Endless Summer

Alrighty, buckaroos. It’s September and things have slowed to a crawl around here because the sheer mass of movies that I’ve watched (among other real life obligations) is dragging behind me like tin cans on a “Just Married” car. Try as I might to knock out full reviews for each of these suckers, I’m but one fallible human being trying to have a good time. So it’s high time for some spring cleaning. Or rather, end of summer cleaning. I’m opening the windows, letting in some air, and clearing off those cluttered shelves to make way for the rich splendor of the Halloween season, where we can once again kick things into high gear. Buckle your seatbelts, kiddos.

The Return of the Living Dead

Year: 1985

Director: Dan O'Bannon

Cast: Clu Gulager, James Karen, Thom Mathews

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Despite the splendors of American Army engineering, a chemical agent at a medical warehouse leaks into the nearby cemetery where a group of punks are partying, causing zombies to rise.

80’s horror is kind of my thing, in case you hadn’t noticed. As an extension of that, I deserve a lifetime sentence in nerd hail for having waited so long to see The Return of the Living Dead. Having been written and directed by Dan O’Bannon (frequent John Carpenter collaborator and the man who wrote the story treatment for freaking Alien), and starring Clu Gulager (The Initiation, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2), James Karen (Poltergeist), Thom Mathews (the cutest Tommy Jarvis, from Friday the 13th Part VI), and Linnea Quigley (everything), I’m basically a Benedict Arnold to my cause, but I’ve rectified that now.

For its first thirty minutes or so, RotLD is unimpeachably the funniest horror comedy ever to walk this freshly-dug earth. The script is tight, fast-paced, and the tongue is so firmly in cheek that the teeth keep biting it every time they try to talk. The punk ensemble is a pitch perfect Greek Chorus of prickly delinquency led by a fearless Quigley with fire engine red toilet brush hair. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Linnea crab walk her way over the hood of a car. The fact that she spends almost the entire remainder of the film naked certainly doesn’t tarnish the film’s cult reputation, but it’s also a dastardly hilarious shock gag that keeps on giving.

While the punks are pure bubblegum fun, the adult cast knows exactly what type of movie they’re making and have no qualms about pitching their performances up to the rafters. Karen and Gulager seem to be locked in a fierce battle to see who can burst their own blood vessels first, and the winner is us.

The set design is pretty top notch, too. Although the film never escapes the “this was made in somebody’s basement” feel, each element of the set is integrated into the storyline in a unique and clever way, from the eye test chart decorating the office wall to the pinned butterflies in the storage room.  Everything has a purpose, whether it’s a sight gag so subtle you’re liable to need further viewings to even notice it, or merely a feature that will come in handy later.

Unfortunately, Return of the Living Dead runs out of steam faster than me after foolishly assuming I can run a mile without warming up first. The characters are too thin to hang such a good movie on, and it ends up ripping right through them by the hallway point. The film never ever let up being entertaining, but its nonstop, careening clip flags in favor of a more standard house in siege movie that gives an inexplicably heavy level of focus to Miguel Nuñez (of Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, in which he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for the role of Demon, the enchilada-scarfing biker who gets impaled while Hershey squirting in an outhouse).

And while the lead zombie has an impressive visage and a terrifying mien, the effects in the film are surprisingly demure for an 80’s zombie epic. For all the obsession with brains, there’s hardly a flash of the pink stuff, and what little we’re left with doesn’t exactly hold up all these years later.

It’s a very cheap, unassuming, slapdash little movie, but that’s exactly what allowed it to harness the gonzo anti-establishment energy that drives its engine for so much of the time. Do I wish it were more consistent? Yes. Would it be better with a gore top-up? Undoubtedly. But it’s still Return of the Living Dead, and its ratty, clever, indefatigable energy refuses to be held down. Nor would I want it to be. Let your freak flag fly, baby.

Rating: 7/10

Night of the Creeps

Year: 1986

Director: Fred Dekker

Cast: Jason Lively, Tom Atkins, Steve Marshall

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Two college freshmen accidentally unleash an alien experiment that turns people into evil zombies.

