels like only a few years back…

OK rant bit done with.

This will NOT end well…

Some pro’s: Stewart is a good, charismatic lead and Marcus Dunstan directs more than competently, creating a decent amount of tension in the opening sequence that poses some questions that may or may not be totally answered.

I’d say The Collector is more of an experience than a piece of escapist horror like a Friday the 13th sequel. Pushing the boundaries has been key to the success of several recent entries in the is-it/isn’t-it torture porn sub-set but even just a hint of a happy ending might’ve made this one more bearable. Let’s see some ass-kicking of the psycho rather than cowering and shrieking victims. What little it does give you isn’t enough to satisfy the counter balance that makes your more regular slasher flick a fun viewing experience – the bit where the final girl turns the tables. Yeah, I said I’d finished ranting already. OK, cut.

Blurbs-of-interest: Daniella Alonso was in Wrong Turn 2: Dead End. Michael Reilly Burke played Ted Bundy in, uh, Ted Bundy.

The Laugh/Barf Principle

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HATCHET

2 Stars  2006/18/81m

“It’s not a remake. It’s not a sequel. And it’s not based on a Japanese one.”

Director/Writer: Adam Green / Cast: Joel David Moore, Tamara Feldman, Deon Richmond, Kane Hodder, Mercedes McNab, Parry Shen, Joleigh Fioreavanti, Patrika Darbo, Richard Riehle, Joel Murray, Robert Englund, Joshua Leonard, Tony Todd.

Body Count: 11

Dire-logue: “It’s not working – are you sure the number is 9-1-1?”

‘Old School American Horror’ sayeth the cover… Hatchet opened to a lot of eager reviews of the “best thing since sliced head bread” variety from various horror ‘ficionados and so, when it eventually washed up on our shores in October of 2007, I was hoping it would remove the sour aftertaste of Rob Zombie’s Halloween right out of there like a keg of Listerine.

On paper it should be perfect: Hodder, Todd, Englund, a true slasher movie fan at the helm, the woods, lost group of tourists, local myth of psycho killer, and still Hatchet and I just didn’t get along. It’s like a blind date set up by your friend who thinks you’ll be perfect for each other but then it turns out that maybe they just don’t know you that well.

Anyway, enough of that tripe, what’s it about?

Recently dumped college boy Moore is dragging his heels around New Orleans Mardi Gras, much to the annoyance of his frat buddies (including director Green in the cap) and opts to take a haunted swamp tour he heard about, accompanied reluctantly by best pal Richmond.

Turned away by Tony Todd’s two minute cameo, they find fake-accented Parry Shen is willing to take them, along with a retired couple, a porno director and his two bickering starlets and a mysteriously quiet local chick who’s looking for her croc hunting Pa and bro (Englund and Leonard) who were offed in the prologue. Their guide soon proves himself incompetent by grounding the tour boat and a croc attack leaves the group staggering around the woods when they happen upon the house allegedly inhabited by a legendary ghoul…

After a flashback tale of poor Victor Crowley, a horrendously malformed child looked after solely by his father (Hodder, out of makeup for a change) who was tormented by local kids who torched his house while the boy was still inside and a botched rescue attempt by daddy left him with an axe in the face… Nominal heroine Feldman tries to guide the group elsewhere but is too late and the hulking Crowley quickly sets about doing away with them one by one.

Hatchet does what we expect it to; the tourists are ripped limb from limb, hacked, sawn, skewered and beheaded with liberal lashings of gore, all of it CG-free, which is admirable, although at times the less-is-more route would have been advisable, although the film was released at a time when ‘horror’ was being cut down to PG-13 levels of acceptability to suck in a younger audience, Hatchet provided a sort of nihilistic flip-off to them and piled on the grue. And the tits.

It was mostly the misbalanced frat-style comedy that shot it in the foot for me. The gags are obvious as Richmond does the typical token black dude thing while McNab is dumber than a box of hair (“call the police, they’ll send the cops!”) and Moore is just the unlucky schmuck. Shen comes out of it the best – possibly the reason he returned for the sequel as a different character – and Feldman is a functional, if not a little lifeless heroine, replaced in Hatchet II by the preferable Danielle Harris.

