Census Bloodbath: Oh, Let Me Be Your...

Year: 1983

Director: David A. Prior

Cast: Ted Prior, Linda McGill, John Eastman

Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

We've been spending a lot of time at the tail end of 1983 mucking about in the corners for some very off-kilter stuff, but it was still a shock how much of a relief it was to return to the familiar warm embrace of a shot-on-video movie about a group of teenagers drinking, doing impressions, having sex, and being picked off one by one. I'm sure I won't feel this way once I'm in the trenches of the late 80's, but in these early days of video (the very first SOV slasher - according to its publicists at least - is Boardinghouse, and that came out the very same year) it's still almost refreshing to come across something so straightforwardly craven.

I'm trying my best to drive myself mad. Is it working?

Sledgehammer has a story that will be intimately familiar to any slasher enthusiast. Once upon a time, there was an abused kid (Justin Greer) who was locked in a closet so his mom could get it on with a mustachioed schlub in a ratty hotel robe. He (or some random maniac, it's not actually clear) promptly murders them with a sledgehammer.

Ten Years Later, a group of teens have decided that the best thing to do with their hard-earned break from college is to go to this very same house and drink a lot. They have a seance, which seems to resurrect the killer, who is alternately a kid and a giant hulking woodsy madman. The intervening time certainly isn't enough for this child to have gained this kind of mass, especially if he's a long-dead ghost, but I'm going to assume he can change size through the power of his convictions like Jet Jaguar in Godzilla vs. Megalon.

The Meat can be laid out thusly: Chuck (former Chippendales dancer and Playgirl centerfold Ted Prior, who would also team up with his director brother for the vastly superior shitty slasher Killer Workout in 1987) is ripped as fuck but also an enormous asshole, a pair of character traits that there is absolutely no precedent for in human history; Joni (Linda McGill) is his girlfriend who, rightfully, is upset that he proposed to her, backed out of the wedding, and yet insists that she still stay with him and tag along on this terrible vacation where he dumps mustard on her head and then talks to his guy friends about getting a "throbber" from looking at some random girl. This is the 80's and she has short hair, so Joni is of course depicted as an unbearable shrew.

The co-conspirators of this sex crime of a vacation are John (John Eastman), a loutish daddy bear; his girlfriend Mary (Janine Scheer), whose hobbies include being brunette and getting absolutely railed by John; Joey (Steve Wright), the prankster who dies first but not before pretending to die a half dozen times; Carol (Sandy Brooke, who had herself quite the Census Bloodbath run: we'll catch up with her in Bits and Pieces and Terror on Alcatraz), who really wants to have sex with her boyfriend Jimmy (Tim Aguilar), who really doesn't want to have sex with her for reasons she doesn't understand.

This conflict is one of the major arcs of the film, and it is never resolved. Well, it is resolved, but "she asked enough times so he had sex with her eventually" isn't worth all the Big Soap Opera Secret buildup we were given! I'm gonna go ahead and assume he's gay, because it's a free country.

There is a clear supernatural angle here, which mostly just serves to make the film more illegible (both visually and narratively), but it's at least something that prevents it from ending up like Blood Lake, a film that is similarly obsessed with exhaustively detailing every millisecond of the boring party games some white kids get up to. Does it make any sense? Of course not! But when your otherwise boring killer sometimes becomes a child who slaps the shit out of a Chippendales dancer, that's when your movie is getting somewhere!

OK, that's not fair. The killer presents a startlingly large, lanky physicality and also has a pretty stellar mask: a clear plastic jobbie with a painted-on smile that creates an uncanny valley where it almost doesn't seem like a mask at all, even though it certainly can't be a human face.

Say cheese!

The murders this killer enacts, however, generally leave something to be desired. They're a notch above what one might expect from your standard SOV fare (the gashes the sledgehammer creates have a pleasant almost three-dimensional effect, though they're always described with much more visceral language than what we actually see), with one truly terrific sequence (more on that later). But Sledgehammer still relies on silhouette and implication more than anything to get the message across.

At least the use of silhouette shows that director David A. Prior knows a single goddamn thing about film language, because the evidence of the rest of the movie doesn't look good for him. This 85 minute movie is so crammed with needlessly prolonged establishing shots and slow motion filler that it boggles the mind. When the exterior of a barn stays onscreen, unmoving, for 35 seconds, I thought my player had broken. Reader, it hadn't.

When a slow motion, sound and score-free shot of Chuck and Joni walking through a field and giggling with one another went on for a full minute, I was sure it must be a joke. When it continued for another full minute, I was sure it wasn't. When it continued for another twenty-six seconds after that, I realized that I had committed a grave sin in my life and Hell was giving me a free sample.

