Census Bloodbath: April Fool's Slay

Year: 1986

Director: George Dugdale, Mark Ezra, & Peter Litten

Cast: Caroline Munro, Simon Scuddamore, Carmine Iannaccone

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The reignition of the Scream franchise with the MTV drama series (which ain’t half bad, if you can turn off that part of your brain that can reliably calculate human ages – if any of those tousled hunks are actually in high school, I will buy myself a hat so I can eat it) has got me thinking. The slasher genre is a malnourished, formulaic bunch, but these satirical pastiches presume that they’re all the same.

They’re not. Now, I’m not saying that slasherdom is an overflowing fountain of abundant innovation. Far from it. But if a sufficiently insane teen is inspired by the series to check one out and picks a title at random from my Census Bloodbath list, more often than not, they’ll end up with a grimy urban thriller like Eyes of a Stranger or a meandering, personality-free attempt at drama like The Outing rather than a traditional slice ‘n dice pic like Friday the 13^th.

Even films with every generic element in place (killer in a mask, crop of partying horndogs, anniversary of a past trauama) can defy expectation – if only for the fact that either the rules hadn’t been invented yet, or else they were so stale and musty by the time the film was made that the producers attempted to lacquer them up with harebrained ideas that appeal to the increasingly easily bored bloodthirsty teens. As a result, almost no slasher is what we can call “typical.” Which is where Slaughter High comes in.

Despite containing every single one of these tropes and change, Slaughter High is a film so singularly misguided, so exquisitely strange, that I defy anybody to attempt to categorize it. As it happens, the film came out in 1986, after non-paranormal slashers had gone out of vogue and producers of such resorted to bigger, splashier deaths to balance out the revenue. This is the roiling, primordial pit that Slaughter High oozed out of, and that is why – in spite of its astoundingly low grade production values in almost every capacity – it remains an indelible classic of the form.

Though, that may not be high praise.

Slaughter High begins on April Fool’s Day, a holiday with robust murder potential and on which two of my favorite slashers are set. The track team of Doddsville County High School is right in the middle of a prank to end all pranks: namely, luring nerdy punching bag Marty (Simon Scuddamore) into the girls’ locker room, getting him naked, and filming the scandalous results. This prank gets interrupted by the Coach (Marc Smith of Deep Red and The Omen III), precipitating a new, even crueler prank on Marty in the chemistry lab that accidentally results in a chemical explosion, leaving him covered in acid scars and severe burns. This prank is execrable. These people are horrible. You will hate them and want very badly to see them die painfully. Luckily, you picked the right subgenre.

Ten years later, the gang arrives for their class reunion only to find an empty, abandoned school as they realize that they’re the only invitees. This leads to a wild night of drunken carousing, getting locked inside, and being efficiently murdered by a scientifically-minded killer in an April Fool’s jester mask. No prizes for guessing who’s beneath it.

The group of Meat (and the degree to which the actors are patently too old to play teenagers is only rivaled by the degree to which they are patently too old to play 28-year-olds) comprises the following.

Carol (Caroline Munro of Maniac) is the beautiful vixen who seduces Marty into evacuating his clothes and is now an unsuccessful actress trying like hell get a single offer that isn’t in porn; Skip (Carmine Iannacone), the team captain/class clown whose nipples heroically strain to be visible no matter what type of shirt he’s wearing; Stella (Donna Yaeger), a spineless blonde bimbo with a voice like a rusty hinge; Joey (Gary Martin, who played a guitarist in Shock Treatment, to nobody’s interest but my own), a dumb gearhead who ends up marrying Stella; Frank (Billy Hartman), a greaser guido with chest hair you could make Velcro out of; Ted (Michael Safran, famous for his role as “Mustard Goon Two” in 2002’s The Ketchup King), who I’m pretty sure doesn’t actually appear in the film until his grisly demise; Carl (John Segal), a blonde law student who mostly just smiles quietly in the background; Suzie (Sally Cross), who is gone half the time meeting her fiancé’s parents only to instantly perish upon arrival; Nancy (Kelly Baker of Don’t Open Till Christmas), who is British; and Shirley (Josephine Scandi), who materializes once the filmmakers decide that we haven’t seen quite enough boobs yet.

 

A vital service.

The most distinctive feature* of Slaughter High is its sheer unpredictability. And I don’t mean the plot – that old chestnut could be figured out from the opening credits. I mean that Slaughter High is such an abominable example of cinema that literally no line of dialogue, aspect of performance, or character reaction is remotely comprehensible to anybody who’s even mildly film literate. It took three whole directors to cobble this mess into a reasonable whole and is captivatingly inane.

