Census Bloodbath: Marriage Can Be Murder

Year:
1985
Director:
Alberto De Martino
Cast:
Christina Nagy, David Warbeck, Carroll Blumenberg
Run Time:
1 hour 36 minutes

Plot: Formula for a Murder (AKA 7, Hyden Park - La casa maledetta) is set in New York state and follows Joanna (Christina Nagy), a rich woman who has had paraplegia since she was sexually assaulted by a man dressed as a priest and thrown down a flight of stairs (there's your clue that this is an Italian movie, if the title didn't already tip you off). After marrying her athletic trainer Craig (David Warbeck of The Beyond and The Black Cat), she finds herself in the middle of a tangled web of deceit, as (mid-plot spoiler alert) he is working with her friend Ruth (Carroll Blumenberg) to murder her and inherit her fortune, killing anybody who gets in the way of this plan.

Analysis: I would have straight-up removed Formula for a Murder from my Census Bloodbath list if not for two things. 1) There is a dream sequence that adds an additional onscreen kill, proving that the movie was at least slightly interested in being a slasher and not just a Hitchcockian thriller with occasional plot-necessary murders. 2) This is unmistakably a giallo movie.

It's a late-period giallo, certainly, but director and co-writer Alberto De Martino (who also made 1982's vividly unmemorable Blood Link) put in a black-gloved killer and some overheated murder melodrama, and you simply can't ignore that, even though the movie mostly revolves around a single, constantly-foiled murder plot than a constant string of body count murders.

Anyway, one major reason I was highly motivated to try and remove the movie from the list, beyond its failures as a slasher, is that it is a deathly dull experience. A movie with this little happening requires a strong character study to prop it up, and nobody onscreen has the barest wisp of a personality. And while Ruth and Craig are at least brought to life by competent actors, the actual lead delivers her poorly translated dialogue with all the fervor of a stoned teenager offering you pretzel samples at a mall. Formula for a Murder is Christina Nagy's only credited film role, and if you ask me, her resume coulda done with one less.

That said, it's not an entirely terrible slasher. There is a profoundly creepy recurring motif of a priest slowly approaching Joanna while holding a doll that both has these unsettling, swollen eyes and tinkles out a high-pitched nursery rhyme. Every time that comes back, it'll send a shiver down the spine. And the kills, while infrequent, aren't half-bad. They're not particularly gory by any stretch of the imagination, but they're more brutal and affective than they have to be, particularly a throat slashing via straight razor that shows how much effort it might actually take to carve through all that irritating gristle contained in the human neck.

There is also a scene where Joanna has a literal screaming orgasm that feels like it belongs in a proper 1970s giallo, so that's something. However, the fact that we are forced to spend so much time with her outside of that scene has a profoundly deleterious effect on the movie. She's tedious even at the best of times, but she can't even get survival right, because her Final Girl sequence one-ups Laurie Strode's "hit 'em once, take a nap" strategy by having her mostly just assume that because Craig has briefly passed out, this means that he has simply expired of his own accord. Maybe she figured that she had bored him to death.

Killer: Craig (David Warbeck)

Final Girl: Joanna (Christina Nagy)

Best Kill: This is probably my pick because it's the only one that feels different from the others, but one of the priests is slammed ruthlessly about the face with a shovel in a protracted and quite intense sequence. 

Sign of the Times: There's a whole lot of business about trying to reach a cordless phone handset that has been tossed down the stairs.

Scariest Moment: In Joanna's nightmare, she is wheeled away helplessly by an increasingly menacing priest.

Weirdest Moment: Dr. Sernich (Rossano Brazzi of Fear City) patiently explains that, even though Joanna's condition is fragile, hardcore sex won't kill her as long as it is an act of love.

Champion Dialogue: “You won't have time to feel sorry for yourself when we're married."

Body Count: 5

1. Father Peter has his throat slit with a straight razor.
2. Father Davis is bludgeoned repeatedly in the face with a shovel.
3. Dream Priest is stabbed to death by Joanna.
4. Ruth has her throat slashed with a straight razor.
5. Craig succumbs to his stab/falling-out-a-window wounds.

TL;DR: Formula for a Murder is boring as all hell, but it has a few exquisitely creepy moments to its name.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 803

Census Bloodbath: La Forma

Year:
1985
Director:
Rubén Galindo Jr.
Cast:
Hugo Stiglitz, René Cardona III, Eduardo Capetillo
Run Time:
1 hour 28 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Plot: Cemetery of Terror (Cementerio del terror) has a lot of moving parts because the idea of "genre" is a wet bar of soap in its hands. First and foremost, we have a pretty traditional slasher setup. Two friends, Jorge (Servando Manzetti) and Óscar (René Cardona III, who later became a director just like his father and his grandfather, the latter of whom directed the iconic 1960 movie La Llorona), conspire to lie to their girlfriends Olivia (Edna Bolkan of Don't Panic and Grave Robbers) and Mariana (Jacqueline Castro) about going to a high society party in order to get them to an abandoned mansion where they can spend the night and have sex. Their himbo friend Pedro (Andrés García Jr. of Like Water for Chocolate) is also tricked by their lie and invites his girlfriend Lena (Erika Buenfil, also of Grave Robbers and approximately 100,000 telenovela episodes) along. The only character traits differentiating any of these characters are that Olivia is a little vain, Mariana is a little horny, Pedro has a mullet, and Lena is observant and thus reluctant to enter the mansion. While there, they find a mysterious Satanic book and the guys plan the prank of the century: steal a body from the morgue and pretend to resurrect it, in order to scare the girls into having sex with them.

This plan works, in more ways than one. The girls do warm up to the boys (because they kinda did want to have sex with them in the first place). However, unbeknownst to the teens, they do also successfully resurrect the corpse, who just so happens to be the Satanist serial killer Devlon (José Gómez Parcero), who the obsessed Dr. Cardán (Hugo Stiglitz, Mexican character actor par excellence) has been warning Captain Ancira (Raúl Meraz) about all night. The corpse uses his Satanist claws (?) to rip his way through the teens while Cardán chases around after him, until at some point the killer gets his hands on the book and causes a zombie uprising at the nearby cemetery, threatening a group of kids that includes ringleader Tony (Eduardo Capetillo) and Ancira's children Anita (María Rebeca of Grave Robbers) and Raúl (César Adrian Sanchez). Oh, and this all takes place on Halloween night. Was everyone taking notes? This will be on the test.

Analysis: So, I had a lot riding on Cemetery of Terror being good, because the Mexican slasher mashup was the directorial debut of Rubén Galindo Jr., who we will be revisiting multiple times during Census Bloodbath with 1987's Don't Panic and 1989's Grave Robbers. It would be a shame to have to be dreading those titles. Thankfully, I think we've at least avoided "dread," but the strongest feeling I'm able to muster about those titles based on this one is "curiosity."

There certainly is a lot going on here. The bizarre mishmash of genres plays very much like a post-Nightmare on Elm Street supernatural slasher, which it obviously couldn't be because it was shot before the Craven masterpiece was unleashed upon an unsuspecting world in late 1984. That supernatural wave wouldn't truly crest until 1986, so this is ahead of the curve while also being miles behind it by dint of being a rip-off of Halloween a good four years past the sell-by date for something like that. In addition to some Carpenter-esque music and a "go get me a beer" scene that I haven't mentioned, I assume you noticed the Dr. Loomis we have scurrying around here. Cardán's breathless monologues about Devlon being pure evil only avoid being exact copies of Donald Pleasence's because of the liberal sprinkling of Catholic fears of Satanism.

