Census Bloodbath: Happy Fearth of July!

Year: 1988

Director: John Hough

Cast: Yvonne DeCarlo, Rod Steiger, Sarah Torgov

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Again we wade into that strange holiday netherworld in which I watch a festivity-appropriate movie on the day of, but don't get a chance to review it until a day later. So I apologize for not reviewing my Fourth of July pick, 1988's American Gothic, until today, but believe me it's worth the wait.

Since we haven't really talked about the climate of 1988 in detail yet, let me paint you a picture. By the end of the decade, the slasher genre was a grotesque and decadent monstrosity lumbering across the plains of cinema. After the advent of home video, DTV slashers had inundated the market, overwatering the already twisted root that was the subgenre.

If you picked any slasher film from the year at random, you would likely find a bloated franchise picture (Friday the 13th Part VII, Halloween 4, Sleepaway Camp II, etc.), a post-Nightmare supernatural twist on the tropes (Bad Dreams, Deadly Dreams, Ghosthouse), or one of a few DTV stragglers that held on to the traditional slice and dice ways with an iron grip (Death Nurse 2, The Last Slumber Party, Amsterdamned).

At this point, it was a genre set in stone with an increasingly bloodthirsty MPAA slashing out gory scenes left and right. Without the appeal of being a shiny new genre or shocking the audience with bloody kills, desperate slashers were grabbing at straws, eager to find anything twisted and exciting to make a quick buck. Usually these films crashed and burned, but American Gothic is a special little monster that almost certainly deserves more attention than it gets.

OK, maybe not that much attention.

The story goes as such. A group of friends traveling to an island in the Pacific Northwest has their propellor plane break down halfway there. They make an emergency landing on nearby shore and decide that an island is an island, so they can camp here until they repair their plane.

The Meat in this film is an exceptionally uninteresting crop, save for one standout, but when something stands out in this movie, it stands the hell out. First there's your usual crop of clichés like Paul (Stephen Shellen, also in The Stepfather), the cute man with glasses who is offscreen for a good two thirds of the film; Lynn (Fiona Hutchison), this film's nomination for Most Slappable Douchebag;  Terri (Caroline Barclay), a terrible actress and scuba diving enthusiast; Rob (Mark Lindsay Chapman), a handsome and playful young man unfortunately saddled with the worst mullet in human history; Jeff (Mark Erickson) an annoying blonde with a Jew Fro and a pilot's license; and Cynthia (Sarah Torgov), his wife and purveyor of that interest I was referring to earlier.

You see, Cynthia has agreed to go on this trip in order to get over the accidental drowning of her child, the trauma of which led her to be institutionalized. The movie begins with her release, opening on a shot of her trapped behind bars.

It's a metaphor, see?

When the group goes exploring, they discover a large home full of 50-year-old toys and furniture. Instead of running away immediately, they play dress-up with clothes from a wardrobe and dance the Charleston because trespassing is OK as long as it's on an island. Needless to say, when the elderly homeowners return, they're none too pleased, although they do invite the youngsters to stay for the night.

At first Ma (Yvonne DeCarlo, also of Silent Scream) and Pa (Rod Steiger), as they prefer to be called, seem just a wee bit eccentric (their religious fervor shows just a tad too strongly and they won't let anybody near the basement door), but once their three children begin to appear from out of the woodwork (it takes literally several days for all three of them to make their presence known), the travelers grow suspicious.

You see, these kids are actually middle aged men and women who act and dress like they're 12 years old. Fanny (Janet Wright), Woody (Michael J. Pollard, also of Sleepaway Camp III: Teenage Wasteland), and Teddy (William Hootkins) seem to believe wholeheartedly not only that they're young and hearty, but that it is the 1920's and the era of President Woodrow Wilson.

This is mighty unsettling, but the best of the three actors is Wright, who captures a sort of Umbridge-esque menace while at the same time 100% accurately portraying the simple emotions and responses that an 11-year-old girl would have to her environment.

