Census Bloodbath: Scareplane

Year: 1982

Director: Alfred Sole

Cast: Tom Smothers, Carol Kane, Paul Reubens

Run Time: 1 hour 22 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Airplane! is one of my absolute favorite movies. It’s a wacky visual gag-laden parody of a very specific subgenre, and it’s a masterpiece. But it also has a lot to answer for. Suddenly, 80’s comedy directors thought that they too could make a film like Airplane!. Spoiler alert: they couldn’t. The tsunami of imitators fling themselves wholeheartedly into zaniness, but they lack the finesse and craftsmanship to be anything but a pale imitation.

Being as it was the premiere subgenre of the 1980’s, the slasher film attacked its fair share of Airplane! clones, as early as 1981’s Student Bodies, just one year into the Golden Age. In the year or two to follow, a whole host of crackerjack joke-em-ups would come tumbling down the chute, but the earliest would come in April 1982: Pandemonium, helmed by Alice, Sweet Alice director Alfred Sole.

Which – you may remember - is famously a laugh riot where a young Brooke Shields is brutally murdered at her first communion.

Pandemonium follows the hijinks that ensue at a cheerleader camp in Indiana that has recently reopened after a long history of attendees being brutally murdered. The camp is run by Bambi (Candice Azzara), the town’s only surviving cheerleader. When two separate maniacs escape from prison and an institution respectively, local Canadian Mountie Sgt. Cooper (Tom Smothers) investigates with his trusty, reluctant sidekick Johnson (Paul Reubens).

Because this is a parody of the rigid slasher formula, this is the first time in a good long while where we get to Meet the Meat. The cheerleaders on the chopping block today are Candy (Carol Kane), a wholesome and telekinetic riff on Carrie, one of the only films to be directly parodied for some reason; Randy (Marc McClure of Strange Behavior, but also the freakin’ Back to the Future and Superman franchises) and Andy (Miles Chapin of The Funhouse), two nearly identical horny white boys; Sandy (Debralee Scott), a pushy broad with impossibly high standards; Mandy (Teri Landrum), a toothpaste-obsessed beauty queen; and Glenn (Judge Reinhold), the platinum blonde son of a blind pencil salesman. …Don’t ask.

They begin to get killed, presumably at the hands of the same murderer who has been targeting cheerleaders in this town since 1963.

It’s pretty much an American pastime at this point.

As you may have noticed, Pandemonium has a pretty stellar cast of name-brand comedians and character actors. They are the wind in this film’s whoopee cushion, because without them the gossamer thin script would fall apart like tissue paper in a tornado. Carol Kane is a delight in a role that frankly never comes together, salvaging as much charm as she can muster to make up for the fact that Candy doesn’t even possess the one note most parody characters are provided at the door. Judge Reinhold is also superb as the cheerily clueless lunkhead with a  heart of gold. The only real sour note is – surprisingly – Paul Reubens, who attempts to solder his Pee-Wee shtick onto the archetype of the obligatory “random zany guy” and creates an excruciatingly irritating Frankensteinian monstrosity of a character in the process.

So, here comes the most important question of all… Is it funny? My answer is… mostly. Some of the broad comedy gags stick the landing (even the obvious ones like what happens when you order the “Three Stooges pie”), and the screenwriters clearly had a deep well of knowledge about the subgenre (especially in the parts where they less-than gently mock the Canadian slashers that masqueraded as American by having a cop in full Mountie regalia presiding over a Midwest town). It’s generally more “clever” than it is actually “funny,” but there’s one line in particular that had me laughing so hard my head rolled right off my shoulders. That’s a gold star achievement for a parody slasher of this ilk.

Of course, the film weakens considerably once the killings begin in earnest, so it can’t be that good a parody. Although the effects are slightly better than the demure offscreen antics of Student Bodies, they’re charmless and tend to focus on character traits that haven’t really been explored beforehand. The only worthwhile kill is in the prologue, in which a group of cheerleaders walking in an absurdly tight single file are shish kebabed with a javelin. 

This is what makes me laugh. Please don’t call the cops.

Now that’s not to say it’s funny all the time to begin with. The gags spray wildly in every direction, and forty percent of them plummet straight into the dirt. This is the nature of these films, but there’s nothing more exhausting than bad comedy, and even at a brisk 82 minutes, Pandemonium slightly overstays its welcome. The story isn’t interesting or consistent enough to pick up the slack when the jokes fail, and it sags desperately every ten minutes or so.

