Census Flashback: Double Dipping Devilry

On our Fright Flashback/Census Bloodbath crossover, every week this summer we'll be exploring an 80's slasher film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to the weekend's upcoming blockbuster.

In anticipation of Deadpool 2, which sees Josh Brolin returning to the world of Marvel as the villain Cable mere weeks after his universe-threatening appearance as Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War, I'll be exploring an 80's slasher where the lead villain also played double duty. In 1989 Robert England continued his landmark role as Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child, but he also played another infamous villain in that same year's The Phantom of the Opera, which we'll be discussing today.

Year: 1989

Director: Dwight H. Little

Cast: Robert Englund, Jill Schoelen, Alex Hyde-White

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I don't know what it is about classic French literature and pop culture, but two of the most adapted novels in the world are Victor Hugo's Les Misérables and Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera. Both books have received the movie treatment more than a dozen times apiece, not to mention TV specials, comics (seriously), and modernizations, as well as one extravagantly popular Broadway musical apiece. 

Phantom is pretty explicitly a horror novel (though certain people choose to highlight the romance over the monstrous element), so it's not shocking that the genre got its grubby little hands on it, as early as 1925. But what's even less shocking is that 80's horror got a swipe in at the property, because if there was one thing genre filmmakers of the time loved more than a new concept for a slasher movie, it was a well-known property already in the public domain. And why not get Robert Englund, for whom playing a man with a hecked-up face was his bread and butter, and who could at least get some literary cred from playing the role? Toss in the director of the exceedingly solid Halloween 4, the special effects guru behind Chucky, the Crypt Keeper, and Freddy himself, plus 80's shlock mega-producer Menahem Golan, and it's a match made in heaven.

Or hell, if you will.

So, the plot should seem pretty familiar, give or take a couple little embellishments. We start off in the 80's for no clear reason other than to gently ease its viewers into a period piece slasher film, following Christine Day (Jill Schoelen, the queen of late 80's/early 90's B-horror, who at this time was fresh off The Stepfather and Cutting Class) as she scours a rare bookstore for material to use during her opera audition. She stumbles across a battered copy of Don Juan Triumphant, and during her audition is hit on the head with a sandbag (?), which sends her back in time (?) to nineteenth century London, when the piece was first written by Erik Destler (Robert Englund, who was by that point a worldwide cultural phenomenon - that very year he was appearing in Freddy drag on MTV left and right).

Christine doesn't seem to realize that she has been transported back into the past, so this whole thing is pretty pointless. I guess they're going for a Mummy-esque reincarnated love thing, but let's call a spade a spade and not pretend it makes a lick of sense. She is a young soprano understudy for the diva La Carlotta (Stephanie Lawrence), but she receives voice lessons from a mysterious angelic figure known as the Phantom, who murders the piss out of anybody who gets in her way. Anyway, it turns out the Phantom is Erik (duh), who has sold his soul to the devil (?), as portrayed by a little person (?), which has made his face all burned and scarred (??). Cue a lot of bad opera and mediocre slashing.

And makeup that's even frightening when it's supposed to seem normal.

Yup, this is one of those cases where the slasher stars seem to have aligned, but alack, those stars got crossed somewhere along the line and it was not meant to be. Phantom of the Opera wants to be a legitimate adaptation of its literary source material and the trashy B-slasher it was always meant to be, but it can't have its cake and stab it too. The slasher elements undercut any ability to take it seriously, and the serious elements make the slasher a bit of a tedious slog.

At every opportunity, Phantom cuts itself short. You can tell it wants to have the quippy punnery of a Freddy Krueger adventure, but then it would tip its hand too far in the "stupid slasher" direction, so it contents itself with some light, playful japing that glances right off the scene and immediately out of one's memory. And it very clearly desires to be an icky, gross-out horror flick, at which it only intermittently succeeds.