Needless to say, the family begins to bump off the group one by one because they perceive them to be sinners. This idea isn't helped by many of the members' utterly oblivious smoking, swearing, and sexing. I know this is the way of the slasher world - you drink, you screw, you die - but never has the way to avoid meeting a grisly end seemed so obvious from the get-go.

Maybe don't willingly piss off people insane enough to wear these outfits.

Before we go on, let's get one thing straight. American Gothic is a poorly made film, but not as bereft of artistry as the typical genre entries this late into the decade tended to be. Sure, maybe the boom mike totally eclipses a quarter of the frame in an early shot. Sure, maybe the ancient house looks freshly painted and underpopulated like the production designer constructed it that day and bought whatever he could find for fifty bucks at a thrift shop.

There's little to no gore in the film thanks to the dictatorial rule of the MPAA but somehow, miraculously, the filmmakers took what they had and turned it into a near masterpiece of bonkers B-cinema. The kills are clever and compensate with humor and tension instead of gore (Rob is swung over a cliff via swingset, a long-forgotten Paul turns up dead at the worst possible moment). And despite the limitations of the budget, American Gothic manages to ramp up the creep factor more than any other slasher in the tail end of the decade.

Sure, it's in a campy register. But if you combine the fun of the kills and the totally bizarre characterizations of the killers along with the surprisingly resonant thematic through line provided by Cynthia as she navigates this world of long-preserved children while coping with the loss of her own, the movie transcends everything and becomes startlingly capable. One memorable scene with a mummified infant corpse still manages to be utterly chilling despite the fact that it looks like an alien sculpture made of raisins. 

And if you show me a person who says they don't find this even slightly unsettling, I'll show you a liar.

This goes on for about an hour, at which point the film just gives up and launches into an entirely new storyline. It feels like the sequel to this film was tacked onto its final thirty minutes. It constantly goes places you never expected it to go and defies any and all expectations, all while maintaining its status as a tacky and silly slasher film.

I won't spoil this half, so lunacy-filled as it is, because I'd rather have everybody experience it on their own terms. But let me just say the final shot actually proves that there was at least a smidgen of talent behind the camera and reminds one of The Descent in a mystifyingly positive way.

This film is a terrific story of a family trapped in time wrapped with a slasher bow and I thought it was great fun. It's not truly scary and it won't be getting on anybody's top ten lists unless you pare it down to the most specific of subsets, but American Gothic will certainly become a new classic in the Brennan household.

Killer: Ma (Yvonne DeCarlo), Pa (Rod Steiger), and their Brood (Janet Wright, Michael J. Pollard, William Hootkins)

Final Girl: Cynthia (Sarah Torgov)

Best Kill: They're all lovely, but I'm rather partial to Rob getting swung over a cliff, to which nobody really has any reaction.

Sign of the Times: Aside from Rob's mullet, he listens to that instrumental (copyright-free) 80's rock that all slasher kids seem to be so into.

Scariest Moment: Fanny asks Cynthia to kiss her baby good night.

Weirdest Moment: Take your pick, this is a deeply weird movie. But I'm personally in favor of when Rob tries to get everybody to dance by shouting "C'mon, gang!" at them repeatedly like he's in a 60's sitcom.

Champion Dialogue: "Don't you wanna be in the clean plate club?"

Body Count: 10; 5 vacationers and 5 killers

1. Rob is tossed over a cliff via swingset.
2. Lynn is hung with a jumprope.
3. Jeff is stabbed in the eye with a toy soldier's bayonet.
4. Paul is axed in the face offscreen.
5. Terri has her neck snapped.
6. Fanny is beaten to death with a tin bathtub.
7. Woody is stabbed with a toy soldier's bayonet.
8. Ma is stabbed with knitting needles.
9. Teddy is stabbed in the neck with a scythe.
10. Pa is shot in the chest with a shotgun. 

TL;DR: American Gothic is a fascinating curio and worth more attention than it gets.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1544

Census Bloodbath: December Thirty Worst

Year: 1980
Director: Emmett Alston
Cast: Roz Kelly, Kip Niven, Chris Wallace
Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

It is only fitting that New Year's Evil should be my first Census Bloodbath post of a long, hopefully slasher-filled year. I hope everybody is settling nicely into 2014 content in the fact that there's a bright shining ocean of opportunity ahead of us and that we haven't just been stabbed repeatedly with a switchblade.