Green’s skills markedly improved by the time the follow up surfaced in 2010, achieving where most sequels fail by completely outdoing the original film. That’s not to say Hatchet is a bad film, it’s just a bit…juvenile? Who knows, maybe it was supposed to be, but it’s bookended plot means that it geographically goes almost nowhere, seemingly set in a patch of woods about thirty feet in diameter. As if unsure whether he wants to shock us or make us laugh, even Green himself seemed to be aware of the flaws during the screening of the second film at FrightFest, a product he was evidently more at home with making and is consequently far more accomplished.

Blurbs-of-interest: Deon Richmond was in Scream 3; Parry Shen was also in Dead Scared; Josh Leonard had the lead in Madhouse. Mercedes McNab used to play dim-witted cheerleader (and then equally incompetent vampire) Harmony in Buffy. Richard Riehle was in The Watermen and Texas Chainsaw 3D, and Mischief Night; John Carl Buechler, director of Friday the 13th Part VII and makeup artist on a gazillion other films cameod as Jack Cracker (and had a bigger role in Hatchet II). Hodder, Englund and Todd’s services to the genre are huge and I hope at the very least you know which three icons they’re most famous for playing.

Don’t not do what they said don’t to, do what you don’t not feel like not doing

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DON’T GO IN THE WOODS

1.5 Stars  1981/18/82m

“Everyone has nightmares about the ugliest way to die.”

A.k.a. Don’t Go in the Woods…Alone!

Director: James Bryan / Writer: Garth Eliassen / Cast: Jack McClelland, Mary Gail Artz, James P. Hayden, Angie Brown, Ken Carter, Tom Drury.

Body Count: 16

Dire-logue: “Peter! That could’ve been a fatal mistake, jumping off a log!”

One of the many horror movies of the “Don’t…” oeuvre of the early 80s, Don’t Go in the Woods may have the achieved the notoreity of finding its way on to the Video Nasties List but it’s possibly even more well known for being a hysterically inept exercise in how not to go about making a slasher film. It’s that film you saw when you were 12 and thought you were so tough for sitting through. At 25 you realise it was just crap.

Starting with silent credits and then aerial footage of some mountains that looks as if the camera was mounted on a vibrator, atop a washing machine in an out of control prototype helicopter, DGITW quickly piles up a worthy body count as a girl running along a stream dies, then a birdwatcher gets his arm lopped off and a couple of oddly dressed day walkers die. We don’t get to see the killer or even really how any of these people die but it’s fairly comical, given that all the audio was dubbed on afterwards to ‘improve’ the sound, rendering any dramatic nuance lost in horrible sounding dialogue that’s either shouted or whispered.

Don’t wear an oversized bowtie in the woods

We meet our quartet of dreary central characters, pink-shirted Peter, know-all man o’ the wild Craig, and two women who are virtually identical save for hair colour, Ingrid and Joanie. Between random murders, we return to the group to listen to Craig droning on about survival and how man is the most feared animal of the woods until he is mercifully the first one killed off.

The others scatter and while Joanie goes it alone, Peter and Ingrid discover more bodies, kill an innocent bystander and find their way to safety only to run back into the woods to search for Joanie and finish off the killer, who, in the meantime, has killed a couple in a VW camper, an artist, a fisherman and – somewhat randomly – beheaded a guy in a wheelchair. Why the fuck would someone wheel themselves up a mountain unaided? The guy even falls out of the damn thing at one point. And why was there an unsteady girl on rollerskates earlier on – are we to believe she skated up the mountain?

Don’t know the hell that is? She’s been skewered through her painting

There are numerous other questions raised by the sheer randomness of this project: the killer, when finally shown about halfway through, is some beardy guy who jangles when he runs, yet nobody hears him approaching… One early victim is tossed off a cliff face and lands on some rocks literally five feet from some people playing in a waterfall and they totally don’t notice!

Eventually, when Peter and Joanie defy the title of the film and return to the woods, they take with them a hunting party, the almost perfectly spherical sheriff and a fucking doctor from the hospital. Things end in a suitably nihilistic way (possibly the scene that got it banned) and it wraps with a stultifyingly horrendous song that can must be heard to be bought.

Don’t Go in the Woods sucks. It sucks so hard I feared that it might suck a hole in the fabric of space and take us all with it. But it’s funny as hell and worth seeing for a dare if nothing more. The dubbing situation is amusing on its own but when coupled with the abysmal acting of virtually all involved, it just becomes one more reason not to visit Utah.

Don’t give up the day job

Blurbs-of-interest: Mary Gail Artz (Ingrid – redhead) became a successful casting director soon after this faux pas and has credits on a lot of big films, including Halloween II and House of Wax in the horror realm. Angie Brown (Joanie) was in All-American Murder.

