Census Bloodbath: Feta Sleaze

Year: 1981

Director: Joe D'Amato (as Peter Newton)

Cast: George Eastman, Annie Belle, Edmund Purdom

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

As we inch toward the dregs of Census Bloodbath in 1981, we’ll be seeing that, despite its reputation for being the Golden Year for slasher cinema, there’s still plenty of crap to go around. This was the slasher genre, after all. It’s not exactly renowned for its consistency and integrity, even in the early days. And there’s perhaps no genre in cinema history more prone to lapses in integrity than 80’s Italian horror, which is where we find ourselves right now.

Today’s topic of discussion is the Joe D’Amato flick Absurd, also sold as Rosso Sangue (Red Blood). Also sold as Horrible. Also sold as Monster Hunter. Also sold as Zombie 6. But mostly sold as Anthropophagus 2, the supposed sequel to Anthropophagus, a movie I quite like. For that reason only, I was jazzed for Absurd.

I should have known better.

In Absurd, two Greeks descend upon small town “America” without explanation during the night of the Big Football Game. One of these is Father Andres (Edmund Purdom, who made bad movie history as the Dean in Pieces), a priest who also studies biochemistry. The other is Mikos Stenopolis (George Eastman), a bloodthirsty killer with the power to heal dead tissue and coagulate his blood like, crazy fast, so wounds don’t hurt him or something. Science! It’s worth noting that he almost never actually uses this power, because they don’t have the budget to manage such extravagance. This is just a pseudoscience explanation for his Michael Myers strength.

We don’t know why this now officially superhuman Michael Myers and his perhaps even more useless Dr. Loomis appear in this small town, nor do we care. The Halloween riffing doesn’t end there (they literally call him the Boogeyman) as Mikos ditches the hospital and closes in on the Bennett home where a babysitter is taking care of the kids while their parents are out watching the Big Game, which has more or less incapacitated the entire police force as well. Not that the active officer Sgt. Engelman (Charles Borromel) is much help anyway. He spends most of his time asking the priest to recite exposition over and over again and then not investigating things until it’s already too late.

Anyway, these kids are Katia (Katya Berger) and Willy (Kasimir Berger). Katia is bedridden with a brace to correct her spinal column (rendering her as helpless as the deaf, mute, and blind Jennifer Jason Leigh in the same year’s Eyes of a Stranger), and Willy has a full time job being the most annoying child eve put onscreen, constantly whining and defying the instructions of every single adult trying to keep him alive.

If the goal was to make you sympathize with Mikos’ urge to kill children, it worked.

After finally watching Absurd/Anthropophagus 2, I feel like one of its alternate titles would fit the movie better: Horrible. Although there is a heaping helping of hilarious “Italians faking America” gimcrackery and some truly inexplicable bad-good scenes (one of my favorites is a surgery scene where the doctor snips vaguely at some intestines with scissors, frantically switching pairs of scissors once every .25 seconds like he’s doing a challenge on The Amazing Race), Joe D’Amato is working very hard to earn his reputation as Most Boring Italian Director.

What I have long come to associate with Italian horror is a certain reluctance to adhere to a straightforward plot but a masterful sense of composing surreal, horrifying cinematic images. D’Amato is the opposite. Absurd’s plot is an extravagantly cavalier rip-off of Halloween (besting even He Knows You’re Alone, which essentially cribs John Carpenter’s entire score wholesale), chugging flatly through a Babysitters in Peril subroutine with nary a narrative fillip in sight. 

So it’s at least comprehensible, but it comes at the expense of anything interesting to look at. D’Amato (also credited as cinematographer) shoots his scenes like they’re horses with broken legs. The devastatingly frequent woodland shots are brutally inelegant, murky, and ill-framed (trees tend to block half the action, because who has time to plan ahead when the director is heading two departments), and the interiors are lit like somebody told a sitcom lighting designer to achieve a “Walmart ambience.”

