Census Bloodbath: Welcome To The Snake Pit

Year: 1982

Director: Timothy Bond

Cast: Matt Craven, Jack Creley, Helen Hughes

Run Time: 1 hour 17 minutes

Plot: Till Death Do Us Part follows three married couples who have arrived at the isolated mansion of Dr. Sigmund Freed (Claude Jutra) for a weekend of radical couples counseling on the weekend between Good Friday and Easter. The house is run by Dr. Honora Freed (Toby Tarnow) and her mute younger brother Stephen (Dermot Stoker, who was a key grip on Friday the 13th: A New Beginning), who operates a bizarre control room. The couples in question are Dr. Susan (Candace O'Connor) and Robert Craig (James Leach), who are processing the loss of their son; Tony (Matt Craven of Happy Birthday to Me) and Ruth Archer (Rachel Wilkinson), who are trying to get a handle on his addiction to coke; and Wally (Jack Creley of Videodrome) and Edna Kroog (Helen Hughes of Visiting Hours, The Incubus, and The Amityville Curse), who are dealing with the fact that he's a lascivious creep and she's a nagging shrew. As bodies begin to pile up, all with crosses slashed into their foreheads, the couples begin to believe that something may be amiss at Dr. Freed's establishment.

Analysis: So. Till Death Do Us Part was the final film I needed to watch in order to fully catch up with films I missed from 1980, 1981, and 1982, following my fifth and (hopefully) final round of research for this project. It was by far the hardest to obtain, to the point that I had to acquire a VHS copy and a VCR to make this happen. Usually if a film is that difficult to track down, it's not worth tracking down. Trust me, I've been burned before. However, there was an element I hadn't accounted for: this is an obscure slasher VHS from Canada. The theorem posited by Tim Brayton, which I have had the opportunity to kick the tires on dozens of times, is that there is an inimitable magic to Canadian slasher filmmaking of the 1980s, and whatever X factor they provide usually helps those films rise above their American counterparts.

Well, that dictum has held true yet again. Even with the limitations of being a made-for-TV slasher movie, Till Death Do Us Part (whose director has had a typical career trajectory for a Canadian TV workman, going on to direct episodes of Friday the 13th: The Series in the 80's, Animorphs in the late 90's, and most recently helming a myriad of Hallmark Christmas movies) is pure bliss. I shouldn't be surprised. The TV slasher sub-subgenre should result in a lot of hollow, useless tripe, but has provided a weirdly robust slate of worthwhile projects, including Dark Night of the Scarecrow and Fantasies.

However, still color me surprised that Till Death Do Us Part is top to bottom compelling. Usually these TV slasher have to find a way to be interesting that aren't the kill sequences, and this film accomplishes that, but the kills are as singularly brutal as their bloodless execution could possibly allow, especially the opening kill that results in a woman being crucified in the upper branches of a tree. It helps that even the de rigueur kills like drowning are accompanied by that excellent organizing principle of crosses being carved onto the victims' foreheads, which both lends an air of creepiness to the proceedings and reminds viewers that this film has a screenplay with an actual consistent aim.

I've seen some people online classifying this film as a horror-comedy, which I think is a bit of a stretch (most of the "jokes" would be contained in the scenes of playful banter that precede the killings, which is an element found in most slashers, though I will give those people the excellent recurring gag where Freed reveals the titles of his published works). It's less "funny" than it is gonzo and weird, which is exactly the right move for a slasher that needs to keep its audience off kilter without pumping gallons of blood across the frame. 

There's an energy to this film that's like holding onto a live wire. From the absurd plot twists (that include undercover reporters, incest, and the truly delectable tossed-off reveal that Stephen isn't mute but "just shy") to the orgiastic pleasure with which the couples indulge in a game of Killer to the constant parade of shirtless men to Dr. Freed's incessant manic piano playing, there's constantly something going on onscreen that is well worth staring at in goggle-eyed wonder. There are also a few random moments of heartstring pulling in the subplot involving the Craigs that are more emotionally impactful than they have any right to be. 

