Census Bloodbath: Cannes You Dig It?

Year: 1982

Director: David Winters

Cast: Joe Spinell, Caroline Munro, Judd Hamilton

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I don't know what I was expecting when I sat down with The Last Horror Film. Maybe I was expecting The Last Horror Movie, which is a totally different film from the early 2000's. It certainly wasn't something good, given the introduction from Lloyd Kaufman before my copy of the movie that informed me that this was distributed by Troma Entertainment. But whatever it was I was expecting, it didn't come to pass when all of a sudden splayed across the screen was a surreal meta-horror that reteamed the leads from Maniac in footage shot guerrilla-style at the actual Cannes Film Festival in 1981.

It's like Escape from Tomorrow, but not pretentious and unbearable!

So. Vinny (Joe Spinell, of the aforementioned Maniac and also Cruising, so he's never not been sweaty in 80's slasher movies). He's a cab driver with dreams of becoming a big shot Hollywood director, so he saves his money and buys a ticket to Cannes, where he stalks movie star Jana Bates (Caroline Munro, who spun her appearances in Maniac and The Last Horror Film into a mini scream queen run that also included Slaughter High and Don't Open Till Christmas - and whose hair in this movie looks like a skunk got electrocuted on her head), who is there for the premiere of her new movie, titled (and I'm not kidding) "Scream". The people who prevent him from accessing her all meet mysterious deaths at the business end of a variety of sharp instruments. 

Spoilers: He does eventually kidnap her and force her to unwillingly play a part in a Dracula movie he has outfitted in a French castle, and if the directing doesn't work out, he might just have a future in set design.

There's a lot going on with The Last Horror Film, which is good news because the plot is the barest thread of gossamer. First off is the sheer pleasure of getting to visit Cannes in 1981 around the edges of this silly slasher movie. The beauty of this style of filmmaking comes both in its inherent realism and the fact that if you ignore what's going on in the middle of the frame, it might as well be documentary footage of a bygone era. This is aided by the inclusion of the ripped-from-the-headlines real events of John Lennon's recent murder by a fan and John Hinckley Jr.'s attempt to assassinate the president to impress Jodie Foster, both of which foreshadow the film's plot bluntly but effectively.

Second off is the soundtrack! After a ripping opening with Depeche Mode's "Photographic" (which probably cost more than the cast's salaries combined), we get a glorious arrangement of pastiches of every popular early 80's genre provided, weirdly, by Jesse Frederick, the guy who wrote the theme songs for Full House, Family Matters, and Step by Step. Speaking of the astonishing pedigree of the filmmakers, this was directed by David Winters, whose career took him from playing A-Rab in West Side Story to being the choreographer of The Star Wars Holiday Special to producing Killer Workout, so don't say people can never change.

Third off? There's a vein of surrealism that runs through this film and is absolutely captivating. Joe Spinell takes his work from Maniac and pitches it to the rafters in a series of bizarre fantasy sequences where he envisions an alter ego who's a slick film director and constantly mocks him. Sound and image seem to slip past each other and blur together in these fantasies, which get more and more bizarre, at one point showing Spinell as a stripper onstage in a bra and panties, which is one of the most special sights that cinema has ever given me.

Whatever is happening here is a close second.

The Last Horror Film is like Maniac tried to market itself as a warm and fuzzy comedy and got lost somewhere along the way. It's bizarre, surprisingly effective (Spinell's intensity sweats out of him, and it's glorious to witness), and the kills are even decent! There's no work at the level of Maniac's Tom Savini (which could hardly be expected from anybody who's not... Tom Savini), but there's a gag where a severed head splashes into a bathtub that I can't describe any other way than delightful. And while a lot of the other in-film kills are in silhouette or shadow (there are a couple more intense ones displayed in movies screening at the lightly fictionalized Cannes - in real life none of the French people would give half a shit about these shitty horror pictures), the actors sell the intensity well enough that they still hit a nerve. 

My experience with this movie was wholly engrossing and entertaining in a way that I never thought could have happened this deep into 1982. It's far too weird to have penetrated far beyond the 80's in the public imagination, sadly, but it's exactly the kind of semi-precious gem I created this project in order to stumble across. It's no masterpiece of the form, certainly, but it's going for the brass ring. It only gets a finger on it, but it still sticks the landing, and who could blame it for that?