It’s not fair to compare Absurd to Anthropophagus (it’s also pointlessly romantic, considering that the only thing this “sequel” shares with that film is its director, star, and a certain predilection for disembowelment.), but this movie couldn’t even dream of achieving one iota of that film’s class, beauty, and elegance.

Remember, that’s the movie where a pregnant woman gets her fetus ripped out.

Absurd is just plain bad. No matter how much the score squeals, desperately proclaiming its terror, it can’t punch up the deathly dull chase scenes that perforate Absurd’s already tenuous pacing. There’s a chase scene between a hobbling handicapped girl and a blinded killer and it’s still the fastest, most action-packed moment in the film. Plus, the gore that’s meant to be Absurd’s shot in the arm curbs its creativity, limiting its especially grotesque kills like it’s on a blood-free diet. And the kills we actually get (most notably a wholly useless character getting his head split open by a band saw) are full of bungled close-ups so extreme you can’t tell whether you’re looking at flesh, bone, or maybe just the wall.

And don’t even get me started on the acting! Edmund Purdom is tedious as the useless priest, his only trick being holding his hand feebly to his collar in a sickly approximation of pious shock. But even worse is Kasimir Berger as Willy, who alternates between reading his lines like a robot whose batteries have just been removed and shrieking at the top of his lungs. Everybody else reaches a median of overly showy woodenness that the at least blends into the background.

Like I said, there are some campy fun moments sprinkled throughout like garnishes, almost apologizing for what you had to sit through to get to them: the biker gang that drives back and forth down the same street like they’re stuck in a Groundhog Day-esque time loop and the enormous suit of armor replete with battle ax decorating this rural Southern home are but two of the inane delights you can come to expect from D’Amato’s anti-masterpiece, but they’re hardly worth the hour and change of relentlessly boring, pallid horror they’re ensconced in.

Killer: Mikos Stenopolis (George Eastman)

Final Girl: Katia Bennett (Katya Berger)

Best Kill: The nurse is drilled in the temple using a magic bit that extends like Pinocchio’s nose all the way through her head.

Sign of the Times: Emily’s hair makes her look like a botched Annie Lennox clone.

Scariest Moment: The town drunk laughs maniacally after handing Emily something she dropped.

Weirdest Moment: The Forrests enjoy the game while chowing down on that classic, All-American football snack: spaghetti.

Champion Dialogue: “We’re just going down the road. After all, it’s not as if we’re leaving for South America.”

Body Count: 7

1. Nurse is drilled in the temple.
2. Mechanic has his skull sawed in half.
3. Biker is strangled.
4. Peggy is pickaxed in the head.
5. Emily has her head stuffed in the oven and is stabbed in the neck with scissors.
6. Father Andres is strangled.
7. Mikos Stenopolis is decapitated with a battle axe.

TL;DR: Absurd is a tedious, occasionally unintentionally silly slog.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1247

Census Bloodbath: The Rage Of Aquarius

For our podcast episode about this very film, click here.

Year: 1987

Director: Michele Soavi

Cast: David Brandon, Barbara Cupisti, Robert Gligorov

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

In my experience, there is a big divide between the slasher movies that people imagine and the slasher movies that actually exist. Everyone knows the set-up: a bunch of horny teens move to an isolated location and doff their tops until a big guy in a mask renders them literally topless with a machete or maybe a pair of garden shears. 

These are the tropes and traditions that come to mind when one thinks of a typical 80's horror flick. But in my unfortunately vast experience, the average slasher is nowhere near as fun, campy, sexy, or gory as the ones we picture in our heads. Many slashers are bland, tasteless affairs that are either gutted by the MPAA or left floundering by an inept filmmaker. Sure, there are plenty of tasteless, sleazy, gory masterpieces like Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter or The House on Sorority Row, but more often than not the micro-budget formula of slasher movies leads to a bunch of junky clunkers.

