Census Bloodbath: Write What You Know

Year:
1984
Director:
Rufus B. Seder
Cast:
Rufus B. Seder, Eugene Seder, George Kuchar
Run Time:
1 hour 32 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Plot: Screamplay follows aspiring horror screenwriter Edgar Allan (Rufus B. Seder, who is the director, writer, producer, matte painter, sound editor, and special optical effects technician for Screamplay and exactly zero other movies, though he later became notable as an author of Scanimation children's books) moving to Hollywood, where he gets a job as the custodian at the Welcome Apartments, which is populated by a strange cast of characters including faded star Nina Ray (M. Lynda Robinson), bodybuilder and casual drag queen murderer Martin (underground director George Kuchar), wannabe actress Holly (Katy Bolger), and fire-and-brimstone rocker Lot (Bob White).

Whenever one of these people crosses him, he writes a scene in his screenplay, where they are murdered. However, when they do begin to die in the ways described on the page, this attracts the interest of homicide detective Sgt. Joe Blatz (George Cordeiro, who also co-composed the movie with Basil Bova). Meanwhile, down-on-his-luck agent Al Weiner (Eugene "Father of Rufus" Seder) sees this screenplay as his ticket to the big time and encourages Edgar to finish it, no matter the cost.

Analysis: Screamplay is kooky as fuck. Normally that would be right up my alley, but something about it was a little too off-putting, at least with this first-time watch. It's certainly unlike any other 1980s slasher out there, which I give it kudos for. It's in black and white, for one thing. It's also self-reflective and meta in a way that wouldn't really come to the fore in horror cinema until the 1990s, so it's ahead of the curve.

But it's just such a slog. There are multiple reasons for this, one of the most striking being the acting. The best performers in the cast are inconsistent and the worst are downright unwatchable. Plus, more than 50% of them are identical balding white men. In fact, I didn't even know that Martin was a different character from his neighbor Kleindorf (Ed Callahan, who did props for Sweet Sixteen and was a sound effects editor on Elm Street 4, Elm Street 5, and the Robert Englund Phantom of the Opera) until very close to the end of the movie. I just thought his name was Martin Kleindorf!

Another reason is that it is deeply unfunny. It mistakes referencing classic movie titles and stars as having anything remotely satirical to say about them. And everything else relies on gags that are so broad that you couldn't fit them into an airplane hangar. There's very little that is more exhausting than a whole lot of bad comedy, and Screamplay had me coming out of it feeling like I'd just done a triathlon.

Also, its meta pretensions could have resulted in something fun, but they are handled in such a loose, incoherent way that they never land. However, the movie grows increasingly proud of what it's doing, even though it's clearly failing, which greatly increased the already intense sense of distance between me and the story.

So ultimately you're stuck with a movie that merrily rockets up its own ass while flat comic beats endlessly unspool in front of you. I got the sense that, if it was better at doing what it was trying to do, it would be something I liked very much, so that's cool. It's at the very least not generic, which makes it more engaging to watch than something like Sledgehammer. 

And I did enjoy some of the kills, which is not nothing. They're not particularly bloody, but they're presented enthusiastically and some of them are reasonably creative. Really, at the end of the day, Screamplay is not a bad time, but I couldn't fathom why anybody would actually sit down to watch it unless they were doing something as categorically unwise as watching every slasher movie from the 1980s.

Killer: Holly (Katy Bolger)

Final Girl: Edgar Allen (Rufus B. Seder)

Best Kill: Even though it's drenched in homophobia, there is a bizarre and arresting scene where a drag queen who has just mugged Edgar is twirling on roller skates and Martin grabs her head, causing her to break her own neck and spin her head around 360 degrees.

Sign of the Times: Edgar is alarmed by how expensive his $1 cup of coffee is.

Scariest Moment: Lot grabs Edgar's hand and forces him to burn it over a candle in penance.

Weirdest Moment: Nina asks Edgar to fix her tub, he accidentally knocks the faucet off with a sledgehammer (knocking over a bottle of bubble solution in the process), and she assumes that he has drawn her a bubble bath, so she undresses and has sex with him in the overflowing soapy tub before he has a chance to fix his mistake.

Champion Dialogue: “You're still very young looking."

Body Count: 10; because this movie presents both the fictional and "real" deaths of certain characters onscreen, I've counted doubled-up murders as one death, though I also counted characters who only died on the page but survived the movie.

1. Waitress has a pie-slicer slammed into her face, in the screenplay.
2. Drag Queen has her head spun around while twirling on roller skates.
3. Rocky the Dog eats ground beef with glass mixed in, in the screenplay and in real life.
4. Nina Ray is drowned in the tub, in the screenplay and in real life.
5. Lot is lit on fire, in the screenplay and in real life.
6. Nicky Blair drives his motorcycle into a truck.
7. Kleindorf has his hand shoved in the garbage disposal and his throat slit, in the screenplay and in real life.
8. Edgar is strangled from behind, in the screenplay.
9. Holly is strangled in the screenplay and hit in the head with a sledgehammer in real life.
10. Martin is shot.

