Census Bloodbath: Christmas Stalking

Year: 1984

Director: Edmund Purdom

Cast: Edmund Purdom, Alan Lake, Caroline Munro

Run Time: 1 hour 26 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Plot: Don't Open Till Christmas takes place in London during the lead-up to Christmas day. By night, a killer is stalking the streets murdering people who dress like Santa Claus. On the case are Inspector Harris (Edmund Purdom of Pieces) and Detective Sergeant Powell (Mark Jones), though they might just be shown up by amateur sleuth Kate (Belinda Mayne), whose father was one of the first victims, and her boyfriend Cliff (Gerry Sundquist of the same year's Blind Date). Also on the case is Daily News reporter Giles (Alan Lake), who keeps getting under the feet of the Scotland Yard professionals.

Analysis: Even in a darker period for the slasher, producers couldn't resist getting those slay bells jingling.  In 1984, we got two entries in the hallowed subgenre of Christmas slashers, and Don't Open Till Christmas is rightfully the far less prominent title, behind Silent Night, Deadly Night. The film is from the same producers that brought us Pieces, and while it has every inch of that movie's general incoherence, it doesn't carry the same spark of charm that makes it a bad-good classic par excellence.

The film is narratively compromised to an almost violent degree, presenting a whodunit that lacks both viable suspects and a real sense of investigation. Most of the important facts of the case are discovered by Kate in offscreen moments that she then describes later, which robs the proceedings of any sense of fun. It doesn't fare much better as a formula slasher, failing to imbue any of the vast slate of victims with any sort of personality, batting away its Final Girl before the climactic third act chase scene, and making the fate of the killer frustratingly opaque rather than ambiguous in a "final shot of Halloween" kind of way. This may be a result of the fact that the movie changed hands between three different directors during production, and while I understand that, they could have just... not released the movie.

Fortunately, while the kills are disjointed, some of them do pack enough of a classic slasher punch to at least be entertaining to witness, and they come at a brisk enough frequency that the taste of the poorly lit and executed ones is washed out of your mouth almost immediately. It would take a person with more moral purity than I to complain about the fact that this movie contains an eyeball sliding out of its socket, a Rube Goldberg-esque car electrocution, a spear through the mouth, and a Santa getting his dick slashed off while he uses a urinal.

There are also some elements that are genuinely good, though those are much fewer and farther between. First off, the score incoporates a minor key rendition of "Jingle Bells" that works wonders to boost the holiday spirit of the story. There is also a general sense that the creators of the film saw the German krimi movies and decided they could make a Scotland Yard murder mystery even more hyperbolically British than those. The film also doesn't want for good locations (including a scene set in the basement of the Tower of London), though it does want for the lighting necessary to really make those locations pop and drive the atmosphere in a real way. Frankly, in general it's a piss ugly movie. If every frame of a film is meant to be a painting, the shots here look like they accidentally sat on a painting.

Don't Open Till Christmas is not exactly a miserable experience to sit through, but I could point you to a half dozen Christmas slashers that are far more worth your time, and that's just off the top of my head.

Killer: Giles (Alan Lake)

Final Girl: Sherry Graham (Kelly Baker), randomly. Her lack of overall importance to the story is indicated by the fact that she is credited as "Experience Girl."

Best Kill: A Santa has his face cleaved in twain backstage at a show and is sent onstage from beneath a trapdoor in the middle of the performance.

Sign of the Times: After rubbing up against a woman wearing a Santa coat, Cliff is worried they'll be mistaken for a couple of "gays" and get arrested.

Scariest Moment: A man comes to Sherry's peep show and begins to talk about his weird relationship with his mother, at which point he is revealed not to be the killer.

Weirdest Moment: The performance that was so cruelly interrupted by the arrival of a dead body was being put on by consummate slasher vixen Caroline Munro of Maniac, The Last Horror Film, and Slaughter High.

Champion Dialogue: "I am welcome everywhere. I am a member of society."

Body Count: 13

1. Makeout Santa is stabbed in the chest.
2. Makeout Woman is stabbed in the stomach.
3. Daddy Santa is impaled through the back of the neck with a spear.
4. Cigarette Santa is garroted with wire and has his face burned.
5. Alley Santa is shot in the head.
6. Peep Show Santa is stabbed in the neck.
7. Drunk Santa is stabbed in the gut.
8. Carnival Santa is kicked to death with a shoe that has a knife in it.
9. Silly String Santa is cleavered in the face.
10. Urinal Santa has his dick slashed off.
11. Kate is stabbed in the gut.
12. Powell is electrocuted by his car.
13. Mom is pushed down the stairs.
14. Ian Harris is exploded by a rigged music box.