It is halfway decent as a Halloween riff. The teens have good chemistry even though Andrés García Jr. is giving such a questionable performance that he can't even kiss convincingly. And while the kills are pretty samey, largely just involving Devlon using his claws to rip people apart in vaguely defined ways, some of them have their moments, including a pretty gnarly arterial spray. There's also a fun fakeout where Lena is so obviously the final girl thanks to her keen eye for things being awry that it comes as a shock when she is given one of the most violent deaths yet.

And while there are a few aesthetic missteps (Galindo Jr. seems unaware that you don't have to wait until a car, boat, etc. completely exits the frame before you cut to a new scene), in general it's a pretty good-looking movie. There are some excellent compositions that make good use of light and shadow, a beautiful cherry red hospital hallway, and an unforgettable sequence of a woman screaming at the blood on her hands while mist swirls disorientingly around her.

However, the movie's abrupt shift from a Satanic slasher movie to a full-on zombie siege movie is unsustainable. At this point, the entire teen cast has been dispatched, so we're stuck with a bunch of shrieking Goonies running in circles while zombies slowly shamble toward them. The stakes are also lowered right through the floor, because it's quite obvious early on that there is no way that Cemetery of Terror is actually going to kill off a child.

Plus, there are even fewer reliable actors in the child cast than the adult cast. Eduardo Capetillo delivers all of his dialogue in a hoarse scream, including in a domestic moment where he's just hanging out having dinner with his older sister. And one of the other kids performs "tired and afraid" so poorly that I genuinely thought the scene was going to be about him getting possessed. At the end of the day, the slasher stuff is not strong enough that I would have loved the movie anyway, but the entire third act makes such a tedious hash of things that it would have scuppered feelings stronger than the ones the movie had already managed to generate in me.

Killer: Devlon (José Gómez Parcero)

Final Girl: A fuckton of children

Best Kill: Even though it makes no sense that Pedro's death is the only one to involve some sort of ghostly or telekinetic force, the floating axe impaling itself in his forehead is too cool to pass up.

Sign of the Times: One of the assorted children has a caricature of Michael Jackson on the back of his jacket, which he is wearing literally the entire time. MJ might actually have more screentime than Devlon.

Scariest Moment: The kids reach the gate of the cemetery, which rises out of the ground, becoming a huge, insurmountable barrier.

Weirdest Moment: Captain Ancira says he went to the school to talk to the kids' friends in an attempt to find out where they might have gone, but it's the middle of the night. Why are these kids at school?! It's not a boarding school, either. I spent minutes trying to puzzle this all out.

Champion Dialogue: “This is the 20th century. The Devil does not exist."

Body Count: 8; the first of which takes place in a nightmare that is probably a flashback but might not be.

1. Elevator Woman is clawed to death.
2. Mariana is clawed in the neck offscreen.
3. Óscar is clawed in the guts.
4. Jorge is lift-choked and has the back of his head impaled on some sort of spike fixture thing.
5. Mariana is disembowled by claws.
6. Lena is clawed to death.
7. Pedro is axed in the forehead.
8. Devlon combusts due to the book being burned.

TL;DR: Cemetery of Terror is a game attempt at a supernatural slasher, but loses whatever amount of steam it was able to build up in the boring third act.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1302

Census Bloodbath: Madman With A Movie Camera

Year:
1985
Director:
Michael J. Murphy
Cast:
Patrick Olliver, Jacqueline Logan, Caroline Aylward
Run Time:
1 hour 23 minutes

Plot: Bloodstream follows a disgruntled horror filmmaker named Alistair Bailey (Patrick Olliver) who decides to seek revenge on the craven producer William King (Mark Wells), who stole his movie, which is also titled Bloodstream. To do so, he decides to create a snuff film involving everyone King loves before killing King himself. He is aided in his quest by his very own dime store Lady Macbeth, King's secretary Nikki (Jacqueline Logan).

Analysis: Another day, another slasher from a storied director. Well, maybe "storied" isn't the right descriptor for British filmmaker Michael J. Murphy, who we last encountered in 1983 with his not-even-an-hour-long slasher epic The Last Night. He sure does exist, though. And a known quantity in Census Bloodbath is always intriguing, even if you know you can only expect cheap ineptitude. 

To be fair, The Last Night was cheap and inept, yes, but it had its share of charm to it. Bloodstream also has this quality, but it turns out that while Murphy's charm might be potent enough to fill 50 minutes, it sure ain't gonna cut it for 83 minutes. Murphy seems to be aware of this himself, as he has padded the majority of the run time with random death scenes from movies-within-a-movie that Alistair Bailey endlessly watches at home on VHS for no real reason that I can discern.

There is only one case where the tapes have any bearing on the plot: he imagines himself being burned at the stake while watching a witch movie, in a pretty neat sequence that effectively tells you where his head it at. Otherwise, this is all useless inflation of the movie's body count with characters who don't even exist in the context of the story. It's not like Alistair is getting ideas for his murders from watching these faux movies, because he doesn't seem to draw inspiration from them. He just kind of sits there watching tape after tape after tape. Maybe this is an indictment of the horror audience or what have you, but if you're so aware of what that audience wants, then maybe don't wait until a full 40 minutes have passed to give it to them.

Once he does get his killing spree started, he still periodically takes breaks to watch more tapes! It's infuriating! Plus, the tapes look even cheaper than the actual movie does. This is a movie that was, by the way, literally made for a budget of 400 pounds.

It is difficult for me to imagine an approach that could be more extravagantly useless than this. However, Bloodstream does begin to suck considerably less when it does get the body count a-rolling. The death sequences are reasonably lively (give or take a slasher cardinal sin or two, like using a gun. I ask you!). Though I say "lively" rather than "creative," because I can't in good conscience apply that term to a movie that rips off the weight bench sequence from Happy Birthday To Me more or less shot for shot.

Also, do I need to tell you that the cinematography is shit and the acting is uniformly flat and affectless? I don't think so, but if I'm wrong, there you go. It has been said. The movie shows enough Theatre of Blood flair by the end that I didn't totally hate it, but it's an immense waste of time that I would only recommend to a completist as foolish as me. Unfortunately, I'm not sure such a person exists.

Killer: Alistair Bailey (Patrick Olliver)

Final Girl: N/A

Best Kill: A gagged Judy having a knife stabbed through the gag and into her mouth is pretty gross!

Sign of the Times: A dude who's camping with his girlfriend in one of the horror tapes looks more or less exactly like Steve from Stranger Things.

Scariest Moment: When you think the movie is over and then Alistair Bailey pops in yet another tape.

Weirdest Moment: Lisa makes her (very handsome) boyfriend leave the house because her father is coming over any moment, then she promptly draws a bubble bath.

Champion Dialogue: “My dear, you're eating your husband's ass."

Body Count: 18; I considered not including any of the kills from the movies within this movie, but frankly if you cut those, Bloodstream doesn't exist, so I'm just going to mark the "fictional" kills with a lil' asterisk.

