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All About Evil

April 15, 2022 Hud Leave a comment

KILL GAME

2018/102m

“No one is laughing now.”

Director/Writer: Robert Mearns / Cast: Sari Sanchez, Michael Galante, Joe Adler, Pierson Fode, Tommy Beardmore, Laura Ashley Samuels, Hilary Anderson, Patrick Zielinski.

Body Count: 11

Some spoilers. Five old friends, who plagued their high school with pranks, attend the funeral of another friend and soon after discover that somebody from their past is fucking with them, ordering a stack of pizzas, removing the battery from a car, sending a sex worker over… Which of their old gag victims could it be?

A seventh friend, jittery walking pharmacy Beth, returns to town and is immediately tracked down by hunky Liam, the estranged twin brother of Brendan, who died years before as a result of a prank gone wrong, which had been masterminded by the recently buried friend. Liam wants to know what happened to his brother, but the seven of them never told a soul.

Thanks to horny cop Blake, the group learn their dead friend was most definitely murdered and via the medium of handy flashback we see him hoisted upside down, naked, over a fire pit, which is lit by a cloaked, Marilyn Monroe-masked killer, who looks like they could go to prom with the cherub from Valentine.

The friends start to reach out to old prank victims and apologise, but Marilyn has other ideas and straps one of the gang to a chair, giving her a blood transfusion from a dead stag in payment for a joke where she’d forged a doctor’s note that informed a nerdy girl she was infected with HIV. Another is burned alive, and one has their tummy tuck procedure fatally crashed by the killer, who also offs the surgical staff.

The dwindling group find themselves back at the beach where Brendan died for a big showdown, which is crashed by the cops before we can get answers.

So who is the killer? Well, Kill Game can’t quite seem to make up its mind, though we get a good scene where Beth wakes up in a hospital staffed by several of the prank victims who begin descending on her like zombies. But that’s a dream.

Instead, the actual killer is revealed in the final shot and is someone who has barely appeared in the film at all. Eagle-eyed viewers may recall them from a couple of earlier scenes, but so fleeting are these appearances that it literally may as well have been an old granny or someone who sped by in a car.

And what the hell was supposed to be in that box?

I see what Kill Game was trying to do here, a grand exercise in misdirection, but instead it kinda just trips you up, having lead you down a blind alley to nowhere for the previous 100 minutes. Personally, I didn’t mind, but I can also envision a few bricks being hurled at screens. As far as I Know What You Did Last Summer/At Camp/At High School/At My Cousin’s Barmitzvah/That Day at IHOP opuses go, it’s fine. Shot in 2014.

Blurb-of-interest: Michael Galante was in Frat House Massacre.

Reviews

Sail into danger

February 2, 2022 Hud 3 comments

SNEEKWEEK

2016/113m

A.k.a. Summer Party Massacre; Scream Week

Director: Martijn Heijne / Writer: Alex van Galen / Cast: Carolien Spoor, Jelle de Jong, Jord Knotter, Holly Brood, Yootha Wong-Loi-Sing, Sanne Langelaar, David Lucieer, Jonas De Vuyst, Ferry Doedens, Frank Lammers, Kimberly Klaver, Diederik Ebbinge.

Body Count: 11

So, Sneekweek is actually a real thing: Held in the Netherlands and billed as Europe’s biggest sailing festival, it becomes the rather unlikely backdrop for this Dutch slasher, which was released in two versions during its theatrical run – one of which was edited to attract a younger audience.

Despite a scene in which characters watch Scream on TV (and complaining it has been dubbed), this has more common ground with I Know What You Did Last Summer. Five college kids are hazing a group of young men for a room in their much sought-after house by keeping them in a tub, dumping ice in and seeing who can last the longest with the least amount of genital shrinkage. Down to two guys, the girls’ favourite, Eric, loses consciousness and dies. Anxious for their futures, they cover it up, bribe the surviving pledge, Peter, with an offer of the room if he stays quiet, and call an ambulance once it’s too late and they’ve papered over the evidence.

Two years later, the six roomies hit Sneekweek, which appears more to resemble Spring Break, with lots of EDM-screaming club nights, fairground rides, sexy young folks posing, and a police commissioner clucking around ordering his minimal force to break up fights and keep the peace.

