Census Bloodbath: Hush Hush Hush, Here Comes The Boogeyman

Year: 1988

Director: Dwight H. Little

Cast: Donald Pleasence, Ellie Cornell, Danielle Harris 

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

After the debacle that was the Myers-free Halloween III: Season of the Witch, the entire franchise went dormant for over half a decade. By the time it came wheezing back into cinemas waving the white flag of its desperately placating title – Halloween 4: the Return of Michael Myers – it was already 1988, perilously close to the death rattle of the slasher genre.

At this point in the decade, slashers were still a viable box office draw, but only if they were attached to franchise names. Luckily for Halloween 4, it was coming on the heels of one of the most successful slasher films of all time. The franchise may have lost its way, but that name still had caché.

Unfortunately for Cheerleader Camp, Destroyer, and Amsterdamned. But really, who would have watched them anyway? Oh right, me.

Halloween 4 finds itself at the beginning of a trilogy (though it doesn’t know it yet) centering on Haddonfield youth Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris). Jamie is the daughter of Laurie Strode (played by a headshot of Jamie Lee Curtis), who has since passed away and left her in the care of a foster family. Not many details are given, but I like to imagine that Laurie married Lance Guest the EMT and subsequently perished in a boating accident like the parents from Frozen.

Jamie’s adopted sister Rachel (Ellie Cornell) wants to spend Halloween night with her boyfriend Brady (Sasha Jenson), but is forced by her parents to take Jamie trick or treating. Brady, being a dude in a slasher movie and essentially a walking pair of testicles, immediately goes home with Kelly (Kathleen Kinmont), a girl with a bigger set of candy corns. When, as the title promises, Michael Myers (George P. Wilbur) breaks out of the hospital and returns to Haddonfield, murderously pursuing his niece and her sister, the girls take refuge in the Sheriff’s house (where Brady and Kelly have holed u) to wait out the night under police protection. Awkward.

And of course Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) returns, because how else would we know that Michael Myers is Pure Evil and that we don’t understand what death is?

Apparently hospital explosions are hardly stronger than accidentally placing your hand on a stove, at least if you’ve got a franchise riding on your back.

So here’s the deal. It’s basically impossible to have a lower budget than the original Halloween, which was pretty much made for the cost of a hardback book at Barnes and Noble. As exorbitant as that price may seem, it’s a pittance in the world of Hollywood filmmaking. Halloween 4’s allowance was easily 16 times that, but Dwight Little isn’t John Carpenter. He could have had 100 million and still not made a film as richly complex as Halloween. Although, to be fair, John Carpenter didn’t direct Free Willy 2: The Adventure Home, so Little has that over him.

But the fact remains that Halloween 4 looks more than a little tacky, which is by far its biggest flaw. The Michael Myers mask looks like a bargain bin purchase from the 99 cent store, and the makeup that bestows Dr. Loomis with his “hideously” burned visage brings to mind half-dried pancake batter. Not to mention it shifts position every time it thinks we’re not looking. If you’re craving convincing effects, you’re gonna stay hungry.

Although there is a pretty cool exploding gas station, because everything spontaneously combusts in 80’s horror. It’s a venerable tradition.

So that’s the readout when you weight Halloween 4 by Halloween standards. But that’s hardly fair, considering that that film is one of the true masterpieces of modern horror cinema. When you take it at slasher standards, the outlook brightens considerably. For a late 80’s creeper feature, the storytelling at work in Halloween 4 might as well be Chaucer.

It might sound unbelievable to those of you who are keen followers of Census Bloodbath, but this film actually has characters. I know, right? Perhaps they’re a bit fundamental, but they have substance, and Rachel specifically has an honest to goodness arc as she transforms from a selfish teenage brat into a caring older sister. On top of that (my, are we being spoiled), there are multiple storylines that weave in and out of Haddonfield’s ensigns, all of which come together in a remarkably satisfying manner. It’s almost like they think “seven to twelve teens gather together, then die” isn’t a solid enough structure to hang a story off of.

The nerve!

Halloween 4 also differs from the norm by actually casting people with more than a tattered shred of talent. Of course it goes without saying that Donald Pleasance is at the top of the heap, toning down his florid spittle spraying to a manageable dull roar, but he’s not the only standout. Ellie Cornell is a tenacious Final Girl with real vulnerability, incredible strength, and a tremendous scream (you’d think good screams would be a given in the horror genre, but that kind of thinking will only bring trouble).