A broken clock is right twice a day, however, and the ample slow motion really serves the film's one good kill, where the killer inserts a knife through the side of Joey's neck. The intensely drawn out process of this kill forces you to reckon with the unnatural angle of the knife and just how nasty it might feel to be on the receiving end of it. It really sends heebie jeebies crawling up and down your skin. So that's a compliment for Sledgehammer! Don't get used to it!

The movie at least gave me the junk food experience of a formulaic slasher that I've been craving at this point in the project. It's very extremely bad, but that just comes with the territory, dunnit?

Killer: The Killer (Doug Matley)

Final Girl: Joni (Linda McGill)

Best Kill: That knife through the neck gag is very delectable.

Sign of the Times: Jimmy looks like John Oates on mullet pills.

Scariest Moment: A cloud reflected in a window pane looks like a mushroom cloud, which led me to ponder the implications of nuclear proliferation.

Weirdest Moment: While everyone is sitting down to sandwiches, Chuck squirts mustard into Joni's hair. She retaliates by smashing a cream pie into his face. You know, one of those lunch cream pies everyone always has lying around.

Champion Dialogue: "A seance, you know, talking to ghosts and goblins, raising the dead, stuff like that."

Body Count: 7

1. Mom's Lover is sledgehammered in the back of the head.
2. Mom is sledgehammered.
3. Joey is stabbed through the side of the neck.
4. Carol has her neck snapped.
5. Jimmy is sledgehammered in the chest.
6. John is stabbed in the back.
7. Mary is stabbed to death.

TL;DR: Sledgehammer is at least delivering the bare minimum of what it needs to be a slasher, but it's still some pretty gnarly shot-on-video trash.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1288

Census Bloodbath: Dismembers Only

Year: 1987

Director: David A. Prior

Cast: Marcia Karr, David Campbell, Fritz Matthews

Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Whenever I need motivation to get back in the swing of things with Census Bloodbath, I always pull out one of the big guns: a title that I have yet to see that has stuck in my craw since I started doing research for this project many bloody moons ago. And frankly, I just couldn’t force myself to wait until this project reached the faraway year of 1987, because I had to see Killer Workout. AKA Aerobicide. AKA two of the laziest, most confusing puns ever written. How could one not be intrigued?

I can’t say I was disappointed with my decision. Killer Workout is terrible, of course, but it’s terrible in almost exactly the way it promises to be. “Almost” being the operative word here, but more on that after we roll out the plot. 

Insofar as you need a plot beyond the title “Killer Workout”

The Hollywood health spa Rhonda’s Workout is a big success. Dozens of legwarmered hardbodies flock there every day to participate in preposterous aerobics exercises so elaborate that the film required two choreographers. These folks are dying to get fit… and one of them is killing for it. A murderer brandishing an oversized safety pin begins to bump off the patrons one by one for reasons unknown. And yes, the killer’s main weapon is a safety pin, an implement so moronic that the slasher parody Student Bodies (which featured a murder via eggplant) couldn’t even have come up with it.

I love the 80’s.

Obviously, this sends co-owner Rhonda Johnson (Marcia Karr of Maniac Cop) into a tizzy, especially when aggressively useless Detective Lieutenant Morgan (David Campbell of Scarecrows and Deadly Prey) starts investigating her customers and staff. There’s hardly been a better time to Meet the Meat, so let’s go for it:

The fitness nuts on the suspect list (or maybe the chopping block) include Jaimy (Teresa Van der Woude of Night Visitor, and damn if this cast wasn’t dedicated to the slasher genre), an aerobics instructor who shows up late to work in red stilettos with a purse full of condoms and is my new idol; Chuck Dawson (Ted Prior – Playgirl centerfold and brother of director David A. Prior - of Sledgehammer, Deadly Prey, and the delightfully titled crime thriller Hardcase and Fist), the senior owner’s mulleted new hire who is suspiciously good at beating the crap out of people; Jimmy (Fritz Matthews, also of Deadly Prey, and wouldn’t you know it but that film was directed by one David A. Prior), a horny meathead who comes onto all the girls and gets in approximately three to thirteen karate fights with Chuck as they work out their testosterone –fueled differences; and…

Wait, the rest of these one-dimensional fools don’t matter. There’s KARATE FIGHTS in this movie?!

