Census Bloodbath: Pull The Other One

Year: 1982

Director: Greydon Clark

Cast: Joe Don Baker, Stella Stevens, George Kennedy 

Run Time: 1 hour 23 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

It makes perfect sense that 1982 would be the year with the highest concentration of slasher parodies. The boom began in earnest in mid-1980 with Friday the 13th, and reached its highest theatrical concentration in 1981 (Night School, Friday the 13th Part 2, Graduation Day, The Burning, and The Fan were all released in a single three-week period). Combine that with the enormous success of Airplane! in 1980, and you've got yourself a recipe for a glut in that very specific sub-subgenre. 

The trend kicked off with the star-studded and decent Pandemonium and the execrable National Lampoon's Class Reunion, which began John Hughes screenwriting career and somehow didn't tank him immediately (he's white). The capper of this trilogy was Wacko, a film that lands somewhere between them quality-wise, though (spoiler alert) it's much closer to Class Reunion on that very limited scale.

Maybe humor didn't get funny until 1983?

Wacko "tells" the "story" of Mary Graves (Julia Duffy of Night Warning and a million TV shows you've actually heard of), whose older sister was killed by The Lawnmower Killer 13 years ago during the Halloween Pumpkin Prom. Wouldn't you know it, now it's time for her Halloween Pumpkin Prom, and someone else has donned the pumpkin mask to kill some kids. She's attending with her boyfriend Norman Bates (Scott McGinnis), who makes lawnmower noises every time he gets horny, and boy they just weren't even trying with naming this character, huh?

The other notable teens are her best friends Bambi (Elizabeth Daily of Bad Dreams and also she's the fucking voice of Babe), Rosie (Michele Tobin), and Rosie's date Tony Schlongoli (Andrew Dice Clay in his first film role), who has a dick so huge that he bursts through his pants whenever he gets a boner. Comedy! Unfortunately we don't get to spend a lot of time with the actual characters, because the producers spent a third of their budget on the name actors playing the adults, including George Kennedy (seen similarly slumming it in Just Before Dawn the year prior) as Mary's father, Stella Stevens as her mother, and Joe Don Baker as film noir-esque detective Dick Harbinger.

Their roles are all embarrassing, but they're laughing their way to the bank.

I suppose we should talk about the comedy, because there's literally nothing to this movie other than an endless litany of gags layered over one another. Sometimes that can be successful. That structure is one of the reasons people praise Arrested Development to high heaven. But in order for that to work, the gags need to be good (see: Arrested Development season 5). 

There is some mildly amusing stuff that crops up every now and again, because out of 100,000 jokes, there's a statistical improbability that not a single one will make you laugh. But none of these successful gags (including a rope hanging out of the window of an escaped mental patient's first floor room, and a student saying of her chemistry teacher "he makes science so believable!") have anything to do with Wacko's ostensible purpose to parody the slasher film formula in any meaningful way.

There are very forced gags pointing out the tendency for these films to have unnecessary dream sequences or perverted gardener red herrings, but in a style that recalls Scary Movie, a lot of the gags feature totally unrelated horror properties (including The Omen, The Exorcist, and Alien) and scattershot cultural detritus (the West Side Story musical number that introduces Tony is both hideously staged and resolutely unfunny, and it does not shock me to find out that it was Andrew Dice Clay's idea). Wacko is so lackadaisically committed to the slasher conceit that the only death in the first hour isn't even perpetrated by the killer who is supposedly stalking around town.

That said, the film's third-best line comes when Mary worries that her father might kill someone with the replacement medical instruments he's been using because he can't find his scalpel, and her mother calmly chides her: "Your father is a doctor. He kills people EVERY day."

And once the kills kick in during the film's Prom Night-inspired final act, they prove to be entirely bloodless and starved for creativity. Even a death involving a teen's head being shoved into a garbage disposal is just an excuse for a flood of gags (the lunch lady shows up to tell the killer he needs to be running the water to turn on the disposal, and then it's randomly revealed that she is the teen in question's mother) rather than a fun, outré death. There is not one drop of blood, or even a little motion implying the jiggling of the machine. It's just static and demure in every possible way.