Back to the Bayou

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HATCHET II

3 Stars  2010/18/82m

“Hold on to all of your pieces.”

Director/Writer: Adam Green / Cast: Danielle Harris, Tony Todd, Kane Hodder, Parry Shen, Tom Holland, R.A. Mihailoff, A.J. Bowen, Alexis Peters, Ed Ackerman, Colton Dunn, David Foy, Rick McCallum, John Carl Buechler.

Body Count: 18

Vegan Voorhees’ first world premiere! Yay!

I realised I hadn’t been to FrightFest for a decade – my last foray was for Cut, the Molly Ringwald/Kylie Minogue Australian answer to Scream, which disappeared without a trace thereafter.

Once settled in the back row, a camera flash caught my attention and I heard the signature purr of Tony Todd’s voice all but ten feet from me – “we’re saving this seat for Adam,” said a small dark-haired girl to his left – Danielle Harris! And a couple of seats closer, do I see the outline of Kane Hodder’s head?

OK, so I’m way too shy to approach but Adam Green gathered the group to the stage after the film for some Q&A and, on his own, introduced the film. He’s a genuine guy and evidently a gem to work with as his entire crew returned to work with him on this sequel to a film I’ve never really thought that much of, therefore my expectations for more of the same weren’t exactly high. Lo and behold…Green’s preamble that his growth as a director has provided a positive knock-on effect for the end product and it’s true, he has surpassed his first effort.

It’s a rarity in the slasher realm for a sequel to actually pick up where its predecessor left off and Hatchet II begins with Marybeth fighting off Victor Crowley after he grabbed her from the boat. She escapes and is rescued by returning character, Jack Cracker, who, upon realising what family she’s a part of, boots her out and sends her in the direction of Reverend Zombie.Tony Todd relishes narrating the backstory of Victor Crowley, going further back than before and therefore permitting Kane Hodder some dialogue as Crowley Sr. as we learn of the curse that was beset on the unborn child, giving some origin to his apparent ongoing survival, and providing space for a quick ‘greatest hits’ style montage of some of Crowley’s kills.

Zombie agrees to accompany Marybeth back to the swamp to recover the bodies of her father and brother as long as she brings along her Uncle Bob and they go with a group of local croc hunters and fisherman, who are competing for $500 bounty on Crowley’s head, including the twin brother of phoney tour operator Shawn (again played by Parry Shen – this time affecting a rubbish French accent), an estranged couple who can’t keep their hands off each other, and every-line’s-a-gag guy Vernon.

Up to this point, the film kinda drags its feet, devoting more screentime to Harris and Todd and the film is almost half over by the time the group get back to the bayou. The big dude quickly appears once the hunting party separate and so begins the carnage and Green has gone all out on a parade of dementedly twisted – and often hilarious – slayings: faces go into outboard propellers, there was quite possibly an axe up the arse and the world’s most phallic chainsaw makes an appearance, as does the power sander used in the previous film and there’s a great tabletop decapitation that had the whole audience applauding.

Almost everything works better this time round the carousel: Crowley’s make-up appears less rubbery and Danielle Harris makes a more appealing Marybeth, simply by the virtue of who she is. Green stated that his entire crew returned for the sequel, which had sets built by the same team from The Dark Knight and told of an E. Coli outbreak that attempted to wipe out most of the cast and crew throughout the shoot.

The dedication of the team allowed for amusing cameo appearances from Mercedes McNab and Joleigh Fioravanti via the recovered camcorder brandished by the amateur pornographer from part one and listen out for the mention of Leslie Vernon during Zombie’s pitch to the hunters.

Bottom line is that Hatchet II just works better, scoring high points for striking its comedy-horror balance, assembly of genre faces and the apparent love all involved had for the project.

Blurbs-of-interest: Danielle Harris played Jamie Lloyd in Halloween‘s 4 and 5 and Annie Brackett in Rob Zombie’s remake and its sequel as well as Urban Legend; Tony Todd was also in iMurders, Scarecrow Slayer, Jack the Reaper, Hell Fest, Candy Corn, and three Final Destinations; Kane Hodder played Jason four times and appears fleetingly in Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon and Children of the Corn V. Parry Shen was in Dead Scared. R.A. Milhailoff was in Texas Chainsaw Massacre III. A.J. Bowen later in appeared in You’re Next.

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