Census Bloodbath: Scareplane

Year: 1982

Director: Alfred Sole

Cast: Tom Smothers, Carol Kane, Paul Reubens

Run Time: 1 hour 22 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Airplane! is one of my absolute favorite movies. It’s a wacky visual gag-laden parody of a very specific subgenre, and it’s a masterpiece. But it also has a lot to answer for. Suddenly, 80’s comedy directors thought that they too could make a film like Airplane!. Spoiler alert: they couldn’t. The tsunami of imitators fling themselves wholeheartedly into zaniness, but they lack the finesse and craftsmanship to be anything but a pale imitation.

Being as it was the premiere subgenre of the 1980’s, the slasher film attacked its fair share of Airplane! clones, as early as 1981’s Student Bodies, just one year into the Golden Age. In the year or two to follow, a whole host of crackerjack joke-em-ups would come tumbling down the chute, but the earliest would come in April 1982: Pandemonium, helmed by Alice, Sweet Alice director Alfred Sole.

Which – you may remember - is famously a laugh riot where a young Brooke Shields is brutally murdered at her first communion.

Pandemonium follows the hijinks that ensue at a cheerleader camp in Indiana that has recently reopened after a long history of attendees being brutally murdered. The camp is run by Bambi (Candice Azzara), the town’s only surviving cheerleader. When two separate maniacs escape from prison and an institution respectively, local Canadian Mountie Sgt. Cooper (Tom Smothers) investigates with his trusty, reluctant sidekick Johnson (Paul Reubens).

Because this is a parody of the rigid slasher formula, this is the first time in a good long while where we get to Meet the Meat. The cheerleaders on the chopping block today are Candy (Carol Kane), a wholesome and telekinetic riff on Carrie, one of the only films to be directly parodied for some reason; Randy (Marc McClure of Strange Behavior, but also the freakin’ Back to the Future and Superman franchises) and Andy (Miles Chapin of The Funhouse), two nearly identical horny white boys; Sandy (Debralee Scott), a pushy broad with impossibly high standards; Mandy (Teri Landrum), a toothpaste-obsessed beauty queen; and Glenn (Judge Reinhold), the platinum blonde son of a blind pencil salesman. …Don’t ask.

They begin to get killed, presumably at the hands of the same murderer who has been targeting cheerleaders in this town since 1963.

It’s pretty much an American pastime at this point.

As you may have noticed, Pandemonium has a pretty stellar cast of name-brand comedians and character actors. They are the wind in this film’s whoopee cushion, because without them the gossamer thin script would fall apart like tissue paper in a tornado. Carol Kane is a delight in a role that frankly never comes together, salvaging as much charm as she can muster to make up for the fact that Candy doesn’t even possess the one note most parody characters are provided at the door. Judge Reinhold is also superb as the cheerily clueless lunkhead with a  heart of gold. The only real sour note is – surprisingly – Paul Reubens, who attempts to solder his Pee-Wee shtick onto the archetype of the obligatory “random zany guy” and creates an excruciatingly irritating Frankensteinian monstrosity of a character in the process.

So, here comes the most important question of all… Is it funny? My answer is… mostly. Some of the broad comedy gags stick the landing (even the obvious ones like what happens when you order the “Three Stooges pie”), and the screenwriters clearly had a deep well of knowledge about the subgenre (especially in the parts where they less-than gently mock the Canadian slashers that masqueraded as American by having a cop in full Mountie regalia presiding over a Midwest town). It’s generally more “clever” than it is actually “funny,” but there’s one line in particular that had me laughing so hard my head rolled right off my shoulders. That’s a gold star achievement for a parody slasher of this ilk.

Of course, the film weakens considerably once the killings begin in earnest, so it can’t be that good a parody. Although the effects are slightly better than the demure offscreen antics of Student Bodies, they’re charmless and tend to focus on character traits that haven’t really been explored beforehand. The only worthwhile kill is in the prologue, in which a group of cheerleaders walking in an absurdly tight single file are shish kebabed with a javelin. 

This is what makes me laugh. Please don’t call the cops.

Now that’s not to say it’s funny all the time to begin with. The gags spray wildly in every direction, and forty percent of them plummet straight into the dirt. This is the nature of these films, but there’s nothing more exhausting than bad comedy, and even at a brisk 82 minutes, Pandemonium slightly overstays its welcome. The story isn’t interesting or consistent enough to pick up the slack when the jokes fail, and it sags desperately every ten minutes or so.

