Census Bloodbath: Sometimes Aunt Cheryl Does Dreadful Things

Year: 1982

Director: William Asher

Cast: Jimmy McNichol, Susan Tyrrell, Bo Svenson

Run Time: 1 hour 36 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Like many an 80’s slasher, our movie for today is known by multiple titles. Although the litany of monikers includes Momma’s Boy, The Evil Protégé, and Thrilled to Death, the two most common ones are Night Warning and the inarguably more evocative Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker. Frankly, it doesn’t really matter which you choose, considering that none of them are applicable to a scrap of the film they claim to describe. Although one title clearly stands out above the others, to avoid my typing fingers cramping up, we’ll be referring to the film as Night Warning from here on out.

So now, without further ado, from the director of Beach Blanket Bingo and hundreds of episodes of Bewitched and I Love Lucy… a slasher movie called Night Warning!

This’ll be great, I can feel it.

So, here’s the plot. After his parents were killed in a suspicious car accident, high school senior Billy (Jimmy McNichol) was raised by his neurotic Aunt Cheryl (Susan Tyrrell) in Flagstaff, Arizona. When his basketball coach (Steve Eastin, who played a cop in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2) tells him about the impending visit of a scholarship scout from the University of Denver, he is thrilled because that means he might get to go to the same school as his devoted girlfriend Julie (Julia Duffy, also of Wacko). This sends Cheryl into a nervous breakdown.

Desperately trying to find a new man of the house, she attempts to seduce TV repairman Phil Brody (the delightfully named Caskey Swaim, who played the non-murderous paramedic in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning). When he resists her sweaty, shrill advances, she stabs him to death and claims he tried to rape her. Although she’s half-telling the truth, local Detective Joe Carlson (Bo Svenson) is a racist, homophobic, just kind of general trash bag, who discovers that Brody and the Coach were in a homosexual relationship, so he assumes that Billy was involved in a deadly love triangle and his Aunt is covering for him.

After that, kinda nothing happens for 40 minutes until a cadre of suspicious individuals descend on the house in the third act. That’s what you get for not building in a pool of body count victims.

Three screenwriters contributed to this film, and apparently not one of them could be bothered to crack open a Friday the 13th for research.

Night Warning is dominated by one thing and one thing only, and that is Susan Tyrrell. Her bravura performance is so gleefully, whole-heartedly bugnuts that it towers over everything else, casting a long shadow over the tepid high school drama. Her deranged, bulging eyes and fidgety physicality make for a perfectly wonderful villain, though it might be a bit of a stretch to call the performance “good.”

Her chopped-back hair creates an off-kilter silhouette and she’s always framed behind shots of kitchen knives looming ominously on the counter. She melodramatically smears blood across everyone and everything in her shrilly incestuous path of destruction, dropping Champion Dialogue-worthy lines like “Don’t go to school anymore. You’ve learned enough, and it’s full of perverts!” like delirious bread crumbs every three minutes.

If they made an inspirational wall calendar of Aunt Cheryl quotes, I’d be the first in line.

The only second that comes even close to reaching her is Detective Carlson, who is a hilariously bitter amalgam of the worst stereotypes of small-town bigotry. His blatant homophobia and racism are made bearable only by the film’s tone, which clearly hoists him to the status of a secondary villain. The film’s portrait of its actual gay character is reasonably sensitive: the Coach is masculine, not a pedophile, and caring – a victim of an evil man who doesn’t deserve the vile scrutiny he’s being put under.

Night Warning allows you to laugh at Carlson, and it also asks us – rightly – to be terrified of the possible violent consequences of his closed-mindedness. So the movie certainly does not want for compelling antagonists. But everything else is just kind of… there.

At least it’s well lit enough that I can see it. I’ll take what I can get.

The kills are bloodless and tedious, taking too long to ramp up and never really delivering a satisfying pay-off, and the plot is too aimless to drum up any sort of sustained suspense. Frankly, Night Warning is a complete hash of a slasher. The deranged character study at the center is what keeps it from total system failure, and even that can’t be bothered to hook itself to any truly compelling psychology. It’s just high-energy weirdness, a sugar rush that fades much too soon.

