Census Bloodbath: Lost In The Woods

Year: 1983
Director: Andrew Davis
Cast: John Friedrich, Adrian Zmed, Ernest Harden Jr. 
Run Time: 1 hour 24 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Considering how long I've been doing this project, the criteria for something to be a Big Title is pretty low at this point. But nevertheless, The Final Terror is one of them. It's a movie that is constantly brought up in the same conversation as classic "youngsters in the woods" slashers like Friday the 13th and The Burning. Now, I'm no fool. 1981's Just Before Dawn is often brought up in those same conversations, and I was massively underwhelmed by that movie. But when you're staring down the barrel of a bunch of movies that were shot on video and nobody's ever heard of, you'll grasp at any straw sticking out of the dung pile.

So yes, I was excited to check out The Final Terror.

Two guesses how that worked out for me.

We do need a plot to get these particular youngsters into these particular woods, so here it is. A crew of forest rangers from Redwood County have decided to go camping out at Mill Creek with a group of civilian girls for a vacation filled with sexy shenanigans and outdoorsmanship. They are driven there by Eggar (Joe Pantoliano!), who has been roped into being their chauffeur despite the fact that he's not invited to actually camp with them, he hates them all, and they all hate him.

The campers all display a staggeringly varied set of vivid and layered personalities. There's Mike (Mark Metcalf, the father from the "We're Not Gonna Take It" music video and also he was in Animal House or whatever), who's kind of the ringleader; Melanie (Cindy Harrell), who is his girlfriend; Nathaniel (Ernest Harden Jr.), who is Black; Vanessa (Akosua Busia, who only had to wait a couple years to get out of the slasher muck when she appeared in The Color Purple), who is also Black and miraculously not automatically coupled up with Nathaniel; Windy (Daryl Hannah, like, the Daryl Hannah), who has beaded braids like she just got back from a Caribbean vacation; Zorich (John Friedrich), who is just a little psychotic and obsessed with survivalism; Marco (Adrian Zmed), who isn't part of the ranger crew and is kind of a third wheel; Margaret (Rachel Ward of Night School) who is a girl who exists; and Boone (Lewis Smith), who is a guy who exists, or at least that's what the credits tell me.

The campfire story that inevitably turns out to be true and right behind you holding a knife is this: years ago, in these very woods, a woman was molested by her uncle and had a kid after being institutionalized. Now she lurks around the woods defending her territory.

And really, what IS more sinister than the victim of a sex crime?

One thing that I never expected was a film that I would like even less than Just Before Dawn, but life loves to throw us curveballs. The Final Terror is a top-down failure on every level I can think of, which is shocking considering the sheer amount of qualified people with actual careers that have gathered to make this film (in addition to the cast full of familiar faces, I haven't yet mentioned director Andrew Davis - of The Fugitive! - or producer Samuel Z. Arkoff - of The Amityville Horror, Dressed to Kill, It Conquered the World, and so on).

Let's take a look at the acting first. Joe Pantoliano doesn't embarrass himself, though his character is assembled from nothing but scraps of manic, contradictory doggerel. But everyone else ranges from bland to shrill, and no higher. Strangely, the reliably vacant Rachel Ward gives one of the best performances here, perhaps because at least two other cast members also share her "dead-eyed and inexplicably British" performance style and both of them are worse. 

Also failing us is the score, the main theme of which was inspired by Billy Idol's "White Wedding" (this is not a joke), except for when it randomly wings a naked Friday the 13th rip-off into the mix in one random moment. As is the cinematography, which will rouse itself occasionally with a fun, capable camera move or canted angle, but mostly just struggles to distinguish the outlines of the poorly lit characters from the poorly lit trees surrounding them.

I would get down on my knees and weep with gratitude whenever the sun rose.

The thing that is super special about the slasher genre is that it can survive all kinds of flaws as long as it throws in some creative kills with half-decent blood. Guess what The Final Terror doesn't have? I don't even know where to start with the list of ways this film fails as a slasher, but here goes. (SPOILERS abound for the rest of the review)

Of the giant victim pool this film provides for us, which comfortably sits at 9, only three of them die. Three. We get to spend time with six whole characters who neither separate themselves as distinct personalities nor have the decency to expire and rid us of the burden of having to deal with them. The film is so anemic with kills that they had to do reshoot to shove two more random deaths in the intro, or else people wouldn't have known it was a slasher at all. Plus, there's a handful of scenes that promise to lead to kills, then inexplicably pull back at the last moment. Indeed, the character Marco gets two of these scenes, the first when he vanishes after being abandoned in the middle of the woods on the first night, and the second when he is unsuccessfully garroted with a rope.