Thanks to Kevin Yagher, the moments where the gore comes to the forefront are spectacular. Especially any time we see the Phantom either assembling or dismantling the false skin he wears to get around in the world, it's stomach-churningly gooey grue that lights up the screen. This sensibility is also applied to a certain number of the deaths, especially in the early going, but for some unfathomable reason the bulk of the murders are rendered as run-of-the-mill gut stabbings that completely lack flair and barely shed a drop of blood.

It's telling that this is about the most dynamic screenshot I can find.

That lack of flair isn't isolated to the murder scenes, unfortunately. Although Halloween 4 did sometimes have the tendency to look a bit like a TV movie, at least it had atmosphere. Here, the lighting scheme wouldn't be out of place at a community center bar mitzvah. See, a huge production is made out of candlelit rooms, and the fact that the Phantom lurks in the shadows to hide his twisted visage. But whenever he blows out a candle to hide his face, the room is still so blasted with light that it looks like he's on the set of King of Queens. If anything, the room seemed darker before the candle blew out. The lighting is so conspicuously inappropriate that it drags you cornea-first out of the movie, undermining the character to a ruthlessly extreme degree.

This is a real shame, because Robert Englund clearly cared about this character. The apathy that defines his Dream Child performance is completely absent here, and he's trying his darnedest to assemble something resembling pathos from the role. It all falls apart like a sand castle too close to the tide, but it's not his fault. There is hardly an inch of plot to hang this performance on within the repetitive (yet somehow infrequent) slashings and endless scenes of Jill Schoelen lip syncing to a deeply milquetoast opera track with English lyrics that feel like they were ripped from a seventh grader's songwriting journal.

I dearly wish The Phantom of the Opera had been much better than it was. Period piece horror films aren't exactly a dime a dozen, and when one gets a chunk of change significant enough to make that a reality, I always hope for the best. Unfortunately for the slasher genre in 1989, "the best" was never really an option. It's Robert Englund's best film of the year by a country mile, but that's praise so faint it can't even muster up the energy to damn anything.

Killer: Erik Destler (Robert Englund)

Final Girl: Christine Day (Jill Schoelen)

Best Kill: Most of the kills are pretty bog-standard, but during the Phantom's first kill, blood covers his face as it contorts with orgasmic delight, which is pretty intense. Also eventually the body is hung up in a closet, sans skin, which is likewise rather intense.

Sign of the Times: When she returns to present day, Christine discovers the completed version of Don Juan Triumphant on a floppy disk.

Scariest Moment: When Christine first discovers the pages of the opera and sings them aloud, the notes on the page turn into drops of blood.

Weirdest Moment: Christine's best friend in the framing sequence is played by Molly Shannon in her first film role.

Champion Dialogue: "Better submerged in bathwater than mediocrity."

Body Count: 10

1. Joseph is gutted with a knife while being winched up into the air.
2. Ruffian #1 is stabbed in the gut.
3. Ruffian #2 is decapitated with a knife.
4. Lead Ruffian is stabbed in the gut.
5. Harrison has his head crushed with a towel.
6. La Carlotta is beheaded offscreen, and her head is boiled into a soup.
7. Rat Catcher is impaled on a spike.
8. Morris has his throat slit offscreen.
9. Davis has his heart pulled out of his chest.
10. Richard is stabbed with a candle holder and burned alive.

TL;DR: The Phantom of the Opera is an admirable effort, but grafting a slasher onto classic literature rendered both of those things not particularly interesting.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1493

Census Flashback: High School Mayhem

On our Fright Flashback/Census Bloodbath crossover, every week this summer we'll be exploring an 80's slasher film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to the weekend's upcoming blockbuster.

This week we’re anticipating Spider-Man: Homecoming, in which a high school kid suits up and fights crime. In honor of its release, I’ll be reviewing a Brad Pitt slasher about deadly crimes at a high school: Cutting Class. Does the Sexiest Man Alive have what it takes to STAY alive?