If I deserved a lifetime sentence in nerd jail for missing out on The Return of the Living Dead, having seen Night of the Creeps certainly qualifies me for parole on good behavior. The film, which has unfortunately almost been lost to the mists of time, is a true gem that deserves to be unearthed, packed with goodies from director Fred Dekker (of The Monster Squad, a much more recognized flick).

For starters, I’m a sucker for college movies and Night of the Creeps is an excellent depiction of the freshman year experience. Within relatable situations (crushing on the unattainable girl, rushing the unattainable frat, experiencing freedom for the very first time), Dekker (who also wrote the screenplay) etches out a genuine friendship between two teens, ride with rich humor and poignant humanity. With such a strong core to branch out from, Night of the Creeps is free to explore all sorts of crazy side streets and as such is one of the most explosively creative, jubilantly hilarious horror-comedies of the decade, hitting both sides of that hyphenate in nearly equal measure.

Admittedly though, one side does dominate through seer strength and willpower so let’s begin with that one: the comedy. There’s so much going on in the film (frat pranks, alien ray gun fights, parasitic zombie worms, a black and white sci-fi prologue, and even a mad axe-wielding slasher) that it would rattle with pure energy even without a strong creative vision. But Dekker must be French for “duct tape” because the man holds all the disparate elements together like a pro, infusing them with laugh-out-loud wit every step of the way. The film traffics in self-referential, winking humor in the vein of Jason Lives, but just like its plot, it can’t nail itself down to one single style. High camp, sophomoric frat comedy, goofy sight gags, and intellectual barbs are tossed into the mélange and blended expertly.

No single actor exemplifies this movie’s personality more than Tom Atkins (of Maniac Cop and Halloween III: Season of the Witch). Atkins swallows the script, digests it, and expels it from every pore of his body. His “Thrill Me,” catch phrase is iconic, but every aspect of his character (the detective investigating the strange happenings on campus) from his deadpan one-liner deliveries to his clipped, decisive movements and hyperbolically serious demeanor is explosively inexplicable and outrageously mirth-inducing. It is also thanks to Atkins that the horror portion of the film works even a quarter as well as it does.

The gravitas he lends to the proceedings allow the scarier moments to get under your skin and claw their way firmly around the base of your spine. Between him and the excellent special effects (which render what could have been totally silly parasite worms as utterly menacing, absolutely autonomous creatures with drive and sinister purpose), Night of the Creeps lands some square sucker punches when you least expect it.

And the filmmaking ain’t half bad, either. When you compare Night of the Creeps to Return of the Living Dead, another goofy horror flick directed by its writer, it’s light years head behind the camera. There’s some daring cinematography, including an immensely memorable spinning shot that outstrips any single visual moment in RotLD, and the lighting scheme (especially when it veers into pulpy pinks and blues) is quite dashing.

All in all, Night of the Creeps is an easy film to fall head over heels for. It’s a heap of fleshy, flashy fun, and it really deserves to stand shoulder to shoulder with classic titles like Evil Dead II and Ghostbusters, if I do say so myself. It’s my blog. Sue me.

Rating: 8/10

I Still Know What You Did Last Summer

Year: 1998

Director: Danny Cannon

Cast: Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr., Brandy

Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Julie James is back and wetter than ever – on an island vacation ruined by monsoon weather, the rain slicker-clad killer returns to claim the lives of her and her friends.

I Know What You Did Last Summer is hardly a classic teen slasher, so the fact that it more or less instantly dove into the realm of ludicrous, crappy sequeldom shouldn’t come as a surprise. In a way, it almost improves the series, and in many ways it makes it a whole lot worse. The instant backslide into pulpy nonsense is fondly reminiscent of 80’s slasher dreck, but the film is so inextricably stupid that – like the Eskimos – I was forced to come up with 50 different words to differentiate the various gradations of stupid that I encountered. Here is but a small sample.

Idiotsplosive: This is a word for something that’s loudly, obnoxiously idiotic. You can’t possibly ignore it because it’s in your face with a bullhorn shouting “Here I am!’ and sharing Facebook posts about Donald Trump.