The best way I could classify this movie is that it's like if the bloodless but playful plot structure of April Fool's Day was grafted onto the energetic dismissal of the limitations of low production value of Island of Blood. I would 100% classify this film as a hidden gem, with a single caveat. Before anyone is galvanized enough to start the journey into finding some way to watch this film, it's important to remember that these films are still graded on a sliding scale. If a weirdo mid-tier slasher isn't something that thrills you, Till Death Do Us Part still isn't going to be your thing. But if that's your bag, this film is an absolute thrill.

Killer: Dr. Honora Freed (Toby Tarnow)

Final Girl: Literally every woman except the maid and Dr. Honora.

Best Kill: I mean, who could resist the sweet delicious irony of Dr. Freed being konked on the head with the bust of himself that he keeps on his desk?

Sign of the Times: Two characters make a Deliverance reference out of nowhere.

Scariest Moment: Wally's attempts to flirt with Ruth at a garden party border on sexual assault.

Weirdest Moment: Dr. Susan decides she wants to make another baby the second she gets over the death of her son.

Champion Dialogue: "Geez, step on, you big goofball."

Body Count: 6

Martine is crucified in the upper branches of a tree.

Wally is hit on the head with a meat tenderizing mallet and falls down a well.

Carl is stabbed in the gut with a tire iron.

Tony is drowned in a jacuzzi.

Dr. Sigmund Freed is hit on the head with a bust of himself.

Dr. Honora Freed shoots herself.

TL;DR: Till Death Do Us Part is perhaps only excellent on the sliding scale of slasher enthusiasts, but it is excellent nonetheless.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1096

Census Bloodbath: Sex And The Single Monster

Year: 1982

Director: John Hough

Cast: John Cassavetes, John Ireland, Kerrie Keane 

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I've been so deep into this slasher movie marathon for so long that I've started to recognize names that wouldn't be uttered in anybody's household from here to Timbuktu. Regardless, John Hough is the reason I was excited to pop in The Incubus, because he directed the low budget 1988 gem American Gothic, a film I've been happy to wave the banner for on many an occasion. Pair that with some cool, eerie poster artwork and you've got me on the hook.

Unfortunately, the lesson I consistently fail to learn during this project is that a poster is not a movie. Even though every single poster, alternates and all, for The Incubus is a drop dead gorgeous specimen (to the point that I could populate this entire review just with different posters - and I will), none of that visual firepower is enough to make a movie worth sitting through for 93 minutes. But more on that in a sec.

First, we must witness this poster that makes the movie look like some sort of heavy metal album cover was adapted into a paperback novel.

Observe the small town of Galen, which is being beset by a terrible tragedy. Local women are being raped so violently that their uteruses are exploding (oh, the 80's, a time when somebody thought this would be a super cool plot hook). Town doctor/autopsist/creepy old man Sam Cordell (John Cassavetes) has been working with the cops to solve the murders, but waiting for the only survivor Mandy (Mitch Martin) to regain the ability to speak is taking too long. Also he needs time to himself to reminisce about his 18-year-old second wife who died under mysterious circumstances.

Sam's daughter Jenny (Erin Flannery) keeps ignoring his orders to stay inside to visit her loser boyfriend Tim (Duncan McIntosh of the same year's Murder by Phone - stay tuned) who keeps having terrible dreams about a woman tied up in a dungeon every time there's a new attack. also on the case is intrepid reporter Laura Kincaid (Kerrie Keane), who strikes up a gross flirtation with Sam despite their age difference appearing to be a flat fifty years. Anyway, it's pretty clear these attacks are supernatural. 

Even though the word "incubus" isn't spoken for about 75 minutes, we the audience know the title of the fucking movie we came to see, so it's not entirely shocking that there's a penis demon wandering around town. But who is the one channeling his presence? Tim? His creepy grandmother Agatha (Helen Hughes of Visiting Hours)? Or someone else from this small town with a population huge enough to host midday concerts in packed movie houses?

Or perhaps it's this sexy demon haunting some heroine from an 18th century gothic novel...

Full disclosure: the effects which bring the titular Incubus to life are really really good. Fuller disclosure: You get to see them for a full ten seconds in this 93 minute movie. Hope you brought your camera! I'd say a picture would last longer, but then again almost anything would. 