It's surprising that the kills are so underplayed, because everything else in the movie is played up to the rafters. Any running gag is repeated no fewer than one thousand times, and the jokes are so crammed into every single element of the movie that any time it stops to breathe for even a two second shot like somebody walking across the lawn, the sound designer throws in a random elephant trumpet sound... just because?

Other than the occasional, incidental laughs, there are only two things I liked about Wacko. The first is that Julia Duffy is a great casting choice, and her cartoonish baby voice provides a heightened, over-earnest register that the whole movie should have taken and run with. And the second thing is that the band that plays at the prom is a group called Avalon, who I actually quite like. So this movie has at least added to my "Slashdance" playlist of songs from slasher movies, even if it hasn't benefited me to watch in any other way.

Killer: Dick Harbinger (Joe Don Baker)

Final Girl: Mary Graves (Julia Duffy)

Best Kill: The chemistry teacher saws a woman in half to prove something about matter, and seems mildly disappointed when he finds out he's murdered her.

Sign of the Times: Andrew Clay hadn't even earned the "Dice" in his name yet!

Scariest Moment: The dad spying on his scantily clad daughters and constantly being laughed off is just... bone-chilling.

Weirdest Moment: There's a random car chase scene where one car uses a ramp to launch over another car as it explodes.

Champion Dialogue: "I'm really honored that you're still a virgin."

Body Count: 6

1. Lady is sawed in half in Chemistry class.
2. Vice Principal has his head squeezed in a vise.
3. Bambi is decapitated with an axe.
4. Tony has his head shoved in a garbage disposal.
5. Rosie is put into some sort of... meat grinder conveyor belt?
6. Dick Harbinger is impaled with an American flag, stabbed a bunch, and probably shot; frankly I'd stopped paying attention at that point.

TL;DR: Wacko is funnier on paper than it is in practice, and it's not that funny on paper.

Rating: 2/10

Word Count: 1174

Census Bloodbath: Sometimes Aunt Cheryl Does Dreadful Things

Year: 1982

Director: William Asher

Cast: Jimmy McNichol, Susan Tyrrell, Bo Svenson

Run Time: 1 hour 36 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Like many an 80’s slasher, our movie for today is known by multiple titles. Although the litany of monikers includes Momma’s Boy, The Evil Protégé, and Thrilled to Death, the two most common ones are Night Warning and the inarguably more evocative Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker. Frankly, it doesn’t really matter which you choose, considering that none of them are applicable to a scrap of the film they claim to describe. Although one title clearly stands out above the others, to avoid my typing fingers cramping up, we’ll be referring to the film as Night Warning from here on out.

So now, without further ado, from the director of Beach Blanket Bingo and hundreds of episodes of Bewitched and I Love Lucy… a slasher movie called Night Warning!

This’ll be great, I can feel it.

So, here’s the plot. After his parents were killed in a suspicious car accident, high school senior Billy (Jimmy McNichol) was raised by his neurotic Aunt Cheryl (Susan Tyrrell) in Flagstaff, Arizona. When his basketball coach (Steve Eastin, who played a cop in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2) tells him about the impending visit of a scholarship scout from the University of Denver, he is thrilled because that means he might get to go to the same school as his devoted girlfriend Julie (Julia Duffy, also of Wacko). This sends Cheryl into a nervous breakdown.

Desperately trying to find a new man of the house, she attempts to seduce TV repairman Phil Brody (the delightfully named Caskey Swaim, who played the non-murderous paramedic in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning). When he resists her sweaty, shrill advances, she stabs him to death and claims he tried to rape her. Although she’s half-telling the truth, local Detective Joe Carlson (Bo Svenson) is a racist, homophobic, just kind of general trash bag, who discovers that Brody and the Coach were in a homosexual relationship, so he assumes that Billy was involved in a deadly love triangle and his Aunt is covering for him.