The kills we do get commit the two worst sins of slasher murders: most of them take place offscreen, and the ones that don't are very nonspecific (ie. knife slashes somewhere, blood smears everywhere, nobody is sure what actually happened). Instead of these campers being picked off one by one, we're just forced to watch them bicker with one another in survivalist scenarios as the men become increasingly less shirtless the further we get into the run time (the opening scenes were promising a Girls Nite Out level of unmotivated barechested men, which would have knocked the movie up the scale at least one extra point).

The experience of watching The Final Terror is more akin to sitting through a barely tolerated acquaintance's Instagram stories about their camping trip than a bona fide slasher film. At least the film accurately recreated a survival scenario, given the way my note taking quickly devolved into stuff like, "It's been 80 minutes, no sign of anything interesting."

Killer: Eggar (Joe Pantoliano) and his mom (Anthony Maccario)
Final Girl: Pretty much everyone
Best Kill: The only kill that is in any way inventive, even if there aren't any actual gore effects involved, is the moment where Lori springs a trap that sends two tree branches covered in sharp tin can lids flying into her face. 
Sign of the Times: The film was shot in 1981, but shelved until 1983, when producers decided they had to capitalize on the rising star of... Adrian Zmed.
Scariest Moment: The campers are hiding in the bus when the killer starts smashing the windows from the outside with an axe.
Weirdest Moment: The killer dresses Melanie in a cute little Steve Irwin hat before throwing her body onto the raft with the other campers.
Champion Dialogue: "What the hell do you think they're gonna do out there in the woods with girls, huh? Pray?!"
Body Count: 7

1. Jimmy has his throat slit (probably) offscreen.
2. Lori is hit with that classic branch/tin can lid trap offscreen.
3. Mike is macheted in the back mid-coitus.
4. Melanie is killed offscreen.
5. Zorich has his ankle hooked by a blade and falls to his death.
6. Eggar is beaten to death.
7. Eggar's Mom is impaled on a spiky log trap.

TL;DR: The Final Terror is a movie seemingly tailored to draw out your disappointment for as excruciatingly long as possible.
Rating: 3/10
Word Count: 1357

Criminally Inane

Let’s take a brief break from the horrors of Halloween to kick back, relax, and laugh before diving straight into more killer classics. Here’s a couple mini reviews of flicks that prove I’m not demented! Maybe.

The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!

Year: 1988

Director: David Zucker

Cast: Leslie Nielsen, Priscilla Presley, O.J. Simpson

Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

A bumbling member of Police Squad! uncovers a lot to assassinate the visiting Queen Elizabeth.

I live for David Zucker comedies. Airplane! Is my favorite non-horror movie of all time, and his absurdist stylings just tickle me wherever I can find them. That said, The Naked Gun is not my favorite entry in his sprawling canon of spoof movies, though it is assuredly very good. My current working theory is that, as a movie version of the pre-existing Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker series Police Squad!, the writers were a smidge too familiar with the material to give it that extra sparkle.

However, please remember that my complaining is completely relative. The Naked Gun is still a damn sight better than most of the mangy pups the studios call comedies nowadays. It’s a relentlessly upbeat marriage of cop movie tropes and zany slapstick, a subversive and ribald genre picture that clearly adores the films it’s skewering. Perhaps my somewhat muted appreciation for this film comes from the intoxicatingly high level of that Stooge-esque slapstick, a form of comedy that fails to completely resonate with me. But the fact remains that it’s being perpetrated by experts of the craft, and I have nothing but respect for that.

Plus, it’s not like The Naked Gun doesn’t have a dozen other outlets for humor. A ZAZ picture is like an immense pipe organ. The air pressure that builds up can be releases through a huge variety of valves and avenues, but they still coordinate to make beautiful music. Or at least “Yakety Sax.” Among the irresistible subversions of generic clichés (even the partner cop’s own wife calls him “Nordberg”) and general buffoonery (an attempt to kick down a door sends a cop’s leg smashing ineffectively through the paneling) are subtle background gags (a sign on a building that says merely “The Police Station”), sly double entendres, choice celebrity cameos, and just plain inimitable line readings (Ted’s forlorn “Why?” after being hit with a tranquilizer dart).

