Census Bloodbath: Xenophobia

Year: 1980

Director: Greyson Clark

Cast: Jack Palance, Martin Landau, Tarah Nutter

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

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

We've got a Crazy Ralph and everything!

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

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

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

It really sends a shiver down the spine, dunnit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Killer: Alien (Kevin Peter Hall)

Final Girl: Sandy (Tarah Nutter)

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

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

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

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

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

Body Count: 9

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

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

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1211

Life Finds A Way

Year: 1993

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Sam Neill, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum

Run Time: 2 hours 7 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

This review is an epic adventure two years in the making. You see, back when I was first starting my blog in 2013, it was right around the time that Jurassic Park was re-released in theaters in 3D. During that time, I was still using my training wheels. I was still transitioning from my cruddy, Tumblr-based format, and it would be a couple months before I made the kamikaze commitment to pen a review of every movie I watched.

Unfortunately, a lot fell through the cracks, though it did lead to some very strange and insightful articles that are far from disappointing. Anyway, this all comes back to me sitting in that dark theater, re-experiencing Jurassic Park for the first time since childhood on the big screen. All big, puffed-up talk about Spielberg and popcorn blockbusters and the rise of the film school generation aside, that is the kind of experience that you can’t fail to be profoundly affected by. You wanna know why? I’m just gonna say it, professionalism be damned: Jurassic Park is freaking awesome. And I’m sorry I didn’t find the time to review this back then.

Yes, it has a brain in its head, yes, it’s marvelously composed and shot, and yes, the computer imagery is revolutionary, but before we get down to brass tacks, let’s take a moment to step back and look at the big picture that those tacks are pinning up.

Jurassic Park is freaking awesome.

Of course, Jurassic Park has the audacity to open straight onto its very worst scene: A tragically silly raptor attack littered with an uncomfortable profusion of extreme close-ups of mouths. But the effect of that front-loading means that it’s only uphill from there, and between this scene and the film’s grand finale, that slope is like Mount Frickin’ Everest.

When the movie settles down into its plot proper, we learn several things. John Hammond (Richard Attenborough) is a man with a dream. And a bank account that would make Donald Trump weep tears of liquid gold. His life’s ambition is to create an unforgettable theme park populated with live, cloned dinosaurs on the South American island Isla Nubar. When his investors demand a thorough inspection of the site before opening it to the public, they call in prominent mathematician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum). 

For his defense, Hammond brings in famed archaeologist Alan Grant (Sam Neill) and his wife/girlfriend/general long-term commitment person, the paleobotanist Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern). To his dismay, his guests don’t want to play on his elaborately-designed rides, rather preferring to marvel at the science behind the cloning and discuss just how dubious an idea it is to toss kids onto an island with a herd of hungry velociraptors.

Right on cue, Hammond’s grandchildren – Tim (Joseph Mazzello) and Lex Murphy (Ariana Richards) arrive. Together with the inspection team, they set out on a jeep tour of the park that goes horribly wrong when a bit of subterfuge by disgruntled employee Dennis Nedrey (wayne Knight – Hello, Newman) causes the gates to malfunction, setting the ravenous dinos on the rampage. Dr. Grant finds himself stranded with the kids and, in the process of escorting the little buggers across the island, begins to shake his firm resolve against ever having one, because Steven Spielberg.

Also, Laura Dern could teach Bryce Dallas Howard a thing or two about sensible footwear in survival situations.

At its core, Jurassic Park is an astounding act of creation. Combining top dollar animatronic effects supervised by SFX superstar Stan Winston with an extremely clever, tastefully discreet use of nascent CGI technology, Jurassic Park brings prehistoric mayhem to impossible life. Computer graphics were about as sophisticated as a Nintendo game back in 1993, but by using them to augment brilliant practical effects and disguising the biggest deficiencies beneath the cover of night, the film holds up mind-bogglingly well. The dinosaurs here have weight and autonomy bestowed upon them thanks to the tender, loving care of the filmmakers, making Jurassic World’s collection of pixels look like a kids’ cartoon. 