This word is the exclusive domain of characters like Jack Black cameoing as the local pothead. Yes, that Jack Black. He runs through nearly every scene in the first act, practically flapping his arms and shrieking inane stereotypes. It’s sheer bliss when he gets a set of hedge clippers buried in his chest. This word also handily describes the score, which is mostly content to busty itself combining rip-offs of Friday the 13th and The Exorcist, but the second anything remotely tense happens, gets overexcited and lets loose with a cacophony of bleats and squeals. Someone touches Julie’s shoulder? BWAMP! A mote of dust lands on a lamp in the foreground? BWLEH! It’s exhausting.

Infinidim: This is a word for something so richly, complexly stupid that it borders on incomprehensible.

This word was created for scenes like the opening red herring, which assume that nobody in the audience knows the capitol of Brazil and that no angry bystander will have irately shouted the correct answer before the reveal an hour later. This word also comes in handy for a film that bases two entirely separate scare scenes around clothes dryers. If you care to extrapolate from that, there’s rather slim pickings when it comes to decent frights in this flick, though one of its jump scares is suitably goosebump-inducing.

Stupidndous: This is a word for something so outrageously daft that it can’t help but be heaps of fun.

Here’s a line from I Still Know What You Did Last Summer: “That was like, heart attack time!” In short, this is a fantastic party movie if you’ve got a big bowl of popcorn and a pile of quip-ready friends. From the high camp of the killer’s reveal and the epilogue (“I love my electric toothbrush!”) to the nonsensical voodoo subplot and the daring decision to put Jennifer Love Hewitt in a sports bra while a hurricane rages around her, this movie does everything wrong in all the right ways.

Micromoronic: This is the word for when the stupid hasn’t entirely gone away, but has temporarily subsided to manageable levels.

Believe it or not, there’s a couple almost completely decent elements to ISKWYDLS. For one, the cinematography is gorgeous, capturing long summer nights with a crisp honey glow and shooting the hotel hallways with an almost (dare I say) Dean Cundey-esque precision to the placement of light and shadow. And I must admit that a stormy tropical island is a pretty awesome place to set a slasher movie, Brandy or no Brandy.

At the end of the day, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer is harmless. If you’re lactose intolerant, you won’t be able to stomach its lethal levels of cheese, but otherwise it’s a half-decent flick for a summer marathon as long as you never take it seriously. It’s not as well made as its predecessor, but it might just be more fun to watch, so take your pick.

Body Count: 9

1. Dave is hooked through the mouth.
2. Derek is hooked to death.
3. Housekeep has her throat slashed.
4. Titus is stabbed in the chest with hedge clippers.
5. Hotel Manager is knifed in the skull.
6. Tyrell is hooked through the neck.
7. Hestus is harpooned in the back.
8. Nancy is harpooned in the gut.
9. Will is hooked in the chest.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 2194
Reviews In This Series
I Know What You Did Last Summer (Gillespie, 1997)
I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (Cannon, 1998)

Census Bloodbath: As We Go On, We Remember All The Lives We Lost Together

I know a lot of my features have been leading up to this, so it can't come as a surprise, but... I'm graduating college today. As I prepare to be punted out onto the football field of life, let's take a moment to reflect on all those poor young souls whose futures were cut short in the name of the American slasher film. 

Year: 1981

Director: Herb Freed

Cast: Christopher George, Patch Mackenzie, E. Danny Murphy

Run Time: 1 hour 36 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Troma is not known for making good films. I've explored this to some length on Popcorn Culture when I reviewed the decadently unfunny Mother's Day, the clichéd and insipid Splatter University, and the dull as dishwater Girls School Screamers. But the thing about the company is that they throw themselves so wholeheartedly into churning out crap that you can't help but have the faintest glimmer of appreciation for them. 

And I mean the faintest.

1981's Graduation Day is an early Troma slasher, so it's thankfully free of the over-baked slapstick abortions that would soon typify the company's output, but it's still a bottom of the barrel entry with a scatterbrained plot, a dismal paucity of gore, and a nasty attitude problem. And yet there's that glimmer.

Glimmer doesn't cost a lot.

Graduation Day opens on a high school track and field event edited so choppily and rapidly that you need to slam the pause button to even see anything but a pulsating mass of color and fleshy form. It is so clearly playing off of the MTV aesthetic that it's legitimately shocking to find out that the film precedes the network by several months. I guess the dirty truth is that MTV ripped off of Graduation Day. Slashers are all about skeletons in closets, amirite?

God, it's gonna be one of those reviews, isn't it?