1. *Zombie Victim has his guts pulled out by zombies.
2. *David is axed in the back of the head by a slasher.
3. *Male Egyptologist is garroted by a mummy.
4. *Quasimodo impales himself on a woman's knife.
5. *Male Vampire is staked through the heart.
6. Greg has a weight dropped on his crotch and his barbell slammed onto his neck.
7. *Biker is shot.
8. *Biker is decapitated.
9. *Suspenders Biker is hit in the chest with a battle axe.
10. Lisa is electrocuted in the tub.
11. Simon is shot, has his arm chainsawed off, and is decapitated with the same chainsaw.
12. Boo the Dog is lit on fire.
13. Sally has her throat slashed with an electric carving knife.
14. *Exorcist has electrodes shoved into his eyes.
15. Judy is stabbed in the mouth.
16. William King is shot through the mouth in a faux suicide.
17. *Werewolf is shot with a silver bullet.
18. Nikki is garroted with a film strip.

TL;DR: Bloodstream has a few charming moments, but those don't a movie make.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 910

Census Bloodbath: No, Canada

Year:
1985
Director:
George Mihalka
Cast:
Winston Rekert, Karen Black, John Novak
Run Time:
1 hour 25 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Plot: Eternal Evil follows disaffected TV commercial director Paul Sharpe (Winston Rekert), who learns how to astral project from former dancer Janus (Karen Black, who should be a very familiar name for lovers of cult and horror cinema, and who we've already encountered for Census Bloodbath in The Last Horror Film). When people who have crossed him begin to die from severe internal hemorrhaging, Paul begins to suspect that he may be subconciously responsible, though he tries his best to keep this fact from the investigating detective Kauffman (John Novak). 

Analysis: Eternal Evil, also known as The Blue Man (this was two years before that phrase would have been associated with a "group" of any kind), was directed by George Mihalka. That might not necessarily mean anything to the casual reader, but I have been doing this for a long time, my friends, so I immediately clocked that he was the director of 1981's My Bloody Valentine, a very good movie to have been the director of. 

This also clued me into the fact this movie was Canadian, which should also have been a good sign, considering the fact that the Great White North has an unconscionably solid track record with the slasher genre. Unfortunately, sometimes people only have one home run in 'em. While this supernatural slasher movie came out after A Nightmare on Elm Street, it was almost certainly produced before the movie became a hit and taught slasher filmmakers that fantastical entries in the genre should also look fuckin' bonkers on top of being surreal.

What we get instead is a slasher that is so far afield from what a slasher actually does that the first 30 minutes had me convinced I had made a misstep at some point during the research that got this title on my list in the first place. The kills are few and far between, and when they do come, they are uniformly tedious, involving the victims grunting and falling over while the camera twirls around their heads and seems to peck at them like a hungry bird.

Slashers that feature killers with non-traditional M.O.s can definitely work. Just look at the delightful Murder by Phone. But these boring kills are but brief interludes between boring exposition scenes, including Kauffman watching a documentary that explains exactly what's going on about 45 minutes before anybody in the movie seems to twig to it. Honestly, it reads like one of those 1950s sci-fi B-movies that fancied themselves hard sci-fi and really took to the blackboard to teach you about everything that's going on in the story. Maybe Canadian audiences really needed a crash course on astral projection in 1985, but I sure didn't. Although... if a local 1980s TV news report about the advent of a wacky new food trend that I saw online is in any way accurate, the general public seemed to have similar trouble grasping the concept of a pizzeria back then, so if that was indeed the case, learning about astral projection was probably the equivalent of a year of grad school.

Anyway, it's dull and the cinematography is trying so hard that at first I thought I might like it until it kept reminding me of the cinematic overexuberance of a student film. Unfortunately, there is not much good to temper the bad. Karen Black is woefully underused until the glorious moment toward the where she is suddenly not. And there's exactly one striking shot in the movie. Which is also used for the poster, because everything you love to complain about Hollywood doing now was just as annoying back then.

It wasn't a terrible movie at the level of true bottom-of-the-barrel 1985 trash like Victims!, but it's absolutely a huge step down for Mr. Mihalka, who made one of the greatest masterpieces of one of the greatest years for slasher cinema. The only other thing I can point to about Eternal Evil that is even in the realm of "interesting," let alone "good," is the fact that it is definitely interested in queerness. It doesn't really understand it, but there's a lot of gender and sexuality fuckery going on that I would never have expected from an exploitation movie of this vintage.

Killer: Janus (Karen Black)

Final Girl: Paul Sharpe (Winston Rekert)

Best Kill: They're pretty much all the same, but at least the murder of Paul's father-in-law Bill involves a ghostly force slamming him against a wall, which is neat.

Sign of the Times: The majority of the score sounds like one of Depeche Mode's drum machines slowly falling down the stairs.

Scariest Moment: An astral voice that is controlling Paul's young son Matthew (who definitely has the shining) commands him to drink bleach.

Weirdest Moment: A quiet scene in Paul's home smash cuts to an adult man in a diaper talking directly to the camera. This turns out to be a commercial that Paul is shooting, but we haven't even learned what his job is at this point.

Champion Dialogue: “It's hard having an appetite when your food smells like paint stripper."

Body Count: 6

1. Dr. Meister is astral projected to death.
2. Bill Pearson is astral projected to death.
3. Jennifer is astral projected to death.
4. Scott is killed offscreen.
5. Monica is shot in the gut.
6. Janus is shot in the back of the head.

TL;DR: Eternal Evil is a muddled mess that takes up too much time on its way to nowhere in particular.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 931

Census Bloodbath: Oklahoma, OK

Year:
1985
Director:
Christopher Lewis
Cast:
Juli Andelman, Charles Ellis, James Vance
Run Time:
1 hour 29 minutes

Plot: Blood Cult is set at what the opening crawl calls a "small Midwestern university." Central State College can't be that small, though, considering that it has a seemingly inexhaustible supply of sorority houses, which are being preyed upon by a cleaver-wielding killer who dismembers their victims. After local sheriff Ron Wilbois' (Charles Ellis, who we'll see reprising this role in the 1986 sequel Revenge) daughter Tina (Juli Andelman of Silent Scream) uses her job at the university library to find him a book about the occult, he begins to suspect that the slayings are being perpetrated by a witch cult who are creating a Frankensteinian effigy to sacrifice to their canine god.

Analysis: With Blood Cult, we get a glimpse into the bright, shiny future that lies ahead for Census Bloodbath. While Blood Cult's ad campaign's claims that it is the first-ever shot-on-video horror movie are spurious, the regional production from Tulsa, Oklahoma is certainly one of the first. The video marketplace was just starting to heat up in the mid-1980s, and without it the slasher wouldn't have survived beyond 1986, even with the Elm Street franchise doing its best to liven up the place.

This is why the number of movies I have coming at me per year through the rest of the 1980s will shoot up precipitously come 1987, so I'm can't say I'm always sure I'm happy about the way things turned out with that there video market. However, history is history, so it's pretty neat to finally be covering Blood Cult.