Jurassic Park is ultimately a celebration of what technology can achieve* when it’s applied with some good, old-fashioned elbow grease. And that’s the thing about the film that makes it such an enduring classic: Yes, it’s an enormous popcorn spectacle, but the showstopping effects are generously ladled over what is already a terrifically solid film qua films.

*Ironically, the story is staunchly anti-science, but that’s more Michael Crichton’s fault than anything.

I would say that the movie would be just as good without the dinosaurs, but even I know that would be going at least a smidge too far.

Beneath the wondrous layer of dino mayhem, Jurassic Park is an appallingly clever film. The subtext (which is largely about chaos theory and how any manmade attempts to alter the course of nature are bound to go horribly wrong) manifests itself in a variety of subtle, layered ways, many of which are achieved with the help of ace cinematographer Dean Cundey (who also did Halloween and everything else that matters). In moments like a computerized DNA pattern being projected onto the rough, scaly skin of a hunting velociraptor, or the billowing “when Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth” banner that flutters from above a roaring T-Rex, Jurassic Park is both rapturously beautiful and visually inventive.

And this rampant creativity doesn’t just stop at frame composition. The film’s action sequences are among the best ever committed to celluloid, ranging from the unbearably tense (the raptors in the kitchen), the heroically cool (the jeep crashing down the cliff face), and the intoxicatingly intense (the kids fighting to keep the jeep’s glass ceiling between them and the T-Rex’s slavering jaws). All this cinematic carnage is peppered with instantly iconic shots that any movie producer would sell their left lung just to have one of, pushed over the edge with bombastic glee by John Williams’ brassy, epic score.

After all this time, we’re still trying to break through the glass ceiling.

Now here’s the part where the imperfections hiding in the shadows come out to pounce now that our guard is down. This was a film made in the early 90’s after all, and the only unquestionably perfect thing to come out of that entire period is me. As such, Jurassic Park hails from the early days of home computers, in which thriller directors found endless captivation in lavishly depicting people clicking through blocky filed systems.

But there’s one thing that betrays the film’s 1993 vintage above all else…

Hold onto your butts.

That’s right, Samuel L. Jackson is cast as the resident computer nerd. Pulp Fiction was a year away, so nobody could quite figure out what to do with him. This is mystifying, but it’s also a good segue into the acting, another unfortunate victim of the stranglehold of the 90’s. Along with a slate of malnourished characters that are more broad strokes than nuance, there are wild peaks and valleys in the film's overall performance quality. Attenborough, Dern, and – shockingly – Knight make it through without a scratch, but Sam Neill is a little too puffed-up, the kids are a little too shrill and wheedling, and I hate to admit it, but I’ve never uh… been um- a huge fan of –uh… Jeff Goldblum.

I appreciate that his acting style emulates the natural processes and rhythms by which actual real people formulate their speech. I really do. But if I had a nickel for every godforsaken syllable he uses to infinitely prolong his (admittedly well-crafted) dialogue, I’d make more than his entire salary. Plus residuals.

But aside from these slight speed bumps, Jurassic Park is and will always remain an indefatigable classic of popcorn cinema. It’s a superbly crafted work of art with a beating human heart hidden beneath its shining, high-tech exterior. And, after my next entry in this marathon, we’ll find out once and for all if quality blockbusters do move in herds.

TL;DR: Jurassic Park is an epic, delightful popcorn adventure.

Rating: 9/10

Word Count: 1359
Reviews In This Series
Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1993)
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1997)
Jurassic Park III (Johnston, 2001)
Jurassic World (Trevorrow, 2015)
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (Bayona, 2018)

Census Bloodbath: Haddonfield Memorial

For our Scream 101 episode about this film, click here.

Year: 1981

Director: Rick Rosenthal

Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasance, Lance Guest

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Sequels are tough. Especially for runaway hits that happen to be ruthlessly simple, auteuristic horror flicks that left half of its cast in body bags.