I do still tend to enjoy these lesser slasher films, but like a connoisseur of fine wines (or an overly devoted Katherine Heigl fan), I've developed a taste for them. So don't go thinking I'll abandon ship on Census Bloodbath. No way no how, this feature is my pride and joy. I'm just saying that this project involves a lot of long slogs through underlit, flavorless wafers to get to the good stuff. I want you to understand this. I want you to know the entire background of where I'm coming from so you'll listen good when I tell you that StageFright: Aquarius (aka Deliria) is one of the best damn slasher films I've ever seen.

It's a certainly flawed, utterly demented little beastie, but I'll be darned if I can find another late 80's slashfest that's such a dynamic, twisted joy to watch.

It's pretty much Birdman with a chainsaw, so it's technically the Best Best Picture.

StageFright hails from the hallowed grounds of Italy and is a product of some of the greatest horror minds of the era. First time director Michele Soavi had previously worked under giallo maestro Dario Argento for many years, producer Joe D'Amato was already notoriously prolific in the Italian horror/softcore business, and the script was even penned by George Eastman, who played the villainous cannibal in the astonishingly effective 1980 proto-slasher Anthropophagus.

But enough with that nerd garbage. Let's get to some slicin' and dicin'! StageFright: Aquarius takes place at a run-down American theater, where a troupe of out-of-work actors is putting together a terrible play described as an "intellectual musical" by its pompous director Peter (David Brandon). The play, which revolves around a series of murders perpetrated by a dancing man with an owl mask, comes to wicked life when an escaped lunatic named Irving Wallace (Clain Parker) sabotages their rehearsal and begins murdering the cast one by one while they're locked in for the night.

The play's cast forms some of the most interesting and varied Meat I've seen in my many years as a slasher historian. The characters are still painted in bloody broad brush strokes, but they capture the attention more than a generic slate of teen spam. 

There's Alicia (Barbara Cupisti of Opera and The New York Ripper), a pleasant young woman with a sprained ankle who desperately needs the money this role can provide; Corinne (Loredana Parrella), the young ingenue who reads Stanislavsky, wildly overpreparing for a play where a ballet owl murders hookers; Laurel (Mary Sellers), the Designated Slut who will do anything for her own gain; Brett (Giovanni Lombardo Radice), the sassy gay friend that every theater kid remembers having in high school; Sybil (Jo Ann Smith), a feisty young woman who is encumbered with both an unwanted fetus and a feathered mullet - it's up to you to decide which is worse; and Danny (Robert Gligorov of Murder-Rock: Dancing Death, which is a real movie), Sybil's baby daddy and Sting's evil twin.

It's pretty easy to watch every breath Danny takes. He doesn't have many left.

As the quickly dwindling group makes their way around the darkened theater in an attempt to find either the key or an escape route, the film slowly reaches a boil, tossing out everything it's got in a rip-roaring climax of chaotic mayhem. The final act of this film is like a shot of pure adrenaline, propelling any fan of slasher panache or cinematic composition out of their seats with a rousing hurrah. OK, maybe I'm a little drunk on gore, this is my first slasher in a while. But it's great!

The best thing about StageFright is that it's full of surprises. Just when you think you have the film pegged, there's a new surrealistic shock around the corner. Whether it's an actress being stabbed to death in the middle of a scene after the killer is mistaken for her co-star, a high octane Die Hard-esque action sequence in the rafters, or an out-of-the-blue gore effect that matches nothing else that came before, the sense of "what the holy hell am I looking at?" rarely abates.

Although the actual construction of the special makeup effects are pretty standard fare, the filmmakers mix them up in creative and unique ways, manufacturing a lively and consistently engaging gorescape.

I bet when you clicked on this article, you were thinking "I hope he describes this film like he's on the Food Network." You're welcome.

On top of the thrills and spills, StageFright: Aquarius is imbued with the stylish brio that only the Italians could bring to the genre. Arranging a clash between stagebound theatrics and the gruesome reality intruding upon the players, scenes are arranged in messy tableaux of gore and pandemonium. Real blood drips onto spilled stage blood, merging with it beneath a burst of feathers that flit through the air like a blizzard. 

By the end, the set looks like the aftermath of a pillow fight at Andy Warhol's house.

