Tag Archives: Halloween

Walk like a Scarecrowey-thing

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DARK WALKER

2 Stars  2003/15/81m

“You were right to fear…Dark Walker.”

Director: Danny Draven / Writer: Dan Jacobs / Cast: Kathleen Susan Taylor, Michael Sage, David DeWitt, Brenda Matthews, Rick Irvin, Emily van Sonnenberg, Brad Potts, Jill Small, Clive Hawkins, Ali Taylor, Ivan Glenn Hall, Chuck Williams.

Body Count: 12

Dire-logue: “You know they call orgasms ‘little deaths’… I want a little death tonight.”

A cursed patch of land in California was the scene of a gruesome beheading in 1878 when a farmer snatched a pumpkin that unleashed a scarecrow-like figure.

125 years later, said land is renovated by a couple who build a sort of mini theme park with a Halloween Haunted House centrepiece and employ several local teens to work inside.

Because the sacred land has again been desecrated, the Dark Walker is given free reign to slaughter those it deems responsible, i.e. the teens.

Throw in psychic heroine Maggie and a ghostly caretaker and it’s a part nobody will forget, least of all because the film knocks off just about everyone, including the nominal hero, except Maggs, and ends with one of those abrupt what-the-fuck shocks that are normally there to paper over the lack of exposition…although in this case the credits promise Dark Walker 2 will follow.

Like all of these “you are SO doomed” flicks, the cast are well aware of the growing body count and still refuse to opt out of returning to the house of death because they need the dough.

As far as cheap, amateurish DVD horror goes it’s not that bad. There’s enough gore without going overboard, even if it is largely buckets of gunk thrown at the nearest wall by production runners.

8 years and counting and no sign of this alleged sequel!

DVD D.O.A.: Shitty Sequels

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The law of diminishing returns rules hard in horrordom; sequels almost always gradually degrade in a nice neat arc.

See?

Though every now and then there’s a nice kink in the drop off (Friday VI, Elm Street 3, Halloween 4)… Those aside, let’s whatever-the-opposite-of-celebrate-is (mourn?) the sequels that NEVER should’ve happened…

I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer (2006)

This sensationally dumb third entry in the I Know What You Did saga abandoned Jennifer Love Hewitt and her substantial cleavage for pastures new.

Colorado. Lots of slicker-clad fishermen found round there.

A quartet of teens whose prank went askew are literally haunted by the killer Fisherman who turns out to be a ghost.

It’s cheap, offensively simplistic and actually has a couple of surplus characters who could’ve been great mystery killers. But no. A fucking urban legend ghost outcome fills a gap in the script so huge and sucksome that it threatens to pull the whole of existence through it.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

In spite of a so-so idea at its core, nobody wants Halloween III. It’s the Smelly Cat of the Halloween series. It’s Andrew Ridgeley. It’s that guy who left the Backstreet Boys. It’s the fat one from Wilson Phillips*.

An eeeeeevil toymaker creates masks that kill their pre-pubescent owners when activated by the insanity-inducing Silver Shamrock advert and it’s FUCKING HORRIBLE TUNE.

“Three more days to Halloween, Halloween, Halloween…” Aaaarrgghhh!!!

Michael Myers was NEEDED to come and kill whoever came up with that.

What mystifies me more is that when they released the first Halloween DVD box, they omitted Halloween 6 but not this one, even though it has fuck all to do with MM (apart from being seen on a TV screen in an almost-bemusing post-modern manoeuvre).

“The” Final Destination (2009)

Sometimes, people should know when to stop.

Even the artwork for this instalment shows that the franchise was less about characters and more about death by this point, about as far removed from the original concept as possible.

In this one – supposed to be the last word at the time – a retread of Final Destination 2‘s pile-up occurs at a Texas racetrack, leaving a quartet of thoroughly boring ‘teenagers’ (none of whom have parents, jobs, occupations) to stand by while a string of strangers meet grim ends before Death comes knockin’ at their door.

It’s crass, suspiciously cheap-looking and about as deep as a kids’ paddling pool, but also packs a mean streak that has several ‘characters’ who aren’t even given names and it doesn’t matter how nice you might be, something undeservedly nasty is going to happen to you.

