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killerkillerKILLERKILLER

1 Stars  2006/75m

“The public calls them murderers. The papers call them monsters. She calls them prey.”

Director/Writer: Pat Higgins / Cast: Cy Henty, Dutch Dore-Boize, Danielle Laws, Richard Collins, James Kavaz, Nick Page, Scott Denyer, Danny James, Rami Hilmi.

Body Count: 9

Bizarre no-budget indie project, which begins with the all-too familiar scenario of a babysitter being stalked around a London townhouse. Into the kitchen… up the stairs… into the bathroom as she disrobes for a shower, turns around to find a masked killer poised with a knife and…

…whips out twin blades and does him in! This witty intro aside, Killerkiller plays out like a stage-adaptation once we meet eight incarcerated murderers who wake up to find their prison-slash-institute has no guards, no locks, and somebody who is offing them one by one. How and why they are there – don’t bother asking.

Mucho testosterone-fuelled dialogue later, we discover that blondie babysitter is some sort of demon who is zapping them temporarily into relative nightmares (all about their past crimes) and passing ultimate judgment over them. It might’ve worked if the expenditure was in double figures – but it ain’t so it ends up as one of the longer 75 minute stints to experience.

July Face-off: ‘Comedy’ porno slasher vs. ‘comedy’ porno slasher

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Long ago, before I’d polluted my delicate mindset with the body count details of 496 slasher films, I was watching Caroline in the City, remember that? There was a scene I’ve always remembered where Caroline’s maneater gal-pal went to the video store where she encountered Matthew Perry in his Chandler persona. He made a big deal out of the store not having The Piano and said to her, as some kinda lame line, that he didn’t like all the guy movies with sex and violence and then queried maneater girl as to what she was renting. ‘Sorority House Massacre II,’ he reads and the scene ends in some other way I’ve now forgotten.

I always thought they’d made up that movie title. But no, when I got my first film almanac, there it was in print, together with its entirely unrelated predecessor. That book was a 1997 guide to video (them were the days) and twelve years have elapsed between the realisation that the film is, in fact, real and me seeing it.

CONTESTANT ONE

shm2

1 Stars  1990/77m

“It’s cleavage vs. cleavers and the result is Delta Delta Deadly!”

A.k.a. Night Frenzy; Nighty Nightmare

Director: Jim Wynorski / Writers: James B. Rogers & Bob Sheridan / Cast: Robyn Harris, Melissa Moore, Stacia Zhivago, Michelle Verran, Dana Bentley, Jurgen Baum, Karen Chorak, Bridget Carney, Peter Spellos.

Body Count: 5

Dire-logue: “Oh my God, our clothes! They’re still upstairs!”

Five “teenage” girls purchase ‘the old Hockstatter place’ for their new sorority house and find out that the patriarch of the family murdered his wife and daughters there, which we are shown through flashbacks, which are actually murder sequences from The Slumber Party Massacre! The girls disrobe, have showers, we see all of them naked and then, one ill-advised seance later, one of them is possessed by the spirit of Clive Hockstatter and begins hooking the others to death. The girls, in their panic, believe the killer to be freaky neighbour Orville Ketchum, who intercedes, takes a lot of damage from knives, bullets and what have you but still survives.

CONTESTANT TWO

hardtodie21 Stars  1990/77m

A.k.a. Tower of Terror

Director: Jim Wynorski / Writers: Mark McGee & James B. Rogers / Cast: Robyn Harris, Lindsay Taylor, Debra Dare, Melissa Moore, Bridget Carney, Peter Spellos, Forrest J. Ackerman, Don Key.

Body Count: 7

Dire-logue: “I just wanna get my clothes on and get the hell out of here!”

Five young agency employees are sent to take inventory of Acme Lingerie’s stock in an office tower. When a parcel containing a strange box is mistakenly delivered to them, it unleashes the Hockstatter spirit, which takes control of one of them and the inevitable occurs. The girls find an arsenal of firearms in the tower and begin shooting the place up. In their panic, they believe the killer to be freaky janitor Orville Ketchum, who takes a lot of damage from crossfire but still survives.

