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