TL;DR: Screamplay might be charmingly weird to some, but my mileage was limited.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 991

Census Bloodbath: Who Do? You Do

Year:
 1984

Director:
 John Carter

Cast:
 David Broadnax, Rita Jenrette, Tom Cantrell

Run Time:
 1 hour 35 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Plot: Zombie Island Massacre follows a group of American tourists in the Caribbean who take a tour to the isolated island of Saint Marie. After witnessing a voodoo zombie ceremony, they find that their tour bus has been incapacitated. While they walk to a remote villa on the island to seek shelter, a mysterious killer who they believe to be the resurrected corpse they witnessed begins to stalk and murder them.

Analysis: Zombie Island Massacre was distributed by Troma, a company that pretty much only ever puts out a good movie if somebody's playing a prank on them. So, when their logo graced the opening credits of the film, I can't say that I anticipated much, and it turns out I was correct to have that reaction. However, the film was least a notch or two above my bottom of the barrel expectations.

For one thing, the project gets sleazy slasher cred thanks to the involvement of composer Harry Manfredini, whose shameless approach to ripping off his own music from Friday the 13th (which in and of itself was busy ripping off Psycho and Jaws) always lends an air of charm to a low budget slice 'n dice picture. For another, while the film has a severe lack of kill scenes that are in any way either bloody or effective (one decapitation depicts a machete knocking against the side of someone's neck, causing their head to go flying off), it sure has a whole hell of a lot of them. This is partially due to the fact that there are so many indistinguishable, terribly acted white people crammed into that tour bus, but part of it is due to the film's most curious twist on the slasher formula.

Abandon all hope to avoid spoilers, ye who enter here:

It turns out that the killer, who many of the tourists fully embrace as potentially being a zombie without a moment's hesitation, is actually a contingent of a Colombian drug cartel trying to suss out who in the tour group is an undercover DEA agent carrying their money. This is just the beginning of the wild swerves the final fifteen minutes of the plot begins to take, and it's an exhilarating roller coaster of nonsense that somewhat offsets the generally bland first hour of the film. While it lacks the verve and commitment of the finale, that first hour is at least also spiced up by the island setting, though that taste is undercut by a heavy helping of racial insensitivity, of course.

The wild plot also benefits from being played entirely straight, a concept that would soon be abandoned by Troma altogether in the coming years. At the end of the day, Zombie Island Massacre is still a bad movie, but at least it puts in the work to make itself a somewhat interesting movie, which is half the battle.

Killer: Like, a whole Colombian cartel

Final Girl: Sandy (Rita Jenrette)

Best Kill: The kill where Connie has a knife embedded in her face actually looks passable.

Sign of the Times: One of the guys has a kerchief tied around his neck every time he appears onscreen, like he's a character in a campfire story.

Scariest Moment: The corpse's fingernails start to grow in the middle of the voodoo ceremony.

Weirdest Moment: A grizzled hunter suddenly shows up and declares that his name is Eli Whitney.

Champion Dialogue: “It looks like a bird or a bear."

Body Count: 19; but don't be fooled into thinking that makes the movie interesting.

1. Eddie is bludgeoned in the back of the head with a stick.
2. Roy is killed offscreen.
3. Donna is killed offscreen.
4. Helen is drowned.
5. Jerry is drowned.
6. George is garroted with a noose.
7. Ethel is killed offscreen.
8. Barbie and
9. Matt are impaled in a pit of spikes.
10. Joe is decapitated with a machete.
11. Man #1 is beaten with a stick.
12. Man #2 is beaten with a stick.
13. Spear Thrower #1 is shot in the head.
14. Paul is speared in the gut.
15. Spear Thrower #2 is shot in the gut.
16. Eli Whitney is shot in the gut.
17. Knife Thrower #1 is shot.
18. Connie has a knife embedded in her face.
19. Knife Thrower #2 is conked on the head.

TL;DR: Zombie Island Massacre is a low-grade body count picture that is briefly jazzed up by a wild series of plot twists.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 750

Census Bloodbath: Midnight Madness

Year: 1983
Director: Norman Thaddeus Vane
Cast: Ferdy Mayne, Luca Bercovici, Nita Talbot
Run Time: 1 hour 26 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

You wanna know something that's scarier than any horror film? Seeing the Troma logo at the beginning of a movie. To be fair, that was less of a death knell in the 80's than it would be in the proceeding decades, but the fact remains that the bulk of their output ranges from rancid garbage at the bottom to passable crap at the top. My top 5 Troma movies would include Splatter University and Graduation Day, which should really tell you something. 

There's a place for Troma, for sure, it's just that that place is not on my Blu-Ray shelf.

So what has Troma dragged past our doorstep this week? Good news! It's passable crap! Frightmare AKA The Horror Star follows the final days of Vincent Price-esque aging B-movie star Conrad Radzoff (Ferdy Mayne). On his way out, he murders a couple directors who have gotten on his nerves, but the fun doesn't truly begin until after the funeral. His mausoleum is robbed by the young folks at the local community college's Horror Film Society, which somehow has the funding to live in a giant Gothic mansion off campus. They spend the night partying with the corpse Weekend at Bernie's style and being generally terrible, until Conrad's widow uses a medium to resurrect his corpse, at which moment he exacts gruesome revenge. The missing corpse is also being investigated by a Detective (Chuck Mitchell of Don't Answer the Phone, but he's better known for playing the title character in Porky's) who moves the plot in exactly zero ways.