Year: 1989

Director: Rospo Pallenberg

Cast: Donovan Leitch, Jill Schoelen, Brad Pitt

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

1989 was the last gasp of the slasher golden age, churning out as many half-baked slice-em-ups as humanly possible, despite the MPAA’s crackdown on gory movies. The slashers of the year had essentially split into two camps: crazy last-ditch gimmicks and self-parody. While Cutting Class isn’t tonally tight or incisive like the far superior Return to Horror High, it’s certainly a flimsy stab at the latter.

One thing Cutting Class has going for it is its cast: almost every single person from the leads on down has had enough success to afford to include a headshot on their IMDb profile, a luxury very few Census Bloodbath entries can boast. That doesn’t mean they’re good, but at least they’re professional, and that definitely counts for something.

And also one of them is LITERALLY Brad Pitt.

Here is the plot those headshots are asked to play out. High school overachiever Paula Carson (Jill Schoelen of The Stepfather) has the house to herself when her D.A. dad (Martin Mull, who is incredible in a lot of things, but especially Clue, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and Arrested Development) goes out for a weeklong hunting trip.

She wants to use this time for incessant studying, but her jock boyfriend Dwight (Brad F**king Pitt) has other ideas. She resists his libidinous advances, but agrees to get dragged into high school hijinks with their beer-swilling friends Gary (Mark Barnet) and Colleen (Brenda James). Unfortunately the people around her begin to disappear at the hands of an unseen murderer. Is it the creepy Brian (Donovan Leitch of The Blob), who was just released from a five year stint at a mental institution after cutting the brakes on his father’s car? The leering principal Mr. Dante (Roddy McDowall, having a great time)? The schizophrenic, philosophizing janitor Schultz (Robert Glaudini)?

Meanwhile, Martin Mull has been shot with an arrow, and spends literally the entire remainder of the film on an allegedly wacky quest to get back home through the swamp. You’d be forgiven for thinking you’d accidentally sat on your remote and changed the channel every 15 minutes or so.

Cue the tuba music.

Cutting Class’ wackiness is the only thing that differentiates it from the pack, but it’s also its downfall. Although there are mildly amusing interstitial scenes like a student haggling over a 50 cent ticket or the incredibly weird janitor smoking a joint, most of the comedy comes in the form of half-assed Breakfast Club antics that endlessly vomit forth with no sense of urgency. And then there’s Martin Mull over there, who seems to be wading through some kind of long-lost Caddyshack sequel.

All this unfunny business drastically undercuts the tension, and the kills are too few and far between (and mostly bloodless) to hold your attention. Cutting Class drifts like an unmoored yacht, smashing into scene after scene with brute force and no apparent direction until the final 20 minutes.

But oh, what a final 20 minutes they are! They pull out all the stops so smoothly it almost makes you feel as if the entire movie had been perfectly tuned to lead up to this sparkling crescendo (spoiler: it wasn’t). It’s ladled with so much bonkers 80’s cheese that it drowns out all the memories of anemic horror, inconsistent character motivations, and crushingly repetitive scenes of Paula trying to study.

If the entire movie matched the manic energy of the killer’s reveal (a bizarrely twisted explanatation that’s exactly what you expected but so much more, delivered with a Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 level of wooden fervor), the Saw-esque math problem death trap, and the battle in the woodshop, Cutting Class would be without a doubt the greatest slasher entry of the year.

Not that Jason Takes Manhattan was much competition.

Unfortunately, we do have that full hour of teenybopper nonsense to contend with. And while this cast is well above the standard for slashers at the time, that’s still a perilously low bar. Jill Schoelen, for one, delivers all her lines like she’s murmuring them in her sleep, and not even Brad Pitt shines. For one thing, his character is a raging asshole that he probably wouldn’t even be able to redeem now as a veteran actor. Seriously, Dwight is the freaking worst, and its hard to get on board with his late-film stint as the heroic boyfriend.

If an asshole saves the day and there’s nobody around who cares, is he still a hero?