Is it funny to paste the Jaws score into a random chase scene? And since when has there been the stereotype of “Girl Obsessed with Toothpaste”? When Pandemonium is grounded in real tropes it excels (like the way the killer’s hands can effortlessly burst through mattresses and walls), but sometimes it can be a bit senile, wandering off in completely arbitrary, inexplicable directions.

The whole affair has a bit of a ramshackle charm to it, but frankly, Pandemonium is too piecemeal for me to proclaim that it’s a hidden gem. I sure as hell had a fun time watching it, but there’s not enough There there for me to want to firmly commit to standing in its corner. It’s about on par with Student Bodies, which I also don’t dig all that much. I respect the existence of both the films, with their occasional giggles, but there’s a reason Scream was hailed as a groundbreaking slasher satire 14 years later: Nobody cared enough to remember that either of these films existed.

Killer: Blue Grange (a briefly cameo-ing Tab Hunter)

Final Girl: Candy (Carol Kane)

Best Kill: Mandy being impaled with a cheerleading bullhorn, because it’s pretty much the only death that feels like the genuine escalation of what the slasher genre was working with at the time. (I disqualified the cheerleader shish kebab because I already rhapsodized about it earlier.)

Sign of the Times: The movie makes an absurdly racist Air Tokyo joke that just wouldn’t fly in this day and age.

Scariest Moment: Randy’s dead body is propped up wearing a horse mask.

Weirdest Moment: A man who just quit his job as the wind sock at an airport eats his lunch while wearing a huge chrome sock as a hat.

Champion Dialogue:  “He doesn’t want you to sin, unless He can watch.”

Body Count: 15; not including various cheerleaders killed within a spinning newspaper montage, or the offscreen victims of the serial killer Jarrett, who were turned into furniture.

1. Five 
2. cheerleaders 
3. are 
4. shish kebabed 
5. with a javelin.
6. Glenn jumps on a trampoline loaded with dynamite.
7. Mandy gets a power drill stuck in her mouth.
8. Fletcher,
9. Jarrett, and
10. Dr. Fuller are simultaneously electrocuted.
11. Bambi is drowned in a milk bath.
12. Randy is smothered with a pompom.
13. Andy is smothered with a pompom.
14. Mandy is impaled with a bullhorn.
15. Blue is crushed by a statue of himself.

TL;DR: Pandemonium is a reasonably entertaining, if disastrously thin parody slasher.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1242

Census Bloodbath: Freak Show

Year: 1981

Director: Tobe Hooper
Cast: Elizabeth Berridge, Cooper Huckabee, Kevin Conway
Run Time: 1 hour 36 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

It's October, man! I'm quite excited to get into the swing of things with my Texas Chainsaw retrospective and a special crossover with my friend Hunter over at Kinemalogue (also expect reviews of Chocolat and Fiddler on the Roof because my friends/boyfriend are strange), but in this central month for horror, it wouldn't be good to skimp on my most terror-centric feature: Census Bloodbath!

Skipping ahead a little bit in 1981, today we're visiting another film by Chainsaw auteur Tobe Hooper, his pea soup movie The Funhouse. I call it this because while some people seem to love it, others despise it with a burning, fiery passion. I'm more in the latter camp, though it's a good sight better than some of the crap I've forced myself to watch this September, so you won't catch me complaining.

This one frame cost more than the entirety of The Outing.

The man who had a major hand in ushering in the slasher era with his 1974 masterpiece returns with this far more straightforward teen fright flick in the second year of the subgenre's boom. So straightforward, in fact, that the opening scene combines the three most prominent elements of the genre as it stood in the 80's - Halloween rip-offs, Psycho rip-offs, and dumbass fake scares. This is certainly not promising, but later on the film does lift itself up slightly from its slasher roots with a more involved B-plot than its uncouth peers.

Unfortunately, the A-plot is what we're stuck with, and a slate of Meat too undercooked to even be served as tartare. There's Amy (Elizabeth Berridge), the virginal and prudish girl who hates fun; Buzz (Cooper Huckabee), the annoying layabout who tries to impress Amy with his machismo; Liz (Largo Woodruff), Amy's best friend; and Richie (Miles Chapin of Pandemonium), her stoner boyfriend. The foursome decides to double date at the local carnival and spend the night in the funhouse against the objections of Amy for reasons of being annoying.