Is it funny to paste the Jaws score into a random chase scene? And since when has there been the stereotype of “Girl Obsessed with Toothpaste”? When Pandemonium is grounded in real tropes it excels (like the way the killer’s hands can effortlessly burst through mattresses and walls), but sometimes it can be a bit senile, wandering off in completely arbitrary, inexplicable directions.

The whole affair has a bit of a ramshackle charm to it, but frankly, Pandemonium is too piecemeal for me to proclaim that it’s a hidden gem. I sure as hell had a fun time watching it, but there’s not enough There there for me to want to firmly commit to standing in its corner. It’s about on par with Student Bodies, which I also don’t dig all that much. I respect the existence of both the films, with their occasional giggles, but there’s a reason Scream was hailed as a groundbreaking slasher satire 14 years later: Nobody cared enough to remember that either of these films existed.

Killer: Blue Grange (a briefly cameo-ing Tab Hunter)

Final Girl: Candy (Carol Kane)

Best Kill: Mandy being impaled with a cheerleading bullhorn, because it’s pretty much the only death that feels like the genuine escalation of what the slasher genre was working with at the time. (I disqualified the cheerleader shish kebab because I already rhapsodized about it earlier.)

Sign of the Times: The movie makes an absurdly racist Air Tokyo joke that just wouldn’t fly in this day and age.

Scariest Moment: Randy’s dead body is propped up wearing a horse mask.

Weirdest Moment: A man who just quit his job as the wind sock at an airport eats his lunch while wearing a huge chrome sock as a hat.

Champion Dialogue:  “He doesn’t want you to sin, unless He can watch.”

Body Count: 15; not including various cheerleaders killed within a spinning newspaper montage, or the offscreen victims of the serial killer Jarrett, who were turned into furniture.

1. Five 
2. cheerleaders 
3. are 
4. shish kebabed 
5. with a javelin.
6. Glenn jumps on a trampoline loaded with dynamite.
7. Mandy gets a power drill stuck in her mouth.
8. Fletcher,
9. Jarrett, and
10. Dr. Fuller are simultaneously electrocuted.
11. Bambi is drowned in a milk bath.
12. Randy is smothered with a pompom.
13. Andy is smothered with a pompom.
14. Mandy is impaled with a bullhorn.
15. Blue is crushed by a statue of himself.

TL;DR: Pandemonium is a reasonably entertaining, if disastrously thin parody slasher.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1242

Popcorn Kernels: The Fairer Sexploitation

In which we present mini reviews of two female-directed entries in stereotypically male-directed genres.

American Psycho (For our Scream 101 episode about this very film, click here.)

Year: 2000

Director: Mary Harron

Cast: Christian Bale, Jared Leto, Reese Witherspoon

Run Time:1 hour 42 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A pent-up Wall Street VP lashes out in a variety of homicidal ways.

American Psycho is a crazy film. One of the few generally accepted horror classics that I hadn’t seen, it defied my expectations at every turn. Based on the controversial Bret Easton Ellis novel that divided critics between viewing it as a dressed-up misogynist tract or a razor-sharp satire, the film was directed by – of all species – a woman. In case you’ve never read this blog before, let me make it very clear that this puts me firmly in the movie’s camp pretty much from the get-go. As far as I can figure it, this is the only popularly regarded staple horror film to have a woman behind the camera (I’m not counting The Babadook, which is far too new to qualify as a classic, as much as I may love it. And I’m certainly not counting Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare).

And how does having a female director affect the horror and humor of American Psycho? Not one whit. Well, maybe we linger a little longer on a showering Christian Bale, but you ain’t catching me complaining there. Other than that, it’s a perfectly sharp yuppie satire for people who liked Fight Club a little too much.

Perfectly skewering the venal, acquisitive nature of Reaganomics-fueled Wall Streeters who are all shallow, greedy, and interchangeable, American Psycho depicts the meltdown of a single individual: Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman – in this massive horde. As he strains to rein in his homicidal outburst, his peers ignore him entirely, even when he publicly confesses to his many sins. This is best encapsulated in a key scene where Bateman trundles a body into the trunk of a cab and a passing coworker coos over the trendy duffel bag he’s using to perform the deed. This is a world where you can be a murderer or, in fact, be murdered yourself, and you won’t make the slightest dent in the indestructibly grinding clockwork of capitalism.

