Tag Archives: what the hell!?

Midnight Deadline

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new-years-evilNEW YEAR’S EVIL

1.5 Stars  1980/82m

“Don’t dare make New Year’s resolutions…unless you plan to live!”

Director: Emmett Alston / Writers: Leonard Neubauer / Cast: Roz Kelly, Kip Niven, Chris Wallace, Grant Cramer, Louisa Moritz, Jed Mills, Taaffe O’Connell, Alicia Dhanifu.

Body Count: 7

Dire-logue: “He’s mutilated the breasts of most of his women. That’s a common characteristic of a psychopathic killer.”

A slasher film set on New Year’s Eve should be easy stuff: gather victims together, give them booze, let them flirt and have sex, page a psycho killer… Here, the killer offs a victim as the clock strikes twelve in each of the time zones. It should work – it doesn’t. FAIL!

This soporific holiday of dullness concerns a coast-to-coast NYE broadcast presented in California by the obnoxious Diane Sullivan (a.k.a. ‘Blaze’ – the “first lady of rock”), a poverty-row Sharon Osbourne. While callers vote from across the nation vote for their favourite new wave rock song of the year, a maniac using a vocoder calls in and announces he’s going to murder somebody Blaze knows as the clock strikes twelve each time, finishing with her when midnight comes to the west coast…

In craptacular fashion, the killer’s face is revealed almost straight off the bat and has him interact like a regular member of society while he seduces women like a Ted Bundy protege and jockeys them into position for the midnight knock-off. Things would have been a lot better if the killer had adopted the eerie Stan Laurel mask he wears momentarily at the end and anonymously slain his vics in one location, such as the venue of Blaze’s broadcast. But no, instead our unnamed killer stalks and chats up his prey, padded out with the horrible interludes of crappy rock.

Once the killer’s identity is revealed, we’re treated to a long speech that contains his useless, misogynistic excuse for a motive and the reasons he wants to kill rock’s first lady. By this point, the film has all but collapsed under its own pretensions and attempts to make things up with a twist we’ve seen coming since the first ten minutes.

Have a good chuckle at the dreadful rock bands who perform and laugh even more at the zombie-like motion of the crowd, who simply drop themselves back and forth – it’s the only thing worth remembering here.

Ranty Monday: I watched TWILIGHT

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Maybe this should be under ‘Today I HATE…’

twilight

Rarely, will you find me taking such a vitriolic stand about a bad film – hey, I liked Jason X – but this… Jesus wept, why has this franchise become so inexplicably popular!? I wouldn’t normally waste precious bandwidth on a non-slasher film but I was kinda angry!

The “story” concerns a girl called Bella, who moves to a new town. Bella is moodiness personified: sullen, glum, dull as the weather in her new town and yet a vegetarian vampire falls in love with her…because he cannot eat her. Other vampires want to eat her, so her love-vamp, Edward, hides her to protect her (God knows why, she’s so damn boring), kills bad vampire. The end.

Vegetarian Vampires? Someone call Buffy… NOW!

So, not only does the “story” in fact feature no story, indeed in a two hour film rarely has so little actually happened, but it’s just so insultingly inoffensive, tip-toeing around issues of sex and violence, raping vampire lore by having them freely wander around in the daylight and observe their own reflections – it’s an absolute affront to be included in the horror genre at all.

A bland, banal, upsettingly sub-mediocre story that has somehow struck gold on the book front, now it’s set to poison the box office too… Pass me a razor, I’m going to need to self-harm if I want to see any excitement.

DEAD GIRLS

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deadgirlsDEAD GIRLS

1.5 Stars  1990/104m

“When rock n’ roll fantasy turns into a nightmare.”

Director: Dennis Devine / Writer: Steve Jarvis / Cast: Diana Karinkas, Angela Eads, Key Schaber, Angela Scaglione, Steven Kyle, Dierdre West, Jeff Herbick, David Chatfield, Ilene B. Singer, David Williams.

Body Count: 15

Dire-logue: “Would you please stop embarrassing him and yourself and anyone else forced to watch this revolting spectacle…”

The Dead Girls are a shiter than shite rock band who look like bargain-basement Bangles – all big hair and strappy, tight leather clothes – and yet the drummer is a guy. And this was made in 1990, after the spandex death metal revolution was done with, right? And that isn’t them on the cover, that’s just some random group of girls. Maybe they’re dead too though. The band are blamed for the suicide of a group of teenagers who listen to their songs – Nail Gun Murder and You’ve Got to Kill Yourself – and take the latter seriously. One girl survives and she happens to be the kid sister of the bands’ songwriter, Gina.

Gina decides the band needs a vacation and so they do what all 80’s horror film rock bands do: they go to a cabin in the woods. There, they are hacked up by a skull-masked looney toon who kills in accordance with the lyrics of their crappy songs. Is it the identikit retarded groundskeeper? Is it Gina’s nasty aunt and uncle, who raised kid sis and tell Gina they hope she’ll “burn in hell for this?”

