Tag Archives: slasher films that aren’t supposed to be funny but are funny

Hanky Panky

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torso 1973TORSO

3.5 Stars  1973/18/93m

“One day she met a man who loved beautiful women… but not all in one piece.”

A.k.a. Carnal Violence; I Corpi Presentano Tracce Di Violenza Carnale [The Bodies Presented Traces of Carnal Violence]

Director/Writer: Sergio Martino / Writer: Ernesto Gastaldi / Cast: Suzy Kendall, Tina Aumont, John Richardson, Luc Merenda, Roberto Bisacco, Angela Covello, Carla Brait, Conchita Airoldi, Ernesto Colli.

Body Count: 11

Laughter Lines: “You’ve got to belong to me and no one else!”

This colourful early giallo features all the wacky hallmarks of a black-gloved killer hunting down beautiful young women who spend much of their screentime as scantily clad as possible.

When a masked loon starts offing female students of Pegulia University’s art class and sawing off limbs, it freaks out American students Jane and Dani, especially when the trail of victims come closer to their group of friends. Could it be possessive ex-boyfriend of Dani’s, Stefano? He stands around and stares intensely a lot.

More so than usual in one of these, all females are impossibly beautiful and more often than not naked, as underscored by a scene where next victim Carol goes to a hippie party at a warehouse where two men fondle her while she gets stoned indifferently, as the camera leers over the bodies of other guests. Do any of the guys disrobe? Not on your life.

torso 1973

After Carol’s murder at the hands of the scarf-wielding killer (strangles first, dismembers after), Dani, Jane, and two other girls take up Dani’s Uncle’s offer to go stay at his country home until the case is solved: The cops know the design of the scarf the killer used, Dani remembers talking to someone who wore it – but who? The vendor knows and attempts to blackmail the killer, but gets mowed down instead.

Arriving at the small village, the women are inspected by the thirsty looking local males, as the camera slowly zooms through the leg of Ursula at the slack-jawed horndogs who live only to objectify them. There are at least three conversations between men about how hot the newcomers are, counting their boobs, legs, etc. One tagline listed for the film is ‘Where whores meet saws’!

torso 1973

No female character in Torso undresses – they strip, usually when someone suspicious is watching. It couldn’t get more objectifying than it does, although curiously more of the onscreen murders are of male characters, with the main three girls each being slain off camera towards the end. What does the killer want or do with the body parts he saws off? It’s never revealed, though flashbacks relate to some sort of broken doll.

The entirely-obvious killer’s motive is as goofy as you’d expect, and the near Kung Fu level fight between loon and male saviour (the surviving girl is, of course, rendered useless) is hilarious and was parodied wonderfully in The Editor. Still, there are some good scenes, with a couple who manage to have sex in a Mini (!) and the killer flicking off the lights as the girl goes to look for her missing boyfriend, and a man (!!) is chased through the village at night after seeing the killer stalking the girls’ residence.

A fun, ridiculous experience.

Blurbs-of-interest: John Richardson was later in Eyeball and Fear.

Wisconsin Mine Syndrome. With Cher.

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trapped alive 1988

TRAPPED ALIVE

1 Stars  1988/92m

A.k.a. Trapped

“There’s evil underground.”

Director/Writer: Leszek Burzynski / Writer: Julian Weaver / Cast: Randolph Powell, Sullivan Hester, Mark Witsken, Laura Kalison, Alex Kubik, Elizabeth Kent, Cameron Mitchell, Michael Nash.

Body Count: 9

Laughter Lines: “Do you realise that just five miles down the road a horde of beautiful and horny young men are panting for our bodies?”

Thank you to @AFinalBoy for making me aware of this… intriguing… product… of film.

Shot in Wisconsin in 1988 and shelved until ’93, the cover image was clearly sought from some adult video store section as the hair styles of the two leading ladies would fool nobody in thinking it was shot anywhere near the 90s.

Three prisoners break out of jail on a snowy night before Christmas and end up car-jacking two poodle-haired party gals on a backroad. Police checkpoints send them careening off the road and literally falling down a shaft at the largely abandoned Forever Mine.

A deputy later shows up to investigate and almost immediately has sex with the clearly desperate wife of the sleeping mine caretaker, who looks like a regional Cher tribute act if ever there was:

"Do you believe in life after Trapped Alive?"

“Do you believe in life after Trapped Alive?”

Down in the mine, the lead prisoner – Face – makes one of the girls do a striptease for him, while locking the other girl in some dark room, and the requisite almost-reformed young inmate tries to get an old generator running. They’ve failed to notice a few human skulls lying around and when the muscle is found with his face chewed off, they grow suspicious. The deputy then enters the cave system and is trapped with them when somebody cuts the rope.

