Census Bloodbath: You Don't Know Jack

Year:
1985
Director:
E.W. Swackhamer
Cast:
David Hasselhoff, Stepfanie Kramer, Adrienne Barbeau
Run Time:
1 hour 37 minutes

Plot: Terror at London Bridge (also known as Bridge Across Time) is somehow neither the first Jack the Ripper slasher movie of 1985 (that would be The Ripper) nor the first movie set at London Bridge in Lake Havasu City, Arizona (that would be Olivia - by the way, that bridge really does use the exterior masonry from the actual London Bridge).

Anyway, back in 1888 London, Jack the Ripper is being chased by the bobbies after his latest bloody murder. He is shot and falls into the river, knocking one of the bridge's stones down with him. In 1985, the final stone has been recovered and Lake Havasu City is holding a ceremony commemorating the official completion of the bridge, more than 20 years after they originally acquired it and built up a chintzy Little England tourist trap around it.

When traveler Alice Williamson (Barbara Bingham of Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan) accidentally smears her blood on that stone, the spirit of Jack the Ripper is resurrected and he kills her. 

Her husband Dave's (Michael Boyle of Luther the Geek) frantic attempts to find her go unheeded by police chief Peter Dawson (Clu Gulager of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, The Return of the Living Dead, The Initiation, and Hunter's Blood) and local city council member Anson Whitfield (Lane Smith of Dark Night of the Scarecrow, Prison, and Night Game), but they do catch the attention of Detective Don Gregory (Baywatch's David Hasselhoff, who at the time would have been Knight Rider's David Hasselhoff), a Chicago transplant with a tortured past.

He tries to solve the case while also flirting with local fishing boat operator Angie (Stepfanie Kramer), whose librarian friend Lynn Chandler (Adrienne Barbeau of The Fog, Escape from New York, Swamp Thing, and Creepshow) finds herself flirting with two different oddly stiff British weirdos (David Fox-Brenton and Paul Rossilli) who are new to town, and either of whom might be the Ripper. Can Det. Gregory uncover the fantastical mysteries behind this case as the bodies continue to pile up?

Analysis: As you may have been able to surmise from my unusually long plot synopsis, there are a lot of moving parts in Terror at London Bridge. This isn't terribly shocking, considering it's a full-on sci-fi-fantasy slasher. But this is also the case because it's an NBC TV movie, so they had to lard up the plot with characters and incidents in order to fill time that might otherwise have been taken up by sequences of nudity or gore in a regular degular theatrical slasher movie.

That said, it's really not a half-bad mystery thriller, especially in its first two acts. There are quite a few reasons for this. One is its weirdly pedigreed cast and crew, which also includes the composer, who is six-time Oscar nominee Lalo Schifrin (of the Mission: Impossible theme, The Amityville Horror, The Seduction, and the original rejected score for The Exorcist).

Another reason is the fact that spending time with this cast of characters is actually mostly worth your while. David Hasselhoff's limited range does not lend itself to playing such a troubled character, but everyone around him believably inhabits their roles, resulting in the movie inexplicably becoming a solid slice-of-life drama that paints a compelling picture of how the townies at a tourist trap relate to one another.

Plus, the stalk-and-kill scenes that take place before the reveal of which character truly is Jack the Ripper (which is predictable and comes probably 20 minutes too early, but happens in a scene so eerie that it almost doesn't matter) have enough shadow-drenched melodrama and squeeze enough realistic "girl walks home alone at night" atmosphere from their scenarios that they are quite satisfying.

Unfortunately, the third act sputters and stalls when it turns into a classic "Hoff wears unbuttoned shirts and punches bad guys" extravaganza that lacks the zesty campiness of some of his other television roles. His scenes are also frustrating because they mostly involve telling us he solved a clue about the mystery without showing us. 

However, even with a lead who drags down the proceedings, Terror at London Bridge is quite charming, and manages to surpass both The Ripper and Olivia as the definitive installment in their weirdly specific subgenres. That maybe wasn't the highest bar to clear, but for a TV movie slasher this late into the 1980s, it's about as impressive as climbing Mount Everest.

Killer: The Ripper (Paul Rossilli)

Final Girl: Angie (Stepfanie Kramer) feat. Det. Don Gregory (David Hasselhoff)

Best Kill: There really isn't one, but the slit throat makeup is most lovingly displayed in Alice's death.

Sign of the Times: There's an E.T. poster proudly displayed on the wall of the library where Adrienne Barbeau's character works.

