Census Bloodbath: Weekend At Bernie's

Year: 1989

Director: Michael O'Rourke

Cast: Blake Gibbons, Ingrid Vold, John Marzilli

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

As I kick the sputtering engine known as Census Bloodbath back into gear, I’m easing back into it as I always do: with movies I’m specifically interested in or which have incredible titles. I’ll be tackling the regular chronological features of 1982 soon enough, but I need to grab onto the things I’m excited about to propel me through the rest. So when I saw that Amazon Prime just added the 1989 slasher Moonstalker, I didn’t hesitate. How could you possibly resist that title? The only slashers with names more flavorful and enticing are probably Amsterdamned and Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge.

If there’s one lesson to take away from Census Bloodbath, it’s that one should never judge a film by its cool poster. It’s time to add to that rule, because judging a flick by its title also turned out to be a bust. But we’ll get to that. First let’s Meet the Meat.

They really cleared out the butcher shop on this one.

Moonstalker, if nothing else, boasts a bizarrely bifurcated plot. The first half hour or so follows the exploits of a family on vacation at a snowy campground: parents Harry (Ernie Abernathy) and Vera (Joleen Troup of Slash Dance, another irresistible title) and teens Tracy (Kelly Mullis) and Mikey (Ron K. Collie). When a dirty old man named Pop (Tom Hamil) pulls up in a camper, they’re friendly until he starts acting a little strange. That night, he sics his mentally handicapped son Bernie (Blake Gibbons) on them and they are summarily Janet Leighed with an axe.

Bernie, doffing his face hood after he acquires a cowboy hat and some cool aviators, double checks his cheat sheet of the plot of Friday the 13th Part 2 and heads over to a nearby Wilderness Counselors training ground to continue defending his territory from the evils of premarital sex. 

The camp contributes to the body count in the form of Regis (John Marzilli), the hothead camp owner; Marcie (Ingrid Vold), Regis’ horndog girlfriend; Ron (Joe Balogh of Hollywood’s New Blood), the capable head counselor; Debbie (Jill Foors), the latecomer with the broken down car – seriously, were they hoping that eight years later people would just have entirely forgotten Friday the 13th Part 2?; Bobby (Alex Wexler), a woman-hungry dork who at last has the decency to switch things up and steal his character from Friday the 13th Part 3; Sophie (Pamela Ross of the classic Sorority House Massacre), whose only character trait is that she’s turned on by showers; Chet (Joseph Christopher), a vaguely ethnic counselor who I swear just teleports into the movie about 65 minutes in; some dude who is either from Seattle or named Seattle or both (Greg Marden); and a variety assortment of interchangeable counselors apparently named Vicky (Ann McFadden), Jane (the incredibly named Sioux-Z Jessup), and Taylor (Neil Kinsella). All I know is that one of them wears a headband.

So… The plot is they die.

Fin.

There’s really not a lot to Moonstalker. Other than that fiddly structure of the first act, this is a very straightforward slice-‘n-dice picture. Cardboard characters have sex in the woods and get murdered in the woods. It’s exactly the type of film the genre didn’t need in 1989, when the played-out format was rattling its last desperate breath. I’m not saying that the slasher genre died because Moonstalker is generic, but maybe it could have held on a few more years if it actually took place on the freaking Moon. Titles, man. They’ll getcha.

Anyway, I spent about 45 minutes of Moonstalker being devastated that the movie had zippo to do with the moon (especially since the ill-lit snowscape of the dreadful opening scene looks alarmingly like the moon’s surface). Nothing else in the first act was soothing my wounds as I was forced to spend time with a sublimely irritating family gnawing on a script that spun around in circles in a tedious holding pattern while the killer pawns were set on the playing field.

That’s right, you just witnessed an unprecedented quadruple mixed metaphor. This is why they pay me the no bucks.

However, once the counselor camp is introduced, Moonstalker transcends from a total waste of time to only mostly a waste of time. Nothing in the movie is arguably good, except maybe Douglas Pipes’ score (which is a shameless rip-off of Halloween sautered onto the meter of The Exorcist, but harnesses both those scores’ propulsive, eerily anthemic qualities), but it all settles into a cheerier tone where just about anything can happen. And it does.

Moonstalker’s approach to sexual seduction is frequently baffling (which is great) and occasionally kinda romantic (which is even better) but never boring. And though the low budget leads the film to a lot of dry, mostly offscreen kills, toward the manic third act they pull out all the stops when it comes to playful, creepy setups. If the entire film could have devoted itself to producing scenes like the severed arm bundled up in the bedroll, or the campfire sing-along of the corpses, this movie would easily crack my Top 5 of the year.