The silver lining is that Final Destination 5 was a vast improvement. And it had the awesome ‘Devour’ by Shinedown on it.

American Psycho II: All-American Girl (2002)

Time for a shot of plain weirdness. This made-for-DVD sequel posits that Mila Kunis is a bigger sociopath than Patrick Bateman ever was and actually stabbed him to death after he killed her babysitter years before.

Masquerading as a co-ed, she enrols in a criminology course taught by – smirk – William Shatner and proceeds to kill anyone who stands between her and getting to Quantico.

The tagline “Angrier. Deadlier. Sexier.” pretty much tells you all you need to know: this is nothing more than a moronic attempt to wring some sleaze out of the cult phenomenon of Brett Easton Ellis’ original novel.

Kunis is clearly embarrassed to have been a part of it, but not as embarrassed as you’ll be watching it.

Wrong Turn 3: Left for Dead (2009)

This should really have been called Wrong Turn 3: How to Lose All Sense of Credibility in 3 Easy Films.

Wrong Turn 2 may have played for gory laughs but at least it remained interesting and partially invested in its own universe of backwoods inbreds killing cityfolk for grub but the following entry is just the bastard offspring of outsourced cheapness.

There’s only two cannibal loons this time, both looking more rubbery than ever before as they hunt down a group of convicts whose bus went off the road in West Virginia Bulgaria.

Awful reliance on crappy looking CGI, 100% unsympathetic characters and acting out of an infomercial with added profanity and a couple of T&A shots. A box-ticking exercise if ever there was one and Wrong Turn 4 looks to be even worse.

Stay tuned for more sequels from hell. Hang on, that means I’ll be creating my OWN sequel to this… Hopefully it won’t suck nearly as hard.

* I liked all of Wilson Phillips – including Carnie.

Legacies of the 90s: Stab-a-thon Stars

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As Kevins Costner and Bacon, Holly Hunter, George Clooney and Tom Hanks paid their slasher movie dues in the films of the 80s, the 90s saw many a familiar face from teen-oriented TV shows rushing to board the terror train following Scream‘s unprecedented success.

Some have remained famous, lots of vanished from the radar and some probably didn’t expect any success at all when they signed on for three scenes and a murder in a video shelf flick they thought nobody would ever see. Bet they hope nobody asks about Teenage Death Camp Massacre VIII now…

stars1aSo, starting at the top left, Sarah Michelle Gellar, arguably the biggest teen star of the era thanks to her role as ass-kickin’ demon hunter Buffy the Vampire Slayer, she played the role of defenceless girly victim in both I Know What You Did Last Summer and Scream 2. She was also originally to play Sasha in Urban Legend before scheduling conflicts got the best of her. Apart from appearing in the first two Grudge movies, after marrying Last Summer co-star Freddie Prinze Jr., she’s disappeared a bit…

Seann William Scott, known as potty-mouthed Stifler in American Pie, became one of Death’s first screen victims in Final Destination but his career has flourished since. Katherine Heigl, recently surfing a wave of rom-coms after the success of Knocked Up, donned final girl shoes in Bride of Chucky and then “the Drew Barrymore role” for Valentine, which she seemed less than impressed with…

Puck from Glee (Mark Salling) looked a lot different (and significantly less buff) when he played Naomi Watts’ little brother in Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering. He later had a small role in the dull The Graveyard.

Another big name from the teen flick circuit, Joshua Jackson had been a fairly successful child star in all three Mighty Ducks movies and a leading role in Dawson’s Creek; aside from his role in Urban Legend and a cameo in Scream 2 (sharing a scene with Gellar), he also starred with Gellar, Ryan Philippe and Reese Witherspoon (who avoided horror at the time) in Cruel Intentions and almost-horror flick Gossip. He’s now in Fringe.

Eva Mendes joins Salling as another Corn almnus after debuting in Fields of Terror, the fifth in the series. She moved on to Urban Legends: Final Cut before mainstream Hollywood success followed. And who could forget Jack Black’s uncredited cameo as Titus the dreadlocked dope-smoking pool boy in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer? I bet he wishes he could!