Mucho talking occurs until – almost an hour in – a murder finally happens. A largely goreless, ridiculous slaying, where the victim sounds more like he’s yodelling than shrieking in pain. Deputy guy takes charge, makes almost-reformed bloke continue fixing stuff while he… does something else. Good girl Robin holds a flashlight for the guy and uses the time to fall madly in love with him.

The cannibal mutant thingy returns and grabs the other girl, forcing almost-reformed to shoot her dead before a worse fate can unfold. The remaining three try to escape, Robin strips to her bra and panties to dive through a flooded shaft (it’s snowing above, so how cold is this water likely to be?), kills the monster, then Cher rocks up, back-fills the story that the monster is her papa and blows up the mine with deputy dude inside, allowing Robin and almost-reformed to escape, then kiss loads.

trapped alive 1988

As the countdown on my VLC player refused ever to tell me there was anything less than 17 hours of the movie remaining, I felt trapped alive by Trapped Alive, a film so terminally boring they toss in a scene where Cameron Mitchell talks to a photograph for about nineteen minutes just in case you might still be awake. The monster only kills two people and is defeated at first strike and there’s very little grue. However, my main question at the end was did Cher’s husband actually sleep through all of this??

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

Mistake, indeed

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home sweet home 1980

HOME SWEET HOME

1.5 Stars  1980/18/83m

A.k.a. Slasher in the House

“Be it ever so humble, there is no place to hide.”

Director: Nettie Pena / Writer: Thomas Bush / Cast: Jake Steinfeld, Colette Trygg, David Mielke, Vinessa Shaw, Peter De Paula, Don Edmunds, Sallee Young, Charles Hoyes, Leia Naron, Lisa Rodriguez.

Body Count: 9

Laughter Lines: “Please don’t hurt her – I’ll play my guitar for you!”

Of all the calendar holidays to trigger the homicidal leanings of a madman, Thanksgiving has largely been left to curdle like old milk, with only this and Blood Rage representing.

Your basic asylum escapee slasher – musclebound fitness guru Steinfeld – happens across a ranch on Thanksgiving and decides to go overboard on the carving duties. The family of largely unsympathetic, barely named characters provide the meat content for the first hour, until the floor caves in for supposed ‘tension building’, pending the obvious confrontation and the last few people alive keep going to check if windows and doors are locked in virtual darkness.

Crappy acting abounds as people fail to react convincingly to anything and don’t seem to care about the rash of disappearances. Future ‘name’ Vinessa Shaw made her debut as the requisite small child who is immune to the violence (and, aged 4, out-acts the adult cast), but the most memorable character has to be her teen brother, named Mistake, who wears Kiss-lite make-up and tries to convince the killer to stop on the promise of hearing him play guitar for him.

Bloody and weird, but don’t let that stop you.

Blurbs-of-interest: Vinessa Shaw was (much later) in Stag Night; Lisa Rodriguez was in the even worse Terror on Tour.

Not quite Star Trek, is it?

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texas chainsaw massacre the next generation

TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE NEXT GENERATION

1.5 Stars  1994/18/84m

“Still buzzin’ after all these years.”

A.k.a. Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre; Texas Chainsaw Massacre 4

Director/Writer: Kim Henkel / Cast: Renee Zellweger, Matthew McConaughey, Robert Jacks, Tonie Perenski, Joe Stevens, Lisa Newmyer, Tyler Cone, John Harrison, James Gale.

Body Count: 8

Laughter Lines: “What if we get into a wreck and crash the car and we all died? They could write a song about it.”

Of the main body count franchises, Texas Chainsaw Massacre likely ranks my least favourite, aided to no end by this much despised fourth outing, which was intended by Kim Henkel as the ‘true sequel’ to the 1974 original.

Things start out okay with four high schoolers crashing their car on a back road on the night of their prom and end up as spare meat for a psychotic family who dwell deep in the woods. The clan is led by unhinged truck driver Vilmer (McConaughey) and his trashy girlfriend, Darla, while Leatherface spends most of the film in drag, like a bad cabaret show at a provincial gay bar. I’ve seen a few of these and can attest the likeness.

There are plenty of harks back to the original, which serve only to remind us how much more raw it was, as the junky action clunks along with horrendous continuity problems, and portrayals of psychosis that rival the drag angle in terms of high camp.

The quartet of teens are allotted little in terms of characterisation, bar dowdy final girl Jenny (Zellweger). Both actors ascended to levels of stardom far removed from this low-end flick, which was later recalled by Zellweger as being so cheaply made the actors shared a single trailer that belonged to a member of the crew. However, there’s no escaping your humble beginnings, and the fact that agencies attempted to sue the production company for reissuing this with the stars as the focus probably only brought more attention to it in the long run. Though without their subsequent good fortune, would it be remembered at all?

