Census Bloodbath: Xenophobia

Year: 1980

Director: Greyson Clark

Cast: Jack Palance, Martin Landau, Tarah Nutter

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Part of the reason we're going back to 1980 to scoop up extra movies is that some films slipped through my net before I refined my criteria for what does or doesn't qualify as a slasher film. Without Warning, which is about an alien invasion (well, kinda), just didn't seem to fit the bill at first. But the more I looked at it, the more I realized how uncannily it does follow the slasher formula, even considering that this should be pretty well impossible for a film that came out just three months after Friday the 13th. 

We've got a Crazy Ralph and everything!

Without Warning has a lot of slasher royalty behind it, as well. Generally the doddering, inbred kind of royalty, but it was shot by Dean Cundey, so that's nice. At the helm here is Greyson Clark, the director behind my fourth least favorite slasher of 1982, Wacko! There's also an Alone in the Dark pre-reunion going on here, teaming Jack Palance with Martin Landau because apparently they were just doing whatever script scribbled on a napkin was shoved in front of them in the early 80's. Anyway, I digress. Let's cover the plot, insofar as there is one (Another slasher trope! I've said this exact sentence dozens of times!).

A hunter (Cameron Mitchell of The Demon, Blood Link, Trapped Alive, Terror Night, Deadly Prey, and Memorial Valley Massacre) and his son Randy (Darby Hinton of Wacko) are killed out in the woods (as played by California dry brush) by what can only be described as extraterrestrial ninja stars. They're basically little frisbees that look like sand dollars with little fanged sucker mouths that attach themselves to your skin via little tubes and start sucking out your insides. They also take down a comic relief Scoutmaster (Larry Storch of Sweet 16) before four horny teens come careening in with their camper van. Now that's more like it!

These teens are the Horny Sex Couple Beth (Lynn The) and Tom (David Caruso, who I certainly didn't expect to see mucking about in the slasher trenches, and boy what a twink he was 41 years ago) and the Sweet Couple Sandy (Tarah Nutter) and Greg (Christopher S. Nelson). The horny teens are dispatched almost instantly and Greg and Sandy are sent running through the woods and into town, where they encounter the Man Who Cried Alien, Sarge (Landau) and reunite with their harbinger, creepy gas station attendant Joe Taylor (Palance). They do eventually discover that there is a humanoid alien  (Kevin Peter Hall, who would go on to greater glory playing an alien in a little film called Predator) throwing these sand dollars around to murder people for.... reasons, and he's hiding the bodies in... a shed. Spooky!

It really sends a shiver down the spine, dunnit?

If there's one thing I've learned from a long and intensive study of slasher movie posters, it's that if the cool-looking monster or alien is shown in detail, then you're only gonna get to see it onscreen for twenty seconds max. I'm looking at you, The Slayer and The Incubus. If a film has enough of the monster that it wants to keep it a secret to surprise the audience, then that's when you end up with a subtle poster like Alien. So at least I didn't come into Without Warning with any illusions about this alien menace.

Ultimately, the design of the alien once we see it (once in a flash under a swinging lamp, the remaining 1 and a half scenes largely in shadow) is a pretty good, if uninspired variation on the Greys. The sucker discs look a little shoddier (when they're sucking their victims dry they're covered in what is unmistakably ketchup and mustard), but they're at least fun B-movie images if you suspend your disbelief off a cliff. Unfortunately, this hot-dog-esque M.O. is the only way people are killed in the movie, so it wears thin long before the gags peter out. 

But isn't it nice that at one frame of the movie looks like this?

Although the effects bringing the sci-fi elements to life are very 80's, the rest is an extremely effective pastiche of an average 50's B-picture. In that nothing happens for 80 minutes. Greg and Sandy run through empty woods interminably, then sit in a bar during a power outage that I'm pretty sure was engineered because they didn't budget for that many lights. The filmmakers seem to have come to the conclusion that the cheapest special effect is human beings grousing at each other in the dark. And the pacing of the kills is terribly poor (another slasher trope executed with aplomb), with most of the kills happening in the first two reels to leave plenty of time for wandering past some scrub. 

Palance and Landau don't liven up the proceedings, barely showing a shadow of even the screen presence they display in Alone in the Dark. But then again it's hard to breathe life into a character when you're asked to spout dialogue like "Alien! Alieeeeen! ALIEN!" The only performer who is doing anything remotely interesting is Larry Storch, in an unfathomable turn as a Scoutmaster who warns the boys against picking up rattlesnakes because they "carry germs" and tries to light his cigarette by holding it against a rock and striking it with flint. He is carted in from a completely different movie and carted back out more or less immediately. 

