Census Bloodbath: Brou-Ha-Ha

Note: It must be recognized that Evil Laugh was directed and co-written by the late Dominick Brascia. Onscreen, he most memorably played Joey, the character whose death sent his secret father Roy on a murderous copycat killer rampage in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning. Brascia also appeared in Rush Week and They're Playing with Fire and directed Hard Rock Nightmare. It's difficult to get too excited about all of these Census Bloodbath connections, considering the fact that he was accused of sexually abusing Corey Haim amid a flurry of he-said-she-said comments made by him, Haim's mother, and Charlie Sheen following Haim's death, so consider the alleged bullshit acknowledged. Woof.

Year:
1986
Director:
Dominick Brascia
Cast:
Kim McKamy, Steven Baio, Myles O'Brien
Run Time:
1 hour 31 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Plot: Aspiring pediatrician Jerry (Gary Hays of Hard Rock Nightmare) invites his med school friends from the fictional Catalina Island State University (this is pretty funny, if you're from Southern California) to come fix up a closed-down foster home. The home is the site of a heinous crime some 10 years before. An employee named Martin brutally murdered the children after they falsely accused him of molesting them, and his ghost is said to still haunt the area. For his trouble, Jerry is murdered by a masked, uncontrollably laughing assailant.

Into this situation unknowingly steps a group of the horniest med students on planet Earth: Jerry's fiancée Connie (Kim McCamy of Dreamaniac, who followed her banner year of slashers by becoming a pornographic actress and body double under the name Ashlyn Gere); the annoying preppy rich couple Betty (Karyn O'Bryan) and Sammy Douglas Baxter III (Tony Griffin); the studly and cruel urologist Mark (Myles O'Brien); dropout X-Ray tech Johnny (Steven Baio, who produced and co-wrote Evil Laugh and later starred in Hard Rock Nightmare - also he's Scott Baio's brother); the ditsy and horny Tina (Jodi Gibson, who later became known as Sasha, the Hollywood Super Madam, running an escort service that at one time employed Heidi Fleiss - is there anyone in this movie whose resume isn't incredibly complicated?).

Although they are somewhat weirded out by the fact that Jerry is missing, they get to work fixing up the place and sexually manipulating one another, often at the same time. Only the Fangoria-reading horror fan Barney (Jerold Pearson of Tag: The Assassination Game) is wary of the situation, and as the laughing killer targets the students one by one, Barney grows increasingly panicked by the signs that only he seems to see.

Analysis: Evil Laugh is a weirdly perfect double feature with Dreamaniac, which is the most recent 1986 slasher we covered on Census Bloodbath. Both movies star Kim McKamy, for one thing. But both also have a sex scene involving whipped cream and feature copious male flesh, though this one is more equitable in the female nudity department and thus significantly less homoerotic, it must be said.

Being significantly less homoerotic than Dreamaniac still leaves a lot of room for fun, however. Take the friendship between Mark, Johnny, and Barney, which is the most "wouldn't it be hilarious if we kissed?" dynamic I've ever seen in a 1980s slasher movie. My favorite scene is the one where Barney pranks Mark by hiding under the bed while Mark is having sex with Tina, then pushing his hand through a hole in the mattress and stroking Mark's pert bottom. You know. Because it's really funny that Mark briefly thinks it's Tina who's caressing and squeezing those caked-up cheeks. Classic prank!

Thankfully, it is pleasant enough to spend time with these characters cleaning and fucking, because the pacing of Evil Laugh is wonky as hell and the core platter of Meat refuses to fall to the killer's blade for the better part of an hour. That said, it's nice to have a good chunk of slasher Meat in the first place, because a lot of the slashers of 1985 largely eschewed that element of the formula.

The movie does less well with other tropes, unfortunately. For instance, the killer's mask is this desperately uninteresting black and white thing that even the movie itself seems embarrassed by, because we only ever see it in like three shots total. Also, the killer's M.O. of constantly laughing isn't scary, but it also fails to tie into either the story of Martin or the eventual reveal of who the killer really is. 

[SPOILER ALERT - the killer is Sadie Burns (Susan Grant), the wife of the property's real estate agent Roger Burns (Howard Weiss), and she is at least seeded into some early scenes of the movie, but her Mrs. Voorhees moment feels especially Friday the 13th-esque because it comes out of absolutely nowhere.]

The kills themselves are often pretty bland, too. In more than half of them, the uniformly bad actors are failing to sell unconvincing gore gags. Plus, the movie resolutely refuses to have the fact that the characters are med students play into these sequences even a little bit. However, the film does perk up periodically for some standout moments.

