Census Bloodbath: Xenophobia

Year: 1980

Director: Greyson Clark

Cast: Jack Palance, Martin Landau, Tarah Nutter

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Part of the reason we're going back to 1980 to scoop up extra movies is that some films slipped through my net before I refined my criteria for what does or doesn't qualify as a slasher film. Without Warning, which is about an alien invasion (well, kinda), just didn't seem to fit the bill at first. But the more I looked at it, the more I realized how uncannily it does follow the slasher formula, even considering that this should be pretty well impossible for a film that came out just three months after Friday the 13th. 

We've got a Crazy Ralph and everything!

Without Warning has a lot of slasher royalty behind it, as well. Generally the doddering, inbred kind of royalty, but it was shot by Dean Cundey, so that's nice. At the helm here is Greyson Clark, the director behind my fourth least favorite slasher of 1982, Wacko! There's also an Alone in the Dark pre-reunion going on here, teaming Jack Palance with Martin Landau because apparently they were just doing whatever script scribbled on a napkin was shoved in front of them in the early 80's. Anyway, I digress. Let's cover the plot, insofar as there is one (Another slasher trope! I've said this exact sentence dozens of times!).

A hunter (Cameron Mitchell of The Demon, Blood Link, Trapped Alive, Terror Night, Deadly Prey, and Memorial Valley Massacre) and his son Randy (Darby Hinton of Wacko) are killed out in the woods (as played by California dry brush) by what can only be described as extraterrestrial ninja stars. They're basically little frisbees that look like sand dollars with little fanged sucker mouths that attach themselves to your skin via little tubes and start sucking out your insides. They also take down a comic relief Scoutmaster (Larry Storch of Sweet 16) before four horny teens come careening in with their camper van. Now that's more like it!

These teens are the Horny Sex Couple Beth (Lynn The) and Tom (David Caruso, who I certainly didn't expect to see mucking about in the slasher trenches, and boy what a twink he was 41 years ago) and the Sweet Couple Sandy (Tarah Nutter) and Greg (Christopher S. Nelson). The horny teens are dispatched almost instantly and Greg and Sandy are sent running through the woods and into town, where they encounter the Man Who Cried Alien, Sarge (Landau) and reunite with their harbinger, creepy gas station attendant Joe Taylor (Palance). They do eventually discover that there is a humanoid alien  (Kevin Peter Hall, who would go on to greater glory playing an alien in a little film called Predator) throwing these sand dollars around to murder people for.... reasons, and he's hiding the bodies in... a shed. Spooky!

It really sends a shiver down the spine, dunnit?

If there's one thing I've learned from a long and intensive study of slasher movie posters, it's that if the cool-looking monster or alien is shown in detail, then you're only gonna get to see it onscreen for twenty seconds max. I'm looking at you, The Slayer and The Incubus. If a film has enough of the monster that it wants to keep it a secret to surprise the audience, then that's when you end up with a subtle poster like Alien. So at least I didn't come into Without Warning with any illusions about this alien menace.

Ultimately, the design of the alien once we see it (once in a flash under a swinging lamp, the remaining 1 and a half scenes largely in shadow) is a pretty good, if uninspired variation on the Greys. The sucker discs look a little shoddier (when they're sucking their victims dry they're covered in what is unmistakably ketchup and mustard), but they're at least fun B-movie images if you suspend your disbelief off a cliff. Unfortunately, this hot-dog-esque M.O. is the only way people are killed in the movie, so it wears thin long before the gags peter out. 

But isn't it nice that at one frame of the movie looks like this?

Although the effects bringing the sci-fi elements to life are very 80's, the rest is an extremely effective pastiche of an average 50's B-picture. In that nothing happens for 80 minutes. Greg and Sandy run through empty woods interminably, then sit in a bar during a power outage that I'm pretty sure was engineered because they didn't budget for that many lights. The filmmakers seem to have come to the conclusion that the cheapest special effect is human beings grousing at each other in the dark. And the pacing of the kills is terribly poor (another slasher trope executed with aplomb), with most of the kills happening in the first two reels to leave plenty of time for wandering past some scrub. 

