Census Bloodbath: Sex Work-Life Balance

Year:
1984
Director:
Peter H. Hunt
Cast:
Barbara Carrera, Kim Cattrall, Debby Boone
Run Time:
1 hour 34 minutes

Plot: Sins of the Past follows a group of former sex workers who were part of a call girl cooperative that broke up when one of their number, Ellen Easton (Megan Gallagher), was murdered. Now it's 15 years later, none of them have aged a day, and they've settled into new, respectable lives. One by one, the girls are sent newspaper clippings about Ellen's death, then they in turn are killed. They think the killer is Ellen's abusive father, Ralph (Gene Dynarski), but in order to get to the bottom of the crime and keep their former lives secret (they almost all have high-stakes reasons to want to keep it quiet), they reunite in LA to try and track down the killer themselves.

The women in question are Terry Halloran (Barbara Carrera, fresh off her stint as a Bond girl in 1983's Never Say Never Again), their former leader who is now hilariously working at a temp agency providing young girls with very different types of jobs - she's also in the middle of a vicious custody battle; Paula Bennett (the Kim Cattrall, two years before Big Trouble in Little China, three years before Mannequin, and 14 years before Sex and the City), a pragmatic woman who got her medical license and is now fighting to turn her temporary job as the head of pediatrics into a permanent position; Clarissa Hope (Debby "Daughter of Pat" Boone), who has found God and now performs songs to support televangelist Rev. Donald Randolph (John Anderson, who played the used car dealer in Psycho); Maureen Warren (Tracy Reed), who is a wife and mother living in domestic bliss; and Patrice Cantwell (Kirstie Alley, whose closet is too full of skeletons for us to consider this movie one of them - also of the same year's Blind Date), a Hollywood actress who has fallen on hard times.

As Terry tries to rally the girls, she becomes the prime suspect and eventual love interest of Lieutenant Malovich (General Hospital mainstay Anthony Geary), who is gunning for a promotion and will do anything to figure out why bodies keep piling up whenever Terry's around. Oh, and he doesn't matter at all, but Paula has a horny coworker played by Matthew Faison, who is one of the corporate paintballers who die via triple decapitation in Jason Lives!

Analysis: TV movie slashers get a bad rap. Obviously, the idea of a genre whose foundational tenets are boobs and blood being subject to network censorship is a suspicious one. And sure, some of them are barrel-scraping piles of pond scum like Hotline or . However, there are quite a few exquisite little TV movie gems scattered throughout slasher history, like Fantasies or Dark Night of the Scarecrow. So I didn't walk into Sins of the Past feeling biased against the format, and I was well rewarded for my faith.

Of course it's not particularly good as a slasher. It has the bloodless, mostly offscreen deaths that I've come to expect from this sub-subgenre, and it doesn't even have the decency to imply that any of them were committed with a sharp weapon. However, just like Fantasies before it, it makes up for its deficits as a slasher by leaning in on being a soapy, Lifetime-y melodrama about women.

The scenes where the women alternately work together and at cross-purposes gives them all an exciting amount of agency as they're propelled through some extreme emotional twists and turns. Plus, the slasher mystery at the center of it is deliciously cozy - more about lounging on couches while discussing the clues rather than gumshoing their way around the problem.

The movie even ages kinda OK in its depiction of sex work. It mostly lands on "it's OK that you did it, because you regret it and you're not doing it anymore," which is kind of a cop-out, but it does allow these sex workers to be complete human beings with lives and flaws and strengths, respecting them even though they committed those sinful, wicked acts in their pasts. There's even a lovely scene where one of the women reveals her past with her current partner, whose immediate instinct is to shun her, but who ultimately comes to accept it.

And the cast is quite good, for the most part. Kirstie Alley is really quite terrific as an amoral diva (no comment), and Tracy Reed delivers a phenomenal monologue in the final third. Unfortunately, Barbara Carrera is not up to their standard. The Nicaraguan-American actress is a Gal Gadotian level of unprepared to deliver lines in English. She wends her way around her dialogue with a sense of blind panic that results in a completely vacant character, leaving a gaping void at the center of the movie.

