Census Bloodbath: Nailed It

Year:
1985
Director:
Bill Leslie & Terry Lofton
Cast:
Rocky Patterson, Ron Queen, Michelle Meyer
Run Time:
1 hour 25 minutes

Plot: The Nail Gun Massacre follows a killer wearing camo fatigues and a motorcycle helmet targeting a group of men who were involved in a violent sexual assault at a Texas construction site. The town's sheriff (Ron Queen) and doctor (Rocky Patterson) are not quite hot on the killer's trail. Let's say they're room temperature on the killer's trail.

Analysis: We've finally made it. The Nail Gun Massacre is our last slasher movie of 1985! I wasn't sure if we'd be ending the year with a bang or a whimper, but it turns out that the movie is kind of both simultaneously.

The Nail Gun Massacre is... peculiar. As the only feature ever made by Dukes of Hazzard stuntman Terry Lofton, the Texas-based slasher is very clearly a labor of love. However, the stuntperson-to-director pipeline that brought us the John Wick movies clearly hadn't been constructed yet in the mid-1980s, because this movie is slapdash as all get out.

Essentially every aspect of the filmmaking goes wrong at some point or another, often multiple times in a single scene. The camera can never quite find the right place to view the action from, the cast seems not only untrained but completely unfamiliar with the concept of acting, and the dialogue is almost always completely drowned out in the mix.

That last one may not be a terrible thing, because the script ain't all that good, either. Plot elements float in and out and are sometimes swapped at random (a trio that is clearly a mother and her two sons is at one point referred to as a group of friends), and the screenplay swirls woozily around a few recurring characters without ever committing to actually making any of them a proper protagonist. In fact, it was looking for a while like the aforementioned two sons would become the main characters, but they vanish from the movie completely about 30 minutes before it ends.

However, the movie's ineptitude actually does it a major service. The fact that the plot keeps shifting at random leaves you without solid ground to stand on. There are no rules to The Nail Gun Massacre, and you never know exactly what's going to happen next or which characters are going to live or die. 

That unpredictability, combined with the film's inches-thick layer of sleaziness, the cast being attractive but in a normal civilian type of way, and the fact that the unpolished nature of the footage lends it an almost documentarian verisimilitude, makes it genuinely dangerous. Your awareness of the camera and the people behind it gives it a home movie feel, like you're watching real people actually have sex and die onscreen. 

In fact, there's a sex scene that's so sleazily presented from every possible angle that it seems almost like it must be real, to the point that there is an apocryphal story that the male actor's girlfriend broke up with him after seeing the movie, even though he is gyrating his hips in a way that would probably snap his penis in half if he was actually mid-coitus. 

There are times when this unsophisticated realism is a demerit, such as the sexual assault scene that opens The Nail Gun Massacre (as in the first frame of the movie is a sexual assault, before the credits even roll). However, for the most part, it effectively makes you feel like you're being grabbed by the hair and dragged inexorably through a hillbilly nightmare.

This vibe is boosted by the two elements of the movie that are actually quite good. First, the kills are pretty decent. In addition to the nail prosthetics and stage blood looking pretty solid (give or take a wobbly rubber moment or two), a fair amount of the kills are cleverly staged. While their primary instinct (a good one) is to lean in on hand trauma, there are a lot of grace notes that make the kills feel different and freshly violent, even though the killer's M.O. basically never changes and the violence doesn't always make biological sense (one girl gets her hand nailed to her open mouth - did the nail hit her uvula, or what?).

Speaking of the killer, the Night School motorcycle helmet is a decent look, though I could have done without the constant, laconically delivered Freddy Krueger quips that are so exaggeratedly voice modulated that they're almost indecipherable.

However, the killer's voice leads us into the second element of The Nail Gun Massacre that works more often than it doesn't: the soundscape. In any dialogue-free moments, Whitey Thomas' surprisingly girthy synth score blends with Vocoder-ized evil laughs and pained moans that bathe the imagery onscreen with an enormously unsettling, surreal blanket of sheer noise that is reminiscent of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in a way that isn't merely ripping it off.

While The Nail Gun Massacre is many things (including, for a brief and bizarre moment in the final confrontation, a Dukes of Hazzard rip-off), it is also a rape-revenge movie, after a fashion. It's too incoherent to really have subtext (it's never quite clear if the victim, Linda, is the killer or not, though the final few shots imply she might be), but there is something effectively subversive about the choice of a nail gun as a weapon meaning that the men being targeted are violently penetrated multiple times before they die.

