Census Bloodbath: Ice To Skate You

Year: 1983

Director: Jonathan Stryker

Cast: John Vernon, Samantha Eggar, Linda Thorson 

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

It's the accepted party line in the slasher fandom that Canadian slashers are as a whole superior to their American counterparts, and I'm inclined to agree with that assessment. However, for every Visiting Hours or My Bloody Valentine, there's a Prom Night or Humongous (come to think of it, maybe I'm just not a Paul Lynch fan). But Paul Lynch had nothing to do with Curtains, a movie that was created by a Who's Who of Canadian slashmakers, including composer Paul Zaza, producer Peter R. Simpson, and Funeral Home and Happy Birthday to Me actress Lesleh Donaldson. So I guess there's a hole in that theory, because Curtains is an absolute mess.

And not just because they left doll heads all littered about.

Curtains is a uniquely unfocused film due to its notorious troubled production, a three-year exercise in frustrating rewrites and additional photography that led the director to remove his name from the project entirely. At first it's about actress Samantha Sherwood (Samantha Eggar), who is preparing for a role in her director boyfriend Jonathan Stryker's (John Vernon) upcoming movie about an insane woman. She's method (AKA irritating) so she wants to be checked into a mental institution, which Stryker helps her accomplish before completely abandoning her and refusing to check her out. That's one way to ghost somebody you're dating.

Cut to years later and he's prepping for the very same film once more, gathering six young actresses from all over into his secluded cabin for a weekend of hardcore auditioning. They wonder what his scheme could possibly be, because they're all so very different. What right do a skinny white lady with short hair and a skinny white lady with long hair have to audition for the same part?

Anyway, there's clearly no possible way this could go wrong. Of course, Samantha breaks out of the institution at the exact same time that the girls he's gathered start dying off one by one? Is this the work of a jealous, aged actress? Is one of the young and hungry actresses a little too hungry? Or is Stryker just the psychosexual maniac the whole premise of this film would show him to be?

But seriously, I have no answers about the dolls. Don't even ask.

The reason Curtains enjoys any sort of cult status must be the ice skating scene. For one thing, it's the only scene I seem to be able to find screen grabs of online. For the other, it's the only scene that is actually creepy or remarkable, and it's a heck of a lot of both. The killer, bestowed in their trademark "hag" mask, skates after one of the girls bearing a curved scythe, and the film's music and cinematography lurch into pure psychedelia. In or out of context, it's an off-kilter and exciting moment, but it's a diamond in a whole lot of rough.

Unfortunately, not a single one of the other kills in the film are an ounce as outré or exciting. The bulk of the deaths in the back half are relegated offscreen, and the ones we do get to see are bloodless and uneventful. I definitely think there's something there in the killer's getup, thematically evoking the fear and horror of women aging out of Hollywood, but other than Samantha Sherwood being a delightful vamp, the film doesn't seem particularly interested in pulling at that thread. 

Also, I'm sure the months and months it was knocking around in the back of some producer's trunk probably helped with its uncanny, withered look.

Really, pretty much every element of Curtains is lacking in one way or another, especially the plot, which is meandering nonsense. I know it took three years to make, but it shouldn't feel like it takes three years to watch. There is no apparent structure to the film, which makes it difficult to set up the series of red herrings and twists that a whodunit like this desperately needs. 

Even if it doesn't have that, the whodunit at least needs to have who's that "it" is done to. OK, that line might not have worked, but I'm saying the characters are entirely interchangeable. It's even more ironic that the girls are so perplexed by how deeply different they are because I literally had to look up a plot synopsis to figure out who died when. I usually have a Meet the Meat segment in my plot synopsis where I run through all the characters and their one personality trait, but I don't think this collected group of six girls has two interesting traits to rub together. The only one of them who's had a career worth mentioning anyway is Sandee Currie, who played Mitchy in Terror Train. Here she's a character called Tara, who... does something, I guess.

Curtains isn't necessarily a bad film, but it's just so thoroughly unremarkable that every detail slides right out of your brain by the time the credits roll. It certainly joins the pile of exceptions to the Canadian slasher rule, though. I will always perk up when I see a movie in the schedule that hails from the Great White North, but if there are more cracks in the armor like this one, that enthusiasm may fade sooner than later.

Killer: [Patti (Lynne Griffin)]

Final Girl: Patti (Lynne Griffin)

Best Kill: C'mon.

Sign of the Times: A man suggests Pac-Man themed role-play.

Scariest Moment: The mask is pretty creepy.

Weirdest Moment: There are definitely parts where this movie wants us to think a sentient doll is the killer, at least for a couple seconds at a time.

Champion Dialogue: "All's fair in love and auditions."

