Census Bloodbath: Beauty School Escapee

Year: 1982

Director: Alan J. Levi

Cast: Donna Wilkes, Richard Jaeckel, Frankie Avalon

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The slasher genre has featured plenty of celebrities in its time, but it usually only intersects with stars at either end of their career. Big shot celebrities like George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, and Johnny Depp got their start in the slasher genre before moving onto bigger, occasionally better things. And then we get to the other end, where older stars like Farley Granger, Ernest Borgnine, Hal Holbrook, Rod Steiger, and Lauren Bacall show up to collect a paycheck once Hollywood isn't knocking down their door.

Even knowing this, let me tell you that seeing Frankie Avalon's name in the credits here is like getting a bucket of cold water dumped on your head. Sure, the timing was right. Even though he's best known these days for his cameo in Grease, the reason he was invited was because he was a venerable icon who could give that 1950's-set movie its retro cred rather than because he was a hot ticket name in 1978. But still.

He's as shocked as I am.

So here's what we're dealing with. When Paul Foley (Frankie Avalon) was a child, his father killed his adulterous mother and then himself, right after crafting his son a wooden instrument that is called a flute by every character but is pretty clearly an ocarina. His father only ever taught him one song (the lullaby "Go to Sleep Little Baby") and now that he's a grown man that's still all he can play. Oh, he's also in an insane asylum for unclear reasons. Probably because he's Pure Evil, because he escapes and immediately starts murdering everybody in his path.

One of those unlucky people in his path is Marion (Donna Wilkes of Schizoid), a high school student who is in a leg brace following a car accident caused by her alcoholic father Frank (Richard Jaeckel), who has only become more indolent and abusive since then, harassing her at every moment and turning every minute conversation into a harangue about defending her virginity from her fisherman boyfriend Joey (William Kirby Cullen). She and Joey are planning to run away to Portland, Oregon but before that things are getting more and more difficult. After a receiving a blood transfusion sourced from the local asylum, she is having terrible nightmares where she witnesses Paul's murders, and when he begins to stalk her around town, she's having a hard time separating dreams and reality.

"That can't be Frankie Avalon, I must be dreaming!"

Blood Song had the budget for both Frankie Avalon and a third act showdown in an operating sawmill, so I'm going to go ahead and assume there was some money behind it, but it looks like a typical microbudget slasher and certainly has the poster of one, so I bet it wasn't much. There's a lot of chintzy work here, especially with the awkward push-in close-ups on her eye that tunnel out into flashes of the killer's actions.  Or the electronic score that sounds like two cats fucking on a synth keyboard. Or the kills that aren't particularly bloody, though they do get a lot of use out of their axe wound prosthetic. But within those pretty tight parameters, Blood Song is actually extraordinarily competent. We're full of surprises today!

The film succeeds in a lot of areas where its peers fail. Beginning with the fact that it actually manages to drum up a little tension every now and again. Sure, the scenes that openly ape Halloween are just surfing in John Carpenter's wake, but there's one scene in particular with a hitchhiker that keeps you constantly on your toes whether Paul is going to profess his love or brutally murder her, sustaining that tension for a good two or three minutes. That's two or three minutes more tension than anything that something like - say - Blood Lake could deliver.

And despite the killer's motive being absolute dumb movie horseshit (His dad killed himself so now he's a murderer who kills anyone who makes fun of his flute? Psychologically sound, for sure), his calling card of snatches of flute music drifting along the wind is actually quite something. I do wish they did something more fully fleshed-out with Marion's psychic connection to the killer, but let's not ask too much of Blood Song.

Let's just sit here and nurse the fact that I can still enjoy anything in this marathon 180 films deep.

And while we're on the subject, I actually quite like Marion, especially the scenes where we're just hanging out with her and her friends. There's something surprising and satisfying about watching a young woman dealing with a physical disability that makes her vulnerable to the killer, yet who is well-liked, sexually active, and driven to survive by any means possible. A Hollywood studio would never have made that call for the character in 1982.