Take a walk down rip-off alley: Final Destination

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As the outward ripples caused by Scream‘s splash began to calm, and the likes of I Know What You Did Last Summer, Halloween H20, and Urban Legend became the likes of Valentine, Cherry Falls, and The Clown at Midnight, into our lives came Final Destination, delaying the decline of teen horror a little longer with its undeniably awesome premise.

Surprisingly, Xeroxing the central motif employed in Final Destination – that victims are killed by elaborate ACME-style cartoon accidents – has clearly proven quite difficult to achieve, and so what rip-offs it inspired have been relatively few and far between. Stroll with me now, through the back streets where mysterious forces might drop a piano on your head…

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999-9999 2002

Thai export 999-9999 came first, in 2002, and introduced us to life at a high school where a group of prankster students are talked into dialling the freaky 999-9999 number, which will grant you any wish.

Despite transfer student Rainbow warning them of the consequences, they each wish for fame, fortune, and Ferraris and, when karma’s bill comes-a-callin’, are killed in weird car wash accidents, drowned and slashed by floating razors (!), perish in fires, fall out of windows, and in one to-be-seen-to-be-believed sequence, sucked into anti-gravity chambers along with lethal buzzsaw blades.

Asian horror is always divertingly fun, and 999-9999 is no different, making the most out of its concept, even with the “OK, what?” twist ending, and some budgetary constraints that make some of the demises a little… ropey, but as a pretender to Final Destination‘s throne, a solid effort.

Death might sue: A speedster drives his new Ferrari into an out-of-order car wash, which, when the fabric is absent, means scratchy, slashy shards of metal are spinning towards you instead.

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scared 2005

Staying in the warmer climes of Thailand, they fused similar ideas with those founding in Battle Royale for 2005 flick, Scared, which sadly wasn’t released with subtitles to discern the finer details of what’s going on.

This time, a busload of students on a field trip crosses a rickety old bridge, which begins to collapse (possibly influencing those who would later pen Final Destination 5), killing a good portion and stranding others on a seemingly deserted island.

As they explore in search of help, they’re systematically done in either by mysterious killers or stumbling into traps designed to skewer them into several pieces. Come the end, it’s something to do with a reality show where being voted off the island is a more permanent fate than usual.

Death might sue: The poor bus driver cops an almost-slapstick log in the face (and through the head) during the bridge collapse.

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open graves 2009

At the time Death was prepping for its fourth and ‘final’ outing, in 2009, along came Open Graves, which also knocks on Jumanji‘s door for some inspiration, as a group of surfer buddies vacationing in Spain play a cursed boardgame named Mamba, that gives players cryptic messages as to their fate, and promises the winner anything they desire.

Once the game is over, those who were out are really out as they begin dying in a series of bizarre accidents. Naturally, the non-Americans are first to go: One guy falls over a cliff; Another into into a pit of snakes; There’s a car crash, and the looks-obsessed girl ages to, like, 70 overnight.

I saw this one almost a decade ago and remember very little beyond Eliza Dushku and Mike Vogel from the 2003 Texas Chainsaw Massacre over-do, and the rather uninspired twist ending. Play at your own peril.

Death might sue: The poor chap who takes a tumble over the cliff tries to save himself by holding onto – and sliding down – barbed wire, then landing on the rocks – still alive – for the crabs to scuttle out.

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wish upon 2017

Into the present we come, with last year’s severely toned-down, teen friendly PG-13 quickie Wish Upon, which I saw last week.

Claire is a down-on-her-luck high schooler whose dumpster-diving dad finds a strange music box covered in Chinese calligraphy and gifts it to her. A convenient Chinese language course and friend are able to declare it a wishing pot, which grants its keeper seven desires, but undoes them if it’s abandoned or destroyed.

Of course, Claire wishes her high school nemesis would rot and the girl develops a flesh eating disease, but Claire’s beloved dog dies. Then she wishes her boy-crush liked her back, an old man down the street falls in his tub and dies. Then popularity, wealth, mother not to have died = kindly neighbour’s ponytail gets caught in the garbage disposal, friend dying in elevator crash, girl skewered on statue etc, etc.

It’s tame, juvenile, and it takes Claire FOREVER to catch on, but the cast is likeable and it’s reasonably well made for a once-over so long as you’re not expecting the ‘accidents’ to have slow, it-could-happen builds like the FD films offer.

Death might sue: Ryan Phillippe supervising the chainsawing of his tree… from underneath said tree. Duh.

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What does this teach us? Thailand represent! But also that it’s reasonably hard to copy the formula, which is why Final Destination dominated this sub-sub-sub-genre for so long. Will they ever make more? Who knows – lemme ask my Haitian nightmare doll…

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