Census Bloodbath: Computer? I Hardly Know Her!

Year:
1985

Director:
Andy Anderson

Cast:
John S. Davies, Lauren Lane, Michael Hendrix
Run Time: 1 hour 18 minutes

Plot: Interface follows Professor Rex Hobson (John S. Davies), who teaches a computer class as a local college and moonlights as a hacker. He becomes the primary suspect in a series of slayings that is being perpetrated by the Circle of Logicians, a cult of masked computer programmers who believe that they are ridding the world of evil. He reluctantly teams up with Amy Witherspoon (Lauren Lane of The Nanny), the resentful wife of his student Bobby (Michael Hendrix), when she shows up brandishing a gun and attempting to get to the bottom of things. Honestly, I'm not actually sure what her goal is, and she's mostly not sure how to accomplish it, so at least we're in the same boat. Anyway, the distrustful pair begin to fall for one another as they become targets of both the police and the computer cult.

Analysis: Weirdly, immediately after watching Post Mortem - Return to Carnage Hall, we are encountering another Texas-based student film, this time produced by the film program of University of Texas at Arlington. Even more weirdly, this one was also a pretty good time.

But let's make one thing clear. Interface is a weird movie, and that is not a word I throw around lightly. The fact that the original goal of the Circle of Logicians was merely to throw paint on evildoers is but the tip of the iceberg. Eventually the movie mutates into this bizarre femme fatale romantic comedy of errors that blends a 1970s conspiracy thriller and a 1980s slasher into the mix. And the thing is, that rom-com mode is actually where it really shines.

Interface is simply not a good slasher. Anything fun that it manages to accomplish with its techno-horror backdrop has already been done better in Evilspeak and much better in Murder by Phone, at least in terms of the kills it doles out to its victims. The body count deaths are bloodless and bland, and the movie eventually gives up on them in favor of a whole lot of gun violence, which as we know is a cardinal sin of the slasher genre. If you're not in the third act of a Scream movie, guns have no place here. Slasher murders demand flair!

The wide variety of inhuman masks worn by the Circle of Logicians (one of which is featured on the poster above) are at least very eerie and well-rendered, but the characters mostly just use their robotic voices to whine at one another in their big scenes. (That said, you do hear a robo-voice say "oh shit" at least twice in this movie, which is worth the price of admission alone.)

But once Amy and Rex are tossed in a box together and Interface starts shaking that box vigorously, everything comes alive. Their nagging, circular, back-and-forth dynamic felt punishing at first, but it eventually coheres into this bizarre blend of alt-comedy and slapstick that produces some genuinely funny moments with great timing, without sacrificing any of the movie's signature weirdness. Case in point - Rex (who is not a pinup hunk, nor does he pretend to be) spends a good chunk of the movie in a towel, having been forced to escape after coming out of the shower. Once he gets some pants, he's then forced to run around shirtless for the next 20 minutes or so. You just haven't lived until you've seen a man in a towel run away from a shotgun-wielding computer hacker. And basically every choice the movie makes is both as inexplicable and as deeply committed as that ever-so-long-running gag.

Another thing that helps boost the weirdness of the movie is the casting. The core cast is perfectly competent by the standards of this kind of amateur production, but there are some baffling choices around the edges. For instance, the movie opens on a scene where Lou Diamond Phillips (in his first credited role, already looking for all the world like a proper movie star with an innate command of the camera) battles the shortest crime boss you've ever seen. But the biggest whiff is the character of the jock bully (already a no-no for a college movie - jock bullies simply do not exist at universities, because they have already evolved into frat bros), who is portrayed by the world's most middle-aged man.

At the end of the day, none of this really adds up to Interface being "good." The first half is too tedious and packed with interchangeable characters for it to accomplish that. Whatever things it is good at, being a slasher certainly isn't one of them, and that's the reason we're here in the first place. However, it is a compellingly strange motion picture that earned a few genuine laughs from me, and that is something I desperately needed now that we have gotten this deep into 1985, which is so far shaping up to be the worst year of the 1980s for the slasher genre. At least, I sure hope it never gets worse than this.