Boarding in an arty, secluded lakeside house, the first sign that something’s off is that none of them own up to being the one who found the rental. Nominal heroine Merel is first to see a figure in a shiny silver mask, but the others think she’s off her face and continue to bed-hop until one of them is attacked outside a club and Peter is arrested when he finds her. The next morning, Merel finds him hanging from the boat’s mast in an apparent suicide. The local cops are keen to flex their investigative muscle, but are sidelined by their boss, and the remaining teens ordered to stick around until the attacker is caught.

Nasty ringleader Boris insists the party go on, so blasts into town with two of the other, leaving Merel and her friend to find the body of a missing girl in the boatshed. Despite commenting on Scream, the girls have learned nothing and decide to split up – one to go to the cops, the other to find their friends.

Another murder occurs and the police arrest Eric’s unhinged mother, who cut and run from her clinic’s day release. They also place the remaining kids on an available yacht for the night in an effort to keep them safe, but ultimately just leave them in a barrel ready to be picked off by the powertool-favouring killer, who leaves a spinning powerdrill in the back of one and engineers another to be sucked into the propellers.

Sneekweek fudges cloaking the identity of the killer effectively enough, giving a little too much away too early on, just leaving a question over who they’ll be to the late Eric that drove them to get power-saw themed vengeance. It also doesn’t deliver much in the way of gruesome demises, with the nastiest character we’ve been waiting to see cark it allocated a rather dull kill scene, although there’s a reason for that revealed during the exposition scene.

A decent enough film with high end production gloss that should set it apart from most of its ilk, despite suffering from predictability and a reliance on some dumb character behaviour (at one point Merel runs away from the safety of the house and into a cornfield). Very similar to Austrian flick Party Hard, Die Young that came along two years later.

Reviews

Sisters are drillin’ it for themselves

December 22, 2021 Hud Leave a comment

SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE

2021/87m

“You know the drill.”

Director: Danishka Esterhazy / Writer: Suzanne Keilly / Cast: Hanna Gonera, Frances Sholto-Doulgas, Mila Rayne, Alex McGregor, Reze-Tiana Wessels, Rob Van Vuuren, Jennifer Steyn, Schelaine Bennett, Masali Baduza, Eden Classens, Michael Potter.

Body Count: 13

Laughter Lines: “I can’t believe these dudes are beating us out on being murdered, like honestly, their privilege is ridiculous.”

Another remake? Sigh. Well… yes and no. A cursory overview of the South Africa lensed Slumber Party Massacre would probably have you thinking we’re in for just another go-round of girls in lingerie being drilled, while horny guys peering through windows get it in the back. But there’s more than meets the eye here. Necessary spoilers ensue.

Beginning with a crash course in slasher film cliches, in 1993, gal-pals Trish, Jackie, Diane, and Kim have rented a lakeside cabin at Holly Springs. Trish’s no-good ex Chad turns up, she tells him where to go, he watches the girls dance through the windows and gets power-drilled for his trouble. The killer then enters the building until only Trish remains, and manages to knock him off the dock, where his body sinks into the darkness.

22 years later, Trish’s daughter Dana is off on a weekend roadtrip with her friends Maeve, Breanie, and Ashley, as well as Maeve’s lil sis Alix, who has snuck her way along. The girls break down on route and end up having to rent a local lakeside house for the night while they wait for new car parts. Hmm… the house is on the opposite side of the lake to the cabin of blood in the prologue. Coincidence?

No. Thirty minutes in, when Alix finds a body outside and puts the pieces together, the other girls whip out weapons and declare they intentionally ended up there to attract Russ Thorn and kill him for good. The rug of prediction pulled out from beneath us, SPM ’21 switches up into a flip reverse opus of the expected: The girls go around the lake to warn five boys who have rented the other residence, but Russ is already at work.

After watching the shirtless guys have a slo-mo pillow fight through the window, a literal murder-in-the-dark scatters the group: The guys stomp out without a plan or try to save the day and largely end up drilled to pieces.

By an hour in, the girls succeed in slashing, stabbing, and hacking Russ to pieces, witnessed by the surviving boys, who suspect the girls are hardline feminists, and while they await the police, it seems another killer enters the midst…

A review on IMDb goes:

“A movie on the SyFy channel, which are mostly a male audience, is getting lectured in a bad movie about misogyny.