Dead Girls is another slasher film where the characters act completely illogically: one victim faces off with the killer and, before he axes her, says this: “I used to be afraid of the afterlife – but not anymore!” It’s also 104 minutes long. One-hundred-and-four minutes. Sixteen minutes away from two bloody hours.

The extra half-star is for the laughs. If you can block-book a day off to watch it – advisably in shifts no longer than fifteen minutes – then it’s good for a few giggles, especially the acting skills of the “burn in hell” woman, who was quite possibly approached in a mall parking lot and asked to come and utter some lines to camera.

Vixen forever! I’ve been livin’ on the edge of a broken heart… Yeah!

SEED

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seed1.5 Stars  2007/18/86m

Director/Writer: Uwe Boll / Cast: Michael Pare, Will Sanderson, Ralf Moeller, Andrew Jackson, Thea Gill, Jodelle Micah Ferland.

Body Count: 10

At the “world premiere” of Seed, much-critiqued director Uwe Boll told the audience he wanted to make a horror film “that was no fun.” Well, he’s done something right…

Seed begins with a warning that it contains “actual scenes of torture,” but the only ‘real’ footage is that of animals a pelt house, supposedly being watched by the killer. It’s gross, to be sure, as a soppy animal lover and immediately dragged my dog closer to me in protection from it’s icky grossness. Strangely – and possibly emphatic of the criticism levelled at Boll’s questionable skills – none of it has anything to do with the rest of the film, which is set in 1979, although we don’t learn this until we see the date written down at least one third of the way through!

The loon here, Max Seed, has apparently murdered 666 people in 6 years – which means 2.13 victims per week without being caught. Yeah, Uwe, “OK”. We see the killer’s cell where he starves various unfortunates to death, starting with a dog (mine is huddled ever closer), then a baby. Through time-lapse photography, they rot into skeletons. Fairly grim. I toy with ejecting the disc and skipping this one altogether.

“Fortunately”, things brighten up just a lil bit once he is caught and strapped into The Chair. There’s some gibberish about the chair not working properly and a bullshit triple jeopardy rule that states if a convict survives three jolts of electricity, he goes free! The prison warden, doctor and detectives conspire and bury Seed alive. A happy ending? Hell-to-the-no! Seed digs himself free and does away with those responsible.

On paper, the plot sounds familiarly acceptable (echoes of Welcome to Spring Break and Destroyer) but the film is half over by the time the stalk n’ slashing begins and is structured so unconventionally that the story is neo impossible to follow. Character names are unclear, as are their roles for the most part, hell they don’t even tell us when the damn thing is set for ages! The absence of any identifiable hero or final girl doesn’t help matters either.

A scene where Seed hammers an anonymous woman’s head in, shot entirely in one take and lasting several minutes, burrows new depths of ‘torture porn’ but thankfully features a level of CGI I could create with Microsoft Paint. That doesn’t work properly. With no mouse. And no hands.

This is the first Boll film I’ve seen, likely to be the last as well. Technically, there’s some negotiable ability there but a brief scan of the articles the detective reads reveals countless spelling and grammar errors – it’s like nobody even tried. Seed, schmeed, ‘PC game’ (!?) included or not. FAIL!

THE UNDERTOW

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undertow1.5 Stars  2003/18/77m

“He’s an unstoppable killing machine!”

Director/Writer: Jeremy Wallace / Cast: Jason Christ, Julie Farrar, Trudy Bequette, Chris Grega, Emily Haack, Robin Garrels, Todd Tevlin, Doc Brown, Joseph Palermo.

Body Count: 12

Dire-logue: “That’s it! Nobody’s ever seeing us again.”

Junky shot-on-video fodder with what appears to be an am-dram group choosing to go camping in the wrong town and ending up on the receiving end of a mongoloid retard’s tantrum.

After the usual stop-and-search scene from an arsey deputy, who pours away all their beer, the “teenagers” begin a river canoe trip and learn from a sympathetic local that the Mayor of Old Mines has convinced the townsfolk that all outsiders are evil and therefore unleashes his son – known only as The Boy – on anyone who lingers too long. On this particular outing, The Boy has had enough of doing what Daddy says and turns on the town as well, offing some irritatingly backward extras before starting on the “teenagers”.

There’s gore-a-plenty in The Undertow, but it’s all a bit sloppy: one guy’s head is squeezed to the point where is brain begins leaking out in mushy chunks and another “teenager” has her innards ripped out and tossed aside like salad. But there’s a good head-on-a-spike that pleasantly echoes the Friday the 13th-wannabes of yore.

Easier to take than a lot of other SOV releases, there’s still a nasty case of crappus dialogus, possibly improvised by the “teenagers” themselves, who favour yelling profanities at each other, gunning down any important information in the verbal crossfire. A couple of nods to better slasher flicks can’t save this at the end of it. Just cross your fingers and hope that open ending doesn’t prompt a change in the tide…

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