Tag Archives: slasher

Surgical Spirit

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DR GIGGLES

3 Stars  1992/18/95m

“The doctor is out…of his mind.”

Director: Manny Coto / Writers: Coto & Graeme Whifler / Cast: Larry Drake, Holly Marie Combs, Cliff DeYoung, Glenn Quinn, Michelle Johnson, Keith Diamond, Richard Bradford, Nancy Fish, Doug E. Doug, John Vickery, Sara Melson, Zoe Trilling, Darin Heames, Denise Barnes, Deborah Tucker, Patrick Cronin.

Body Count: 18

Dire-logue: “Get ready to take your medicine, Moorehigh: the doctor is in.”

“The town’s got a doctor and his name is Rendell, stay away from his house ‘cos he’s the doctor from hell…” So goes the jump rope chant that the residents of your common or garden American small-town-with-a-past, in this case a psychotic Doc who offed several patients trying to find a cure for his ailing wife.

35 years after it all went down, Dr Rendell’s son (Drake) – who was never found – is now a fully grown lunatic standing over six feet tall and handily escapes from his institute and returns to Moorehigh for a comedically grisly revenge on the townfolk he perceives murdered his dad.

We’re presented with a few high schoolers and an array of other people who Doc Rendell Jr. injects, impales, saws and sucks to death, always with a witty medical one-liner to accompany their demise. The teen heroine Jennifer conveniently has a heart malfunction that prompts Rendell to stalk her in the hope of achieving with her what pops couldn’t for his missus. On the way, a nosy neighbour gets the nasal probe from hell, a horny couple fail to get their rocks off with each other and a girl is gagged to death with a giant band aid.

By 1992 there was very little left to explore in slasher film territory until Scream came along and shook it all up just four years later. Much of Dr Giggles is recycled from things we’ve already seen and leans heavily on the later Elm Street‘s for its comedic roots and the likes of low-renters like Psycho Cop.

Nevertheless, Drake’s charm and the corny jokes combined with a good cast make it a pleasant diversion and it’s interesting to see a young Holly Marie Combs in one of her earliest roles as Jennifer.

Best moment: Rendell says “it’s time to do what Doctors do best,” and grabs a golf club.

Blurbs-of-interest: Larry Drake was Bubba in Dark Night of the Scarecrow (and has barely aged); Nancy Fish was Mrs Knocht in Cutting Class; Coto also directed weird Yugoslavian flick Playroom.

Hole in your soul

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MY SOUL TO TAKE

2.5 Stars  2010/108m

“Only one has the power to save their souls.”

Director/Writer: Wes Craven / Cast: Max Thieriot, Emily Meade, John Magaro, Zena Grey, Nick Lashaway, Paulina Olszynski, Denzel Whitaker, Jeremy Chu, Jessica Hecht, Frank Grillo, Raul Esparza, Danai Gurira, Harris Yulin.

Body Count: 10

Dire-logue: “If things get too hot, turn up the prayer conditioning.”

Unaninmously slated upon its US release in October 2010, Wes Craven’s first written and directed horror flick since New Nightmare holds the rather prickly honor of having the lowest grossing opening weekend for a 3D movie to date.

But then, by that October, there was barely a cinema on the planet that didn’t have at least one 3D feature playing at any given time. Piranha 3D didn’t rake in the wads that they expected and for reasons unknown, My Soul to Take was stuffed into the post-production 3D-ifying machine seemingly to bolster its chances of doing any business.

Time was, Wes Craven’s name attached should get bums on seats but the last Scream flick was a decade earlier (the fourth movie’s imminence notwithstanding) and remember if you will the mess that was Cursed? His last semi-successful output was 2005’s Red Eye, which was a pretty good distraction, if barely a horror film at all. So what went askew with My Soul to Take?

The story goes like a combo of Elm Street and 1989’s clunky Shocker: in the small township of Riverton, a family man has a schzoid-psychotic break and discovers he is the Riverton Ripper, the serial killer who has been terrorising the locale of late. He flips, slays his pregnant wife and is gunned down by the cops but won’t seem to die. In a true Halloween 4-style ambulance crash, his body disappears into the (Riverton?) river and is never seen again. Simultaneously, six women in the town go into labour – hmmm.

