Census Bloodbath: Psychically Susan

Year:
1985
Director:
John Llewellyn Moxey
Cast:
Cindy Williams, David Morse, Lee Horsley
Run Time:
1 hour 35 minutes

Plot: In When Dreams Come True, museum tour guide Susan Matthews (Cindy Williams of Laverne & Shirley) is in a rough patch with her workaholic cop boyfriend. Alex Kazloff (Lee Horsley). He's too caught up with chasing a serial killer - the lazily named Perfect Murderer - to pay attention to her needs. She has dreams about meeting and being seduced by the mysterious stranger Robert Wynton (David Morse), and when he shows up at the museum, she finds him just as tempting in real life.

However, her prophetic dreams aren't limited to just booty calls. She soon begins to suspect that her dreams are informing her about who the Perfect Murderer is targeting next.

Analysis: As I continue catching up with older titles that slipped through the cracks during my first few rounds of research for Census Bloodbath (I'm getting close!), some trends have begun to emerge First of all, we've been covering a lot of international titles, which makes sense. Obscure non-English films can be hard to categorize. We've also gotten a whole heap of TV movies that managed to escape the Internet's notice. I'm less sure why that might be the case, but it's possible that people simply wanted to spare me from watching When Dreams Come True. And I thank them for their valiant effort.

When Dreams Come True lives up to its title by being a goddamn snooze. While I really appreciate the TV movie slashers that focus on women's stories (Fantasies is great! Sins of the Past is a hoot!), true feminism means accepting that some women can be boring, and Susan is one of the most tedious protagonists in the business. 

Girl needs to dump her awful boyfriend, sure, but I find it hard to believe that the best replacement she can find is this wet dishrag with the hair of Ludwig van Beethoven who is in serious need of a rizz transplant. Any scene she spends with any of the men in her life sucks, and almost every scene features some combination of those three characters. 

Also, almost every time she hangs out with Alex (who is of Romani origin), they say a lot of racist stuff about his family and his ancestors. Though I suppose racism is interesting, even if it's in a negative way. I almost wish their conversations were nothing but epithets. At least then I'd feel something.

Needless to say, it's a bad slasher too. Not only are the kills bloodless (they were always going to be), but they also take place offscreen and for the most part happen to characters who we never get to know anything about. Plus, the killer reveal is so blindingly obvious that I'm not entirely sure they were actually trying to hide his identity from us.

Anyway, When Dreams Come True only ever really comes alive when Susan is hanging out with her horny, witchy coworker Annie (cult film icon Jessica Harper, of Suspiria, Shock Treatment, Phantom of the Paradise, and Bones and All). Harper waltzes away with the movie every second she spends onscreen, using every tool at her disposal (Those giant eyes! That husky voice!) to ooze charisma like a poorly sealed toothpaste tube in a carry-on bag. Oh, and the banishment ritual she does at one point in the movie is the only well-executed special effects sequence.

The only other saving grace here is when they remember that Laverne & Shirley was a comedy and find anything for poor Cindy Williams to do other than look vaguely anxious. She comes alive when she gets to be funny, whether it's reacting with annoyance to her overbearing neighbor's dogs, trying to parse what Annie is saying about her weird dream about being chased by bats through the Grand Canyon (the film's best scene!), or fucking around with her snippy older coworker Mrs. Colton (Norma Young, who we've seen before in a whole other review series as a Venusian girl in the Cardboard Science title Queen of Outer Space).

All in all, When Dreams Come True is more boring than truly bad, but who needs that? Let me be mad!

Killer: Robert Wynton (David Morse)

Final Girl: Susan Matthews (Cindy Williams)

Best Kill: It would have to be the death of the security guard Jack (Eli Cummins) - he is stabbed in the gut - both because it's the only body count death that's actually shown onscreen and because Jack is annoying and sucks.

Sign of the Times: This was acceptable hair for a date at a fancy restaurant.

Scariest Moment: The opening dream, when Susan is running away from an unknown assailant and nobody is helping her, is actually pretty frightening and disorienting.

Weirdest Moment: Susan and Robert go on a date to see The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe and I find out that that's the name of a real movie and not just something they made up.

Champion Dialogue: “Making love in a hallway with just about anybody would certainly thrill me. Especially Richard Gere."

Body Count: 5

1. Woman is killed offscreen.
2. Woman #2 is killed offscreen.
3. Jack is stabbed in the gut.
4. Annie is killed offscreen.
5. Robert is shot by Lee.

TL;DR: When Dreams Come True is a tedious TV movie slasher that is only good when Jessica Harper is onscreen.

Rating: 4/10

Census Bloodbath: Sex Work-Life Balance

Year:
1984
Director:
Peter H. Hunt
Cast:
Barbara Carrera, Kim Cattrall, Debby Boone
Run Time:
1 hour 34 minutes

Plot: Sins of the Past follows a group of former sex workers who were part of a call girl cooperative that broke up when one of their number, Ellen Easton (Megan Gallagher), was murdered. Now it's 15 years later, none of them have aged a day, and they've settled into new, respectable lives. One by one, the girls are sent newspaper clippings about Ellen's death, then they in turn are killed. They think the killer is Ellen's abusive father, Ralph (Gene Dynarski), but in order to get to the bottom of the crime and keep their former lives secret (they almost all have high-stakes reasons to want to keep it quiet), they reunite in LA to try and track down the killer themselves.

The women in question are Terry Halloran (Barbara Carrera, fresh off her stint as a Bond girl in 1983's Never Say Never Again), their former leader who is now hilariously working at a temp agency providing young girls with very different types of jobs - she's also in the middle of a vicious custody battle; Paula Bennett (the Kim Cattrall, two years before Big Trouble in Little China, three years before Mannequin, and 14 years before Sex and the City), a pragmatic woman who got her medical license and is now fighting to turn her temporary job as the head of pediatrics into a permanent position; Clarissa Hope (Debby "Daughter of Pat" Boone), who has found God and now performs songs to support televangelist Rev. Donald Randolph (John Anderson, who played the used car dealer in Psycho); Maureen Warren (Tracy Reed), who is a wife and mother living in domestic bliss; and Patrice Cantwell (Kirstie Alley, whose closet is too full of skeletons for us to consider this movie one of them - also of the same year's Blind Date), a Hollywood actress who has fallen on hard times.

As Terry tries to rally the girls, she becomes the prime suspect and eventual love interest of Lieutenant Malovich (General Hospital mainstay Anthony Geary), who is gunning for a promotion and will do anything to figure out why bodies keep piling up whenever Terry's around. Oh, and he doesn't matter at all, but Paula has a horny coworker played by Matthew Faison, who is one of the corporate paintballers who die via triple decapitation in Jason Lives!