So, yeah. It’s funny. And it wouldn’t be half as funny as it is without the grave, deadly earnest Leslie Nielsen at the helm. The key to terrific comedy is characters who don’t realize that they’re being funny, and Nielsen’s background in self-serious B-movies (including our very own Prom Night – we can’t escape the Halloween season) perfectly matches him to this kind of material.

Nielsen approaches each and every scene with such confidence and gravitas that it’s incessantly surprising when it all falls to pieces. His performance also keeps the central plot in focus, preventing the attention deficit that oh so frequently scuttles similar parody movies. Or, you know, unfunny wrecks like Meet the Spartans or Vampires Suck that we all thought were the pinnacle of hilarity back in middle school.

The only place where the movie falls truly flat is the baseball stadium finale, which has too many narrative switchbacks to properly follow the plot and acts as a showcase for the film’s least effective gags. At this level, “least effective” would still be funny in any other movie, but here they’re just too typical to match the dizzy heights the film has set for itself.

The bottom line is that The Naked Gun is funny 99 percent of the time. It might not always be funny in ways that I personally appreciate, but that doesn’t prevent it from worthy entry into the pantheon of spoof classics. Surely you can’t object to that.

Rating: 7/10

Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid

Year: 1982

Director: Carl Reiner

Cast: Steve Martin, Rachel Ward, Carl Reiner

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Rigby Reardon is a private eye investigating the possible murder of the father of a local femme fatale.

Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid is one of my all time favorites comedies. Not only is it a ribald send-up of classic black and white detective flicks, it pits Steve Martin’s Reardon against character from real film noirs, expertly cutting him into footage from scores of old films. It’s not often that you find a spoof comedy starring Barbara Stanwyck, Ray Milland, Ava Gardner, Burt Lancaster, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman, Veronica Lake, Bette Davis, Lana Turner, James Cagney, Joan Crawford, and Vincent Price. It’s true they’re not exactly in on the joke, but that’s a killer cast, to say the least.

Though some of the continuity editing is a little shaggy DMDWP’s construction is awe-inspiringly tight, utilizing matching sets, clever dialogue cuts, and blended color schemes to create one continuous, totally viable film. And although some of the comedy does come from structural humor (non sequiturs present in the borrowed dialogue, absurd match cuts), the best thing about it is that it’s genuinely funny in its own right. The spliced-in footage might be a gimmick, but it certainly isn’t what keeps the movie afloat.

Just as film noir exists in a heightened reality where everything dark and grimy about the human condition is amplified tenfold, DMDWP subverts that charged atmosphere, using it as a springboard into the heady heights of ludicrous absurdity. The movie bends the rules of reality, making every act – from brewing a pot of java to flirting with a woman to talking about cleaning women – a bold triumph of ecstatic silliness.

And my oh my is it startlingly lewd. Maybe some of the raunchier jokes just seem amplified by the film’s apparent vintage, but either way they work like gangbusters. Just like Leslie Nielsen, Steve Martin’s über-serious work here informs the hyperbolic parody, though he’s certainly a touch more aware of himself as evidence by his mugging for the camera. Luckily he finds a counterbalance in Rachel Ward (of Night School – thank you, Halloween spirit), whose every word drips with sheer, oblivious sincerity. Perhaps that might be all she’s capable of, but boy does it every work wonders in this particular context.

The humor of DMDWP is sterling and pretty much untouchable, but the film’s not entirely flawless. In the second act, it gets a little too caught up in its own mystery. The joking abates for brief periods while it delicately lays out its oddly complex system of clues and suspects like they’re fragile china on a tea tray. Because of the sheer mass of threads and characters plucked from other movies, the storyline never quite makes sense, and the intricate algorithm required to keep them glued together only mucks up the narrative works something fierce.

The film settles down once it simplifies itself again in the finale, but for a while, it’s merely a string of funny gags dangling precariously from a single loose plot thread. But damn are those gags entertaining as hell. Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid is an utterly singular comedy that, if you haven’t seen it, I’m marvelously proud to have introduced you to. Go to it now. I want to kiss this movie with every lip on my face.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1220

Census Bloodbath: Back To Back To Skull - Day 2

Welcome back to the second day of our second weeklong celebration of films that encourage people to really rethink their undergraduate ambitions! Our subject for today's lesson is another oddity from 1981- a buried slasher that deserves to be unearthed.