Killer: Bret Bates (Glenn Jacobson)
Final Girl: Jana Bates (Caroline Munro)
Best Kill: Suzanne's death itself is by gunshot, which is not, what you want from a slasher movie, but afterward she falls from the roof of a building and smashes her head open like a watermelon. So, y'know. Pretty cool.
Sign of the Times: Literally every movie poster displayed in the Cannes footage (The French Lieutenant's Woman! Polyester! For Your Eyes Only!).
Scariest Moment: Vinnie bursts through the window of Jana's bathroom while she's showering.
Weirdest Moment: When a kid is looking up at an airplane with a banner hanging from it, he drops a piece of cake between the breasts of a topless sunbathing woman.
Champion Dialogue: "Every side of your face is the best side."
Body Count: 6; although numbers 1 and 3 take place in films within the film, which in and of itself is in another film, so why split hairs?

1. Hot Tub Blonde is electrocuted in a pool.
2. Martin is axed in the back.
3. Alley Man is slashed and his guts are ripped out.
4. Stanley is stabbed.
5. Suzanne is shot.
6. Bret is chainsawed.

TL;DR: The Last Horror Film is thin, but only in plot, and who really needs one of those in a slasher anyway?
Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 1100

Census Bloodbath: He May Be Bad, But He's Perfectly Good At It

If you’re an avid reader of Census Bloodbath, first of all, bless your heart. Second, you may notice that I’ve backtracked a tiny bit. Although I’ve already run a post-mortem on the slashers of 1980 and 1981, a second round of research has added a couple more titles to my list: mostly foreign and obscure stuff, but also titles with dubious connection to the genre that I found myself being more lenient with this time around. I’ll be working back through these extra titles as we also continue to push forward into 1982.

Year: 1980

Director: William Friedkin

Cast: Al Pacino, Paul Sorvino, Karen Allen

Run Time: 1 hour 42 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

One of those titles that received a less lenient treatment this time around was Cruising, an Al Pacino crime thriller from The Exorcist and The French Connection auteur William Friedkin. It’s hard to judge a movie’s slasherness sight unseen, but I was dead wrong about this one. Hell, it’s more of a slasher than half the crap I covered from 1980; don’t let the presence of prestige film mainstays fool you.

I don’t care how many Oscars you have between you, this movie has a higher body count than The Stepfather.

Cruising made the highly controversial decision to set a cop thriller in the milieu of New York’s gay S&M leather bar scene. This outraged moralistic heterosexuals, but it also caused a stir in the gay community who objected to the film’s narrow representation and violence against gay men. Fortunately, this is the rare occasion where time has been rather kind to a film’s controversial subject matter. Gay stories are becoming more abundant in the media, so this isn’t the only representation out there, and Cruising has now become something of a historical document capturing a particular urban scene a mere year before AIDS arrived on its doorstep and permanently decimated it.

There’s no denying that the depiction of the sexuality and activities of gay men is depicted with a certain sense of goggle-eyed horror, but removed from the stern gaze of Al Pacino, it’s also unflinchingly erotic, in a way that certainly had never been seen before in mainstream cinemas. It’s hard to watch this film from any perspective and not be awash with conflicting feelings, but it’s possible to read it in a way that doesn’t feel like an attack (as long as you’re aware of the strict conventions of the slasher formula).

I should probably get to the plot. Rookie cop Steve Burns (Al Pacino) is given an undercover assignment by stern father figure Captain Edelson (Paul Sorvino); he must pose as a gay man and roam New York’s leather bars to attract the attention of a killer who has been cruising the area and murdering his hookups.

He easily befriends his harmless playwright neighbor Ted (Don Scardino of He Knows You’re Alone) but this deep dive into this psychosexual underworld is causing turmoil in his own mind and in his relationship with Nancy (Karen Allen).

But really, what doesn’t cause Al Pacino turmoil?

The sexual subtext present in every slasher film is incredibly transparent here. Most slasher killers are sexually repressed for one reason or another, and that repression requires a release, causing them to fly into murderous rages, penetrating those who commit the sin of tempting them, using the blade of a knife rather than anything naughty. It’s been this way from Psycho to Sleepaway Camp, and for what I believe is the first time, Cruising flips that concept on its head.

Especially in the 80’s and before, sexual repression is tragically prevalent in the gay community. Many of us are taught from birth that the way we feel is sinful and wrong, and that’s before we add a layer with a fetish like BDSM. The symbolism of the reasonably bloody kills in Cruising (the murderer always stabs his victims in the back) is unmistakable, and the motivation – while twisted – has a sad basis in real-life crimes. 

Symbolism? What symbolism?

For this reason alone, the killer would be terrifying, but combine that with his creepy whispered mantra (“Who’s here? I’m here. You’re here…”) and menacing silhouette, and you have yourself a tremendously chilling and memorable antagonist.

I didn’t even mention that he wears huge sunglasses and a leather jacket, which are pretty memorable in their own right.