Honestly, the thing that truly keeps the film afloat is that it does have these scattered moments of horror brilliance. It just carries on being a run-of-the-mill slasher movie for minutes upon minutes upon minutes, but then it'll have a gem of a scene like the one where Betty is tied up on the bed and gagged for a bit of S&M fun and thus Sammy is unable to heed her warning that a killer has entered the room.

Now, the thing that I haven't mentioned about this movie yet is that people will tell you is that this movie is a meta comedy precursor to 1996's Scream. It certainly has a few moments that predict, Nostradamus-like, the way that the seminal meta slasher will behave 10 years on, including a proto "this is the part where the killer comes back to life" bit from Barney. 

And it's true that there are quite a few moments where other slasher movies are referenced and a few where the tropes of horror (sex = death, mainly) are discussed, particularly by Barney. However, at least to my eyes, these moments were much more similar to the vein of humor you found in the same year's Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives than anything Kevin Williamson was up to in the Scream franchise. It was late enough into the 1980s that screenwriters were more and more tempted to put a hat on the slasher tropes they were using, without the added element of having the majority of the characters genuinely seem to be aware that they were in a horror movie.

That's about the extent of the comedy in this movie, which is otherwise a run-of-the-mill slasher. However, the presence of a strong comic thread makes certain moments play wrong, particularly the absurdly dark backstory given to the foster home. The details we learn about Martin's rampage grow more and more ludicrously shocking, in a way that never plays as humor but also never appropriately bleeds into the level of horror at which the main story is operating. It's just kind of gross and edgelordy for no reason.

All in all, while I am content with giving Evil Laugh the same score as Dreamaniac, it's one that I'm less keen to recommend. It just barely crawled its way across the threshold of being worth watching, whereas the other Kim McKamy joint of the year was a blast from start to finish.

Killer: Evil Laugher (Dominick Brascia when masked)/Sadie Burns (Susan Grant when unmasked)

Final Girl: Connie (Kim McKamy)

Best Kill: Johnny has his head shoved into a microwave, which cooks him to the point that blood explodes out of his cranium. This absolutely isn't how it would work in real life, but who cares. 

Sign of the Times: They say picture is worth a thousand words.

Scariest Moment: Chief Cash (Hal Shafer) is talking to a wannabe cop, Freddy (Johnny Venokur of Hard Rock Nightmare), who is stationed in the bushes to watch over the house. Freddy is wet behind the ears and unsure about how cop things work, so he asks why there is somebody in the backseat of Cash's car. Somebody that Cash was unaware of until that moment...

Weirdest Moment: In the closing sequence, Connnie is seen walking past a signed headshot of her late fiancé.

Champion Dialogue: “If I were a girl, I'd become a lesbian."

Body Count: 12

1. Jerry is stabbed in the back and has his heart removed.
2. Donald is drilled in the torso.
3. Chief Cash has his throat slit offscreen.
4. Freddy is stabbed in the gut.
5. Sammy is macheted in the back of the head.
6. Betty is killed offscreen.
7. Mr. Burns is stabbed in the crotch.
8. Mark is axed in the forehead.
9. Tina is strangled and has her neck snapped.
10. Johnny has his head microwaved.
11. Sadie Burns is shot, both by Connie and Barney.
12. Barney is stabbed with scissors by Connie.

TL;DR: Evil Laugh is a threadbare slasher, but it is intermittently horny enough, funny enough, and scary enough to be worth watching.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1528

Census Bloodbath: Won't You Take Me To Twunkytown?

Year:
1986
Director:
David DeCoteau
Cast:
Thomas Bern, Kim McKamy, Sylvia Summers
Run Time:
1 hour 22 minutes

Plot: Aspiring heavy metal musician Adam (Thomas Bern) makes a deal with a succubus named Lily (Sylvia Summers). According to multiple plot synopses online, this deal is to make him better with women. The audio on the absurdly shitty VHS transfer used for the movie's official DVD release was too muddy for me to hear exactly what he asked for, but that request doesn't really make sense to me, because he already has a cool punk girlfriend, Pat (Kim McKamy of Evil Laugh). 

Whatever it is that he actually asks for, he ends up being enslaved by the succubus, who shows up at a sorority party thrown by Pat's sister Jodi (Lauren Peterson) and begins killing people left and right. She is somewhat indiscriminate when it comes to the gender of her victims, but she does try to seduce as many of the men as she can before eliminating them.

Analysis: Let me introduce you to Dreamaniac director David DeCoteau, if you've never had the pleasure. He is a gay icon, and a director with many fascinating behind-the-scenes stories to tell. The only problem comes when you get in front of the scenes. 

His movies, from Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama to A Talking Cat!?!, are usually shoestring budget productions that are produced at breakneck speeds to capitalize on whatever the latest trend is. It's fascinating to hear him speak about how he does what he does, but usually the answer is "let the camera roll on an actor walking around for 10 minutes without cutting."