All in all, I think The Nail Gun Massacre is neither a bad movie nor a good movie. It's too slippery to be put in a box like that. But whether the good elements are intentional or not, whether it's effectively disorienting or just slapdash and grimy, I found it to be a hypnotic, transfixing movie to sit through. And I suppose that's a recommend, especially when the movie is taken in the context of 1985, which has given us dud after dud after dud.

Killer: Bubba Jenkins (Beau Leland), but I'm still inclined to believe it's actually Linda Jenkins (Michelle Meyer)

Final Girl: N/A, but kind of Doc (Rocky Patterson)

Best Kill: I am most partial to Mark's death, because he gets nailed while chainsawing a tree and the still-functioning chainsaw slices off his hand as he falls, adding insult to injury.

Sign of the Times: A young man wearing a M*A*S*H is told that he is being "bogus."

Scariest Moment: The opening sexual assault scene had me worrying that this movie was going to be infinitely more unpleasant than it turned out to be.

Weirdest Moment: A group of friends has a picnic where they talk about eating both sandwiches and hot dogs, but all they seem to have brought with them is Ritz crackers and beer.

Champion Dialogue: “Do you remember when you could sit outside and not worry about the mosquitoes and the killers?"

Body Count: 16

1. Leroy Johnson has his hand nailed to his forehead.
2. Brad is nailed in the stomach and the dick.
3. Mark is nailed in the back and accidentally chainsaws his own hand off.
4. Hitchhiker is nailed in the chest, through the hands, and (the killing blow) in the shoulder.
5. Woman is nailed offscreen.
6. Hal is nailed in the back of the head.
7. Ann is nailed in the hand and boobs.
8. Ben is nailed to a tree via the hands.
9. Rick's Friend is nailed in the face.
10. Rick is nailed.
11. Jethro is nailed.
12. Jethro's Date is nailed in the boob and the neck.
13. Dad is nailed and falls stomach-first onto a grill.
14. Curly Haired Woman is nailed.
15. Blonde Woman is nailed.
16. Bubba falls from a great height.

TL;DR: The Nail Gun Massacre is a poorly made movie, but its ineptitude gives it a verisimilitude that makes its nastiness really sting.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1308

Census Bloodbath: Oh, Let Me Be Your...

Year: 1983

Director: David A. Prior

Cast: Ted Prior, Linda McGill, John Eastman

Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

We've been spending a lot of time at the tail end of 1983 mucking about in the corners for some very off-kilter stuff, but it was still a shock how much of a relief it was to return to the familiar warm embrace of a shot-on-video movie about a group of teenagers drinking, doing impressions, having sex, and being picked off one by one. I'm sure I won't feel this way once I'm in the trenches of the late 80's, but in these early days of video (the very first SOV slasher - according to its publicists at least - is Boardinghouse, and that came out the very same year) it's still almost refreshing to come across something so straightforwardly craven.

I'm trying my best to drive myself mad. Is it working?

Sledgehammer has a story that will be intimately familiar to any slasher enthusiast. Once upon a time, there was an abused kid (Justin Greer) who was locked in a closet so his mom could get it on with a mustachioed schlub in a ratty hotel robe. He (or some random maniac, it's not actually clear) promptly murders them with a sledgehammer.

Ten Years Later, a group of teens have decided that the best thing to do with their hard-earned break from college is to go to this very same house and drink a lot. They have a seance, which seems to resurrect the killer, who is alternately a kid and a giant hulking woodsy madman. The intervening time certainly isn't enough for this child to have gained this kind of mass, especially if he's a long-dead ghost, but I'm going to assume he can change size through the power of his convictions like Jet Jaguar in Godzilla vs. Megalon.

The Meat can be laid out thusly: Chuck (former Chippendales dancer and Playgirl centerfold Ted Prior, who would also team up with his director brother for the vastly superior shitty slasher Killer Workout in 1987) is ripped as fuck but also an enormous asshole, a pair of character traits that there is absolutely no precedent for in human history; Joni (Linda McGill) is his girlfriend who, rightfully, is upset that he proposed to her, backed out of the wedding, and yet insists that she still stay with him and tag along on this terrible vacation where he dumps mustard on her head and then talks to his guy friends about getting a "throbber" from looking at some random girl. This is the 80's and she has short hair, so Joni is of course depicted as an unbearable shrew.