Body Count: 8

1. Mandy is stabbed to death.
2. Christie has her throat slit with a scythe.
3. Laurian is stabbed.
4. Brooke is shot.
5. Stryker falls out of a window.
6. Matthew is stabbed in the back offscreen.
7. Tara is killed offscreen.
8. Samantha is stabbed in the gut.

TL;DR: Curtains is a messy, largely incoherent slasher that leans on one iconic kill to prop up its reputation.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1030

Census Bloodbath: A Grave Mistake

If you're new to Census Bloodbath, click here.

Year: 1980

Director: William Fruet

Cast: Kay Hawtrey, Lesleh Donaldson, Dean Garbett

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

At this point do I even need to tell you that this film's quality is extremely cruddy and low-fi? Can we just take that for granted? OK. It's oversaturated, blurry, grainy, and the music sounds like it's stuck somewhere between Gone With the Wind and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

First, an anecdote. I got this DVD for about 3 bucks at Fry's because I am an extremely discriminating individual. When I popped it into Alan, my computer, Alan popped it right back out at me. As it happens, it was a Region 0 DVD. In case you didn't know, every DVD has a region code that shows which part of the world's DVD players it is compatible with. The US code is Region 1 (We're number one! USA!) and there are seven or so other codes that correspond with different sectors of the planet.

Region 0, however is a universal region. Meaning, much like Esperanto, it is useless universally. Macs are hardwired for it to be extremely tough to change regions so I had to scrounge up my old portable DVD player from home before I could even watch this film. And let me tell you, it was not really worth my time. Aw well, that's what you get for toeing the waters of forgotten 80's horror.

A saving grace: This is a Canadian film so at least it works better than its spiritual forebear, Silent Scream.

More on that later.

Funeral Home follows the "adventures" of the "character" Heather (Lesleh Donaldson, aka the girl who dies in the first ten minutes of Happy Birthday to Me) as she helps her stout and matronly grandmother, Maude Chalmers (Kay Hawtrey, who has minor roles in Videodrome and Urban Legend, both of which I'd rather be watching), convert her old funeral home into a sort of bed and breakfast. After her grandfather Mysteriously Disappeared, the business went downhill and Maude needs to rake in a little cash.

Maybe sell the dolls on eBay. I say sell the dolls.

Heather (whose only description on the back of the DVD box is "easily frightened," and I can't argue that there's any more to her than that) slowly discovers that her grandma is not all there, frequently talking about things her religious grandfather would disapprove of as if he were still alive and with her today. Almost as if he were hiding in, say, the basement, where she frequently slips away in the dead of night to have whispered conversations.

Also on hand are Billy (Stephen E. Miller, who we will later revisit in The Stepfather), the mentally handicapped and sexually frustrated groundskeeper, and Rick (Dean Garbett of literally nothing else), the young swain who lives nearby and inexplicably finds Heather interesting. Let me commend the filmmakers for not turning Billy into a hideously grotesque stereotype, opting to keep him as a mildly uncomfortable one.

So with the religious and unstable Maude, the lonely and confused Billy, and the angry whispers from the basement, we can get the ball rolling! But first, some nothing.

I'd much rather watch this scene than somebody getting cleavered in the face. Totally.

Heather wanders around the funeral home like Dorothy in Oz (another character aptly compares her to Alice in Wonderland) being scared by black cats and coffins and leering groundskeepers. When a door-to-door salesman and his mistress (Harvey Atkin and Peggy Mahon) come to town, they liven things up  by being uniquely acidic and horrible people. They go around being mean to everyone (except for one scene where the mistress goes apesh!t over some flowers and squeals like a little girl) until Maude discovers they've been "living in sin."

This word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

She asks them to leave but they refuse. They won't leave, and Grandfather would definitely not approve of this. To add the cherry on top, the mistress teases Billy in ways that only a sociopath could dream up, so there's enough ire to go around for all three of the potential killers. It doesn't help that she's Fran Drescher's evil twin.

But that mystery will have to wait so we can watch a brawl at a barn dance.

Eventually, they are killed when their car is shoved into a quarry.

This is half of the body count right here.

Back to the barn dance thing. The plot of Funeral Home is not so much a sustained narrative as a collection of events, like colorful glass beads on a bracelet. Whereas in a real person story, the situations rise from the characters and their reactions to the world around them, the plot demands that the characters bend and twist to its demands (insofar as this film has "plot" and "characters"). Rick gets the brunt of it, teleporting across town at will to be there when important events go down.

Combine this with a bumbling cop narrative straight out of the weird hillbilly subplot from Last House on the Left and you've got, well, a fairly typical 1980 slasher film. Rick's brother Joe (Alf Humphreys) is new on the police force and doesn't get the respect he deserves as a native son of the small town. As he stumbles into cow pies and fumbles around interrogations, I can't help but wonder if David Arquette's character from Scream might be a little bit based on him.

