Tag Archives: slasher

Ree! Ree! Ree!

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PSYCHO

 5 Stars  1960/15/104m

“A new and altogether different screen excitement!!!”

Director: Alfred Hitchcock / Writers: Robert Bloch & Joseph Stefano / Cast: Anthony Perkins, Janet Leigh, Vera Miles, John Gavin, Martin Balsam, John McIntire, Simon Oakland.

Body Count: 3

How do you even review Psycho? What can possibly be said or theorised about the film now that hasn’t been said or theorised a million times before by better, more academically-sounding bods? Nothin’, that’s what, nothin’!

To kill some time while I think about what I might say, here’s the plot-o-matic lowdown: Janet Leigh is Marion Crane, a sexy secretary who, when faced with the option of depositing $40,000 for a client or running off with it to start a new life with her mantoy takes the low road and scarpers, buys a new car and checks into the weatherbeaten Bates Motel late one night.

There, she meets the young owner, Norman, who resides in the big old house that overlooks the estate with ‘Mother’, who shouts and screams at the boy. He confides in Marion that he wishes he could escape but is duty bound to stay and run the motel. But there’s something a bit creepy about Norm, with his spyholes and twitchy behaviour…

Said creepiness manifests itself when Marion, having decided to abort her wayward fantasy and return the cash, steps into the shower and finds herself in an up close and personal encounter with Mother, who slices with mean precision. Norman covers up for her, sending the body and Marion’s car to the bottom of the local swamp. Done and dusted.

…Until Marion’s sister Lila comes looking for her at the same time as a private detective hired by the victim of the theft, which leads him to the Bates Motel and, ultimately, a similar fate to his quarry.

Lila and Marion’s boyfriend, Sam Loomis, then decide to go looking for the missing detective, Arbogast, at the motel, posing as newlyweds and, while Loomis distracts Norman with chit-chat, Lila sneaks up to the house to interview Mother about what might have become of her sister.

Psycho ends in true slasher movie style, with a big reveal – doubtlessly shocking at the time – and an epilogue to explain the whats and hows for the audience. Needless to say, ‘Mother’ wasn’t all she was talked up to be.

Psycho is a film I don’t watch much, I always think it’ll be boring and slow because of its age but then am always surprised by how fluid and engaging it is, thanks in large part to Hitch’s celebrated auteuristic direction and the performances from the perfect cast. And those strings! Those shrieking strings!

It’s worth remembering – ‘specially for the nippers of the Saw and remake generation – that without Psycho these films wouldn’t exist at all. It was the trailblazer for all manner of loon versus helpless victim films. The shower scene has been replicated hundreds, if not thousands of times and the plot, albeit often compacted into lesser vehicles, is now the accepted standard of the genre:

Victims in peril; unfamiliar surroundings; creepy old house; stalking; slashing; plucky female investigation into underlying secrets with ghastly consequence… Psycho did it all and did it first.

In some ways, it’s strange that it wasn’t really until Halloween that the prototype morphed into the staple sub-genre of the slasher film. Even Black Christmas and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre were made well over a decade afterwards, which raises odd questions about the rest of the 60s, largely filled in by the giallo exports from Europe – why did America take its sweet time fixing the conventions together for Michael and Mrs Voorhees to become the glue that became the superstructure of the slasher flick?

Who knows? Well, some books probably do. As I’m not really ‘into’ giallo and most the pre-Halloween US body count flicks suck harder than a Dyson, I’ve frankly not hiked into this territory out of laziness or, as I prefer to think of it, a brazen preference for the 80s output.

Psycho is not my favourite Hitch movie, that honour belongs to Strangers on a Train and then, possibly, The Birds, but any which way you cut it, it was probably his most important movie when it came to its influence over the future of horror.

Blurbs-of-interest: Perkins reprised his role in all three sequels and was in Destroyer; Vera Miles also returned for 1983’s Psycho II and made The Initiation that same year; Janet Leigh made a cameo in Halloween H20. Martin Balsam played a stock local sheriff in Innocent Prey. Screenwriter Joseph Stefano scribed TV proto-slasher Home for the Holidays in 1972. Gus Van Sant made a strange shot-for-shot colour remake in 1998.