Even by the standards of the slasher genre, the characters on the chopping block are bland and undistinguishable. The ones that stand out are Meg (Jennifer Starrett), because she is the Obvious Final Girl who isn't so sure they should be partying with a dead man; Saint (Luca Bercovici, who was the screenwriter for Ghoulies and Rockula), because he is named Saint and also is Meg's boyfriend; and Stu, because he is played by Jeffrey Combs, who would rise 80's horror royalty after his role in Re-Animator the following year (rumor has it he was cast because they needed a brunette to match the severed head they were using). 

Oh Jeffrey, you have no idea what's coming. I envy you.

Basically, this film was created on the same model that would Troma would later use to produce the mediocre Girls School Screamers: a big mansion, a group of co-eds (mostly female), and just enough supernatural mayhem to separate it from even more basic slashers. The only considerable difference between these two movies is that in its extended prologue, Frightmare actually spends time with a character who's over the age of 25, as Conrad struts and preens his way through a mini Theatre of Blood remake.

As an exercise in running characters through the slasher formula with little embellishment, it's totally watchable, though there are several dozen mediocre slashers I would rather throw on before pulling this one off the shelf. The kills are at least varied and in ample supply, even though only 3 of them really exert themselves as any sort of special effects spectacle. We do unfortunately get a lot of the undead Conrad holding his hands up to his temples and bugging his eyes out while something vaguely telekinetic happens to his victim, which is disappointing. We have a physical killer wandering around, so why not just have him stabbing people with corkscrews and whatnot? It's not hard!

The space between the blandly functional kills is where they really get you, though. Even with its tight run time, there's a lot of flab on Frightmare. Especially before it commits to being a body count picture in earnest, we're just stuck hanging out with an undifferentiated mass of white people who are all equally unpleasant and think it's the height of comedy to flirt with a corpse.

Not pictured: Anyone I'd want to spend time with.

There are a couple times that Frightmare nods toward the campy classic it might have been (especially when we spend time with anybody connected to Conrad's home life, which seems utterly bonkers), but largely it is content to go through the motions and not suck harder than it needs to. Except for the cinematography, which sucks hard all the way through. As you can see in the screenshot above, anything that's bright enough to cause glare will create a constellation of hazy glow that obscures anything around it (I liked cinematographer Joel King's work better in a film I liked worse, 1981's Just Before Dawn).

The best I can say about Frightmare is that it indeed does everything it needs to do to be a slasher movie. If you've seen everything there is to see and you're on the constant hunt for more material, this one will arrange those impulses in your brain in the right order. I understand if "it's not entirely unsatisfying" isn't exactly selling you on Frightmare, but that was never my intention anyway.

Killer: Conrad Radzoff (Ferdy Mayne)
Final Girl: Meg (Jennifer Starrett)
Best Kill: In the film's single best effect, Eve is menaced by a floating coffin chasing her down the stairs before it smashes her body like a battering ram.
Sign of the Times: Conrad's mausoleum is marked with a tacky flashing neon star.
Scariest Moment: Conrad's mouth emits a horrible prolonged screech when he corners Saint in an embalming room.
Weirdest Moment: Apparently the ghost of Conrad gave his widow the phone number of the film society's mansion.
Champion Dialogue: "Good night, sweet prince of ham."
Body Count: 9; not including an additional 18 victims implied to have been murdered by Conrad prior to the beginning of the film.

1. Director is pushed off a railing.
2. Wolfgang is smothered with a pillow.
3. Oscar has his tongue pulled out.
4. Donna is set on fire with telekinesis.
5. Bobo is killed with poison gas.
6. Eve is bashed with a floating coffin.
7. Stu is decapitated with a sword.
8. Saint is cremated.
9. Mrs. Rohmer has a wad of money shoved into her mouth.

TL;DR: Frightmare is a paint-by-numbers slasher that is satisfying, but at the minimum possible level.
Rating: 5/10
Word Count: 1051

Census Bloodbath: As We Go On, We Remember All The Lives We Lost Together

I know a lot of my features have been leading up to this, so it can't come as a surprise, but... I'm graduating college today. As I prepare to be punted out onto the football field of life, let's take a moment to reflect on all those poor young souls whose futures were cut short in the name of the American slasher film. 

Year: 1981

Director: Herb Freed

Cast: Christopher George, Patch Mackenzie, E. Danny Murphy

Run Time: 1 hour 36 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Troma is not known for making good films. I've explored this to some length on Popcorn Culture when I reviewed the decadently unfunny Mother's Day, the clichéd and insipid Splatter University, and the dull as dishwater Girls School Screamers. But the thing about the company is that they throw themselves so wholeheartedly into churning out crap that you can't help but have the faintest glimmer of appreciation for them. 

And I mean the faintest.