Getting John Carpenter to do things is tough. Even at a young age, he seemed to have perfected the "grumpy old man" schtick. So when the time came for his contractual obligation for Halloween II to kick in, he reluctantly agreed to pen the screenplay. But, aided by his partner Debra Hill and a six pack of beer, he tossed together a script with exactly none of the slickness and nuance of his 1978 masterpiece.

What it did have, however, was a heavy influence from 1980's Friday the 13th and its endless cadre of clones from the months following. Between 1978 and 1981, the genre had received a major facelift, and Carpenter's biggest strength was in his acknowledgment of that fact. Instead of turning in another moody, low key horror film, he turned his magnum opus into a glittering example of a 80's slasher crud.

The most difficult thing about viewing the film with open arms is separating it from its genuinely thrilling forebear. But if you can clear that road block, Halloween II is a sweet holiday treat.

Like a Nerds Rope or something, not those gross Malted Milk Balls.

Halloween II picks up immediately after the original film, with Final Girl extraordinaire Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) being sent off to the local hospital following the massacre of her best friends at the hands of escaped madman Michael Myers (Dick Warlock, also of Pumpkinhead). While the Myers-obsessed Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) continues to chase the masked figure around the town of Haddonfield and the heavily sedated Laurie strikes up a tentative romance with cute ambulance paramedic Jimmy (Lance Guest), Myers stalks and kills the staff of the eerily empty hospital while attempting to get another crack at his escaped victim.

The film never for a single second escapes the looming shadow of Halloween. For all its decentness, especially compared to the crop of its 1981 peers, it's hard not to note "wow, the plot point that Laurie is Michael's long-lost sister really diminishes the effectiveness of the original without actually informing any of the narrative in the sequel," or "wow, I really wish they hadn't introduced the Celtic ceremony of Samhain in this one, which would have eliminated some of the druid nonsense in the later sequels," or even "wow, John Carpenter does not handle his beer well."

I'm gonna give it to you straight, here. Halloween II is not a great slasher film. It has a slapdash plot at best, supported by a series of fun, if not particularly imaginative kills. Such is the law of diminishing returns. But at all times it is a good slasher film. Such is the law of having freaking Dean Cundey as your cinematographer. (For those not in the know, Cundey is the man behind the original Halloween, Jurassic Park, Back to the Future, Apollo 13, and every other film on your dad's DVD shelf.)

As Myers stalks and slashes a variety of thinly etched-out nursing staff, Cundey soaks the goings-on in spooky Halloween atmosphere, lighting the slickly sinister hospital hallways with creeping, glistening shadows and the occasional splash of vivid, saturated color to shake up any visual complacency. It's gloomy and organic in an impossibly effective way, considering how difficult it is to create variation in a hospital interior. Halloween II is by far the best-shot slasher of the year and that is no small achievement considering that subgenre filmmakers were still actually trying in 1981. 

The bone-deep genre fatigue wouldn't begin to set in until 1982, when 43 of the godforsaken things squirmed their lumpen selves out of the womb of cinema.

It's a gory, exploitative hunk of cheese, but thanks to Cundey and - to a lesser extent - Carpenter, it's the aged brie of The Burning rather than the Kraft Singles of, say, Bloody Birthday. By far the most interesting parts of Halloween II stem from its departures from the original, engaging with the new slasher formula and highlighting just how much had changed in the genre in a few short years.

That's not to say it's better, but as an integral cog of slasher history it's fascinating. The classic minimalist score is spruced up with some truly challenging Flock of Seagulls synths, the cop character that replaces Sheriff Brackett (Charles Cyphers, who was presumably too busy to appear in more than one scene) looks like a cross between Dolph Lundgren and a frying pan, there's more gore and a higher body count, a Spring-Loaded Cat scare, and everything explodes. There's even an appearance by Dana Carvey in a small role! It's like the vanilla ice cream cone of Halloween was dipped in the decadent chocolate coating of the 1981 slashers.

I'm making a lot of food puns. Maybe I should eat breakfast.