When promising young track star Laura Ramstead (Ruth Ann Llorens) is pushed to the edge of her endurance by Coach George Michaels (Christopher George of Pieces and Mortuary), a blood clot crashes into her brain like a shot put, sending her to an early grave after she passes the finish line.

Two months later, Laura's sister Anne (Patch Mackenzie) arrives from her Navy service in Guam for the high school's graduation ceremony, at which she is accepting an award on Laura's behalf. However, what is meant to be a solemn, but happy occasion is marred when the day before the ceremony, a killer in a fencing mask begins stalking and murdering the surviving members of the track team, timing his kills with a track stopwatch.

That's pretty much it for the plot, which consists almost entirely of lackluster stalking sequences, semi-creative kills, and utterly unnecessary side characters' antics, pitched between which are preposterously long swaths of filler that stop the film dead in its tracks. The most notable of these moments is the five minute-plus segment of the semi-known New Wave band performing their song "Gangsters of Rock" at a roller disco in that screeching goat style that only teenagers have the iron will to listen to, although other dead patches include a fully rendered gymnastics routine and the "Graduation Day Blues" hootenanny and harmonica jamboree.

"Felony" member or John Waters' long-lost son? The world may never know.

As you might have been able to surmise, Graduation Day is a tad bit disjointed. Each scene wholeheartedly rams into the next with all the finesse of a bumper car on PCP, rarely if ever having anything to do with the plot at hand. The heroine vanishes for a great portion of the middle of the film, the red herrings are thin on the ground, and there is no dimension whatsoever given to the vast majority of the overgrown potatoes that dare to call themselves "characters."

The more prominent of these figures include Kevin (E. Danny Murphy), Laura's ex-boyfriend who has taken her death hard, Principal Guglione (Michael Pataki of Halloween 4 and Sweet 16), who could hardly give a rat's ass that his students are going missing, and Mr. Roberts (Richard Balin), a lascivious music teacher who sleeps with Linnea Quigley and subsequently evaporates from the film. As the scriptless meanderings unspool across the screen, random squealers Joanne (Karen Abbott) and Doris (the Vanna White) wander in and out of situations, improvising incoherent babble like a drunken, giggling Greek chorus.

To call Graduation Day unprofessional would be an insult to amateurs. I've eaten croutons more professionally made than this film. The first and second acts are about as lively as microwaved roadkill, and the third act is even worse, lifting entire passages from the score of Psycho and rendering its military protagonist a screaming hysterical girl as she flails through an overlong denouement. The cinematography is murky at best, the gore is sparse and undercooked, the men of the film are uniformly disgusting, misogynist creatures, the editing works at far too fast a clip to maintain any semblance of tension, and most of the actors seem actively bored. 

Patch Mackenzie can only display emotions in brief, emphatic flashes, Christopher George obviously can't hear through the cloud of hair dye around his head so he shouts all his lines, and E. Danny Murphy alternates between sleepwalking and high-pitched kettle shrieking as he attempts to obscure the fact that he's clearly 10 years too old for the part behind a curtain of greasy ringlets. And let's just say that it's a good thing Vanna White found a steady job touching letters, because reading and speaking them is not her strong suit.

That pink blouse/shimmer belt combo is also not a strong suit. ...Geddit? ...Please don't leave, I'm only in the second year of this godforsaken decade project.

But no matter how many insults I can lob at Graduation Day, they just keep pinging off like bullets against Superman's chest. It is not, was not, and will never be a good movie, but there's just enough enjoyment to be eked out of the thing to not render it totally useless. First off, its utterly strange editing pattern is kind of endearing, like a first grader's drawing stuck to a fridge. It's admirably wonky, zipping back and forth between shots at a speed that defies the capacity of the human eye, launching from an inexplicable profusion of POV shots into a machine gun clatter barrage of flashback footage, half-glimpsed movement, and unknowable, subconsciously-received imagery. It's not successful, but at least it's trying something. 

Second, it's campy as all hell. This fact is frequently masked behind the sheen of technical incompetence, but enough of the potent stuff squeezes itself out to keep the film from tipping over the edge. The slasher hadn't quite reached its decadent era yet, so many of the kills are uneventful, but several of them are utterly unique, especially the scene where a jock is stabbed with a football attached to a javelin. You just don't get that every day.