1981's Graduation Day is an early Troma slasher, so it's thankfully free of the over-baked slapstick abortions that would soon typify the company's output, but it's still a bottom of the barrel entry with a scatterbrained plot, a dismal paucity of gore, and a nasty attitude problem. And yet there's that glimmer.

Glimmer doesn't cost a lot.

Graduation Day opens on a high school track and field event edited so choppily and rapidly that you need to slam the pause button to even see anything but a pulsating mass of color and fleshy form. It is so clearly playing off of the MTV aesthetic that it's legitimately shocking to find out that the film precedes the network by several months. I guess the dirty truth is that MTV ripped off of Graduation Day. Slashers are all about skeletons in closets, amirite?

God, it's gonna be one of those reviews, isn't it?

When promising young track star Laura Ramstead (Ruth Ann Llorens) is pushed to the edge of her endurance by Coach George Michaels (Christopher George of Pieces and Mortuary), a blood clot crashes into her brain like a shot put, sending her to an early grave after she passes the finish line.

Two months later, Laura's sister Anne (Patch Mackenzie) arrives from her Navy service in Guam for the high school's graduation ceremony, at which she is accepting an award on Laura's behalf. However, what is meant to be a solemn, but happy occasion is marred when the day before the ceremony, a killer in a fencing mask begins stalking and murdering the surviving members of the track team, timing his kills with a track stopwatch.

That's pretty much it for the plot, which consists almost entirely of lackluster stalking sequences, semi-creative kills, and utterly unnecessary side characters' antics, pitched between which are preposterously long swaths of filler that stop the film dead in its tracks. The most notable of these moments is the five minute-plus segment of the semi-known New Wave band performing their song "Gangsters of Rock" at a roller disco in that screeching goat style that only teenagers have the iron will to listen to, although other dead patches include a fully rendered gymnastics routine and the "Graduation Day Blues" hootenanny and harmonica jamboree.

"Felony" member or John Waters' long-lost son? The world may never know.

As you might have been able to surmise, Graduation Day is a tad bit disjointed. Each scene wholeheartedly rams into the next with all the finesse of a bumper car on PCP, rarely if ever having anything to do with the plot at hand. The heroine vanishes for a great portion of the middle of the film, the red herrings are thin on the ground, and there is no dimension whatsoever given to the vast majority of the overgrown potatoes that dare to call themselves "characters."

The more prominent of these figures include Kevin (E. Danny Murphy), Laura's ex-boyfriend who has taken her death hard, Principal Guglione (Michael Pataki of Halloween 4 and Sweet 16), who could hardly give a rat's ass that his students are going missing, and Mr. Roberts (Richard Balin), a lascivious music teacher who sleeps with Linnea Quigley and subsequently evaporates from the film. As the scriptless meanderings unspool across the screen, random squealers Joanne (Karen Abbott) and Doris (the Vanna White) wander in and out of situations, improvising incoherent babble like a drunken, giggling Greek chorus.

To call Graduation Day unprofessional would be an insult to amateurs. I've eaten croutons more professionally made than this film. The first and second acts are about as lively as microwaved roadkill, and the third act is even worse, lifting entire passages from the score of Psycho and rendering its military protagonist a screaming hysterical girl as she flails through an overlong denouement. The cinematography is murky at best, the gore is sparse and undercooked, the men of the film are uniformly disgusting, misogynist creatures, the editing works at far too fast a clip to maintain any semblance of tension, and most of the actors seem actively bored. 

Patch Mackenzie can only display emotions in brief, emphatic flashes, Christopher George obviously can't hear through the cloud of hair dye around his head so he shouts all his lines, and E. Danny Murphy alternates between sleepwalking and high-pitched kettle shrieking as he attempts to obscure the fact that he's clearly 10 years too old for the part behind a curtain of greasy ringlets. And let's just say that it's a good thing Vanna White found a steady job touching letters, because reading and speaking them is not her strong suit.

That pink blouse/shimmer belt combo is also not a strong suit. ...Geddit? ...Please don't leave, I'm only in the second year of this godforsaken decade project.

But no matter how many insults I can lob at Graduation Day, they just keep pinging off like bullets against Superman's chest. It is not, was not, and will never be a good movie, but there's just enough enjoyment to be eked out of the thing to not render it totally useless. First off, its utterly strange editing pattern is kind of endearing, like a first grader's drawing stuck to a fridge. It's admirably wonky, zipping back and forth between shots at a speed that defies the capacity of the human eye, launching from an inexplicable profusion of POV shots into a machine gun clatter barrage of flashback footage, half-glimpsed movement, and unknowable, subconsciously-received imagery. It's not successful, but at least it's trying something. 

Second, it's campy as all hell. This fact is frequently masked behind the sheen of technical incompetence, but enough of the potent stuff squeezes itself out to keep the film from tipping over the edge. The slasher hadn't quite reached its decadent era yet, so many of the kills are uneventful, but several of them are utterly unique, especially the scene where a jock is stabbed with a football attached to a javelin. You just don't get that every day.

He wide-received that pigskin right in his penalty zone.