[SPOILER ALERT, through the end of the review]

And we must talk about Kim Cattrall, of course. Although she does deliver a perfectly Samantha-esque line comparing marriage to sex work, she's confident and competent here rather than truly marvelous, which is a shame considering the fact that it's revealed that her character contributed two kills to the body count. Her final scene is solid, but it fails to deliver the Ghostface campiness that it could have had.

That said, as a whole, the third act (when everyone converges on one of the reverend's telecasts, which Clarissa refuses to back out of in spite of the fact that the killer is clearly planning to murder her there) is actually deliciously tense. Director Peter H. Hunt, who mostly takes a backseat elsewhere, finally stirs to life as he guides us through all the different pieces being set on the board.

Although I'm not saying the movie has nothing to offer artistically. There's exactly one good shot in the movie, of a slash of light revealing Maureen's eyes as she explores a dark Mission. 

Speaking of, there are a lot of real-life Southern California locations being used, which gives the whole thing a lived-in realism. All in all, in spite of Barbara Carrera's alarming limitations, Sins of the Past is a real nice warm bath of a movie, which is the highest-possible tier that a TV movie slasher could hope to reach.

Killer: Ralph Easton (Gene Dynarski) & (gasp) Paula Bennett (Kim Cattrall)

Final Girl: Terry Halloran (Barbara Carrera)

Best Kill: Oooh baby, watching the dummy playing Kim Cattrall falling from the catwalk at the end is why television exists!

Sign of the Times: The article that the girls are being sent has the hilarious headline "Dad Kills Prostie Daughter."

Scariest Moment: Terry is followed by an unknown man after Patrice's funeral.

Weirdest Moment: Ralph Easton takes aim to kill Clarissa with a rifle, but realizes he forgot to put his glasses on.

Champion Dialogue: “A meat cutter is drop-kicking pot roasts around the kitchen and demanding a tryout with The Raiders."

Body Count: 5; not including Amy (Mallie Jackson), whose offscreen death occurs during the time jump.

1. Ellen is killed offscreen.
2. Diane (Kristen Meadows) is struck by a car.
3. Patrice is killed offscreen.
4. Ralph Easton is shot by Lt. Malovich.
5. Paula falls from a great height.

TL;DR: Sins of the Past is charming TV movie slasher that blends women's picture melodrama with a cozy mystery vibe.

Rating: 7/10

Census Bloodbath: Gland Guignol

Note: The English subtitles that were available to me for this Cantonese-language movie were very poorly translated, so take my review with a huge grain of salt. Also, I do not have access to translated credits, so I unfortunately cannot credit actors for their roles. Though it's worth noting that the cast includes Hong Kong Butcher producer Wai-Leung Cheng, Dress Off for Life star Lau Kong, and Hell Has No Boundary stars Ping Ha and Hak-Shun Leung (the latter of whom was also in the extraordinary He Lives by Night).

Year:
1984
Director:
Dan Pan
Cast:
Wai-Leung Cheng, Han Chiang, Ping Ha
Run Time:
1 hour 23 minutes

Plot: Pituitary Hunter follows, perhaps naturally, the police on the hunt for a serial killer who removes the pituitary glands from their victims, presumably to eat them. While the unnamed (in my subtitles, at least) Inspector is hot on the trail of the killer, hospital janitor Dr. Kwok keeps up a secret medical practice out of his apartment. He was trained in China, you see, and he isn't licensed to practice in Hong Kong. This seems like it might give the movie subtext of some kind, and that is an illusion.

Anyway, after he gives an abortion to sex worker Manna Chan, she begins to fall for him. However, as she learns more about the secretive doctor, she begins to suspect that he has something to do with all the pituitary thievery.

Analysis: Hong Kong's Pituitary Hunter has a hell of a title, and I wish that I could report it was also a hell of a movie. And perhaps it almost gets there? There's certainly enough moments in the movie that, were I to describe them, would sound very bonkers and fun on paper. However, this straightforward story is incoherently told from the jump, and once it gets complicated... woo, it's a toughie.

The subtitles I had are certainly to blame for part of my difficulty. The name Dr. Kwok is also incorrectly attributed to Dr. Ng all the way through the first act up until the latter's death. Also the killer is referred to by two different full names in the subtitles and a nurse is consistently misgendered. So that didn't help, but the movie also has fundamental flaws that are ruinous in any language.