After that, kinda nothing happens for 40 minutes until a cadre of suspicious individuals descend on the house in the third act. That’s what you get for not building in a pool of body count victims.

Three screenwriters contributed to this film, and apparently not one of them could be bothered to crack open a Friday the 13th for research.

Night Warning is dominated by one thing and one thing only, and that is Susan Tyrrell. Her bravura performance is so gleefully, whole-heartedly bugnuts that it towers over everything else, casting a long shadow over the tepid high school drama. Her deranged, bulging eyes and fidgety physicality make for a perfectly wonderful villain, though it might be a bit of a stretch to call the performance “good.”

Her chopped-back hair creates an off-kilter silhouette and she’s always framed behind shots of kitchen knives looming ominously on the counter. She melodramatically smears blood across everyone and everything in her shrilly incestuous path of destruction, dropping Champion Dialogue-worthy lines like “Don’t go to school anymore. You’ve learned enough, and it’s full of perverts!” like delirious bread crumbs every three minutes.

If they made an inspirational wall calendar of Aunt Cheryl quotes, I’d be the first in line.

The only second that comes even close to reaching her is Detective Carlson, who is a hilariously bitter amalgam of the worst stereotypes of small-town bigotry. His blatant homophobia and racism are made bearable only by the film’s tone, which clearly hoists him to the status of a secondary villain. The film’s portrait of its actual gay character is reasonably sensitive: the Coach is masculine, not a pedophile, and caring – a victim of an evil man who doesn’t deserve the vile scrutiny he’s being put under.

Night Warning allows you to laugh at Carlson, and it also asks us – rightly – to be terrified of the possible violent consequences of his closed-mindedness. So the movie certainly does not want for compelling antagonists. But everything else is just kind of… there.

At least it’s well lit enough that I can see it. I’ll take what I can get.

The kills are bloodless and tedious, taking too long to ramp up and never really delivering a satisfying pay-off, and the plot is too aimless to drum up any sort of sustained suspense. Frankly, Night Warning is a complete hash of a slasher. The deranged character study at the center is what keeps it from total system failure, and even that can’t be bothered to hook itself to any truly compelling psychology. It’s just high-energy weirdness, a sugar rush that fades much too soon.

Plus, other than the fresh and sleazy opening flashback, there isn’t really a defining aesthetic to the film. It trots along through the drab grey interiors without a flair in the world. Even the title card is a half-assed affair, flashing onscreen so briefly that it feels almost like a subliminal message. Nobody whose named wasn’t Tyrrell cared about this movie, and thus that performance feels like a dazzling gem carelessly discarded in the gutter, wrapped in a bit of used tissue. At no point is it especially bad. It’s just thoroughly underwhelming.

Killer: Aunt Cheryl (Susan Tyrrell)

Final Girl: Billy (Jimmy McNichol)

Best Kill: Billy’s Dad’s head is Final Destinationed by a log that falls off the back of a truck.

Sign of the Times: A bully in a crop top has the gall to imply that Billy is the one who seems gay.

Scariest Moment: Cheryl hisses “I’m your girlfriend now,” to Billy.

Weirdest Moment: The end credits feature a scroll describing what the surviving characters are up to, as if this were a college movie.

Champion Dialogue: “College is for rich kids and people with brains. You wouldn’t fit in there.”

Body Count: 7

1. Dad has his head smashed with a log.
2. Mom falls off a cliff in a car, which explodes.
3. Phil Brody is stabbed in the neck.
4. Margie is axed in the stomach.
5. Officer Cook is axed to death. 
6. Cheryl is impaled on a fireplace poker.
7. Detective Carlson is shot to death.

TL;DR: Night Warning is a thin slasher with lame kills that hinges entirely on a truly demented pair of antagonists.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1065