Scariest Moment: David Fox-Brenton's character Mr. Latting meets Lynn at the local House of Horrors, and invites her to go for a walk to discuss the nature of good and evil. Because red flags hadn't been invented yet in 1985, she says yes. However, as she walks, the things he says grow creepier and creepier and she desperately tries to find a way to get out of the conversation, only to be rescued and then menaced afresh by a different weird British man. 

Weirdest Moment: After an ad break, there is a brief interlude where David Hasselhoff is boxing while shirtless.

Champion Dialogue: “That's a theory, Gregory. That's all it is, it's a theory, and it's your theory, and I don't wanna see your theories in the newspaper!"

Body Count: 6

1. 1888 Woman is stabbed.
2. Alice Williamson has her throat slit.
3. Elaine is stabbed.
4. Kid is shot by Don Gregory in flashback.
5. Lynn has her throat slit offscreen.
6. The Ripper is shot.

TL;DR: Terror at London Bridge is surprisingly good for a mid-1980s TV movie slasher, but that doesn't necessarily get it as far as being a proper hidden gem.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1008

Corn To Run

Year: 2018

Director: John Gulager

Cast: Marci Miller, Jake Ryan Scott, Sara Moore

Run Time: 1 hour 22 minutes

Well, it happened. We're finally here. The end of the line. Last stop. The tenth and final film in the Children of the Corn franchise. Until seven years from now when Dimension needs to renew the rights and demands somebody cobble one together in three days. Curiously, this is the only time one of these marathons has had its final entry created in the year of writing, proving that the Corn really can't be kept down. It will keep springing up through the cracks like an insidious weed.

That was a bad choice of words. I've gone and reminded myself that I could be watching the Insidious movies instead. And there's only FOUR of those!

Children of the Corn: Runaway, intriguingly enough, follows the story of an actual canonical character from the short story. Ruth (Marci Miller) was a pregnant teen member of the cult of He Who Walks Behind the Rows and escaped by burning down the cornfield and most of her compatriots with it. She has spent the last thirteen years wandering the American South with her son Aaron (Jake Ryan Scott) like a regular Sarah Connor, avoiding an implacable presence she feels is following her (aw damn, I just reminded myself that I could have been watching It Follows instead, too).

When their truck is impounded by police in a remote Oklahoma town, Ruth decides that maybe it's time to try and put down roots. She gets a job as a mechanic, befriends local waitress Sarah (Mary Kathryn Bryant), and attempts to give her son a normal life while experiencing bizarre hallucinations of her murderous past. But when several adults in town turn up dead, she realizes that the evil she is facing might not be only in her head.

But it's the tenth Children of the Corn movie, so what were the odds that she was just imagining things?

John Gulager (who previously did the Feast movies and Piranha 3DD) is probably the most famous director to helm a Children of the Corn movie, which is saying something more about the franchise than anything. But it's still surprising that this movie got so little fanfare, even for a direct-to-video release. The only reason I even knew it existed was because I was bored and scrolled all the way down to the dark corners of my Redbox app one night.

And yet, exist it does. And not much more than that. Even though the concept itself is probably the best in the franchise, it immediately whittles away every last vestige of potential it has by the half hour mark. No, instead of being an interesting exploration on trauma and living with guilt smack dab in the middle of a zeitgeist that just so happens to be conveniently obsessed with cults, it's a shallow slog chock-full of characters it refuses to sketch out in anything but strokes so broad they're visible from space.

Including "Hooker," the most interesting character in the movie by a country mile.

Children of the Corn: Runaway is like looking at a good movie through a car's review mirror. There are tiny slivers of quality and structure that you can make out, but you feel like you're constantly moving away from them at high speed. The cinematography is actually decent, giving the town a sun-bleached feel that drains the energy right out of you (on purpose, I might add), but it also sucks every last bit of tension from potential scare scenes. And the acting is pretty good too, but the dialogue is so inane that every second the performers are forced to speak (and there are a lot of those seconds, because this "talkie" trend seems to be here to stay) you'll cringe so hard you'll end up a half an inch shorter by the time credits roll.

There are also some murders that are creatively staged (albeit with a heaping helping of weightless CGI blood), but they're either drawn-out far past the point of comfort or revealed to be one of Ruth's endless, irritating dream sequences.

In scenes so elliptically associated with the plot, you do begin to wonder if you just dreamed them yourself.

Honestly, I think the biggest problem here is the baggage they brought with them from the franchise's first returning screenwriter Joel Soisson. He wrote (and directed) 2011's Children of the Corn: Genesis and does not seemed to have learned a lot of lessons in the meantime about sticking the landing on an interesting premise. Or even sticking the takeoff to begin with. It perhaps makes more sense than Genesis, but it's much more rote and boring in the process, anchoring itself to characters that don't have the weight to keep the movie on course. It just wanders off in any old direction until a rapid-fire succession of reveals at the end that are just more and more confounding.

