Census Bloodbath: A Pleasure To Have In Class

Year: 1983
Director: William Wiard
Cast: Donna Reed, Larry Wilcox, David Ackroyd
Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

You know a couple things ahead of time when you head into a TV movie slasher. You know there's going to be a bunch of random TV actors assembled for the honor of dying in order from least to most famous (the absolute most famous either don't die at all because they're just a cameo for one day of filming, or they're the killer. Or both.) And you know the kills aren't going to be what you're used to, given network censorship against violence, especially at that time. Although, given the way the MPAA was cracking down on the genre in theaters by this point in the 80's, there's hardly any difference.

So I always try to keep an open mind when approaching one of these things, and Deadly Lessons, which originally premiered on ABC, had a couple aces up its sleeve that I was keen to check out. First, it comes from director William Wiard of Fantasies, which was the best TV movie slasher of 1982 (yes, there were several. You couldn't escape the slasher film on any medium in the 80's, including NES games and 900 numbers). And it was written by a woman, in this case prolific TV movie and miniseries writer Jennifer Miller. Any time a slasher even glances in the direction of having anyone behind the scenes be female, it's worth paying extra attention.

Even when that movie is unwatchable like A Night to Dismember, which also came out in 1983.

So our story begins with young Stefanie Aggiston (Diane Franklin of Amityville II: The Possession) getting a scholarship to go to the prestigious rich girls' boarding school Starkwater Hall. It takes a while for her to fit in with the upper crust brats over summer session, but right when she starts feeling comfortable, someone starts murdering the girls one by one. Enter Detective Russ Kemper (Larry Wilcox of CHiPS!), hellbent on discovering the identity of the murderer. But can Stefanie, fueled by her Nancy Drew moxie and obsession with the Clue-esque board game Evidence! beat him to the punch?

Deadly Lessons has a shockingly huge cast of characters, almost all of whom are played by someone of note ("of note" includes the rather generous definition of people who were in another Census Bloodbath movie, but still, these names!). Let's start with the victim pool, AKA the girls of Starkwater Hall: literal Saudi princess Shama (Vicki Kriegler); the worldly - see: "horny" - Rita Armstrong (Ally friggin' Sheedy); her best friend and Token Black Character Cally (Renee Jones of Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives); and shy overeater Libby (Nancy Cartwright, Bart Simpson herself).

Then we have the suspect pool, AKA the staff of Starkwater Hall: ice queen headmistress Miss Wade (Donna friggin' Reed); equestrian teacher and Wade's secret lover John Ferrars (David Ackroyd); requisite creepy groundskeeper Robert Hartigan (Donald Hotton of Freeway Maniac); handsome stable boy Eddie (Bill Paxton of Bill Paxton, but also Night Warning and Mortuary); stuffy bow-tied English professor Morgan Rank (Robin Gammell of Murder by Phone); French teacher Mrs. Grant (Ellen Geer of Bloody Birthday); and prim assistant headmistress Miss Hunt (Ruth Silveira, also of Bloody Birthday).

And the review hasn't even started yet! You ready?

I've already mentioned that we knew going in the kills weren't going to be remarkable, but they're actually even more demure than in Fantasies. There was never going to be any blood dripping around the place, but here we exclusively get either cutaway gags or people discovering the body after the fact. Luckily the filmmakers made the smart move of having the victims be strangled or drowned, so they can at least show the bodies without too much fretting. We're at least aware we're making a slasher movie here.

But what Deadly Lessons can't deliver in gruesome murders, it does in heaps of playful whodunit mayhem. The parlor room sequences abound here, as the plot thickens and two factions of sleuths race to the finish. There's a little too much cop nonsense in the movie, which you know I don't like (they needed as many scenes for Larry Wilcox as possible), but any moment where Stephanie and her Babysitters Club gaggle of Sherlocks are trying to get to the bottom of things is a delight. Unfortunately the Encyclopedia Brown sleuthing (there's a lot of material mined from whether or not people's boots are covered in mud) doesn't get us all the way to the finale, which kind of chucks murder mystery mechanics in exchange for a Big Grand Villanous Motive Explanation Speech. But it was fun while it lasted.