Analysis: TV movie slashers get a bad rap. Obviously, the idea of a genre whose foundational tenets are boobs and blood being subject to network censorship is a suspicious one. And sure, some of them are barrel-scraping piles of pond scum like Hotline or . However, there are quite a few exquisite little TV movie gems scattered throughout slasher history, like Fantasies or Dark Night of the Scarecrow. So I didn't walk into Sins of the Past feeling biased against the format, and I was well rewarded for my faith.

Of course it's not particularly good as a slasher. It has the bloodless, mostly offscreen deaths that I've come to expect from this sub-subgenre, and it doesn't even have the decency to imply that any of them were committed with a sharp weapon. However, just like Fantasies before it, it makes up for its deficits as a slasher by leaning in on being a soapy, Lifetime-y melodrama about women.

The scenes where the women alternately work together and at cross-purposes gives them all an exciting amount of agency as they're propelled through some extreme emotional twists and turns. Plus, the slasher mystery at the center of it is deliciously cozy - more about lounging on couches while discussing the clues rather than gumshoing their way around the problem.

The movie even ages kinda OK in its depiction of sex work. It mostly lands on "it's OK that you did it, because you regret it and you're not doing it anymore," which is kind of a cop-out, but it does allow these sex workers to be complete human beings with lives and flaws and strengths, respecting them even though they committed those sinful, wicked acts in their pasts. There's even a lovely scene where one of the women reveals her past with her current partner, whose immediate instinct is to shun her, but who ultimately comes to accept it.

And the cast is quite good, for the most part. Kirstie Alley is really quite terrific as an amoral diva (no comment), and Tracy Reed delivers a phenomenal monologue in the final third. Unfortunately, Barbara Carrera is not up to their standard. The Nicaraguan-American actress is a Gal Gadotian level of unprepared to deliver lines in English. She wends her way around her dialogue with a sense of blind panic that results in a completely vacant character, leaving a gaping void at the center of the movie.

[SPOILER ALERT, through the end of the review]

And we must talk about Kim Cattrall, of course. Although she does deliver a perfectly Samantha-esque line comparing marriage to sex work, she's confident and competent here rather than truly marvelous, which is a shame considering the fact that it's revealed that her character contributed two kills to the body count. Her final scene is solid, but it fails to deliver the Ghostface campiness that it could have had.

That said, as a whole, the third act (when everyone converges on one of the reverend's telecasts, which Clarissa refuses to back out of in spite of the fact that the killer is clearly planning to murder her there) is actually deliciously tense. Director Peter H. Hunt, who mostly takes a backseat elsewhere, finally stirs to life as he guides us through all the different pieces being set on the board.

Although I'm not saying the movie has nothing to offer artistically. There's exactly one good shot in the movie, of a slash of light revealing Maureen's eyes as she explores a dark Mission. 

Speaking of, there are a lot of real-life Southern California locations being used, which gives the whole thing a lived-in realism. All in all, in spite of Barbara Carrera's alarming limitations, Sins of the Past is a real nice warm bath of a movie, which is the highest-possible tier that a TV movie slasher could hope to reach.

Killer: Ralph Easton (Gene Dynarski) & (gasp) Paula Bennett (Kim Cattrall)

Final Girl: Terry Halloran (Barbara Carrera)

Best Kill: Oooh baby, watching the dummy playing Kim Cattrall falling from the catwalk at the end is why television exists!

Sign of the Times: The article that the girls are being sent has the hilarious headline "Dad Kills Prostie Daughter."

Scariest Moment: Terry is followed by an unknown man after Patrice's funeral.

Weirdest Moment: Ralph Easton takes aim to kill Clarissa with a rifle, but realizes he forgot to put his glasses on.

Champion Dialogue: “A meat cutter is drop-kicking pot roasts around the kitchen and demanding a tryout with The Raiders."

Body Count: 5; not including Amy (Mallie Jackson), whose offscreen death occurs during the time jump.

1. Ellen is killed offscreen.
2. Diane (Kristen Meadows) is struck by a car.
3. Patrice is killed offscreen.
4. Ralph Easton is shot by Lt. Malovich.
5. Paula falls from a great height.

TL;DR: Sins of the Past is charming TV movie slasher that blends women's picture melodrama with a cozy mystery vibe.

Rating: 7/10

Census Bloodbath: Drown By The Seashore

 

Year:
1982
Director:
Peter Medak
Cast:
Patrick Duffy, Cindy Pickett, Lawrence Pressman
Run Time:
1 hour 32 minutes

Plot: Cry for the Strangers follows psychiatrist Brad Russell (Patrick Duffy) moving to the small seaside town of Clarks Harbor with his wife Elaine (Cindy Pickett, Ferris Bueller's mom!) for some peace and quiet while he writes his book. Unfortunately, he finds neither peace nor quiet in the storm-ravaged area. Every time the wind picks up, somebody who wasn't born in the town (a "stranger," some might say) dies under mysterious circumstances. Who is the culprit? Is it a human being? A series of dreadful accidents? Or the indigenous American ghosts who haunt the nearby beach? Speaking of, the ghosts seem to have a special interest in possessing Robby Palmer (Shawn Carson of The Funhouse), a young boy who is a former patient of Dr. Russell's.

Analysis: Just getting through the opening credits of Cry for the Strangers gave me whiplash. First, there was the disappointment of learning that it was a TV movie (for CBS, to be precise). TV movie slashers can be good (Dark Night of the Scarecrow, Fantasies, Deadly Lessons), but more often than not they are bloodless, plodding affairs. So imagine my shock when I learned that this particular movie was directed by Peter Medak, just two years off from helming the exquisitely atmospheric haunted house movie The Changeling.

The man who made the single scariest seance scene in horror cinema does have a few tricks up his sleeve here, even on a TV movie budget. There are plenty of ambitious shots, including the camera constantly spinning around a central axis and a pretty fun mirror shot introducing a scene in the local tavern. He also knows what to do whenever the tension of the movie grows to a crescendo, giving the spine-tingling moments room to breathe, then wanging you on the head with a surprise jump cut.

He also imbues the movie with a solid sense of place. It helps that they used real locations on the coast of the Pacific Northwest, but there's also a strong sense of community threaded throughout, especially in the body discovery scenes.

Unfortunately, Cry for the Strangers is also boring as fuck. I could have done with about 12 fewer scenes of somebody walking across a quiet beach, shouting somebody's name (usually Robby - that fool did love to wander off onto the beach over and over and over again). There's "slow boil" and then there's "under heavy sedation," and this movie is in the latter camp.

It's also deathly dull as a slasher movie. Indeed, if it weren't for the fact that (SPOILER ALERT) it is revealed that there is an actual human being perpetrating the killings, I was going to kick this movie off my Census Bloodbath list completely. I wasn't shocked that the kills in this TV movie almost entirely took place offscreen, but not once does an edged weapon come into the equation even a little bit. And the movie is so dead set on being a (generic, racist) ghost story that the slasher elements recede into the background most of the time.

