Tag Archives: rip-off central

Regress

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SPRING BREAK MASSACRE

1 Stars  2008/77m

“Party till you drop DEAD.”

Director: Rex Kramer [Michael A. Hoffman] / Writers: Meghan Jones & Michael A. Hoffman / Cast: Reggie Bannister, Sarah Minnich, Joh Shumski, Leanne Vanmaulle, Erin Meyers, Ally Hartman, Renee Darmiento, Toni Buena, Rick Federman, Jeff Pride, Jeff Hayden, Christian Anderson, Linnea Quigley, Bob Farster, Curtis Taylor.

Body Count: 16

Laughter Lines: “I’ve seen enough of these slumber party slasher flicks to know what’s going on.”

Three teens at the world’s most boring party decide to play with a Ouija board while they do shots. When the girl demands the two chaps leave, she gets her throat slashed and the murder is blamed on the pizza delivery guy who stumbles in and finds the body.

Ten years later (not nine, not eleven) the usual denomination of mid-western college kids throw a slumber party. Boyfriends attempt to crash. Tits. Girl-on-girl rubbish. Horny neighbour who keeps turning up at the door. Eventually, death for the majority of them. Who is it? Who cares? Certainly not the writers.

Pitched as an homage to the Slumber Party & Sorority House Massacre franchises, the DVD cover is about as close as it gets. The rest is a no-budget dullard of a product, with characters so stupid and vacuous there’s zero sympathy for their plight, something at least most of those older films could lay claim to.

Yeah OK, it was shot with one camera over about a week, but c’mon, it’s time that girls in slasher flicks were at least as capable as their real life counterparts. Has Scream been entirely forgotten? These ARE the stupid girls Sidney Prescott refers to in her anti-slasher film rant. Boys, of course, remain clothed where it counts and are afforded largely off-camera demises.

Bannister and Quigley muddle through largely unscathed and the final girl acts quite well, but everybody else blurs into a mass of amateur-night forgettableness. A kind-of sequel, Girls Gone Dead, followed in 2012. I won’t be bothering.

Blurbs-of-interest: Bannister was also in Bloody Bloody Bible Camp; low-end horror icon Linnea Quigley can be found in Graduation Day, Silent Night Deadly Night, Fatal Games, Kolobos, and Jack-O.

Disco Demon

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THE DEMON

2 Stars  1979/18/89m

“It is among you… waiting!”

A.k.a. Midnight Caller

Director/Writer: Percival Rubens / Cast: Jennifer Holmes, Cameron Mitchell, Craig Gardner, Zoli Markey, Mark Tanous, Moira Winslow, Peter J. Elliott.

Body Count: 7

Laughter Lines: “Just because I’m not married even my mother thinks I’m on the other side.”

Believe it or not – and I probably wouldn’t – this Dutch/South African production has some of the best acting I’ve ever witnessed in a slasher movie, thanks to some well crafted dialogue from writer/director Rubens (at least most of it anyway), but stalls at two stars because it’s so excruciatingly boring until the last twenty minutes, when the Halloween clichés start to come thick and fast.

Mitchell plays a detective who is “just someone who’s been gifted with ESP” investigating the kidnapping of a girl from her bedroom by a mystery killer who wears – but unfortunately rarely uses – a steel-clawed glove, and is now after pretty kindergarten teacher Holmes, whose seriously-misinformed cousin Jo is dating a slick disco bunny. Both of those two are doomed, natch.

Simply one of the weirdest flicks you will ever see; Mitchell’s character never even comes within spitting distance of Holmes, and is eventually shot dead by the kidnapped (and now dead) girl’s mother  (“did your ESP see this coming?”) and the two plots only have the killer to relate them!

The final showdown between heroine and killer is rousing enough, on the heels of her attempted escape in nothing but panties. Alas, too many boring murders (usually strangulations and asphyxiations) and the damage is done. Look for the sign to “Boobs Disco”.

Blurbs-of-interest: Cameron Mitchell was also in Valley of Death, Jack-O, Toolbox Murders, Trapped Alive, and Silent Scream.

La da dee da death

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KUCCH TO HAI

2.5 Stars  2003/12/142m

Translation: There Must Be Something

“This winter a chill will run down your spine…”

Directors: Anil V. Kumar & Anurag Bosu / Writers: Rajeev Jhaveri, Anuraag Praparna, Umesh Shukla & Sameer (song lyrics) / Cast: Tusshar, Esha Deol, Yash Tonk, Natassha, Ashay Chitre, Vrajesh Hirjee, Kusumit Sana, Rishi Kapoor, Johny Lever.

Body Count: 7

To sound like some racist asshole – I can’t tell this film and fellow Hindi slasher Sssshhh… (also from 2003) apart. I’ll make the excuse that it’s been years since I’ve seen either, but notes from the occasion suggest this is the lesser of the two projects.

As that other film, and blatant Nightmare on Elm Street rip off Mahakaal (1993), a whole lotta Kucch to Hai is recycled material from North American slasher films of the post-Scream boom. It’s a Bollywood trip down memory lane…

Beginning with an almost shot-for-shot rip-off of Jennifer Love Hewitt’s confessional dream from I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, we quickly move into flashback territory and the story of how college kids Karan and Tanya fell in love, punctuated with ear-melting pop songs and love ballads, as is prerequisite in Indian cinema, even in genres as diverse as horror.