Whether it's a gymnast being killed while shaving her legs in the sink, the camera lingering on the pert ass of a deceased victim, or the heavy woodland that seems to be located in the middle of school property, Graduation Day is a barrel of unintentional laughs. Not to mention that the dialogue and production design are out of this world, in the sense that they must have been improperly translated from Martian.

It's anticlimactic, it's erratic, and it's just plain weird so much of the time that you can't help but feel like you've stumbled across a psychedelic art piece that taps into that secret space between dreams and reality. Graduation Day challenges everything that we know about contemporary filmmaking, not in an experimental way, but in a manner reminiscent of a baby attempting to mimic its parents' voices. 

It's a deranged, bifurcated reflection of films like Friday the 13th as viewed through the dirty, coke-smeared looking glass of somebody who either knows nothing about life or way more than we can ever imagine. It's an experience, is what I'm saying, and while I don't have the patience to find it a true bad-good gem, it's a relentlessly compelling, awful, delirious, heart-wrenching, apocalyptic, quasi-satisfying film experience. Watch at your own risk.

Killer: [Kevin Badger (E. Danny Murphy)]

Final Girl: Anne Ramstead (Patch Mackenzie)

Best Kill: A pole vaulter falls onto a mat with spikes hidden inside.

Sign of the Times: This guy is straight.

Scariest Moment: Anne approaches Kevin's grandma, who appears to be dead. She is not. ...This isn't a particularly scary movie.

Weirdest Moment: The truck driver insists that he gets to cop a feel on Anne because he's "a taxpayer."

Champion Dialogue: "Sit on it and rotate!"
Body Count: 9

1. Laura's heart explodes while she's running track.
2. Paula has her throat slit.
3. Sally is stabbed in the neck with a saber.
4. Ralph has a football with a blade attached thrown into his chest.
5. Tony is decapitated with hedge clippers.
6. Dolores is decapitated with a sword.
7. Pete pole vaults onto a spiked mat.
8. Coach Michaels is shot to death.
9. Kevin is impaled on spikes. 

TL;DR: Graduation Day has a valuable campiness that is somewhat tempered by how extremely dull and erratic it is.
Rating: 4/10 (though my sliding scale for grading slashers is taking a lot of strain on this one - but what the heck, I'm in the graduation spirit)
Word Count: 1573

Census Bloodbath: Back To Back To Skull - Graduation Day

Year: 1986

Director: John P. Finnegan

Cast: Mollie O'Mara, Sharon Christopher, Mari Butler

Run Time: 1 hour 20 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

"In the darkness, there is evil. Within the evil, there is death."

Hello, everybody! Welcome to the final day of Back to Back to Skull! The torment is about to end! Well, for you. I still have an entire semester of college left after this. Our final excursion into the world of co-ed campus slashfests is Girls School Screamers, another release by the notorious bad movie production company Troma.

The poster for Girls School Screamers has it all: a syntactically confusing but tantalizing title, a tagline that has more punctuation than a text message in 2007, a wormy cadaver with a cleaver, screaming bikini girl mayhem, and a nun on uppers. I might actually prefer staring at that poster for 80 minutes over the film, because not a lick of it is accurate in any meaningful way.

And there are NO good screenshots on Google. Like I want to work to find slasher stills. Rude.

Girls School Screamers is a woefully dull late 80's B-flick, wavering between being a haunted house movie and a slasher for 40 minutes before deciding that it should be both. Poorly. We open with the best scene in the film, in which a young boy is dared to enter an empty haunted house and is confronted by a rotted, worm-riddled ghost in a wedding dress. She gibbers and he runs and the credits roll on a film that is in every way less interesting - and almost entirely unrelated.

Some time later the estate - which belonged to the late Tyler Welles (Charles Braun) - is bequeathed to the Trinity School for Girls. When a group of young women is sent along with the kindly Sister Urban (Vera Gallagher) to catalogue the contents of the mansion, they hold a seance (of course they do) and awaken the slumbering spirit - who seemed pretty lively just a minute ago but what do I know.

By the way, the barely distinguishable Meat platter consists of Jackie (Mollie O'Mara), a young woman who discovers that she has a striking resemblance to Tyler's young niece Jennifer, who died in that very house in 1939; Elizabeth (Sharon Christopher), who is engaged to an unseen character, though if her strange predilection for acting with her eyebrows is an indicator, it might just be Eric Freeman from Silent Night, Deadly Night: Part 2; Rosemary (Monica Antonucci), a childish slob who wears an ash gray track suit who probably would have become a gym teacher had she not met her untimely peril; Adelle (Marcia Hinton) the token black friend who has not a trace of a character trait but is charming anyway; Susan (Karen Krevitz), the Blonde One; and Kate (Mari Butler) and Karen (Beth O'Malley), who are not the Blonde One.

After a full half hour of Sister Urban toddling around like a dizzy turtle and the girls counting objects (riveting), they finally begin to murdered one by one by an unseen force as Jackie slowly reads through Jennifer's diary at plot-convenient intervals to find out exactly what terrible thing happened in this house. Spoiler: It's boring.