All in all, it's a bit of a whiff for ol' Peter Medak. But looking at his filmography, it honestly seems like The Changeling might have been more of a fluke than anything else.

Killer: Chief Whalen (Brian Keith)

Final Girl: Dr. Brad Russell (Patrick Duffy) & Co.

Best Kill: The opening scene is kind of clunkily paced, but the closing gag - young Whalen finding his grandparents' bodies buried in the sand on the beach - boosts up the eeriness something fierce.

Sign of the Times: Fisherman/body count padder Chip wears a red headband at all times, day or night.

Scariest Moment: The newly widowed Miriam arrives on Brad and Elaine's porch out of nowhere, with a dire warning.

Weirdest Moment: When Chief Whalen drops off Brad and Elaine at their new home, he lets them know they won't be able to turn on the power for a few days. Excuse me, what?

Champion Dialogue: “Robby! Robby! ROBBY!"

Body Count: 8

1. Grandma and
2. Grandpa are buried up to their necks in sand and drowned offscreen.
3. Pete is found dead in his fishing net.
4. Miriam is hanged offscreen.
5. Max is killed offscreen in a boat explosion.
6. Chip is drowned offscreen.
7. Riley dies offscreen. 
8. Chief Whalen is shot.

TL;DR: Cry for the Strangers is appropriately atmospheric at times, but it's also dead boring.

Rating: 4/10

Census Bloodbath: Turn On, Tune In, Drop Dread

 Note: This movie was only available to me in unsubtitled Italian, so take my review with a grain of salt.

Year:
1980
Director:
Aldo Lado
Cast:
Auretta Gay, Pietro Brambilla, Aldo Sassi
Run Time:
1 hour 3 minutes

Plot: A black-gloved killer stalks the cast and crew of the real-life Italian variety TV show Variety. After Ely (Margherita Sestito) discovers the corpse of the dancer Diamante (Mariarita Viaggi), she enlists the help of PA Sandro (Pietro Brambilla of The House with Laughing Windows) and blind switchboard operator Lia (Auretta Gay of Zombie) in getting to the bottom of the mystery.

Analysis: I don't have a lot experience with the giallo genre on the small screen, but there was evidently a pretty big push to get it on the Italian airwaves throughout the 1980s, which more or less culminated in the short-lived 1987 variety show Giallo (something I now desperately want to get my hands on). Because Census Bloodbath is exclusively limited to features rather than series, this is something I have had very little reason to encounter outside of the aborted-miniseries-turned-theatrical-feature The Scorpion with Two Tails, which is uniquely terrible.

Suffice it to say, in the wake of seeing Scorpion, I approached Crime in Via Teulada with some trepidation. You see, the movie (originally titled Delitto in Via Teulada) had previously aired on Variety as a series of five-minute shorts in 1979 before being assembled into a (sort of) feature-length production and debuting in theaters in early 1980.

While the great Sergio Martino delivered us Scorpion, so I know that a filmmaker's legacy doesn't necessarily mean much with TV giallo, I was immediately intrigued by two of the names in the credits: director Aldo Lado (Short Night of Glass Dolls, Who Saw Her Die?) and composer Fabio Frizzi (The Scorpion with Two Tails, The Beyond, Zombie). 

As it turns out, I was right to allow a ray of hope into my heart. While Frizzi is merely competent, delivering a solid Pino-Donaggio-lite orchestration, Lado is firing on as many cylinders as it's possible to fire. While he is still limited by the standards of television storytelling (given the evidence, Italian standards and practices at the time curtailed violence, but not gratuitous boob shots), he puts on a hell of a show.

He stages quite a few exquisite moments of tension and terror, most notably in a sustained chase sequence that sees the character Annie (Barbara D'Urso) being chased from a cherry red stage all the way upstairs to an editing bay via the narrow stairwells surrounding an elevator shaft. He is also extraordinarily skilled at emphasizing Lia's headspace, highlighting how the chaotic sounds and incessantly moving objects in her environment blot out her ability to keep tabs on where she is.

Simply put, Crime in Via Teulada looks fabulous. Moody scenes are drenched in striking pools of light, and sets abound with rotating mirrors, flowing curtains, and everything else you might want out of a stylish giallo production.

Scratch that. Everything you might want, with the exception of outrageous kills. However, the kills that we do get actually aren't half bad. While there are a few more gun deaths than I'd prefer in any given slasher movie, Crime in Via Teulada generally finds ways to stage kills in ways that emphasize the brutality of murder without actually showing much blood or gore.

I don't want to waste my time by trying to convince you that this hourlong movie that Frankensteins together a few shorts from a variety show is some kind of hidden masterpiece, but it is quite lovely for what it is. 

Killer: Lia (Auretta Gay)

Final Girl: N/A

Best Kill: Annie's strangulation by scarf is probably the best, because it accomplishes the "non-gory but still brutal TV kill" vibe with a bit of classic giallo stylization.

Sign of the Times: After Annie is strangled with her scarf, Lia jams it into a spinning tape reel in an editing bay to pretend that it got tangled up in the mechanism. 

Scariest Moment: Annie's extended chase sequence is a real thrill!

Weirdest Moment: In one scene, a costume department worker appears to be ironing her own hand.

Champion Dialogue: N/A

Body Count: 6

1. Diamante is shot in the head.
2. Annie is strangled with a scarf.
3. Ely is blasted in the face with steam.
4. Stagehand is run through with a sword offscreen.
5. Enrico is shot in the back.
6. Lia dies of a gunshot wound.

TL;DR: Crime in Via Teulada is a well-shot and totally pleasant little TV giallo lark.

Rating: 6/10

Census Bloodbath: A Whisper To A Scream

Year:
1988
Director:
Christian I. Nyby II
Cast:
Loni Anderson, Joe Penny, June Lockhart
Run Time:
1 hour 34 minutes

Plot: Whisper Kill follows Liz Bartlett (Loni Anderson), the lead (and only?) reporter at a local newspaper called the Faircrest Falcon. When her business partner is stabbed to death after receiving a threatening phone call from a whispery voice, investigative reporter Dan Walker (Joe Penny of Bloody Birthday) takes a job at the Falcon to look into matters. As he and Liz begin to fall in love, they both suspect one another of being the killer as more whispery calls are placed and bodies begin to pile up (though it's a small pile, because this was an ABC TV movie, after all).

Various characters who are either suspects or victims float around the pair, including Liz's advice columnist mother Winifred Rogers (June Lockhart of Deadly Games), her therapist Dr. John Oxford (Jeremy Slate of The Dead Pit), her rival Oz Stevens (Joe Lerer), and Dan's friend/informant Vince Messina (James Sutorius of Cruising).

Analysis: Now, any slasher fan knows to go into a TV movie with some amount of trepidation. Exploitation movies and Standards and Practices departments aren't exactly bosom pals. However, I have found that TV movies frequently overlap with "women's picture" slashers, many of which I hold dear. In fact, the platonic ideal of the slasher TV movie, 1982's Fantasies, was put out by ABC. So I wasn't as nervous as I could have been when I was stepping into Whisper Kill.