Unfortunately, it can’t sustain entertainment for more than two minutes at a time, so it’s too much of a slog to recommend. Moonstalker is only for hardcore slasher devotees, but speaking as a member of that elite group, it was just strong enough to keep stoking the flame of my renewed energy for this particular project.

Killer: Bernie (Blake Gibbons)

Final Girl: Debbie Harris (Jill Foors)

Best Kill: Detective Taylor is impaled while he’s holding a rope around a counselor’s neck, and his death causes her to be hanged in a wicked chain reaction.

Sign of the Times: There’s a character whose only goal in life is to listen to her Walkman.

Scariest Moment: When two counselors are having sex, the tent fabric rips, sending a splash of light over the girl’s face.

Weirdest Moment: Marcie preps for sex by dressing in a camouflage bikini and an ammo belt, then doing karate moves while “Ride of the Valkyries” plays.

Champion Dialogue: “I’m gonna kick your ass from here to the next hospital!”

Body Count: 18; not including four deaths implied in the opening sequence.

1. Boy gets axed offscreen.
2. Girl gets axed offscreen.
3. Harry is decapitated.
4. Vera is axed offscreen.
5. Mikey is axed in the chest.
6. PJ is strangled with a chain.
7. Tracy is hit with a car.
8. Mullet Counselor and…
9. Jane are knifed mid-coitus.
10. Marcie is axed in the stomach.
11. Regis is shot in the mouth.
12. Sophia is burned by a shower.
13. Chet is axed in the chest.
14. Pop dies of a heart attack offscreen.
15. Bobby has a knife thrown through his forehead.
16. Detective Taylor is impaled with a spear.
17. Headband Counselor is hung.
18. Ron is axed in the back.

TL;DR: Moonstalker is a deeply generic slasher film, but it's fun enough to overcome its boring first act.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1180

Census Bloodbath: Back To Skull - Day 5

Year: 1986

Director: Carol Frank

Cast: Angela O'Neill, Wendy Martel, Pamela Ross

Run Time: 1 hour 14 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

And here we are at the final day of our university slasher marathon. I hope that everybody who started school this week has had a chance to settle in and figure out which classes they can skip and still get good grades. We welcome this new sense of jadedness with Sorority House Massacre, an overwhelmingly lazy and tawdry slasher from 1986.

Although it is one of only three (so far) slashers in Census Bloodbath that were directed by women, Sorority House Massacre holds in common with its predecessor and loosely-franchised namesake The Slumber Party Massacre (Carol Frank cut her teeth as the director's assistant on this feature) the fact that it is perhaps even more chintzy and exploitative than its male-directed peers.

Sorority House Massacre is by far the worse of the two, not only for appearing so late in the game, but also by losing the thin veneer of quasi-feminist quasi-parody that Slumber Party Massacre boasted, causing it to be a worthy entry in the subgenre. No, this film is a routine slice and dice picture, the female director adding about as much to the slasher formula as a nice face adds to an Abercrombie bag. It's great that you have it, but it ain't gonna be showing up in the frame.

Not when there's some good, clean massacring to be done.

This film also shares with Slumber Party Massacre the guiding light of an uncredited Roger Corman, who undoubtedly lent to the production its ineffably cheap "shot in three days" atmosphere. But hey, there's more than enough time to complain after the plot is laid out. And what a simple post-Nightmare plot it is.

Beth (Angela O'Neill) is a young woman with a butch haircut who makes the inarguably terrible decision to stay with the Theta Omega Theta sorority over the course of an unspecific school break. Being in the house triggers strange dreams within her, dreams of the same house in a different time and a mysterious killer chasing after her.

Her supportive Flesh friends include Tracy (Nicole Rio), a boy crazy, slightly insensitive girl who is dating the horny jock Craig (Joe Nassi), whose motto seems to be cojones ergo sum, for the entirety of his existence is predicated on the existence of his penis; Sara (Pamela Ross, also of 1989's Moonstalker), a fashion-backward pop psychology enthusiast who is dating Steve (Thomas R. Mustin), whose only scene in the film involves him ditching her to go rafting; and Linda (Wendy Martel), a down-to-earth girl who's friendly if a little ditsy and who is dating Andy (Marcus Vaughter), the nerdiest nerd to ever nerd the nerd and the second by that name this week.