TL;DR: Don't Open Till Christmas is incoherent and stupid, but it's mildly entertaining nevertheless.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 938

Census Bloodbath: Cannes You Dig It?

Year: 1982

Director: David Winters

Cast: Joe Spinell, Caroline Munro, Judd Hamilton

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I don't know what I was expecting when I sat down with The Last Horror Film. Maybe I was expecting The Last Horror Movie, which is a totally different film from the early 2000's. It certainly wasn't something good, given the introduction from Lloyd Kaufman before my copy of the movie that informed me that this was distributed by Troma Entertainment. But whatever it was I was expecting, it didn't come to pass when all of a sudden splayed across the screen was a surreal meta-horror that reteamed the leads from Maniac in footage shot guerrilla-style at the actual Cannes Film Festival in 1981.

It's like Escape from Tomorrow, but not pretentious and unbearable!

So. Vinny (Joe Spinell, of the aforementioned Maniac and also Cruising, so he's never not been sweaty in 80's slasher movies). He's a cab driver with dreams of becoming a big shot Hollywood director, so he saves his money and buys a ticket to Cannes, where he stalks movie star Jana Bates (Caroline Munro, who spun her appearances in Maniac and The Last Horror Film into a mini scream queen run that also included Slaughter High and Don't Open Till Christmas - and whose hair in this movie looks like a skunk got electrocuted on her head), who is there for the premiere of her new movie, titled (and I'm not kidding) "Scream". The people who prevent him from accessing her all meet mysterious deaths at the business end of a variety of sharp instruments. 

Spoilers: He does eventually kidnap her and force her to unwillingly play a part in a Dracula movie he has outfitted in a French castle, and if the directing doesn't work out, he might just have a future in set design.

There's a lot going on with The Last Horror Film, which is good news because the plot is the barest thread of gossamer. First off is the sheer pleasure of getting to visit Cannes in 1981 around the edges of this silly slasher movie. The beauty of this style of filmmaking comes both in its inherent realism and the fact that if you ignore what's going on in the middle of the frame, it might as well be documentary footage of a bygone era. This is aided by the inclusion of the ripped-from-the-headlines real events of John Lennon's recent murder by a fan and John Hinckley Jr.'s attempt to assassinate the president to impress Jodie Foster, both of which foreshadow the film's plot bluntly but effectively.

Second off is the soundtrack! After a ripping opening with Depeche Mode's "Photographic" (which probably cost more than the cast's salaries combined), we get a glorious arrangement of pastiches of every popular early 80's genre provided, weirdly, by Jesse Frederick, the guy who wrote the theme songs for Full House, Family Matters, and Step by Step. Speaking of the astonishing pedigree of the filmmakers, this was directed by David Winters, whose career took him from playing A-Rab in West Side Story to being the choreographer of The Star Wars Holiday Special to producing Killer Workout, so don't say people can never change.

Third off? There's a vein of surrealism that runs through this film and is absolutely captivating. Joe Spinell takes his work from Maniac and pitches it to the rafters in a series of bizarre fantasy sequences where he envisions an alter ego who's a slick film director and constantly mocks him. Sound and image seem to slip past each other and blur together in these fantasies, which get more and more bizarre, at one point showing Spinell as a stripper onstage in a bra and panties, which is one of the most special sights that cinema has ever given me.

Whatever is happening here is a close second.

The Last Horror Film is like Maniac tried to market itself as a warm and fuzzy comedy and got lost somewhere along the way. It's bizarre, surprisingly effective (Spinell's intensity sweats out of him, and it's glorious to witness), and the kills are even decent! There's no work at the level of Maniac's Tom Savini (which could hardly be expected from anybody who's not... Tom Savini), but there's a gag where a severed head splashes into a bathtub that I can't describe any other way than delightful. And while a lot of the other in-film kills are in silhouette or shadow (there are a couple more intense ones displayed in movies screening at the lightly fictionalized Cannes - in real life none of the French people would give half a shit about these shitty horror pictures), the actors sell the intensity well enough that they still hit a nerve. 