The co-conspirators of this sex crime of a vacation are John (John Eastman), a loutish daddy bear; his girlfriend Mary (Janine Scheer), whose hobbies include being brunette and getting absolutely railed by John; Joey (Steve Wright), the prankster who dies first but not before pretending to die a half dozen times; Carol (Sandy Brooke, who had herself quite the Census Bloodbath run: we'll catch up with her in Bits and Pieces and Terror on Alcatraz), who really wants to have sex with her boyfriend Jimmy (Tim Aguilar), who really doesn't want to have sex with her for reasons she doesn't understand.

This conflict is one of the major arcs of the film, and it is never resolved. Well, it is resolved, but "she asked enough times so he had sex with her eventually" isn't worth all the Big Soap Opera Secret buildup we were given! I'm gonna go ahead and assume he's gay, because it's a free country.

There is a clear supernatural angle here, which mostly just serves to make the film more illegible (both visually and narratively), but it's at least something that prevents it from ending up like Blood Lake, a film that is similarly obsessed with exhaustively detailing every millisecond of the boring party games some white kids get up to. Does it make any sense? Of course not! But when your otherwise boring killer sometimes becomes a child who slaps the shit out of a Chippendales dancer, that's when your movie is getting somewhere!

OK, that's not fair. The killer presents a startlingly large, lanky physicality and also has a pretty stellar mask: a clear plastic jobbie with a painted-on smile that creates an uncanny valley where it almost doesn't seem like a mask at all, even though it certainly can't be a human face.

Say cheese!

The murders this killer enacts, however, generally leave something to be desired. They're a notch above what one might expect from your standard SOV fare (the gashes the sledgehammer creates have a pleasant almost three-dimensional effect, though they're always described with much more visceral language than what we actually see), with one truly terrific sequence (more on that later). But Sledgehammer still relies on silhouette and implication more than anything to get the message across.

At least the use of silhouette shows that director David A. Prior knows a single goddamn thing about film language, because the evidence of the rest of the movie doesn't look good for him. This 85 minute movie is so crammed with needlessly prolonged establishing shots and slow motion filler that it boggles the mind. When the exterior of a barn stays onscreen, unmoving, for 35 seconds, I thought my player had broken. Reader, it hadn't.

When a slow motion, sound and score-free shot of Chuck and Joni walking through a field and giggling with one another went on for a full minute, I was sure it must be a joke. When it continued for another full minute, I was sure it wasn't. When it continued for another twenty-six seconds after that, I realized that I had committed a grave sin in my life and Hell was giving me a free sample.

A broken clock is right twice a day, however, and the ample slow motion really serves the film's one good kill, where the killer inserts a knife through the side of Joey's neck. The intensely drawn out process of this kill forces you to reckon with the unnatural angle of the knife and just how nasty it might feel to be on the receiving end of it. It really sends heebie jeebies crawling up and down your skin. So that's a compliment for Sledgehammer! Don't get used to it!

The movie at least gave me the junk food experience of a formulaic slasher that I've been craving at this point in the project. It's very extremely bad, but that just comes with the territory, dunnit?

Killer: The Killer (Doug Matley)

Final Girl: Joni (Linda McGill)

Best Kill: That knife through the neck gag is very delectable.

Sign of the Times: Jimmy looks like John Oates on mullet pills.

Scariest Moment: A cloud reflected in a window pane looks like a mushroom cloud, which led me to ponder the implications of nuclear proliferation.

Weirdest Moment: While everyone is sitting down to sandwiches, Chuck squirts mustard into Joni's hair. She retaliates by smashing a cream pie into his face. You know, one of those lunch cream pies everyone always has lying around.

Champion Dialogue: "A seance, you know, talking to ghosts and goblins, raising the dead, stuff like that."

Body Count: 7

1. Mom's Lover is sledgehammered in the back of the head.
2. Mom is sledgehammered.
3. Joey is stabbed through the side of the neck.
4. Carol has her neck snapped.
5. Jimmy is sledgehammered in the chest.
6. John is stabbed in the back.
7. Mary is stabbed to death.

TL;DR: Sledgehammer is at least delivering the bare minimum of what it needs to be a slasher, but it's still some pretty gnarly shot-on-video trash.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1288

Fright Flashback: The Eternal Grinding Of The Hollywood Machine

Welcome back to Fright Flashback, where every week until the end of summer we will visit an older horror film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to an upcoming new release. This week we are anticipating Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, the fifth of the seemingly endless Mission: Impossible movies. In celebration, we'll be revisiting Slumber Party Massacre III, another late sequel in a franchise with a mystifying number of entries.