Somewhere between The Dorm That Dripped Blood and Sorority House Massacre II, the plot is DOA, seemingly only a channel to display buxom ladies in their skivvies. The fact that the film fails to even do that (not a single topless scene, and no underwear to be found) is a testament to its supreme, almost otherworldly inadequacy. The kills in the film are shot with a level of basic splatter film competence, but lack any arresting grue thanks to the social climate of 1986 and or a budget flimsier than those "tearable" edges on notebook paper. So what any self-respecting cheapie would do is scoop up an armful of breasts and drop them onto the set to make up for a lack of bloody FX. Those come cheap and you don't have to wash them off quite as often. But alas, Girls School Screamers is beyond even that basic courtesy.

Also some boys show up, but we don't even get a sex scene. Exploitation shouldn't necessarily be a genre to strive for, but if you're going to take your stab at it, at least do it right.

The biggest sin of Girls School Screamers is that it's damn boring, but there's plenty of smaller sins sprinkled around for taste:

Sin #1: The Acting

When there are no headshots on the entire IMDb cast list of a film, you know there's a problem with the talent. So we won't dive into this too much, but it must be said that Mollie O'Mara makes no attempt to differentiate Jackie from Jennifer Welles (who she plays in flashback) or even hazard a guess as to what people in the 1930's might have acted like. Vera Gallagher plays her elderly character so woozily that it looks like she might drop dead at any moment and Peter Cosimano (as Paul, Jackie's boyfriend) rattles off five page monologues with machine-gun monotony.

Sin #2: The Music

The composer here could give the guy who wrote my AAA driving video theme song a run for his money. His go-to theme is nothing less than a steel drum variation on The Exorcist and though I can say that I never dreamed I'd hear something like that, I can't say that it was good by any definition of the word.

Sin #3: The Dialogue

When it's not being written and enunciated like a masterpiece theater melodrama, the screenplay skitters into the corner and concocts strange new verbal creations, the likes of which have never been heard before or since. A personal favorite is "he wanted to paint a portrait of me with himself as the artist." Also, I'm pretty sure Paul keeps calling his girlfriend "pal," but I could never get a bead on his exact verbiage because of his record-breaking vocal WPM.

Sin #4: The Miscellaneous

It's just a poorly-constructed film, is what it is. Sister Urban tells the story of what happened to poor Jennifer, the film cuts to an entirely different person telling the same story to somebody else. Unnecessary and perplexing moments like this abound, like when Paul insists on visiting the newspaper archives to investigate the house where his girlfriend is staying, though he has absolutely no reason to be suspicious. The film briefly livens up during a flashback when it very nearly turns into  a silent melodrama, but for the most part it clunks along like a bike with square wheels.

The best thing I can say about Girls School Screamers is that the kills are mildly engaging for their variety and that people are actually visible in the nighttime scenes. These moments are quite obviously "lit" but I'll take a visible spotlight over a murky pool of darkness any day. So, don't go running out to Netflix to rent the film (how do things even work anymore?), but if it's a choice between this and, say, a Transformers marathon, you could do slightly worse.

Killer: The Ghost (?) of Tyler Welles (Charles Braun)

Final Girl: Jackie (Mollie O'Mara)

Best Kill: Susan pulls the chain on a light bulb and it electrocutes her. This is the kind of design flaw you'd think the engineer might have noticed, but American craftsmanship just isn't what it used to be.

Sign of the Times: Elizabeth wears a pair of cream-colored heels that I'm pretty sure dissipated back into the netherworld at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve in 1989.

Scariest Moment: The opening (see: only) effects shot is quite a doozy.

Weirdest Moment: A Jewish doctor named Robert Fisher mysteriously appears at the beginning and end of the film although he was never asked to come to the house and has no impact on the plot whatsoever.

Champion Dialogue: "You're gonna make a pretty good parent the way that you're worrying. Just kidding."

Body Count: 9; including the killer, assuming he wasn't a ghost maybe.

1. Rosemary is cleavered in the mouth.
2. Karen is hung on a hook.
3. Kate is drowned in the lake.
4. Bruce is run over by a car.
5. Adelle is killed offscreen.
6. Susan is electrocuted on a light chain.
7. Paul is pitchforked in the chest.
8. Jennifer Welles is tossed down the stairs in a flashback.
9. Tyler Welles has his eyes poked out. 

TL;DR: Girls School Screamers is a plodding, sexless wisp of an exploitation film.
Rating: 3/10
Word Count: 1418

Census Bloodbath: Back To Back To Skull - Day 5

Year: 1984
Director: Richard W. Haines
Cast: Forbes Riley, Rick Randig, Dick Biel
Run Time: 1 hour 18 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Splatter University, one of the most enticingly-named college slashers thus far, had the misfortune of coming out during the subgenre's first tragic death. It's not like the film was ever going to be any good (especially being distributed by Troma, the patron saint of intentionally bad filmmaking), but a straightforward campus slashfest was exactly what the market had far too much of by this point in the decade.

The MPAA and angry parent organizations had been making overtures at shutting down the slashers for years and their great victory seemingly came when Paramount decided to (very temporarily) lay to rest their biggest cash cow with Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter in April. The format was quickly rejuvenated in November with the cinderblock-smashing hit A Nightmare on Elm Street, but a film waving its flag for the splatter genre during those few months was pretty much guaranteed to be DOA.