My experience with this movie was wholly engrossing and entertaining in a way that I never thought could have happened this deep into 1982. It's far too weird to have penetrated far beyond the 80's in the public imagination, sadly, but it's exactly the kind of semi-precious gem I created this project in order to stumble across. It's no masterpiece of the form, certainly, but it's going for the brass ring. It only gets a finger on it, but it still sticks the landing, and who could blame it for that?

Killer: Bret Bates (Glenn Jacobson)
Final Girl: Jana Bates (Caroline Munro)
Best Kill: Suzanne's death itself is by gunshot, which is not, what you want from a slasher movie, but afterward she falls from the roof of a building and smashes her head open like a watermelon. So, y'know. Pretty cool.
Sign of the Times: Literally every movie poster displayed in the Cannes footage (The French Lieutenant's Woman! Polyester! For Your Eyes Only!).
Scariest Moment: Vinnie bursts through the window of Jana's bathroom while she's showering.
Weirdest Moment: When a kid is looking up at an airplane with a banner hanging from it, he drops a piece of cake between the breasts of a topless sunbathing woman.
Champion Dialogue: "Every side of your face is the best side."
Body Count: 6; although numbers 1 and 3 take place in films within the film, which in and of itself is in another film, so why split hairs?

1. Hot Tub Blonde is electrocuted in a pool.
2. Martin is axed in the back.
3. Alley Man is slashed and his guts are ripped out.
4. Stanley is stabbed.
5. Suzanne is shot.
6. Bret is chainsawed.

TL;DR: The Last Horror Film is thin, but only in plot, and who really needs one of those in a slasher anyway?
Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 1100

Census Bloodbath: April Fool's Slay

Year: 1986

Director: George Dugdale, Mark Ezra, & Peter Litten

Cast: Caroline Munro, Simon Scuddamore, Carmine Iannaccone

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The reignition of the Scream franchise with the MTV drama series (which ain’t half bad, if you can turn off that part of your brain that can reliably calculate human ages – if any of those tousled hunks are actually in high school, I will buy myself a hat so I can eat it) has got me thinking. The slasher genre is a malnourished, formulaic bunch, but these satirical pastiches presume that they’re all the same.

They’re not. Now, I’m not saying that slasherdom is an overflowing fountain of abundant innovation. Far from it. But if a sufficiently insane teen is inspired by the series to check one out and picks a title at random from my Census Bloodbath list, more often than not, they’ll end up with a grimy urban thriller like Eyes of a Stranger or a meandering, personality-free attempt at drama like The Outing rather than a traditional slice ‘n dice pic like Friday the 13^th.

Even films with every generic element in place (killer in a mask, crop of partying horndogs, anniversary of a past trauama) can defy expectation – if only for the fact that either the rules hadn’t been invented yet, or else they were so stale and musty by the time the film was made that the producers attempted to lacquer them up with harebrained ideas that appeal to the increasingly easily bored bloodthirsty teens. As a result, almost no slasher is what we can call “typical.” Which is where Slaughter High comes in.

Despite containing every single one of these tropes and change, Slaughter High is a film so singularly misguided, so exquisitely strange, that I defy anybody to attempt to categorize it. As it happens, the film came out in 1986, after non-paranormal slashers had gone out of vogue and producers of such resorted to bigger, splashier deaths to balance out the revenue. This is the roiling, primordial pit that Slaughter High oozed out of, and that is why – in spite of its astoundingly low grade production values in almost every capacity – it remains an indelible classic of the form.

Though, that may not be high praise.

Slaughter High begins on April Fool’s Day, a holiday with robust murder potential and on which two of my favorite slashers are set. The track team of Doddsville County High School is right in the middle of a prank to end all pranks: namely, luring nerdy punching bag Marty (Simon Scuddamore) into the girls’ locker room, getting him naked, and filming the scandalous results. This prank gets interrupted by the Coach (Marc Smith of Deep Red and The Omen III), precipitating a new, even crueler prank on Marty in the chemistry lab that accidentally results in a chemical explosion, leaving him covered in acid scars and severe burns. This prank is execrable. These people are horrible. You will hate them and want very badly to see them die painfully. Luckily, you picked the right subgenre.

Ten years later, the gang arrives for their class reunion only to find an empty, abandoned school as they realize that they’re the only invitees. This leads to a wild night of drunken carousing, getting locked inside, and being efficiently murdered by a scientifically-minded killer in an April Fool’s jester mask. No prizes for guessing who’s beneath it.