Sixteen years later, a group of kids known as The Riverton Seven who were all born that night gather for Ripper Day, an annual sorta rite-of-passage event. One of the kids was predictably born to the Ripper’s dead wife and seems to have inherited dad’s schizophrenia and so could just be the one who starts knocking off the others throughout the course of the day.

In the first instance, My Soul to Take plays out like any other slasher flick: we meet the meat: five boys and two girls who all turn sixteen together. Bug is instantly singled out as the lead, a quirky brooding sort who has a history of mental unbalance but is strangely the object of lust for several girls at school, including his two female birth-mates, devout Christian Penelope (who can sense something bad coming) and valley girl-lite Brittany, who bows to every command of the school Queen Bee, Fang. There’s also jock bully Brandon, token Asian Jay, blind black guy Jerome and Bug’s bestie Alex.

The high school melodrama is entertainingly surreal: Fang dictates almost everything, from who gets hit and how hard to who her following of airhead girls can and can’t have the hots for. And Bug is off the list.

There’s an amusing show-and-tell scene where Bug and Alex present a piece on the Great American Condor and get some semblance of revenge on Brandon and then things shift into horror gear proper as the teens start piling up dead, stalked and offed by a loon dressed as the Riverton Ripper (mangy coat, plastic mask and dread-like hair) who eventually decides to pay a visit to Bug’s place.

Considering the film nearly reaches two hours, it’s amazing how few scenes there are: after it gets going, we jump from murder to murder for a time and then everything else occurs at Bug’s house, where a midriff revelation about his and Fang’s relationship opens up some questions about the past before we find out just who is possessed by the Ripper’s vengeful spirit.

Up until this point, I was wondering why everyone viewed My Soul to Take so harshly. Then came the ending. I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced such a flaccid, rookie climax as this – it just…happens. Craven didn’t put the strongest finale on Elm Street and I’ve never minded that but it’s as if he got to the last page of the script and thought “bollocks! I’ve completely forgotten to think up an ending for this!” and just grabbed the nearest feasible character to make the possessee.

The gravity of how flat the ending is easily robs a star from the rating but even so, Craven’s direction feels restrained and almost pedestrian when we’re all too aware of what he’s capable of achieving on a tight budget. The film looks better than most but there’s nothing – visually or scripted – that has his stamp on it and some of the characterisations leave a lot to be desired.

Curiously, the most intriguing character is Penelope, who speaks to God as if he’s beside her and has some idea of the storm that’s coming and yet she’s rather heartlessly killed off early on. It would’ve been easy to turn her into a parody of the middle-American religious zealot but Craven succeeds in drawing out her personality, which is probably the most appealing on show, but then elects bitchy Fang as a sort of secondary hero? What gives, Wes?

Elementally, a frustrating film that seems to have arrived about fifteen years too late and a bit of a bum note for Craven, although not as dire as many have cited.

Blurbs-of-interest: Frank Grillo was in iMurders; Harris Yulin was in the Elm Street cash-in Bad Dreams; Music was by Marco Beltrami, who worked on all three Scream movies. Craven’s other slasher flicks include The Hills Have Eyes Part II and Deadly Blessing.

Trade-a-Life II

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Sometimes when watching a slasher pic there’ll be a nice person who dies and I’ll be sad about it for ten or twelve minutes. In recent years horror’s insistence that all people bar heroes are tossers has meant this is rarely the case anymore but way-back-when it wasn’t uncommon for sympathetic victims to pile up along with their more promiscuous, pot-smoking, more sinful buddies. It smarts more if someone who damn well should’ve been turned into a giant pin cushion makes it out unscathed.

Hence, here are three such examples where I’d gladly play God and swap one of the survivors for someone who bought the farm… Humongous spoilers follow.

THE PROWLER

Joseph Zito’s nihilistic little splatter movie may be largely a bore-fest punctuated by some excellent grue but it did offer up a strange little moment of trickery where a teen boy and girl, who I’m calling HornySexCouple for lack of a better understanding of their purpose, creep away from supervision to do the dirty in the basement. A classic slasher flick error.