Year: 1990

Director: Sally Mattison

Cast: Keely Christian, Brittain Frye, 

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

The Slumber Party Massacre franchise is an alarming combination of fascinating and frustrating: In short, it is a Roger Corman production. The original Slumber Party Massacre was written as a feminist pastiche of the genre, but filmed totally straight, leaving it clever but muzzled and ladled with a steam helping of nudity in levels heretofore unseen this side of the “Adults Only” curtain. Slumber Party Massacre II drops the parody angle but adds a heavy dose of Krueger-ific dreamscapes and a rock ‘n roll killer that noodles tunes on his guitar (complete with nifty drill bit attachment) before mowing down pillow fighting co-eds, one of whom is the little sister of the original survivor’s neighbor. Hey, it makes more sense than the Terminator coming back as a good guy. Sequels are tough.

Slumber Party Massacre III throws its lot wholeheartedly in with the rest, featuring authentic female behaviors in an almost neoreliast, documentary-like fashion, including spontaneous double stripteases, cookie dough finger licking, and the like. That’s all fine and dandy, really. I love me some unabashed tawdriness in a film. Not everything has to be Gone With the Wind. But in a franchise with such a strong subtextual core – the killer’s drill represents his penis, his killings are psychosexual release, and his death is castration - being saddled with such a abundance of shallow exploitation seems disingenuous. The real clincher though, is that this terminally exploitative franchise has been directed and written by women from the start, the only slasher series in existence to do so.

Being a feminist slasher blogger is like trying to hug a cactus.

Slumber Party Massacre III tells the story of – you guessed it – the 1986 NATO summit. Just kidding. It’s about, of all things, a slumber party. After a fun day of volleyball at the beach (this film very explicitly takes place in the coastal town of Playa Vista – one thing I love about this franchise is that it makes no attempts to hide its (cheap) California roots – it feels like home), a buxom group of guys and gals prepares for the night of their lives. For many of them, it will be their last. 

Let’s Meet the Meat, shall we? There’s Jackie (Keely Christian), the girl hosting the party while her parents are out of town looking at real estate; Frank (David Lawrence), her new boyfriend who looks like a Play-Doh statue of Sam Smith; Tom (David Kriegel), a schlub who sucks at volleyball; Susie (Maria Claire), who has low enough standards to overlook Tom’s total lack of personality; Maria (Maria Ford of the arthouse classic Stripped to Kill II: Live Girls), who looks like Elvira but more corpse-like and with a bigger wig, and has a thing for men over 50; assorted light and dark Meat, overstuffed; and Juliette (Lulu Wilson), who I would call the “slut” character if that title hadn’t already been claimed by literally everybody else.

As the party goes on, the attendees begin to get picked off one by one (and then all at once) by a killer in a clear mask brandishing a power drill. Could it be the creepy lurker, credited only as Weirdo (Yan Birch), who wears a black gi and a hideous blonde goatee that makes me want to break some Entourage DVDs in half, who found the house thanks to an address book that Jackie left at the beach for some inscrutable reason? Or is it the creepy neighbor Morgan (Michael Harris), who spies on the girls with a telescope, walks through unlocked doors at random, peruses anatomy textbooks in his downtime, and who clearly attended the Creepy Suspect seminar of the raw meat-eating Orville Ketchum from Sorority House Massacre II?

Or maybe it’s one of the newcomers to the party: Duncan (David Greenlee), the nerdy outcast who has been shunned by the group, and Ken (Brittain Frye of Hide and Go Shriek), the too-perfect hunk who Juliette met at the beach, whose ex-cop uncle just mysteriously committed suicide.

Also his name makes Ken doll jokes suspiciously easy.

The most striking thing about Slumber Party Massacre III is that for a crappy direct-to-video slasher sequel it actually serves up a pretty decent mystery for a good chunk of the time. This is an entirely new feature. In the first two films, there is absolutely no question that the murders are being perpetrated by Russ Thorn and… Weird Elvis Guy. So it’s doubly unexpected when this DTV 1990 flick with the dialogue about hips and thighs and Barbie commercial performances manages to keep you on the hook for so long. And the mask is genuinely creepy, too! Halfway between The Purge and Alice, Sweet Alice, it’s a slick little number that has no business being anywhere near a dunghill like this.

