Census Bloodbath: My Fair Lady

Year: 1983
Director: Ulli Lommel
Cast: Suzanna Love, Robert Walker Jr., Jeff Winchester
Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Ulli Lommel and Suzanna Love are the Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson of dumb early 80's horror movies. Their relationship is fascinating. Lommel was an acolyte of both Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Andy Warhol and seems to have learned nothing from either of them. Love is a DuPont heiress who was married to him from 1978 to 1987, writing the checks to fund several of the movies they made together. Over the course of their marriage they created 12 movies, previously intersecting with Census Bloodbath with the 1980 killer mirror movie The Boogeyman and its 1983 sequel Boogeyman II. That same year, they created Olivia, a movie inspired by a location scout for Boogeyman II, and that's what we're here to talk about today.

And doesn't that title just send a chill up your spine?

So Olivia (Suzanna Love, of all people) is a young London woman with a ridiculous Dick van Dyke accent trapped in a loveless marriage to Richard (Jeff Winchester). As a child, she witnessed her prostitute mother being murdered by a john, and now imagines her mother's voice yelling at her and demanding that she murder men. She does follow her mother's orders once, but then she quickly falls in love with a potential victim, American builder Mike Grant (Robert Walker Jr.), who is in town to discuss whether to renovate or demolish the London Bridge (yeah, that's what this movie is about, for some reason I can't possibly fathom).

Richard discovers the affair, there's a scuffle, and Olivia escapes. Cut to four years later, the London Bridge has been transplanted into the middle of Arizona, and Mike reunites with Olivia, now going by Ginny and working as a real estate agent at a set of luxury condominiums built along the Colorado river. Then it mostly forgets that it's a horror movie until the final 10 minutes or so.

Everyone, Olivia is very strange.

Olivia is barely a slasher movie. Hell, it's barely a movie. There are enough kills present that I don't regret its inclusion in this project, but the nods at a Psycho-esque psychological profile of a woman driven to kill (which is certainly the impression the poster wants to give us, at the very list) are just nods. I can't quite discern what kind of story Olivia wants to tell, but it's certainly not a story about a serial killer. It's a little bit about a woman caught up in the headwinds of male desire and patriarchal oppression and struggling to escape from that. But also not really? It's dumb, is what it is.

I will say this about Olivia: it ends very far from where it starts, so it certainly keeps you on your toes. There's a fine line between "weird" and "bonkers" and the film doesn't cross over into the latter enough to be satisfying as a camp spectacle, but it's at least different. There's no movie like it. Because most movies have rising action, a climax, and then falling action. The narrative here is more of an omelet than anything, whisking together gratuitous sex scenes, the occasional kill, and lots of Olivia glowering in any direction she pleases.

You go, girl!

There is actually some good material in Olivia, and it comes from the place I'd least expect this movie to excel: the score. The composer here is Jerry Goldsmith('s son Joel), and he is turning in a score that feels very John Carpenter. And I don't mean he's joining the endless collective of slasher composers copying Carpenter's iconic 1978 score for Halloween. No, it feels very 2018 Carpenter, bizarrely ahead of its time with its penchant for sustained drones that sound like plaintive whale calls. The score is perhaps just as wide-ranging and unfathomable in its motivations as the movie itself, but it's lush. The sex scene that is scored by a synthesized harp that sounds like it's meant to be set behind a waterfall in a Fantasia movie is a particular standout. I'd actually listen to this score on purpose, and that's not something I've said about many a 1983 slasher movie.

Also, the lighting is somewhat atmospheric sometimes. And the acting, while certainly not good, is at least enough to get you through these characters' ever-changing journeys. But having sat through the entirety of Olivia, I really have no idea how to digest it. It just kind of sits there in my brain in one big lump. I've at least hacked off a piece and filed it under "remember this score," but otherwise I'm at a loss.

Their previous slasher The Boogeyman isn't exactly a masterpiece, but it's at least very clearly a slasher movie with a hearty body count, even when it turns into a peculiar Exorcist riff with John Carradine toward the end. Here they take a lot of the same ingredients (sexy murder flashback, vaguely supernatural events surrounding murder, etc.) and get really distracted by the London Bridge. Honestly, this might be more of a travelogue than anything, a full experience of what it's like to cross the bridge both in its original London home and at the real-life facsimile in Lake Havasu City, Arizona that somehow inspired this whole mess. I guess I'm grateful to this movie for that, because I had no idea we had a whole-ass London Bridge on this side of the pond, but I'd rather watch a documentary on the creative process behind deciding how this movie was going to be structured rather than the actual movie itself.

