Census Bloodbath: Ski You Later

Hello, everybody! It's been a while since I've shared a proper review of a 1980s slasher. Things have been real busy on my end, writing for Screen Rant full time and all. I have a tentative plan to get Census Bloodbath back up and running some point by spring 2025, but before then, please enjoy this review of a snowy slasher I watched as part of my duties at Horror Press.

Year: 1988
Director: Jeff Kwitney
Cast: Debra De Liso, Doug Stevenson, Lisa Loring
Run Time: 1 hour 26 minutes

Plot: In Iced, four years after their friend Jeff (Dan Smith of Hitcher in the Dark) dies in a skiing accident, a group of friends is invited to the swanky Snow Peak skiing community for a vacation. Isolated and surrounded by snow, they begin to be hunted by a killer wearing Jeff's cracked ski mask who blames them for the accident. Is it Jeff? Or is it someone else seeking revenge? 

The characters in question are Cory (Doug Stevenson of The Prowler), whose braggadocio and stealing of Jeff's girlfriend caused Jeff to go angry-skiing during a storm in the first place; Trina (Debra De Liso of The Slumber Party Massacre), said former girlfriend and now wife of Cory, who is obsessed with exercise; pediatrician John (John C. Cooke); John's resentful wife Diane (Elizabeth Gorcey); Jeanette (Lisa Loring, the original onscreen Wednesday Addams, also of Blood Frenzy), their transparently desperate single friend who just had a blow-out fight with her dorky boyfriend Eddie (Michael Picardi); and Carl (Ron Kologie of Cards of Death), the requisite irritating prankster who has the additional character trait of being addicted to drugs, aided by his high-paying job at a pharmaceutical company. Also on hand is the allegedly hunky Snow Peak real estate agent Alex Bourne (Joseph Alan Johnson, who wrote Iced in addition to starring in Berserker and The Slumber Party Massacre), who is desperate to impress his father and who Jeanette immediately throws herself at.

Analysis: Unfortunately, like a lot of meat-and-potatoes slasher movies of the late 1980s, Iced does not have much to offer the seasoned horror fan. The acting ranges from competent (hi, Lisa Loring) to absolutely abysmal, averaging out much closer to abysmal than not. Joseph Alan Johnson in particular is a disastrously beige nonentity. 

The movie’s pacing and structure are also baffling. There are almost no murders beyond the opening kill for a good half of Iced’s runtime, which forces you to spend time watching this group of people have a pretty mediocre ski vacation where they’re constantly sniping at one another and not doing much else. When the kills do come, they zip past you at a too-rapid clip, hardly giving you time to pay proper attention to them, like chocolates on the conveyor belt in I Love Lucy.

There is next to no tension-building in the movie because of this, just a lurching sort of stop-start motion that will make you seasick. By far the most exciting and visceral moment of the movie is a scene where a character is wandering around in the dark and bangs his shin on a coffee table. Tragically, the skiing is also not that thrilling to watch. While it’s competently shot, enough to be legible, it seems to be beyond the limits of director Jeff Kwitney to turn it into something propulsive and exciting. Thankfully, the movie pretty much forgets about skiing after the first act, anyway.

Although the sum of its parts is pure blandness, there is plenty that Iced does quite well. For instance, the movie was shot in Utah and thus comes by its iciness naturally (sorry, Jack Frost, California doesn’t quite cut it), crafting a unique setting for a late-period slasher with a frigid, moody atmosphere. I’m also a sucker for themed kills, and the use of a ski pole, an icicle, a snowplow, and a hot tub do a lot to spice up the proceedings.

For the gorehounds in the audience, only one of the kills is particularly bloody, though they are nearly all well-rendered by their own standards (there’s an electrocution that relies on performance rather than effects, for instance, and does stick the landing). And even the offscreen or underwhelming kills end up being useful in the Final Girl sequence, when their frozen bodies provide a gruesome and effectively bleak tableau.

As far as exploitation movies go, Iced also has quite a bit to offer on that front. Nearly every member of the cast takes off all their clothes at one point or another, chilliness be damned, and there is a reasonably equitable division of male and female characters wandering around bare-chested, which always feels shockingly progressive when you’re watching a 1980s slasher. Plus, the sequence that is the most undignified (a topless corpse is seen with snow piled on her breasts) actually works for the tone, as the indignity makes her death feel that much more tragic, while the piled snow emphasizes how impossibly long the character has been exposed to the elements.