OK, so how on earth do you decide which is the better film out of two films that are pretty much photocopies of one another, but, you know, when someone copies the copy over again it looks worse and worse… Arguably, there’s not much wrong with the production values in either. As they hail from the Roger Corman library, both take footage from The Slumber Party Massacre for their own foul use and have bad intercut footage of grainy lightning.

Quite who these films are aimed at is a mystery: in both, virtually all female characters appear – at the very least – topless, with gratuitous shower scenes and odd squidgy-rubber sound effects as they soap themselves. Nudity and slasher flicks are like conjoined twins and that’s fine so long as the filmmakers remember they’re supposed to be producing a horror film and don’t keep forcing the nude scenes, they should appear incidental like in the good ol’ days. 77 minutes of tits, rubbish gore effects and fucking Orville Ketchum (…it just isn’t funny) makes for a tedious experience in both cases. I think Sorority might have been slightly more tolerable and it was nice to see northern lass Harris as the final girl (if one could call her character such) in both films, still, both were crap I never want to have to sit through again.

WINNER: NEITHER!

“It’s really a one person job.”

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hanwHAVE A NICE WEEKEND

1 Stars  1974/15/80m

“Savage, brutal and horrific.”

Director: Michael Walters / Writers: John Byrum, Michael Walters & Marsha Shelness / Cast: M.B. Miller, Valerie Shepherd, Pat Joyce, Nikki Counselman, Colette Bablon, Peter Dompe.

Body Count: 3

Dire-logue: “You do exactly what I tell you! Mother – make sandwiches for everyone.”

A thoroughly depressing pre-Halloween mystery with elements of the growing stalk n’ slash opus, largely borrowing from Psycho. Young Chris has just returned from Vietnam and wants to meet up with his family, so mom, dad, sis and her college roomie gather at their island summerhouse. Family friends Donald and Joan are already there and Frank the caretaker is busy readying houses and stuff for the winter.

There’s something weird about the get together, as illustrated in sporadic flashbacks to altercations between various characters. And why was Chris wearing a disguise when he returned? Well rest easy ‘cos none of these issues are resolved before, during or even after the murders begin occurring – a whopping three of them. In the wake of one stabbing and one trowel-meets-head incident, much of the film is taken by by repetitive dialogue as people try to suss each other out after realising the killer is one of them. Though being stuck on an island with these people would surely send even Ghandi on a machete wielding rampage… Unless he hadn’t already been bored to death by the script.

The killer is eventually revealed in one of the most terminally dull ways imaginable and, after a title card mercifully informs us we’ve reached the end after the longest 74 minutes in history, there’s a six minute epilogue where a shrink explains to one of the other characters what was happening inside the killer’s head.

Worth seeing only for the sandwich-making scene where Joan says “it’s really a one person job” approximately eleven hundred times in two minutes. One brief note of a hope for the future is that Have A Nice Weekend is so rare it appears only to have ever been given one UK video release way back when. The only way I could rid myself of the thing was to hide it in a bundle of videos I gave to the YMCA store. Find anything else to do if you want a nice weekend.

Chucky in no way endorses this product

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sweetinsanitySWEET INSANITY

1 Stars  2006/15/81m

“Meet the new girl.”

A.k.a. Stranger: A Soulmate of Chucky

Director: Daniel Hess / Writers: Daniel Hess & Adam Weis / Cast: Rebekah Isaacs, Mackenzie Firgens, David Fine, Corbett Tuck, Jeff Bell, Josh McRae, Cory Knauf, Vanessa Motta, Shawn Bohigian, Christopher Ratti, Ryan Nixon, Sam Kraus.

Body Count: 9

Bargain basement video sludge with high-schooler Stacey’s parents off on vacation for the weekend, allowing a gaggle of her friends to stop by, drink beer, and get stabbed, slashed and pick-axed by a shadowy killer, who looks most likely to be either Stacey’s weird neighbour – a shamed cop who shot a kid – or is it her new gal-pal Christina, a goth chick whom only Stacey seems to be able to see…?