Optimism only gets you so far, alas. Thanks to the necessity of keeping Liz a suspect for as long as possible (until the penultimate scene, in fact), this movie keeps its female lead at arm's length, much to its detriment. We're forced to split our time between Liz and Dan, the latter of whom isn't hunky or charismatic enough to hold up his end of the soapy romance. With all due respect to the titular Jake of Jake and the Fatman.

Really, nothing about the small town melodrama plot works. The dialogue is snappy without ever actually being clever, and the only supporting characters who really pop do so because of their absolutely demented 1980s hair.

Unusually, the slasher elements of Whisper Kill almost work. It's got a more sizable body count than other TV movie slashers (here's looking at you, Hotline), for one thing. There is also a bit more emphasis on depicting the process of victims being stabbed to death, even though those scenes are almost entirely bloodless. And the muffled punching noises that the foley artists have chosen to accompany the knife's movements make it sound like the citizens of Faircrest are anthropomorphic body pillows.

It's also hornier than the average TV movie. While it is outrageously bad at depicting actual eroticism thanks to the anti-chemistry between the two leads, Whisper Kill certainly wants to put their sex lives front and center. Hell, we even get a steamy "Unchained Melody" scene two full years before the premiere of Ghost.

I guess I'll leave it at this. Sure, Whisper Kill has more and better slasher touches than I was expecting, across the board. In addition to what I've already broken down, we get a black-gloved killer and a pretty decent score from the underrated Charles Bernstein (A Nightmare on Elm Street, April Fool's Day). However, these were never going to be enough to sustain a 1980s TV movie. The non-horror elements need to pull their weight and they don't, making its 94 minutes feel like an eternity.

Killer: Winifred "Winnie" Rogers (June Lockhart)

Final Girl: Liz Barlett (Loni Anderson)

Best Kill: They're all mostly comparable, but Vince's stabbing is the best because it takes place in his car, allowing the killer to do the classic horror movie thing by popping up from the backseat.

Sign of the Times: The opening scene involves a call being placed from a phone booth to a bar's pay phone.

Scariest Moment: Backseat killer, baby!

Weirdest Moment: Liz and a hungover Dan attend a birthday party for the mayor's granddaughter, where Dan puts sunglasses in the dog.

Champion Dialogue: “All your ancestors are slime!"

Body Count: 4

1. Jerry Caper is stabbed to death.
2. Oz Stevens is stabbed to death.
3. Vince Messina is stabbed in the back.
4. Winnie Rogers is shot.

TL;DR: Whisper Kill is a tedious and bland TV movie slasher.

Rating: 4/10

Census Bloodbath: You Don't Know Jack

Year:
1985
Director:
E.W. Swackhamer
Cast:
David Hasselhoff, Stepfanie Kramer, Adrienne Barbeau
Run Time:
1 hour 37 minutes

Plot: Terror at London Bridge (also known as Bridge Across Time) is somehow neither the first Jack the Ripper slasher movie of 1985 (that would be The Ripper) nor the first movie set at London Bridge in Lake Havasu City, Arizona (that would be Olivia - by the way, that bridge really does use the exterior masonry from the actual London Bridge).

Anyway, back in 1888 London, Jack the Ripper is being chased by the bobbies after his latest bloody murder. He is shot and falls into the river, knocking one of the bridge's stones down with him. In 1985, the final stone has been recovered and Lake Havasu City is holding a ceremony commemorating the official completion of the bridge, more than 20 years after they originally acquired it and built up a chintzy Little England tourist trap around it.

When traveler Alice Williamson (Barbara Bingham of Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan) accidentally smears her blood on that stone, the spirit of Jack the Ripper is resurrected and he kills her. 

Her husband Dave's (Michael Boyle of Luther the Geek) frantic attempts to find her go unheeded by police chief Peter Dawson (Clu Gulager of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge, The Return of the Living Dead, The Initiation, and Hunter's Blood) and local city council member Anson Whitfield (Lane Smith of Dark Night of the Scarecrow, Prison, and Night Game), but they do catch the attention of Detective Don Gregory (Baywatch's David Hasselhoff, who at the time would have been Knight Rider's David Hasselhoff), a Chicago transplant with a tortured past.

He tries to solve the case while also flirting with local fishing boat operator Angie (Stepfanie Kramer), whose librarian friend Lynn Chandler (Adrienne Barbeau of The Fog, Escape from New York, Swamp Thing, and Creepshow) finds herself flirting with two different oddly stiff British weirdos (David Fox-Brenton and Paul Rossilli) who are new to town, and either of whom might be the Ripper. Can Det. Gregory uncover the fantastical mysteries behind this case as the bodies continue to pile up?

Analysis: As you may have been able to surmise from my unusually long plot synopsis, there are a lot of moving parts in Terror at London Bridge. This isn't terribly shocking, considering it's a full-on sci-fi-fantasy slasher. But this is also the case because it's an NBC TV movie, so they had to lard up the plot with characters and incidents in order to fill time that might otherwise have been taken up by sequences of nudity or gore in a regular degular theatrical slasher movie.

That said, it's really not a half-bad mystery thriller, especially in its first two acts. There are quite a few reasons for this. One is its weirdly pedigreed cast and crew, which also includes the composer, who is six-time Oscar nominee Lalo Schifrin (of the Mission: Impossible theme, The Amityville Horror, The Seduction, and the original rejected score for The Exorcist).

Another reason is the fact that spending time with this cast of characters is actually mostly worth your while. David Hasselhoff's limited range does not lend itself to playing such a troubled character, but everyone around him believably inhabits their roles, resulting in the movie inexplicably becoming a solid slice-of-life drama that paints a compelling picture of how the townies at a tourist trap relate to one another.

Plus, the stalk-and-kill scenes that take place before the reveal of which character truly is Jack the Ripper (which is predictable and comes probably 20 minutes too early, but happens in a scene so eerie that it almost doesn't matter) have enough shadow-drenched melodrama and squeeze enough realistic "girl walks home alone at night" atmosphere from their scenarios that they are quite satisfying.

Unfortunately, the third act sputters and stalls when it turns into a classic "Hoff wears unbuttoned shirts and punches bad guys" extravaganza that lacks the zesty campiness of some of his other television roles. His scenes are also frustrating because they mostly involve telling us he solved a clue about the mystery without showing us. 

However, even with a lead who drags down the proceedings, Terror at London Bridge is quite charming, and manages to surpass both The Ripper and Olivia as the definitive installment in their weirdly specific subgenres. That maybe wasn't the highest bar to clear, but for a TV movie slasher this late into the 1980s, it's about as impressive as climbing Mount Everest.