And this may be faint praise, but I promise it's not damning: the climactic chase sequence is lit properly. That is a luxury you can rarely expect from a slasher movie of this budget and vintage. But in every shot of the heroine running from the killer in the dark, you can see every facial expression, locked door, and improvised weapon that you need to see. It's not just a smudgy black screen with random flecks of color muddily swimming around. I could cry! Also there's a shot that's even kind of beautiful, of a forklift bearing a pallet of wood boards being knocked into a body of water, the machine sinking as the lightweight wood floats up and breaches the surface of the water.

I don't think Blood Song is a movie I would recommend to literally anyone. It just doesn't do enough beyond the exact baseline of not sucking. But coming from someone who is dangerously deep in the weeds on this subgenre, the care and skill put into making it was a real breath of fresh air. It's like a well-built chair. You might not rave about it to your friends, but you've sat in enough uncomfortable chairs to quietly appreciate the craftsmanship.

Killer: Paul Foley (Frankie Avalon)

Final Girl: Marion (Donna Wilkes)

Best Kill: Marion's dad's death, both because he deserves it and Paul really goes to town on him, axing his chest, face, and knee with some showstopping (for the budget) special effects.

Sign of the Times: I don't know what the hell this guy's problem is, but I know I'm more scared of him than the killer.

Scariest Moment: Literally any time Marion's dad speaks.

Weirdest Moment: The film opens with a Tennyson quote for some unfathomable reason.

Champion Dialogue: "I've got a hangover that would make King Kong climb a wall."

Body Count: 9; not including Joey, who is presumably killed offscreen before the final shot.

Wife and

Lover are shot.

Jack shoots himself.

Orderly is strangled.

Driver is axed in the face.

Hitchhiker is garroted with a necklace.

Cathy is killed offscreen.

Frank is axed to death.

Bill is crushed with a forklift.

TL;DR: Blood Song is surprisingly a totally passable obscure weirdo slasher effort.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1208

Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back In The Theater

Year: 1978

Director: Jeannot Szwarc

Cast: Roy Scheider, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton

Run Time: 1 hour 56 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Jaws was bigger than any movie that ever came before it. It splashed onto the cinema scene like a 400-pound Great White shark, and the only surprising thing about the fact that it got a sequel was that it took them three years to make it. One good thing about this is that it allowed Italy time to crank out Orca: the Killer Whale, in which a whale devours a Great White in a show of aquatic horror supremacy (more on that in a bit). The bad thing is, they don’t seem to have spent those three years developing a shark animatronic that would actually work properly.

Bruce Jr. is carrying on the family name of being a massive disappointment.

One thing Jaws 2 has going for it is the return of a lot of the core cast and locations from the original: We pick up off the coast of Amity Island, where two scuba divers are attacked by a Great White shark, which we know more because of the John Williams score than the actual special effects. Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) isn’t alarmed at first, but a sudden spike in disappearances and accidents (including a beached Orca with a huge chunk bitten out of it – zing!) leads him to believe that Amity is once again under siege by a giant shark. Lord knows how he got re-elected, but once again the Mayor (Murray Hamilton) intercedes with his attempts to shut down the beaches on the account of some visiting investors.

This is how Brody’s son Michael (Mark Gruner), now a sexy teen, ends up on an ill-fated sailing expedition with a gaggle of his sexy teen peers and his little brother Sean (Marc Gilpin), who appears to be the exact same age as he was three years ago, eve though Mike has apparently accelerated through puberty like a regular Jack. Time is weird.

Anyway, Brody finds himself in the position of singlehandedly saving his sons and their friends from the ministrations of a ravenous, very pissed-off shark.

Also, it got its face burned in an explosion, because it was almost the 80’s, so SOMETHING had to explode.

You know that thing that happens in the credits of movies where, after the names of the main stars appear, they’ll save time by showing a block of eight to ten names of the lesser actors? There are no fewer than two of those blocks in the opening of Jaws 2, and that speaks to what is perhaps its biggest flaw. The film has already speared as many Jaws actors as possible into returning (including the guy who played Screaming Swimmer and the lady who asked “Are you going to close the beaches”) and yet it still feels the need to cram in a baker’s dozen of horny teens, only four or five of which get any semblance of a personality or even an introduction.