All in all, despite its mild B-science fiction charms, Without Warning presents us with almost nothing to recommend itself. It's a dreadfully tedious motion picture experience that wastes every ounce of talent spent on it (and once you get past those two veteran actors and Dean Cundey, that well is already shallow as hell). This kind of film is why I'm glad to mostly be free of 1980. It doesn't have the vigorous excesses of the later 80's, but it's not sober or serious like the late 70's, so it's really just a waste of time all around.

Killer: Alien (Kevin Peter Hall)

Final Girl: Sandy (Tarah Nutter)

Best Kill: They're legitimately all the same, but the death of the Scoutmaster has the ooziest gooiest blood splatter, so I'll pick that one.

Sign of the Times: Greg has to use a dial to turn on his windshield wipers.

Scariest Moment: Martin Landau points his fun at Greg and starts yammering about how the aliens are all his fault.

Weirdest Moment: In the spooky gas station, the gang discovers an upside-down baseball cap in which a rat is snuggled with its litter of babies.

Champion Dialogue: "I saw something outside that bar I've never seen before, and I have no desire to see it again."

Body Count: 9

1. Hunter gets suckered.
2. Randy gets suckered.
3. Scoutmaster gets suckered.
4. Beth gets suckered offscreen.
5. Tom gets suckered offscreen.
6. Greg gets suckered.
7. Sarge gets suckered.
8. Joe Taylor and
9. Alien die in an explosion.

TL;DR: Without Warning is a dire sci-fi B-movie that wandered its way out of the 50's and got itself some decent special effects that are hardly used.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1211

Census Bloodbath: Twin-sanity

Year: 1982

Director: Alberto De Martino

Cast: Michael Moriarty, Penelope Milford, Geraldine Fitzgerald 

Run Time: 1 hour 38 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Blood Link is an early 80's slasher made by Italians, which a stone cold horror scholar could have sniffed out just from the poster, which borrows heavily from the poster for the same year's The New York Ripper, and by borrows heavily I mean wholesale steals the entire image except for Michael Moriarty's face shoved in there at the bottom. That kind of brazen thievery bears the distinct markings of the Italian horror producers of the late 20th century (the same group of people who, you might remember, advertised Twitch of the Death Nerve as The Last House on the Left Part 2 even though it came out several years before Last House).

You can also tell from the fact that every female character takes her top off at some point in the movie.

In Blood Link, Dr. Craig Mannings (Michael Moriarty) is living his best life, building an experimental therapy practice with his girlfriend who he refuses to marry, Dr. Julie Warren (Penelope Milford). Unfortunately this revolutionary new therapy (which involves electrocuting people through acupuncture needles - neat!) has unlocked a part of his brain and he can now occasionally see through the eyes of his long-lost conjoined twin brother Keith (Michael Moriarty). Wouldn't you know it, but this twin is a bit evil, and has been wandering around Germany murdering women for who knows how long.

He heads off to Europe to see if he can't drag his twin back to the states to get help, but becomes mixed up in his twin's evil schemes, because having the same face as somebody who has been murdering people in broad daylight is a little bit of a liability. He arrives just as a case of mistaken identity has thrown Keith into the path of Craig's former patient, prizefighter Bud Waldo (Cameron Mitchell of Memorial Valley Massacre, Terror Night, Without Warning, Blood and Black Lace, Silent Scream, and The Demon, phew) and his daughter Christine (Sarah Langenfeld).

Plus we get a whole bunch of shots straight out of The Parent Trap.

Blood Link very clearly wants to be an elegant early-70's style giallo like The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, but it's missing one key element: Dario Argento. His early work was just as nasty-minded and misogynistic as this movie is, but he at least presented it with style and panache. Alberto De Martino wouldn't know panache if it sprayed blood all over his fish tank. 

Sure, he gets a few cracks in at some pretty shots (it's very nice whenever the camera peers up into the mirrored ceiling of a prostitute's room, and there's one solid shot of the aforementioned fish tank lighting up an artfully arranged corpse), and Ennio Morricone's lush score makes a solid effort to class up the proceedings (minus the moments when the titular blood link is activated, which just sounds like a telegram coming in). But Blood Link is just plain nasty - cruel and gross in all the wrong ways.