First, scene placement is a nightmare. One scene almost never naturally flows into the next. For instance, let me explain opening. A man standing behind a bush eats a dead rabbit, which cuts to family members loudly weeping over an old man's corpse in a hospital. When they follow the gurney into the morgue, a different corpse in a body bag falls on them, which cuts to the opening credits, which play over a young girl doing a dance routine. If this was meant to set anything up, hell if I know what it was. Though the mourners are weeping so loud that they're annoying another patient, which is a very funny The Host-style gag, though nothing else in the movie is really overtly comic like that, so I don't know if they did that on purpose.

Second, this movie is too damn dark. During the nighttime scenes (aka the kills), it is almost impossible to tell who is doing what, to whom, and where. These are pretty important things to know, I'd say.

Speaking of the kills, they're mostly not bad. They're often weirdly elaborate, and the black-gloved killer is sometimes shown in what looks like an awesome porcelain demon mask. There's also a "killer in the backseat" moment that happens right after a couple hooks up in the front seat, which has an added element of creepiness.

Once the story gets cooking, it also finds a few threads of pathos that are ultimately unusual in this type of slasher. [SPOILER ALERT FROM THIS POINT ON] It turns out that Dr. Kwok has a daughter with dwarfism, Siu-Hua, and he is trying to use a blend of human and animal pituitary glands to "cure" her (paragraphs and paragraphs of text at the end of the movie, as far as I can tell with Google Translate, overexplain that this can't actually be done - thanks, credits! I was about to crack open a few skulls, but now I won't bother!). This makes him a good red herring, because it turns out that he only ever wanted the pituitaries from corpses, and the real killer - a bodybuilder with dwarfism who gets two names but is most consistently called Tsang Kwok On - has gone rogue in an attempt to force the doctor to cure his own dwarfism.

It's not a storyline that holds up super well under an anti-ableism lens, obviously, but the movie has sympathy for Kwok, Siu-Hua, and Tsang in spades. In fact, even when Tsang goes off the deep end and threatens to burn a blind old woman alive, he is given a sympathetic and melancholy death scene à la Frankenstein or King Kong or Rodan. However, while there is some good in Pituitary Hunter, all of this adds up to nothing much, since the bad is so bad and the good isn't great to begin with.

Killer: Tsang Kwok On

Final Girl: Manna Chan

Best Kill: The kill itself is kind of a nothingburger, but I admire Tsang Kwok On's idea to get a victim out of the tent she's in by unleashing a bunch of mice into it.

Sign of the Times: In his bodybuilding lair, Tsang Kwok On has some epic posters of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone.

Scariest Moment: We watch a nurse lean a group of corpses against a wall, start commanding them like a drill sergeant, and then bite the shoulder of the one who's "disobeying orders."

Weirdest Moment: The police lure an unhoused man out of a sewer tunnel with a duck, which he wants to devour raw, and as he chases it, they drop a metal cage on him.

Champion Dialogue: “Human's pituitary is useful when he is alived."

Body Count: 9; not including Siu-Hua, who may have died from stress during the final confrontation. That's left unclear in the final moments.

1. Cannibal Nurse dies of fright.
2. Dr. Ng dies offscreen.
3. Junkyard Watchman is lifted into the sky in a burning van, which is dropped and then crushed by the crane.
4. Tent Lady is stabbed.
5. Car Guy is stabbed from behind.
6. Lily is stabbed in the back.
7. Big-Mouth So dies offscreen.
8. Dr. Kwok is stabbed in the side.
9. Tsang Kwok On is shot by the police.

TL;DR: Pituitary Hunter is an incoherent movie that has some sparks of life to it, but is mostly confusing and unsatisfying.

Rating: 4/10

Census Bloodbath: Don't Break Daddy

Note: I don't have access to full, translated credits for this Cantonese-language movie, so unfortunately I can't accurately credit every role.

Year:
1983
Director:
Lee Siu-Wah 
Cast:
Eddie Chan, Olivia Cheng, Git-Leung Chan
Run Time:
1 hour 28 minutes

Plot: The Hong Kong movie Crazy Blood (Feng xie) follows police photographer Wei Ming (Eddie Chan of the delightful He Lives by Night), who is frustrated that his wife Chen Ching Min (Olivia Cheng) is constantly too busy with her job as a social worker to either have sex with him or help him take care of their son, Chia Pu.