He wide-received that pigskin right in his penalty zone.

Whether it's a gymnast being killed while shaving her legs in the sink, the camera lingering on the pert ass of a deceased victim, or the heavy woodland that seems to be located in the middle of school property, Graduation Day is a barrel of unintentional laughs. Not to mention that the dialogue and production design are out of this world, in the sense that they must have been improperly translated from Martian.

It's anticlimactic, it's erratic, and it's just plain weird so much of the time that you can't help but feel like you've stumbled across a psychedelic art piece that taps into that secret space between dreams and reality. Graduation Day challenges everything that we know about contemporary filmmaking, not in an experimental way, but in a manner reminiscent of a baby attempting to mimic its parents' voices. 

It's a deranged, bifurcated reflection of films like Friday the 13th as viewed through the dirty, coke-smeared looking glass of somebody who either knows nothing about life or way more than we can ever imagine. It's an experience, is what I'm saying, and while I don't have the patience to find it a true bad-good gem, it's a relentlessly compelling, awful, delirious, heart-wrenching, apocalyptic, quasi-satisfying film experience. Watch at your own risk.

Killer: [Kevin Badger (E. Danny Murphy)]

Final Girl: Anne Ramstead (Patch Mackenzie)

Best Kill: A pole vaulter falls onto a mat with spikes hidden inside.

Sign of the Times: This guy is straight.

Scariest Moment: Anne approaches Kevin's grandma, who appears to be dead. She is not. ...This isn't a particularly scary movie.

Weirdest Moment: The truck driver insists that he gets to cop a feel on Anne because he's "a taxpayer."

Champion Dialogue: "Sit on it and rotate!"
Body Count: 9

1. Laura's heart explodes while she's running track.
2. Paula has her throat slit.
3. Sally is stabbed in the neck with a saber.
4. Ralph has a football with a blade attached thrown into his chest.
5. Tony is decapitated with hedge clippers.
6. Dolores is decapitated with a sword.
7. Pete pole vaults onto a spiked mat.
8. Coach Michaels is shot to death.
9. Kevin is impaled on spikes. 

TL;DR: Graduation Day has a valuable campiness that is somewhat tempered by how extremely dull and erratic it is.
Rating: 4/10 (though my sliding scale for grading slashers is taking a lot of strain on this one - but what the heck, I'm in the graduation spirit)
Word Count: 1573

Census Bloodbath: All Is Calm, All Is Fright

Year: 1984

Director: Charles E. Sellier, Jr.

Cast: Robert Brian Wilson, Gilmer McCormick, Toni Nero

Run Time: 1 hour 19 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Merry Christmas, everybody! If you celebrate the holiday, I hope you have a great time ignoring your family to read this review. If you don't, hopefully a festive slasher feels enough like counter-programming that you'll stick around anyway. I oh so adore holiday horror, and the Christmas season is rife with gaudy gruesome flicks filled with puns like Santa's Slay, Black Christmas, Satan Claus, Santa Claws, The Gingerdead Man, and so many others that you would require a small nation's entire output of boxes and wrapping paper to slip them under the tree.

One of the most notorious of these titles is Silent Night, Deadly Night, the poster for which caused a national uproar as anxious mothers picketed and petitioned against its depiction of Santa Claus as an axe murderer. The upset was so thorough that Siskel and Ebert (who never shied away from declaiming splatter movies like a pair of tetchy schoolmarms) publicly shamed the crew by name on their show. After only two weeks, the film was pulled from theaters and thus a legend was born.

Obviously, those of us in the horror community will vehemently seek out any film decried in the public media, pushing implacably forward like the Terminator until we finally have a chance to view it. The thing about Silent Night, Deadly Night that sets it apart from many other shamed fright flicks is that it's actually pretty decent. It's by no means the best slasher ever made. It's not even the best slasher released on that day. But it's a gruesome holiday treat that, while it can be a tad mean-spirited from time to time, embraces the humor and fun present in the scenario and mixes it with some surprisingly affecting shocks.

Also the angry moms let the psycho santa flicks To All a Goodnight and Christmas Evil slip right by them four years previously, so let us never say that angry reactionaries are accurate and rational human beings.