New Year's Evil, one of the very first holiday themed slasher films (to my knowledge, it was only preceded by Christmas Evil a month before and To All A Good Night in January 1980. And of course Halloween in 1978 and Black Christmas in 1974. Neither of which really had much to do with the holidays they took place on.), has the unique advantage and disadvantage of being released in 1980.

This was the year the slasher was born, so the slice-n'-dice films that came out this year weren't beholden to the sort of rigid structure slashers of a couple years down the line pretty much had to adhere to. This is a great benefit in the sense that they're allowed to break the rules. Considering that the rules were still in the process of being invented, this was a pretty easy thing to do.

The problem is that these films were all trying to be something they patently weren't - good films. Or at least passable ones. By 1981, studios had it all figured out. They were trying to be Friday the 13th. But the flicks produced in this period didn't have that template to draw from and as such didn't lean back on great gore effects to support their flimsy narratives.

They tried to let the narratives speak for themselves like they were John Carpenter or some BS and that is not OK. Unless, of course, you're John Carpenter. But very few people are.

A quick experiment. Look at this picture. Then look at a mirror. Do they match? No? Then you are probably not John Carpenter.

(By the way, if you happen to be both 1) reading this blog and 2) John Carpenter, I am a huge fan of your work. Thanks for checking this out.)

However, despite a pronounced lack of satisfying gore, many of New Year's Evil's breaks from slasher tradition tend to make it slightly more interesting than a generic film with its same plot could have been. First off - we see the killer's face almost immediately, which is why I don't care about spoilers for this although we don't learn his identity until much later (not that it's not easy to figure out based on an early exchange).

And second - the man actually has social skills. He can speak, he can dance. He competently seduces women before he murders them, something a big lunk like Jason never could pull off. This is a double edged sword because this kind of killer has more in common with the ugly early 1980 slashers like Don't Answer the Phone and Don't Go in the House, but it also serves to make him more realistically threatening.

The man in question is one Richard Sullivan (Kip Niven), a regular looking man who is tormenting his wife Diane (Roz Kelly) as she hosts a massive New Year's Punk/New Wave telecast in Hollywood. And if you thought nothing could be more 80's than the end of that last sentence, check out this picture.

My Rubik's Cube is twitching.

Richard has disguised his voice with some sort of Darth Vader machine and calls the show claiming to be be called "EEeeeEEEevil," and threatening to kill one person every hour as midnight strikes in each time zone until Pacific Standard Time, when he'd come after somebody close to her.

After checking on her estranged son (estranged because she's a dick to him - ignoring his important accomplishments like getting a lead role on Spaceship America, a TV show that I fervently wish was real.) Derek (Grant Cramer in his first role in a career that would lead him to both Killer Klowns From Outer Space and Santa Claws), she calls the cops (one of whom is played by Chris Wallace of Don't Answer the Phone) and they decide that she should keep on trucking with the show until they can keep him on the line long enough to track him.

Pretty standard horror phone call stuff going on there. But the hourly nature of the killings keep NYE from having the typical slasher platter of Meat, instead opting for unconnected victims across Southern California including Jane (Taafe O'Connell), a sexy nurse who looks like Lisa Kudrow; Sally (Louisa Moritz), a vapid meditation enthusiast; and Lisa (Anita Crane in her only film role), her roommate and nervous diarrhea-haver (it's a long story).

Whenever I get nervous, I spontaneously bleed from the neck.

The film trudges along alternating between midnight murder sequences and the show, which is essentially just a music video for a series of ear-splittingly shrill 80's rock groups so terrible that they must have been real. This is all mildly amusing but it doesn't quite get to "so bad it's good" territory (bread and butter for holiday slashers) until the final showdown when Richard has Diane tied to the bottom of an elevator that's about to drop.

"Enjoy your going away party. Get smashed."