It sounds intense, and it is. But it’s also pitch-black hilarious humor so grim that even the folks on the gallows might find it distasteful. Patrick Bateman is a man who murders people who can nab reservations at better restaurants than he can, discussing the finer points of Huey Lewis and the News while zipping up a plastic poncho to protect his designer suit from stains. Patrick Bateman is a man who trembles at the mere sight of  trendy business card, who has a stroke of panic when an opponent’s apartment is nicer than his. His viewpoints and motivations are so pointlessly inane that you can’t help but laugh, even as you cringe at the thought that the world around him allows him to get away with his crimes.

The only thing stopping American Psycho from being a flat-out black comedy masterpiece is a tendency toward repetition in the second act. Every scene follows a very precise structure, hobbling its ability to shock. A glorious ATM scene that simultaneously implies that Money is God and kicks the film’s craziest sequence into gear provides the jolt that the system needs, but the film enters a holding pattern for a little too long to preserve my patience. But we can’t all be perfect. American Psycho is a clever, superb little lick that’s just as keen to reference The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as Ivana Trump. I love that, even if it houses a half hour that falls short of being a masterpiece.

Rating: 7/10

Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Year: 1982

Director: Amy Heckerling

Cast: Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judge Reinhold

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The teens at Ridgemont High really love bangin’.

Another entry in an exploitation genre secretly helmed by a woman, Fast Times at Ridgemont High definitely wears its gender on its sleeve, at least a teensy bit more. Despite its unfair proportion of bare breasts (a male full frontal scene was excised by the ever-progressive MPAA), Ridgemont High is first and foremost a story of a young woman discovering her sexuality and learning what she wants from men. Of course, this is a rote toss-up between a smooth talking stud and a namby pamby Nice Guy, but this was 1982. Let’s not expect too much.

This young woman, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh in the role that made her a star (though she showed great promise in the previous year’s Eyes of a Stranger), is a sexually active teenager treated with a tremendous amount of respect. Her sexual misadventures are never presented as shameful, and an abortion scene late in the film is presented as a natural – if difficult – part of life, used to further Ridgemont High’s sweetest relationship, between Leigh and her ne’er do-well brother Judge Reinhold.

Of course, she’s the only character given anything even remotely resembling a story arc. The movie around her is a haphazard explosion of random, occasionally comic vignettes following stoners, football players, cool guts, and nerds through their daily lives. Each fragmented piece is part of a vast mosaic, depicting nothing in particular. It’s vexing, and the tendency to showcase overlong, almost actively unfunny sequences (an imaginary surfing championship interview, an enraged football player winning a game) is damning. To be fair, I have the personal bias that Sean Penn’s stoner drawl and Robert Romanus’ droning deadpan rub me exactly the wrong way, like a sandpaper suit.

This total disconnection from the concept of “story” or “character” is intensely frustrating and the movie’s habit of poor continuity editing only highlights how scraped-together the overarching plot feels. Even Phoebe Cates’ iconic bikini scene suffers from – frankly – a dreadful botch-job on the part of the splicer. This is less like cutting a movie and more like cutting the cheese (Hey! Rimshot!).

Of course, the “time in a bottle” aspect of Ridgemont High does much to soothe any wounds it may have caused. With a pitch perfect soundtrack of 80’s hits that have actually aged terrifically (Jackson Browne, The Go-Go’s, The Cars… This is a synthcrap-free zone) and a horde of future stars (joining Penn and Leigh are Forest Whitaker, Nicolas Cage, and horror icons Amanda Wyss – Freddy Krueger’s first victim in A Nightmare on Elm Street – and Kelli Maroney, who would eventually return to the Sherman Oaks Galleria where this film was shot four years later in Chopping Mall), Fast Times at Ridgemont High is a dreamy time capsule of days gone by.

It might not be a perfect high school sex romp, but it’s decently funny and occasionally sweet. I can make do with that while jamming to “We Got the Beat.”

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1155
Reviews In This Series
American Psycho (Harron, 2000)
American Psycho 2: All-American Girl (Freeman, 2002)