Unfortunately, the movie combines two of my least favorite slasher subgenres: the police procedural and the cult movie (shoulda seen that one coming). The reason I don't like cult movies is that I prefer my slasher formula to be delivered a little more cleanly, with just one killer doling out deaths. Or two killers, if it's an absolute necessity. Thankfully, that turns out not to be a huge concern here. The death scenes are delivered in a pretty meat-and-potatoes slasher movie way, so the cult stuff doesn't really come to eclipse the movie with its ooky stupidity until late in the game.

Meanwhile, the reason I don't like police procedural slashers because they focus on the law enforcement officals tracking down the killer rather than the victims, usually resulting in the victims becoming paper-thin characters. I wasn't so lucky in this case. Not only do the victims have no discernible personalities (the most we learn is that one of them likes anchovies on pizza, which is hardly a selling point), most of them don't even get names.

Unfortunately, they don't even function properly as body count padding, because the kills here are uniformly terrible. Here is how each of them plays out: A killer with a vaguely defined weapon (even the coroner seems unsure if it's a cleaver or a knife) skulks around in the dark for a while and then kind of flails the limb holding the weapon in the general direction of a victim's body, for a very long time. Eventually the victim dies(out of sheer boredom, presumably) and catch a glimpse of the dismembered body part being collected, as represented by a prop that looks so cheap that it wouldn't even have made the Spirit Halloween catalogue.

So, it's not a very good slasher movie or a very good cult movie. Hell, it's a pretty incompetent movie all around, with a generally loose grip on acting, continuity, the 180-degree line, where to put the film gate (hint: not in the frame), and so on. And at best it's only a half-decent procedural. So why did I not hate Blood Cult? 

It's certainly not because of all the good qualities it has. I could count those on one hand: 1) There is exactly one excellent shot of a foggy alleyway, 2) The father-daughter relationship is well-established and genuinely sweet, 3) The instrumental score has this radical Miami Vice-esque synth motif that makes scenes seem more dynamic than they are, and - oh, would you look at that, I didn't even need the whole hand.

Nevertheless, there is something effortlessly charming about its regionalisms and its insistent hokiness. One does get the sense of a bunch of people taking the week off work and throwing together a movie, just for fun (which is exactly what happened, by the way). Nobody in this movie can really act, but it does have a magical time capsule quality that is completely free of Hollywood polish. Everyone in this movie just looks like a normal human being from the mid-1980s, doing their thing with their worries about the outcomes of local elections and their toilets with carpeted lids and all that jazz. I just think that's nice.

Killer: The Blood Cult, including Doc White (Peter Hart, who also returns in Revenge) and Tina (Juli Andelman)

Final Girl: Sheriff Ron Wilbois (Charles Ellis)

Best Kill: I suppose this is telling about how tepid the movie is, but the best kill is the offscreen murder of the dog Sparks, which is presented as a wide exterior shot of a house and a barn where the noise of the dog barking at the chickens and subsequently being decapitated plays alongside dialogue of Sparks' owner Gracie (Bennie Lee McGowan of both Christopher Lewis' Revenge and his other 1985 slasher The Ripper) wondering where he's run off to.

Sign of the Times: For a time, Sheriff Ron is terrified that these murders might somehow be related to Dungeons & Dragons.

Scariest Moment: While Ron is talking to a potential witness at her home in the boonies, the movie keeps cutting to her creepy kids just like... whittling on the porch and staring. They have nothing to do with anything, but it's unsettling!

Weirdest Moment: At one point, the killer appears to be stepping to the beat of the instrumental score.

Champion Dialogue: “Please, please, please don't kill me. Please, please, please... Please don't."

Body Count: 7

1. Shower Girl is cleavered.
2. Debbie's Roommate is decapitated.
3. Jill is chopped.
4. Sparks the Dog is decapitated offscreen.
5. Dumpster Girl is killed offscreen.
6. Joel is cleavered.
7. Tina falls from a height onto a dumpster.

TL;DR: Blood Cult isn't very good, but it's more charming than it has any right to be.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1064

Census Bloodbath: I Am In Spain, Both With And Without The S

Note: The copy I was able to find of this Spanish-language movie did have subtitles, but they were extremely literal translations that frequently misunderstood homophones such as "un hombre" and "un nombre," so they were practically useless. I do know enough Spanish to get by, but Mexican Spanish, not Spain Spanish. So take my review with a grain of salt, if you're curious about this movie. But you really shouldn't be. PS: Check out one of my favorite mistranslations in the "Champion Dialogue" section.

Year:
1985
Director:
Carlos Aured
Cast:
Adriana Vega, Sara Mora, José Luis Alexandre
Run Time:
1 hour 23 minutes

Plot: Atrapados en el miedo (also known by the far inferior English-language title Caught in Fear) follows two couples: the more established (and thus hornier) Antonio (José Luis Alexandre) and Ana (Sara Mora) alongside the newly-set-up José (Joaquín Navarro) and Laura (Adriana Vega), who is Ana's sister. They hang out for the weekend in an isolated manor home that just so happens to be quite close to the psychiatric hospital from which a killer known as el Loco (Luis Canovas) has just escaped.

Analysis: Atrapados en el miedo has absolutely glorious opening credits. And I'm not even trying to damn the movie with faint praise, though admittedly there isn't much more praise coming its way. The credits are meant to evoke dripping blood, I think, but they have this red-brown-black dripping aesthetic that makes them seem more like a lava lamp. Anyway, whatever is going on, the opening is jaunty and lively in a way that had me feeling a certain amount of goodwill toward the movie right away.

Reader, the movie eventually drained every last ounce of said goodwill. I haven't seen director Carlos Aured's Spanish giallo movie Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll (aka The House of Psychotic Women) from 11 years earlier, but that enjoys a certain reputation that this movie completely fails to live up to.

I mean, sure, there are a few brutal moments scattered throughout. For instance, the unnamed lesbian who tries to seduce her friend in the opening scene gets her neck snapped for her troubles, and that foley gives a mean crunch. It's hard to deliver an impactful kill when you don't have the budget for gore, but that scene delivers. However, the exploitative angle of the opening scene (this isn't the first Spanish-language movie I've seen to start with some lesbian sex-murders, and it won't be the last) is instantly dropped in favor of spending time with couples who love talking about sex way more than actually doing it.

If the filmmakers intended on deriving terror from evoking the feeling of being a fifth wheel on a vacation with two of the most annoying couples in the world, then they accomplished their goal, one hundred percent. And we don't even get to see them die! Spoiler alert, I guess. That's right, not a single one of the four main characters I listed in the plot synopsis is dead by the end of the movie. We are forced to watch them laboriously make grocery lists, go to and from town, and trade boring stories, and they don't even have the decency to perish for our amusement!

The killer (whose face is kept unseen until one late scene where it just randomly isn't) kinda just wanders around the outside of the house, dicking around. He frightens the gals once or twice, and he has a habit of flexing his thumbs like he's just itching to strangle, which is a unique little gimmick. But he has no backstory, no personality, and really no M.O. because he only kills a few people on the outskirts of the narrative. Forget attempted murder, this whole movie is an attempted slasher.

There's just enough going on in the movie that it almost feels legit for the first act and a half, but eventually it becomes so tedious that when one of the characters goes into a fugue state out of fear, I was terribly envious of her ability to dissociate.