*Aside from its score – an eight note progression that is repeated incessantly on every instrument available to session musicians in the 80’s – which mainly means saxophones, electric guitars, and synth boards because the 80’s were the Modern Renaissance. This was composed – if you could call it that –by Harry Manfredini, who had exactly one great idea in 1980 with Friday the 13^th that he spent the rest of his career flailing to recreate.

Presumably it took two entire co-directors to keep the pile of cocaine from blowing away.

Slaughter High is a frustratingly difficult film to pin down. It’s like trying to pick up an ice cube with chopsticks: Just when you’re laughing derisively at the film’s manner of proving that the women have aged by draping them in prodigious fur coats that threaten to swallow them whole, or their dogged insistence that April Fool’s Day ends at noon, or the pitiful jingling of Marty’s jester cap as he tries to stalk menacingly behind defenseless victims, you find yourself laughing at something even more inexplicable: an actual joke. That is not to say that any of Slaughter High’s badness is intentional (in all honesty, it’s probably the goodness that’s unintentional), but there are some genuinely funny gags that crop up in unexpected places, like pens that have fallen off your desk.

And the kills! Oh, I could wax poetic about the kills. Never in cinema history has there been such a striking collection of frantically off-the-wall murders. Between a chemically-spiked beer that makes a guy’s intestines explode out of him, an acid-filled bathtub that reduces a trauma victim to cinders, and the metal bed that electrocutes a woman mid-coitus, blasting the guy off of her, but taking great care to make sure we can still see her waggling breasts, there is no shortage of mystifying carnage around every corner. It’s over the top, boldly idiotic, and surprisingly gory when it gets the chance. A couple of these scenes shade a smidge too far into torture porn for my tastes, but the rest are like an endless big top carnival of biological mayhem.

Between the cheesy laughs, the actual laughs, the spectacular kills, and an ending that devolves into a maudlin fever dream that would make Salvador Dalí do a double take, Slaughter High is a fascinating antique.

Also there’s a penis! And a man ass! The film is practically progressive at this point.

I think I’ve done a great job at describing the manifold wonders of Slaughter High while leaving room for your own personal discoveries along the way. But I must leave you with a warning: Campy or not, Slaughter High is a piece of crap. It is what a piece of crap would crap after eating too much crap.

It’s impossible to see through the sludgy murk of the exterior scenes, there’s as much tension as an episode of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, and the Final Girl sequence unravels the conflict with a weak, overlong wet fart. No actor is turning in decent work, but Marc Smith seems to be actively falling asleep, several of the women screech their dialogue as if they’re hanging in a cage suspended from a tower, Caroline Munro seems to have her lines erupt from her entirely by serendipitous accident, and Simon Scuddamore screams like an elderly spinster cooing over a tray of tea cakes.

It’s in the firestorm of awful that Slaughter High is able to find its true, ineffable self, but that doesn’t make the awful stuff any easier to sit through. I will leave you with two fleeting, concluding impressions – one good, one bad – after which you can balance out your options and decide if this movie is for you. Here goes:

1: The single best element of the production is its set design, which reliably renders a school building as something gothic and spooky.

2: In an attempt to make him look younger in the high school scenes, an industrious makeup person vigorously rubbed an actor’s cheeks with bright crimson rouge.

Until next time, I'm your faithful servant in slasherdom. Happy belated April Fool's!

Killer: Marty Ranson (Simon Scuddamore)

Final Girl: Carol (Caroline Munro)
Best Kill: Ted's intestines explode out of him after he shotguns a chemically-altered beer, for so many reasons. First, because people have been drinking beer all night and somehow this is the only dangerous one. Second, because it is so unexpected and so boldly gory and just so damn strange.
Sign of the Times: When the pranksters film a naked Marty in the locker room, they scream "Where's the beef!"
Scariest Moment: Lights explode above Carol as she runs down the hallway.
Weirdest Moment: The ending, which transforms the school into a fog machine hell dimension.
Champion Dialogue: "Dirty talk? Um... Fuck. Tits. Screw."
Body Count: 13

1. Caretaker has his head impaled on a coat hook.
2. Ted's intestines explode out of his gut.
3. Carl is stabbed through the back with a sword.
4. Shirley is dissolved in an acid bath.
5. Suzie is killed offscreen.
6. Joey is crushed by a lawn mower and his torso is mowed.
7. Stella and
8. Frank are electrocuted in a metal bed.
9. Nancy is drowned in slurry.
10. Skip is axed in the face.
11. Carol is speared in the heart.
12. Nurse is killed offscreen.
13. Doctor is stabbed in the eye with a syringe. 