There are a couple horny and loathsome nerds, the mayor’s son, two female cousins, and three or four couples in various combinations, but they live and die in a world that’s almost entirely undisclosed to us. They are but ants, interchangeably suffering at the fins and teeth of Amity’s second largest export. Coming after Jaws’ expert work at imbuing even the minor, one-scene characters with color and inner life, the endless parade of identical slasher-esque teens with floppy hair is a crushing disappointment.

Although, let’s give a warm Census Bloodbath shoutout to Donna Wilkes of 1980’s Schizoid!

There is more to Jaws 2 than the uncomfortable marriage of small town drama and teen horror, but precious little more. While Chief Brody does the old “man who cried shark” soft shoe, he finds himself at the receiving end of some mildly amusing dialogue, and the devastated townsfolk are for the most part well-acted. It’s not a slog to sit through, and if you bob along with your brain turned off, you will make it through to the end just fine.

That’s far from strong praise, but it’s the best I can do. Unlike its titular sea beast, Jaws 2 is pretty toothless. It drops any and all pretense of actually being a horror film (though it does keep the faux-grindhouse ending that cuts to credits with brutal efficiency the second the threat is vanquished), and that tonally flat presentation mauls any sense of tension.

Of course, it doesn’t help that the shark menacing this film’s shores looks downright terrible. Even with the added crutch of a scorch mark across the shark’s face, it rings incredibly false, all emotionless rubber and endlessly gnashing teeth. Unfortunately, director Jeannot Szwarc (of the similarly lauded Supergirl) is no Steven Spielberg, and he flails when he tries to walk the tightrope of suggestion: trying to imply the beast’s size and strength without actually showing it requires an actual vision.

The shark might as well be played by an oven mitt with googly eyes, but the alternative is worse. The shots of people thrashing about in the water are much too wide, exposing the fact that, unless the shark is nibbling on their toes, there’s actually no way a fish that huge is touching the person in the shot. It’s all just desperate artifice without a solid story to hold it all together.

And the villain looks more like a hot dog with teeth than a shark.

Jaws 2 certainly isn’t the worst sequel in the world. At least it’s faithful to the universe it takes place in and the characters who live there (the same could not be said for the likes of the abominable Exorcist II: The Heretic, released just one year prior). Unfortunately, it’s a charmless waste of time. I know Spielberg makes everything look easy, but you wouldn’t think it’d be such a challenge to make a big budget shark attack movie into something that’s actually fun to watch.

TL;DR: Jaws 2 is mildly entertaining but completely fails to even attempt to compete with the excitement of the original Jaws.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1024
Reviews In This Series
Jaws (Spielberg, 1975)
Jaws 2 (Szwarc, 1978)
Jaws 3-D (Alves, 1983)
Jaws: The Revenge (Sargent, 1987)

Census Bloodbath: Scissors, Der Zorn Gottes

If you're new to Census Bloodbath, click here.

Year: 1980

Director: David Paulsen

Cast: Klaus Kinski, Donna Wilkes, Marianna Hill

Run Time: 1 hour 26 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

After some time traveling all the way through to 1984 with my Friday the 13th marathon, let's reel it back in here with the next film, straight outta 1980. This was a unique year for the slasher film because nobody really knew what they were doing yet. The rules hadn't yet been set in stone, and the flicks that came out in the months following the Crystal Lake Massacre were too deep in production at the time of release to reasonably be able to copy Mrs. Voorhees' exploits. That would come, my pretties. That would come.

But in the meantime the slasher film was still on uneven ground, and this film falls in more with the Silent Scream and Don't Answer the Phone features, focused more on plot and characters than elaborate gore effects. In fact, except for the damning aspect that a serial killer is offing women with a pair of scissors, Schizoid could hardly be considered a slasher movie at all.

It regards itself more as a psychological thriller, which is evident in the film's lack of gore (except for one split second shot of a cut on a woman's face, it's absolutely bloodless) as well as its cast. For you see, Schizoid is helmed by the frequent Werner Herzog collaborator Klaus Kinski, a man of no small talent who would certainly see it as an insult to be asked to perform in something as lowly as a slasher picture.