What else is good? Well… The killer’s POV is depicted by showing a view through the crack’s in Jeff’s visor, which provides a neat new image for a type of shot that is otherwise pretty standard for a slasher movie.

However, Iced ultimately exists in this nether space between interesting and boring where it never particularly feels like a slog, but is oh so withholding when it comes to meting out exciting moments. I’ve seen dozens of slashers that are much, much worse, so it’s hard to get angry about what this 1988 entry is bringing to the table. That said, this one is only for die hard fans of the subgenre, or for people who desperately need a snowy horror fix and have already seen everything else from The Shining to Wind Chill.

Killer: Alex Bourne (Joseph Alan Johnson)
Final Girl: Trina (Debra De Liso)
Best Kill: John getting stabbed through the back of the neck with a ski pole while sitting in the car evokes Halloween in a fun way, is the best themed kill, and is also the most showstopping gore moment, simultaneously.
Sign of the Times: A man who is supposed to be inconspicuous is seen wearing a red headband over a teased blond mullet.
Scariest Moment: The killer is seen reflected in a makeup mirror while one of the characters is standing at the bathroom counter.
Weirdest Moment: Jeanette and Alex share an intimate conversation while lying in front of the fireplace and start hardcore making out, after which point it is revealed that everybody else is still in the room with them, and has been the whole time.
Champion Dialogue: "I didn't have any tits hardly, and I was terrified my secret would be discovered."
Body Count: 7

1. Jeff dies in a skiing accident after falling on some rocks.
2. Eddie is run over with a snowplow.
3. John is stabbed through the back of the neck with a ski pole.
4. Diana is stabbed in the eye with an icicle offscreen.
5. Jeanette is electrocuted in a hot tub.
6. Carl has both feet caught in bear traps and dies somehow.
7. Alex is kicked out of a window and shot simultaneously.

TL;DR: Iced is bland but hardly the worst slasher out there, mostly thanks to its unique snowy setting.
Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 1222

Census Bloodbath: That Sleep of Death

Year: 1982

Director: Amy Jones

Cast: Michelle Michaels, Robin Stille, Michael Villela

Run Time: 1 hour 17 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I rewatched an old classic this weekend in solidarity with one of my favorite online reviewers, Tim Brayton of Antagony & Ecstasy, an absolutely fabulous writer who, every summer, does a marathon of slasher movies called Summer of Blood where he reviews an old slasher movie every weekend. My Census Bloodbath feature is essentially the same thing except instead of occupying a couple weekends out of the year, it's my entire life.

Anyway, I've been following his stuff for years and I've decided to stick it out alongside him as many weekends as I can this summer. What gave me the push was that this week, he landed upon The Slumber Party Massacre, one of the films that helped me get into the genre and become such a longtime fan. 

Written by outspoken lesbian and feminist activist Rita Mae Brown as a parody, but shot as a straightforward slasher, SPM comes to its cheesy delights with a simultaneous genre purity and winking sense of humor.

Wow, the wine tonight really has body.

Trish (Michelle Michaels) is an 18-year-old girl whose parents are going out of town, and if you want more character traits than that, you're watching the wrong movie. This weekend, all she wants is to party and slumber with her best girlfriends Kim (Debra De Liso), a blonde sports nut; Diane (Gina Smika Hunter), who'd really rather be macking on her neckless jock boyfriend John (Jim Boyce); and Jackie (Andree Honore), who just barely escapes being a Token Black Character but still has no defining traits other than "Alive Until She Isn't."

Also on the Meat Tray for this evening are Valerie (Robin Stille), the sweet new girl who just moved in next door and is a little upset that Trish's friends aren't quite as welcoming as she and Courtney (Jennifer Meyers), Val's little sister who, despite being clearly played by a teenager, sucks on a lollipop to assert her age. There's also the hapless party crashers Jeff (David Millbern) and Neil (Joseph Alan Johnson, who would later star in Berserker in 1987), who are irritating voyeurs who think removing fuses from the electrical box is a world class prank.

So, with our invitingly large number of pieces put into play, our escaped serial killer Russ Thorn (Michael Villela) can have some fun. In a way, I love that he's given no direct motive other than "he's a serial killer, duh." It really helps makes SPM the stripped down fun ride it's meant to be. So, yeah. He's a serial killer and he serial kills as many of the slumberers as he can in 77 minutes, mostly with his massive penis.

Sorry, I meant penis.

Dang Autocorrect.

Penis.

PENIS.

He kills them all with a drill. That's what I meant to say.

Although, come to think of it...