Killer: Olivia (Suzanna Love), but only sort of
Final Girl: Olivia (Suzanna Love), but only sort of
Best Kill: It's the only kill that's any good at all, but it's actually quite pleasing. Mike is brushing his teeth with an electric toothbrush and gets the device shoved through the back of his neck in what might be the film's only special effects shot.
Sign of the Times: Olivia's out-on-the-town outfit is a spray of hard-cut blonde bangs and the squarest sunglasses you ever did see.
Scariest Moment: When "flirting" with her, Mike forces his way into Olivia's house.
Weirdest Moment: Mike seduces Olivia with a sexy rendition of "London Bridge is Falling Down," emphasis on "my fair lady."
Champion Dialogue: "They've got nothing better to do than jump off the bridge."
Body Count: 4; only 2 of which are perpetrated by Olivia.

1. Olivia's Mom has her head slammed into the bed which kills her somehow.
2. Eric has a bottle smashed on his head.
3. Mike has an electric toothbrush shoved through the back of his throat.
4. Richard is stabbed to death.

TL;DR: Olivia is a scatterbrained, strange movie that doesn't really add up to much.
Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 1139

Census Flashback: Doing All The Old Bits

On our Fright Flashback/Census Bloodbath crossover, every week this summer we'll be exploring an 80's slasher film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to the weekend's upcoming blockbuster.

In anticipation of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, which has hired Jeff Goldblum to recite every line ever spoken in the previous films, I'll be reviewing Boogeyman II, a sequel that is mostly comprised of flashbacks to the original 1980 supernatural slasher.

Year: 1983

Director: Bruce Starr

Cast: Suzanna Love, Ulli Lommel, Shannah Hall

Run Time: 1 hour 19 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The clip show slasher is a grand tradition of the subgenre, helping out sequels that ran out of money across the board from The Hills Have Eyes Part II to Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2. To my knowledge, Boogeyman II AKA Revenge of the Boogeyman, one of Britain's infamous Video Nasties,  is the first of them. This is partially because its original film came out so early in the slasher Golden Age, and partially because arthouse dropout director Ulli Lommel really didn't want to make this movie.

Pictured: Lommel's face during the pitch meeting.

So what did old Lommel do to make a quick buck? He slapped together a ton of old footage from the original, mediocre killer mirror slasher, and whipped up a scathingly meta script with wife/star Suzanna Love. The footage they added was clearly shot as quickly and with as little equipment as possible (my guess is three days, tops), bada bing bada boom.

The story revolves around Lacey (Love), the survivor of the first film, visiting her childhood friend Bonnie Lombard (Shannah Hall, who also shares co-writer credit) in Hollywood, where she lives with her pretentious director husband Mickey (Lommel himself). After telling the story of the killer mirror in excruciating detail for the first fifty minutes or so, she reveals that she has brought a shard of said mirror with her, and it begins wreaking havoc upon the Hollywood hob-knobbers who have gathered at the Lombards' party and want to make a movie out of Lacey's story.

This image returns once more to strike fear into the hearts of men and women alike! Quiver in abject terror! 

Much like Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 before it, Boogeyman II actually negates any reason to watch the original film. It cuts out all the boring bits in favor of the showstopping kills, which were by a wiiiiiide margin the only reason to watch. Unfortunately, it also does this to its own narrative, whatever thirty-some minutes of it that we get. It's a nonstop Lazy Susan of murder sequences, strung together with maybe three or four lines like a bad community theater musical revue show. Although honestly, that honestly doesn't disqualify it from being a good slasher movie.

What does disqualify it is that these murder sequences in no way have the creativity or impact of the original film. The kills are always presented in pairs, choppily cutting between the two players in a way that makes it entirely unclear what is happening, and to whom. Not to mention the fact that the cinematography is murky as hell and the gore is practically nonexistent. It's dark, cheap, and unsatisfying, like a can of generic-brand grocery store beer. 

Then there's the fact that every man in the movie is a Harvey Weinstein, with each kill introduced by some producer or other attempting to trade sex for a role in a movie that hasn't even been greenlit yet. That has aged even worse than the practically obligatory regressive sexual politics present in the average 80's slasher.

It must be so fun to be a woman.

So yes. Boogeyman II is almost entirely void of artistic merit. Almost. You see, Ulli Lommel's disenchantment with Hollywood bleeds through every frame, starting with the fact the he cast himself as the reluctant, put-upon director. Every character on this film's platter of Meat is a grotesque caricature of the L.A. lifestyle, spouting hilariously vain, clueless dialogue that wouldn't be out of place in an episode of Barry. 