The film slams the audience with jarring overhead shots, creepy mannequins, and extreme eyeball close-ups in a deliciously unpredictable rhythm. And all of this is interspersed with the lively banter of two cops who are obliviously standing watch outside. It's a real doozy.

It's been so long since I've sat through a film that's just so tremendously fun, so I highly recommend StageFright to any slasher fan, veteran or neophyte. Heck, I recommend it to any movie fan, as long as they can stomach some good 80's grue.

And some FANTASTIC dancing.

Now, a caveat. This film isn't perfect. Shocking, I know. But to fully appreciate the vivacity and color of StageFright: Aquarius, one must be subjected to its truly horrendous electric guitar score. Let me paint you a picture. The lead singer of Flock of Seagulls sits down in his dressing room and pops the needle onto his StageFright soundtrack record. After some thoughtful contemplation while he sips his New Coke, he blows his bleached tip out of his eyes and unplugs the machine. "Too much synth," he says.

The music ineffably lends almost exactly the wrong tone to every scene in which it lurks. Whether it's a tense search for a missing key or a POV shot zooming through backstage, the score lends operatic overture and shrill, Mockingjay-esque whistling in precisely the wrong amounts. At times, the zany energy of the music catches up to the presented visuals in a galvanizing way, but these moments are few and far between.

We're also saddled with a final scene that needlessly extends the run time and makes a half-baked stab at a "killer is still alive" scare that slightly deflates the power of the whole affair.

But while those flaws might be fatal to a lesser movie, StageFright: Aquarius is still more than worth your time. If you make a point to watch just one obscure 80's slasher movie from my frighteningly long list, do yourself a favor and let it be this one.

Killer: Irving Wallace (Clain Parker)
Final Girl: Alicia (Barbara Cupisti)
Best Kill: Peter's arm is cut off with a chainsaw which then runs out of gas, at which point the killer decapitates him with an axe. Deliciously brutal.
Sign of the Times: Oh sweet Debbie Harry, please spare me.

Scariest Moment: Alicia struggles to get a key out from between the floorboards while the killer sleeps.
Weirdest Moment: The film ends on a shot of a Marilyn Monroe lookalike playing the saxophone.
Champion Dialogue: "She's a perfect example of the method, she really feels her parts."
Body Count: 10

1. Orderly is stabbed in the neck with a hypodermic needle.
2. Betty is pickaxed in the mouth.
3. Corinne is stabbed to death.
4. Mr. Ferrari is stabbed to death.
5. Mark is drilled through the stomach.
6. Brett is axed in the chest.
7. Sybil is cut in half.
8. Danny is chainsawed in half.
9. Peter is decapitated with an axe.
10. Laurel is stabbed in the gut. 

TL;DR: StageFright: Aquarius is bogged down by some truly dreadful musical decisions and an unnecessary ending, but it's one of the most electrifying and exciting entries in the late 80's slasher genre.
Rating: 8/10
Word Count: 1548

Census Bloodbath: The Lonely Island

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

WARNING: This post contains graphic images of cheesy 80's gore.

Year: 1980

Director: Joe D'Amato

Cast: Tisa Farrow, Saverio Vallone, Zora Kerova

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

A word on the Video Nasty: Around 1982, British censors started to realize that some of the horror films coming out nowadays were getting a tad gory. Instead of doing the polite British thing and turning their noses up but letting it happen, they ripped a page from America's songbook and took a wild stand against something they didn't totally comprehend (Commentary! I bet you weren't expecting that in your slasher review).

A whole slew of late 70's and early 80's slasher films (along with grindhouse, cannibal, and zombie movies) landed on what became known colloquially as the "Video Nasties" list, a strict censorship code which essentially blackballed films from ever playing in Britain, sometimes allowing them to be released in heavily edited (read: boring) formats.

Anthropophagus aka The Grim Reaper is such a film. Considering that the only other Video Nasties I've seen were The Evil Dead and The Burning (the former being a wonderfully campy debut for genre maven Sam Raimi and the latter being the single best slasher film of 1982), I was pretty excited. 