Yeah, you read that right. At a frequency almost quicker than there are murders, Chuck has knock-down drag-out fights with as many men as possible, but mostly Jimmy. And these aren’t simple little scuffles, either. With almost as much choreography as the Kenny Ortega-esque aerobics sequences, these scenes all last two to five minutes, shading between wrestling match grandstanding (a trash can and a rake come into play later on), superfluous Karate Kid flourishes (so many spin kicks!), and boxing plucked straight out of a cartoon (one guy’s head is used as a speed bag). It is ridiculously macho, completely out of left field, and always bafflingly hilarious. This is the fuel on the bad-good fire that most campy slasher movies would provide with cheesy, creative deaths.

And it’s fortunate Killer Workout has that going for it, because those murder sequences really aren’t doing it for me. Yes, that giant safety pin is a ludicrous weapon that I will be discussing at parties for years to come (at the parties that I get invited to, that is a tame topic of conversation), but the scenes all play out at the most tame Psycho rip-off level of bloodless tedium. The weapon is raised into the air, we see a bunch of stabbing motions offscreen or in silhouette, and the victim falls to the ground. And maybe there’s boobs.

There’s usually boobs.

Though I guess Killer Workout must be commended for exactly toeing the line between horror and softcore porn without quite stepping over it. There is certainly a truckload of nipples on hand here, but the audience’s unsavory desires are mostly fulfilled by the endless shots of gyrating, spandex-clad bodies than actual sex or active nudity. And those exploitative scenes have the added benefit of being a showcase of the most maniacally patterned, poorly color-blocked fitnesswear the decade had to offer. So gay or straight, 80’s lover or hater, there’s something there for you to sit and stare at with goggle-eyed awe.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, as far as retro absurdity is concerned. A 1987 slasher movie about one of the decade’s biggest fads is the exact place to find some perfectly aged, fermented-just-to-the-point-of-rotting synthcrap songs for the record books. The soundtrack is a Frankensteinian grotesque, created by distilling Olivia Newton John and Cyndi Lauper, pouring it onto a John Carpenter riff, and overboiling it until is surpasses maybe even the Crystal Light “Champions” track as the best eldritch synthesizer nightmare with which to fuel your hardbody herky jerky.

I’m still not sure I’d actually recommend Killer Workout, because they play a dangerous game with the sheer amount of filler stuffed into its altogether brief run time (aside from the endless workout footage that may actually feature some Crystal Light athletes come to think of it, we get a clearly reshot sequence of graffiti-ers getting slashed up with a knife that in no way ties in with the plot or even the killer’s M.O., and a drearily extended sequence where the terrible Lt. Morgan tells us his father’s life story) and other than three or four cardboard characters, everyone else might as well be played by a Lycra unitard full of potatoes for all the dimensionality they’re given. And let’s not even pretend there was any chance it was going to be scary. No, Killer Workout is a goreless, milquetoast video relic that was mothballed for a reason, though it does feature its fair share of irresistible campy nonsense and frothy 80’s signifiers. It has far more rewatch value than a Majorettes or a Cutting Class, but it’s still just at the top of the middle. Slasher hounds should definitely make a pit stop here, but the casual horror fan can cruise on by without regrets.

Killer: [Rhonda Johnson (Marcia Karr)]

Final Girl: Rhonda Johnson (Marcia Karr)

Best Kill: When the token black girl is killed in the token shower sequence, it’s the one and only time a neck wound actually looks realistic, with blood flowing out between her fingers in chilling bursts.

Sign of the Times: Feast your eyes and ears:

Scariest Moment: A girl in a car tries to avoid a long knife that’s rapidly piercing through the roof of her convertible.

Weirdest Moment: Rhonda walks in on Jaimy just kinda staring at a jock strap and testing its elasticity.

Champion Dialogue: “Just relax, it’s not like I’m some kind of crazy killer!”

Body Count: 13; not counting a slit throat in an unnecessarily padded dream sequence.

1. Rachael is safety pinned to death.
2. Diane is safety pinned to death.
3. Curtis is safety pinned in the neck.
4. Tagger Girl #1 has her throat slit.
5. Tagger Girl #2 is stabbed in the heeded.
6. Weight Lifter has his face smashed with a barbell.
7. Brad is safety pinned in the forehead.
8. Tommy is safety pinned to death.
9. Jaimy is hanged.
10. Kathy is killed offscreen.
11. Chuck is stabbed with a screwdriver.
12. Jimmy is shot to death.
13. Lt. Morgan is hit in the heed with a shovel.

TL;DR: Killer Workout is halfway an 80's bad-good gem, but the milquetoast kills don't drag it across the finish line.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1345