Killer: El Loco (Luis Canovas)

Final Girl: Laura (Adriana Vega) feat. everyone else

Best Kill: The killer is eventually defeated by being run over with the car. And run over again. And again. They're just doing donuts to repeatedly smush the guy. It's excellent.

Sign of the Times: I mean, it's not like this brand isn't still around, but something about the sign in the background telling us to "Beba Fanta" (aka "drink Fanta") really felt like a perfectly 1980's sight to behold.

Scariest Moment: The shadow of el Loco's head rises up the stairs toward where Laura and Ana are standing.

Weirdest Moment: There's a cuckoo clock jump scare.

Champion Dialogue: “The sailboat is completely virgin virgin."

Body Count: 4

1. Mónica is choked with a tree branch.
2. Lesbian has her neck snapped.
3. La Sobrina Marcela is strangled.
4. El Loco is done donuts upon.

TL;DR: Atrapados en el miedo isn't exactly as bad as a slasher can get, but it makes an absolute hash of the format nevertheless.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 845

Census Bloodbath: Dead, For A Ducat, Dead!

Year:
1985
Director:
Tony Lo Bianco
Cast:
Mike Connors, Anne Archer, Ian McShane
Run Time:
1 hour 40 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Plot: Too Scared to Scream follows a series of slayings that take place in a luxury New York City high-rise apartment complex known as the Royal Arms. Could it be perpetrated by the charming, Norman Bates-esque doorman Vincent Hardwick (Ian McShane), who has a strange relationship with his mother and doesn't realize that absolutely nobody is thrilled by his habit of constantly quoting Shakespeare? Probably not, because the movie keeps refusing to show you the killer's face, so if you know a single thing about murder mystery tropes, you know that the detectives on the case - the hard-bitten Lieutenant Alex Dinardo (Mike Connors of Mannix) and the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed Kate Bridges (Anne Archer of Fatal Attraction) - have their work cut out for them.

Analysis: I'm going to give you a quick peek behind the curtain of Census Bloodbath. I generally watch each year's movies in chronological order by release date, but there is always a random cludge of titles that don't have proper release date information. These are usually obscure video titles or movies that nobody has cared enough about to keep proper records on, and they are usually abysmal for that reason. I used to carve my way through said cludge at the end of each year, but that always killed my drive to want to keep moving forward, so I switched it to the beginning of the year, thus saving the best (or at least the better) for last.

They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore was the last from the "unknown" pile of 1985 (your clue as to it belonging to that elite group was the 2/10 score), which is why we're suddenly finding ourselves with an embarrassment of riches. A beautiful poster and actors whose names we recognize (Murray Hamilton from Jaws and The Graduate is also kicking around here)? An original song that gets credit in the opening titles? Will the wonders never cease?

Yes, yes they will. That is because Too Scared to Scream is boring as shit, but at least it's a well-appointed boring movie that wasn't shot by teenagers with a camera they stole from a junkyard. 

So, here's the problem. Too Scared to Scream wants you to think that it's classy. It's a Psycho riff that would even look down its nose at Dressed to Kill, is what I'm saying. This blatantly ignores the fact that the movie is tacky and exploitative as all get out, shuffling women out of their clothes at a relatively rapid clip, trying to startle you with a cheap spring-loaded bird jump scare (now there's a new one), and featuring multiple tawdry gay reveals. This is back when "gay" meant "psychopathic," of course. Again. Psycho riff.

Anyway, the result of it thinking it's better than being a slasher movie (when it really shouldn't, considering it's a big screen vehicle for fucking Mannix) is that its kills are woefully tedious. The ones that don't take place offscreen might as well have, because they are all delivered in the same Norman Bates stab-stab-cutaway style. This lacks the visceral intensity of Psycho, of course. Tony Lo Bianco ain't no Hitchcock. What we get in between these wan kills is a bunch of go-nowhere romance with Kate and Alex, a final girl sequence where Kate keeps desperately trying to figure out if the screenplay wants her to have skills or not, and Ian McShane reciting Shakespeare. That last part is delivered well, at least. I mean, we'd all go see him do Richard III, right? We're only human.

However, because this is a real movie with a real professional crew making it, there are at least some bright sides to our first soujourn into movies with actual legitimate release dates in 1985. There is a killer thriller moment where a victim is looking through her closet and is confused by a sleeve she doesn't recognize, only to realize that it belongs to someone holding a knife. And a playful scene where what seems to be spilled blood is actually wine. The movie is also a New York-set story that doesn't forget people of color exist, which is nice, even if it doesn't always remember to avoid trapping them in stereotype purgatory for all eternity.

All in all, this is still not a great showing for the slashers of 1985, but one could do worse. And I certainly have.

Killer: Edward (Chet Doherty)

Final Girl: Kate Bridges (Anne Archer)

Best Kill: There's really not much to choose from, but when Cynthia (Victoria Bass), the first victim, is Psycho stabbed, the camera lingers on her prone body while a voicemail from her mother plays, which is effectively tragic.

Sign of the Times: More than anything, this is a sign that the movie was shot in 1981 and shelved for a couple years, but it sure was a pleasure to see The Burning on the marquee of a Times Square movie theater.

Scariest Moment: Alex finds suspect Barry (Beeson Carroll) naked, bound, and gagged, with cigarette burns on his ass, under a pile of cushions in his apartment, and when he ungags him, Barry begins screaming his lungs out. It's all very Se7en.

Weirdest Moment: Kate grabs a telephone receiver to use as a makeshift weapon, and it works! Twice! You can't do that with an iPhone.

Champion Dialogue: “I've been in and out of so many clothes, I feel like a dancing coat hanger."

Body Count: 8

1. Cynthia is stabbed to death.
2. Mrs. Horner is stabbed to death.
3. Sidney is killed in the head offscreen.
4. Nadine has her throat slit offscreen.
5. Mike is killed offscreen.
6. Irma is killed offscreen.
7. Vincent is stabbed in the back offscreen.
8. Edward is shot.

TL;DR: Too Scared to Scream puts on airs of being classier than it is, which results in it failing to be much of anything at all.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 998

Census Bloodbath: Can't We All Just Get A Lawn?

Year:
1985
Director:
Nathan Schiff
Cast:
John Smihula, Adam Berke, Mary Spadaro
Run Time:
1 hour 10 minutes

Plot: They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore follows Texas gardeners Billy Buck (John Smihula of director Nathan Schiff's previous slasher The Long Island Cannibal Massacre) and Jacob (Adam Berke) moving to Long Island, where they proceed to murder the shit out of a bunch of people, mostly women, while occasionally complaining about rich Northerners often enough that the movie can pretend it has a theme.

Analysis: 1980's The Long Island Cannibal Massacre is a movie that is bad but exuberantly bloody in a way that only a teenage filmmaker could bring to life. This is indeed what writer-director-producer-cinematographer-editor Nathan Schiff was at the time. However, as we catch up with him five years later for his follow-up slasher, he is now in his early twenties and we can begin to expect at least a little more from him. Unfortunately, with They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore, we get even less.

Oh, it tries to do things. It really does. It even makes a stab at having arthouse themes. Or at least that's what I assume the monologue over a shot of a dismembered Barbie doll is meant to be doing at the beginning of the movie. 