Year: 1981

Director: Ken Hughes

Cast: Leonard Mann, Rachel Ward, Drew Snyder

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

1981 is commonly known as the best year for the slasher genre, but it's also the era when the sub-subgenre of the college slasher bloomed in full force. Up until then, the slasher film was still on shaky legs, vacillating between dreary Psycho rip-offs and an inexplicable plethora of films set on holidays. In retrospect, the college setting with its near-nightly parties and wealth of healthy young co-eds was the perfect fodder for the structure of the format, but slasher filmmakers were playing it by ear, and 1981 was when they struck gold.

Already from 1981 we've covered the interesting but uninspired sorority slasher Hell Night, the dull but shockingly tense and gory The Prowler, and the generic but visually kinetic Final Exam. But even among such well-known and prestigious peers (well, comparatively), today's topic - Night School - is a standout that deserves far more recognition than it has ever received. 

And not just because of the pristine scenery.

Night School regales us with the tale of Lt. Judd Austin (Leonard Mann, who also played Laura's psychiatrist in Silent Night, Deadly Night III) as he investigates a series of vicious decapitations around Boston, perpetrated by a mysterious killer in a motorcycle helmet. He traces one of the victims back to Wendall College, a women's-only night school where a lecherous anthropology professor named Vincent Millett (Drew Snyder) is rumored to be fooling around with several of his students, to the consternation of his live-in girlfriend/research assistant Eleanor Adjai (Rachel Ward of The Final Terror and - a personal favorite of mine, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid), who really should know better at this point, considering how their relationship started.

When more of Millett's sexiest students start losing their heads (and not in the usual "finals are next week" sort of way), Judd and his partner Taj (Joseph R. Sicari) buckle down on the search for this mysterious headhunter. The killer's MO invokes a primitive ritual by submerging the heads in water, so could Millet be the culprit? Or is it Gary (Bill McCann), the creepy Peeping Tom busboy who followed Eleanor home the other night? Or is it someone else entirely? My money's on the butler. 

It's a rare example of a mystery slasher that actually works, with each suspect given clear potential culpability and kept in the game until just about the very last second of the reveal.

Maybe it's HER- oh wait, probably not.

Night School really is an odd little duckling. While there is absolutely a precedent for slashers based around police procedural, they usually don't have the feel of the classics of the genre. However, Night School is still firmly ensconced in that arena with its masked killer, sexual exploitation, and bevy of lithe female corpses - making itself an almost perfect hybrid of the two storytelling structures. 

Like many cop slashers, it's decidedly un-gory. Despite nearly every death in the film being a decapitation, they occur offscreen and there aren't many big grisly payoffs when the heads are discovered (although they are nearly always found in amusing places - personal favorites include a toilet - à la House on Sorority Row - and a turtle tank at the aquarium). But the film combines the best of both genres to become a fun, extremely well put-together piece of work despite the lack of grue.

Like many of the best slashers, Night School lives and dies as its characters do - in a well-etched location. Shot and set in Boston, the movie expertly captures the geography of its little brick-and-lamplight neighborhood on the water's edge. It could be a damn postcard if it weren't for all the beheadings. Much like the terrific My Bloody Valentine, the town's atmosphere seeps through every frame, providing a convivial, lived-in location for a set of characters that are equally engaging and fleshed out.

You see, there is no Meat in this film. Because of the dearth of heavy gore effects, Night School elects to maintain its focus on character rather than rent flesh and geysers of blood (what a notion!). Even minor characters like Judd's partner, or Gus the line cook, or the one-scene-only Mrs. Austin are given names, character traits, inner life, and moderately talented performers for taste. All this creates a thoroughly realistic background environment for the mystery that heightens the tension.

As well as all the madcap shower hijinks.

No two ways about it, Night School is more than a cheesy decapitation slasher. It's a fairly decent film qua films, with production quality higher than "I just dug all the change out of this vending machine, let's make a movie." The camera moves, engages with, and comments on the action. The production design is sumptuously detailed, especially in regards to Millett's well-appointed house full of anthropological artifacts. And the editing seeks to draw connections in the viewers mind, rather than just try to hide the boom mikes in every other shot. One notable scene involves juxtaposing the killer's appearance with a shark swimming in a tank, which is literally one of the oldest tricks in the book (a similar cut opens Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times from 1936), but shows that the film seeks to be so much more than its tatty precursors.

The cherry on top is that Night School knows its audience. It's aware that people who are coming to see a slasher film (gasp) want to see a slasher film and (double gasp) have presumably seen quite a few of them already. Using this to its advantage, the film toys with the audience's knowledge of similar films to playfully subvert expectations.