Another fun thing about the man is that, between mockbusters like Hansel and Gretel: Warriors of Witchcraft and 90210 Shark Attack, he has built entire franchises (1313, The Brotherhood) out of watching twunks wandering around in their tighty whities and having nasty things happen to them. Because of his filmmaking approach, however, the results are usually terminally boring. Nevertheless, you gotta admire him.

Anyway, very few things get between David DeCoteau and a quick buck, so I can't say that I was surprised to find him in the director's chair for one of the first slasher movies to capitalize on the popularity of 1984's A Nightmare on Elm Street. 

Dreamaniac came still early enough in the slasher timeline that it was merely retitled (from Succubus) and given a new poster, rather than fully ripping off Elm Street storywise, in the manner of something like Bad Dreams. This means that, instead of forcing us to watch an insipid Freddy Krueger imitation quip his way through scenes (à la Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama), DeCoteau has instead leaned in on what would soon become his standby narrative mode: twunk-watching.

Almost without exception, the male characters in this movie doff their tops, pants, and even underwear in the pursuit of maximal titillation, while the women among their number mostly make do with low-cut dresses and sexy lingerie (if I recall correctly, there is only one female character who goes topless in this movie, which is a rarity for this level of slasher sleaze).

While we did get some other inexplicably male-flesh-heavy 1980s slasher movies (like Girls Nite Out and The Majorettes) from time to time, the fact that Dreamaniac was also directed by a gay man, written by two women, and stars a nonbinary actor (Lauren Peterson) makes it more or less unique among the slasher sludge of the 1980s.

Its queer sensibility extends way beyond its obsession with male flesh. Without this group of people behind the camera, I don't think the resident mean girl Francis (Cynthia Crass) would have half as many deliciously cutting things to say, for instance. There are only a few rare moments of actual homoerotic subtext (that said, the men in this movie are unusually incurious about what sex with their dates might be like), but there is an overall sense of playfulness that I think would be lacking if Dreamaniac was made by cishet male filmmakers.

Having women pen the screenplay also gives the movie an additional layer. It's hardly a feminist text, but it ultimately leans much more Slumber Party Massacre than I might have expected, especially with its dual final girls and a few well-placed drill-related moments.

Having said mostly nice things about this movie, so far, I don't want to be mistaken for saying it's some kind of long-lost masterpiece. David DeCoteau's less exhilarating filmmaking instincts do shine through on occasion (including the loooooooong opening credits sequence where the names of the cast and crew appear on the screen one by one by one in an implacable, stately march), and the acting ain't all that great for the most part. Plus, despite a few major exceptions, the kills are fairly tame and unoriginal.

However, it succeeds far more often than it fails. And most of the times it does fail, it does so in a zesty way, like the closing sequence that randomly posits that (SPOILER ALERT) the events of the movie are the contents of a novel written by the real-life Adam. This sequence includes a joke that winks at the fact that the movie is called Succubus. Which, of course, it isn't. Don't you just love that?

Killer: Lily (Sylvia Summers)

Final Girl: Pat (Ashlyn Gere) feat. Jodi (Lauren Peterson)

Best Kill: Adam's death is gruesome. Pat uses the world's longest drill to sever his head, and we get a gnarly insert shot of his flesh ripping in the process.

Sign of the Times: Everything that is said or worn is incredibly 1980s, but a small moment is what really caught my eye this time: Adam fiddling with his guitar while watching a kaiju movie on his tiny portable rabbit-ear television evoked a very realistic vibe of a bored dude at home that would look entirely different if it took place in 2025.

Scariest Moment: The opening establishing shot of Adam's house lasts like 40 seconds, and I worried that this would be another interminable David DeCoteau joint.

Weirdest Moment: One scene in the kitchen keeps panning past the fridge, which has four different canisters of Quaker Oats on top of it.

Champion Dialogue: “I remember Brad. Big-hearted, and it stops there."

Body Count: 10; give or take a smothering that I think was committed on Lily and was thus unsuccessful, but the visuals were too murky to tell if it was accidentally perpetrated on a different character.

1. Cat dies offscreen.
2. Valley Girl is stabbed in the top of the head.
3. Ace is electrocuted while tied up, then later impaled through the eye.
4. Foster is stabbed in the back of the neck while drinking from the punch bowl.
5. Jan has a poker jammed into her chest.
6. Brad has his dick bitten off.
7. Francis has her throat slit by Adam.
8. Jamie is garroted.
9. Adam is decapitated by Pat with a drill.
10. Real-Life Adam is clawed in the throat.

TL;DR: Dreamaniac is a gleefully cheesy softcore slasher with a welcome queer sensibility.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1173