On top of everything else, Runaway commits that worst of horror movie sins: it's boring. Almost nothing happens in this movie, and while it skates in at just over 80 minutes, it feels easily thirty or forty longer than that. It just thoroughly fails to find a personality, placing too much stake in a wholly charisma-free child villain, using voiceover at intervals too random to feel consistent, and throwing in a boost of stylish craziness at the exact moment you most want to actually just sit down and follow a straightforward plot.

It's just too complacent in its laziness for a film that sets up so much stuff that could actually be compelling. It's all the more frustrating for giving you the ability to snatch brief glimpses of the - if not awesome - at least decently middling movie it could have been. All I can say is, at least we're not ending with the worst Children of the Corn movie, but it's not that steep an uphill hike to get to Runaway from the likes of Revelation or Isaac's Return.

TL;DR: Children of the Corn: Runaway is reasonably well-made, but that only serves to highlight how empty it is.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1032

Reviews In This Series
Children of the Corn (Kiersch, 1984)
Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (Price, 1992)
Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (Hickox, 1995)
Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering (Spence, 1996)
Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror (Wiley, 1998)
Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return (Skogland, 1999)
Children of the Corn: Revelation (Magar, 2001)
Children of the Corn (Borchers, 2009)
Children of the Corn: Genesis (Soisson, 2011)
Children of the Corn: Runaway (Gulager, 2018)

Census Bloodbath: Back To Skull - Day 4

For the crossover review of this film over at Kinemalogue, click here.

Year: 1984

Director: Larry Stewart

Cast: Daphne Zuniga, Vera Miles, Clu Gulager

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

As we venture out further and further into the murky depths of university slashers for our Back to School spectacular, things - as they are won't to do - begin to get a little hackneyed. Although I remember enjoying the 1984 sorority slashfest The Initation the first time I watched it, after about 50 of these reviews, the sheen wears off just a little.

The Initiation is a perfectly serviceable slasher with an all-star cast, but five years into the slasher boom, the flop sweat was beginning to stain the screen and it couldn't recapture the magic of similar films like the markedly superior The House on Sorority Row. 

It's at the very least better than Hell Night.

"Delta Rho Chi, Never Will Die."

This is the soon-to-be ironic motto of the local sorority, of which only 4 out of 15 pledges remain. Alison (Hunter Tylo) is your typical sorority girl - boy crazy, gorgeous, and ready to toss out full frontal at the drop of a hat. She is not the focus of our story. Megan (Frances Peterson) is the vile pledge trainer, drunk on sex and power. This is not her story. Marcia (Marilyn Kagan) is affable and demure, haunted by the taunting of the Greeks who mistake her innocence and purity for virginity. She's oh so close, but no, this is not her story. Kelly (Daphne Zuniga) is a warm-hearted pledge, the daughter of wealthy couple Dwight (Clu Gulager) and Frances Fairchild (Psycho's Vera Miles). She has lately been having dreams about a mysterious incident in her past, in which she watches her mother and father having sex in a mirror and stabs her father before another man bursts in, who then gets burned alive in a  fireplace. Whether this is a dream or a repressed memory she can never be sure, having suffered from amnesia and completely losing everything before age 9.

A-ha.

Was anybody keeping track of how many times I mentioned sex in the character descriptions? The Initiation occupies an awkward space between "at least the sexual characteristics are more varied than 'horny slut likes to bang bang'" and "this is uncomfortably dark and morally dubious." Honestly I would have preferred good old erotic exploitation to the nightmarish house of horrors that makes up about 50% of our characters' sexual development.

The "parents having sex" thing was a given, but "molested by a violin teacher" is patently not. Far better films than The Initiation would come unpinned tackling that particular topic, but this film - being what it is - careens wildly like a roller coaster car in a Final Destination movie. The Initiation handles its delicate topic in an outrageously clumsy way, suggesting that all the girl in question needs to soothe her troubled psyche is some vigorous porking.

Of which there is much to be had at Delta Rho Chi.

Sexual politics aside, The Initiation is a decent bit of fun in the immediately post-Nightmare era, one of the last gasps of non-supernatural slashers. Although the clumsy mishandling of its erotic elements plunge the film like a stone in the river of my esteem, The Initiation provides something a little different, just enough to pique my interest. 

Written by soap opera veteran Charles Pratt Jr. (whose CV includes 300 episodes of All My Children, 387 General Hospitals, and 304 Santa Barbaras), it's no accident that the plot pulls out all the soapy stops, replete with sexy dream therapists, hidden family secrets, amnesia, and SPOILERS [Evil Twins.]. The man deserves an Oscar for the "Repressed Desires" theme party alone.