In the few seconds we're given to breathe between kills, Boogeyman II is a savage satire, frequently funny on its own merits, with enough memorable screenwriting pearls that my shortlist of Champion Dialogue quotes was longer than the body count. The shallow, callous way that these Beverly Hills types treat Lacey and attempt to manipulate her trauma for their own gain is kind of magnetically funny, in a twisted, pitch black kind of way.

Sure, it's still a piece of crap. We're introduced to these characters as they step into frame (lit from below like they're telling a spooky campfire story) and recite their names one by one. They teleport around the party and die while in conversation with people we've never seen them interact with before. They name drop Halloween and Blow Out like they have a snowball's chance in Hell of ever being favorably compared to either. I'm not here to say Boogeyman II is a masterpiece. But for a 75-minute fluffball slasher, I feel like I got more than my money's worth. (It probably doesn't hurt that the soundtrack liberally indulges in the first film's license of tracks from the D.C. New Wave band 4 Out of 5 Doctors, my absolute favorite slasher movie party band.)

Mind you, I didn't actually spend any money to watch this movie, but the sentiment remains. The film would have even dragged itself over the threshold to a positive score if the kills had been any good at all. But I enjoyed spending the time with my favorite parts of the original while indulging in a few genuine chuckles, a privilege that very few slashers can afford a discerning viewer. Not that it encounters many of those.

Killer: The Mirror

Final Girl: Lacey (Suzanna Love)

Sign of the Times: The world was apparently clamoring for a sequel to The Boogeyman.

Best Kill: There's a lot of phallic imagery to choose from here, but I'm partial to the one where a man gets an electric toothbrush shoved down his esophagus.

Scariest Moment: The child's toys come to life all around him while he sleeps.

Weirdest Moment: The dialogue turns all echoey for a poolside conversation about goblins between a child clearly dubbed with an adult's voice and the German servant.

Champion Dialogue: "Without people, there wouldn't be... anybody."

Body Count: 18; 8 of which are from the previous film.

1. Mom's Lover is stabbed in the back in flashback.
2. Woman is stabbed in the throat with scissors in flashback.
3. Boy has his neck crushed in a window in flashback.
4. Woman is hit in the face with a medicine cabinet in flashback.
5. Boy is impaled in the back of the neck in flashback.
6. Girl is impaled on the same spike in flashback.
7. Lacey's Husband has his face melt in flashback.
8. Elderly Priest is killed during an exorcism in flashback.
9. Sally is weed whacked.
10. Sandor is killed by hedge clippers.
11. Producer gets choked with an electric toothbrush.
12. Brunette gets her face covered in shaving cream, which somehow kills her.
13. Bernie is hung with a garden hose.
14. Blonde gets spanked by a ladder, which shoves her mouth onto an exhaust pipe.
15. Priscilla has her neck crushed with barbecue tongs.
16. Jim is corkscrewed.
17. Joseph is drowned.
18. Bonnie dies in a car explosion.

TL;DR: Boogeyman II is almost completely devoid of artistic merit, but as a nuts and bolts body count movie, it's weirdly satisfying.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1250

Reviews In This Series
The Boogeyman (Lommel, 1980)
Boogeyman II (Starr, 1983)

Census Bloodbath: The Man In The Mirror

Year: 1980

Director: Ulli Lommel

Cast: Suzanna Love, John Carradine, Ron James

Run Time: 1 hour 22 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The Boogeyman is a peculiar little trifle of a film. In fact, it's almost impossible to describe with the slasher terminology of 1980 as it stood although it is undoubtedly a member of the genre. At a spritely 82 minutes, it's a crackerjack shocker that's at once interminably dull and delightfully bizarre. 

It opens with the most brazen Halloween riff yet, in which a mother (Gillian Gordon)'s two children spy on her as she gets it on with her lover (Howard Grant). The lover catches them and beats the young son. One Steadicam shot later, the son is stabbing him to death as his sister watches from around the corner via an ornate mirror.

This entire sequence is bathed in soft colorful light that implies an actual brain behind the production before it cuts to the present day and everything is boring again.

Although at the very least it's visible, which is something I've learned not to take for granted.

It's twenty years later and the sister Lacey (Suzanna Love) has married a nice blonde policeman (Ron James, something of a Walmart brand Midnight Cowboy) and popped out an irritating little tyke, Kevin (Raymond Boyden). Although things have changed a lot since those days and they now live on a remote tract of farmland, Lacey and her brother Willy (Nicholas Love, Suzanna's real life brother) are still haunted by the events of that night.