Frankly, I wouldn’t care if you played hooky on Cutting Class. It’s a minor amusement from the dregs of the decade, and you definitely do worse, but it’s just not as fun as it wants to be. The flop sweat is overpowering, and only the most hardcore of Brad Pitt or slasher fans should consider making the approach.

Killer: Brian Woods (Donovan Leitch)

Final Girl: Paula Carson (Jill Schoelen)

Best Kill: The physical and motivationally preposterous scene where Coach Harris is bouncing idly on a trampoline until a flag is placed underneath him, on which he impales himself.

Sign of the Times: Brad Pitt gets third billing behind Jill Schoelen, for crying out loud.

Scariest Moment: Colleen sees her boyfriend killed in front of her and her screams are drowned out by the marching band.

Weirdest Moment: Roddy McDowall’s final onscreen appearance is during a backstage auditorium chase scene where Brad Pitt walks in on him trying on a powdered wig full of fruit.

Champion Dialogue: “Have you ever felt my tingle?”

Body Count: 7

1. Mr. Conklin is baked in a kiln.
2. Gary has his throat slit.
3. Colleen is killed offscreen.
4. Mrs. Knocht has her head slammed into the copy machine.
5. Coach Harris is impaled on an American flag.
6. Mr. Glynn is axed to death.
7. Bryan has the short end of a hammer buried in his head and is buzz sawed in the back.

TL;DR: Cutting Class is a mildly bemusing but gormless slasher that's at least slightly redeemed by its bonkers ending.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1099

Census Flashback: Bad Dads

On our Fright Flashback/Census Bloodbath crossover, every week this summer we'll be exploring an 80's slasher film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to the weekend's upcoming blockbuster.

This week we’re anticipating Despicable Me 3, the third entry in a franchise about three girls who are adopted by a single dad who turns out to be a supervillain. In honor of this, we’ll be reviewing a 1987 film with one of cinema’s all-time Bad Dads: The Stepfather.

Year: 1987

Director: Joseph Ruben

Cast: Terry O'Quinn, Jill Schoelen, Shelley Hack 

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

As you get deeper into horror fandom, as I have (if I go any deeper, you might never see me again), you discover that there exists entire worlds of cinematic ephemera around the edges of public consciousness. People generally know their way around the Friday the 13th or Halloween franchises, but it’s not until you take the plunge that you learn that there were three sequels to Psycho, or an entire trilogy of Slumber Party Massacre movies. But even with this insider knowledge, I’m constantly shocked when I remember that (including the remake), there are a whopping four Stepfather movies. Even more shocking, I’d never seen any of them. Well, that’s about to change.

What a service I provide for you. You’re welcome.

In The Stepfather, teen girl Stephanie (Scream Queen extraordinaire Jill Schoelen, whose candle burned bright in this, Wes Craven’s Chiller, Cutting Class, Curse II: The Bite, The Phantom of the Opera, Popcorn, and When a Stranger Calls Back, all between 1985 and 1993) has some problems. She’s been getting in trouble at school after the death of her father, and even worse, her mother Susan (Shelley Hack of Troll) seems to have completely gotten over it, thanks to the new man in her life. That man is the titular Stepfather Jerry Blake (Terry O’Quinn of Lost), whose Ward Cleaver-esque appearance and attitude disguise the fact that he’s the very same man who murdered his entire family in a nearby town over a year ago. He loved them… But they disappointed him.

Steph begins to grow suspicious of Jerry’s odd behavior, and attempts to find out the truth about him. Meanwhile, the brother of his previously deceased wife, Jim Ogilvie (Stephen Shellen of American Gothic), works to track down his sister’s killer, who he rightly suspects has taken up residence nearby. In the parlance of the meta-slasher Behind the Mask, Jim is this movie’s Ahab, a vengeful force for good who is inhumanly dedicated to stopping the evil, á là Dr. Loomis in Halloween. These characters are almost universally hilariously incompetent.