And even though there isn't a murder setpiece around every corner, Deadly Lessons does its best to deliver overheated melodrama action as often as possible, including hay bales falling to crush Stephanie out of nowhere, and a bucking bronco triggered by an electric shocking gadget beneath the saddle. These are the moments where the thrills come, and while they're certainly not actually thrilling, they're deliciously cheesy in the way of all the best old school TV movies.

You must remember, this is back before all TV was movies.

And probably the biggest accomplishment of Deadly Lessons is making such a huge cast of characters seem unique and compelling in their own right. Sure, there are a couple of the tertiary characters I could never quite get straight, but on a whole the morass of identically clad schoolgirls is actually quite easy to parse through, thanks to a set of distinct performances that capture each girl's personality and her dynamic with the rest of the group.

The cherry on top is Donna Reed parading around as the frigid grand dame to rule them all, playing off of several saucy love triangles. Sure, it could have been better if it was a theatrical movie with the guts to include more guts. But within the narrow realm of what it is, Deadly Lessons is nothing short of a delight. I certainly wish William Wiard had continued to work in the slasher industry, because I could use a couple more sparkling gems like this to unearth coming down the line.

Killer: Det. Russ Kemper (Larry Wilcox)
Final Girl: Stefanie Aggiston (Diane Franklin)
Best Kill: There aren't any kills onscreen, but I'll say the death of mean girl Tember is the best because it's surprisingly early and means we don't have to deal with her for the rest of the movie.
Sign of the Times: You know this is pre-1985 because Ally Sheedy doesn't have the lead role.
Scariest Moment: The Obvious Red Herring Groundskeeper goes absolutely bananapants and kidnaps Ally Sheedy to tie her up and tell her all about how much he loved her mom.
Weirdest Moment: See above.
Champion Dialogue: "Who could be so barfy?"
Body Count: 3; though there is a fourth pre-Final Girl attack sequence where the victim just happens to survive.

1. Tember is drowned offscreen.
2. Althea is strangled with wire offscreen.
3. Shama is strangled with her scarf offscreen.

TL;DR: Deadly Lessons is limited as a slasher by the nature of being a TV movie, but it leans into all the other things that make TV movies great.
Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 1214

Under The Dome

Year: 2007

Director: David Silverman

Cast: Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

This summer I spent eight hours a day five days a week transcribing episodes of The Simpsons for my summer job. All in all, not the worst temp work I've ever done. I mean, it beats folding plaid shifts for Catholic schoolgirls. (Fun Fact: I actually did work at a school uniform retail store the summer before college. Lucky me!) 

Anyway, what all this boils down to is that Sergio and I vowed to watch The Simpsons Movie once my work was done both as a celebration and as a revisitation of an animated classic now that I had the necessary 18-odd years of context. (Fun Fact: The Simpsons is five years older than I am. Less Fun Fact: I learned this in excruciating detail when I was working full time transferring data fields for each of those years.) So we did watch it. Here's how that went.

If the movie was really terrible, I'd have had a funnier caption to this photo.

When a television property becomes a work of cinema, several things happen. First, fanboys and fangirls and fan-non-binary-adaptives rejoice. Second, Twitter pundits complain excessively. Considering that in 2007 Twitter was nowhere near being a widely-embraced fountain of cultural insight (come to think of that, it still isn't), naysayers must have carved their complaints into stone - or whatever it was that passed for social platform in the days before iPhones. Third, and most importantly, the work gains the inherent expansiveness of the cinema format.

It is a challenge and an opportunity when transferring a sitcom into a feature length motion picture, especially an animated one. The jokes and aesthetics of a TV program might work on the small-screen slices of 22 minutes that break up the endless void of commercials. But there's every chance that they could extend past their shelf life when presented on the massive silver screen in a 90-minute, uninterrupted chunk.

There's also a great deal of physical danger involved.

The Simpsons Movie tentatively embraces the larger format and looser morals of the movie houses and it is a marked return to form after a couple of seasons in the dumps, but it only halfway succeeds in being something bigger than itself. The beauty of the show lies in its massive, hyperextended cast of minor characters, about whom I have previously written with rapturous regard. Having a bigger platform should have encouraged the Simpsons veteran filmmakers* to pull out all the stops in a whiz bang extravaganza celebration of the show's legacy, giving as many characters as possible a moment in the limelight.