Also there's John (Vinnie Bilancio), the requisite blind date character who exists solely to get in Beth's way while she hallucinates about bleeding picture frames and dripping knives and whatnot. These dreams eat up an alarming amount of the run time, padding a film that - even in its finished state - is only 74 minutes long.

There's more fruit on Sarah's outfit than there are minutes in this movie.

I'm going to go ahead and SPOIL this movie because the plot is dismayingly obvious (a dramatic twist near the end reveals... Beth's middle name). An escaped mental patient and our villain for the evening, Bobby (John C. Russell), is Beth's brother, who killed her entire family in this very house when she was a child and is returning to finish the job. I'd like to move on because this killer just isn't very interesting.

He kills in uninteresting ways (many of his victims are stabbed in the back with a minimum of blood - my guess is that they only had one good prosthetic and were determined to utilize it as many times as possible) and he stalks Beth in uninteresting, plodding, repetitive beats, both in dreams and in reality. The climactic chase sequence plays like a glitch in the matrix, with the girls repeatedly running upstairs and blocking the door with a bookshelf, discovering the killer, running downstairs to try to unlock the door, discovering the killer, and so on and so forth ad nauseum.

Although Bobby does manage to leap through a second story window at one point, so he's not all bad. 

Just the parts that aren't his calf muscles.

So, back to the cheapness, like I promised. Thanks to its presumably rushed production schedule, Sorority House Massacre falls into an unofficial franchise I like to call the Boom Mike Apocalypse series. There is so much exposed equipment on the edges of the frame, it honestly feels like the set is getting smaller and smaller, threatening to crush the actors if they don't finish the movie in time.

Perhaps that's the reason why the sets are so barren. What's the point of putting more than one piece of furniture or decoration in a room if it'll all be smashed to smithereens by dawn anyway? You'd think that the money they saved by not putting any decorations on the stark white walls (except for in one room, which is the absolute opposite - an ocular explosion of hair metal posters and hot pink) would allow them to afford to buy their prop knife somewhere other than Party City, but you would be wrong.

I mean come on! There's just no room in the budget. Look how many salaries they have to try to get out of paying!

Obviously Sorority House Massacre isn't a good movie. That's immediately evident from the title (and from the preceding paragraphs, but who reads anymore, amirite?). There's quite a few fun elements available for bad movie enthusiasts, though not nearly enough to recommend the film to anyone other than the most masochistic horror movie viewers.

But if you're up for it, Sorority House Massacre delivers a sexy saxophone dress-up scene that plays like a montage from an after school special except with 800% more naked breasts, some pretty cool creepy dream imagery, a sex scene in a teepee, an boy who seems more irritable than scared when his girlfriend is murdered, as if he were more concerned about bloodstains on his clothes, and a girl who announces she's going to venture out alone to fix the electricity and then turns on a lamp so she can grab her coat and head outside.

It's just fun enough to not feel like a waste of time, but it's too dumb, cheap, and inconsequential to rise above even the lesser Back to School fare like The Dorm That Dripped Blood.

Killer: Bobby (John C. Russell)

Final Girl: Beth (Angela O'Neill)

Best Kill: Tracy's death - being stabbed in the chest - is exactly choreographed to best display her ample bosoms. You gotta love that kind of shameless energy.

Sign of the Times: Although there is a dress-up scene that is shot like the background of a Cyndi Lauper music video, I'm gonna have to give the final prize to this screenshot I grabbed. It's got everything - the inexplicable "middle-aged businesswoman" ensemble, the fruit-patterned crop top. The Billy Ray Cyrus hair. It's like the entire decade distilled into one vile, poisonous, colorful liquor.

Scariest Moment: After stealing a car, the killer gets on the 5 freeway, heading South. The traffic occurs offscreen.

Weirdest Moment: I am pretty in love with the teepee sex scene.

Champion Dialogue: "I remember lime Jello."

Body Count: 9; not including the family that dies repeatedly in flashback/dream sequences.

1. Walkman Orderly has his head smashed against the wall.
2. Store Clerk is stabbed in the gut.
3. Andy is stabbed in the gut.
4. Tracy is stabbed in the boobs.
5. John is stabbed in the back.
6. Craig is stabbed in the back.
7. Sarah is stabbed in the chest.
8. Linda is stabbed in the back.
9. Bobby is stabbed through the throat.  

TL;DR: Sorority House Massacre is shoddy and cheap, but on occasion enjoyably dumb.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1335

Reviews In This Series

Sorority House Massacre (Frank, 1986)

Sorority House Massacre II (Wynorski, 1992)