Plus, other than the fresh and sleazy opening flashback, there isn’t really a defining aesthetic to the film. It trots along through the drab grey interiors without a flair in the world. Even the title card is a half-assed affair, flashing onscreen so briefly that it feels almost like a subliminal message. Nobody whose named wasn’t Tyrrell cared about this movie, and thus that performance feels like a dazzling gem carelessly discarded in the gutter, wrapped in a bit of used tissue. At no point is it especially bad. It’s just thoroughly underwhelming.

Killer: Aunt Cheryl (Susan Tyrrell)

Final Girl: Billy (Jimmy McNichol)

Best Kill: Billy’s Dad’s head is Final Destinationed by a log that falls off the back of a truck.

Sign of the Times: A bully in a crop top has the gall to imply that Billy is the one who seems gay.

Scariest Moment: Cheryl hisses “I’m your girlfriend now,” to Billy.

Weirdest Moment: The end credits feature a scroll describing what the surviving characters are up to, as if this were a college movie.

Champion Dialogue: “College is for rich kids and people with brains. You wouldn’t fit in there.”

Body Count: 7

1. Dad has his head smashed with a log.
2. Mom falls off a cliff in a car, which explodes.
3. Phil Brody is stabbed in the neck.
4. Margie is axed in the stomach.
5. Officer Cook is axed to death. 
6. Cheryl is impaled on a fireplace poker.
7. Detective Carlson is shot to death.

TL;DR: Night Warning is a thin slasher with lame kills that hinges entirely on a truly demented pair of antagonists.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1065

Census Bloodbath: A Wet Dream On Elm Street

Year: 1985

Director: Jack Sholder

Cast: Robert Englund, Mark Patton, Kim Myers

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

When New Line's breakout hit A Nightmare On Elm Street brought in enough money to wallpaper the Empire State Building in 1984, they knew they had to act fast to capitalize on their newfound franchise. And it's a good thing too, because some of the Nightmare sequels are among the best horror films of the 80's and 90's. A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge is not one of them.

Released less than a year after the first film, Freddy's Revenge is a hilariously confusing mishmash of garbled mythology, oddball visual effects setpieces, and a veritable mountain of homoerotic tension. Yes, this is the gay Nightmare and it is glorious.

Because of the bizarre, out of character nature of its story and the fact that A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors is both awesome and an actual legitimate sequel that follows the story and characters of the original, many fans of the franchise dismiss the second film as a bizarre fluke of rushed studio filmmaking and ignore it in the context of the storyline.

This is a travesty, because Freddy's Revenge is a camp classic.

The 80's are present in every single frame, starting literally from the very first.

Taking place five years after Nancy Thompson's misadventures in 1428 Elm Street (in the newly named Springwood, OH) the Walshes have just moved in and already their teenage son Jesse (Mark Patton) is having terrible nightmares about a mysterious man in a red and green sweater who pursues him with a clawed glove. 

His little sister (Christie Clark) is perturbed by his daily shrill screams but his mother (Hope Lange) insists it's a normal response to the move and his father (Clu Gulager, who performs a Census Bloodbath Hat Trick in this film, 1986's Hunter's Blood, and The Initiation, one of the best slashers of 1984) is more concerned with the fact that Jesse hasn't unpacked yet.

He is given a beautiful teen love interest in Lisa Webber (Kim Myers) but would much rather spend his time with his jock friend Grady (Robert Rusler) pantsing and wrestling in the dirt in that way that straight dudes do all the time. I actually think their butts have more screen time than Freddy himself, who only appears in about 12 minutes of the whole film.

No, time is much better spent on moments like these.

Freddy (Robert Englund)'s endgame this time around is to take over Jesse's body and use it to further his killing range because... I guess he just has a taste for it now. I mean, after getting revenge for your violent death by manifesting as a dream demon and killing the children of your lynch mob, what's there left to do? Take up knitting?