The tale of Silent Night, Deadly Night begins with an extended, bifurcate prologue depicting the development of a young boy named Billy (played by Jonathon Best at Age 5, Danny Wagner at Age 8, and Robert Brian Wilson for the remainder of the film) and his fear of Christmas. After an ominous warning from his comatose grandfather (Will Hare) on Christmas Eve, Billy watches as his parents are brutally murdered by a robber dressed as Santa Claus. He and his little brother Ricky (Alex Burton) are then sent to an orphanage run by nuns, where Mother Superior (Lilyan Chauvin) teaches Billy all about the consequences of premarital sex and the value of punishment.

Billy thus grows up believing Santa Claus to be some sort of avenging angel, punishing the naughty with swift and brutal death. When he turns 18, the kindly Sister Margaret (Gilmer McCormick) helps him get a job as a stock boy at a toy store run by Mr. Sims (Britt Leach) and Mrs. Randall (Nancy Borgenicht of Halloween 4). He nurses a crush on pretty cashier Pamela (Toni Nero) and reluctantly works alongside the foulmouthed, penis-peddling Andy (Randy Stumpf). When the guy they hired to be Santa during the Christmas season calls in sick, Billy is chosen to don the outfit on Christmas Eve and after a couple drinks and a little provocation in the form of Andy nearly raping Pamela in the back room, Billy finds his personality completely subsumed by Santa's and goes on a merry killing spree.

As he wanders around the town murdering the naughty, Sister Margaret and Officer Barnes (Max Robinson of Halloween 5) attempt to track him down and protect Mother Superior and the kids at the orphanage. That's quite a lot to chew on for a 79-minute film, so for that reason the whole thing adopts a brisk pace that never lets up, save for the very end.

How is it possible to be bored with so many bosoms and axes afoot?

There's only one resolutely Christmasy death (Andy is hung with a string of lights), but in every set the halls are decked with holiday cheer, providing an ironic twinkling backdrop for the fairly decent slasher mayhem. At least in the unrated cut, there's plenty of drippy blood and unnecessary topless scenes to keep the slasher engine running well into the night until not a creature is stirring.

The cheesy music (although all the songs are Christmas-themed, the 80's can't resist poking its head in and the arrangements sound anywhere between the Cheers theme song and what can only be described as reggae electrosynth caroling) and the flop-sweaty exploitation (there's more boobs in this film than wreaths, and we're delivered this cheerily inane line as a couple makes out on a pool table: "2 ball in corner pocket.") are enough to keep spirits high, but it must be said that some scenes are a little tough to stomach.

Although thankfully no rape occurs during the course of the film, there are several protracted scenes that, if allowed to continue, would have gone all the way. Plotwise, this is ostensibly to trigger Billy's buried memories, but moviewise, it leaves a layer of grime caked over the whole thing that isn't entirely eradicable. But there are enough gritty or tense moments that play in that register and succeed (the robber Santa, for one, and the grandfather's stern admonition) that it evens out the rougher ones and allows Silent Night, Deadly Night to tend to be more frightening than the average slasher flick.

And who doesn't love creepy nuns?

The mostly smooth pacing gets a little wonky when the third act culminates in a race-to-save-the-day police thriller atmosphere, but it's still got plenty of camp involved that keeps interest up. One of Billy's favorite activities is to leap out of nowhere and scream "PUNISH!" while brandishing an axe, and if that's not the funnest thing to watch even 45 minutes later, maybe this film isn't for you.

Silent Night, Deadly Night is unique because of its in-depth look into the mind of a slasher villain, justifying his fervent opposition to promiscuity (because, let's face it, Jason and Michael might as well be the Virginity Police) and even grounding the campy Santa costume in some semblance of psychological reality. This is the most thoroughly thought-out holiday horror vehicle of the decade, and the fact that it is capable of giving the jitters is just one huge stocking stuffer.

There's no traditional Final Girl, mask, or filmic structure, but Silent Night, Deadly Night is a slasher for the ages. Its nastiness and uneven quality prevents me from unconditionally loving the thing, but when you're penning your letter to Old Saint Nick, it might do you well to include this DVD on your list if you're so inclined.