Killer: The Circle of Logicians

Final Girl: Rex Hobson, Ph.D. (John S. Davies) and Amy Witherspoon (Lauren Lane)

Best Kill: Honestly, none of them, but the death of the prostitute Bambi (and how 1980s of this movie to assign the sex worker as "evil" rather than her pimp) at least involves her talking to a john who appears on a television screen and then exploding, so that's kinda weird.

Sign of the Times: The conversations about how computers need to be connected to phones in order to do anything was just as mystifying to me now as it probably was to people at the time.

Scariest Moment: Honestly, any time the scene lingers in the cult's lair, just staring at those masks is pretty spine-chilling.

Weirdest Moment: Midway through the third act, about 15 minutes before the movie ends, Rex takes a potty break and we just sit there watching Amy impatiently waiting in the foreground while he pisses like a racehorse for 52 straight seconds, the sound of which then makes her need to pee.

Champion Dialogue: “What's the matter? You seem more pathetic than usual."

Body Count: 12

1. Punk Sidekick is shot.
2. Crime Boss is shot.
3. Nervous Punk is elbow-choked.
4. Bodyguard is shot in the forehead.
5. Lead Punk is killed offscreen.
6. Bambi is killed in a hotel room explosion.
7. Paul is electrocuted by his phone.
8. Sidney is killed offscreen.
9. Male Cop is shot.
10. Security Guard is shot.
11. Female Cop is shot.
12. Cult Member is bonked on the head.

TL;DR: Interface is not a particularly good cyber-thriller slasher, but it's got a surprising amount of vim and vigor as a warped romantic comedy.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1133

Census Bloodbath: Let There Be Carnage

Year:
1989
Director:
John Harvey
Cast:
Rhett Pennell, John Harvey, Kevin Schmidt
Run Time:
1 hour 49 minutes

Plot: Post Mortem - Return to Carnage Hall takes place five years after the events of 1988's Carnage Hall. The Einstein-masked killer has returned as a ghostly apparition who possesses various people and causes them to commit murders in and around the Tom Brown Hall dorm at Texas Christian University. The only people who can stop him are the people who accidentally summoned him in the first place during a seance gone wrong - wide-eyed freshman Danny Hughes (Rhett Pennell), his free-spirited roommate Wesley "Elf" Worthington (John Harvey), Elf's girlfriend Cassandra (Kimb Shiver), and Cassandra's roommate/Danny's love interest Lisa (Marisa Murray) -as well as the ghosts of two of his previous victims, Kevin Schmidt (Kevin Schmidt) and Todd Camp (Todd Camp), who need to do a good deed to avoid being stuck in Purgatory forever, watching endless reruns of The Love Boat.

Analysis: Why watch Return to Carnage Hall without having seen Carnage Hall, you ask? Great question. I have been doing dogged research on exactly how to watch 1988's Carnage Hall for years now. It is literally the only movie on my slasher list that I have never been able to find access to, either online or out in the world (VHS tapes and import DVDs usually help a lot in this department). For all intents and purposes it is a lost film, even though it was tantalizingly screened in Ontario exactly once about a decade ago. However, during my latest round of research, I did discover that it has a sequel. While this sequel is so obscure that it literally doesn't even have a page on IMDb, it clearly exists, because I watched it with my own two eyes.

Why watch said sequel now instead of waiting until it's time to cover 1989 slashers, you ask? An even better question. I was only able to access the movie via a non-downloadable video file hosted online, and I wanted to make sure I watched it ASAP in case the link ever went dead. Now. Enough dithering. Let's get to the movie.

Made on a slim budget by actual college students at Texas Christian University, the Carnage Hall movies are pure amateur hour, shot-on-video, microbudget nonsense, which is why I didn't feel terribly bad about writing off the first installment as a lost film. However, my experience of watching its sequel has transmogrified my feelings about the situation into those of profoundest regret.

