Census Bloodbath: Mutilate Me, Daddy

Year: 1984

Director: Buddy Cooper

Cast: Matt Mitler, Ruth Martinez, Bill Hitchcock

Run Time: 1 hour 26 minutes

Plot: The Mutilator follows six bored college students on Fall Break deciding to visit the beachside condo owned by Big Ed (Jack Chatham). The group contains three couples: Ed Jr. (Matt Mitler), a horndog who loves bragging about all his father's hunting trophies perhaps as a blind for his obvious daddy issues, and Pam (Ruth Martinez), a Virgin Who Notices Things Are Slightly Off who just might have a chance at surviving this movie if you catch my drift; Ralph (Bill Hitchcock), a horndog and the resident prankster, and Sue (Connie Rogers), a living breathing woman; and Mike (Morey Lampley) a horndog who loves sex and in his spare time has sex, and Linda (Frances Raines of the same year's Disconnected), who gets along with Mike because they share a keen interest in sex.

Little do they know, but Big Ed harbors a grudge against his son for this one time when he was a kid and he accidentally shot his mother in the back on his father's birthday (it's a long story). He is lurking in the garage and ready to take the first opportunity to use his cornucopia of hunting equipment to turn these lithe young bodies into pincushions.

Analysis: When it comes to slasher films, there are classics like Friday the 13th, Halloween, and Psycho. You know, things even babies have heard of. But once you start to skim the surface of the genre, there is a whole B-tier of what you might call "in-the-know classics." Movies that have a huge reputation, even if it doesn't spread beyond the sphere of horror fans. Things like Sleepaway Camp or The Burning or Slaughter High. The Mutilator is the very last one of those films that I had yet to see, and it's entirely appropriate that it holds that distinction, because I now realize it is the last gasp of the slasher genre as it existed in the early '80s.

Just one month after the release of The Mutilator, A Nightmare on Elm Street would swoop in and resurrect the genre wholesale after it had begun to peter out in late 1983. This, plus the rise of video stores, would send the slasher careening into its Silver Age, but things look a lot different beyond that point, largely because of all the Freddy clones and more supernatural storylines that began popping up around every corner. The Mutilator doesn't know about this and is firmly looking back, planting its flag as a dyed-in-the-wool, meat and potatoes slasher. It has everything: the traumatic event from a decade ago, the annoying virgin who gets to live, the kids partying in an unwelcoming locale, the wide variety of edged weapons... It's even unusually tidy in its presentation of the formula, with an exceptionally easy to parse slate of meat divided evenly into three couples without many extra characters to fiddle around with.

That alone makes The Mutilator go down real smooth. This is a very good thing, because there is plenty to dislike about the film. It boasts a lot of the same flaws as the early classics it emulates, only with an even more threadbare approach to filmmaking. The "kids having fun" sequence, for one thing, is exhausting and spins its wheels for what feels like an entire evening presented in real time as the characters resolutely refuse to just go to bed and chase down their whims like a walk on the beach, a game of Blind Man's Bluff, a peculiar bit of foreplay involving bobbing up and down in a swimming pool that nearly rivals Madman for maddening horny aquatic nonsense, and - oh - maybe just a little more unpacking while we're at it. It doesn't help that this stretch of the film features the most Morey Lampley, and his wooden, booming line deliveries that sound like someone taught a hollow tree to speak and asked it to do an impression of Patrick Star.

The filmmaking is also aggressively mediocre, in ways that even Mr. Sean "just let that flashlight bob in the middle of the black screen for three minutes" S. Cunningham managed to avoid. They clearly learned how to build tension from an IKEA instruction manual, and the lack of mystery around the killer doesn't help. He's just this middle-aged white dude who is visible the whole time. Also, in a transparent effort to hide the seams in the effects, the filmmakers have rendered many of them completely illegible, either keeping the important information exactly out of frame, shredding it to pieces in editing, or drowning it in murky shadow sometimes to the point that even the weapon being used is difficult to parse. 

People will tell you that the film's most memorable kill is its nastiest one - in which a woman gets a giant fishing hook inserted where the sun don't shine. However, in addition to being immensely sleazy in a way the film doesn't really commit to elsewhere, it's one of the most befuddlingly presented sequences in the film, making it difficult to actually parse out what's going on other than the fact that it's fucking gross. Luckily, the other kills in the third act are as a whole cleaner, more legible, and more excitingly conceived (to contrast: the very first body count kill is a drowning that is 1) boring and 2) presented in needless slow motion).

There are kills that I think are better (see Best Kill below for more info, but I am a sucker for a pitchfork) and nasty moments that I think are more effective (see: the dream sequence involving multiple extremely graphic child murders), so that's nice at least. There are also only pleasures that come from the film's soundtrack, including the original song "Fall Break" which is the most lyrically inane and delightful piece of music this side of "The Best Times (Of Our Lives)" from Killer Party. There is also a genuinely terrific moment where the composer incorporates a minor key rendition of "Happy Birthday" to underscore a tragic sequence. 

So, all in all, it's a balance. While there was enough that was frustrating in The Mutilator to prevent me from declaring it a new all-time favorite, it was certainly a breath of fresh air in this run of particularly off-kilter slashers that we have been getting at this point in 1984.