The group of Meat (and the degree to which the actors are patently too old to play teenagers is only rivaled by the degree to which they are patently too old to play 28-year-olds) comprises the following.

Carol (Caroline Munro of Maniac) is the beautiful vixen who seduces Marty into evacuating his clothes and is now an unsuccessful actress trying like hell get a single offer that isn’t in porn; Skip (Carmine Iannacone), the team captain/class clown whose nipples heroically strain to be visible no matter what type of shirt he’s wearing; Stella (Donna Yaeger), a spineless blonde bimbo with a voice like a rusty hinge; Joey (Gary Martin, who played a guitarist in Shock Treatment, to nobody’s interest but my own), a dumb gearhead who ends up marrying Stella; Frank (Billy Hartman), a greaser guido with chest hair you could make Velcro out of; Ted (Michael Safran, famous for his role as “Mustard Goon Two” in 2002’s The Ketchup King), who I’m pretty sure doesn’t actually appear in the film until his grisly demise; Carl (John Segal), a blonde law student who mostly just smiles quietly in the background; Suzie (Sally Cross), who is gone half the time meeting her fiancé’s parents only to instantly perish upon arrival; Nancy (Kelly Baker of Don’t Open Till Christmas), who is British; and Shirley (Josephine Scandi), who materializes once the filmmakers decide that we haven’t seen quite enough boobs yet.

 

A vital service.

The most distinctive feature* of Slaughter High is its sheer unpredictability. And I don’t mean the plot – that old chestnut could be figured out from the opening credits. I mean that Slaughter High is such an abominable example of cinema that literally no line of dialogue, aspect of performance, or character reaction is remotely comprehensible to anybody who’s even mildly film literate. It took three whole directors to cobble this mess into a reasonable whole and is captivatingly inane.

*Aside from its score – an eight note progression that is repeated incessantly on every instrument available to session musicians in the 80’s – which mainly means saxophones, electric guitars, and synth boards because the 80’s were the Modern Renaissance. This was composed – if you could call it that –by Harry Manfredini, who had exactly one great idea in 1980 with Friday the 13^th that he spent the rest of his career flailing to recreate.

Presumably it took two entire co-directors to keep the pile of cocaine from blowing away.

Slaughter High is a frustratingly difficult film to pin down. It’s like trying to pick up an ice cube with chopsticks: Just when you’re laughing derisively at the film’s manner of proving that the women have aged by draping them in prodigious fur coats that threaten to swallow them whole, or their dogged insistence that April Fool’s Day ends at noon, or the pitiful jingling of Marty’s jester cap as he tries to stalk menacingly behind defenseless victims, you find yourself laughing at something even more inexplicable: an actual joke. That is not to say that any of Slaughter High’s badness is intentional (in all honesty, it’s probably the goodness that’s unintentional), but there are some genuinely funny gags that crop up in unexpected places, like pens that have fallen off your desk.

And the kills! Oh, I could wax poetic about the kills. Never in cinema history has there been such a striking collection of frantically off-the-wall murders. Between a chemically-spiked beer that makes a guy’s intestines explode out of him, an acid-filled bathtub that reduces a trauma victim to cinders, and the metal bed that electrocutes a woman mid-coitus, blasting the guy off of her, but taking great care to make sure we can still see her waggling breasts, there is no shortage of mystifying carnage around every corner. It’s over the top, boldly idiotic, and surprisingly gory when it gets the chance. A couple of these scenes shade a smidge too far into torture porn for my tastes, but the rest are like an endless big top carnival of biological mayhem.

Between the cheesy laughs, the actual laughs, the spectacular kills, and an ending that devolves into a maudlin fever dream that would make Salvador Dalí do a double take, Slaughter High is a fascinating antique.

Also there’s a penis! And a man ass! The film is practically progressive at this point.

I think I’ve done a great job at describing the manifold wonders of Slaughter High while leaving room for your own personal discoveries along the way. But I must leave you with a warning: Campy or not, Slaughter High is a piece of crap. It is what a piece of crap would crap after eating too much crap.

It’s impossible to see through the sludgy murk of the exterior scenes, there’s as much tension as an episode of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, and the Final Girl sequence unravels the conflict with a weak, overlong wet fart. No actor is turning in decent work, but Marc Smith seems to be actively falling asleep, several of the women screech their dialogue as if they’re hanging in a cage suspended from a tower, Caroline Munro seems to have her lines erupt from her entirely by serendipitous accident, and Simon Scuddamore screams like an elderly spinster cooing over a tray of tea cakes.