Unfortunately, after a stellar first half exploring life and death in this fascinating lost community, Cruising turns its focus to its single weakest element: Al Pacino. His presence in the film was never interesting to begin with (he just silently wanders through bars gawking at men in leather hats groping each other, his only character development being the increasing amount of accessories he wears), but he fails to stick the landing on the two most crucial elements the third act needed to survive: Steve’s descent into madness and the solution to the mystery.

The reveal of the killer is a dud, as it doesn’t involve any of the characters we’ve come to know or any real agency on the part of Steve Burns. He sits around glowering, he’s handed a piece of evidence by the chief, and then he surveils the suspect in a montage so idiotic and cheesy that the film literally irises in on Pacino to underline that fact that he’s in the scene we’ve been watching him be in for three minutes. It’s a fat load of nothing, and it forces the villain’s exciting presence offscreen for far too long.

This devastating lack of action also decimated whatever feeble attempt at a character study there is in Cruising. The idea is supposed to be that Pacino gets too deep undercover and begins to question his own identity, but you get none of that in the man’s poisonously flat performance, which chokes on its own ambiguity. And the screenplay never commits to escalating his behavior to any real degree other than committing to be hog-tied once during a sting operation. It’s so easy to picture the third act that Cruising wanted to have and easily could have created, but it flinches, forcing us to suffer through 40 minutes of Pacino sitting around twiddling his thumbs until we reach the deliberately ambiguous ending that the bungled setup thoroughly failed to earn, and in fact renders completely nonsensical.

You can’t have a cop movie with a cop that doesn’t do anything, and it’s infuriating that this dreadful third act mars a film with this good a setting and villain. The lurid, saturated color and casually explicit sexuality of the first hour are so incredible that the fact the movie falls so hideously short of being a masterpiece is just devastating.

Killer: I’m honestly not sure.

Final Girl: Is there even a girl in this movie?

Best Kill: The momentum is brutally murdered at about minute 56.

Sign of the Times: One of the victims lives above a Radio Shack.

Scariest Moment: A man in a sling gets fisted in the middle of a bar. I’ve never been to New York, but I’m pretty sure that violates the health code.

Weirdest Moment: Sitcom icon Ed O’Neill briefly shows up as a homicide detective.

Champion Dialogue: “If that bulge in your pants ain’t a knife, why don’t we take a walk?”

Body Count: 4

1. Loren Lukas is stabbed in the back.
2. Eric Rossman is stabbed in the back.
3. Martino Perry is stabbed in the back.
4. Ted Bailey is killed offscreen.

TL;DR: Cruising is a waste of the monumental potential that the first hour sets up.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1263

Census Bloodbath: He's At Your Door

Year: 1980

Director: William Lustig

Cast: Joe Spinell, Caroline Munro, Abigail Clayton

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

As you can probably tell from my tirade in the beginning of my Killer Party review, watching all these 1980 slashers had left me feeling like a plastic bag drifting through the wind. The only problem is, I don't want to start again. But in order to reach the shining Mecca of 1981, I gotta drink the dregs. Luckily Maniac, released the day after Christmas in the year of our lord Tom Savini, was like finding a lump of sugar stuck in the bottom of my teacup.

As the frequent observer of this blog may have predicted, Maniac is not what anybody could in good conscience call a "great" film. But what it is doing is so daring and strange that I have to give it props just for the foolhardy gusto with which it tells its story.

And he's dancing like he's never danced before.

Maniac tells the story of one Frank Zito (Joe Spinell, also of The Last Horror Film and, surprisingly, two Rocky movies and two Godfather movies), a man whose mommy issues extend well beyond the grave (and well beyond the expiration date for Psycho ripoffs, but this one's better than the dreary Funeral Home or the noxious Silent Scream from the same year). His particular issues send him careening out of control one holiday season (this is the third and by far the best 1980 slasher to be set around Christmas time), and Frank departs his apartment every night with his handy toolkit of sharp implements and puts them to good use, murdering and scalping women he believes to contain his mother's soul and nailing their scalps to mannequins back at his apartment. You know, like you do.

Maniac is one of the few films in the 80's to make truly interesting use of the situation of being caught in between the frights of the 70's and the nascent slasher genre. DNA from many other film styles are conglomerated into one ugly, but eternally compelling mess, a heaping pile of elements from early slashers films, a heavy dollop of Psycho, some nasty grindhouse thrown in to provide a basic structure, and a sprinkling of the Italian giallo for flavor.

All of these combine into one brutal, ugly flick, the perfect surrounding for the brutal, ugly man that is Frank Zito.

The camera adds ten pounds... of FURY.