Meanwhile, nice teech Miss Allison (Donna Davis) goes to look for a missing (and in fact dead) student. The camera cuts between both parties challenging us to guess who’s gonna get it. We watch from behind blurry foreground objects HornySexCouple get in on while Miss Allison discovers a bloody pool where the now-dead chick was slashed up.

Alas, Miss Allison is hijacked on the way back to safety by the killer and gets a blade to the neck while HornySexCouple, it turns out, were being watched by the local perv rather than the psycho. A cruel trick on a nice character.

HornySexCouple were just non-dimensional fodder who would’ve bolstered the rather low body count and Miss Allison should’ve lived to twirl another day in her delightful pink-with-black-shapes dress.

SLEEPAWAY CAMP III: TEENAGE WASTELAND

I actually have nothing against eventual Tiffany-lite heroine Marcia (Tracy Griffith, Mel’s half-sis), she who along with Tony (Mark Oliver), are the only campers at Camp New Horizons who make it out in one piece after puritanical transsexual psycho-loon Angela does away with the rest, who are participating in a meeting of the privileged and not-so youths in an “exercise of sharing.”

Tony is from the less-privileged group, while Marcia is middle class all the way, and herein lies my objection: bad guys can survive but final girls almost always have to be good, moralistic and girly. So I champion Arab (Jill Terashita) as the preferred choice to Marcia.

Arab has ‘tude, silky long hair and a bitchin’ leather jacket. She’d have kicked Angela’s ass if she hadn’t fallen for her trick and lost her head in the process. In fact, looking back at the film, Arab didn’t actually commit any particular ‘sin’ of the type Angela is always so keen to act on.

Although, I should point out neither can hold a candle to Sleepaway Camp II‘s final girl, Molly, played by the lovely Renee Estevez.

FRIDAY THE 13TH (the remake)

Were you sad when final-girl-for-most-of-it Jenna (Danielle Panabaker) became nothing more than a bit of meat stuck to the end of Jason’s machete? Even though I saw her demise coming, it was still a rare ‘awww’ moment for a Friday film, where characters seldom graduate beyond well-trodden stereotypes who we don’t care much about.

Why swap her with Clay, you ask? Well, I loves me some Amanda Righetti in The Mentalist so I can’t bring myself to trade her in for Jenna but then I thought, why couldn’t there have been two final girls for like the first time ever (unless you count Bloody Murder 2 or the Scream movies)?

There’s nothing wrong with Jared Padalecki as the lead but in Jason movies, the main character should really be a girl who channels some inner-Xena to kick ass. A 6’4″ buff guy doesn’t quite press the right buttons but on this one I’m fairly forgiving and it’s clear that Chewie (Aaron Yoo) was the best character by a mile anyway.

Yes? No? Still reeling from my inclusion of Alice last time? Leave me a comment and let’s duke it out.

Murder, Midgets & Misogyny

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SLEEPLESS

3.5 Stars  2001/18/113m

Director: Dario Argento / Writers: Argento, Franco Ferrini & Carlo Lucarelli / Cast: Max von Sydow, Stefano Dionisi, Chiara Caselli, Gabriele Lavia, Rossella Falk, Paolo Maria Scalondro, Roberto Zibetti, Roberto Accornero, Barbara Lerici, Guido Morbello, Massimo Sarchielli.

Body Count: 12

This review is dedicated to Ross of the excellent Anchorwoman in Peril!, a real Gift-Horsley who began overseeing his New Year’s resolution of familiarising me with Italian giallo – a resolution made on my behalf by Ross. But if such involuntary resolutions produce free DVDs then bring on 2012.

I’m not particularly unfamiliar with giallo, I’ve seen maybe two dozen or so films from the slashier end of the subset but I’ve yet to see one that’s, you know, massively converted me into some loose-lipped advocate of Italiano horror. Yeah, even Suspiria – it was okay. But anyway, on to the freebie that was Sleepless…

Compared to the other Argento slasher flicks I’ve seen (Tenebrae, Opera, Phenomena, Trauma), it’s functional in terms of plotting, no more or less so than the others but where it truly succeeds – indeed where all the aforementioned examples succeed – is in the visuals. Slasher films would be so much richer a subgenre were all directors as focused on presentation as Argento is. The plot, however, doesn’t offer much we haven’t seen before, albeit an interesting and engaging little mystery…

A long-thought solved case of serial murder that occurred around Turin in 1983 – credited to dead dwarfed writer of twisted horror Vincenzo de Fabritiis – begin to reoccur seventeen years later when a hooker accidentally makes off with a dossier of the killer’s handiwork. In what’s clearly the film’s best sequence, she is tormented and murdered on the completely empty train back to the city, as is her roommate, and the old killings begin all over again.