This film is in Italian (Questionably. More on that in another article. Italian cinema was weird about languages around this time.), but opens on a remote island in Greece as a pair of German tourists relax on the beach. I'm going to cut the subtitle editor some slack - maybe his recently deceased dog was a German Shepherd and he couldn't handle the associated emotions - but I had to rely entirely on my German 101A knowledge to understand any of the dialogue.

Example Scene:

"This water is ice cold!"

"Something something something sunglasses!" 

 Anyway, because they are a couple and they are in the first ten minutes of a slasher movie, they die.

Whoops, spoilers. Sorry, dude.

A group of tourists has just descended onto the coast of Greece so it's time to Meet the κρέας! This ragtag band includes Andy (who I swear was called Alan in the subtitles, but either way he's played by Saverio Vallone), the adventurer med student who had the bright idea to sail around the Greek archipelago; Maggie (Serena Grandi, who we'll meet again later as the title character in Delirium: Photos of Gloria), who is pregnant; her husband Arnold (Bob Larson) who isn't the most attentive person in the world, frequently leaving her behind to pursue other activities; Carol (Zora Kerova), Andy's sister and Master of Tarot Cards; her womanizing boyfriend Daniel (Mark Bodin); and Julie (Tisa Farrow) who isn't actually a part of the group but hitched a ride on their boat to come visit some friends at (dun dun DUN) an eerily familiar remote Greek island.

Julie is sorry to intrude upon their leisure trip, but due to unforeseen circumstances they're her only option. The men of the group are less sorry, going out of their way to flirt with the new girl to the dismay of Carol and Maggie.

As revealed through a series of heavy breathing-filled POV shots, Maggie sprains her ankle and decides to stay with the captain on the boat while the others explore the island. The village is deserted... The telegraph is broken... There are no phones... When they get back, Maggie has vanished and the boat is drifting out to sea... It's not all Greek to me, they're in trouble.

To make a long story short, they hole up in Julie's friends' empty house for the night and find themselves pursued by a cannibalistic madman (George Eastman) who has apparently devoured every living inhabitant of the island. He spends most of the time in shadow, which is a plus considering that his makeup looks something like a linebacker crossed with a lizard.

According to the backstory he's just really sunburned. No, I'm not kidding. Although, since this is Italian we will not call this stupid and allow it to represent the fact that he has become something less than human due to the insanity brought on by being forced to kill and eat his wife and child when adrift at sea. Yeah, that sounds more like it. Viva Italia!

Like most slashers, in between the kill scenes we get to spend some time with our characters and watch their relationships develop. Or, as with most slashers, we watch "characters" develop their "relationships." These scenes land somewhere in the middle of the spectrum because while they don't have a lot of, say, thematic weight, they are certainly entertaining and much more nuanced than your average hack 'n kill. 

Another element that makes Anthropophagus a cut above the rest (if you'll forgive that worthless pun) is that its characters are all adults, and as such their interpersonal drama has more heft and draw. And maybe this is just because they were speaking Italian, but the genre's typical bad acting was at an all time low. Kerova in particular burns with the flames of a thousand Mediterranean suns.

So the movie is content to trundle along on its fairly standard course, remaining an above average and fun slasher movie but not anything more and only being intermittently nasty. There's a cleaver in the face here, a severed head in a bucket there. It's pretty gory (and great), but it's nothing to write letters to the editor about.

And then. And then.

Things get real. After a series of three scenes that are much too long for their own good (I wrote in my notes that if the movie continued like this, I'd have to mark it down a grade), the blood fuel is poured on the nightmare fire and the real fun begins.

As the island crew is whittled down to only a few stragglers, Julie and a blind French girl who can smell the killer (Another overwhelmingly Italian plot point that works beautifully. It adds tension like you wouldn't believe.) are trapped in the very house where they learn the killer's story (that he's a man who went insane after being forced to Donner Party his own family). Driven to insanity (for to return to being sane would be to return to a world without his beloved wife and child, forever haunted by the knowledge that he was personally responsible for their demise), he has become a ravenous beast stripped of all human dignity.