Things trundle along and a black cat attempts to be symbolic.

Hi!

Another tenant, Mr. Davis (Barry Morse) is suspicious of Mrs. Chalmers and he is bumped off quietly in the night as he investigates his wife's disappearance in that very same funeral home.

Things build to a climax as Billy is murdered during a basement investigation and Heather whimpers in a corner as Maude goes a little axe-crazy. This is actually pretty boring save for one shot in the end. Oh, also guess what. Surprise of the century! Maude was the killer! The grandfather in the basement was....

Norman Bates' Mom!

Evidently Grandpa was sleeping around with Mr. Davis' wife and Maude quite rightly took an axe to them both and kept her husband in the basement so she wouldn't be lonely. So here we have a bland slasher film with a paucity of deaths that's really just another riff on Silent Scream which was just a riff on Psycho.

It's all there. The deranged matronly caretaker of a run-down guest home. The corpse in the basement. The killer pretending to be somebody else due to... Psychosis. 

It's not really that interesting.

The Final Girl is a damp dishtowel who whimpers behind a coffin in the basement as her boyfriend is beaten and resigns to her fate, just burying her face in her arms as the axe is raised above her. Disgraceful. Heather is one of the few Final Girls that lends credence to the hard-to-dispute theory that slasher movies were intensely misogynistic.

Luckily Donaldson got something more interesting to do in Happy Birthday to Me, another Canadian product, so she could redeem herself from this travesty of a character. 

Let me say though that Kay Hawtrey actually gives a pretty delightfully hammy performance as Maude Chalmers.

So there's that.

One to miss.

Unless you want to check out this sexy swimsuit scene.

Killer: Maude Chalmers (Kay Hawtry)
Final Girl: Heather (Lesleh Donaldson)
Best Kill: Billy is stabbed with an embalming needle.
Sign of the Times: Rick's shorts are even shorter than Heather's.
Scariest Moment: Maude raising the axe as a hanging lamp swings wildly - the only even slightly scary or off-putting moment in the film.
Weirdest Moment: After Maude snaps and destroys everything in the basement with an axe in her pursuit of Heather, the police run in, calm her down, and they all go for a cup of tea.
Champion Dialogue: "He was just playing mean... and he had a bad drinking problem too."
Body Count: 4

1. A man is pushed into a lake inside his car.
2. A woman is pushed into a lake in a car.
3. A man is beaten in the head with a shovel. 
4. A man is stabbed with an embalming needle. 

TL;DR: Funeral Home is just another thin manifestation of the ghost of Psycho.
Rating: 3/10
Word Count: 1404

Census Bloodbath: From Birth To Death

I'm turning 19 today! Because I'm me, why not celebrate by reviewing a birthday themed slasher film (And give y'all a sneak peek of Census Bloodbath 1981)? You're so lucky to have me around.

Happy Birthday To Me

Year: 1981
Director: J. Lee Thompson
Cast: Melissa Sue Anderson, Glenn Ford, Lawrence Dance
Run Time: 1 hour 50 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Hailing from the inimitable slasher year of 1981 and the inimitable slasher realm of Canada, Happy Birthday To Me is one of the most highly regarded slasher films of the day (the fact that it has a 33% on Rotten Tomatoes should speak to the consistently low critical perception of the subgenre). Only the idea of how cool it would be to watch it at my birthday party could staunch my unquenchable desire to watch this film the second I got it on DVD.

The film opens promisingly with the credits in blood red print on a pitch black screen as moody piano music swells underneath. Thus begins 110 minutes of one of the most quintessentially slashery films the 80's had to offer (never mind that the filmmakers insisted it was a "psychological thriller"), full of branches being pulled back by gloved hands, people saying "Oh, it's you" to the killer, and plenty of bad impressions, which had been a staple of the genre since Friday the 13th.

The fact that I allowed this film to be 110 minutes long without once complaining (all good slasher films are more or less exactly 90 minutes on the dot) is a testament to its quality and its captivating power, which held myself and several other slasher veterans in its thrall the entire time.

HBTM opens as Bernadette O'Hara (Lesleh Donaldson) sets out on her way to meet her friends at the Silent Woman Tavern. She is rudely interrupted in this task by a stranger intent on strangling her to death. In a bizarre moment of chutzpah for an opening scene death, she plays dead and manages to escape the killer's clutches, only to stop just feet away (for... reasons) and be summarily sliced by a shadowy figure in a striped scarf and black gloves.

Her screams fade away into the night and we shift our attention to her friends (all decked out in the exact same scarves as the killer - evidently it's school colors) at the Tavern, the so-called "Top Ten" of Crawford High. As this is a self-named group, we quickly learn that they are snobby, popular, and entitled. We yearn for their deaths more or less immediately.