But try as it might with all its lather and antics, The Initiation suffers from a lethargic first half, where it insists on being a bad college psychological drama rather than a bad soap opera slasher, which is a much less punishing thing to be. Luckily the second half delivers. When the pledges find themselves trapped in Kelly's father's mall during a prank gone wrong, the kids play in the stores, screw around with boys, and are offed one by one by a mysterious killer in creative, rewardingly drippy sequences.

For a slasher fan, it doesn't get much better than this. Perhaps it's best if you don't think about it.

The acting isn't great. Zuniga, though later she became a fairly medium-sized celebrity, is not in her best form, and James Read as her dream therapist/quasi-boyfriend lets his eyebrows completely subsume his persona. It's like watching two caterpillars battle for domination over an impassive, fleshy battlefield.

The kills aren't great. An impalement with an arrow fails to line up both sides of the appliance properly - either that or Megan has a small wormhole located just above her gallbladder - and some of the makeup shows its seams.

But there's a party full of glitter, 80's teens (by far the most likeable horror ensembles) get to play around in various mall stores doing their 80's teen thing (which, although I can't understand it for the life of me, includes doffing your top for twenty seconds, then going roller skating), and there's more blood than a lot of its peers and that adds up to a lot, ramping up the absurdity factor.

All in all, The Initiation is not the worst piece of crap I've ever seen. But I've already seen two better films this week, so I'm not going to toot its horn more than it deserves. It's a fairly entertaining movie, but as sorority flicks go, there have been way better offerings both before and after this one. If you find yourself loving The House on Sorority Row or other low budget titillators like The Slumber Party Massacre, maybe this film is worth your time, but otherwise I'd steer clear of it.

Killer: [Terry Fairchild (Daphne Zuniga)]

Final Girl: Kelly Fairchild (Daphne Zuniga)

Best Kill: I'm partial to harpoons and mid-coitus mayhem, so Ralph's death by harpoon gun while he's on top of Marcia is by far a standout.

Sign of the Times: Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like you to meet Heidi. Raise your hand if you're shocked she never made a movie outside of the 1980's.

Scariest Moment: The opening nightmare sequence is hellish, rapidly edited, and massively disorienting.

Weirdest Moment: Ralph shows up to a party dressed as a penis.

Champion Dialogue: "It's like looking for the meaning of life in a donut hole."

Body Count: 10

1. Nurse Higgins is stabbed to death with a trowel.
2. Dwight Fairchild is stabbed in the neck with a trowel. 
3. Todd is stabbed in the chest with a trowel.
4. Andy is hit in the head with an axe.
5. Megan is shot in the chest with an arrow.
6. Chad has his throat slit offscreen.
7. Allison is stabbed to death.
8. Ralph is harpooned in the back.
9. Marcia is killed offscreen.
10. [Terry is shot through the chest.]

TL;DR: The Initiation is an uneven, but pleasantly bloody and soapy affair.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1170

Census Bloodbath: A Wet Dream On Elm Street

Year: 1985

Director: Jack Sholder

Cast: Robert Englund, Mark Patton, Kim Myers

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

When New Line's breakout hit A Nightmare On Elm Street brought in enough money to wallpaper the Empire State Building in 1984, they knew they had to act fast to capitalize on their newfound franchise. And it's a good thing too, because some of the Nightmare sequels are among the best horror films of the 80's and 90's. A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge is not one of them.

Released less than a year after the first film, Freddy's Revenge is a hilariously confusing mishmash of garbled mythology, oddball visual effects setpieces, and a veritable mountain of homoerotic tension. Yes, this is the gay Nightmare and it is glorious.

Because of the bizarre, out of character nature of its story and the fact that A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors is both awesome and an actual legitimate sequel that follows the story and characters of the original, many fans of the franchise dismiss the second film as a bizarre fluke of rushed studio filmmaking and ignore it in the context of the storyline.

This is a travesty, because Freddy's Revenge is a camp classic.

The 80's are present in every single frame, starting literally from the very first.

Taking place five years after Nancy Thompson's misadventures in 1428 Elm Street (in the newly named Springwood, OH) the Walshes have just moved in and already their teenage son Jesse (Mark Patton) is having terrible nightmares about a mysterious man in a red and green sweater who pursues him with a clawed glove. 

His little sister (Christie Clark) is perturbed by his daily shrill screams but his mother (Hope Lange) insists it's a normal response to the move and his father (Clu Gulager, who performs a Census Bloodbath Hat Trick in this film, 1986's Hunter's Blood, and The Initiation, one of the best slashers of 1984) is more concerned with the fact that Jesse hasn't unpacked yet.