Killer: The Ripper (Paul Rossilli)

Final Girl: Angie (Stepfanie Kramer) feat. Det. Don Gregory (David Hasselhoff)

Best Kill: There really isn't one, but the slit throat makeup is most lovingly displayed in Alice's death.

Sign of the Times: There's an E.T. poster proudly displayed on the wall of the library where Adrienne Barbeau's character works.

Scariest Moment: David Fox-Brenton's character Mr. Latting meets Lynn at the local House of Horrors, and invites her to go for a walk to discuss the nature of good and evil. Because red flags hadn't been invented yet in 1985, she says yes. However, as she walks, the things he says grow creepier and creepier and she desperately tries to find a way to get out of the conversation, only to be rescued and then menaced afresh by a different weird British man. 

Weirdest Moment: After an ad break, there is a brief interlude where David Hasselhoff is boxing while shirtless.

Champion Dialogue: “That's a theory, Gregory. That's all it is, it's a theory, and it's your theory, and I don't wanna see your theories in the newspaper!"

Body Count: 6

1. 1888 Woman is stabbed.
2. Alice Williamson has her throat slit.
3. Elaine is stabbed.
4. Kid is shot by Don Gregory in flashback.
5. Lynn has her throat slit offscreen.
6. The Ripper is shot.

TL;DR: Terror at London Bridge is surprisingly good for a mid-1980s TV movie slasher, but that doesn't necessarily get it as far as being a proper hidden gem.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1008

Census Bloodbath: Da Be Dee, Da Ba Die

Year: 1985

Director: Charlie Wiener

Cast: Jamie Spears, Terry Logan, Peter Brikmanis

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

Plot: Blue Murder sees a mysterious killer targeting the folks behind the production and distribution of dirty movies. The killer has been menacing investigative journalist/weekly columnist Dan Blake (Jamie Spears, who as far as I can tell is not Britney Spears' father, which is great news for him) in an attempt to get him to write a column condemning pornography, which will somehow get the theaters shut down. Blake teams up with Lieutenant Rossey (Terry Logan) to get to the bottom of this.

Analysis: Blue Murder is a TV movie from Canada. If you're thinking "gee, that's a weird thing for a slasher about the porno industry to be," well, you have more sense than the producers of Blue Murder. Rather than being the prurient slasher promised by the poster, it is instead the thing that all audiences in the mid-'80s apparently craved even more than sweet, delicious cocaine: bland police procedural.

Even though it does its slasher due diligence and features a black-gloved killer with an M.O. that involves placing a creepy crown mask on his victims, the film is deeply committed to exploring the underbelly of the city as Blake and Rossey wander around milling around with various anonymous Canadians, most of whom never appear again or figure into the story in a way that actually matters. The kills are also much more "crime movie" than slasher, focusing heavily on the use of guns, the burning of warehouses, and the like.

It's not even good at doing the procedural thing, presenting scenes of investigation in an incoherent jumble that don't seem to connect to anything that comes before or after. Somehow, in spite of this, it's practically impossible not to guess the identity of the killer within ten minutes. 

The true strength of the movie is the fact that it is absolutely bananapants. Because of its kaleidoscope of random white people, the constantly shifting landscape of characters sometimes vomits forth a truly ineffable presence, like the gay stool pigeon relaxing on a yacht with a harem of prettyboys, or the high-roller who informs us that he has been bankrolling Rossey this whole time, even though this reveal amounts to absolutely nothing.

Even though the investigation is incoherent and poorly presented, the fact that the film can only occasionally mimic real human behavior leads to some truly delightful scenes, including - I kid you not - a scene where Blake and Rossey discuss the details of the case while Blake is perched on a toilet at the head of a tub that Rossey is currently taking a bath in. It truly needs to be seen to be believed. While nothing else reaches that kind of ludicrous pleasure, there is something pleasantly delirious about how the film's narrative slips ineffably past you (for instance, the body count reported by the cops is always at least seven kills higher than what is shown onscreen, in a bit of unintentional surrealism), and it's hard not to be drawn to a scene where a farm girl you met one scene ago comes home to her father yells at him about how her mother left them years ago, only to learn that her mother never left and has just been hiding in the next room over, at which point she tells her daughter to fuck off.

It's hard not to feel like I dreamt Blue Murder, and while it is an ineffably bad movie, that is nevertheless a quality I prize very much.

Killer: Father Richards (Peter Brikmanis)

Final Girl: Dan Blake (Jamie Spears)

Best Kill: This is really like picking the best ant at your picnic, but I guess... the projectionist being hanged in the opening montage, while offscreen, provides the creepiest image and implication.

Sign of the Times: One of the cars in the movie has those headlights that flip up when you turn it on.

Scariest Moment: The killer sneaks into Dan's home in the middle of the night to warn him.

Weirdest Moment: As if I could ever get enough mileage out of the bathtub scene.

Champion Dialogue: "If you don't, I'm gonna cram your skull down the toilet."

Body Count: 15; not counting the various inflated body count numbers given by the police throughout the movie (and a couple of the names I'm a little shaky on).

1. Frank Cole is shot offscreen.
2. Stryker is shot.
3. Porn Actor is shot.
4. Porn Actress is shot.
5. Porn Actor #2 is shot.
6. Projectionist is hanged offscreen.
7. Linda is shot in the head.
8. Vince is shot.
9. Some White Man dies in a fire.
10. Markham dies offscreen.
11. Peter is shot.
12. Max is garroted.
13. Debbie is axed offscreen.
14. Debbie's Friend is axed offscreen.
15. Father Richards is shot in the back.

TL;DR: Blue Murder is an incoherent, bad slasher that at least has the decency to be absolutely banana pants.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 824

Census Bloodbath: Each And Every Day Of The Year

Year: 1984

Director: William A. Graham

Cast: Tom Skerritt, Sharon Stone, Robert Culp

Run Time: 1 hour 35 minutes 

Plot: Calendar Girl Murders follows a faux-Playboy magazine called Paradise that is run by Richard Trainor (Robert Culp). When their calendar girls for January and February are murdered, homicide cop Lt. Dan Stoner (Tom Skerritt) must try to find out who is targeting the girls while also discovering the mysterious secret behind former Angel of the Year Cassie Bascomb's (Sharon Stone, who was still in the slasher trenches after Deadly Blessing) departure from the company. She also keeps crossing his path and trying rather desperately to fuck him despite the fact that he's married, which is really the plot of the movie if we're being honest.

Analysis: The TV movie format should be an absolute killer for the slasher genre, which thrives on blood, guts, and nudity, all things that were not allowed to be broadcast on network TV in the 1980s. However, I have found that those restrictions tend to empower the slasher movie to aim for better plots and more layered characters (especially for women), so TV films including Fantasies, Dark Night of the Scarecrow, Deadly Lessons, and last week's Till Death Do Us Part have been delightful breaths of fresh air. If anything, Calendar Girl Murders being boring is the exception that proves the rule.