It also doesn't help that the movie's crap, but that's irrelevant.

Splatter University details the exploits of Julie Parker (Forbes Riley), a new professor at St. Trinian's University. Although her cheerful demeanor seems unimpeachable, her resilience is challenged by a loudly disinterested sociology class, headmaster (? I don't know, it's a Catholic college) Father Janson's (Dick Biel) resistance against her discussion of controversial topics, and - oh - an escaped lunatic mowing down sexually promiscuous women on campus. As she and her coworker Cynthia (Laura Gold) investigate the identity of the culprit, she begins to suspect that her new boyfriend Mark (Ric Randig) may be behind the serial murders.

Also, because adults aren't nubile enough to keep your typical slasher fan invested (especially during the genre's autumnal decline), there's a heaping helping of useless teen Meat generously dumped across the film. Many of these scenes were filmed a year after initial production to pad out the run time, which was barely over an hour in the original cut. That should tell you all you need to know about Splatter University, which feels lopsided thanks to having another, entirely separate, teen film roughly wedged between its frames.

Far too many of these unnecessary teens fail to die, but the important ones include Doreen (Joanna Mihalakis), an unpleasant girl who's always running off to do homework; Tony (George Seminara), Doreen's boyfriend and a business major getting his start early by selling prescription drugs; Wolf (Sal Lumetta), a horny bastard who got his nickname from his penchant for howling or maybe vice versa; Kathy (Kathy LaCommare - and we're at the point where the screenwriters were so lazy they didn't even think of new names), an edgy girl with a mullet on her head and a bun in the oven; and Denise (Denise Texeira), this film's designated 80's Ambassador with studded fingerless gloves and hair that increases in diameter with every scene she's in.

After she dies, the hair subsumes her body and skitters away into the sewers.

Several storylines are relatively unique to the slasher genre, like the pregnant quasi-heroine (used rather infrequently, though notably in several early efforts) or the exploration of the ins and outs of campus politics. I'd shudder at the thought that you might infer that Splatter University has anything valuable to say about these topics (other than the fact that pretty much all extremist conservatives are one R-rated movie away from becoming knife-wielding psychopaths), but their presence is valuable nonetheless.

This is comforting because the plot at large is perfunctory and extremely disjointed, to the point where half of the deaths are never even mentioned again after they occur. And the central mystery is a dry little crackerjack, wetted only by some of the kills, which are of a piece ineptly executed but gooey enough to provide some of the charnel house thrills that slasher films thrive on. But there's no point beating around the bush, most of Splatter University is just plain bad.

Between ceaseless, bleating repetitions of the one surf rock song the filmmakers could afford to include on the soundtrack, there are frequent and irksomely lengthy fades to black that feel like they belong to a TV movie. This at least matches the tone of the performances, which are sub-informercial quality. Unfortunately there are no truly memorable bad line readings like in yesterday's Pieces, but Forbes Riley's insistent refusal to pronounce "Mark" any way other than "Mork" does cheer one up.

Cut her some slack. She teaches sociology, not English.

Also, random extras linger in the background just watching the actors as they "perform." It's by far the creepiest part of the film.

So. Splatter University's deficiencies are impossible to overlook. And with any other film displaying similarly dismaying construction, I might suggest just chucking your Netflix DVD in the garbage and telling them you never received it in order to save future customers the pain of queueing it out of morbid curiosity. But Troma chose to distribute the film for a reason and it has one saving grace. The notoriously zany tone of the company's productions isn't present here in spades, but Splatter University is so brief that it's kind of pleasantly daffy and has some moments of genuine, sparkling humor.

Some moments are just quietly strange, like the title card of the post-prologue scene which reads "the next semester yesterday..." But a surprising many of the film's nutty idiosyncrasies cause legitimate, unironic laughter. Moments like the morbid landlady Mrs. Bloom (Mary Ellen David) telling the story of a previous tenant's poisoning, or a handful of the teens' one-liners ("Did you hear Cathy was killed at the drive-in?" "No sh*t! What was playing?") are authentically delightful.

Of course, a couple grim-faced japes aren't enough to recommend a movie as thoroughly shoddy as Splatter University, but at least it tries. And - most importantly - it's short. It's hard to hate a movie that's already over. So with that scant praise, I leave Splatter University and wish you a happy tomorrow. Send me good wishes over my last first weekend of homework!

Killer: [Father Janson (Dick Biel)]
Final Girl: Julie Parker (Forbes Riley)
Best Kill: Doreen is sliced across the forehead, which is certainly creative and evidently very effective.

Sign of the Times: When Tony asks John if he could borrow an exam he's copying he says he would never give one away for free because he's not a Communist.
Scariest Moment: Julie helps students open a locked closet, only to discover the corpse of her best friend inside.
Weirdest Moment: The most famous person in the film is the girl on the poster (Elizabeth Kaitan of Friday the 13th Part VII and Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2), who doesn't appear in a single frame.
Champion Dialogue: "My stupid teacher got killed. What a pain in the ass."
Body Count: 8; although it feels like much, much less.