There’s a lot of this…

All of this stuff takes an HOUR. SIXTY MINUTES. At this point, Tanya takes the blame for Karan’s exam faux pas, risking a failure for herself, and thereby prompting a group of her friends to sneak into the creepy Professor Bakshi’s home to change the grade on her paper. However, their mini-heist is interrupted when the Prof comes home and, during their escape, they find his dead, virtually mummified wife in the basement, and duly run him over with their van as they make their getaway. Three years later, the group recongregate at the wedding of two of their friends at a ski lodge and find the party crashed by a figure in a black mack who dons a curved blade.

There’s little attempt to disguise the fact that Kucch To Hai unashamedly lifts its entire plotting from the original Last Summer flick, detouring via another shot-for-shot recreation of the killer-in-the-backseat opening from Urban Legend, albeit with a slightly different outcome and the theme from Mission: Impossible replacing ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ as the song on the radio!!!

A scene stolen from Scream 3 sneaks in once the stalking kicks off in the last twenty minutes, with very little bloodshed and a confusing unmasking twist at the finish line. It’s a tough race as the film grinds on relentlessly towards the two-and-a-half hour mark, taking pauses from the horror for its musical interludes, and far more concerned with the developing love triangle between the main characters.

…and not much of this

Western audiences will be nothing short of aghast at the stylings, with a veritable rainbow of colour and overdramatic camera work to accentuate the drama, so it’s not possible to tell how technically good the film is compared to other exports from its home country without a good base knowledge of Indian cinema – which I don’t have.

Both dialogue and songs are subtitled, although the actors occasionally cross over into English to make their points.

Acid reflux

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PLEDGE NIGHT

2 Stars  1988/82m

“Brothers to the end… the very end.”

A.k.a. A Hazing in Hell; Death Night

Director: Paul Ziller / Writer: Joyce Snyder / Cast: Todd Eastland, Shannon McMahon, Will Kempe, James Davies, Lawton Paseka, Dennis Sullivan, Michael T. Henderson, Arthur Lundquist, Steven Christopher Young, Craig Derrick, David Neal Evans, Robert Lentini, Joey Balladonna.

Body Count: 14

Laughter Lines: “Two of my friends are dead and you’re telling me to ‘sleep on it’!?”

Fraternity dickheads initiating six pledges at the same house where a hippie died in a bath of acid during Hell Week in the sixties, stir up his vengeful spirit and soon find membership in a rapid decline before next semester.

Our Freddy-lite killer, Acid Sid, is an archetypal hippie, complete with headband, slurred speech, and was the boyfriend of one of the new pledge’s mothers, setting things up for a howlingly obvious twist when we’re down to the last two kids left alive.

Not a decisively bad film, but with a forty minute wait before the killing begins, the build needs to be decent, and it’s not. Instead, it’s pumped out with frat boy antics and a five minute flashback to explain the demise of Acid Sid.

In true post-Elm Street style, Sid has a naff one-liner for each kill, while the off-the-shelf victims bring new depths to the meaning of stupid (“No, I’ll stay here – you go for help”), or jockey themselves into inescapable situations caused by much aimless wandering about the closer we get to the finale.

Some good FX work and no shortage of grue – including a cherry bomb up the ass for the spiteful ringleader – but slack pacing and understated characters who are clearly a lot older than the roles they’re playing foil any hope of making an impression.

Blurb-of-interest: Shannon McMahon was in the strikingly similar hazing-gone-wrong flick, Blood Sisters.

The Re-title-ing

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ROADSIDE MASSACRE

1 Stars  2012/18/80m

A.k.a. The Texas Roadside Massacre (UK DVD)

Director/Writer: Scott Kirkpatrick / Cast: Marina Resa, Matthew Schiltz, Elio Mardini, Jordan Martin, Summer Lima, Fragino M. Arola, Master Dave Johnson, Dusty Probert, Scott Seargeant, Jason James.

Body Count: 5

Whilst browsing the horror section at my local HMV a few weeks back I noticed a single DVD tucked almost out of sight: The Texas Roadside Massacre. Groan worthy, isn’t it? Mercifully, it’s just a cheapo regional title to try and push copies in the same way The Asylum releases Transmorphers as the latest Transformers comes out.

First off, it was filmed in California and there’s no mention of it being set anywhere else. No one dons a chainsaw as shown on the artwork below. And another review from the IMDb links states that the site credited with the praise belongs to band Dreadzone, who had a chart hit back in the mid-90s with Little Britain. Nothing about film on their site. Sooooo much fakery, surely the film is alright, eh?

Instead, five teens in a van got stuck in a shitty ass-end town famed for Jimmy’s Rib Shack, where the staff are a bunch of lobotomized teens and it’s obvious what the secret ingredient will turn out to be. Nominal heroine Karen thinks one of the waitresses is her missing sister. A stock obese moron in a butcher’s apron chases and kills some of them, while Karen and a guy looking for his missing brother are captured to be turned into subservient staff members.

Full of annoying characters that imitate those from more popular films and strange jumps to conclusions: Two teens tell the Sheriff they want to report an act of vandalism and he immediately responds by assuming they’re on drugs. Seconds later, he explains that he will send somebody to collect their stranded friends when they hadn’t even mentioned they were with anybody else.

And that’s about all there is to it. The UK re-titling is the most interesting facet associated with just another low-end Leatherface knock-off. About as depressing as they get.

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