Killer: Big Ed (Jack Chatham)

Final Girl: Pam (Ruth Martinez)

Best Kill: After Pam rams Big Ed into a wall of cinderblocks, she backs up the car to reveal that he has been halved as his torso bloodily separates from the rest of him.

Sign of the Times: I don't think a single person in this film escapes having a sweater wrapped around their shoulders at one point or another.

Scariest Moment: Ralph goes walking on the beach wearing shoes.

Weirdest Moment: At one point, Mike flirts with Linda by undressing her using a pair of pliers.

Champion Dialogue: "Lightning is not one of my favorite things."

Body Count: 7

1. Ed's Mother is shot in the back.
2. Linda is drowned in a swimming pool.
3. Mike is has a running boat motor inserted into his gut.
4. Cop has a fencepost jammed into his face and is then decapitated with a battle axe.
5. Ralph is stabbed in the neck with a pitchfork.
6. Sue is stabbed in the groin with a fishing gaff, then decapitated with a battle axe.
7. Big Ed is slammed into a wall with a car, resulting in him being cut in half.

TL;DR: The Mutilator is reassuringly formulaic, though it only infrequently does much to earn that goodwill.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1284

Census Bloodbath: The Line Is Dead

Year: 1984

Director: Gorman Bechard

Cast: Frances Raines, Mark Walker, Carl Koch

Run Time: 1 hour 22 minutes

Plot: Disconnected follows Alicia (Frances Raines of that same year's The Mutilator), a video store employee in Waterbury, Connecticut who is being haunted by strange noises on her telephone as well as the fact that her twin sister Barbara Ann (also Frances Raines) always sleeps with her boyfriends. After one such indiscretion causes her to break up with Mike (Carl Koch), she begins to go out with the cute nebbish Franklin (Mark Walker), though unbeknownst to her he is in the middle of serial sex murdering his way through half the beautiful women in town.

Analysis: Gorman Bechard is probably the best director with the least aptitude for making movies. Between Disconnected and his 1987 effort Psychos in Love, he has certainly proven that he should definitely procure and maintain a day job and yet both films are nevertheless limitlessly compelling. His existence is meant to provide an imbalance to the "so bad it's good" scale, because his movies are so bad they're bad, but there is a vim and vigor to them that can't be dismissed.

I suppose the right word for his work here really is "interesting." Because of his lack of skill behind the camera (at least in the mid-80's; I cannot speak to the cavalcade of documentaries he has directed in the interim), he keeps falling ass-backward into unusual setups that he would know better than to include if he, well, knew better. His bumpers-down approach to the medium results in scenes that you couldn't possibly have ever seen before, or at least executed in quite the same way, including the bizarrely meta series of documentary confessionals with Carmine Capobianco's (also of Psychos in Love) cop character that are interspersed throughout the project to catch viewers up on the plot. Disconnected actually has quite a similar plot to Psychos in Love, only with one fewer psycho, come to think of it. It also has a lot of its bizarre feints at style, with excess crammed into every frame.

Naturally, there are some elements here that are just bad, including the audio recording in which dialogue is frequently drowned out by the motors of passing cars. There is also one utterly indefensible shot where the sun streaming through the blinds drowns out everything in the frame so strongly that you begin to suspect the film was shot somewhere on the planet Arrakis. However, as I've said, the best moments thrive in that liminal space between "was this intentional?" and "holy shit, what am I looking at?" like the scene that randomly becomes a series of still black-and-white images before abruptly returning back to regular color and motion.

One thing it can't quite capture, unfortunately, is being a proper slasher, but I take what I can get with this project. Another bummer is that Disconnected is only interesting up to a certain point. That point is when the plot ends, but alas the film continues for a solid 22 minutes beyond it. The aggressively needless wheel-spinning of this stapled-on fourth act, which add nothing and conclude nowhere, makes this a considerably less easy film to recommend than Psychos in Love, unfortunately. But if you just brush that under the rug, it's a mighty fine time at the movies.

Killer: Franklin (Mark Walker)

Final Girl: Alicia (Frances Raines)

Best Kill: I guess it's the death of the second victim of Franklin, who is stabbed in bed, but that's because it's the only murder that's actually onscreen.

Sign of the Times: The video store where Alicia works is intoxicatingly early '80s, and I had a lot of fun scoping out the covers on the VHS tapes behind her, which included previous Census Bloodbath productions Mother's Day, Visiting Hours, and Halloween II.

Scariest Moment: The scene where Alicia first meets Franklin is an appropriately creepy moment that any retail person can relate to, where a customer is being weird and absolutely refuses to leave.

Weirdest Moment: After Franklin kills a woman, the camera pans up to a crucifix on his wall, as if we're supposed to be shocked that a Catholic is capable of doing something bad.

Champion Dialogue: "It's a pity those four girls can't eat grinders anymore."

Body Count: 4

1. Woman #1 is killed offscreen.
2. Woman #2 is stabbed to death.
3. Barbara Ann is killed out of frame.
4. Franklin is shot offscreen.

TL;DR: Disconnected is a poorly made, incoherent film, but in a way that is somewhat compelling.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 761