I'm not saying that the slasher genre isn't built on the backbone of objectifying then murdering women, but rarely has that approach been so cut and dry, converting the already unsubtle subtext of phallic knife slayings into out-and-out text with clunky dialogue about Keith's impotence that it tries to gussy up with lots and lots of pointless philosophizing about twins. It has nothing to say, it just knows it needs to fill up the scenes between uncomfortable rapey menacing of women with something.

It's not scary other than when you're contemplating who out in the world would actually find this entertaining (the climax of the movie is a rape scene in a park, which should show you how little interest this has in really being a psychological horror film), and it's certainly not fun. It's just... unpleasant.

Meanwhile, Michael Moriarty continues to fuck his way across Europe like a regular Robert Langdon.

It doesn't even have the decency to at least spruce up the murder scenes with fun special effects. No, just a lot of grunting and stabbing in the back, and moving right along. And Michael Moriarty does not provide a fun presence to spend 100 minutes with. He might be playing two characters, but he's giving about half a performance between them. Every line spoken by Craig is spoken in a miserable monotone like Ross saying "hi..." in the pilot episode of Friends, and Keith is mostly performed the same except for the random moments where he becomes Jim Carrey as the Grinch.

This is exploitation filmmaking at its most bare bones. It's not quite pornography, not quite horror, not worth your time. It definitely makes sense why they didn't even bother making Blood Link its own poster. I don't want you to mistake me as saying this is one of the worst slasher films I've ever seen - it's not even in the bottom 100 - but it certainly gave me no pleasure to watch. It's largely competent at putting images on the screen and presents its tawdry narrative with clarity, so it's at least above par for an entry this deep into any Census Bloodbath year.

Killer: Keith Mannings (Michael Moriarty)

Final Girl: Julie Warren (Penelope Milford), but only as an afterthought

Best Kill: The reveal of how the twins' parents died, which shows them having sex in a garage for some reason and being hilariously crushed by a speeding truck.

Sign of the Times: We just can't stop calling people with creepy messages on those courtesy telephones at the airport, can we?

Scariest Moment: When training with Bud, Keith starts to get more and more violent and intense.

Weirdest Moment: One other thing the twins have in common is that they like to stir jam into their coffee.

Champion Dialogue: "Breakfast in bed is a disgusting luxury. I love it."

Body Count: 9

Cougar is stabbed in the back.

Prostitute #1 has her head smashed through a window.

Bud Waldo has a heart attack while being beaten to death.

Christine is stabbed to death.

Prostitute #2 is stabbed in the back.

Smuggler is stabbed in the chest.

Keith (or was it Craig? cue dramatic music) is stabbed in the back.

Mom and

Dad are crushed with a truck in flashback.

TL;DR: Blood Link is trying to be something better than it is, and it is failing.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1080

Census Bloodbath: A Cry In The Dark

Year: 1981

Director: Percival Rubens

Cast: Jennifer Holmes, Cameron Mitchell, Craig Gardner

Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

According to the plot description of The Demon, which was shot in South Africa in 1979 but released on US video in 1981, the malevolent killer can "bring your worst fears to life." The only way I can see this being accurate is if your worst fear is having to watch an acutely crappy slasher picture.

This is gonna be one of those reviews. All the pictures I can find are either stupefyingly dull or severely degraded. The Demon is not, shall we say, a classic.

The Demon consists of about two and a half plots, none of which are linked with any sort of connective tissue other than the presence of a shadowy killer (who isn't even credited, so I have no idea who played him - it seems like even the filmmakers themselves didn't particularly care for this movie). The first (and least interesting) plot follows the Parker family. When their fourteen-year-old daughter Emily (Ashleigh Sendin) is abducted by the demon, her parents hire Colonel Bill Carson (Cameron Mitchell of Blood and Black Lace, Memorial Valley Massacre, Bloody Movie, and Night Train to Terror - the man's a trouper), a detective with ESP to help find her.

Mainly his investigation consists of groaning asthmatically, sniffing pillows, and ripping apart bedclothes while the score feebly bleats behind him, then going off to overact at a dull, grey ocean which the film cuts to every ten minutes or so despite the fact that it plays no significant role in the film's plot or geography. As one can expect, this method accomplishes exactly nothing and he is shot in the head before he can even find the killer. This storyline connects with the second, considerably more interesting plot at exactly zero points.