Even so, it's only boring because it favors a format other than the "Lifetime movie" vibe that a project like this demands. Instead it's a bland police procedural without much new to bring to the table. At least that element requires many characters who only show up in 1 or 2 scenes, allowing the cast to be even more stacked than the typical entry, including appearances from Robert Morse, Alan Thicke, Robert Beltran, and Barbara Parkins. 

The procedural is quite bad, not really committing to any proper red herrings and losing the organizing principle of women being killed in calendar order by the halfway point. It is then intermittently intercut with scenes that prove that Sharon Stone needed some practice before she could claim her seductive hold over cinema in the 1990s. I don't blame Stone for being unappealing here, she's struggling with an impassive love interest in a schlubbed-up Skerritt, a trite script, and the overall confusedly horny atmosphere that makes it feel like the film was produced by 12-year-old who haven't actually had sex.

Obviously, a TV movie about nude models isn't going to show actual naked people. But it also didn't have to show us the photo shoots, where the women are donning outfits they could get away with wearing into church. It undercuts the sense of lusty fantasy the film is trying to indulge in, and that lack of heat is felt in no place more than the slow motion firefighter photo shoot that is the lead-out to a scene where Dan learns that his wife's life is in danger, instantly deflating whatever modicum of tension the scene had established.

Its kills are similarly lackluster, as must be expected from this vein of the slasher. Still, I might not be expecting blood, but I was definitely expecting there to be an actual kill in the second half of the movie rather than a woman failing to be drowned and a man who has his life support machine shut off, which I think can claim the record for history's least interesting slasher movie murder.

The film isn't aggressively bad by any stretch of the imagination, it's just content to be a bland bit of programming you can ignore while falling asleep face down in your TV dinner. It briefly livens up with a car chase that is by far the single best sequence of the film, but then it has the gall to leave us on one of the worst final scenes I have ever witnessed, half of which takes place with the characters blocked behind a closed door before it cuts to credits.

Killer: Cassie Bascomb (Sharon Stone)

Final Girl: Nancy Stoner (Barbara Bosson), but really only because she's the last woman we see

Best Kill: There's not much to choose from, but Miss February is stabbed while getting a snack and falls into the fridge which is kinda neat.

Sign of the Times: The dreadful synth cover of Neil Sedaka's "Calendar Girl" this movie opens with.

Scariest Moment: Cassie is accosted by a strange man in a parking garage.

Weirdest Moment: A random dude who hasn't shown up before and won't be seen afterward does a midair splits at an otherwise relatively sedate party.

Champion Dialogue: "What am I supposed to wear to an orgy?"

Body Count: 3

Pamela (Miss January) is pushed off a tenth story balcony.

Kara (Miss February) is stabbed in the gut.

Albert has his life support switched off.

TL;DR: Calendar Girl Murders is a passable TV movie effort but has a lot of wasted potential.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 826

Census Bloodbath: Welcome To The Snake Pit

Year: 1982

Director: Timothy Bond

Cast: Matt Craven, Jack Creley, Helen Hughes

Run Time: 1 hour 17 minutes

Plot: Till Death Do Us Part follows three married couples who have arrived at the isolated mansion of Dr. Sigmund Freed (Claude Jutra) for a weekend of radical couples counseling on the weekend between Good Friday and Easter. The house is run by Dr. Honora Freed (Toby Tarnow) and her mute younger brother Stephen (Dermot Stoker, who was a key grip on Friday the 13th: A New Beginning), who operates a bizarre control room. The couples in question are Dr. Susan (Candace O'Connor) and Robert Craig (James Leach), who are processing the loss of their son; Tony (Matt Craven of Happy Birthday to Me) and Ruth Archer (Rachel Wilkinson), who are trying to get a handle on his addiction to coke; and Wally (Jack Creley of Videodrome) and Edna Kroog (Helen Hughes of Visiting Hours, The Incubus, and The Amityville Curse), who are dealing with the fact that he's a lascivious creep and she's a nagging shrew. As bodies begin to pile up, all with crosses slashed into their foreheads, the couples begin to believe that something may be amiss at Dr. Freed's establishment.

Analysis: So. Till Death Do Us Part was the final film I needed to watch in order to fully catch up with films I missed from 1980, 1981, and 1982, following my fifth and (hopefully) final round of research for this project. It was by far the hardest to obtain, to the point that I had to acquire a VHS copy and a VCR to make this happen. Usually if a film is that difficult to track down, it's not worth tracking down. Trust me, I've been burned before. However, there was an element I hadn't accounted for: this is an obscure slasher VHS from Canada. The theorem posited by Tim Brayton, which I have had the opportunity to kick the tires on dozens of times, is that there is an inimitable magic to Canadian slasher filmmaking of the 1980s, and whatever X factor they provide usually helps those films rise above their American counterparts.

Well, that dictum has held true yet again. Even with the limitations of being a made-for-TV slasher movie, Till Death Do Us Part (whose director has had a typical career trajectory for a Canadian TV workman, going on to direct episodes of Friday the 13th: The Series in the 80's, Animorphs in the late 90's, and most recently helming a myriad of Hallmark Christmas movies) is pure bliss. I shouldn't be surprised. The TV slasher sub-subgenre should result in a lot of hollow, useless tripe, but has provided a weirdly robust slate of worthwhile projects, including Dark Night of the Scarecrow and Fantasies.

However, still color me surprised that Till Death Do Us Part is top to bottom compelling. Usually these TV slasher have to find a way to be interesting that aren't the kill sequences, and this film accomplishes that, but the kills are as singularly brutal as their bloodless execution could possibly allow, especially the opening kill that results in a woman being crucified in the upper branches of a tree. It helps that even the de rigueur kills like drowning are accompanied by that excellent organizing principle of crosses being carved onto the victims' foreheads, which both lends an air of creepiness to the proceedings and reminds viewers that this film has a screenplay with an actual consistent aim.

I've seen some people online classifying this film as a horror-comedy, which I think is a bit of a stretch (most of the "jokes" would be contained in the scenes of playful banter that precede the killings, which is an element found in most slashers, though I will give those people the excellent recurring gag where Freed reveals the titles of his published works). It's less "funny" than it is gonzo and weird, which is exactly the right move for a slasher that needs to keep its audience off kilter without pumping gallons of blood across the frame. 

There's an energy to this film that's like holding onto a live wire. From the absurd plot twists (that include undercover reporters, incest, and the truly delectable tossed-off reveal that Stephen isn't mute but "just shy") to the orgiastic pleasure with which the couples indulge in a game of Killer to the constant parade of shirtless men to Dr. Freed's incessant manic piano playing, there's constantly something going on onscreen that is well worth staring at in goggle-eyed wonder. There are also a few random moments of heartstring pulling in the subplot involving the Craigs that are more emotionally impactful than they have any right to be. 