So what are we left with for those remaining 5,570 seconds? A pretty miserable slog, to be honest. The Incubus has all the gritty, grotesque flavor of a mid-70's grindhouse exploitation epic, but it's too demure to fully commit to its hog wild concept. Not that I want the endless rapes to be onscreen. In fact, I am tremendously glad all I had to suffer through was a little slow motion screaming, and not a relentless slew of sex crimes like Don't Answer the Phone. But the fact remains that this movie is by design a story about sex, violence, and a monster, and it features almost none of those things.

To be fair, the rest of the things it's about aren't achieved particularly well either. As a mystery with a mounting body count, The Incubus is extraordinarily messy, forgetting to show us scenes about suspects, non-Cassavetes characters, and especially victims until they suddenly are jolted awake and thrown into play way too late in the game. One victim, a docent at the town museum, we meet in the very scene where she dies with about two lines of dialogue. About twenty minutes later Cassavetes randomly drops a line about this woman being his wife's cousin. About fifteen minutes after that, we learn her name. Tell me, how am I supposed to care about following a mystery that can't even follow itself? All this builds up into a tedious double parlor room sequence that spends fifteen minutes in two locations to establish that yes, there's an incubus, and then cuts to credits before anything actually happens.

And don't even get me started on the bizarre subplot about Laura Kincaid being a doppelgänger for Sam's dead second wife, which immediately leaps out the window and is never heard from again.

This beautiful poster is just mocking me at this point.

At the very least, The Incubus makes some swings toward atmosphere that occasionally connect. The score is a creepy atmospheric blanket over the whole thing, and the decision to run the opening credits over a shot that slowly zooms out to reveal a human eye is pretty stylish. And the decision to mount a camera under a character's wheelchair as she zooms around is... odd, but at least creative. Unfortunately, the editing takes a bit of a beating, presenting events in a bizarre kaleidoscope of smash cuts. 

But with a script that's this much of a shambles, even if it was perfectly cut together it would still seem completely random and aggrieved, as if individual parts of each scene want nothing to do with one another. So the redeeming qualities available to us here are limited. I didn't hate the experience of sitting through this movie, but I could have been staring at a blank screen for an hour and a half and edified myself to the exact same degree.

Killer: The Incubus [as embodied by Laura Kincaid (Kerrie Keane)]

Final Girl: Sam Cordell (John Cassavetes)

Sign of the Times: Every time a character turns on a radio, out screeches hair metal so terrible that I don't even want to put it on my slasher movie music playlist, which includes some real dreadful shit.

Best Kill: In one of the only sequences that betrays its slasher roots, the shotgun-toting patriarch of a farming family follows the demon into a barn, where he is stabbed in the neck with a shovel, then blows his own foot off in shock.

Scariest Moment: John Cassavetes tells his 18-year-old daughter Jenny, "you are my queen, my morning..."

Weirdest Moment: A scene opens with a cat chilling on a porch, then the paper boy hits it square in the face with the daily news.

Champion Dialogue: "Will you get out of here? I don't have time for idiots."

Body Count: 8

1. Roy is hit in the face with a board with a nail in it.
2. Caroline is Incubus'd.
3. Chip the Dog is impaled with a pitchfork.
4. Ernie is stabbed in the neck with a shovel.
5. Jane is Incubus'd.
6. Jane's Sister in a Wheelchair is killed offscreen.
7. Concert Girl is Incubus'd.
8. [Jenny is Incubus'd.]

TL;DR: The Incubus is at least uncompromising, but is both icky and a little bit dull.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1236

When I Sleep, I Dream And It Gets Me By

Year: 1990

Director: Tom Berry

Cast: Kim Coates, Dawna Wightman, Helen Hughes

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

And… here’s where this marathon is going to get tough, as if it wasn’t a hard pill to swallow from square one. After fending off the direct-to-video doldrums for four entries and eleven years, the swiftly declining haunted house series succumbed to the pull of its mediocre horror destiny with its fifth entry, The Amityville Curse.

At this point, I can’t help but worry that my reviews will begin to deteriorate, as there are only so many variations on “boring and poorly made motion picture goes through the motions of a haunted house thriller” that I can pull out of my brain. But let’s see if I can squeeze a few more drops out of this godforsaken franchise, shall we?

Lord knows Hollywood seems to be able to.