This is underscored by a moment where Maggie, the pregnant girl who it turns out is a lot hardier and more alive than we thought, tries to convince the Beast not to kill her for she is with child. He responds by choking her to death, ripping out the fetus, and eating it. Video nasty you say? Yeah, it's pretty gross and gory and immoral and whatever, but 1) It's freaking awesome, 2) It's the most bizarre, jaw-dropping horror scene I've ever witnessed, and 3) It's actually relevant to this man's character arc and descent into barbarity.

So we have elements of shock and awe being put to good use for the first time in, well, ever. We have a Final Girl who does pretty well for herself, smashing mirrors and commanding spineless friends around and generally kicking butt. Her young ward gets her scalp ripped off and her throat devoured (they must have saved their entire effects budget for this finale, and they were absolutely correct in that decision), and then scary things happen! In a slasher film!

Julie ends up hanging by a broken wrist on a rope inside a well, with the Beast beneath her steadily climbing the ladder toward her. This is terrifying, well-shot, and tremendously effective in a way few American slasher movies could have ever hoped to compete with. She gets out but she is still restrained by the rope, but Andy saves the day by burying a pick axe into the monster's gut.

And then, the monster does what we never would have expected but secretly knew in our gut all along - he devours himself, the final link in the chain of torment and hunger.

Part of a balanced breakfast.

Is it Nasty? Yes. Is it great gory fun? Yes. Is it thematically resonant? Weirdly, yes. This is no Shakespeare obviously, but it has its own very straightforward arc that really makes you think.

I know, right?

One final thing before I wrap this up - the cinematography was inexcusably good. What I was primarily startled by was the fact that I could actually see what was happening. What luxury!

There are a couple deep focus shots that use background elements to comment on foreground elements, which is totally film 101 stuff but at least they're doing it! There are clever frame constructions using reflections in cleavers and dark pools of shadow over the Beast's eye sockets and it's generally not a hilariously ugly affair.

This movie is by no means perfect, but it's a little-seen gem that I would highly recommend for gorehounds and genre fans alike.

This picture really shouldn't make me feel good, but I'm just so relieved that one of these films has some value to it. And not half bad effects considering the region and time period.

Killer: Nikos Karamanlis aka The Beast (George Eastman)

Final Girl: Julie (Tisa Farrow)

Best Kill: Did I mention he ate a baby?

Sign of the Times: Since I have such a ball writing descriptions of the musical scores to 80's slasher movies, allow me to present you with several options of from which you can pick your favorite:

• Somebody farting into a Vocoder.
• The Phantom of the Opera playing bagatelle.
• Crazy Frog hiccuping.
• The Main Street Electrical Parade as interpreted by Bernard Herrmann.
• A xylophone made of macaroni noodles.

Scariest Moment: A girl pops out of a wine cask, stained red, and attacks Daniel in the basement.

Weirdest Moment: There is a particularly endearing Spring-Loaded Cat scare in which an adorable kitten is dropped onto the keys of a piano.

Champion Dialogue: (Arnold to his wife as she vomits overboard) "Don't worry dear, I'm feeling a little seasick myself."

Body Count: 13; not including Ariette's parents or the entire village, but including the fetus.

1. German Girl is killed by a Jaws ripoff camera angle.
2. German Guy gets a cleaver in the face.
3. Sailor gets his head ripped off.
4. Daniel's throat is ripped out.
5. Irina hangs herself.
6. Nikos' Son dies of exposure.
7. Nikos' Wife is accidentally stabbed. 
8. Arnold is stabbed to death.
9. Maggie is torn apart.
10. Maggie's unborn baby is devoured.
11. Carol's throat is slit.
12. Ariette's scalp is ripped off as she is pulled through the roof.
13. Nikos is stabbed in the stomach and devours his own intestines.  

TL;DR: Anthropophagus can drag occasionally, but it has fairly well-realized characters, fun gore scenes, and a killer final twenty minutes.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1822