Retired and aged detective Moretti (von Sydow) who investigated the original murders is brought back into the fold and contacts the grown up son of one of the previous victims (who suffered a grisly case of death-by-broken-clarinet) and the pair begin looking into the possibility that Vincenzo isn’t actually dead.

More slayings ensue, each of them left with a paper cut-out of a farm animal that corresponds to an old poem while Giacomo (the son) reconnects with his old flame, much to the annoyance of her dorky boyfriend. But who is the killer? What is his motive? Why are all the female characters in the film so fucking stupid?

I mean, really… what keeps me at arms-length with Argento’s work is his portrayal of women as dumbfucks who can’t operate locks on doors, fall over a lot, and drop the contents of their over-stuffed purses, leave their things behind so they have to go back for them, say they don’t require company walking home but then act all skittish and jump out of their skin at every little sound… Meanwhile, the ranks of idiotic male counterparts go largely unpunished despite acting like prize pricks – they’re exempted from the slashes of the killer’s blade. It’s annoying and goes against the the story by crowbarring these unlikely simpletons into the complex nature of what’s actually going on.

This issue brushed aside, Sleepless is an above average slasher film with a nice surprise ending that, for once, isn’t direly predictable, aided by the film having limitless background characters who could be the killer. The connection to the murders two decades earlier is neatly tied off in a believable way and it pretty much all makes sense. How hardcore fans of Argento’s see this alongside his earlier, more famous, more bloodthirsty work is a mystery to me but I can say with certainty that I liked it, I just wish the man himself would turn out a film where the victims were primarily stupid men and the women saved the day, or some gay blokes – hey, it could happen!

One final word on it, there was a brief laugh out loud moment when, almost out of nowhere, this person appeared:

She just…pops up, spinning to the camera before we cut back to something else. Look how happy she is. And she’s a waitress. Isn’t she supposed to be surly and annoyed? It looks like she works in one of those ‘theme’ establishments so at the very least she should be hocking up phlegm globs in the fries. Again, Argento’s talent for representing folk fails on this count.

Pant-Soiling Scenes #17: FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2

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My earliest Friday related memory is seeing a TV spot for a Halloween showing of The Final Chapter when I was in Florida circa 1989: it featured the scene where Jason bursts through the window and grabs Corey Feldman and also the re-used footage of the campfire tale from the opening montage. I was only about 10 so couldn’t watch.

Years later when I became dependent on an almost daily Friday-fix, I kept expecting these scenes to show up. Neither were in Part 1 (and I was also staggered to find that neither was Jason!) and by the time I saved up for my VHS of Part 2 I was to find that that window scene was also absent. The Final Chapter would turn out to be the last of the original films I tracked down. But…the creepy campfire story, it was present along with some of the most effective jump-scares I’ve ever encountered…

And so it comes to this: my favourite scene in any movie ever. I love this moment so much. Sure, it’s predictable now but the first two or three times I watched it, it succeeded in making me jump outta my skin.

Ginny hides from bag-headed (and so even creepier) Jason in a bathroom that can’t be locked. The soundtrack maintains a tense string note that seems to go on forever as she listens through the door and slowly…sloooowly…reaches for the window… As Vera Dika’s dissection of how these films work keyed in on, we wonder where Jason might’ve gotten to in the meantime. Oh, you’ll find out!

The fact that Amy Steel is without a doubt the best final girl in the history of the genre aids this remarkably well choreographed scene and those that follow as she runs past the camera and into another room. These films might’ve been cheap but they were certainly not hack jobs made up of rubbish edits, crappy synths and ketchup squirts – some real craft went into making them tense and, in the case of this scene, downright frightening, something all too absent in todays boardroom-produced box-ticking exercices that pass for horror.

Read my full review for further ranting.

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