Even young Danielle Harris knocks ‘em down, with a layered rendition of a young girl desperately in search of validation and identity. She seems decades older than she really is, a haunting effect that’s creepier than anything else in the movie but totally fits her tragically orphaned character. She proves herself more than worthy to carry on the royal lineage of the genre’s reigning Scream Queen (both within the movie and in real life – Curtis bailed out of horror after Halloween II wasted her and drowned her beneath a waxen wig.), but some tense, character-based chills tossed together with a dark, smoky, outdoor atmosphere is nothing to cry about.

If you really want to complain about something, you have limited options. There’s the aforementioned tackiness, of course, but that’s hardly out of character for the late 80’s. The only other element you can latch onto is the film’s vanilla approach to exploitation. A promising sex scene manages to avoid showing female or male chests, and the 1988 gore just ain’t what it used to be. But Halloween 4 is strong enough as a piece of cinema that it’s hard to feel cheated by the missing slasher trappings. Of course, it’s still a cheesy slasher at heart, but it’s a dark, engaging entry that’s absolutely worth checking out.

Killer: Michael Myers (George P. Wilbur)

Final Girl: Rachel (Ellie Cornell)

Best Kill: Kelly’s impaled on a shotgun. It’s pure slasher mayhem when guns are used as murder devices, but not as intended.

Sign of the Times: At one point, Michael mysteriously sports bleached blond hair.

Scariest Moment: Michael’s siege on the barricaded house.

Weirdest Moment: A gas station wall is decorated solely with dozens of framed photographs of Abraham Lincoln.

Champion Dialogue: “Oh God, Rachel Please come alive!”

Body Count: 12; not including a paramedic team, a dog, or an entire police station.

1. Attendant has a thumb shoved through his forehead.
2. Mechanic is impaled with a metal rod.
3. Waitress is killed offscreen.
4. Bucky is electrocuted by a transformer.
5. Ted Hollister is shot to death.
6. Deputy Logan is mangled offscreen.
7. Kelly is impaled on a shotgun. 
8. Brady has his face crushed.
9. Orrin is stabbed in the back and pushed off a truck.
10. Alan is stabbed in the stomach and pushed off a truck.
11. Unger is thrown off a truck.
12. Earl has his neck ripped open. 

TL;DR: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers is a prim, but thrilling and skillfully told story.

Rating: 8/10
Word Count: 1272
Reviews In This Series
Halloween (Carpenter, 1978)
Halloween II (Rosenthal, 1981)
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (Wallace, 1982)
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (Little, 1988)
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (Othenin-Girard, 1989)
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (Chappelle, 1995)
Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (Miner, 1998)
Halloween: Resurrection (Rosenthal, 2002)
Halloween (Zombie, 2007)
Halloween II (Zombie, 2009)
Halloween (Green, 2018)

Halloween Kills (Green, 2021)

Census Bloodbath: Happy Birthday To Me

To listen to our podcast episode about this very film, please click here.

Year: 1983

Director: Jim Sotos

Cast: Dana Kimmell, Bo Hopkins, Susan Strasberg

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Today is the day that I turn 21 years old. Considering that I don’t drink, I decided that the next best thing to get me into that emotionally battered, physically nauseated state was a slasher movie from 1983. So here we are at Sweet 16, a flick filmed in the subgenre’s Golden Age year of 1981 but shelved as audience interest started to wane in the hopes that a resurgence was right around the corner.

It wasn’t. Sweet 16 was unceremoniously dumped into the world two years later, during perhaps the single worst year for slasher cinema until the genre well and truly keeled over and died in 1989.

At least its lack of success spared us Sweet 17: B.Y.O.Body.

Sweet 16, for what it’s worth, at least has a unique premise for a meat and potatoes slasher. When pretty city girl Melissa (Aleisa Shirley)- and by pretty I mean literally caked in make-up every second of every day whether she’s sleeping, taking a shower, or even putting on make-up – moves into a small Texas town with her parents [the famed archaeologist Dr. John Morgan (Patrick Macnee) and Joanne (Susan Strasberg AKA the deliciously named Miss Viola Davis from another notable birthday slasher, 1981’s Bloody Birthday), who was born and bred in this town with her sister], all the boys are dying to go out with her. Or rather, they’re dying in general, because every boy she hooks up with ends up at the receiving end of a mad killer’s flashing blade before the night is through.

The local hicks blame the citizens of the nearby Indian reservation, namely the ancient Greyfeather (Henry Wilcoxon) and his grandson Jason longshadow (Don Shanks, who has the slashing distinction of portraying Michael Myers in Halloween 5 as well as appearing in Silent Night, Deadly Night and the Native American shaman slasher The Ghost Dance), leading to ugly racial tension about town that comes bubbling to a boil on the evening of Melissa’s sixteenth birthday party.

But what’s a birthday bash without a little lynching among friends?