The Simpsons Movie adamantly refuses to do this, and that is its biggest flaw. It instead resorts to a well-worn storyline (though, after 18 seasons, any possible storyline was already going to have been picked apart by moths in a studio cloakroom long ago): Homer Simpson (Dan Castellaneta) has faults as a husband and father which estrange him from his family until he can learn to overcome his selfishness and stupidity and realize that there are people who depend on him. It's not a bad plot, nor is it a bad film, but the structure requires Homer to venture off on his own, limiting the amount of time we get to spend with beloved personalities, or - come to think of it - inside Springfield itself.

Although they are credited, recurring characters Patty, Selma, and Edna Krabappel are given not a single line of dialogue, and many other perennial favorites are cast aside into crowd scenes or given paltry plot-specific lines before fading into the background once more. Even Milhouse, Bart's best friend, is barely given a passing nod. And I don't even want to speak about poor Martin Prince or Hans Moleman.

If you'll excuse me, I need to take a puff from my NerdRage inhaler. Give me a second.

*Director David Silverman has been with The Simpsons since day one (he directed the pilot episode) and the movie shares literally dozens of writer-producers with the show. 

OK, that's better.

We now return to your regularly scheduled review. Sure, The Simpsons Movie has its flaws, but it's also tremendously funny and rewarding and I haven't even really touched the plot yet. So. When Lake Springfield becomes overly polluted, young Lisa Simpson (Yeardley Smith) assembles a petition to improve Springfield's environment. Things get better until Homer brings home a pig and needs to find somewhere to dump his... waste. 

Needless to say, Homery things happen and the lake ends up even worse than before. Soon after, the EPA - led by corrupt businessman Russ Cargill (Albert Brooks) - lowers a dome over the city to prevent it from polluting the rest of the nation. After a Stephen Kingian amount of time (say, about 20 seconds), the townspeople turn on Homer and mob the Simpsons, who escape through a secret exit and heave ho toward Alaska and a new life. But Marge (Julie Kavner) has serious doubts about Homer's reckless, endangering behavior and Bart (Nancy Cartwright) is beginning to see evangelical neighbor Ned Flanders (Harry Shearer) - pious as a cherry pie though he may be - as a better father figure than the one he's got. 

Lisa's obviously mad about the pollution thing (leading to many an oh-so 2007 joke including a parody of An Inconvenient Truth that has already aged so poorly, one might reasonably begin to worry about the current state of US environmentalism). And Maggie's just along for the ride, she's chill. But before long, Homer alienates his family one too many times and is left alone in the wintry wilderness, tasked with saving his family, Springfield, and himself in the process.

The city of Springfield (played by Hank Azaria) nervously awaits its savior.

Along with these plot beats comes a smattering of some of the best Simpsons material in years, sharply skewering religion, environmentalism, the government, and just about every hot topic on the market (except, notably, Hot Topic). Freed of the standards and practices department for 87 beautiful minutes, The Simpsons Movie embraces the dark side its satirical nature for the first time in many moons. Also returning are the show's classic slapstick comedy (Homer is always funny, but he has rarely been so consistently on point delivering the doltish broad humor that his character does best) and clever sight gags. 

And although its ambitions are far too low in the character department, the film dips its toe in the waters of ribaldry, tossing in humor it never could have gotten away with otherwise. A curse word or two here, a bong and a cartoon penis there... It's no cartoon Big Lebowski, but it's definitely a far cry from prime time at the Fox network.

Along with a wider mean streak, the film gains a deeper aesthetic, with the animation exploring the depth of its cartoonish world, sometimes even flirting with the fabled third dimension. There is some CGI imagery that goes awry, but The Simpsons Movie is largely pristine, with moments that legitimately resemble real world cinematography in a way the show has never attempted in any meaningful way. A shot of the wind blowing outside the dome while Marge sits in the backyard is breathtaking, and there are plenty of spectacular visual moments that follow.

This... is not one of them.

The Simpsons Movie is a strange beast with one foot in the movies and one foot firmly planted network television. It explores and it doesn't explore the implications of transferring from one to the other. It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. But through all the contradictions, it's an entertaining, incisive, droll tale about a family that can make it through anything, and there ain't nothing wrong with that.

TL;DR: The Simpsons Movie can't quite shake off the feeling of being too small, but it's funny and sharp nonetheless.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1329