Palance and Landau don't liven up the proceedings, barely showing a shadow of even the screen presence they display in Alone in the Dark. But then again it's hard to breathe life into a character when you're asked to spout dialogue like "Alien! Alieeeeen! ALIEN!" The only performer who is doing anything remotely interesting is Larry Storch, in an unfathomable turn as a Scoutmaster who warns the boys against picking up rattlesnakes because they "carry germs" and tries to light his cigarette by holding it against a rock and striking it with flint. He is carted in from a completely different movie and carted back out more or less immediately. 

All in all, despite its mild B-science fiction charms, Without Warning presents us with almost nothing to recommend itself. It's a dreadfully tedious motion picture experience that wastes every ounce of talent spent on it (and once you get past those two veteran actors and Dean Cundey, that well is already shallow as hell). This kind of film is why I'm glad to mostly be free of 1980. It doesn't have the vigorous excesses of the later 80's, but it's not sober or serious like the late 70's, so it's really just a waste of time all around.

Killer: Alien (Kevin Peter Hall)

Final Girl: Sandy (Tarah Nutter)

Best Kill: They're legitimately all the same, but the death of the Scoutmaster has the ooziest gooiest blood splatter, so I'll pick that one.

Sign of the Times: Greg has to use a dial to turn on his windshield wipers.

Scariest Moment: Martin Landau points his fun at Greg and starts yammering about how the aliens are all his fault.

Weirdest Moment: In the spooky gas station, the gang discovers an upside-down baseball cap in which a rat is snuggled with its litter of babies.

Champion Dialogue: "I saw something outside that bar I've never seen before, and I have no desire to see it again."

Body Count: 9

1. Hunter gets suckered.
2. Randy gets suckered.
3. Scoutmaster gets suckered.
4. Beth gets suckered offscreen.
5. Tom gets suckered offscreen.
6. Greg gets suckered.
7. Sarge gets suckered.
8. Joe Taylor and
9. Alien die in an explosion.

TL;DR: Without Warning is a dire sci-fi B-movie that wandered its way out of the 50's and got itself some decent special effects that are hardly used.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1211

Census Bloodbath: The Lunatic Is In The Hall

Year: 1982

Director: Jack Sholder

Cast: Jack Palance, Donald Pleasence, Martin Landau 

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Up until now, I've been going through 1982 in pretty much chronological order, but I just had to skip ahead for two reasons: 1) I'm going to be speaking about this movie with the Keep Screaming podcast in about a month. 2) Alone in the Dark is the film on my remaining 1982 list that enjoys the loftiest reputation, so I seized onto it like a life raft, in a fit of desperation after a couple real stinkers.

Time to see if I made the right decision.

Alone in the Dark is perhaps the most diffuse slasher we've ever covered because it focuses on no less than four different killers, the psychopaths who populate the third floor of an asylum in sleepy Springwood. New psychologist Dan Potter (Dwight Schultz) has moved into town with his wife Nell (Deborah Hedwall) and daughter Lyla (Elizabeth Ward), and are soon visited by his nuclear activist sister Toni (Lee Taylor-Allan), who is recovering from her own mental breakdown.

At work, Dan meets the psychopaths: Frank Hawkes (the Jack Palance), a veteran who is the de facto leader of the group; Preacher (the Martin Landau), a man who constantly lets loose a stream of religious fundamentalist babble; Fatty (Erland van Lidth), a child molester; and The Bleeder, who doesn't like to show his face (leading him to wear a pre-Friday the 13th hockey mask) but gets a nosebleed whenever he strangles his victims.

They are kept in bounds by an electric security system manned by the hippy dippy Dr. Leo Bain (Donald Pleasence), who thinks the world is the place that's crazy and the people under his care are "voyagers" into new spaces of the mind. Of course, there's a blackout and the killers are released. After a murder spree, they focus their sights on Dr. Potter, who they think has killed their former doctor, who just left for another job.

Donald Pleasence really needs to stop being hired to be in charge of mental patients, he really can NOT keep track of them.

Alone in the Dark is a curious beast. You've already seen the ways the structure breaks from the established slasher norm (and after the landmark year of 1981, which saw the release of literally dozens of theatrical slasher movies), and it breaks down even further when it becomes a home invasion/siege movie in the third act. But it was also the first film produced by a little distribution company known as New Line Cinema, which would eventually strike gold two years later with the release of an indie cheapie called A Nightmare on Elm Street.