[MILD SPOILERS PEPPER THE REST OF THIS REVIEW. BE WARNED. THOSE WHO WISH TO CONTINUE SHOULD READ ON AFTER THE BREAK.]

The most quintessential of these playful scenes follows the death of the diner waitress Carol (Karen MacDonald), who is decapitated in the alley after pulling a pot of water out of the freezer. By now the audience has come to expect the head to be submerged, so when Gus (Nicholas Cairis) arrives the next morning and serves two construction workers stew from the same pot, the tension is delicious. The scene progresses step-by-step as a sufficiently well-versed horror fan would expect, slowly creeping toward the inevitable reveal as Gus pours out the stew and.... it never comes. When no head tumbles from the pot, audience imaginations are encouraged to run wild as a series of similar, suggestive moments occurs before the final, fateful revelation.

It's one of my favorite body reveal scenes of all time, impishly using the audience's knowledge against them to create a sense of unease. Another similar scene involves Eleanor taking a shower immediately after being followed home by a creepy busboy. Obviously, any shower scene in a horror film can't escape the gargantuan shadow of Psycho, which Night School is duly aware of. So when it  later cuts to swirls of red running down the drain, alarm bells blare in your brain until it is revealed that something entirely different (and perhaps even less appealing) from murder is occurring. Sorry for the awkward wording there, I'm trying not to completely ruin these scenes, just commend them for their sheer cleverness.

Something I never thought I'd say about the Motorcycle Killer movie.

All said, Night School is far more elegant than your typical slasher. It's still exploitative of course (there's plenty of bra shots and a wonderfully sleazy lesbian headmistress), but much more stately and involved with engaging interpersonal affairs. There is a body count, certainly, but it doesn't exist solely to sate bloodthirsty teen boys, rather to ramp up the tension and urgency of the central mystery.

On top of all that, if one wishes to take a Carol J. Clover-type perspective when analyzing the film, they won't be disappointed. 

[SPOILERS (YAY!) AND ANALYSIS (BOO!) The film's constant suggestion that mankind has just barely stepped out of the savage, primal jungle is evidenced in this film's womenfolk, who take traditionally male roles. The killer turns out to be Eleanor, who is pregnant with Millett's child and dutifully murdering anybody he has an affair with. In this way, as evidenced through dialogue, she is taking on the "masculine" role of defending her family, adopting a phallic knife to enact this role with murderous intent. ("It's this culture that's uncivilized. Where a woman can't defend herself.") And Helene Griffin (Annette Miller), the predatory headmistress who seduces a student, likewise takes on a domineering "male" role. 

Not only do these women perform the roles of men, they do it much better than the unfortunately penis-laden ever could, resulting in death, destruction, and general mayhem. By embracing the violence and lust of the male role, the women destroy everything in their path, both indicting the inherent savagery of the human race and the debilitating gender roles imposed by modern society on both men and women, encouraging the primitive aspects of one while repressing the innate natures of the other.]

I really adored Night School. Do I wish it were more licentious with its killings? Absolutely. Do I wish that the victims fought back against their assailant instead of leaning against walls and screaming? By all means. But the blank-faced killer cuts an impressive figure, the characters are engaging, and the filmmaking is exuberant and lively. Especially in the slasher genre, it doesn't get much better than this.

Killer: [Eleanor Adjai (Rachel Ward)]

Final Girl: There isn't one! Gender politics! Unless you count Lt. Judd Austin (Leonard Mann), which I don't.

Best Kill: Anne Baron is decapitated while the killer spins her on a playground's mini merry-go-round.

Sign of the Times: Judd performs a stakeout in a bulky knit sweater.

Scariest Moment: Eleanor is followed home by a creepy busboy.

Weirdest Moment: Eleanor and Vincent have weird anthropology sex in the shower, where he smears her with primitive body paint as they make out.

Champion Dialogue: "I suddenly find myself up to my neck in heads."

Body Count: 6

1. Anne Baron is decapitated on a merry-go-round.
2. Kim is decapitated.
3. Carol is decapitated.
4. Helene Griffin is decapitated. 
5. Kathy is decapitated.
6. Vincent Millett breaks his neck in a motorcycle crash.

TL;DR: Night School is nearly gore-free but makes up for it with well-etched characters and locations, and an engaging and playful storyline that knows how to toy with its audience.
Rating: 8/10
Word Count: 1780