The world around Frank is dull and grey - a night-addled funhouse mirror vision of New York City. And his interiors are no better. Frank's apartment is full of squat furniture and garish colors that provide a harsh contrast to the grey world outside, a very Italian and very unsettling touch.

It ain't easy being purple.

Maniac has no high machinations. It doesn't want to play with delicate themes or in-depth psychological analysis. It just wants to punch you in the nads as hard as it can for as long as possible, showing the dark side of the world we live in. At this, it is only intermittently successful but aided in huge part by Tom Savini's masterly gore effects.

I have sung the praises of Mr. Savini far and wide, but would never pass up the opportunity to do so again. His grisly gore effects revolutionized horror in America when they first came to the screen in Friday the 13th and would continue to turn up in some of the best movies of the decade including The Burning, The Prowler, and Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. And Maniac is no exception.

Despite being perhaps less gory than the film's notorious reputation would have you believe, Savini delivers the grue with as much care as the doctor who had to deliver Princess Kate's baby. Unique in the slasher genre thus far, we get several deaths by sword and two brutal scalpings, the former of which probably earned the film its nasty word of mouth and deserved it. But there's no ignoring the fact that it's a work of a master of the craft.

I'm not actually sure I can show screenshots without ruffling a few feathers, so here's a kitten playing the piano.

So. Intermittently successful. I've chosen to mainly focus on my praise for the film, but there is certainly. First, there's the dismal budget and the fact that most of the minor parts were cast with porn actresses to cut costs. Porn actresses in the new millennium are hardly known for their acting prowess, but imagine the crop of talent available immediately post-70's. It's not pretty.

And the middle half of the plot can be quite repetitive, although I hardly noticed. As a veteran of watching such films as Psycho Santa and Memorial Day, I've built up a high tolerance. This is perhaps not one of my prouder skills. Luckily things pick up after Frank meets Anna (Caroline Munro, also of The Last Horror Film - with our Mr. Spinell - and Slaughter High), a plucky photographer who brings out the best in him. Unfortunately the best in him is still a murderous slob, but at least he buys her a stuffed bear. 

And, alas, the film is full of victims whose main line of defense is trying to shriek the killer into submission while standing stock still and never moving a muscle. This sounds misogynistic and it is, but any masochistic feminist who decided to rent Maniac on movie night would be pleasantly disappointed, because the film is shockingly uninterested in exploiting female flesh.

There's one topless scene, but it lasts about a half second when a woman is in a bath and she immediately covers herself demurely with bubbles. My theory is that director William Lustig (also of Uncle Sam and all three Maniac Cop movies) didn't want to distract anybody from the unrelenting violence of the picture, even for a second.

And the... whatever the hell this is.

So, yes. It has flaws. But the film is so deeply frenetic and interesting that it is hard to find an overwhelming fault to doom it entirely. Most importantly, even in the draggiest sequences, the time just whisks by. After the likes of Terror on Tour and To All A Goodnight, I had forgotten that movies didn't have to be boring.

And there's a handful of hearty cinematic moments that pepper the general dreariness of the production values, ramping up the tension and just letting the movie have a chance to breathe and have fun. And the ending - hoo boy the ending - is so jaw-droppingly picturesque in its violence and inimitable in its gonzo balls-to-the-wall approach. Honestly, the entire film is worth seeing just for those final moments. The fact that the rest of the film isn't half bad is merely window dressing.

No, it's not going to win any awards anytime soon. And that window of time has already long since passed. But it's not the worst way to spend ninety minutes and any 80's enthusiast who wants a crash course in the world of horror at the beginning of the decade should look no further than this film.

Killer: Frank Zito (Joe Spinell)

Final Girl: Anna D'Antoni (Caroline Munro)

Best Kill: Tom Savini gets a chance to show what he's worth by blowing his own head off (well, a character played by him) with a shotgun, exploding into a million tiny pieces.

Sign of the Times: Anna's everyday "lounge around the house" outfit is a pair of tight red leather pants.

Scariest Moment: The interactions Frank has with the mannequins never fail to be terrifying.

Weirdest Moment: A victim hiding from the killer strains her face and neck in such a way that the only possible explanation is severe constipation. The fact that she's hiding in a bathroom does not help matters.

Champion Dialogue: "You're the most beautiful woman I've seen since my mom."

Body Count: 8; including the killer.

1. Beach Girl has her throat slit.
2. Beach Boy is garroted with wire.
3. Hooker is strangled.
4. Disco Boy is shot in the head with a shotgun.
5. Disco Girl is shot to death.
6. Nurse is stabbed through the back with a sword.
7. Rita is stabbed in the abdomen.
8. Frank Zito impales himself on his own sword. 

TL;DR: Maniac is a deeply messy but infinitely compelling violent fright flick.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1396