An indie cheapie that would spawn a litany of sequels, the first of which was directed by Jack Sholder of... Alone in the Dark. Dude kept himself a job. 

And while your mileage on Freddy's Revenge may vary, the opening scene of Alone in the Dark is more than enough to prove to me how he got the gig. It's a dream from Preacher's perspective that takes place in a generic small town diner which slowly devolves into surreality, from a frog hopping across the counter to rain suddenly pouring from the ceiling. It's an impeccably crafted scene that has nothing to do with the remainder of the movie, but that doesn't mean it's not effective as a little capsule of nightmare fuel.

And I can't say I'm not grateful for this image.

I mostly get what Alone in the Dark is going for. It's attempting to show that Dr. Bain is right: the world we live in is crazy, and maybe those who society sees fit to put away aren't the ones we should be afraid of. The second the blackout occurs, the looting and rioting begins (this is apparently based on real incidents at the time as well), and the movie spends a lot of town fleshing out Toni's nuclear protest and the live wire rock 'n roll music that fuels her. Violence and chaos are everywhere in 1982, not just in the psychos behind the mask. But this is a slasher movies and they do need to chop up people, so they're really trying to have their cake and eat it too.

The place they're most successful is actually with the character Fatty, whose crimes are most irredeemable. However, his arc implies that he might actually be attempting to improve himself as a human being, and his inevitable eventual death is given the most heartbreaking coda. 

So this is all interesting, if not particularly well-executed. Unfortunately the slasher movie elements are worth far less. The gore budget on this film is nil, so a lot of the bloodier kills are edited into ribbons, giving the vaguest impression of what is even happening. I know down below, my description for kill #3 sounds very confident, but I have about 10% clarity on what actually happened beyond a vague slashing motion and a gob of goo that represents a completely illegible mystery internal organ.

And Jason wore it better, too.

And this is all presented rather plainly. Beyond the first sequence, the only moment that shows any sense of flair is a shot of Toni slowly drifting across the room to close an open window while absolute hell breaks loose behind her in deep focus. Also, I'm not going to complain about a movie that gets such heavy-hitters to play its killers. Unfortuantely, they're poorly written personalities and aren't given enough screen time to really ham it up. Thus, the character that emerges as truly iconic is a horny teen neighbor mysteriously named Bunky (Carol Levy), who gives the bizarre snack-devouring girl in Death Valley a run for her money as my favorite Census Bloodbath babysitter.

The way it all shakes out, I think I liked this film. But I'm incredibly far from loving it. It's fun to see the trends in horror (and New Line specifically) it's predicting, but pretty much everything on display here would be perfected later in the cycle.

Killer: Frank Hawkes (Jack Palance), Preacher (Martin Landau), Fatty (Erland van Lidth), and The Bleeder

Final Girl: The whole Potter family

Sign of the Times: When Toni first shows up, she is dressed like Hello Kitty joined the Cobra Kai dojo.

Best Kill: I love when the lieutenant is attached to a tree via crossbow bolt to the gut, because it's one of the only truly good effects and also it's the moment that really launches the movie into high adrenaline mode until the credits roll.

Scariest Moment: Lyla is cornered by Fatty who starts trying to groom her while they're alone together in her house.

Weirdest Moment: The asylum's post-blackout roll call includes the names David and Lisa.

Champion Dialogue: "What are you, some kind of asshole?"

Body Count: 12; committed by a good half dozen characters.

1. Curtis has his back broken over Fatty's knee.
2. Larkin has his head punched through a car window.
3. Looter has his larynx removed with a hand rake.
4. Mailman is hit with a van.
5. Billy is killed offscreen.
6. Bunky is lifted into the air and strangled.
7. Lt. Burnett is shot in the gut with a crossbow.
8. Dr. Leo Bain is axed.
9. Fatty is cleavered in the back and the cleaver is hit with a bat.
10. Tom is stabbed in the gut.
11. Preacher is stabbed in the back.
12. Bouncer has his head smashed against a wall.

TL;DR: Alone in the Dark does enough off-template stuff to distinguish itself, but it's not a particularly energetic slasher.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1274