Blood will flow… Talent, not so much

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THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE MASSACRE

0.5 Stars  2005/18/92m

A.k.a. Sickle (UK)

“Blood will flow…”

Director/Writer: Paul Gagne / Cast: Shaila Vaidya, Paul Cagney, Maurizio Farhad, Stacey Denson, Jacob Bailey, Vaedynn Orland.

Body Count: 6

Dire-logue: “Do you think she’s hot with her big tits and no panties?”

If the world could find a single use for Simon Cowell, it would be to send him to the numerous idiots who think a camcorder, a carton of corn syrup and a nude chick kissing another nude chick will be enough to get their slasher film to DVD and just tell them no. No, in big shouty words, backed by Tina Turner singing “You’re simply the worst…” No.

With Cowell otherwise engaged ass-raping popular music, we’re left alone to suffer through the conglomerate of shit that ass-rapes the slasher genre that is The Slaughterhouse Massacre, which, according to the DVD box is more frightening than The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Yes, yes it is, although I’m sure the original intentions that quote had quite a different sense of ‘frightening’ in mind.

Two jock-jerks and their annoying girlfriends explore an abandoned abattoir rumoured to be haunted by the ghost of Marty Sickle. Sickle, that common surname of Joe Public. Why do they always insist on giving their killers “ironic” names in these cheapo projects? Robert Hatchet. Simon Axewielder. Lucy AK47.

Sickle was lynched for a murder years earlier, of course. What else could you do with that surname? A mock seance soon brings dire consequences when the maniac is resurrected and begins killing them.

All you really need to do is copy some good scenes from other horror films to at least make it look like you know what works. And yet, here every single scene is dragged out to the maximum lengths of human tolerance in order to reach a feature running time and with only four characters in peril, things get very boring very fast.

Ancillaries are introduced only to disappear from the film long before any of the horror begins, proving that neither the budget nor imagination of the writer/director could accommodate them. So we get offensive pandering to the supposed adolescent male demographic instead with completely unrequired girl-on-girl action and intermittent stoner ‘comedy’.

The Slaughterhouse Massacre is simply the worst.

Stock Background Characters 101: Black Girl with Attitude

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In this feature, we examine the lesser beings of the slasher movie realm, which, if you’re making your own slasher film, could provide a good cast roster for you.

No killer or final girl profiles here, this is a celebration of those underlings who made the most of their fleeting flirtation with stardom. And usually died.

Today we salute… BLACK GIRL WITH ATTITUDE

Overview: BGA – black girl with attitude – is the character, often close to the heroine, who provides sassy insights into the goings on in the world created for the movie, commenting on the situation and offering advice. Yet, in a cruel twist of fate, despite usually being right, BGA rarely survives. It was my BFF Grace – who once auditioned for a role called ‘Black girl with attitude’ for Ripper 2 – who pointed out that the black girl’s boyfriend has to be darker than she is. She can’t date a white guy, interracial romances are yet to reach the shores of the slasher movie realm.

She is sometimes even played by a pop or R n’ B singer, probably under the illusion that she’d be allowed to beat the crap out of the killer before “script changes” necessitated her death instead.

Linguistic Snapshot: “Girl! Did you see the way that guy was lookin’ at chu? Mmm hmm, you need to get yo white ass on that befaw this psycho killer comes-a-callin’, girl.” (clicks fingers and bobs head left and right)

Styling: Because slasher films are plain lazy, BGA varies only very minimally from film to film. She’s into her looks, so hair and make up will be immaculate. She is almost always called something beginning with K: Keisha, Kia, Kally, Kenda and sometimes Tameka, LaShonda, Quantinisha. Uh, and Maureen in Scream 2.

Hallmarks: Black girl is usually the heroine’s best friend, but occasionally a total bitch. Sorry, bee-yatch. However, she is often the one who first announces that everyone should just get the hell outta dodge before they end up chopped, but the white people vote to stay “in case Susan is alive” and thus BGA’s cards become marked.

Downfall: Usually an inflated sense of self-defence agility is what bests our girl here, she either tries to talk the killer away (Kia in Freddy vs Jason) or her own don’t-shit-me outlook fools her into thinking she’s not in any danger anyway until it’s too late (see Monica in The Clown at Midnight; Maureen in Scream 2).

