Census Bloodbath: Sex Work-Life Balance

Year:
1984
Director:
Peter H. Hunt
Cast:
Barbara Carrera, Kim Cattrall, Debby Boone
Run Time:
1 hour 34 minutes

Plot: Sins of the Past follows a group of former sex workers who were part of a call girl cooperative that broke up when one of their number, Ellen Easton (Megan Gallagher), was murdered. Now it's 15 years later, none of them have aged a day, and they've settled into new, respectable lives. One by one, the girls are sent newspaper clippings about Ellen's death, then they in turn are killed. They think the killer is Ellen's abusive father, Ralph (Gene Dynarski), but in order to get to the bottom of the crime and keep their former lives secret (they almost all have high-stakes reasons to want to keep it quiet), they reunite in LA to try and track down the killer themselves.

The women in question are Terry Halloran (Barbara Carrera, fresh off her stint as a Bond girl in 1983's Never Say Never Again), their former leader who is now hilariously working at a temp agency providing young girls with very different types of jobs - she's also in the middle of a vicious custody battle; Paula Bennett (the Kim Cattrall, two years before Big Trouble in Little China, three years before Mannequin, and 14 years before Sex and the City), a pragmatic woman who got her medical license and is now fighting to turn her temporary job as the head of pediatrics into a permanent position; Clarissa Hope (Debby "Daughter of Pat" Boone), who has found God and now performs songs to support televangelist Rev. Donald Randolph (John Anderson, who played the used car dealer in Psycho); Maureen Warren (Tracy Reed), who is a wife and mother living in domestic bliss; and Patrice Cantwell (Kirstie Alley, whose closet is too full of skeletons for us to consider this movie one of them - also of the same year's Blind Date), a Hollywood actress who has fallen on hard times.

As Terry tries to rally the girls, she becomes the prime suspect and eventual love interest of Lieutenant Malovich (General Hospital mainstay Anthony Geary), who is gunning for a promotion and will do anything to figure out why bodies keep piling up whenever Terry's around. Oh, and he doesn't matter at all, but Paula has a horny coworker played by Matthew Faison, who is one of the corporate paintballers who die via triple decapitation in Jason Lives!

Analysis: TV movie slashers get a bad rap. Obviously, the idea of a genre whose foundational tenets are boobs and blood being subject to network censorship is a suspicious one. And sure, some of them are barrel-scraping piles of pond scum like Hotline or . However, there are quite a few exquisite little TV movie gems scattered throughout slasher history, like Fantasies or Dark Night of the Scarecrow. So I didn't walk into Sins of the Past feeling biased against the format, and I was well rewarded for my faith.

Of course it's not particularly good as a slasher. It has the bloodless, mostly offscreen deaths that I've come to expect from this sub-subgenre, and it doesn't even have the decency to imply that any of them were committed with a sharp weapon. However, just like Fantasies before it, it makes up for its deficits as a slasher by leaning in on being a soapy, Lifetime-y melodrama about women.

The scenes where the women alternately work together and at cross-purposes gives them all an exciting amount of agency as they're propelled through some extreme emotional twists and turns. Plus, the slasher mystery at the center of it is deliciously cozy - more about lounging on couches while discussing the clues rather than gumshoing their way around the problem.

The movie even ages kinda OK in its depiction of sex work. It mostly lands on "it's OK that you did it, because you regret it and you're not doing it anymore," which is kind of a cop-out, but it does allow these sex workers to be complete human beings with lives and flaws and strengths, respecting them even though they committed those sinful, wicked acts in their pasts. There's even a lovely scene where one of the women reveals her past with her current partner, whose immediate instinct is to shun her, but who ultimately comes to accept it.

And the cast is quite good, for the most part. Kirstie Alley is really quite terrific as an amoral diva (no comment), and Tracy Reed delivers a phenomenal monologue in the final third. Unfortunately, Barbara Carrera is not up to their standard. The Nicaraguan-American actress is a Gal Gadotian level of unprepared to deliver lines in English. She wends her way around her dialogue with a sense of blind panic that results in a completely vacant character, leaving a gaping void at the center of the movie.

[SPOILER ALERT, through the end of the review]

And we must talk about Kim Cattrall, of course. Although she does deliver a perfectly Samantha-esque line comparing marriage to sex work, she's confident and competent here rather than truly marvelous, which is a shame considering the fact that it's revealed that her character contributed two kills to the body count. Her final scene is solid, but it fails to deliver the Ghostface campiness that it could have had.