The best way I could classify this movie is that it's like if the bloodless but playful plot structure of April Fool's Day was grafted onto the energetic dismissal of the limitations of low production value of Island of Blood. I would 100% classify this film as a hidden gem, with a single caveat. Before anyone is galvanized enough to start the journey into finding some way to watch this film, it's important to remember that these films are still graded on a sliding scale. If a weirdo mid-tier slasher isn't something that thrills you, Till Death Do Us Part still isn't going to be your thing. But if that's your bag, this film is an absolute thrill.

Killer: Dr. Honora Freed (Toby Tarnow)

Final Girl: Literally every woman except the maid and Dr. Honora.

Best Kill: I mean, who could resist the sweet delicious irony of Dr. Freed being konked on the head with the bust of himself that he keeps on his desk?

Sign of the Times: Two characters make a Deliverance reference out of nowhere.

Scariest Moment: Wally's attempts to flirt with Ruth at a garden party border on sexual assault.

Weirdest Moment: Dr. Susan decides she wants to make another baby the second she gets over the death of her son.

Champion Dialogue: "Geez, step on, you big goofball."

Body Count: 6

Martine is crucified in the upper branches of a tree.

Wally is hit on the head with a meat tenderizing mallet and falls down a well.

Carl is stabbed in the gut with a tire iron.

Tony is drowned in a jacuzzi.

Dr. Sigmund Freed is hit on the head with a bust of himself.

Dr. Honora Freed shoots herself.

TL;DR: Till Death Do Us Part is perhaps only excellent on the sliding scale of slasher enthusiasts, but it is excellent nonetheless.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1096

Census Bloodbath: A Pleasure To Have In Class

Year: 1983
Director: William Wiard
Cast: Donna Reed, Larry Wilcox, David Ackroyd
Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

You know a couple things ahead of time when you head into a TV movie slasher. You know there's going to be a bunch of random TV actors assembled for the honor of dying in order from least to most famous (the absolute most famous either don't die at all because they're just a cameo for one day of filming, or they're the killer. Or both.) And you know the kills aren't going to be what you're used to, given network censorship against violence, especially at that time. Although, given the way the MPAA was cracking down on the genre in theaters by this point in the 80's, there's hardly any difference.

So I always try to keep an open mind when approaching one of these things, and Deadly Lessons, which originally premiered on ABC, had a couple aces up its sleeve that I was keen to check out. First, it comes from director William Wiard of Fantasies, which was the best TV movie slasher of 1982 (yes, there were several. You couldn't escape the slasher film on any medium in the 80's, including NES games and 900 numbers). And it was written by a woman, in this case prolific TV movie and miniseries writer Jennifer Miller. Any time a slasher even glances in the direction of having anyone behind the scenes be female, it's worth paying extra attention.

Even when that movie is unwatchable like A Night to Dismember, which also came out in 1983.

So our story begins with young Stefanie Aggiston (Diane Franklin of Amityville II: The Possession) getting a scholarship to go to the prestigious rich girls' boarding school Starkwater Hall. It takes a while for her to fit in with the upper crust brats over summer session, but right when she starts feeling comfortable, someone starts murdering the girls one by one. Enter Detective Russ Kemper (Larry Wilcox of CHiPS!), hellbent on discovering the identity of the murderer. But can Stefanie, fueled by her Nancy Drew moxie and obsession with the Clue-esque board game Evidence! beat him to the punch?

Deadly Lessons has a shockingly huge cast of characters, almost all of whom are played by someone of note ("of note" includes the rather generous definition of people who were in another Census Bloodbath movie, but still, these names!). Let's start with the victim pool, AKA the girls of Starkwater Hall: literal Saudi princess Shama (Vicki Kriegler); the worldly - see: "horny" - Rita Armstrong (Ally friggin' Sheedy); her best friend and Token Black Character Cally (Renee Jones of Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives); and shy overeater Libby (Nancy Cartwright, Bart Simpson herself).

Then we have the suspect pool, AKA the staff of Starkwater Hall: ice queen headmistress Miss Wade (Donna friggin' Reed); equestrian teacher and Wade's secret lover John Ferrars (David Ackroyd); requisite creepy groundskeeper Robert Hartigan (Donald Hotton of Freeway Maniac); handsome stable boy Eddie (Bill Paxton of Bill Paxton, but also Night Warning and Mortuary); stuffy bow-tied English professor Morgan Rank (Robin Gammell of Murder by Phone); French teacher Mrs. Grant (Ellen Geer of Bloody Birthday); and prim assistant headmistress Miss Hunt (Ruth Silveira, also of Bloody Birthday).

And the review hasn't even started yet! You ready?

I've already mentioned that we knew going in the kills weren't going to be remarkable, but they're actually even more demure than in Fantasies. There was never going to be any blood dripping around the place, but here we exclusively get either cutaway gags or people discovering the body after the fact. Luckily the filmmakers made the smart move of having the victims be strangled or drowned, so they can at least show the bodies without too much fretting. We're at least aware we're making a slasher movie here.

But what Deadly Lessons can't deliver in gruesome murders, it does in heaps of playful whodunit mayhem. The parlor room sequences abound here, as the plot thickens and two factions of sleuths race to the finish. There's a little too much cop nonsense in the movie, which you know I don't like (they needed as many scenes for Larry Wilcox as possible), but any moment where Stephanie and her Babysitters Club gaggle of Sherlocks are trying to get to the bottom of things is a delight. Unfortunately the Encyclopedia Brown sleuthing (there's a lot of material mined from whether or not people's boots are covered in mud) doesn't get us all the way to the finale, which kind of chucks murder mystery mechanics in exchange for a Big Grand Villanous Motive Explanation Speech. But it was fun while it lasted.

And even though there isn't a murder setpiece around every corner, Deadly Lessons does its best to deliver overheated melodrama action as often as possible, including hay bales falling to crush Stephanie out of nowhere, and a bucking bronco triggered by an electric shocking gadget beneath the saddle. These are the moments where the thrills come, and while they're certainly not actually thrilling, they're deliciously cheesy in the way of all the best old school TV movies.

You must remember, this is back before all TV was movies.

And probably the biggest accomplishment of Deadly Lessons is making such a huge cast of characters seem unique and compelling in their own right. Sure, there are a couple of the tertiary characters I could never quite get straight, but on a whole the morass of identically clad schoolgirls is actually quite easy to parse through, thanks to a set of distinct performances that capture each girl's personality and her dynamic with the rest of the group.

The cherry on top is Donna Reed parading around as the frigid grand dame to rule them all, playing off of several saucy love triangles. Sure, it could have been better if it was a theatrical movie with the guts to include more guts. But within the narrow realm of what it is, Deadly Lessons is nothing short of a delight. I certainly wish William Wiard had continued to work in the slasher industry, because I could use a couple more sparkling gems like this to unearth coming down the line.