Killer: Billy Chapman (Robert Brian Wilson)

Final Girl: Sister Margaret (Gilmer McCormick)

Best Kill: Classic Scream Queen Linnea Quigley is impaled on one of those wall-mounted deer heads. Topless, because that's how the 80's worked.

Sign of the Times: Young Billy is punished with a truly unfortunate mullet.

Scariest Moment: Billy's catatonic grandfather bursts to life when they're alone together and warns him about the dangers of Santa Claus before laughing hysterically and slipping back into his stupor.

Weirdest Moment: When he meets a little girl who has done nothing naughty, Billy rewards her with a bloody box cutter.

Champion Dialogue: "Are you having a religious experience or did you pee your pants?"

Body Count: 13; not counting a snowman that gets decapitated.

1. Convenience Store Clerk is shot to death.
2. Jim Chapman is shot to death. 
3. Ellie Chapman has her throat slit.
4. Andy is hung with Christmas lights.
5. Pamela is gutted with a box cutter.
6. Sims is hit in the head with the back of a claw hammer.
7. Mrs. Randall is shot in the back with a bow and arrow.
8. Denise is impaled on deer antlers.
9. Tommy is thrown through a window and impaled on the glass.
10. Mac is beheaded with an axe while sledding.
11. Father O'Brien is shot to death.
12. Officer Barnes is axed in the chest.
13. Billy is shot to death. 

TL;DR: Silent Night, Deadly Night is uneven and a little nasty, but it's a fun slasher with a heaping helping of Christmas cheer.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1403

Reviews In This Series

Silent Night, Deadly Night (Sellier Jr., 1984)

Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 (Harry, 1987)

Silent Night, Deadly Night III: Better Watch Out! (Hellman, 1989)

Silent Night, Deadly Night IV: Initiation (Yuzna, 1990)

Silent Night, Deadly Night V: The Toy Maker (Kitrosser, 1991)

Silent Night (Miller, 2012)

Archive: January 10, 2013

Like Bowling Pins

I’ve watched a buttload of movies that I have not yet talked about (in fact, six of them were in the same day - a new record for me), so I’m gonna knock ‘em out one by one real quick.

Leprechaun 4: In Space

Year: 1996
Director: Brian Trenchard-Smith
Cast: Warwick Davis, Brent Jasmer, Jessica Collins
Run Time: 1 hour, 35 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

This movie got its start when, as a prank, a producer pasted a picture of the Leprechaun over Tom Hanks’ face on an Apollo 13 poster. That perfectly exemplifies the amount of thought that went into the making of this film. Brian Trenchard-Smith returns to direct his second film in the franchise, which is a fate I wouldn’t wish on even my worst enemies.

This movie doesn’t make as much of the “In Space” gimmick as the likes ofJason X and Co., but does feature some stellar bad-good scenes like the Leprechaun bursting out of a Space Marine’s penis, the diabolical Dr. Mittenhand, and an Irish magic-induced drag performance by the ship’s captain.

Pretty solid stuff right there.

Body Count: 8

Rating: 4/10

Leprechaun: In the Hood

Year: 2000
Director: Rob Spera
Cast: Warwick Davis, Ice-T, Anthony Montgomery
Run Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

It’s always a bad sign when they stop numbering these things.

This film follows our little Irish friend across the streets of Compton as he pursues a trio of rappers who have stolen his magic flute. The flute’s magical power seems to be that it makes audiences enjoy really awful rap, and the group is trying to use this to score a trophy at a competition in Vegas.

It’s exactly as uncomfortable as you would expect a movie by a white director that is chock full of black stereotypes to be. Ice-T’s character is named Mack Daddy, for crying out loud. This film also features a cross-dressing character, which is the only thing that resembles continuity in the entire series.

Body Count: 9

Rating: 5/10

Leprechaun: Back 2 Tha Hood

Year: 2003
Director: Steven Ayromlooi
Cast: Warwick Davis, Tangi Miller, Laz Alonso
Run Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

This is (at the time of writing) the last film in the Leprechaun series, and it actually kinda doesn’t suck. A stoner gets stabbed with his own bong, the annoying skank gets what’s coming to her, and there’s a psychic that’s just a jumbled ball of clichés but at least they’re trying something new.