That said, as a whole, the third act (when everyone converges on one of the reverend's telecasts, which Clarissa refuses to back out of in spite of the fact that the killer is clearly planning to murder her there) is actually deliciously tense. Director Peter H. Hunt, who mostly takes a backseat elsewhere, finally stirs to life as he guides us through all the different pieces being set on the board.

Although I'm not saying the movie has nothing to offer artistically. There's exactly one good shot in the movie, of a slash of light revealing Maureen's eyes as she explores a dark Mission. 

Speaking of, there are a lot of real-life Southern California locations being used, which gives the whole thing a lived-in realism. All in all, in spite of Barbara Carrera's alarming limitations, Sins of the Past is a real nice warm bath of a movie, which is the highest-possible tier that a TV movie slasher could hope to reach.

Killer: Ralph Easton (Gene Dynarski) & (gasp) Paula Bennett (Kim Cattrall)

Final Girl: Terry Halloran (Barbara Carrera)

Best Kill: Oooh baby, watching the dummy playing Kim Cattrall falling from the catwalk at the end is why television exists!

Sign of the Times: The article that the girls are being sent has the hilarious headline "Dad Kills Prostie Daughter."

Scariest Moment: Terry is followed by an unknown man after Patrice's funeral.

Weirdest Moment: Ralph Easton takes aim to kill Clarissa with a rifle, but realizes he forgot to put his glasses on.

Champion Dialogue: “A meat cutter is drop-kicking pot roasts around the kitchen and demanding a tryout with The Raiders."

Body Count: 5; not including Amy (Mallie Jackson), whose offscreen death occurs during the time jump.

1. Ellen is killed offscreen.
2. Diane (Kristen Meadows) is struck by a car.
3. Patrice is killed offscreen.
4. Ralph Easton is shot by Lt. Malovich.
5. Paula falls from a great height.

TL;DR: Sins of the Past is charming TV movie slasher that blends women's picture melodrama with a cozy mystery vibe.

Rating: 7/10

Popcorn Kernels: The Worst Idea Of All Time

In which we review two movies inspired by the back catalogue of the bad movie podcast The Worst Idea of All Time, and instantly regret doing so.

Sex and the City 2

Year: 2010

Director: Michael Patrick King

Cast: Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis 

Run Time: 2 hours 26 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The Sex and the City gals take a trip to Abu Dhabi.

The plot of Sex and the City 2 is elemental, really. In fact, it’s barbarically simple, just a faceless mannequin of a story ready to be dressed in the latest designer brands as selected rom local K-Mart shoppers’ vision boards. And yet the movie is Over. Two. F**king. Hours. Long. The 2008 movie it follows was also Over. Two. F**king. Hours. Long. but at least it has a semblance of a structure, following a year or so in the lives of beloved [sic] HBO characters Samantha, Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda.

This movie can’t boast the same sense of purpose. We’re already caught up with these sexy city gals after one movie, so we’re past the first date stage. It’s time to find out if we’re compatible, and this movie rejects the audience like a liver transplant from a dead horse. Sex and the City 2 is nothing more than a revolting exercise in consumerist acquisition, panning past 90 square miles of company logos as our heroines drift like mindless zombies from store to store across the world, draping themselves in some grotesque simulacrum of high fashion.

The eldritch horror of their costuming cannot be overstated. Carrie carries the worst of it on her shoulders, at all times looking like she’s one millimeter away from dying her skin with tiger stripes like the denizens of the Capitol in The Hunger Games. Whether she dons a pair of goggle-like gold sunglasses that make her look like she just got a spray tan at King Midas’ palace, a set of headdresses that imply she’s either an evil queen in training or she’s currently being devoured by an oyster, or a skirt so poofy I felt morally outraged coupled with a pair of opera glass sunglasses that I kind of liked but were so patently extraneous that they should have done us all a favor and obliterated themselves at the molecular level, she never at any point looks like the movie wouldn’t be improved if she were kicked into a volcano.

[EN: I don't normally put pictures in mini-reviews, but let's take a quick break to gawk at this f**king sh*t:]

But let’s not get superficial, as much as that’s the main thrust of the entire movie. Carrie Bradshaw is ugly on the inside, too. Her struggles are nominally relatable (not wanting to become a boring old married couple; a brief dalliance with a former flame), but she approaches them with such garish self-indulgence that you can’t help but see her as the villain. She’s a clingy, needy harpy who shrilly rejects any suggestion from her (also terrible) husband and demands that they spend time together even though they don’t seem to even like each other all that much.

