Tag Archives: what the hell!?

[Insert slack-jawed emoji]

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scream 1981 a.k.a the outing

SCREAM

0.5 Stars  1981/18/79m

“No one ever returns from this phantom town of TERROR!”

A.k.a. The Outing

Director/Writer: Byron Quisenberry / Cast: Pepper Martin, Hank Worden, Ethan Wayne, Woody Strode, Joe Allaine, Joseph Alvarado, Ann Bronston, Julie Marine, Cynthia Faria, Nancy St. Marie, Alvy Moore, Bob MacGonigal, Bobby Diamond, John Nowak.

Body Count: 7

Laughter Lines: “He wouldn’t have enough sense to shit if his mother didn’t call him every day and remind him.”

“No one ever returns,” the tagline promises – uh… yes they do. Half of the cast, in fact.

Ten rafters and their guides find themselves trapped for a couple of nights in an abandoned town that resembles a low-end theme park attraction. Ten minutes in, they’re already wandering around aimlessly in the dark and being killed by an off-camera presence that is never revealed. An hour and several corpses later, some fog rolls in, followed by a guy on a horse and his dog; he tells them he used to be a sailor and then leaves again!

One of the few… ‘defining’ (?) aspects of Scream is that the cast are adults rather than teenagers and all of the victims are male. The age makes no difference though, in fact seemingly making them less intelligent, as they fail to notice missing people and walk off on their own for reasons such as fetching a beer from a separate building. “I’ll be fine!” One character is attacked by a reanimated corpse BUT DOESN’T TELL ANYONE ABOUT IT!

Stir in the crappy daytime-TV saxophone score, horrible characters, dismal acting from some semi-known (John Wayne’s son is in this) and you have one of the worst films in the history of moving pictures. Critics who mauled Friday the 13th should rent this.

Blurb-of-shame: Pepper Martin was later in the only marginally better Return to Horror High.

Dark night of the scare– Oh no, wait.

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dark harvest 2004

DARK HARVEST

1 Stars  2004/86m

“You reap what you sow.”

Director/Writer: Paul Moore / Cast: Don Digiulio, Jeanie Cheek, Jennifer Leigh, B.W. York, Jessica Dunphy, Amiee Cox, Paul Bugelski, Booty Chewning.

Body Count: 10

Laughter Lines: “This says something about you – you left the black guy and the lesbian to get the bags.”

Yet more college kids versus yet more homicidal scarecrows, but even worse than the usual fare. In the 30s, a sheriff discovers a farmer has been murdering his farmhands and turning them into scarecrows, leading to the only good crop in the region. Seventy years later, farmer’s great-grandson shows up with his fiancé and some other friends, having inherited the place. Grandson learns that the farm is cursed and when the harvest moon (or ‘blood moon’) rises, it wakes three scarecrows each with an axe to grind. Or a scythe.

Crap everything sinks this in a pile of manure from the get-go, with annoying token girl-on-girl scenes, characters who argue non-stop, a questionably-accented “British” girl, and white-bread leads who are more boring than being stuck on a secluded farm with only Keeping Up with the Kardashians to watch.

Unsurprisingly shelved for two years after it was shot, and followed by two sequels that may or may not be related to this one. Avoid please.

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.

Wronger Turn

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albino farm 2009

ALBINO FARM

1 Stars  2009/85m

“The Legend is Real…”

Directors/Writers: Sean McEwen & Joe Anderson / Cast: Tammin Sursok, Sunkrish Bala, Alicia Lagano, Nick Richey, Chris Jericho, Richard Christy, Duane Whitaker, Bianca Allaine, Kevin Spirtas.

Body Count: 10+

Cheapo Wrong Turn clone with a quartet of college kids on a project lured to go and investigate the ‘Albino Farm’, a local legend, that’s brimming with malformed outcasts, who are also, naturally, all murderers.

Notable only for a likeable Indian guy cast as the nominal hero, and Kevin Spirtas from The Hills Have Eyes Part II and Friday the 13th Part VII in a three-minute role as a preacher. Everything else is a fifth-rate photocopy of something you’ve seen ten times before, scraping such depths as a guy willing to allow complete strangers to molest his girlfriend for a ride to the farm. Total bollocks.

“I’m beginning to suspect foreplay.”

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psycho cop returns 1992

PSYCHO COP RETURNS

2 Stars  1993/18/82m

“He’s the life and death of any party.”

A.k.a. Psycho Cop 2

Director: Rif Coogan [Adam Rifkin] / Writer: Dan Povenmire / Cast: Bobby Ray Shafer, Barbara Lee Alexander, Roderick Darin, Miles David Dougal, Nick Vallelonga, Dave Bean, Julie Strain, Alexandria Lakewood, Priscilla Huckleberry, John Paxton, Justin Carroll, Kimberly Speiss, Al Schuermann.

Body Count: 9

Laughter Lines: “Anything you say can and will be considered extremely strange because… you’re dead.”

It’s like twenty years since I picked this up on VHS at a time when the first film hadn’t even been released here. Not that you need it to follow the relatively simple opus of big dude kills office bods at an after hours party.

Hulking Satanic officer of the law Joe Vickers overhears plans for a bachelor party at an office block and decides to crash, hunting down the horny young execs, the strippers they invite, the nightwatchman, a couple who stuck around to have sex in the copy room… He’s not short on fodder. Victims are stabbed in the eye with pencils, thrown down elevator shafts, impaled to the wall, and photocopied to death.

With each demise, Shafer has a Krueger-esque quip to add, many of which are groan worthy, and the film can’t help itself from leaving the door open for the sadly never realised opportunity that would’ve been Psycho Cop vs. Maniac Cop vs. RoboCop. Amusing in a ten-years-too-late kinda way, but viewing the trailer earlier I wasn’t tempted to watch the whole thing again. Curiously, it took one week to film in 1992 but remained unreleased until mid-1994.

Blurbs-of-interest: Shafer had a small part (as a cop!) in Monster Man; Director Rifkin acted in Bikini Island and Last Dance, the latter also featuring Kimberly Speiss; Julie Strain was later in Bleed.

 

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