Rounding off this box, Jennifer Love Hewitt, co-star to Neve Campbell in Party of Five, took the lead in both Last Summer films.

stars2aMrs Liev Schrieber, sometimes known as “Naomi Watts”, yet another survivor of the neverending Children of the Corn franchise, playing Salling’s big sis and eventual heroine. Josh Hartnett was Jamie Lee Curtis’ annoyingly slappable offspring in Halloween H20, in which he was smug boyfriend to Dawson’s Creek star Michelle Williams.

The late Brittany Murphy was on the verge of stardom when she played the heroine of Cherry Falls; and mini Aussie pop queen Kylie Minogue – relatively unknown in the US but with over 30 UK Top 10 hits to her name – was the ‘big star’ to be offed at the beginning of Australian Scream off-shoot Cut.

Like Josh Jackson, Joseph Gordon-Levitt was a child star in 3rd Rock from the Sun, he turned up in many an art project and a strangely small and thankless role as an early victim in Halloween H20. The beautiful Kelly Brook, now better known to horror fans as one of the naked porn stars ripped apart by dodgy-looking CGI piranhas, was an unlikely criminal psychology student in Ripper: Letter from Hell.

Lastly, James McAvoy and Isla Fisher turned up in the strangely eclectic German slasher film The Pool, which starred Cherry Falls‘ Kristin Miller. Both were gruesomely dispatched fairly early on but can look back and laugh now they’ve had admirable Hollywood careers.

And lastly, I couldn’t get a good shot of the lovely Anna Faris, who, before she became a comedy queen thanks to doing all four (ugh!) Scary Movie‘s, turned up in the type of film they parodied, Lovers Lane, where she played Janelle the plucky cheerleader, who just wanted to make new friends but got gutted with a hook for her trouble. Here she is on the cruddy UK cover with it’s naff international title…

So there we have it, the biggest faces of the 90s horror scene, eleven of them died (one of those twice!), none of them went topless (well, some of the guys did), and only one came back for a sequel! Ha ha @ Jennifer Love Hewitt!

Please shut down your genre and reboot

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SCREAM

4.5 Stars  1996/18/107m

“Someone has taken their love of scary movies one step too far.”

Director: Wes Craven / Writer: Kevin Williamson / Cast: Courteney Cox, Neve Campbell, David Arquette, Skeet Ulrich, Rose McGowan, Matthew Lillard, Jamie Kennedy, Drew Barrymore, Joseph Whipp, Henry Winkler, W. Earl Brown, Roger Jackson, Linda Blair.

Body Count: 7

Dire-logue: “She wants to kill herself but then she realises that teen suicide is out this year and homicide is a much healthier therapeutic expression.”

Gazillions of people around the world have reviewed Scream so what am I supposed to write that makes a difference? Probably nothing I can write really. It’s influence is undeniable and it was thankfully not a cheap, transparent product that pissed off a generation of horror fans.

What I could knock Scream for is not its fault, more the society that received it. All manner of critics lined up to heap praise on the film for intellectualising dumb slasher films, used a lot of big words in doing so, happy that they were able to say that the genre sucked when, quite apparently, they’d never seen more than a handful of slasher films in the first place.

Post-modernism was the key term linked to mucho reviews of the film when it came out and, yeah, okay, it’s a slasher film where the characters know how slasher scenarios work, but in spite of what everyone said at the time, it certainly wasn’t the first horror movie to be self-aware. Even forgotten gutter dwellers like Blood Sisters had one-liners along the lines of “and just like any horror film, the van won’t start!”

What Kevin Williamson achieved with his screenplay was toying with the audience’s expectations: unlike most critics, they knew more about how these films worked and it was they who the film set out to impress. This was achieved largely by a series of homages to the dead teenager movies of yore, dismissed by many and likely cluttering the resumes of several big Hollywood stars who didn’t want to be associated with that trash. Scream reconciled the genre to this effect, giving it a geek-chic makeover and rendering it cool to like, underscored by the presence of Jamie Kennedy’s Randy – a video store clerk who lectures the teens of Woodsboro on the ‘rules’ of the scary movie. Yes, it was now cool to talk about Prom Night in the light of day. Of course cool defined in a sort of Central-Perk-irony way…

Aided no end by the harvesting of several important players; Wes Craven hadn’t had a box office hit in some while but was still able to surf his I-made-Freddy wave into the directors chair and a horror film that can nab Drew Barrymore for a 12-minute cameo also put bums on seats.