Genesis: Black characters rarely appeared in the earliest slasher films and, when they did, were often marginalised to early victims, hence the birth of the “black guy always dies first” cliche…  Although excluding films with all black casts and Elm Street 4, I can’t think of a film where this actually applies.

Demi in Sleepaway Camp II packed a little bit of ‘tude but it was in the late 90s that BGA became a popular fixture, Brandy’s turn as Karla (with a K!) in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer being a role that ticked all the boxes but miraculously allowed her to survive!

Elsewhere, there was the nasty “oh no you di’uhnt” girl from The Curse of El Charro; the girls of ‘The Crew’ who OD’d on sass in 7eventy 5ive; the heroine’s doomed best friend, Lisa, in the dismal Prom Night remake; mountain of attitude Bella in Return to Sleepaway Camp and the particularly irritating Kimmy in Somebody Help Me, who wore the ‘annoying girl’ shoes perfectly and was allowed to survive!

Legacy: I, for one, await the day that we get a black girl without attitude who not only saves the day, but also kicks the killer’s ass in the process. Even in the all black cast productions, the girls are usually relegated to the damsel in distress part. And Jen from Camp Daze doesn’t count as she was an obnoxious cow.

Until that day (and it surely must happen soon?) it looks like we’re going to see more of Kantonisha and her gal pals pointing out the obvious while the white folk dim-wittedly go and look for their already dead friends. Bring it, girl, mmm hmm! Click, bob.

The Laugh/Barf Principle

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HATCHET

2 Stars  2006/18/81m

“It’s not a remake. It’s not a sequel. And it’s not based on a Japanese one.”

Director/Writer: Adam Green / Cast: Joel David Moore, Tamara Feldman, Deon Richmond, Kane Hodder, Mercedes McNab, Parry Shen, Joleigh Fioreavanti, Patrika Darbo, Richard Riehle, Joel Murray, Robert Englund, Joshua Leonard, Tony Todd.

Body Count: 11

Dire-logue: “It’s not working – are you sure the number is 9-1-1?”

‘Old School American Horror’ sayeth the cover… Hatchet opened to a lot of eager reviews of the “best thing since sliced head bread” variety from various horror ‘ficionados and so, when it eventually washed up on our shores in October of 2007, I was hoping it would remove the sour aftertaste of Rob Zombie’s Halloween right out of there like a keg of Listerine.

On paper it should be perfect: Hodder, Todd, Englund, a true slasher movie fan at the helm, the woods, lost group of tourists, local myth of psycho killer, and still Hatchet and I just didn’t get along. It’s like a blind date set up by your friend who thinks you’ll be perfect for each other but then it turns out that maybe they just don’t know you that well.

Anyway, enough of that tripe, what’s it about?

Recently dumped college boy Moore is dragging his heels around New Orleans Mardi Gras, much to the annoyance of his frat buddies (including director Green in the cap) and opts to take a haunted swamp tour he heard about, accompanied reluctantly by best pal Richmond.

Turned away by Tony Todd’s two minute cameo, they find fake-accented Parry Shen is willing to take them, along with a retired couple, a porno director and his two bickering starlets and a mysteriously quiet local chick who’s looking for her croc hunting Pa and bro (Englund and Leonard) who were offed in the prologue. Their guide soon proves himself incompetent by grounding the tour boat and a croc attack leaves the group staggering around the woods when they happen upon the house allegedly inhabited by a legendary ghoul…

After a flashback tale of poor Victor Crowley, a horrendously malformed child looked after solely by his father (Hodder, out of makeup for a change) who was tormented by local kids who torched his house while the boy was still inside and a botched rescue attempt by daddy left him with an axe in the face… Nominal heroine Feldman tries to guide the group elsewhere but is too late and the hulking Crowley quickly sets about doing away with them one by one.

Hatchet does what we expect it to; the tourists are ripped limb from limb, hacked, sawn, skewered and beheaded with liberal lashings of gore, all of it CG-free, which is admirable, although at times the less-is-more route would have been advisable, although the film was released at a time when ‘horror’ was being cut down to PG-13 levels of acceptability to suck in a younger audience, Hatchet provided a sort of nihilistic flip-off to them and piled on the grue. And the tits.