Willy hasn't said a single word since he stabbed the man in another obvious Halloween-y touch. And for a while we watch the family interact, not really encountering much in the way of "plot" or "entertainment" for the first 40 minutes or so. There are brief flashes where the direction or the editing is actually worthwhile, but the overall impact of those moments is negligible.

It isn't until about halfway through the film that Suzanna visits her old home and shatters the mirror to pieces during a vivid hallucination and the real fun begins. Where, up til now, The Boogeyman has adhered fairly closely to the Michael Myers mythology (up to, and including the title), all of a sudden a gasket bursts somewhere and the whole thing is sucked into a vortex of insanity.

The breaking of the mirror has released the spirit of the murdered man trapped inside of it and he begins to kill the new inhabitants of the house in a way that's half Final Destination, half The Happening, and all crazy go nuts.

When this is the most logical scene in your movie, you've done something very wrong or very right.

The film careens wildly across subgenres from high concept supernatural thriller as the mirror glows red and turns household objects into murderous missiles to straight-up slasher in a tacked-on lakeside teen slaughter scene obviously thrown into the mix after Friday the 13th hit it big until it settles on being an exorcism movie in the darned weirdest way possible.

Basically, wherever the shards of the mirror end up, terrible things happen. There are several wild and hilarious scenes in this back half and the ending is a ludicrously self-indulgent cacophony of colors and noise and nonsense and it's all pretty great. Theoretically. Although it's a joy to watch these scenes, there's still something missing.

It all feels very Slash By Numbers, put together without any real care that the end product is anything worth seeing whatsoever. Even in the most preposterous and campy moments, there's an unmistakeable tinge of shallowness that dooms the entire picture.

Yes, even when John Carradine holds out a crucifix to a mirror shard-possessed Lacey.

The back half does tend to make up for some of the draggier bits in the beginning but the whole thing evens out to a perfectly bland and uninteresting film. It's even more disappointing for the crazed fun the film could - and should - have been.

And by all accounts the two sequels are even worse. Obviously having given up on the concepts of artistic integrity or narrative quality, both Boogeyman II and Return of the Boogeyman clock in under 80 minutes and are largely comprised of stock footage of the original film. Definitely expect reviews if I can ever get my hands on those (understandably) rare cuts.

Director Ulli Lommel (who helmed 17 serial killer pictures in four years) was never a name brand auteur, but his close relationship with master director Rainer Werner Fassbinder was supposed to teach him the tricks of the trade. By all evidence, it did not. But at least his ideas (in the back half of the film, anyway) were unique in the fairly barren terrain of Psycho and Halloween knockoffs that was the slasher genre at the beginning of the decade.

But The Boogeyman is not a pet project. It is a charmless seat filler that unfortunately made yachtloads of box office off of its $30,000 budget. Utterly passionless with only a few stabs at cinematic craftsmanship, it's ultimately trivial and forgettable.

And it's no coincidence that it starred his (then) wife. Spill that tea.

Killer: A mirror infused with the murderous spirit of their mother's Lover (Howard Grant)

Final Girl: Lacey (Suzanna Love)

Best Kill: A young man is skewered through the back of his head and his girlfriend is pulled onto the front, locking them in an eternal lip lock of death.

Sign of the Times: Everything eventually either catches on fire or explodes.

Scariest Moment: A girl holding a vibrating shard of mirror can't let go and it cuts into her fingers.

Weirdest Moment: A random buck-toothed character named Katy (Catherine Tambini) shows up to ask Willy for eggs, tries to seduce him, gets strangled, and runs away never to appear in the movie again. Predictably, Willy says nothing.

Champion Dialogue: "As long as I've known you, I can't keep in mind you don't talk."

Body Count: 9; including the Lover in the beginning.

1. Mom's Lover is stabbed in the back.
2. A woman is stabbed in the throat with scissors.
3. A boy has his neck smashed in a window.
4. A woman is killed offscreen.
5. A boy is impaled through the back of the head with a knife.
6. A girl is impaled on the front of that same knife.
7. A man is impaled in the throat by a pitchfork.
8. A girl is strangled with a garden hose.
9. Elderly Priest is repeatedly stabbed in the back. 

TL;DR: With a better concept than execution, The Boogeyman is a disappointment but still is an interesting one-of-a-kind curio for more devoted fans of the genre.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1113

Reviews In This Series

The Boogeyman (Lommel, 1980)

Boogeyman II (Starr, 1983)