Her punishment for her behavior is being forced to wear a diamond, because if you’re going to be lifestyle porn, you might as well earn that triple-X. But here’s the thing: her marital problems hinge on the purchase of a flatscreen TV, as opposed to the obvious, borderline-psychotic homophobia her husband exhibits at the lavish gay wedding that gobbles up 30 minutes of run time in the opening act. There are movies about serial killers that have more sympathetic lead characters.

So these four shrieking cyphers are forced to totter their Louboutin-clad feet through an hour of this bloated, staggering mess before they even get to Abu Dhabi. At which point they revel in the worst kind of exoticism, learning life lessons left and right from the Quaint Locals of Arabia, making Statler and Waldorf-esque comments on the behavior of women in burqas, and flagrantly breaking the law about half a dozen times because the only right way is the American way, dammit. The biggest conflict they ever face is the looming dread that they might have to fly coach, and it’s at this point that I vomit up my brain stem.

The worst part of this movie full of causal racism and homophobia (weird, considering it was written, directed, and produced by a gay man) is that it’s allegedly a comedy. If you pull out your magnifying glass and corncob pipe, you might sleuth out a joke or two, but they don’t seem to realize that sex isn’t inherently funny, and that by marrying off three-quarters of its main cast, it has hobbled sex’s potential to even appear at all. The rest of the film is just chockablock with overwritten puns that clearly took a great deal of effort to craft, but thud to the floor like anvils.

Comedy is all about timing, and Sex and the City 2’s refusal to let any scene end before it expires peacefully of natural causes prevents any such enjoyment. What we’re left with is lavish and empty, just like the lives of its main characters. One to miss.

Rating: 2/10

Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2

Year: 2015

Director: Andy Fickman

Cast: Kevin James, Raini Rodriguez, Eduardo Verástegui 

Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Everyone’s favorite mall security guard attends a conference in Las Vegas, only to find himself and his daughter embroiled in a massive art heist.

I save the dreaded 1/10 rating for only the worst of the worst dregs of what cinema has to offer. Much like the coveted 10/10, it is an extremely momentous occasion when one is handed out. I recently watched Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 for the purpose of witnessing its unholy glory, and unfortunately today is that much less special because it did not earn a 1/10. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a wriggling sack of dog crap, but at no point did I feel like it was actively draining my life force like a The Outing or Prom Night.

But that’s the problem with PB:MC2: It’s just barely good enough to be totally unfun to watch. It’s not funny, but it’s no so unfunny that it swings wildly from the rails of reality like your Sex and the City 2’s.

Although, I will say that it has just as much product placement with just as little grace. There’s the establishing shot of Las Vegas’ Wynn Hotel that practically interrupts scenes for another glittering, pornographic pan around its glorious edifice, for one (oddly, not a single other notable Vegas landmark is visited – in the world of Paul Blart, Las Vegas is an insulated monolith that provides for all needs, á là High-Rise or Poltergeist III), but the scene that really fascinates me is a blatant ad for Panda Express that neither promotes the good qualities of the product, nor describes it in any way visible to the naked eye. Blart uses a Panda bag to quell his rapid breathing, sniffs, and mutters “That’s orange chicken.” Then he goes outside and gets attacked by a bird. This is unrelated, but it’s a pretty good example of how the manically uninspired screenplay operates.

But let’s step back and take a breath to recognize some good qualities of Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2. Let’s rejuvenate our souls for a hot minute: The cast is very diverse, so that’s nice. And there’s a joke or two that lands, which is more than I can say for Carrie Bradshaw and her army of diamond-encrusted goblins.

But nearly every element of the film itself is inept. The script’s infrequent lurches into comedy seem to be the unintended side effect of its total lack of an attention span. Slip-sliding from scene to scene, taking on new genres and adding new characters at the drop of a hat. The pacing is a scientific marvel, pulling the fabric of time itself apart to stretch single moments into what feel like days, even weeks (most notably a scene where Blart unwraps a Hershey’s Kiss during a quick-cut sequence where he prepares for battle, a moment that should have been a sprightly, Edgar Wright-esque breeze but seems to have taken its timing cues from 2001: A Space Odyssey). And the acting ranges from Disney Channel pantomime to comatose squirrel.

For an hour and a half, we get to watch Paul Blart do things that make no sense in a desperate attempt at wackiness that feels like an estranged father trying to connect with his 6-year-old. None of it lands, and some jokes – like the aforementioned Panda Express gag – don’t even seem to be trying to make us laugh. They just kind of… exist. It’s a deeply bland, lackluster comedy, and that’s the worst sin of them all. It’s not even bad enough to be particularly interesting.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1490

Review In This Series
Sex and the City (King, 2008)
Sex and the City 2 (King, 2010)