There are still some decently scary moments while Myers stalks some unwary staffers up and down the preternaturally empty hallways, but for the most part the 80's aesthetic plays it a little too hot and heavy with Haddonfield's favorite serial killer. He is shown in full far too often and far too early, diminishing his power as a mysteriously evil force of nature. And honestly, Dick Warlock can't hold a candle to the original Nick Castle performance, rendering the character a tad too mundane for my liking.

Actually, all across the board the performances are diminished. Jamie Lee Curtis' powerhouse turn as Laurie is diluted through the multitude of Meat as the cardboard characters sneak out, hook up, and get knocked down. In fact, Laurie Strode, the supposed main character only gets about 25 minutes of screen time in the entire movie, during which she is swallowed beneath the most hideously waxy broom-bristle wig I've ever had the displeasure of watching. 

And I haven't done the math on this, but I'm pretty sure Myers could beat her total run time by almost half. When your villain is onscreen longer than your heroine, you know somebody beat too many eggs into the batter.

Seriously though, I might be starving to death.

So JLC is out of commission, wasted on a character who is heavily sedated for the bulk of her already truncated appearance, Myers is bland, and even Donald Pleasance's reliable Dr. Loomis has sprung a leak. The character himself seems to be getting tired of his incessant monologuing about the pure evil and yadda yadda yadda of Michael Myers. But hey. It's not the original film. The acting is still about 800 degrees better than the average slasher. It just feels so much more egregious because of the gold it follows.

Halloween II has the kind of kills that would revive any garden variety lackluster slasher: hypodermic needles, hot tubs, scalpels, and all sorts of creative misuses of hospital implements. The effects themselves look a tad too "accident at the acrylic paint factory," but they're jolly good campy fun.

Honestly, the biggest issue with Halloween II is that it's scatterbrained. It can't focus on its main characters, it gives too much credit to its killer (who works best as a haunting metaphor rather than an active presence), and it's a little too chintzy to earn the truly wonderful talent behind the camera. But hey! It did provide the song "Mr. Sandman" to the franchise's soundtrack, so it's definitely not the worst thing that could have happened to Haddonfield's finest.

No, that would be the Rob Zombie remake, but we'll get there my pretties. Unfortunately.

Killer: Michael Myers (Dick Warlock)

Final Girl: Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis)

Best Kill: Ben Tramer is hit with a cop car and slammed into a nearby van, which then explodes, lighting him on fire. The best part is that this is the guy that Laurie said she had a crush on in the first film.

Sign of the Times: The way Michael Myers learns of Laurie's location is that a kid walks by him carrying a ghetto blaster turned to the news.

Scariest Moment: Michael Myers slowly appears behind Janet after she discovers Dr. Mixter's body.

Weirdest Moment: Apparently Michael Myers broke into an elementary school just to make a crayon drawing and stab it, then write an ancient Irish word on the board for kicks.

Champion Dialogue: "Amazing Grace, come sit on my face."

Body Count: 10

1. Alice is stabbed in the chest.
2. Ben Tramer is hit with a cop car and burns to death. 
3. Mr. Garrett is hit in the head with the claw end of a hammer.
4. Bud is garroted.
5. Karen is drowned and burned in a boiling hot tub.
6. Dr. Mixter is stabbed in the eye with a hypodermic needle.
7. Janet is stabbed in the temple with a hypodermic needle.
8. Mrs. Alves is drained of her blood.
9. Jill is stabbed in the back with a scalpel.
10. Marshall has his throat slit. 

TL;DR: Halloween II is a scattershot slasher that's too generic to live up to the power of its predecessor, but still pretty fun in its own right.

Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 1612
Reviews In This Series
Halloween (Carpenter, 1978)
Halloween II (Rosenthal, 1981)
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (Wallace, 1982)
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (Little, 1988)
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (Othenin-Girard, 1989)
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (Chappelle, 1995)
Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (Miner, 1998)
Halloween: Resurrection (Rosenthal, 2002)
Halloween (Zombie, 2007)
Halloween II (Zombie, 2009)
Halloween (Green, 2018)

Halloween Kills (Green, 2021)