Bizarrely, the UK DVD for this film is titled Stranger: A Soulmate of Chucky! Look, there’s even a creepy doll on the cover…

strangerIs there a murderous doll in the film? No. Is there a creepy doll in the background? No. Does anyone mention dolls in any way, shape or form? No. This title shall forever remain a mystery, methinks.

Anyway, the ending is kind of Haute Tension-esque by way of Identity, and may require a second look to cement what the writer’s are proposing here and also because the sound is so bad the dialogue is often inaudible. A laughable film with maybe a semi-interesting idea and a decent powertool murder as all there is to recommend it. Well, not recommend… Another word that means sort of the same thing without committing myself to being responsible when you go and rent it. I stand by my one-star!

Blurb-of-interest: David Fine was also in 7eventy 5ive.

Wait. What?

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skeletonmanSKELETON MAN

1.5 Stars  2004/18/86m

“Some myths are real.”

Driector: Johnny Martin / Writer: Frederick Bailey / Cast: Michael Rooker, Casper Van Dien, Sarah Ann Schultz, Nils Allen Stewart, Jackie Debatin, Lisa Oliva, Jerry Trimble Jr., Noa Tishby, Eric Etabari.

Body Count: 39 – yes, thirty-nine!

First-rate Fatality: boom-boom-boom like a hammer to the (explodey) head…

When somebody tells you that something has to be seen to be believed, they’re normally telling you about their trip to the Great Wall of China or some circus sideshow they saw… However, when somebody says this to you in reference to Skeleton Man, they’re not lying.

From Nu-Image, who normally make creature-features about spiders, octopods and crocodiles with imaginative titles like Spiders, Octopus and Crocodile – all of which had sequels, can you guess what they were called? Anyway, this knowledge on board, Skeleton Man is a bit of a departure for them. It’s a slasher flick, make no mistake about it, with some unexplained supernatural elements thrown in for good measure no real reason.

Some archaeologists dig up a skull and then a cloaked figure appears and murders them (plus a couple of more schmucks who get in the way). ‘Tis the skeleton man of course, and he manages to kill one guy by lifting him in the air… From there, some other guys are killed, army dudes, and a few weeks later a group of eight soldiers is sent to the region (which I thought was supposed to be South America but gradually looks more and more like a Californian national park). The group is led by Michael Rooker as the Cap and Casper Van Dien is also there but only says about eight words. He has a scar, ‘cos he’s like, y’know, “seasoned”. Four of the men are Delta Force and they’re joined by four women, all of whom we’re asked to believe are in the military but look like catalogue models and cry when they find dead bodies.

skelmanThrough the medium of flashback part I, we learn what happened to the previous team, they met the Skeleton Man, and the body count reaches double figures within fifteen minutes. The group then stumble upon a blind Indian who uses flashback part II to explain that the killer once killed loads of tribal folk and is called ‘Cotton Mouth Joe’ – almost like the song. Almost. The skeleton man appears, usually on horseback, through weird little CG vortexes (that everybody sees but nobody mentions) and begins chopping and skewering the soldier dudes and dudettes, brings down a chopper with a bow and arrow and appears impervious to bullets, which doesn’t put any of the team off wasting their rounds.

Eventually, skeleton man goes to a chemical plant to kill more people, sending the body count soaring to nearly forty by the time Rooker explodifies the joint. But who is skeleton man? Where did he come from? Why does Casper Van Dien commandeer that truck? Why does it explode for no reason? How come it stops for him to leap out but is still rolling along in the next shot, huh? Well, you’ll never find out, never! It’s like cheap wine, it gets you drunk and you giggle, but you never want to see or hear from it ever again.

Blurb-of-interest: Casper appeared in Tim Burton’s sort-of slasher Sleepy Hollow; Rooker was in The Dark Half.

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