He is given a beautiful teen love interest in Lisa Webber (Kim Myers) but would much rather spend his time with his jock friend Grady (Robert Rusler) pantsing and wrestling in the dirt in that way that straight dudes do all the time. I actually think their butts have more screen time than Freddy himself, who only appears in about 12 minutes of the whole film.

No, time is much better spent on moments like these.

Freddy (Robert Englund)'s endgame this time around is to take over Jesse's body and use it to further his killing range because... I guess he just has a taste for it now. I mean, after getting revenge for your violent death by manifesting as a dream demon and killing the children of your lynch mob, what's there left to do? Take up knitting?

As the people around him start to mysteriously die (and literally everything in his house/the universe spontaneously combusts), Jesse struggles with his sanity and guilt. It's really very similar to A Nightmare on Elm Street in that nobody knows whether it's a dream or reality, only it sucks. 

At the expense of sounding like a massive sourpuss, Freddy's powers over the mind extending into the real universe (including lighting a toaster on fire) and managing to kill other people from the dreams of one person are extremely divergent from the rules of the franchise universe. In fact, they would never be mentioned again because it's really quite stupid.

Freddy's Revenge stomps on and twists the Freddy mythology into obscene contortions.

Much like what Freddy does to Jesse's body (in this fabulous gore scene).

Did that caption sound a little gay to you?

Well this gay thing isn't a passing theory, oh no. Freddy's sole design is to enter Jesse's body. He frequently wakes up sweaty and shirtless and flashdances around the room. In a classroom scene there's a rectum drawn on the board. And then he's wrapped in a giant snake. A sign on his door reads "No Chicks." The board game in his closet? "Probe."

After unsuccessfully trying to make out with Lisa, he runs to Grady's room to "sleep with [him]" and at one point the evil baseball coach (Marshall Bell) and Jesse have a chance meeting at a leather bar (there is no explanation as to why our young buck came here) and the movie smash cuts to Jesse running (presumably post-coitus) laps in the school gym. 

Also everything about this scene.

It all kind of goes nowhere (it so easily could have been a much better film about Freddy manipulating a young man's latent homosexuality for his own purposes), but it's the hysterical result of an openly gay (and mischievous) production designer working with a (later) openly gay star under the nose of a totally unaware director.

If they had all been working together, they could have made a movie with actual impact. But what we get is pretty great anyway with the perfect combination of winking licentiousness and oblivious unintentional hilarity.

You are all my children now.

Killer: Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund)
Final Girl: Lisa Webber (Kim Myers), but only incidentally.
Best Kill: The Coach is pelted with balls, tied up naked in the shower, whipped with a towel, and slashed across the back as the shower heads spurt blood. Simultaneously silly and intense, super homo-erotic and kinda cool. A perfect representation of the film.
Sign of the Times: Nobody bats an eye at the kid in the back of the bus blasting tunes on a boom box; Jesse dons lightning bolt sunglasses and dances to synthpop in his room.

Scariest Moment: Jesse opens his little sister's bedroom door to find her jumping rope in slow motion and chanting "1... 2... Freddy's coming for you..."
Weirdest Moment: One of their parakeets goes rogue, dive bombing Jesse and his family in their living room before EXPLODING because this is the 80's.
Champion Dialogue: "Are you mounting her nightly or what?"
Body Count: 6 people give or take; 5 by Freddy's hand (3 in the Pool Party Massacre) and 1 trampled to death. All male, because slasher murder is a metaphor for sexual violence so...
Also 2 parakeets and 2 fish.

1. Coach Schneider is tied up in the locker room and slashed.
2. Grady is slashed across the torso after Freddy emerges from Jesse's body.
3. Party Guest #1 is slashed in the face and throat.
4. Party Guest #2 is trampled by escaping partiers.
5. Party Guest #3 is slashed in the stomach.
6. Party Guest #4 is thrown onto a barbecue. 

Stud Finder: Grady is pretty bomb. I can see why Jesse dug him so much.

TL;DR: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge is a terribly messy film full of misplaced homoerotic subtext and it is so so fun to watch.
Rating: 8/10
Word Count: 1147
Reviews In This Series
A Nightmare on Elm Street (Craven, 1984)
A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (Sholder, 1985)
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (Russell, 1987)
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (Harlin, 1988)
A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (Hopkins, 1989)
Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (Talalay, 1991)
Wes Craven's New Nightmare (Craven, 1994)
Freddy vs. Jason (Yu, 2003)
A Nightmare on Elm Street (Bayer, 2010)