Her job eventually introduces too many criminal types into their life, particularly serial arsonist MiMi  and her creepy gymnastics coach boyfriend David. Eventually, Wei Ming's sister So Fong is sexually assaulted by David when she's supposed to be babysitting. Meanwhile, an unsupervised Chia Pu climbs out the window in an attempt to get ice cream and falls to his death. This sends Wei Ming on a violent spiral where he attempts to exact revenge on everyone involved in his son's death, including his wife.

Analysis: You're welcome for making Crazy Blood sound legible in that synopsis. A better title would be Crazy Structure. It starts with the death of MiMi (in an illegibly edited sequence where she's climbing a fence, it gets struck by a car, and she tumbles gently to the asphalt, apparently dead), which is followed by a flashback that lasts for about 50 minutes and had me constantly asking "so is this taking place in the past, or did I not understand the opening scene?" This flashback is not slasher-y even a little bit, and spends most of its time expounding on the thesis that it's super annoying when women have jobs.

Once the movie finally catches up with itself (and makes us watch MiMi's bad death scene again), an entire slasher movie happens in the space of a cut. Suddenly, Chen Ching Min is like "hey, did you know all the girls I've been caring for are dead?" While we do get a couple proper body count kills after that, it's shocking how little this slasher is interested in actually being a slasher.

Of the actual body count kills, 50% of them are falling-related deaths, which also takes a lot of wind out of this movie's sails. In fact, everything was so wonky that I would have taken Crazy Blood off my slasher longlist entirely if not for two scenes.

The first is that David's death scene involves an exquisite kung fu-flavored chase sequence that takes place in multiple rooms of an empty gym. In perfect Hong Kong movie fashion, both Wei Ming and David use every possible bit of gym equipment as improvised weapons, including weights and - at one point - an entire tanning bed. The second is the final sequence (which is also pretty solid) where David is menacing his wife in their apartment, picking up a meat cleaver and finally going full Jack Torrance.

Anyway, I think this movie could learn a thing or two from Death Wish and its rip-offs. If you give a character a kid and you mess with that kid, the audience will get why he's mad. You don't need to spend more than half the movie explaining why he loves the kid. Crazy Blood is so goddamn boring, which is a shame because it features some deeply unhinged moments that would have played better in a more well-structured action-slasher. 

The behavior of the criminal element in the movie makes absolutely no sense, for one thing. This movie exists in a culture beset by Mad Max style cartoon criminals who are giddy hedonists that do hyperbolically evil acts non-stop for the simple pleasure of being outrageous, including trying to light a car on fire while a couple makes out inside it.

Oh, and there's exactly one shot in this movie that is aesthetically pleasing, showing Chen Ching Min staring out the window as seen in a fragmented mirror. Beyond that, though, Crazy Blood doesn't have much to offer, unless you like interminable scenes of people buying ice cream. 

Killer: Wei Ming (Eddie Chan)
Final Girl: Chen Ching Min (Olivia Cheng)
Best Kill: I guess I'd have to say David's death by drowning, but only because it comes at the end of that really cool chase scene.
Sign of the Times: When Chia Pu and Wei Ming watch TV together during one of their many cheesy "daddy-son time" montages, they're watching one of the original 1970s Doraemon episodes.
Scariest Moment: In the final sequence, Wei Ming acts increasingly unhinged while holding a butter knife as his wife prepares dinner.
Weirdest Moment: David and MiMi drive a jeep onto the beach and randomly start trying to run over So Fong, who they've never met. When Chen Ching Min finds out who they are, she casually introduces them to Wei Ming.
Champion Dialogue: “I thought she'd change after being shaved bald."
Body Count: 6

1. MiMi falls from a fence that she's climbing when it's hit by a truck.
2. Chia Pu falls to his death offscreen.
3. Jenny is pushed out a window.
4. Unnamed Child falls to his death offscreen.
5. David is drowned in a swimming pool.
6. Wei Ming is slashed with a box cutter (I think by MiMi, who then succumbs to her injuries).

TL;DR: Crazy Blood is a somewhat enjoyably demented family drama, but it's crap as a slasher.
Rating: 4/10