Yeah, that's definitely a penis. No ifs, ands, or butts. Although the subtext would have worked better in its original parodic form, the villain of The Slumber Party Massacre brings the sexual undercurrent of the slasher film genre to the forefront. From the beginning, the "pretty young thing penetrated by a sharp weapon" angle has been used to express sexual frustration or indict sexuality. Whether intentionally or subconsciously, psychosexual themes are apparent in all but the most aberrant slasher films.

This is largely from a misogynistic standpoint. Slashers are films generally written and directed by men and marketed to teen boys and the violence tends almost exclusively toward women and the men who stand in the way. We won't see the victim pool change much here, but the thematic intent is vastly different. Where in many slasher films the knife's phallic point is used as a countermeasure to prevent female sexuality from expanding beyond controllable limits by punishing their sin, Russ Thorn's gigantic drill turns the tables on the male perpetrator, literalizing his penis as a weapon in the most obvious way possible.

Instead of women being punished by what they take into their bodies, the men are indicted because of the punishment they inflict upon women. The fact that this theme is present in a film with a cacophony of exploitative topless scenes dilutes it somewhat, but the point is clear. Slumber Party Massacre doesn't want to be like other slashers.

I mean, it is. It very much is like other slashers. And that's probably the biggest problem with its overall message, but the straightforward approach to the formula is what endeared me to the film in the first place so I can't rightly call it a flaw.

I mean, come on. This is kind of my thing.

Slumber Party Massacre is a crummy slasher film, but it's a crummy slasher film written and directed by women and for women, so that is where it draws its strength and uniqueness, not from trying to alter rules that had long since been set in stone. 

There's heaps of false scares, plenty of Idiotic Horror Behavior like "why don't we split up?" or "I'll just go investigate that dark corner with no weapon," and plenty of gooey gore. But that's all part of the fun, isn't it? Getting to eat popcorn with your friends and yell at the screen as unaware victims back straight into the killer is the cornerstone of cheese cinema and Slumber Party Massacre acknowledges this with good humor, including enough winks and nods to keep the laughs flowing although its parodic roots remain deeply buried.

So, to sum up. The film is a contradictory but smart mostly feminist slasher with plenty of blood. It's a cheese fest filled with idiots making terrible decisions. It's a clever script adhering to a dumb formula and ends with multiple final girls and a castration metaphor. It's a blisteringly fast 77 minutes that are full of joy and humor the whole way through. It's really just a fun, good natured exploitation film and a lot of the entertainment is derived from the way those opposing parts clash into one another.

Truly a blissful experience in sleaze cinema, The Slumber Party Massacre doesn't rise up from the swamp of a genre that birthed it, but rather nestles into it to provide the best thrill it can, and that's really all I asked for it to do. The feminist stuff is just a bonus, but a grandly delightful one in the middle of a decade that wasn't quite prepared for this kind of thing yet.

You go, girls.

Killer: Russ Thorn (Michael Villela)

Final Girl: Trish (Michelle Michaels), Valerie (Robin Stille), and Courtney (Jennifer Meyers)

Best Kill: Mr. Contant is drilled through the neck after he cleavers a snail in half. He deserved it.

Sign of the Times: Kim's gym shirt says "Space Baby" on it in big glittering letters for no discernible reason.

Scariest Moment: The arrival of the Pizza Boy is simultaneously hilarious and shocking.

Weirdest Moment: Jackie eats pizza using the dead delivery boy as a table.

Champion Dialogue: "It's not how big your mouth is, it's what's in it that counts."

Body Count: 12; including the killer.

1. Telephone Repairwoman is drilled in the forehead.
2. Linda is drilled offscreen.
3. Mr. Contant is drilled through the neck.
4. John is decapitated offscreen.
5. Diane is impaled with the drill.
6. Pizza Boy has his eyes drilled out.
7. Jeff is drilled through the chest.
8. Neil is stabbed to death.
9. Jackie has her throat slit with the drill.
10. Kim is stabbed in the gut.
11. Coach Jana is gutted with the drill.
12. Russ Thorn is metaphorically castrated, has his hand cut off, is gutted, and impaled on a machete. 

TL;DR: The Slumber Party Massacre is the perfect slumber party horror flick - short, and full of characters you can scream at for being dumb and cheer on for being heroic.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1317

Reviews In This Series

The Slumber Party Massacre (Jones, 1982)

Slumber Party Massacre II (Brock, 1987)

Slumber Party Massacre III (Mattison, 1990)