Unfortunately, the end result is completely incoherent. For instance, if this is meant to be about a war between the classes, why are the gardeners such cartoons? (Billy has on Alice Cooper eye makeup and a dark black fright wig, whereas Jacob's meant to have a disfigured face that is brought to life by what seems for all the world to be a dime store witch mask.) 

But forget about the macro level of themes, the movie doesn't even have a grip on the micro level of scenes. There is a baffling moment in the third act where the gardeners kidnap one dark-haired woman, only to have the next scene feature two identical women tied up in a room while Billy proceeds to murder other women who look exactly like them outside, and it is dazzlingly unclear if he is attacking multiple women one at a time or a couple women over and over again.

On top of being incoherent, it is also boring. Even with a 70 minute run time, it finds ample opportunity to show us long scenes of, say, Billy messily eating from a can. Plus, The filmmaking is top-to-bottom amateurish (which, again, makes sense from amateurs, but you don't have to like it). Smihula and Berke's performances aren't exactly groundbreaking, but any time anybody else opened their mouth I felt a profound sense of relief that the gardeners were the characters we spent the most time with. Every other performance is as flat as the Long Island lawns that they have tended to so lovingly.

They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore at least retains the unrestrained Herschell Gordon Lewis messiness of the kills in Long Island Cannibal Massacre. They are uniformly poorly rendered (intestines look like shoelaces, somebody pulls a spleen out of a skull, and so on), but that sense of low-budget glee is still palpable. And, poorly rendered or not, some of the grotesque acts depicted onscreen truly are stomach churning (including multiple women having their faces peeled from their skulls - which seems to be the only bone that the filmmakers are aware of in the human body).

I think it goes without saying that the manner in which the plays out is also grossly misogynistic, in a variety of repellently ugly ways (including - be warned - the line that I chose for Champion Dialogue, which is vile but also too hilariously unhinged to ignore). But that is just one sin of many that this movie commits, a list that also includes having a complete lack of narrative thrust (there is no rhyme or reason to the murders, and at one point the killers literally just take a break to go to the movies) and boasting characters that fail so hard to even be one-dimensional that they might as well just collapse into black holes.

I suppose I should close out with a few nice things, just for fairness' sake. First and foremost, the theme that plays over the opening credits is pretty neat, showing off the same deft hand with picking library music that The Long Island Cannibal Massacre had. And the gag that [SPOILER ALERT] the gardeners end the movie by giving up and getting corporate jobs is actually pretty amusing. But beyond that, this is a blighted wasteland that is not worth spending a second of your precious time on.

Killer: Billy Buck (John Smihula) and Jacob (Adam Berke)

Final Girl: N/A

Best Kill: After knocking one of his employers out with a wrench, Billy puts dynamite in her mouth (well, the mouth of the doll that has suddenly replaced her), which is a move that I appreciated for its sheer Wile E. Coyote-ness.

Sign of the Times: One character is solely (and repeatedly) defined by her relationship to cocaine.

Scariest Moment: The first time Jacob is revealed, while peeping on a necking couple, his tongue is poking out of the witch mask and copious drool is pouring out.

Weirdest Moment: A woman who has been captured by the gardeners insists that she can get herself and her fellow captive out of the situation because of her skills as a psychiatrist. She then proceeds to tell Jacob to look at himself in a mirror and informs him that he's "fuckin' ugly." This works!

Champion Dialogue: “I ain't gonna rape you, bitch, you smell like fish."

Body Count: 14; or somewhere thereabouts - I'm unclear exactly how many dark-haired women there actually were in the final act. I suppose it's possible he propped some of them back up to shoot them again.

1. Ricky is smacked in the back repeatedly with a machete.
2. Sally has her intestines pulled out.
3. Movie Woman is stabbed.
4. Alan is impaled in the ass with a hot metal spike and then he's shot in the back.
5. Alan's Girlfriend is dismembered with a saw.
6. Sunbather is drowned.
7. Barbecue Girl is disemboweled.
8. Ms. Reynolds has her head battered with a wrench, and then her head is exploded with dynamite.
9. Dark-Haired Woman #1 is shot.
10. Dark Haired Woman #2 is shot.
11. Dark-Haired Woman #3 is chainsawed.
12. Dark-Haired Woman #4 is shot.
13. Dark-Haired Woman #5 is decapitated with a machete.
14. Dark-Haired Psychiatrist is chainsawed in the torso.

TL;DR: They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore has some moments of handmade charm, but they don't redeem its bottom-of-the-barrel storytelling.

Rating: 2/10

Word Count: 1103

Census Bloodbath: A Girl's Best Friend Is Her Sister

Note: The American VHS release of Psycho Girls was heavily edited (the mid-1980s were extremely unfriendly to gore, if you recall). The version I was able to get my hands on had the gore footage spliced back in from an Italian dub, leading to certain death scenes becoming intensely saturated halfway through, at which point the characters all started speaking Italian until the sequence was over with. If anything, this enhanced the experience, but be aware I was not capable of fully understanding the dialogue in those scenes. 

Year:
1986
Director:
Jerry Ciccoritti
Cast:
John Haslett Cuff, Darlene Mignacco, Rose Graham
Run Time:
1 hour 37 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Plot: As told via the framing device of pulp novelist Richard Foster (John Haslett Cuff) at a typewriter explaining the story of That Terrible Day, Sarah Tusk (Darlene Mignacco) escapes from an asylum and murders her sister Victoria (Agi Gallus) - who poisoned their parents via breakfast in bed and blamed Sarah for it. She replaces Victoria as the cook for Foster and his wife Diane (Rose Graham), who are holding a dinner party for their anniversary.

In attendance are the obnoxious psychologist Dr. Dekker Wilson (Dan Rose), his Marxist wife Femme (Doren Ferber), failed screenwriter but professional womanizer Anthony Zippo (Frank Procopio), and his wannabe actress girlfriend Wendy Fields (Kim Cayer, who played an uncredited porn actress in Blue Murder). They are all drugged by Sarah and spirited away to the abandoned asylum where she spent 15 years, where she and her fellow escapees Kazma (Silvio Oliviero) and Waldo (who does not seem to be credited, unless he is the Pier Giorgio DiCicco who is mysteriously credited as the mononymous character "Tony") torture and kill the majority of them.

Analysis: Fun fact. This movie was made by the same guy who directed Netflix's Hot Frosty. This kind of thing is actually not uncommon these days, because Canadian tax shelter cinema changes with the times. What was once lucrative during the slasher boom is no longer en vogue, so plenty of former slasher filmmakers have transferred their attention to Hallmark and Hallmark-adjacent projects. Perhaps most notably, Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II screenwriter Ron Oliver has gone on to direct Christmas at the Plaza, A Timeless Christmas, Christmas Everlasting, and approximately 800 other movies with a straight white couple on the poster delivering Stepford smiles while wrapped in tinsel.

But let us not get bogged down in that strange corner of cinema history. If you've been paying attention to Census Bloodbath for any amount of time, I hope my mention of Canada had you pricking up your ears. That's right, the Great Blood-Red North, home to some of the best-ever examples of the 1980s slasher, is at it again. And by "it," I don't just mean saying "abote"an average of two dozen times per scene, though that does also happen here.