It’s in the firestorm of awful that Slaughter High is able to find its true, ineffable self, but that doesn’t make the awful stuff any easier to sit through. I will leave you with two fleeting, concluding impressions – one good, one bad – after which you can balance out your options and decide if this movie is for you. Here goes:

1: The single best element of the production is its set design, which reliably renders a school building as something gothic and spooky.

2: In an attempt to make him look younger in the high school scenes, an industrious makeup person vigorously rubbed an actor’s cheeks with bright crimson rouge.

Until next time, I'm your faithful servant in slasherdom. Happy belated April Fool's!

Killer: Marty Ranson (Simon Scuddamore)

Final Girl: Carol (Caroline Munro)
Best Kill: Ted's intestines explode out of him after he shotguns a chemically-altered beer, for so many reasons. First, because people have been drinking beer all night and somehow this is the only dangerous one. Second, because it is so unexpected and so boldly gory and just so damn strange.
Sign of the Times: When the pranksters film a naked Marty in the locker room, they scream "Where's the beef!"
Scariest Moment: Lights explode above Carol as she runs down the hallway.
Weirdest Moment: The ending, which transforms the school into a fog machine hell dimension.
Champion Dialogue: "Dirty talk? Um... Fuck. Tits. Screw."
Body Count: 13

1. Caretaker has his head impaled on a coat hook.
2. Ted's intestines explode out of his gut.
3. Carl is stabbed through the back with a sword.
4. Shirley is dissolved in an acid bath.
5. Suzie is killed offscreen.
6. Joey is crushed by a lawn mower and his torso is mowed.
7. Stella and
8. Frank are electrocuted in a metal bed.
9. Nancy is drowned in slurry.
10. Skip is axed in the face.
11. Carol is speared in the heart.
12. Nurse is killed offscreen.
13. Doctor is stabbed in the eye with a syringe. 

TL;DR: Slaughter High is a mystifying, terrible, magnetic presence that makes this project the exciting adventure that it is.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1805

Census Bloodbath: He's At Your Door

Year: 1980

Director: William Lustig

Cast: Joe Spinell, Caroline Munro, Abigail Clayton

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

As you can probably tell from my tirade in the beginning of my Killer Party review, watching all these 1980 slashers had left me feeling like a plastic bag drifting through the wind. The only problem is, I don't want to start again. But in order to reach the shining Mecca of 1981, I gotta drink the dregs. Luckily Maniac, released the day after Christmas in the year of our lord Tom Savini, was like finding a lump of sugar stuck in the bottom of my teacup.

As the frequent observer of this blog may have predicted, Maniac is not what anybody could in good conscience call a "great" film. But what it is doing is so daring and strange that I have to give it props just for the foolhardy gusto with which it tells its story.

And he's dancing like he's never danced before.

Maniac tells the story of one Frank Zito (Joe Spinell, also of The Last Horror Film and, surprisingly, two Rocky movies and two Godfather movies), a man whose mommy issues extend well beyond the grave (and well beyond the expiration date for Psycho ripoffs, but this one's better than the dreary Funeral Home or the noxious Silent Scream from the same year). His particular issues send him careening out of control one holiday season (this is the third and by far the best 1980 slasher to be set around Christmas time), and Frank departs his apartment every night with his handy toolkit of sharp implements and puts them to good use, murdering and scalping women he believes to contain his mother's soul and nailing their scalps to mannequins back at his apartment. You know, like you do.

Maniac is one of the few films in the 80's to make truly interesting use of the situation of being caught in between the frights of the 70's and the nascent slasher genre. DNA from many other film styles are conglomerated into one ugly, but eternally compelling mess, a heaping pile of elements from early slashers films, a heavy dollop of Psycho, some nasty grindhouse thrown in to provide a basic structure, and a sprinkling of the Italian giallo for flavor.

All of these combine into one brutal, ugly flick, the perfect surrounding for the brutal, ugly man that is Frank Zito.

The camera adds ten pounds... of FURY.

The world around Frank is dull and grey - a night-addled funhouse mirror vision of New York City. And his interiors are no better. Frank's apartment is full of squat furniture and garish colors that provide a harsh contrast to the grey world outside, a very Italian and very unsettling touch.

It ain't easy being purple.