Niven is fairly compelling as the face of banal evil and the film has enough breaks from standard slasher material to keep you on your toes, but there's not a lot to New Year's Evil. It's a great film to watch if you want to bathe in the vileness of early 80's fashions and music and it has some pretty exciting editing techniques at infrequent intervals, but for fans of slashers as a form, it's not quite up to the caliber of later pun-filled holiday bonanzas.

I'll never regret sitting through it, but I'm not champing at the bit to watch it again ever in my entire life.

Killer: Richard Sullivan (Kip Niven)
Final Girl: Diane Sullivan aka Blaze (Roz Kelly)
Best Kill: A girl is smothered with a bag of weed.
Sign of the Times: This film takes place largely at a Punk/New Wave concert, so the entire film is smothered in tacky cultural signifiers; Diane's drag queen make-up and cheetah print jacket; Yvonne's shell braids; every member of the audience's everything; it's like a Scissor Sisters concert gone wrong.
Scariest Moment: The ending is actually really good, especially with the implication attached to Honolulu's midnight celebrations.
Weirdest Moment: Every time Richard kills one of his victims, he accidentally leaves a single shoe behind. He's the freaking Cinderella of serial murderers.
Champion Dialogue: "You castrated me. And that is not nice."
Body Count: 7; including the killer - with an implied eighth.

1. A woman is stabbed to death offscreen.
2. A woman is stabbed to death.
3. A woman is suffocated in a bag of marijuana.
4. A woman is stabbed to death.
5. A man is stabbed in the gut.
6. A man falls to his death.
7. A man is killed offscreen. 

TL;DR: New Year's Evil is a so-so slasher movie that benefits and suffers in equal measures from not adhering to formula.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1171

Alles Gute Zum Vatertag!

Happy Father's Day, everyone!

You really should call him.

Today's post has to be quick, because it's a holiday and also we have a visitor from Germany in the house and I don't want to be unhöflich.

In honor of the day, I will review one of my father's favorite movies, one which we watched together with my mother last night over dinner. (That's right, I come home to visit my parents. I'm a good son)

A Fish Called Wanda

Year: 1988

Director: Charles Crichton

Cast: John Cleese, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Kline
Run Time: 1 hour 48 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I'm just gonna say it. A Fish Called Wanda has one of the tightest comic scripts of the decade, perhaps even the century. The storylines are balanced, thematically cohesive, have equal importance to the narrative and, most importantly, are consistently funny. On top of a routine heist movie framework filled with double crossings and disguises lies a blistering satire of English-American relations. It comes as no surprise that the script was penned by Monty Python alum (and co-star) John Cleese.

The story follows the dynamics of a group of bank robbers in London: George (Tom Georgeson) is the big cheese gangster. Ken (Michael Palin, another Monty Python alum) is his right hand man with a strong stutter and a stronger crush on Wanda (Jamie Lee Curtis), an American con artist who helps them pull off the heist. Her boyfriend Otto (Kevin Kline) is an American vulgarian and faux intellectual.

Wanda has been dating George for years and seeing Otto behind his back. After a series of double crossings George lands in jail, but not after hiding the jewels and giving Ken the key along with strict instructions to hide it in a safe place and arrange for the only witness's accidental death.

Basically, this movie is the Jamie Lee Curtis show, as Wanda pulls out a complex series of cons on each man in her crew as well as George's barrister, Archie (Cleese). Wanda is conniving, powerful, and fabulous, using her sexuality to achieve her goals. 

She is the ultimate feminist character. A strong confident woman, she is miles smarter than any of the men in her life. Even when she is less than successful at her con work, the boys fall for it hook, line, and sinker due to her manipulation of the way society views women.

Even though her wardrobe might as well have "IT'S 1988 HI" printed in glitter over the front, she has never been sexier or more diabolical. I love love love Jamie Lee Curtis and she is really given a chance to shine and play in this role, while still allowing her co-stars to turn in uniformly marvelous performances.

I'm hesitant to give a top rating to a film because nothing is perfect, but if any film comedy comes close, it's this one.

Thanks dad!

Rating: 9/10
Word Count: 487