Well, at least there’s some semblance of a plot. Let’s talk about it. Twelve years after a priest (Jan Rubes) is shot to death in a confessional, his dilapidated house is bought by newlywed couple; Marvin (David Syerin) and Debbie (Dawna Wightman). It’s a surprise they’ve managed to stay together even this long, because they quite transparently loathe each other. Debbie is a psychic who has been receiving visions in her dreams of evil forces lurking in the house, and Marvin is a psychologist skeptic who scoffs at everything she believes in and stands for.

The couple is joined for the week by three friends who for some reason have agreed to drop everything and help them remodel the house. They promptly set into acting like a bunch of randy teens because this is a horror movie, even if they’re patently too old to be behaving this way. These bizarre houseguests include horny sex couple Abigail (Cassandra Gava) and Frank (Kim Coates of Sons of Anarchy in an early role), and Bill (Anthony Dean Rubes), about whom we know nothing other than he has a penchant for wearing stripes. Bill is by far the most mysterious thing in the movie, much more so than the shadowy presence who is bumping off the people in the house, starting with the one-eyed neighbor Mrs. Moriarty (Helen Hughes).

Also, spooky paranormal things happen, but they really take a back seat to scenes of remodeling and half-baked drama about Abigail’s fidelity.

Though that drama is so blink-and-you’ll-miss-it that you’d need a Clockwork Orange machine for it to even register.

As you may have noticed, this is the movie where the franchise really starts to lose the plot. Even the “haunted floor lamp in California” entry has stronger ties to the events of The Amityville Horror than Curse, which contents itself to merely present a paranormal story that takes place in the same town. As if Amityville, Long Island was built over a Hellmouth or something. As much as it behooves the franchise to break from the limiting confines of the “true” Amityville story, you just can’t expect to succeed when you oust the franchise’s most consistent and compelling character: the house, with its iconic arched, angry windows.

That house and its excellent expressionistic design went a long way toward delivering the chills even in the chintziest, most boring sequences the franchise had to offer. And The Amityville Curse is nothing if not chintzy and boring. The anonymous, squat pile of bricks at the center of Curse sucks out every last molecule of atmosphere, revealing the disappointingly bare foundation that all of these films have been built on.

The Amityville Curse revels in its own tedium, unspooling scene after scene of character interactions that have just enough flavor for you to despise every one of the players involved, but yet not enough to actually pique even the slightest amount of interest in their dealings. The plot seems to center around the vague shape of a mystery, but it’s so ineptly handled that the Huge Twist is something I just took for granted like 20 minutes in. There’s nothing to latch onto for at least an hour, other than a handful of lines written with an iota of pith and one or two shock gags that you can find scary if you really focus.

Forgive me for trying to feel something while sitting through this movie.

The only truly interesting thing about The Amityville Curse is that, by the end of the third act, it completely forgets that it’s a ghost movie. You see, the mysterious figure who has been murdering the hell out of folks turns out to be an actual flesh and blood human being, and just like that we have a slasher film on our hands. The Amityville Curse is so much of a slasher, in fact, that had this been released a year earlier, I would have had to strongly consider including it in Census Bloodbath.

And wouldn’t you know it, Debbie is actually a pretty capable Final Girl. Drawing inspiration from other hardcore heroines in terrible movies like The Demon or Lady Stay Dead, she gets creative when she’s in survival mode, using saw blades as Frisbees and even giving us a passable gore gag when crushing the killer’s fingers in a door.

Of course, this trick didn’t make me like The Demon or Lady Stay Dead any more, so it certainly doesn’t do the trick with The Amityville Curse. Ten relatively thrilling minutes don’t make up for all that wasted time sitting through this movie when I could have been doing something more interesting and rewarding, like watching a leaky roof drip water into a bucket, or pricking my own finger with a thumbtack.

TL;DR: The Amityville Curse make a surprising turn into decent slasher territory, but it's too little too late.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 963

Reviews In This Series
The Amityville Horror (Rosenberg, 1979)
Amityville II: The Possession (Damiani, 1982)
Amityville 3-D (Fleischer, 1983)
Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes (Stern, 1989)
The Amityville Curse (Berry, 1990)
Amityville 1992: It's About Time (Randel, 1992)
Amityville: A New Generation (Murlowski, 1993)
Amityville Dollhouse (White, 1996)
The Amityville Horror (Douglas, 2005)
Amityville: The Awakening (Khalfoun, 2017)