True to its lineage, Psycho Girls is considerably better than it really has any right to be. It's certainly not the cream of the crop like My Bloody Valentine, Visiting Hours, or the aforementioned Prom Night II, but for a grindhouse cheapie like this, it's downright extraordinary how many things go right. 

Those things do not include the acting or the cinematography, which are never abysmal but infrequently rise above "flat." However, the screenplay is absolutely tops. The dialogue writing here counts among the best of the entire genre, and it can thank its frequent homages to pulp fiction for the fact that it had like a dozen runners-up for my Champion Dialogue selection ("My head feels like it's got menstrual cramps," anyone?). The story isn't always great, because it loses any sense of forward momentum once the torture starts and the third act mainly involves lots of running around echoey hallways, but it's got a strong sense of character, a cheeky surprise ending, and an unrelenting approach to brutality.

And let me tell you, these kills are a lot. Even before the movie gets torturey and toenails are being pulled out and whatnot, it's a lot to swallow. The movie is chock full of intense, bloody, disturbing moments that really land, though thankfully they are delivered with a certain amount of Herschell Gordon Lewis glee rather than the grimdark drudgery of the latter Saw sequels. This brutal sensibility spills out into its general atmosphere, as well.

In fact, there might not be anything more intense than the opening scene where little Victoria poisons her parents, and that doesn't even feature any gore. What it does have is an appropriately off-kilter child performer giving a dead-eyed stare and asking her parents to come back and tell her what God looks like. I mean... holy shit. 

All in all, there is a lot going on here that really works, sometimes in spite of itself. Really, the only flaw I can find with this movie that it doesn't share with other low-budget horror movies of its ilk is the fact that we spend way too much time witnessing the Fosters' incredibly boring dinner party. But having sat through plenty of boring dinner parties in real life, I knew I had to just grin and bear it and pray for something interesting to happen. And you know what, it sure did happen.

Killer: Sarah Tusk (Darlene Mignacco) feat. Waldo (?) & Kazma (Silvio Oliviero)

Final Girl: Diane Foster (Rose Graham)

Best Kill: Dr. Hippocampus (don't ask) has this bizarre telescoping pair of shears attached around his neck that are slowly squeezed, messily decapitating him, which is then followed by a disgusting moment where Sarah is washing off his skull and seems to be whittling the remaining flesh off of the bone with a knife.

Sign of the Times: I'm not saying Chappell Roan didn't base her whole makeup look off the floor show drag that Sarah puts on for torturing her victims.

Scariest Moment: That murder via breakfast in bed is eerie as fuck.

Weirdest Moment: Diane and Richard rapidly lift weights while staring at one another and then have sweaty, writhey, single-artwork-for-Olivia-Newton-John's-Physical sex.

Champion Dialogue: “What's money, anyway, except paper with germs on it?"

Body Count: 13

1. Pearl and
2. Victor eat poisoned pancakes.
3. Head Matron has her throat ripped out by Sarah's teeth offscreen, as described later.
4. Dr. Hippocampus has his head severed with telescoping shears.
5. Victoria is stabbed with her own knife.
6. Anthony has his throat slashed with a straight razor.
7. Wendy is electrocuted in a tub.
8. Dekker is shot in the head.
9. Femme has her throat slit.
10. Sarah is stabbed with her own knife.
11. Waldo is garroted with a fire hose.
12. Kazma has his head smashed with a rock.
13. Roger is repeatedly struck with a meat cleaver.

TL;DR: Psycho Girls is astonishingly brutal and surprisingly sharp, which allows it to overcome what it lacks in filmmaking craft.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1140

Census Bloodbath: I'm Gonna Show You Where It's Dark, But Have No Fear

Note: The version of this Cantonese-language movie that I was able to watch had an issue where longer subtitles were cut off at either side, which diminished comprehension somewhat, but not to a degree that I feel compromises my ability to review it in any meaningful way.

Year: 1985
Director: Philip Chan
Cast: Melvin Wong, Philip Chan, Patricia Ha
Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

Plot: Night Caller (Ping an ye) begins with the brutal murder of model and single mother Jessica (Terry Hu). The only witness is her daughter Edith (not credited in a manner that I can read), who is in shock and has not spoken since the incident. This leads her to be more or less adopted by the detective on the case, James Wong (Melvin Wong of Yes, Madam!), and his wife Kiki (Deborah Sims). Meanwhile, the buttoned-up James and his loose cannon partner Steve Chan (Philip Chan of Hard Boiled, also the director of this here movie) use their investigative skills and, naturally, their kung fu prowess to try and solve the mystery as more bodies begin to pile up.

Analysis: Night Caller has a simply incredible opening sequence. Somebody must have been making a mint off dubbed Dario Argento tapes in Hong Kong in the early 1980s, because just like 1982's He Lives by Night, the introductory kill is giallo as all hell. It's exquisitely crafted from top to bottom, disorienting you with jagged editing as it combines beautiful cinematography and crisp shadows with extraordinarily violent imagery (including an apple being smashed into Jessica's face during her struggle for survival). It is exquisite. It is horrible. It is pure cinema.

Nothing else in Night Caller quite lives up to this sequence, but that's hardly a knock against it. I couldn't imagine improving on that opening. Nor can writer-director-star Philip Chan, evidently, because the buddy cop comedy stuff kicks in more or less instantly after this scene. (Look, it's a Hong Kong movie. If you're not ready for the genre to change every 45 seconds, you're going to have to take two aspirin and go to bed straight away.)

I'm not saying it's a bad buddy cop kung fu comedy romance family drama movie, either. However, it reaches its aesthetic heights in the horror scenes, which also include the scene where James brings Edith back to her dark apartment to try and jog her memory and the movie's second kill (which is also the last proper body count kill, alas). Said second kill can't match the sheer audacity of the opening sequence, but it does involve a man being stabbed and falling from a catwalk, whereupon his corpse dangles upside down from a cable. After having fallen through a box of glitter. A box of glitter that was suspended over a catwalk full of models. On live TV. Y'all, this movie is kind of great.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes. The aesthetic value of the movie drops off sharply every time it's not doing a horror scene. And while the inclusion of kung fu fight scenes in a slasher movie should provide a frisson of camp, only one is lit well enough to properly see what's going on. This seems like a peculiar misstep for a kung fu veteran to make, even if working behind the camera was never exactly the thing he was known for.

However, whatever that aspect of Night Caller lacks in camp value is made up for by the killer, Bobby (Siu-Fung Wong), who wanders into the movie at about the halfway mark and simply makes herself known, preventing the movie from adding "whodunit" to its roster of genres. Every time we see Bobby after the "big" reveal, she is wearing a new ludicrous outfit (in one scene, she is simply wearing mud) and psychosexually torturing a shirtless, handcuffed James. Now that's more like it!

I think I like this movie more than I love it, because the extremely tropey buddy cop material is front and center when it really shouldn't be, given how little effort was put into it. However, the horror is effectively horrifying, the comedy is frequently very funny (even during its darkest turns, such as the scene where a woman who discovers a valuable clue suddenly dies of a brain disease before the cops can ask about it), and there is always some inexplicable moment waiting behind every narrative corner (like the gang of punks who squirt ketchup on a restaurant owner's face and try to put his wife's fingers in the toaster).