Williamson and Craven adorned their film with young actors plucked from various TV shows, gave them dialogue more substantial than “quit screwing around” and a modicum of intelligence that is fair to say was missing from most of the campers at Crystal Lake. Again, in the wave of films that followed, the Dawson’s Creek-style verbosity of the youthful casts became occasionally annoying, wheeled in to replace the exploitation elements of the 80s – it’s worth noting that in the big studio slasher films of the 90s movement, there was hardly any skin on show at all.

Neve Campbell, then on Party of Five, was cast as the put-upon final girl, Sidney Prescott, whose mom was raped and murdered the previous year. With the case shut and bolted, Sid’s happy to get on with her life until a ghost-masked killer begins playing with her and laying to waste random townsfolk, including some of her friends, eventually causing her enough grief to question the truth about her mother’s death…and life.

Almost every character who appears is a suspect to some degree: Sidney’s nemesis, cheesy reporter Gale Weathers (Cox, borrowed from Friends) is back stirring up shit she doesn’t want to face and her ‘bubble-butt’ boyfriend Billy (Ulrich) is handily on scene to rescue her after the killer takes his first swipe – coincidence? Even ancillary cast members employ suspicious expressions here and there, wear boots that look similar to the killer’s and say things, meaningless things, that cast the smallest of shadows over their trustworthiness.

suspects-2
The climax may look like standard fare now but at the time was something new, down to the exposition and the why’s, how’s and when’s that fill in all the blanks neatly and it’s then down to Sidney to survive. And survive she does, with more grit and gusto than most final girl’s since Heather Langenkamp rigged a whole Home Alone full of tricks to hurt Freddy Krueger.

The end of Scream is especially interesting in comparison to its 80s ancestors, where the victims were interchangeable clones of those from the previous sequel. Here it was the survivors who moved intact from film to film while the killers identities were altered, although always related to earlier events. Scream was the first slasher flick in a long time to allow more than one female character to survive, ushering in a new breed of heroines who were smarter, harder and always more personally involved with the killer than before.

There was no doubt Scream would be successful: it had stars, bankable production talent and a budget large enough that would’ve made half a dozen indie films of the same ilk. But even cumulatively they would’ve grossed only a fraction of the box office if they’d made it past video releases at all. Besides Barrymore’s turn at the beginning, there are cameos from Linda Blair as a pushy news anchor and Henry ‘The Fonz’ Winkler as Sidney’s high school principal.

Beyond the ka-ching of its big screen run, Scream has become synonymous with almost every slasher film that’s followed it. Dusty old scripts were soon dug out of vaults and flung into production; I Know What You Did Last Summer appeared only months later, more traditional in its plot but taking on board much of the formula. Halloween was resurrected; Urban Legend pulled together every cliche in the book and gave them a good varnish; and as movie magazines declared teen horror ‘out’ around the release of Scream 3 – which, for the time being, wrapped it up – Final Destination appeared and started its own cycle.

The good done by the film far outweighs the bad, which, to some was a kind of cover-up of embarrassing old cliches in favour of trendy dialogue and depth of character where there sometimes didn’t need to be, but also its ongoing position as “the only slasher film you need to see” is detrimental to the myriad of great flicks around, even if they might not take a trip down self-referential alley but the paradox is that if it hadn’t been for Scream they probably wouldn’t have been made in the first place!

And that irksome little thing about referring to horror movies as “scary movies”, as if the former is a dirty word that one does not utter in high society – what’s with that?

Blurbs-of-interest: Cox, Campbell, Arquette, Kennedy, Jackson, Craven and Williamson all returned for both sequels (in some form or another); Arquette and Cox were in The Tripper (which he directed); Drew Barrymore had previously taken on final girl duties in 1989’s Far From Home; Matthew Lillard was previously in Serial Mom; Joseph Whipp was one of the cops in the original Elm Street; Linda Blair was in Hell Night.