TL;DR: Slaughter High is a mystifying, terrible, magnetic presence that makes this project the exciting adventure that it is.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1805

Census Bloodbath: Back To Back To Skull - Day 4

For the crossover review of this film over at Kinemalogue, click here.

Year: 1982

Director: Juan Piquer Simón

Cast: Christopher George, Lynda Day George, Ian Sera

Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

MPAA Rating: UR

Now's the time where things get really weird. Our fourth collegiate slasher entry for the week - Pieces (aka Mil gritos tiene la noche) - hails from Spain in 1982, by which time slashers had crept over the globe like the invasive kudzu plant. Just like the Canadian slashers before it, Pieces bends over backwards to pretend it's American, to the point where the frame is doused in product placement for Wendy's, American film posters (including 1981's Friday the 13th Part 2), and - my personal favorite - framed photos of Ronald Reagan on the walls.

In spite of this back-breaking effort, the film can't escape a thick sheen of Euro sleaze, for which it benefits more than anything else. Without the strange coloring of a (largely inept) foreign take on the tropes of the genre, Pieces wouldn't be anything more than a typical low-grade campus slasher. But with it? It's still enormously low-grade, that's for sure, but it has enough purely campy or slightly pretty elements to allow it to pass with flying colors.

Four days in, I'm quickly running out of school puns.

Our story begins in "Boston," where young Timmy (Alejandro Hernández) is playing in his toy room with clear intent to transition into playing with himself, once he finishes his naughty naked lady puzzle. When his mother catches him and smashes a mirror in rage (she's so angry, she even smashes it again in slow motion), he surprises her with a an axe to the skull and a bit of post-mortem sawing to boot. Cut to 40 years later on an unnamed Boston campus in Madrid.

When a mysterious killer shown only in silhouette begins murdering co-eds around campus and removing parts of them with a chainsaw, it soon becomes clear that his wicked intent is to stitch together into a sort of Frankenstein sex doll. As healthy young women drop like flies (but not before baring their breasts) and the killer puts the bloody puzzle from his childhood back together piece by piece, police spy/tennis pro Mary Riggs (Lynda Day George of Mortuary) is enlisted by Lt. Bracken (Christopher "Mr. Lynda" George, also of Mortuary and Graduation Day) and Sgt. Holden (Frank Braña) to masquerade as a tennis coach on campus and work with the Dean (Edmund Purdom of Don't Open Till Christmas) to try and track down the mysterious madman.

The suspects include Professor Brown (Jack Taylor of Edge of the Axe), a closeted homosexual and anatomy professor - it's a toss-up as to which makes him more sinister; Willard (Paul L. Smith), the creepy groundskeeper with an affinity for chainsaws and being in the wrong place at the wrong time - think of him as a more pervy Hagrid; and Kendall (Ian Sera), the campus lothario whose girlfriend becomes the second victim at the school swimming hole. His alibi for not being at the pool where she told him to meet her so they could have sex? He was busy banging a different chick he found on the way over. Later in the film, a girl squeals with pleasure before he even touches her and, when admonished for making so much noises, eagerly suggests that he could gag her. The police decide that this horny Romeo is much too slick and awesome to be the killer, so they immediately enlist him to aide Mary in her investigation, no questions asked. 

It's good to be the king.

Pieces is well-liked by the horror crowd, but only as a Troll 2-esque trash gem, so why don't we try a little counter-programming and begin with what's good about it? This won't take long.

The best thing about the film is by far its cinematography. Aside from having the dusky romantic glow of a cheap foreign film processed through about a dozen different formats, the imagery is largely well-composed, with special focus on the power of shadow. Especially in the aerobics hall scene, light and shadow is used to suggest movement and project sinister intentions. Small points of light in the darkness bear the most visual information of some scenes, making subtle implications rather than straightforward statements.

Wasn't that fun? Now, on to the bad stuff.

There's plenty where that came from.