Maniac has no high machinations. It doesn't want to play with delicate themes or in-depth psychological analysis. It just wants to punch you in the nads as hard as it can for as long as possible, showing the dark side of the world we live in. At this, it is only intermittently successful but aided in huge part by Tom Savini's masterly gore effects.

I have sung the praises of Mr. Savini far and wide, but would never pass up the opportunity to do so again. His grisly gore effects revolutionized horror in America when they first came to the screen in Friday the 13th and would continue to turn up in some of the best movies of the decade including The Burning, The Prowler, and Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. And Maniac is no exception.

Despite being perhaps less gory than the film's notorious reputation would have you believe, Savini delivers the grue with as much care as the doctor who had to deliver Princess Kate's baby. Unique in the slasher genre thus far, we get several deaths by sword and two brutal scalpings, the former of which probably earned the film its nasty word of mouth and deserved it. But there's no ignoring the fact that it's a work of a master of the craft.

I'm not actually sure I can show screenshots without ruffling a few feathers, so here's a kitten playing the piano.

So. Intermittently successful. I've chosen to mainly focus on my praise for the film, but there is certainly. First, there's the dismal budget and the fact that most of the minor parts were cast with porn actresses to cut costs. Porn actresses in the new millennium are hardly known for their acting prowess, but imagine the crop of talent available immediately post-70's. It's not pretty.

And the middle half of the plot can be quite repetitive, although I hardly noticed. As a veteran of watching such films as Psycho Santa and Memorial Day, I've built up a high tolerance. This is perhaps not one of my prouder skills. Luckily things pick up after Frank meets Anna (Caroline Munro, also of The Last Horror Film - with our Mr. Spinell - and Slaughter High), a plucky photographer who brings out the best in him. Unfortunately the best in him is still a murderous slob, but at least he buys her a stuffed bear. 

And, alas, the film is full of victims whose main line of defense is trying to shriek the killer into submission while standing stock still and never moving a muscle. This sounds misogynistic and it is, but any masochistic feminist who decided to rent Maniac on movie night would be pleasantly disappointed, because the film is shockingly uninterested in exploiting female flesh.

There's one topless scene, but it lasts about a half second when a woman is in a bath and she immediately covers herself demurely with bubbles. My theory is that director William Lustig (also of Uncle Sam and all three Maniac Cop movies) didn't want to distract anybody from the unrelenting violence of the picture, even for a second.

And the... whatever the hell this is.

So, yes. It has flaws. But the film is so deeply frenetic and interesting that it is hard to find an overwhelming fault to doom it entirely. Most importantly, even in the draggiest sequences, the time just whisks by. After the likes of Terror on Tour and To All A Goodnight, I had forgotten that movies didn't have to be boring.

And there's a handful of hearty cinematic moments that pepper the general dreariness of the production values, ramping up the tension and just letting the movie have a chance to breathe and have fun. And the ending - hoo boy the ending - is so jaw-droppingly picturesque in its violence and inimitable in its gonzo balls-to-the-wall approach. Honestly, the entire film is worth seeing just for those final moments. The fact that the rest of the film isn't half bad is merely window dressing.

No, it's not going to win any awards anytime soon. And that window of time has already long since passed. But it's not the worst way to spend ninety minutes and any 80's enthusiast who wants a crash course in the world of horror at the beginning of the decade should look no further than this film.

Killer: Frank Zito (Joe Spinell)

Final Girl: Anna D'Antoni (Caroline Munro)

Best Kill: Tom Savini gets a chance to show what he's worth by blowing his own head off (well, a character played by him) with a shotgun, exploding into a million tiny pieces.

Sign of the Times: Anna's everyday "lounge around the house" outfit is a pair of tight red leather pants.

Scariest Moment: The interactions Frank has with the mannequins never fail to be terrifying.

Weirdest Moment: A victim hiding from the killer strains her face and neck in such a way that the only possible explanation is severe constipation. The fact that she's hiding in a bathroom does not help matters.

Champion Dialogue: "You're the most beautiful woman I've seen since my mom."

Body Count: 8; including the killer.

1. Beach Girl has her throat slit.
2. Beach Boy is garroted with wire.
3. Hooker is strangled.
4. Disco Boy is shot in the head with a shotgun.
5. Disco Girl is shot to death.
6. Nurse is stabbed through the back with a sword.
7. Rita is stabbed in the abdomen.
8. Frank Zito impales himself on his own sword. 

TL;DR: Maniac is a deeply messy but infinitely compelling violent fright flick.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1396