Those Germans, man.

As a result, the film takes itself very seriously, which to be honest isn't a total benefit to Census Bloodbath.

The plot follows recently divorced advice columnist Julie (Marianna Hill) as she receives a series of mysterious and threatening letters cut and pasted from magazines. She is unsettled by this, but she is rebuffed by the police when she requests an investigation. Nobody has actually been harmed by the letter sender, so there's no justification to warrant police action.

Things begin to look up for her case when members of her therapy group begin turning up dead, brutally stabbed to death with scissors like a demented giant's art project. These victims include Sally (Cindy Donlan), who was supposed to leave for Tennessee so nobody noticed she was gone; Rosemary (Kiva Lawrence), who disappears for the entire second act only to be killed in the last half hour; and a woman who is apparently called Pat according to IMDb, but I assure you gets no name in the film. I took to calling her Boobs McGee (Flo Gerrish, aka the Final Girl from Don't Answer the Phone, a movie with a suspiciously similar plot) because there's a scene with her being a topless dancer at a bar that has absolutely zero impact on the film at large.

As the bodies pile up, Julie gets more and more perturbed. And the dramatic upheaval of her personal life certainly isn't making things any easier. She has recently kindled a relationship with her therapist, Dr. Pieter Fales (Kinski) against the objections of his daughter Alison (Donna Wilkes), who hasn't yet come to terms with the death of her mother. And her annoying ex-husband Doug (Craig Wasson who we'll later see in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, one of the actually good Freddy movies) simply won't leave her alone, especially since they work for the same newspaper.

Also creepy plumber Gilbert (Christopher Lloyd aka Doc Freaking Brown) stands in the background being creepy.

You know what else can go 88 miles per hour...

Julie is much more reactionary than your typical Final Girl which is a little disappointing, but she does stick to her guns and get what she wants. Go feminism!

Honestly I don't have a ton to say about this film. It was obvious they were trying to be scary (you'd be surprised how many slasher films seem to forget that's an element of horror) and they were intermittently successful, meaning this is one of the scariest slashers ever made (slashers aren't scary). But for the bulk of it, it's just pretty boring.

The greatest redeeming factor of the film is the interplay between Kinski and Wilkes as an estranged father and daughter. Their chemistry is so strong it burns holes in the film and the scenes they have together sizzle and pop.

For some reason, I can't find a picture of them together without her boobs showing. Screw you too, Google.

There's really a lot of good in this film, it's a shame it's so slow. Alongside its pretty well accomplished actors, it has a uniquely realistic plot and the twists bubble up naturally from the movie's universe so they're totally believable as well as being unexpected. The reveals at the end are a marvel of intricate slasher plotting that are only undone by the sedate finale, in which Kinski walks around an office building for five minutes.

So, maybe not one for the record books, but this slasher has a brain and it's not afraid to use it. I'd much rather rewatch this film than any of the Don't films or even Mother's Day. Schizoid has understandably been forgotten by time, but it perhaps doesn't deserve its fate as much as some of its 1980 brethren.

Killer: [Doug (Craig Wasson)]

Final Girl: Julie (Marianna Hill)

Best Kill: The kills are all the same, but Rosemary's is the best cuz she's in a hot tub.

Sign of the Times: Typewriters and pay phones are both integral to the plot.

Scariest Moment: Sally is chased into an abandoned house off the side of the road.

Weirdest Moment: The doctor has sex with Boobs McGee in a scene that, rather than increasing the mystery, makes everything that much more confusing. Also he never takes his pants off.

Champion Dialogue: "I have felt less terrified in my life."

Body Count: 5; including the killer.

1. Sally is stabbed in the gut with scissors.
2. Boobs McGee is stabbed in the back with scissors.
3. Rosemary is slashed with scissors in a hot tub.
4. A man is stabbed in the back.
5. [Doug is killed somehow. Let me get back to you on that one.]

TL;DR: Schizoid is of a higher class than some of its slasher counterparts, but we're not in this for the class.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1077