Killer: Det. Russ Kemper (Larry Wilcox)
Final Girl: Stefanie Aggiston (Diane Franklin)
Best Kill: There aren't any kills onscreen, but I'll say the death of mean girl Tember is the best because it's surprisingly early and means we don't have to deal with her for the rest of the movie.
Sign of the Times: You know this is pre-1985 because Ally Sheedy doesn't have the lead role.
Scariest Moment: The Obvious Red Herring Groundskeeper goes absolutely bananapants and kidnaps Ally Sheedy to tie her up and tell her all about how much he loved her mom.
Weirdest Moment: See above.
Champion Dialogue: "Who could be so barfy?"
Body Count: 3; though there is a fourth pre-Final Girl attack sequence where the victim just happens to survive.

1. Tember is drowned offscreen.
2. Althea is strangled with wire offscreen.
3. Shama is strangled with her scarf offscreen.

TL;DR: Deadly Lessons is limited as a slasher by the nature of being a TV movie, but it leans into all the other things that make TV movies great.
Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 1214

Census Bloodbath: The (Last) Days Of Our Lives

Year: 1982

Director: William Wiard

Cast: Suzanne Pleshette, Barry Newman, Robert Vaughn

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

There are certain mini-trends I've noticed in my Census Bloodbath project, and as we dive deeper into our reflection on the slasher movies of 1982, we've encountered two of them. Last time, the sub-subgenre we unearthed was a personal favorite: a one-off entry from a foreign country trying to cash in on the boom. This time, it's an even more delicious discovery: one more fruit from the tree of the made-for-TV slasher. This entry in particular is Fantasies, AKA The Studio Murders, made for ABC in the early 80's to cash in on the craze that seemed like it would never die.

Unlike the characters that populated it.

Fantasies tells the story of Carla Webber (Suzanne Pleshette of The Birds and The Bob Newhart Show), the creator of a massively popular nighttime soap opera called Middleton, U.S.A. She receives a professional challenge in the form of a deranged madman murdering the actors on her show one by one, but she faces it with headstrong courage. She also must navigate a new potential love affair with Detective Flynn (Barry Newman), who's investigating the mruders, her teenage daughter Sandy (Lenora May) becoming independent and starting to date, and her ex-husband John (Patrick O'Neal) suddenly showing up to cause drama.

Also all that chalk dust is hell on the lungs. Somebody needs to invent laptops, stat!

Whenever I'm digging these trenches through the backwaters of the 80's and unearth a movie made for television, I get a teensy bit nervous. The TV restrictions on gore and sexual content, especially in  the 80's, would seem to strip slashers of every possible reason they have to exist. But maybe that existential challenge is exactly what filmmakers need to craft something unique, because between this one and the previous year's Dark Night of the Scarecrow, they've turned out to be pretty excellent so far.

Or rather, they excel at certain strengths that most slashers lack. As a horror-slasher film, Fantasies is a pretty abysmal failure. Not only are the killings bloodless, offscreen, or in silhouette, they barely scrape up enough screentime and consequence to be considered a B-plot. Because of the amount of time we spend with Carla, we don't get a lot of one-on-one moments with the victims themselves so it's hard to care what happens to them. And even though Carla is our anchor, we often don't even get her reaction to the killings, but rather cut to a point down the road where she's already learned of the death and processed it. There's no sense of mounting dread or progression to the murders: at one point we learn there's been a lull in the killings after the show was put on hiatus, but we literally haven't learned yet that either of these things have happened.

It's a good thing then that Fantasies has no aspirations to be a true blue slasher. Instead it works very hard at being a Lifetime-y "women's picture" thriller, a course of action which plays to its strengths extremely well. Its depiction of a woman in charge of a TV writer's room is decades ahead of its time, and it's fascinating to observe Carla's decisions behind every narrative beat and how it will affect the audience's perceptions of sexuality, gender, and morality. It's a story that really drills down into the ways that television informs the culture, for better or for worse, in a way that's specifically and thrillingly female-forward.

Fantasies has an iron grip on what makes Carla tick, and her every emotional beat is electric (the scene where her ex-husband laments that she wasn't destroyed but rather reborn when he left her is powerful), and it's all thanks to Suzanne Pleshette. She has bucketfuls of charisma, whether she's leading a saucy Q&A on a college campus, bonding with her impossibly lovely daughter, or lamenting the potential loss of the show that she is so proud of. Pleshette portrays a certain down-to-earth optimism with conviction, and it's impossible not to be drawn into her storyline. The horror she plays a little less well (as does the movie), but she's a magnetic lead character that redeems all of this film's quite severe flaws.

Here's more of her at a chalkboard, because apparently this movie didn't make enough of an impression on the zeitgeist for Google to give me a lot of options.

Carla stands head to head with most of my favorite adult final girls, including Lauren Bacall from The Fan and Lauren Tewes from Eyes of a Stranger. Interestingly, all three of them play public figures. Maybe that just does something for me. Anyway, she and her drama are fascinating enough to watch that you almost forget you're watching a slasher film. And it's a good thing too, because as bad as the horror elements are in progress, the way the end is almost worse.

After the disposal of a red herring using a clue that's deeply hilarious ("He couldn't have strangled her because there's literally no tendons in his left hand so he can't close it!"), we get a showdown in the surf on a moonlit beach that would be cool if there were any lights on it. It's a dark, fumbling, foamy pit of nonsense and it's not the best choice with which to end a movie that up until now hasn't really given a shit about its own tension. Plus, as much as this film is about female empowerment, the filmmakers were very skittish about having their lead character commit violence, so she's not real active about defending herself. I won't even mention the final gag that is not only cliché but actively undermines the entire 85 minutes that came before it. 

As it shakes out, Fantasies is at least still a fun time. But only if you approach it as something more Steel Magnolias than Friday the 13th.

Killer: [Arthur (Ben Marley)]

Final Girl: Carla Webber (Suzanne Pleshette)

Best Kill: There's not a lot of excitement going around in this section, but before Quentin Mallory is killed, he is thrown through a glass table which is kinda fun.

Sign of the Times: There is so much business about having to hand out different telephone numbers for every distinct place the characters are going to be at any given time.

Scariest Moment: I know the movie wants me to think it's the POV shots where the killer stalks Carla while whistling "Pop Goes the Weasel," but it's actually the scene where a woman approaches an actress in the grocery store and begins to talk to her like she's her character from Middleton.

Weirdest Moment: The killer breaks into Carla's house to strangle her, which she reacts to afterward like she just saw a mouse and is vaguely grossed out.

Champion Dialogue: "Those cozy little meals evoke too many memories, all of them unpleasant."

Body Count: 4; not including the husband of one of the victims, who is presumably killed alongside her but we don't see or hear about it.

1. Quentin Mallory is beaten to death with a baseball bat.
2. Larry Malden is pushed through a window.
3. April is stabbed to death.
4. Roy Hanson is shot.

TL;DR: Fantasies is not a solid slasher movie, but a rather fun Lifetime-esque movie instead.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1225