More rubbish films that don’t deserve long reviews

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Would you believe that quite a lot of slasher films suck? No, me either. I expect brilliance in everything. But as before, some slasher films have failed me. Failed miserably. And thus, they don’t warrant any more of my ludicrously precious time than they’ve already sucked away with their suckiness. Sucks to them!

BLOOD TRAILS

1.5 Stars  2006/18/87m

“You can’t outride death.”

Director/Writer: Robert Krause / Cast: Rebecca R. Palmer, Ben Price, Tom Frederic, J.J. Straub.

Body Count: 7

A terminally dull German film masquerading as American by casting British actors effecting bad accents.

Moody bicycle courier Anne is approached by her estranged ex, Michael, and agrees to get out of the city for some fresh air after a particularly bizarre sexual encounter with unhinged traffic cop, Chris.

Now, if you were a fisherman by trade, would you go on a fishing holiday? No. Still, Anne being a bit of a simpleton, she and Michael decide to go mountain biking deep in the woods. Guess who shows up and manages to cut Michael’s throat with a bike tyre via a nifty Matrix-style in-air skid?

After this development, about twenty minutes in, the rest of Blood Trails consists of Anne pedalling away; Anne sitting on rocks; Anne crouching behind trees on lookout… Everything takes forever to unfold, supposedly in the name of tension building but, if anything, if there was ever an excuse to fast forward, this was it.

At one point, Anne comes across two forest workers, neither of whom utter a single word despite the obvious fact that the woman is traumatized and that the tree they were sawing down fell on her! It matters not, as Chris soon floats in and kills them.

Minimal interest kicks in as Anne attempts to escape but it all goes out the window with a stupid finale in which the unarmed killer manages to shoot two cops who turn up out of the blue for no reason.

It looks like helmer/scribbler Krause was trying to create a ‘true’ survivalist horror but the film spends too much time with an unsympathetic simpleton of a heroine who makes some of the most ridiculous decisions in slasher movie history, i.e. you have a car at your disposal, which you could run down the killer with but instead get out and cycle away. Says it all.

Blurb-of-shame: Tom Frederic was in Wrong Turn 3.

WHISPERKILL

 1988/15/90m  1 Stars

“Shhh… You’re next.”

A.k.a. A Whisper Kills

Director: Christian I. Nyby II / Writer: John Robert Bensink / Cast: Loni Anderson, Joe Penny, June Lockhart, James Sutorius, Jeremy Slate, Joe Leter.

Body Count: 4

It’s great that this made-for-cable “mystery” doesn’t give away the killer’s identity on the DVD box, isn’t it? Oh look, it’s obviously a female in a film with only two female characters.

Bad-movie-fixture Loni Anderson is the owner-slash-editor of newspaper in the small town where a ski-masked fiend is first making murmured phone calls to the people who later get stabbed.

Like others of its ilk, Whisperkill is laced with stock soft-focus erotic scenes between Anderson and leading man – and suspect – Joe Penny. Meanwhile, the real killer knocks off a few of her male acquaintances and the rest is fattened up by crummy sex-scenes until the identity of the “mystery killer” is revealed for us all to go “oh, for fuck’s sake!” at.

Commits the unforgivable sin of being boring as well as crap.

THE DEADLY INTRUDER

1 Stars  1986/18/84m

“Someone out there is watching you… Don’t unlock your door.”

Director: John McCauley / Writer: Tony Crupi / Cast: Molly Cheek, Chris Holder, Tony Crupi, Danny Bonnaduce, Laura Melton, Styart Whitman, Danny Greene, Marcy Hansen, Santos Morales.

Body Count: 9

Dire-logue: “Cooking without garlic is like making love without foreplay.”

Another escapee from an asylum arrives in another small town (Midvale, pop. 18,000) and begins laying the locals to waste. This truly horrible film has the audacity to declare itself “in the Hitchcock tradition” on the back of the box but could not be further from Hitch’s style if it boarded a rocket to Jupiter. And I wish it had.