The killer is a man and this movie makes no sense. Did I fail to mention it has close up shots of men slow motion bathing, which is for feminismgayism empowerment, for a straight male audience?”

Feminismgayism? This guy arrogantly assumes the film (and by extension any film on SyFy) is for straight men. The self-absorbed nature of this comment is pretty much why this movie is the way it is. Idiot.

The reversal of the trends does present the ‘straight male audience’ with an ogle-worthy shower scene where Matt soaps up his rock hard abs before being wasted. It’s a direct reflection of what slasher films of olde served up their female cast members, and probably more confronting in its depiction of a very sculpted physique, rather than anything else.

The emergence of the second killer forces the conventions back on the familiar track after the film merrily skewered them up to that point, with some nifty demises for the remaining characters, but a not-so-surprising revelation around who this character is, which the film kinda treats as a gasp-worthy development, but has been seen before in one of the most famous slasher films around.

SPM ’21 is a great companion piece to the original, and perhaps adheres closely with Rita Mae Brown’s original vision. But there’s also a lot of love, with the girls at the start sharing names with their 1982 counterparts, a victim using a very 80s electric guitar to try and fight off the killer in an homage to SPM II. Rob Van Vuuren also gets Thorn’s unique walk and cranial lilt bang on. This is the film the 2019 Black Christmas reimagining wishes it was.

Reviews

Syndromeo & Eww-liet

December 13, 2021 Hud Leave a comment

NOBODY SLEEPS IN THE WOODS TONIGHT II

2021/18/97m

Director/Writer: Bartosz M. Kowalski / Writer: Mirella Zaradkiewicz / Cast: Mateusz Wieclawek, Julia Wieniawa-Narkiewicz, Zofia Wichlacz, Andrzej Grabowski, Lech Dyblik, Sebastian Stankiewicz, Robert Wabich, Izabela Dabrowska, Wojciech Mecwaldowski.

Body Count: 12

A timely follow up to the 2020 Polish summer camp slasher, part two begins with the twin monsters and sole survivor Zosia holed up in cells at the local cop shop.

Optimistic rookie officer Adam pedals into work as his superior escorts Zosia back to the house to get her perspective and leaves her handcuffed to a bed above a section of the meteor, which soon does its thing, infects her, and turns her into one of the mutants.

Adam and fellow cop Wanessa eventually grow concerned and find themselves thrust into the horror, along with two survivalist types, the camp manager, and a hooker. Monster-Zosia makes mincemeat out of most of them and converts Adam into a fellow mutant. They kill a dog-abusing vendor, hook up in a rather confronting sex scene, and return to the police station to liberate their family members.

The gross-out comedy facets are pushed to the fore in this grotesque combo of any Wrong Turn sequel you like, with parts of Hatchet thrown in. There are some funny moments, but it just doesn’t commit itself and seems to drag on forever the longer it continues.

Reviews

We don’t care what we did last summer

November 25, 2021 Hud Leave a comment

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER

2021/380m

Directors: Johanna Stokes, Lana Cho, Phoebe Fisher, Sara Goodman, Shay Hatten, Chaconne Martin-Berkowicz, Gary Tieche / Writers: Logan Kibens, Craig William MacNeill, Benjamin Semanoff, Lois Duncan (novel) / Cast: Madison Iseman, Brianne Tju, Ezekiel Goodman, Bill Heck, Ashley Moore, Fiona Rene, Sebastian Amoruso, Cassie Beck, Brooke Bloom, Eric William Morris.

Body Count: 10

Laughter Lines: “What’s with all the screams, Neve Campbell?”

A proposed second adaptation of I Know What You Did Last Summer helmed by Mike Flanagan (of Hush, Oculus, and The Haunting of Hill House notoriety) was floating around for a few years, a script was ready to go, reportedly going at Lois Duncan’s novel from a more traditional perspective. Whatever happened to that, it never seemed to advance and the idea of a teen TV series floated to the top, produced again by Neil H. Moritz.

As with all of these things, Pretty Little Liars always seems to get namechecked as a source of inspiration. I never watched past the first episode of that show so have little context, but those I know who did stick with it groaned that it outstayed its welcome by repeatedly tacking on extra layers to the mystery. Scream – The TV Series was just about okay (and also featured Brianne Tju), but the idea behind I Know… seems more suited to a multi-episode arc than most other slasher ventures.