While everything I said about the movie is true (and it must be said, the only available copy online looks like absolute dogshit), it is also an utter delight. This is clearly the result of a group of friends throwing anything and everything they thought might be funny onscreen, which usually results in sheer tripe, but in this case harnesses a sort of deranged comic energy that uplifts the entire experience. Not every joke lands, but like all the best comedies, there are enough gags delivered at such a rapid pace that you hardly notice the duds as they're going by.

It's no Airplane!, mind you, but there is a delirious "let's put on a show" energy to the whole affair that is buoyant and effortlessly charming. And some of the jokes are genuinely funny, if a bit broad. Take, for instance, the scene where Cassandra first meets Danny and instead of shaking his hand, reads his palm and mutters "five kids, good luck." Or the bits where Cassandra and Lisa are trying to interpret the words they caught during their seance, which turn out to be Kevin and Todd singing along to the Love Boat theme song.

In addition to being genuinely funny with an unusually well thought-out screenplay, the movie has a lush sense of creativity in spite of its ramshackle production value, and this results in a great deal of dynamic staging the likes of which usually can't be found within miles of a 1980s slasher this cheap. The filmmakers' creative impulses run roughshod over the movie, leading it to peter out in the third act as the movie runs a good 20 minutes too long, but that's a trade I'm willing to make for moments like the wailing electric guitar on the score that perfectly matches the cadence of a professor who is blowing her top at Danny and Elf (whose names, by the way, are for some reason a reference to Danny Elfman).

On top of all this, Return to Carnage Hall is a perfect time capsule. As is the case for almost any movie too cheap to afford such nonessential things as costumes, sets, and the like, the camera simply captures what things really looked, sounded, and felt like in the late 1980s. This adds a great deal of texture to the experience, particularly during a gloriously campy dress-up montage. But the jokes about, say, people up in Heaven throwing on a tape of Beetlejuice or the boys doing an impression of Zelda Rubinstein in Poltergeist offer some great insight into what was truly stuck in the craw of big time horror fans during the waning years of the decade.  A decade that I might remind you was one of the best times for the horror genre that there ever was.

The movie is hardly a masterpiece, but I had a hell of a time watching it. Given how brutal slogging through 1985 has proven to be, it really was a breath of fresh air to be watching a movie so joyously invigorated by the mere idea of being a goofy slasher.

Killer: The Einstein-masked killer, in various forms

Final Girl: Danny Hughes (Rhett Pennell) and Wesley "Elf" Worthington (John Harvey) feat. Lisa (Marisa Murray)

Best Kill: Elvis is stuck to the wall with telekinetically tossed CDs and has his head split in half vertically with a vinyl record.

Sign of the Times: The boys' rooms are plastered with totally radical mid to late '80s movie posters, including The Blob, A Fish Called Wanda, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, Sleepaway Camp II, Summer School, Beetlejuice, Spaceballs, Die Hard, Monster Squad, and From Beyond (the latter of which is featured prominently in Elvis' death scene).

Scariest Moment: Kevin and Todd use their ghostly powers to distort their faces and voices in order to make Danny and Elf listen to them.

Weirdest Moment: The entire movie opens on a fake commercial for a store that sells globes that ties into the actual movie in basically zero ways.

Champion Dialogue: “Have a little respect for the dead, asswipe!"

Body Count: 10

1. Travis is decapitated after having his head pulled into a toilet.
2. Chelsea is drowned in a fountain.
3. Janitor is impaled with a mop handle.
4. Makeout Point Guy has his head slammed in a car door.
5. Shoplifter is shot.
6. Mall Cop shoots himself while possessed.
7. Liz has an 8 ball thrown into her forehead.
8. Random Dorm Guy is strangled and hanged with a phone cord.
9. Elvis has his head split in half with a vinyl record.
10. Cassandra is stabbed with a machete by Elf while possessed.

TL;DR: Post Mortem - Return to Carnage Hall is a charming amateur slasher, even if it overstays its welcome.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1212

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