Things kick off in a fairly pacey Friday the 13th way with seven murders in the first 35 minutes before the rot begins to set in. The rest of the plotless plot centres around screechy heroine Jessie, who throws a party for some friends (two of whom never make it) where she is introduced to Bob, a magazine writer from Canada working in a local clothes store to “get the working man’s perspective.”

And while nobody but Jessie and friends believe him, there’s a homeless drifter loitering outside the windows, wandering aimlessly with a sickle, looking like a psychotic Paul McCartney. Said hobo abducts Jessie that night and ties her up in a shack about 30 feet away from her house!

A good third of the film is taken up by this senselessness that never goes anywhere as we decide who is now more likely to be the killer: Wino McCartney or Bob? The outcome is anything but a surprise and the obnoxious twist that somehow anticipates the sequel-that-never-was is the only scary thing that happens in The Deadly Intruder.

There is no merit to this film with the possible exception of seeing Danny Bonaduce of The Partridge Family murdered with prejudice. Add this to the ghastly repetitive synth score and it hurts like fingernails down the chalkboard OF MY SOUL!

SNAPPED

2005/15/80m  1.5 Stars

“Picture yourself dead.”

Directors: Jeffrey Prosserman & Julian Van Mil / Writers: Steve Abbott, Michael Bien, Prosserman & Van Mil / Cast: Tiffany Knight, Michael Bien, Joe Costa, Natalie Van Rensburg, Peter Soltesz, Sara-Jean Villa, Brett Rabinowitz, Lindsey Veenendaal.

Body Count: 10

Dire-logue: “So, you’re solution to my dilemma being ‘all men are dicks so stick yours in me’?”

I like weird things: cold toast with Vegemite, sideburns, Dr Pepper and Eurovision. Snapped is a weird film, really weird. But I didn’t like it. Sorry, Snapped and all ye affiliated with you.

Tiffany Knight is the curiously named Amy Mechanic, a struggling photographer who lands a well-paid new job for a mystery client. Without any credible explanation, Amy begins bludgeoning and hacking up bystanders in her life and taking pictures of the bodies to win the praise of oddball gallery rep Virgo.

Much of the build up to her ‘snapping’ (get it?) concerns the split from her junkie painter boyfriend and moving into the basement of bitchy best friend, Rose, whose own boyfriend is getting visits from an ass-kicking female loan shark. None of these things are of much importance, merely devices to bring more pitiless victims into Amy’s path.

Like so many post-millennial slashers, Snapped suffers from an overabundance of assholey characters we don’t care about, rather than nice folk battling for survival, rendering it the kind of picture you shouldn’t stop to gaze upon, let alone attempt to figure out the ridiculous twist ending, which makes even less sense!

BLOOD REAPER

1 Stars  2004/18/80m

“The legend has just become a bloody reality…”

Director: Lory-Michael Ringuette / Writers: Douglas Hensley, Ringuette & Michael J. Stewart / Cast: Cameron McHarg, Alison Moon, Jerri Badenhop, Mark Siegel, Charlene Amoia, Lory-Michael Ringuette, Brinke Stevens, Bernard Mann.

Body Count: 10

As if the barrel-scraping of Camp Blood and its shoddy sequel was actually a challenge to other filmmakers, here’s another shot-on-video campers-in-peril quickie with equally abysmal results.

More youngsters ignore warnings of a mythical killer living in the woods blah, blah, blah. They go camping anyway, blah, blah, blah. Even Brinke Stevens – who gets top billing for her seven minute cameo – looks glazed with disappointment that it’s come to this.

Long, boring sequences of individuals milling silently amongst trees while the camera bobs behind branches pad out the eighty minutes, while the audience pleads for someone to put us out of our misery. There’s an almost eye-opening innovation of electing the chubby girl as the heroine but, alas, they make it not so and kill her with a sharp log.

The intermittent gory murders are sloppy and unrealistic, reproducing everything we’ve seen elsewhere in better films and they even try to recreate the famous Ki-ki-ki ma-ma-ma sound of Jason and toss in a plinky-plonky Halloween-style theme to lighten proceedings but all it does it remind us that Blood Reaper will never live up to those standards.

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