The Leprechaun doesn’t even show up in the main plot until about the half-hour mark, so we actually get to see some fleshed out characters that somewhat resemble real human beings. It’s kinda nice.

Body Count: 9

Rating: 6/10

Psycho Santa

Year: 2003
Director: Peter Keir
Cast: Krystal Stevenson, Jason Barnes, Jeff Samford
Run Time: 1 hour, 21 minutes
MPAA Rating: N/A

I don’t even wanna talk about this one, what torture. The plot of the movie takes place in a series of flashbacks as a man tells his girlfriend the tale of the Psycho Santa. Essentially there are 4 vignettes, each more boring than the last.

In the first, we watch a girl and her friend have a sleepover in a cabin in the woods, which sounds like the perfect setup, but then nothing happens. One girl takes a shower and we get to see just how many body piercings a single person can hold. And then the other girl dances for about 6 minutes. Not even sexily. Just kind of mindlessly gyrating. Then it cuts back to the storyteller, who tells us that they were killed. We don’t even get to see it.

The second vignette follows burglars who sneak into a supposedly empty house, which turns out to be occupied by a blind woman. They let her go about her business. She’s blind so she doesn’t notice them. Then they proceed to drown her FOR NO REASON in a scene that lasts about three minutes and is just absolutely awful.

The third shows the Psycho Santa kill a young boy and his mother (props to the filmmakers for being brave enough to kill disabled women and children, I guess. It absolutely does not work.). Well, he slices the woman on the collarbone. Evidently this renders her completely immobile and wracked with pain, and she crawls toward a telephone that happens to be on the floor. For about seven minutes. Kill myself.

I’m so bored I don’t even want to talk about the fourth one. If this movie handled its pacing well with the plot it was given, it would have a 10 minute run time. And that would be about 5 minutes too long.

Body Count: 1 hour and 21 minutes of my life

Rating: 0/10

The Christmas Season Massacre

Year: 2001
Director: Jeremy Wallace
Cast: D. J. Vivona, Jason Christ, Chris Belt
Run Time: 1 hour, 10 minutes
MPAA Rating: N/A

This movie came in the same DVD bundle as the atrocious Satan Claus and Psycho Santa, but it was actually pretty funny. It’s clearly just a group of friends who got together to make a movie and it runs like amateur hour, but it follows a guy with an eyepatch decorated with a Christmas tree who kills his high school classmates in pirate themed ways in Christmastown, California, so it’s really not all bad.

God, sometimes I question my life choices when I write sentences like that.

Body Count: 9

Rating: 4/10

Silent Night, Deadly Night

Year: 1984
Director: Charles E. Sellier Jr.
Cast: Lilyan Chauvin, Gilmer McCormick, Toni Nero
Run Time: 1 hour, 19 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

OK, this one was actually pretty great. It’s been nearly impossible to find, but the DVD just got released in the wake of its loose 2012 remake, Silent Night. I rejoiced much more than I should have.

This film got an unfair amount of flak for portraying Santa as a psycho even though in the film it’s clearly just a guy dressed as the Jolly Red Serial Killer. But moral tensions were high and this film got the axe, as it were, and barely saw the light of day until several years afterward.

However, it’s a solid slasher flick about a kid who watched a robber dressed as Santa murder his parents at a young age. He now views Santa as a punishing figure and after he is forced to dress as Mr. Claus for his job at the toy store and has a little too much eggnog, he seeks to punish those he deems naughty.

Featuring an appearance by scream queen Linnea Quigley, this film was great fun and has some actually disturbing sequences that still hold up to this day.

Body Count: 13

Rating: 7/10

Psycho Beach Party

Year: 2000
Director: Robert Lee King
Cast: Lauren Ambrose, Nicholas Brendon, Thomas Gibson
Run Time: 1 hour, 35 minutes
MPAA Rating: UR

This film is basically what a Gidget movie would be like if there was a serial killer on the loose. 

It features Xander from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Aunt Zelda from Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and Amy Adams in her second feature film role.

The female detective is played by a man in drag, who uses a body double for a sex scene.

It is based on a play that this man wrote and starred in.

It also features a two gay beach bunnies struggling with their love for each other, one of whom is severely constipated due to stress.

It’s a deliriously absurd, campy mess and it is absolutely delightful.

Body Count: 4

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1311