As the people around him start to mysteriously die (and literally everything in his house/the universe spontaneously combusts), Jesse struggles with his sanity and guilt. It's really very similar to A Nightmare on Elm Street in that nobody knows whether it's a dream or reality, only it sucks. 

At the expense of sounding like a massive sourpuss, Freddy's powers over the mind extending into the real universe (including lighting a toaster on fire) and managing to kill other people from the dreams of one person are extremely divergent from the rules of the franchise universe. In fact, they would never be mentioned again because it's really quite stupid.

Freddy's Revenge stomps on and twists the Freddy mythology into obscene contortions.

Much like what Freddy does to Jesse's body (in this fabulous gore scene).

Did that caption sound a little gay to you?

Well this gay thing isn't a passing theory, oh no. Freddy's sole design is to enter Jesse's body. He frequently wakes up sweaty and shirtless and flashdances around the room. In a classroom scene there's a rectum drawn on the board. And then he's wrapped in a giant snake. A sign on his door reads "No Chicks." The board game in his closet? "Probe."

After unsuccessfully trying to make out with Lisa, he runs to Grady's room to "sleep with [him]" and at one point the evil baseball coach (Marshall Bell) and Jesse have a chance meeting at a leather bar (there is no explanation as to why our young buck came here) and the movie smash cuts to Jesse running (presumably post-coitus) laps in the school gym. 

Also everything about this scene.

It all kind of goes nowhere (it so easily could have been a much better film about Freddy manipulating a young man's latent homosexuality for his own purposes), but it's the hysterical result of an openly gay (and mischievous) production designer working with a (later) openly gay star under the nose of a totally unaware director.

If they had all been working together, they could have made a movie with actual impact. But what we get is pretty great anyway with the perfect combination of winking licentiousness and oblivious unintentional hilarity.

You are all my children now.

Killer: Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund)
Final Girl: Lisa Webber (Kim Myers), but only incidentally.
Best Kill: The Coach is pelted with balls, tied up naked in the shower, whipped with a towel, and slashed across the back as the shower heads spurt blood. Simultaneously silly and intense, super homo-erotic and kinda cool. A perfect representation of the film.
Sign of the Times: Nobody bats an eye at the kid in the back of the bus blasting tunes on a boom box; Jesse dons lightning bolt sunglasses and dances to synthpop in his room.

Scariest Moment: Jesse opens his little sister's bedroom door to find her jumping rope in slow motion and chanting "1... 2... Freddy's coming for you..."
Weirdest Moment: One of their parakeets goes rogue, dive bombing Jesse and his family in their living room before EXPLODING because this is the 80's.
Champion Dialogue: "Are you mounting her nightly or what?"
Body Count: 6 people give or take; 5 by Freddy's hand (3 in the Pool Party Massacre) and 1 trampled to death. All male, because slasher murder is a metaphor for sexual violence so...
Also 2 parakeets and 2 fish.

1. Coach Schneider is tied up in the locker room and slashed.
2. Grady is slashed across the torso after Freddy emerges from Jesse's body.
3. Party Guest #1 is slashed in the face and throat.
4. Party Guest #2 is trampled by escaping partiers.
5. Party Guest #3 is slashed in the stomach.
6. Party Guest #4 is thrown onto a barbecue. 

Stud Finder: Grady is pretty bomb. I can see why Jesse dug him so much.

TL;DR: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge is a terribly messy film full of misplaced homoerotic subtext and it is so so fun to watch.
Rating: 8/10
Word Count: 1147
Reviews In This Series
A Nightmare on Elm Street (Craven, 1984)
A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (Sholder, 1985)
A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (Russell, 1987)
A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (Harlin, 1988)
A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (Hopkins, 1989)
Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (Talalay, 1991)
Wes Craven's New Nightmare (Craven, 1994)
Freddy vs. Jason (Yu, 2003)
A Nightmare on Elm Street (Bayer, 2010)