Come Autumn 2021, Amazon Prime released an episode a week to a rather dismal reaction from most corners. Let’s dive in… Spoilers in the road ahead – careful you don’t run them down.

Episode 1 introduces us to Hawaii and our core teen cast, who are celebrating graduating high school at a lavish party thrown by rich girl Margot’s mother. In attendance is her gay best friend Johnny, intense intellectual type Dylan, drug dealin’ Riley, good time girl Lennon and, lurking, Lennon’s shy identical twin sister Alison. It’s quickly established that the sisters are Yin & Yang, with Lennon popular, liberal with drugs and sexual fluidity. When she screws Alison’s long term crush Dylan, they argue and she storms out. Wait… who storms out?

Clambering into a jeep wasted, the five teens rocket down the freeway and run over Alison, who’s inexplicably in the middle of the road at night. Panicking as Julie, Ray, Helen, and Barry once did, they elect to place the body in a cave that floods to wash it out into the Pacific and tell everybody Alison ran away. The cave was also the scene of a mass cult suicide some years earlier that may or may not have been what killed the twins’ mom. Their grumpy dad, Bruce, isn’t particularly forthcoming, but you know we’ll find out eventually…

One year later, Lennon returns from her first year of college and finds a severed goats head in her closet and ‘I know what you did last summer’ scrawled on the mirror. DUH DUH DUUUUHHHH. And at the end of episode 1, the entirely unsurprising revelation that this is in fact Alison is tossed to us like crumbs. Some blah over a piece of jewellery, taking her sister’s jacket and her nasty words to heart, Alison decided to pretend to try on fun loving, popular Lennon for size.

While Alison continues to pretend she’s Lennon, we learn that her father is in on the secret, something around it being more believable troubled Alison would disappear. She reconnects with her friends and shares the threat. Suspects are quickly slotted in: Riley’s attitude-tastic mom, Courtney, local weirdo Clara, who saw the teens that night, the Sheriff who is screwing Bruce, and dorky deputy Doug, whose investigative skills might jeopardise the killer’s scheme. Dylan, too, has gone understandably weird.

The group begin to receive texts ‘from Alison’ and eventually at the end of the second episode, the killing begins. There’s no fisherman, no cool mask, and in visual scope terms, no killer – they’re completely off-camera, which will clue in seasoned viewers to narrowing their suspect field down a bit.

A few days later, Lennon’s body appears in the ocean in front of the family guesthouse. Considering she’s been dead a year, the corpse is remarkably well preserved, leading Bruce to confront weird Clara, who admits she kept it with her all this time and was treating it for transition into the next life (this part-explains the honey on the poster).

More murders occur, including a grisly double at the memorial service for ‘Alison’, death-by-slushie machine, one poor sod killed on the toilet… All the while, the remaining members of the group can’t get their shit together to investigate cohesively. Questionably, they continue to laugh about stuff, do drugs, hook up, play pranks while snooping around a suspect’s house…

Your friend is dead. People wish you dead. What are you doing?

Crucially, the major black mark against this iteration of the story is that the characters are assholes. Every last one of them. Had there been a decent, believable reason for Alison to become Lennon, it might wash, but she literally just alters her attitude to become bitchy and mean, leading on various suitors and seemingly unfazed by the growing body count. Whereas the 1997 film focused on the damage done to the characters’ lives by their secret, these kids seem to give no fucks whatsoever, extracting any sense of morality or accountability.

Some bloody crime scenes are interesting, but the murder set pieces are minimally allotted any time or tension – no chase scenes are possible given the lengths the camera goes to to keep the killer out of the frame, leaving this a stalk n’ slasher without much stalk and a base level of minimal slash.

Ultimately, the killer’s identity isn’t totally predictable, thanks to some misdirection earlier, but the motive is fuzzy and shallow to the point there’s a tacked on piece to camera by the character at the end revealing how they did it. Although, watch back again and you’d see that they fudged it – the killer reacts in horror at one murder, but nobody else was with them, so why even bother acting shocked? Stranger still is the coda shared by the surviving characters, a sort of cynical “happily ever after” that flies directly in the face of the motive Alison was on the receiving end of one scene prior!?

Reviews

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