At least this film is honoring the franchise tradition of staunchly defying black or white categorization. But we’re here to attempt to review this rat’s nest, so let’s step back and take a look at the facts:

• Slumber Party Massacre III is the worst Slumber Party Massacre movie.

The law of diminishing returns strikes again. Never a big budget franchise, this films seems to have been made for less than the cost of a routine nipple reduction surgery (at least, circumstantial evidence seems to prove that this is so), with a series of kills that are either goreless or intimately repetitive, presumably so they could reuse the same prosthetic over and over again.

• Slumber Party Massacre III is not scary.

Well-crafted scares require a well-crafted, well, anything. Beyond an attack in a car that introduces the drill via the rearview mirror and stages the killing pretty explicitly as a penetrative sexual act, there is an utter lack of style evident in the film. Non sequitur dialogue and bland medium shots smash into one another at regular intervals, occasionally combining serendipitously into something borderline coherent.

• Slumber Party Massacre III is still… kind of good.

Damn it!

The profoundly vexing thing is that the frequently bad-good campy charms sometimes (though very rarely) shade into genuinely good-good territory. Now what am I supposed to do with that? In addition to the aforementioned first act mystery (which is no Agatha Christie but keeps you guessing for longer than most rote hack ‘n slash whodunits), there are some laugh-out-loud comic relief moments that betray this film’s buried parodic pedigree. I’ll only spoil one of these for you: Frank wants to go check out the basement, but Jackie urges him to take Duncan’s fireplace poker with him.

“Actually, these are tongs.”

OK, maybe you had to be there. But the fact remains that this film is actually a half-decent slumber party flick. You and your friends can place bets on the murderer, shiver (but not too much) at the masked driller killer, laugh yourselves silly at the wooden performances and genuine humor, and shout at dumb characters to not go in the basement when there’s an open sliding glass door twelve feet from you, ya dipstick! And thought the low budget prevents the kills from spilling more than a thimble or so of blood, there’s some extravagantly cheesy compensation, including someone being stabbed with a swordfish and a particularly clever death involving the house’s “For Sale” sign.

SPOILERS PEPPER THE REMAINDER OF THIS REVIEW!

Of course, Slumber Party Massacre III still isn’t a good film, as the entirety of the third act labors tirelessly to prove. The killer turns out to be Ken, which is interesting in its own right (the handsome, unassuming killer brings Psycho to mind – plus I like to think of it as backlash against the yuppiefied 80’s), but Frye plays psychosis like a six-year-old having a temper tantrum, and his implied, undernourished molestation backstory gets too dark too quick. After he reveals himself, there are still a good five or six girls still alive, and he begins chasing them around the house in a scene that begins exciting but rapidly deteriorates into a sloppy Caligula of idiocy.

The girls scuttle right past one another as they bleed to death, refusing to render aid or exit through the unblocked front door. Time endlessly unspools as scene after scene ticks by of girls hiding, smashing lamps over Ken’s head, then practically handing his drill back to him and starting it all over again. It’s like the final scene of Halloween, only Jamie Lee Curtis has been lobotomized and it’s played simultaneously on five different screens like one of those a cappella YouTube videos.

Nothing can take away the surprising quality and fun of the first half of Slumber Party Massacre III, but its third act can damn sure try. With some proper editing, this film could have been just as memorable as its wacky brethren, but as it stands, it’s still one big hunk of crap that I can’t say I’m sorry I saw. This unknowable, ineffable franchise is finally finished. It’s been a bumpy ride, but certainly a wild one.

Killer: Ken (Brittain Frye)

Final Girl: Jackie Cassidy (Keely Christian)

Best Kill: Juliette is electrocuted when a vibrator is tossed in the tub. It’s not even hers. She’s borrowing it.

Sign of the Times: Jackie’s jeans have a higher proportion of patches on them than actual denim.

Scariest Moment: The masked killer pursues the Pizza Girl (Marta Kober of Friday the 13th Part 2) down a moonlit street.

Weirdest Moment: After Tom complains that his ankles hurt sometimes, Ken chainsaws his Achilles tendons, admonishing, “Never ever admit your weaknesses.” Somehow, I feel like pretty much everyone has a weakness to being chainsawed in the ankles.

Champion Dialogue: “If you can’t stop your parents from moving, why don’t you just move in with us? My mom wouldn’t notice. She’s going through menopause.”