Killer: Bobby (Siu-Fung Wong)
Final Girl: James Wong (Melvin Wong)
Best Kill: Accept no substitutes for the opening kill of Night Caller.
Sign of the Times: When Bobby's accomplice Mickey (Kei Mai) introduces himself, he starts maniacally singing Toni Basil's "Mickey" (which is honestly the only way to sing it).
Scariest Moment: An off-brand Chuck E. Cheese mascot character who looks like a bedraggled Hills Have Eyes mutant grabs Edith while she's at the arcade.
Weirdest Moment: Mickey performs a scene from Taxi Driver to himself in the mirror while in blackface.
Champion Dialogue: "I'll be back to add a few holes to your ass."
Body Count: 7

1. Jessica is stabbed 29 times, with the final stab going in the gut before she falls through a window.
2. Ho Tak is stabbed in the chest.
3. One-Eyed Neighbor is shot in the head and burned to death offscreen.
4. Lady Who Finds The Ring dies of brain disease offscreen.
5. Newbie Cop is shot.
6. Bobby is shut.
7. Mickey is drowned in a mud bath.

TL;DR: Night Caller is a little more of a generic cop movie than I wish it was, considering its extraordinary facility at being a Hong Kong giallo.
Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 958

Census Bloodbath: I Guess Murdersloth And Murdergluttony Were Busy

People keep asking if I'm back, and I haven't really had an answer, but now, yeah, I'm thinking I'm back! 

Welcome back to Census Bloodbath. For those who have forgotten what the hell this thing is in the years since I last did much of it in earnest, my mission is to watch and review every slasher movie from the 1980s. We're just over halfway through! And it's been more than a decade since I started, so here's hoping it doesn't take another 10 years to finish. 

My slasher writing got interrupted by a few very good updates in my life, including getting paid to write about other things full time at ScreenRant and penning a murder mystery novel that I hope to drag out into the light of day at some point. I'm not going to sit here and promise five reviews a week or nothing, but I'm hoping to get back to posting semi-regularly, in the new, slightly truncated format I developed the last time I didn't have time to do this project. Without further ado, let's hop back into 1985. Where were we...

Year: 1985

Director: Donald M. Jones

Cast: Eli Rich, Rochelle Taylor, Dennis Gannon

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

Plot: Murderlust follows Sunday school teacher Steve (Eli Rich of The Jigsaw Murders) using his free time to pursue his secret passion: murdering prostitutes and dumping their bodies in the desert, a nasty habit that has earned him the moniker "The Mojave Murderer." 

Analysis: As I've worked on this project, I've noticed multiple sub-subgenres emerge from the overall morass of the 1980s slasher. Over the years, you get stuff like the "rubber reality" slashers inspired by A Nightmare on Elm Street, the Lifetime-esque movies that I have dubbed the "women's picture" slashers, and so on. 

One sub-subgenre that I have considerably less enthusiasm for is the "women be dying" slasher. These titles combine the faults of the "hero killer" format (by following the killer rather than the victims, the victims frequently become paper-thin characters whose deaths have no import) with intense indulgence in the misogyny that is always quietly simmering beneath the surface of the slasher genre. These movies, which are largely a hangover of the grindhouse pictures of the 1970s, typically feature a string of rapes and violent murders of women that are barely hung together on a "story" about a male killer wandering around, seeking out new victims. 

Some of these movies, or others like them, can be quite good, or at least compelling. I was pleasantly surprised by Eyes of a Stranger (which, to be fair, has two final girls as its protagonists rather than being a hero killer movie). But when you're getting down and dirty in the muck with the likes of Don't Answer the Phone, it can be an entirely unpleasant experience. While Murderlust seems to fancy itself a successor to Maniac, another of the better examples of the sub-subgenre, it is instead just another speck of grime on the undercarriage of the slasher. Literally the best thing I can say about it is that at least Steve isn't a rapist. Mostly.

Murderlust is a scummy, scuzzy experience with no redeeming value. The best down-and-dirty horror movies leave you with the feeling of needing to take a shower, in a good way. But this one just rubs your face in muck and kicks you in the ribs out of pure meanness, because there are no aesthetic, tonal, or narrative niceties that allow you to feel like you've actually gleaned something from the experience.

It's a go-nowhere movie that just sits there idling for the majority of its runtime. It seems to be trying to horrify the audience by juxtaposing Steve's prim and proper Sunday school persona with his violent nature behind closed van doors, but we spend too much time with him for that to feel like a clear divide. Even in other professional/public parts of his life such as his job as a parking lot security guard or his interactions with his weird neighbor-cousin Neil (Dennis Gannon), who seems to be an ancestor to Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, Steve is a crude, boorish, lazy lout who is constantly braying at people who annoy him. Which is everyone. Rather than being horrifying or enlightening, spending time with him is simply irritating.

The slasher element is also repetitive and boring. He kills all of his victims in the same way (garroting them with rope), and their slayings are all overseasoned with misogynistic rambling. If Steve blaming women for all the world's problems and lobbing insults at them is meant to lend insight into his motive, Murderlust has defaulted on this loan.

The only thing that prevents this movie from becoming absolute bottom-of-the-barrel garbage like Victims! is the fact that its dialogue is frequently actually kinda good. When Steve is flirting with women before revealing his true colors, their repartee tends to sparkle, and the movie opens with him having a tête-à-tête with a sex worker that actually manages to have a little insight into how someone can wield various forms of social currency (charisma, money, power) to convince someone to do something that would otherwise go against their better judgment.

I suppose I'll leave this part of the review on a high note, so I'll add two more things that I write. Although the movie only barely lurches toward having a proper final girl at the very end, her fight for her life is chaotic and brutal in a compelling way. Also, the real-life Mojave Desert scenery that pops up every 20 minutes or so is lovely to look at, but this is simply more proof of how hard it is to fuck up shooting a nice landscape, because the cinematography is doing its darndest to make everything as bland and flat as possible otherwise.

Killer: Steve Belmont (Eli Rich)
Final Girl: Cheryl (Rochelle Taylor)
Best Kill: They're literally all the same, so I'm going to pick Debbie's, because it takes place offscreen and saves us from wasting another three minutes of our lives on this movie.
Sign of the Times: When Steve is accused of molesting a Sunday school student, the board of the church doesn't believe the alleged victim for even one single second. They don't even pretend to consider believing her, which is what I assume they would do nowadays.
Scariest Moment: The opening shot of the movie is Steve staring directly into the camera with a blank look for like five full seconds.
Weirdest Moment: Steve badgers Neil into helping him move a trash can containing a corpse into his van and he keeps bleating, "it's traysh, Neil, now push!"
Champion Dialogue: "God is a big drag, and he doesn't exist anyway."
Body Count: 5

1. Prostitute is garroted with a noose.
2. Prostitute #2 is garroted with a noose.
3. Teenage Girl is garroted with a noose.
4. Debbie is killed offscreen.
5. Steve succumbs to his gunshot wounds while crawling through the desert.

TL;DR: Murderlust is a complete waste of time, in spite of boasting slightly sharper writing than one might expect from a down-and-dirty, misogyny-forward slasher movie.

Rating: 3/10
Word Count: 1193