Sweet 16 does not put its best foot forward. As a slasher, it is a daft, crummy mess and for the first twenty minutes or so it shows no indication that it might change its ways. Its muddy cinematography and cheap sets give way to even muddier night exteriors and even cheaper gore, which is invariably of the lazy Psycho-esque, “knife raise – scream – cut away” variety without a teaspoon of Hitchcock’s flair or talent. Or ability to see anything in the frame. 

The truly upsetting thing is that early on, while reading a mystery novel, a character inquires how one might murder somebody with a rake, and then the film has the sheer foolhardy audacity to go ahead and kill exactly zero people with zero rakes. There’s not even a gardening scene. It just carries on with its dishwater knife twaddle like it didn’t clearly have an ace up its sleeve.

It’s a testament to my perseverance that I haven’t yet set my hair on fire during this project.

Luckily, Sweet 16 does have an ace up its sleeve, though it’s completely unrelated to the woebegone slasher twiddling its thumbs in the wings. That ace is Marci Burke (Dana Kimmell of Friday the 13th Part 3: 3D), the daughter of the local Sheriff (Bo Hopkins of Uncle Sam). She’s the reader of the aforementioned mystery novel and a Nancy Drew-ish curiosity-seeker who would much rather accompany her father on visits to murder sites than go to the mall or play with dolls. She’s spunky, funny, and the amount of rouge blast-sanded onto her cheeks to de-agify her is frankly riveting.

Unfortunately, as happens more often than not with the film, Sweet 16 fails to follow through on the promise of a fun slasher whodunit about a young woman solving the mystery of the murders in her town. But at the very least, Marci’s presence elevates it from crappy slasher to mildly diverting crappy slasher, and that’s a distinction I do not make lightly. And as it turns out, the mystery does have a half decent reveal, even though it’s completely obvious to anyone with a veteran’s ear for clunky dialogue.

Marci and that reveal are the only genuinely good things about the movie however, save a comic relief records clerk and a shot of a moonlit lake so beautifully composed, it makes up every scrap of publicity material for the film. Beyond that it’s just a jumble of half-digested ideas that fail to come to fruition: not enough boys die by Melissa’s seductions to give the mystery any juice, the racial undercurrent is only valuable as a red herring rather than any sort of cultural statement, and nobody gets killed with a freaking rake.

I’d even be happy with a Stooge-esque face smashing. Cut me some slack here.

I think one of the most essential rules of thumb when telling apart bad movies from the good ones (it’s harder than you think – they’re still making Transformers sequels) is to listen to the incidental music. That’s the music that plays in the non-monumental moments which aren’t as high profile as the main theme (which, incidentally, is a deliciously syrupy lyrical ballad entitled “Melissa” that calls to mind a caramelized Air Supply B-side). Let me give you an example – in a steamy love scene between Melissa and her new beau, Johnny, (Glenn Withrow), listen closely: What you hear is nothing. Complete, staticky silence.

That’s a telltale sign of a bad movie. You know, that and its dull plodding pacing, the outrageously uncharismatic kills, and utter lack of atmosphere. Sweet 16 couldn’t scare the pee out of a baby and that’s pretty much all those cherubic little bastards know how to do. It slightly attempts to make up for it deficiencies with a thin sheen of camp (especially a staccato shuttering zoom effect during its horror sequences that dates it more accurately than a calendar printed in the corner of the screen would), but it’s too little too late.

Sweet 16 isn’t the worst slasher one could find themselves chancing upon on a lonely video shelf, but it’s a film I can’t imagine ever revisiting of my own volition. If you’re a sick freak like me looking for some classic slicing and dicing action to gift yourself with on your birthday, you’re better off sticking with tried-and-true titles like Happy Birthday to Me or even the killer kid flick Bloody Birthday.

Killer: [Joanne/Trisha Morgan (Susan Strasberg)]

Final Girl: Marci Burke (Dana Kimmell)

Best Kill: Not applicable. I’m still fuming about the rake thing.

Sign of the Times: Nearly every item of clothing is a precise shade of Violet Beauregarde blue.

Scariest Moment: Melissa’s mother screams in fear that her dead father is coming to get her.

Weirdest Moment: The sheriff attempts to research on the microfiche while the lonely records clerk lavishly describes the steak dinner they could be eating right about now.

Champion Dialogue: “Why does he always laugh when I propose?”

Body Count: 6 [uniquely, all men, except for the killer.]

1. Johnny is stabbed to death.
2. Tommy is stabbed to death.
3. Greyfeather is hung.
4. Billy is stabbed in the back.
5. Billy’s Friend is stabbed to death.
6. [Joanne/Trisha stabs herself in the gut.]

TL;DR: Sweet 16 is a dull slasher redeemed only by a unique teen character.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1258

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