Body Count: 11; I’m not counting Tom, because unless he bled out through the ankles, he sure as patoot didn’t die.

1. Sarah is drilled through the back.
2. Michael is stabbed through the chest with a For Sale sign.
3. Pizza Girl is drilled in the gut.
4. Juliette is electrocuted with a vibrator.
5. Weirdo is stabbed in the mouth with a swordfish.
6. Duncan is slashed across the stomach with a drill.
7. Frank dies from being hit in the face somehow.
8. Janine is drilled in the gut.
9. Maria is drilled in the gut.
10. Diana is stabbed to death.
11. Ken is drilled in the gut.

TL;DR: Slumber Party Massacre III is a bad-good movie with more than occasional glimmers of brilliance.
Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 1837
Reviews In This Series
The Slumber Party Massacre (Jones, 1982)
Slumber Party Massacre II (Brock, 1987)
Slumber Party Massacre III (Mattison, 1990)

Mary Lou Too

Year: 1990
Director: Ron Oliver, Peter R. Simpson
Cast: Tim Conlon, Cyndy Preston, Courtney Taylor
Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Have you ever seen somebody with such a terrible haircut you wonder what prompted them to get it in the first place? Has that haircut ever been made of lime green Jello with gummy snakes swimming around in it playing miniature saxophones? Well this movie is a little bit like that.

Prom Night III: The Last Kiss marks a less than venerable Canadian institution's descent into Direct to Video Hell, and with the concurrent drop in quality came a burst of incoherent colors and shapes that some mad intern seemingly decided to convert into a screenplay.

I know this opener makes literally no sense, but I just needed to get you in the right mindset to think about this movie.

Prom Night III starts off with as much normalcy as it can muster, opening with a singularly bland title card. It's literally just the name of the movie in plain white font. They really broke the bank on that one. And then. And then.

We are transported to some sort of Prom Hell Dimension where chained zombies do the can-can. Mary Lou files through her shackles and escapes, zooming through the halls of Hamilton High in a giddy Steadicam sequence straight out of Evil Dead that proves that these movies weren't quite done strip-mining other people's horror properties.

She lures a janitor into a boiler room (Phew, we're back to ripping off Nightmare. I'm glad they left Evil Dead well enough alone) with a juke box of all things and steps into the light revealing... she's not the same Mary Lou from before. Cassidy and I cry tears of sorrow. This Mary Lou looks like a cardboard cutout and talks like one too. No life. No joy. Only anguish and pain forever and ever.

The eighth circle of Hell is the eternal duckface.

I apologize for the low quality of my screengrabs, but the movie is very low quality.

Anyway, she blows up the janitor's pacemaker and says "Mama always said I'd be a heartbreaker." Here it is, folks. The Prom Night series has finally gotten so desperate and strapped for ideas that we've reached the Quipping Point. You see, this film is a horror comedy, but what attempts to pass for comedy is usually downright abysmal, while the funniest moments can be leached from unintentional terribleness. 

In actuality, it's totally my kind of movie.

Mary Lou Maloney is the only returning character in the entire five movie franchise, if you can even call her that. Mary Lou is virtually unrecognizable from her previous incarnation, both in looks/performance as I mentioned earlier, and in overall motivation and, well, everything that makes a character. Instead of wanting to be prom queen and bandying about her lady parts, she's content with stalking a cute boy and channeling late period Krueger.

And you thought I was kidding.

Young Alex Grey (Tim Conlon) is your typical average American* teen (he has a monologue to this effect that actually channels the "Christmas sucks" monologue from Gremlins quite favorably). His final year of high school is drawing to a close, and he must decide whether to spend the summer road tripping it up with his best friend Shane (David Stratton) or staying on a farm with his shrewish and needy girlfriend Sarah (Cyndy Preston).
*Remember when I said that Canadian slasher movies liked to pretend they take place in America? Boy you're in for a treat.

Sarah and Alex get into a fight, and at a romantic candlelit drive-thru dinner he admits that he's stressed out because his guidance counselor told him his grades are too terrible to pursue his dream of medical school and he should just learn how to fry burgers now because that's how he's gonna spend the rest of his life. Sarah isn't very helpful because she's the worst, and when he goes back to school to collect his Biology book to study, he encounters Mary Lou in the flesh. Well, ectoplasm.

Like any normal pair of high school-aged strangers, they start making out, ripping an American flag off the wall and boning on top of it while the national anthem plays. America, guys.