Although the film is a little too repetitive and has a lethargically stately pace, there are moments of pure bad-good camp gold littered throughout that make it all worthwhile. It starts off small, with little moments like Kendall reading a note in the library where the voiceover is whispering. But before long, the movie cuts loose and rams full speed into moments like the killer hiding a chainsaw behind his back in an elevator, cops shooting the hinge off a door, and - a perennial favorite - Lynda Day George channeling the forceful energy of every damsel ever tied to the railroad tracks to cleave the heavens in two with a rapturous, thunderous cry of "BASTARD!"

Along with these scattered treasures (I won't even mention the ending), the entire film is blessed with an otherworldly patina by the just barely out-of-sync dubbing and the dialogue which was clearly written by people with a less than workable knowledge of the English language and performed as if it were the first time the lines were being read*. 

The pinnacle of these scrappable scriptural moments is when a police officer thanks a records employee by saying "I'll send you a case of lollipops," but there's plenty of instant classics like "Don't tell me I'm the bearer of bad news, I could kill myself," "We don't have any more time. Take some uppers or something," and a girl flirting with a professor by asking where her pectorals are. The rest of the script is made up of odd non sequiturs or responses that are just one degree off from real human speech, like when I've just woken up and groggily answer "How did you sleep?" with "Thank you." It's really more like a group of humans talking at one another than legitimate, organic dialogue, and it is purely fascinating. 

*The actors (who are of a piece equally inept, though several of the minor female classmates are the most insidiously horrendous) begin each line with no clear idea how it will end, shifting allegiances and enunciations with unsteady bravura halfway through. Even the climactic discovery is bungled, with the police declaring the identity of the murderer like it was their coffee order.

Caption Contest: What do you think Willard says in this scene?

While the dialogue and presentation are deliciously fun, the mystery at the center of Pieces is a muddled affair, with halfhearted but admirably persistent red herrings forming most of the B-story while nameless nubile women are chopped up at every turn. Each kill is preceded by about two minutes of sexy scene-setting, whether it be sexy swimming, sexy aerobics, or two full rounds of sexy tennis. And although many of the murders aren't spectacularly bloody thanks to budgetary limitations, given the context what is shown (a girl peeing herself in fear, a stabbing on a water bed, some splashy geysers of blood) is palpably, unavoidably misogynistic.

The slasher genre is never more than two steps away from uncomfortable gender relations, but in Pieces it's hard to ignore. The killer's sexual neurosis is exploited rather than explored in any meaningful way, and Mary - the one lady cop - is wimpy and malleable, melting like a Drumstick on the kitchen counter (don't ask, the wound's still fresh) whenever something violent happens. On top of that, the victims aren't even characters. They exist solely as the film's pound of flesh with no personality traits or affectations, just a heap of skin and a scream.

Pieces is still a fun watch, but between the duller moments and the griminess of its exploitation, you're gonna have to grit your teeth to get through it. It's absolutely worth checking out for any fan of the best of the worst cinema has to offer, especially if you're looking for gems with less airtime than films like The Room or Troll 2. So I suppose the overall net worth is positive, but not by a wide enough margin to really be proud of.

Killer: Charlie Chainsaw [The Dean (Edward Purdom)]

Final Girl: Mary Riggs (Lynda Day George) sort of.

Best Kill: Virginia Palmer is abruptly decapitated with a chainsaw in the quad in broad daylight. Nobody seems to care.

Sign of the Times: We have the distinct pleasure of watching a solid two minutes of aerobics (oh how the 80's loved their rhythmic exercises) to a song that sounds like a robot trying to sing disco.

Scariest Moment: The kettle abruptly goes off while [the Dean is spiking Mary's coffee with Evil Drugs.]

Weirdest Moment: When Mary is creeping around the campus, a Bruce Lee impersonator leaps out of nowhere, attacks her with martial arts, then immediately falls to the ground, asleep. When Kendall shows up, he explains that it's just his kung fu professor, who then wakes up and claims he ate bad chop suey, so he must have blacked out.

Champion Dialogue: "The most beautiful thing in the world is smoking pot and fucking on a water bed at the same time."

Body Count: 7; including the killer.

1. Timmy's Mom is axed in the head and decapitated.
2. Virginia Palmer is decapitated with a chainsaw.
3. Jenny is drowned with a pool net and dismembered offscreen.
4. Mary has her arm cut off with a chainsaw.
5. Sylvia is stabbed to death on a waterbed.
6. Tennis girl is chainsawed in half.
7. [The Dean is shot in the head.] 

TL;DR: Pieces is an absurd mess of a slasher with enough outrageous campy moments to make it noteworthy but only to the most minimal degree.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1657