The group is comprised of Etienne (Michel-René Labelle), a French foreign exchange student who is also an accomplished motorcycle racer; Steve (Matt Craven), a merry prankster; Greg (Richard Rebiere), a cocky jock; and Alfred (Jack Blum), the group's punching bag (but still an accomplished goalie) who is into rodents and taxidermy, just like all regular high school boys. He looks a little like what would happen if a young Woody Allen had a love child with himself.

Courtesy of Mommy, What Will I Look Like? Photo Simulation Services

There's also Ann (Tracy Bregman), a fun-loving and careless girl and her best friend, Ginny Wainwright (Melissa Sue Anderson), who is new to the school. She's just moved back into her old house after recovering from What Happened. See those capital letters! We've just met our Final Girl for the evening!

In case you're a mathematician, you may have noticed I did not just list ten names. There are, oddly enough, ten people in the Crawford Top Ten, but the rest of them are interchangeable and eerily similar looking. I dare you to try to keep them apart.

The kids frolic and prank and generally cavort about until one of their games goes wrong.  Ginny is shoved into a car as her friends drive it Evel Knievel style over an open drawbridge, which triggers repressed memories from The Accident.

As she slowly pieces together what happened to her That Fateful Night, her friends begin to disappear one by one. And here's where the poster tagline kicks in. The film promises "six of the most bizarre murders you will ever see," and wow does it deliver. Although a salivating MPAA was eager to hem back the gore, the kill scenes were one and all clever, surprising, and relevant to the characters.

What other slasher movie can say that? Even Jason Voorhees, He of A Thousand Sharp Things, can't claim to bring that level of quality and creativity to each of his kills. Of course we all can predict that a kid dies by kebab, but could anyone have guessed the death by whirling motorcycle tire or the gleefully brutal weight lifting scene?

Happy Birthday To Me has a lot to bring to the table with a slate of great kills, a solid central mystery that builds in a manner that is actually suspenseful, and a slew of suspects including Mr. Wainwright (Lawrence Dane), Ginny's doctor, David Farraday (Glenn Ford), their creepy taxidermist friend Alfred,  their other friend Rudi (David Eisner) for reasons I can no longer remember, and even Virginia herself as she slowly begins losing her mind. The movie keeps us guessing and even though the final twist is a bit off the wall (a true mark of a great slasher film), the buildup is genuinely diverting and gripping and the pieces fit together astonishingly well once it's all said and done.

Never mind the fact that a birthday isn't even mentioned until an hour in. Never mind that the cameraman was a little shaky and markedly obsessed with having people get really really close to the camera before fading out. Never mind that Ginny has a weird mouth-kissy relationship with her father. Never mind that apparently shish kebabs are sexy.

It's a slasher flick, not a freaking arthouse movie.

With moments that are actually chilling and intense, death scenes that can only be described with the word "awesome," and a brief performance by Sharon Acker as Ginny's mom, taking supremely hammy dialogue and eating it alive, Happy Birthday To Me is a classic for the ages.

Killer: Highlight for spoilers [Ann Thomerson (Tracy Bregman)]
Final Girl: Virginia "Ginny" Wainwright (Melissa Sue Anderson). It is no accident that her name has the word "virgin" in it, although the film is mysteriously absent of sex scenes.
Best Kill: Greg is pumping iron when the killer drops a weight on his crotch, causing his barbell to fall and crush his neck.

Sign of the Times: The word "nimrod," which has not fallen upon living ears since the fall of the Berlin Wall; The killer wears white Converse; Ginny's room is decorated with those flowing lacy white curtains every girl in the 80's seemed to have. Also a Genesis poster.
Scariest Moment: A car teeters on the top of a drawbridge as it opens.
Weirdest Moment: Ginny invites her doctor to her birthday party and lets him spend the night.
Champion Dialogue: "Come along Winston, give mummy head!"
Body Count: 9; 8 murders and one death in a flashback.

1. Bernadette's throat is slit with a straight razor.
2. Etienne's scarf drags his face into a spinning motorcycle tire.
3. Greg has a weight dropped onto his groin, which makes him drop a barbell onto his throat.
4. Alfred is gutted with pruning shears.
5. Steve gets a shish kebab shoved into his mouth.
6. Mrs. Wainwright is drowned in a car crash.
7. Dr. Faraday is hit in the head with a coal holder.
8. Mr. Wainwright has his throat slit with a cake knife.
9. [Ann is knifed in the stomach.]

TL;DR: Happy Birthday To Me is a slasher classic with clever deaths and moments of real suspense.
Rating: 8/10
Word Count: 1288