Although she does have a point, considering that once inside they witness the murder of the carnival's fortune teller at the hands of a Monster (Wayne Doba), the deformed son of the carnival Barker (Kevin Conway). When they get trapped inside, they must dare to face this twisted duo and yadda yadda, bad things, it's a slasher, you get it.

Just to make sure we knew that, they slipped in a shower scene in the opening because there's an unfortunate lack of bathrooms in carnival rides.

Although the film boasts a clever premise and a killer villain (pun intended), The Funhouse is an utterly flavorless genre picture. The first act stretches on into eternity as the bland kids wander around the carnival being douches, which slams into a dull second act with some admittedly grotesque special effects. The film doesn't truly pick up until the final showdown in the third act, at which point it is far too watered down to even come close to the kinetic finale of Chain Saw. It might as well be called "The House" because there certainly isn't any fun to be had here.

Perhaps it's not fair to constantly compare Tobe Hooper's later output with his magnum opus film, but the longer his career stretches, the more the film seems like a cosmic joke we haven't been told the punchline to. And truth be told, Hooper's twisted Texan influence can be felt throughout The Funhouse, but it shoots off in all directions rather than joining together in a focused, heaving mass of depravity.

Some choice picks from a sea of examples include a man who offers a young boy a ride in his truck, then points a shotgun at him, hooting up a storm, a mysterious Bag Lady (Sonia Zomina of Eyes of a Stranger) whose sole purpose in life seems to be covering herself in dirt and shouting at people, and the carnies, all of whom are alcohol-swilling degenerates with no qualms about the exploitation of themselves or others.

Each isolated person or event is creepy, but the aimless tone of the movie prevents them from ever forming a coherent whole. It's just a series of scenes, some creepier than others, that drift along until the halfway point, when the kids finally enter the funhouse and relieve that relentless itching that occurs while waiting for something - anything - to happen.

Step right up and witness the most horrifyingly uninteresting protagonist of cinema history!

OK, it's not all bad. The makeup on the killer is unforgettable. (I shan't spoil it here, but if you wish to take a peek, click this.) There's some interesting stuff buried beneath the surface about generational discord (if you're willing to dig a bit and maybe own an industrial drill), especially with the juxtaposition of Amy's relationship with her dad and the bond between the Barker and the Monster.

And Doba's performance as The Monster is quite thrilling, though coming so soon after the tonally similar Leatherface is a huge hurdle to jump. And once Hooper's style kicks into hyperdrive in the finale, throwing Amy into a hellstorm of rapid-fire editing and jarring color compositions, the shroud of tedium lifts for several sustained minutes.

But all in all, The Funhouse is a dull carnival ride with lifeless scares popping out on springs, but not enough heart to really sell them. The Final Girl is a useless mop who'd scream at her own shoelaces and the story resolves itself almost entirely by accident. There's a pointless subplot about her little brother Joey (Shawn Carson) that steals so much screentime that you're convinced something exciting or game-changing will happen with him. It doesn't.

Its production values keep the whole thing flowing together smoothly, but The Funhouse is far too drab for me to ever want to visit again.

Killer: The Monster (Wayne Doba)

Final Girl: Amy Harper (Elizabeth Berridge)
Best Kill: When Richie is hung by a noose, stolen money spills from his pockets, making it rain on his unwitting friends.
Sign of the Times: Amy uses a pay phone to call her mom. Can you believe people used to need an entire box to make a phone call? How demanding.
Scariest Moment: The Bag Lady emerges from her position crouching in the dirt to shriek at Joey.
Weirdest Moment: Joey apparently decorates his room with medieval weaponry.
Champion Dialogue: "I hate people who preach. Especially in bathrooms."
Body Count: 6

1. Madame Zena is strangled.
2. Richie is hung by a noose.
3. Liz is punched and/or clawed to death.
4. The Barker is impaled on a sword and shot four times.
5. Buzz is killed offscreen.
6. The Monster is electrocuted, hung on a hook, and crushed between two gears. 

TL;DR: The Funhouse is a tremendous concept with utterly dull execution.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1152