It was mostly the misbalanced frat-style comedy that shot it in the foot for me. The gags are obvious as Richmond does the typical token black dude thing while McNab is dumber than a box of hair (“call the police, they’ll send the cops!”) and Moore is just the unlucky schmuck. Shen comes out of it the best – possibly the reason he returned for the sequel as a different character – and Feldman is a functional, if not a little lifeless heroine, replaced in Hatchet II by the preferable Danielle Harris.

Green’s skills markedly improved by the time the follow up surfaced in 2010, achieving where most sequels fail by completely outdoing the original film. That’s not to say Hatchet is a bad film, it’s just a bit…juvenile? Who knows, maybe it was supposed to be, but it’s bookended plot means that it geographically goes almost nowhere, seemingly set in a patch of woods about thirty feet in diameter. As if unsure whether he wants to shock us or make us laugh, even Green himself seemed to be aware of the flaws during the screening of the second film at FrightFest, a product he was evidently more at home with making and is consequently far more accomplished.

Blurbs-of-interest: Deon Richmond was in Scream 3; Parry Shen was also in Dead Scared; Josh Leonard had the lead in Madhouse. Mercedes McNab used to play dim-witted cheerleader (and then equally incompetent vampire) Harmony in Buffy. Richard Riehle was in The Watermen and Texas Chainsaw 3D, and Mischief Night; John Carl Buechler, director of Friday the 13th Part VII and makeup artist on a gazillion other films cameod as Jack Cracker (and had a bigger role in Hatchet II). Hodder, Englund and Todd’s services to the genre are huge and I hope at the very least you know which three icons they’re most famous for playing.

Pot, Pitchforks & Poe

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DEAD END ROAD

2 Stars 2004/18/80m

“Only one detective can stop the Poe Killer before he completes another tale in his book of death!”

Director: Jeff Burton / Writers: Burton, Erik F. Hill & Bill Vincent / Cast: Anita La Selva, Jason Carter, Bill Vincent, Spice Williams-Crosby, Jennifer Lantz, Gunhild Giil, Erik F. Hill, Curtis Hall, Casimir Borowicz, Bonner C. Upshaw III, Robert Leeshock, Dee Wallace Stone, Dennis Haskins.

Body Count: 12

Dire-logue: “I am the wind that comes out of the night!” – well, you certainly do blow

There’s something appealing about the concept of ‘The Edgar Allan Poe Killer’, a serial murderer who bases his slayings around the tales of the master of the macabre – how could it go wrong? Answer: budget.

Starting well with a murder that puts a great spin on The Tell-Tale Heart, detective Burt Williams has been trying to catch the fiend for three years and is eventually struck off the case by his FBI daughter (!) who is close to tricking the killer into meeting her by posing as another IQ-challenged internet victim.

Meanwhile, a quintet of dope-smoking, “law enforcement students” of her cop-turned-lecturer father decide to take a trip out to the house where the killer, his identity known but notoriously elusive, used to live and, by contrived change, has just taken FBI daughter-girl hostage! The road where the house is located is a dead end, in case you were wondering what the hell the title was about.

While FBI daughter-girl awaits her fate beneath a giant pendulum, our Poe-wannabe stalks and slaughters the “law enforcement students” before a showdown with the father-daughter cop team.

There are some fun murders, like a sword through the head, pitchfork in the face and a decapitated head being spewed out of the bowling ball return conveyor thingy, all set to the killer’s quotes of Poe’s most famous works, “never more” being the appropriate follow up to one brutal kill.

Sadly, the whole project is undermined by the amateur-night performances (Stone and Haskins briefly cameo) and camcorder-esque photography. Still, at a mere eighty minutes, it doesn’t outstay its welcome by much.

Blurbs-of-interest: Dee Wallace Stone is also in Popcorn, Jeepers Creepers: Reborn, Scar (the ‘less good’ one) and Rob Zombie’s Halloween retooling; Spice Williams-Crosby was in Fatal Games under her previous name Marcelyn Ann Williams.

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