Census Bloodbath: Jack Of All Trades

Year:
1985
Director:
Christopher Lewis
Cast:
Tom Schreier, Mona Van Pernis, Tom Savini
Run Time:
1 hour 42 minutes

Plot: The Ripper follows Tulsa professor Richard Harwell (Tom Schreier) discovering an antique ring that belonged to Jack the Ripper (Tom Savini, whose name does ring a bell, now that you mention it) at the same time that he's reached the Whitechapel murders unit in his film class about movies adapting real crimes. Not so coincidentally, women around town have begun to turn up dead in slayings that seem eerily similar to the real Jack the Ripper's crimes.

As Harwell begins to have dreams of Jack the Ripper and fall into fugue states where he loses time as the body count rises, he nurses suspicions about the ring, as does his obsequious student Steve (Wade Tower of Revenge), a film geek who calls Harwell three times a night to remind him about what Vincent Price movie is on TV that night. Will either of them solve the problem before Steve's girlfriend Cindy (Andrea Adams of Revenge and Blood Lake), a fellow student, or Harwell's girlfriend, dance professor Carol (Mona Van Pernis), end up at the wrong end of a blade?

Analysis: Christopher Lewis is a director we've seen quite a bit of in 1985, because he was the director of that year's early shot-on-video slasher Blood Cult. The extremely low-budget regional Tulsa production had its ample flaws, as I detailed in my review, but I also couldn't help but being won over by its handmade charms.

That said, I wasn't exactly champing at the bit to see his immediate follow-up. However, nervous as I was, Lewis pulled out all the stops with a movie that is leaps and bounds better than Blood Cult. It still retains some of the movie's flaws (most notably an intense lack of interest in the victims who provide the body count, the majority of whom wander into the movie during the same scene in which they are bumped off). However, it shines in a number of meaningful ways.

First is the fact that the kills themselves are 1) legible and 2) actually quite brutal. In spite of the fact that the majority of them have the same M.O. (throat-slitting, sometimes followed by Herschell Gordon Lewis-esque disembowlment), there is enough variety to the way that they are presented that they feel consistently brutal and shocking. That feeling is enhanced by some half-decent, disgusting, drippy gore. You'll find blood spurts aplenty in The Ripper (even for wounds where there probably shouldn't be any), which was more than enough to keep me entertained during the murder sequences.

The movie also manages to ditch the atmosphere-killing police procedural element of Blood Cult while retaining all of its little idiosyncrasies and weird regionalisms, including two inexplicably long scenes with a pushy antique store clerk (Bennie Lee McGowan of Blood Cult and Revenge) that are about nothing and hold no importance and yet are riveting from start to finish. Another beautiful idiosyncrasy is the seemingly intense psychosexual relationship between Steve and Harwell. I'm not even sure the filmmakers are aware of its presence, simmering beneath the surface, but when you have a character calling his professor while shirtless in the dark of night, any responsible viewer must ask questions!

The movie is still far from perfect, though. Naturally so, considering the movie allegedly had a budget of just $75,000. However, the majority of its flaws come from places that have nothing to do with its price tag, including the fact that the plot is a little repetitive and really peters out in the third act. It can't even sustain enough energy for Tom Savini's big scene to be remotely interesting (even though it cost them a full 20% of that budget just to get him for one night).

The gore maestro's turn as Jack the Ripper is notable only because he allowed it to happen in the first place and not because he deigned to imbue the character with any actual menace. It truly feels like Christopher Lewis wished on a monkey's paw to have Tom Savini work on his movie.

So no, not perfect. But The Ripper is ever so charming, even more than its predecessor, to the point that I'm almost excited to take a gander at Lewis' next feature, which was the 1986 Blood Cult sequel Revenge. Stay tuned, I guess.

Killer: Jack the Ripper (Tom Savini) acting through Richard Harwell (Tom Schreier)

Final Girl: Carol (Mona Van Pernis)

Best Kill: As neat as the throat slittings tend to be, my pick would have to be the woman being garroted with a phone cord, both because it stands out and because I do love a good improvised weapon.

Sign of the Times: I mean, it has to be the dance class that Carol teaches, which involves students in aerobics leotards doing a minutes-long performance to a faux Bonnie Tyler song while smoke machines fill the room with haze. On day one, mind you.

Scariest Moment: The opening sequence where Jack stalks a woman down a foggy London street has more atmosphere than every scene in Blood Cult put together (in addition to somehow transforming Tulsa into a halfway convincing facsimile of 19th century Britain).

Weirdest Moment: The class clown Brian (Jeffrey Fontana) sings a song about Jack the Ripper in front of a chalk drawing of the man himself while accompanying himself on the harmonica.

Champion Dialogue: “You can jump on me any time you like."

Body Count: 6

1. Fancy Lady has her throat slit.
2. Old Timey Carol has her throat slit in a dream.
3. Cocktail Waitress has her throat slit.
4. Judy is garroted with a phone cord.
5. Cindy has her throat slit offscreen.
6. Richard Harwell is shot.

TL;DR: The Ripper is a totally charming SOV slasher that has a few tricks up its sleeve.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 978

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