At least this one is handsome.

Let’s get the unpleasant business out of the way first: The Stepfather is hardly a slasher film. The body count is almost lower than Weekend at Bernie’s, and there is no focus on gore or creative kills. However, this doesn’t disqualify it from Census Bloodbath. Much like the terrific 1981 thriller Road Games, The Stepfather is a micro-slasher, expanding a tiny stretch of time and one particular set of victims from the overarching career of a serial killer. He’s presumably killed many people before the events of this film (it’s even heavily implied that he may have killed Stephanie’s dad), but we’re focusing in on one leg of a long journey.

Anyway, what The Stepfather is instead of a slasher film is a family drama mixed with a Hitchcockian thriller. The audience is immediately aware of Jerry’s homicidal tendencies, so the thrills are drawn from the dance between him and Steph as she comes closer and closer to discovering his true identity. Personally, I might have preferred it if there was even a scrap of doubt about his true intentions, but it’s at least amicably creepy.

The only real problem with The Stepfather is that it feels deeply generic. The central conflict is a game of cat and mouse that has been played over and over again in many a psycho thriller, and they don’t do much to spice up the affair. In fact, the movie seems to think that its thrills and chills are such a lock that they don’t really have to try all that hard for the story to make sense. Side characters teleport out of nowhere halfway through the film and nab a handful of scenes only to vanish without consequence, while main characters are often sequestered offscreen so long you almost forget they exist. It’s a haphazard construction that doesn’t offer a lot to support the film’s decently affecting atmosphere.

It's more like "No, seriously, who is this guy?"

Occasionally, those random shards of subplots and side characters coalesce into something truly delightful (a go-nowhere flirting scene between Jim and a Barb-esque secretary is inexplicably lovely, and the scene where he’s canvassing the town and accidentally walks in on the middle of a marital argument is excellent at implying a bigger world around the film), but there’s no real sense of intentionality to the film’s randomness.

The scene that’s most symptomatic of The Stepfather’s total lack of a coherent identity is a shower scene that comes absurdly late in the game. With less than 20 minutes left, Jill Schoelen is shoehorned into the bathroom to bare her breasts and stop the plot dead in its tracks, in a film that at no point has otherwise indicated it wants to be a cheesy, exploitative slasher.

Fortunately, Terry O’Quinn is enough of a magnetic personality to hold the whole thing together. Watching him slowly unravel is truly remarkable, providing a certain skin-crawling otherness in a movie that’s mostly just a bland thriller by numbers.

The Stepfather is certainly one of the more stately entries in the genre, but that’s not always a good thing. It gives you a couple moments to cling to, but otherwise it’s entirely forgettable.

Killer: Jerry Blake (Terry O’Quinn)

Final Girl: Stephanie (Jill Schoelen)

Best Kill: There’s really not a lot to go on here, but I’ll pick Jim’s death, which happens pretty much immediately upon encountering Jerry, proving pretty definitively that Ahab character suck at their jobs.

Sign of the Times: Steph has to mail a letter to the newspaper asking for a photo of the killer, because she can’t just Google it.

Scariest Moment: The Stepfather loses his grip and accidentally uses the wrong name with Susan, revealing his deception.

Weirdest Moment: On his way to save Jerry’s family, Jim has to stop to let a nun cross the street.

Champion Dialogue: “Girls don’t get expelled.”

Body Count: 3; not including the family that is murdered immediately prior to the opening scene.

1. Dr. Bonderant is bludgeoned to death with a 2x4.
2. Jim is stabbed in the gut.
3. The Stepfather is stabbed in the heart, and I’m counting this as a death even though I know full well there’s a sequel.

TL;DR: The Stepfather is a respectable but non-essential slasher adjacent thriller.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1161
Reviews In This Series
The Stepfather (Ruben, 1987)
Stepfather 2: Make Room for Daddy (Burr, 1989)