Because she's apparently a Na'vi from Avatar who mates for life once they have sex, Mary Lou falls instantly in love with Alex and uses her magic powers to protect him, mostly by killing people who are hurting him, like his Biology teacher who flunks him or the guidance counselor who catches wind of his grades being altered.

The kill scenes are so utterly outlandish and bizarre that it seems like the screenwriter watched A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child and saw the scenes that were relevant to each character taking place on garish setpieces (an anorexic model is fed until she explodes, a comic geek is transformed into a paper drawing and slashed to ribbons) and only took away the setpiece part without realizing they all had something to do with the nature of the character being killed.

Instead of killing the Biology teacher with, say, a ton of animals or some weird hanging skeleton or whatever, she just jams her own weird-ass setpiece in there - in this case an ice cream parlor.

You know, like every Biology classroom has.

She kills the guidance counselor with a Battery Acid Hair Salon Torture Chamber™, shoves an entire 50's-era kitchen into a lab room, and even possesses a Sex Ed video.

The movie continues on like this for a while with Mary Lou killing to Alex's benefit in super ludicrous ways and him burying her victims in the football field, then boning her a little bit more to cheesy saxophone music. There's also a couple jump scares thrown in, almost like they think this is a horror movie.

The movie ends at a prom, when Alex finally realizes he should stop having people killed and breaks up with Mary Lou, who seeks revenge. The prom part is mostly only there because they must have realized the title of the movie and decided they had to include one in there somewhere. Although the ending is a solid ten minutes too long at least, there is a comic relief cop (Brock Simpson) who is the only element of the movie that's intentionally funny that lands at all. So hats off to him, a two time veteran of the franchise. What a depressing distinction.

Although I guess things could be worse.

Prom Night III is the cheapest movie yet in the series and it wears that badge proudly. The DVD I was watching was clearly a bad VHS transfer with weird fuzz that obscured the image from time to time, and it's not even the actual film. The DVD is a ripped copy of the edited for TV movie that censors some of the language and nudity, neutering an already very uneven film.

The behind-the-camera work is particularly shoddy and anonymous, and I get the feeling the sound department entertained themselves by playing a private game called Boom Mike Apocalypse. I swear, there was a boom at the top of half the frames. The ones that weren't obscured by other means, at least. One shot has a small black cloth diagonally jutting through the top of the screen.

It's not well made. It's not scary. It's not funny. In fact, it's so dizzyingly incoherent that I can barely write about it without descending into primitive madness. But in spite of its massive problems, the careless low budgetry of the film lends it a vibrancy and life it wouldn't otherwise have, and the terrible acting paired with the cheesy quipping and inscrutable kill scenes all add up to a tremendously wonderful B-Movie masterwork.

Killer: Mary Lou Maloney (Courtney Taylor)

Final Girl: Sarah Monroe (Cyndy Preston) with Alex Grey (Tim Conlon)

Best Kill: Alex's biology teacher is stabbed with ice cream cones, gets an egg beater to the face, then is split open and filled with bananas, cherries, various flavors of ice cream, and miniature American flags, accompanied by the Yankee Doodle song. Seriously, guys. We're in America. We can agree aboat that.

Sign of the Times: The word "daddy-o."

Scariest Moment: I'm sorry, I don't understand the question.

Weirdest Moment: When Alex calls his parents on the pay phone at school, they sound like they're speaking in simlish. This is hilarious, and the turning point when you realize this movie has zero hope of getting any better.

Champion Dialogue: "Firstly, you really gotta stop killing people."

Body Count: 9

1. Jack is electrocuted by a jukebox.
2. Mr. Walker is stabbed with ice cream cones and gets a blender in the face.
3. Ms. Richards is locked in a hair dryer and drenched in battery acid. 
4. Andrew is impaled with a football drill.
5. Shane's heart is ripped out of his chest.
6. Policeman #1 is electrocuted.
7. Policeman #2 is electrocuted.
8. Leonard is hung with magnetic tape.
9. Sarah gets punched through the chest.

TL;DR: Prom Night III: The Last Kiss is batsh*t insane, and I love it.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1531

Reviews In This Series
Prom Night (Lynch, 1980)
Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (Pittman, 1987)
Prom Night III: The Last Kiss (Oliver/Simpson, 1990)
Prom Night IV: Deliver Us From Evil (Borris, 1992)
Prom Night (McCormick, 2008)