Let's move on from that hot mess, shall we? Young schoolteacher Mary (Jennifer Holmes) is living by the city with her eighteen-year-old cousin Jo (Zoli Marki), having romantic misadventures while occasionally seeing a creepy figure appraising them from outside the windows. Mary is in a long-term relationship with the charming but unfortunately be-mustached Bobby (Mark Tanous), but Jo is embarking on a newfound romance with Dean Turner (Craig Gardner), a woefully rich trust fund stud who she is teaching how to be a better person.

This romance is genuinely sweet and, compounded with the terrific chemistry Marki maintains with both Tanous and Holmes, brings the film within a hair's breadth of being actually watchable.

Also, The Demon has no qualms about showing its female leads topless, if that's the kind of thing you're into.

The rest of the film is made up of scenes depicting the killer's perilously underlit antics about town, doing things we can't see to people we don't know or care about, and being generically evil, doing pushups and ripping up magazine centerfolds. The killer, more than anything, is where The Demon well and truly falls apart. 

His scenes are awash in blackness, probably intended to create a mood like "ominous dread" but only managing "I accidentally left my sunglasses on and it's past 8PM." His scenes thus become a messy confused jumble, like "Did he just punch a motorcyclist? Is that white blob in the corner of the frame his face? Who are these men he's slaughtering in a stairwell? Are they gangsters? Avon employees? Did he kill them or adjust their bow ties? Are they wearing bow ties? Who am I?"

The film attempts to explain the menace, shoving broad soliloquies on the topic in Cameron Mitchell's mouth, but all we get out of him is the fact that he's an aberration of the species and he likes bright lights, apparently. Not to mention that the way he is explicated is on a completely different spectrum from how he actually acts. He is painted as a ghoul of darkest night, harnessing your fears and using them against you, but all he seems to do is bumble around in the dark with no motivation or personality, arbitrarily acting upon his unfortunate tendency of smothering people with plastic bags. 

To be fair, maybe this movie is an in-depth, probing exploration of people whose deepest darkest fear is plastic bags, in which case I have not given the film enough credit.

In short, The Demon is inept as all hell. Side characters are introduced and frequently cut to with absolutely no payoff, Emily's skeleton is found hanging in a tree but that scene does not inform any of the moments that follow, and the musical accompaniment is slack, occasionally letting out a feeble toot when something really important happens. It's dull as seaweed; an underlit, tiresome slog.

But then there's Jo and Mary. These two girls are characters who seem like they've been transplanted from some other, better movie. Maybe a scrapped sequel to He Knows You're Alone or something. And their final scene is a cracking good time, with Jennifer Holmes selling a plot point that sends her careening topless through an attic before carving a poncho for herself out of a shower curtain. With this, the film reaches a heretofore underserved campy register before alighting upon the best scene in the film, as she utterly destroys the killer using household bathroom supplies.

This strange, action-packed, astonishingly awesome scene (along with the spurts of keen romance scattered throughout) in no way makes up for the doldrums of the previous 75 minutes, but it makes The Demon a curio I'm not too keen to let go of. 

Killer: The Demon (Who Even Knows)

Final Girl: Mary (Jennifer Holmes)

Best Kill: Mary locks herself in the bathroom, squirts soap all over the floor, and sprays the killer with an adjustable sink head when he breaks through the door. He slips on the soap and she stabs him in the neck with scissors. This is awesome.

Sign of the Times: Jo wears what appears to be a termite tent on her hot date.

Scariest Moment: Mary is chased through her house by the killer after discovering her cousin's dead body.

Weirdest Moment: A scene takes place in a roller rink named "Boobs Disco."

Champion Dialogue: "I promise I won't let him ruffle my fur until he's given me a bank reference, financial statement, and his credit rating."

Body Count: 10

1. Emily is abducted and killed offscreen.
2. Truck Driver is suffocated with a plastic bag.
3. Some Dude is slashed to death with a clawed glove.
4. Some Other Dude is slashed to death with a clawed glove.
5. A Third Dude is thrown from a balcony.
6. Mr. Parker is strangled and has his neck broken.
7. Colonel Bill Carson is shot in the head.
8. Dean is suffocated with a plastic bag. 
9. Jo is killed offscreen.
10. The Demon is stabbed in the throat with scissors. 

TL;DR: The Demon is a dull, inept trash slasher redeemed only by a genuinely sweet romance and a stunning Final Girl.
Rating: 3/10
Word Count: 1165