1. Doctor McDouchebag is stabbed in the crotch.
2. Janet Phillips is stabbed in the boob.
3. Doreen is sliced on the forehead.
4. Cathy has her throat slit.
5. Cynthia is generically killed offscreen.
6. Margaret is stabbed in the gut.
7. Denise is stabbed in the mouth.
8. [Julie is stabbed in the back and filleted.] 

TL;DR: Splatter University is a terrible slasher movie, but is slightly redeemed by a genuine sense of humor.
Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 1223

Census Bloodbath: A Boy's Best Friend Is His Mother

If you're new to Census Bloodbath, click here.

Year: 1980

Director: Charlie Kaufman

Cast: Tiana Pierce, Nancy Hendrickson, Deborah Luce

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: UR

First a caveat: This film has nothing to do with the actual holiday Mother's Day. I no longer feel guilty for watching it in September.

This movie marks the first (and far from last) entry into the slasher genre from the cult beloved production company Troma. Always at the forefront of sleaze cinema, it is no surprise that Lloyd Kaufman's craptastic brood jumped on the slasher bandwagon long before most copycat killers. Troma is a company that revels in making terrible films (the most prominent of which is the campy The Toxic Avenger) and, for better or for worse, they have been going strong since their inception in (dear God) 1974.

Always toeing the line between bad-good and bad-bad, Troma approaches each and every film with an undeniable sense of humor which is already evident in the poster for Mother's Day. Though I appreciate the effort, something about movies that are intentionally bad will eternally be less funny than films that are bad by accident, but the manic glee with which Troma throws together films almost makes up for their shrieking insincerity. We will revisit this execrably delightful company time and time again during this series for Graduation Day, The Last Horror Film, Frightmare, Blood Hook, and the inimitable Splatter University.

But for the moment, we are here. 

And thankfully not here.

A brief word about the DVD. Although skeletal and bare, completely devoid of extras, the film was lovingly rendered and supremely easy on the eyes. The bar has been set very low as of late with the fuzzy and oversaturated Funeral Home and the ghastly dark Silent Scream and Humongous, so compared to those guys, Mother's Day is practically The Godfather.

The film opens with the closing moments of the inspirational seminar known as Ernie's Growth Opportunity (EGO, in the first of many Troma mandated background gags) as a young hippie couple (Kevin Lowe and Marsella Davidson) hitch a ride home with a kindly old woman (Beatrice Pons). The couple sours quicker than milk in the Sahara and it's clear they plan on robbing and killing the old lady.

Unfortunately for them, Mother is one step ahead of them. After she stops on the side of the road to fix the engine, the man is brutally decapitated and his girlfriend is swiftly dispatched via rope. This is the scene where Troma finally tips its hand, with editing possibly perpetrated by blind squirrels. The decapitation itself is pretty swell even if the head is pretty clearly prosthetic, but the clincher is that the hippie's girlfriend turns, screams, gets sprayed with blood, and then he gets decapitated. I had to rewind this scene twice to let it fully sink in.

Oh, Troma. What are we going to do with you?

Kill it with fire.

The opening credits are almost overwhelmingly the best sequence in the entire movie as we see a slideshow of pictures from Wolfsbreath College in 1970 accompanied by the commentary of three best friends known as the Rat Pack. The girls' banter is unforced and natural (two words which have no business being in a review of this film) and do a great job of setting up character relationships, establishing a shared background, and placing the movie in time.

Cut to ten years later and the Rat Pack has reunited for their yearly girls weekend away. There's Trina (Tiana Pierce), the blonde and stuck-up socialite who'd obviously much rather being chewing out a poolboy at a coke-fueled Hollywood pool party than meeting with her college roommates in dumpy little Drexford, New Jersey. There's Abbey (Nancy Hendrickson), a shy girl with an overbearing and sickly mother. And finally there's Jackie (Deborah Luce), a bubbly and optimistic girl who keeps getting dealt bad hands in life, not the least of which are her divorce and her boyfriend who is the living embodiment of of every negative masculine stereotype ever invented (he thinks strangling her is funny, steals money from her wallet, and is just super gross).

That paragraph was about as long as most of my Meet the Meat summaries even though there are far fewer people in the core cast than usual, which is actually a good sign - the characters have a lot of room to breathe and develop their own distinct personalities.

The girls have decided to retreat to the woods to get away from it all and after a quick, rousing topless water fight, the girls are abducted from the campgrounds by a pair of brothers, Ike (Holden McGuire) and Addley (Billy Rae McQuade), who bring them home to Mother.

This is her day after all.

Mother, it seems, hasn't taken her medication in about two decades and has been teaching the boys how to kill. She grins in delight as they tie up their prey and runs a series of exercises with them to practice properly attacking defenseless women. The relationship between Mother and her sons is also thoroughly explored (overbearing Mother refuses to be left alone, insisting that if both her boys leave her side, her evil sister Queenie will attack - a tale which smacks of old wivery and the boys start to catch on) excpt for, you know, the reason they kill people, which you think would be important.

Troma.

Jackie is taken first and the movie takes a sharp turn south as she is raped repeatedly (and it is implied this continues all night) and left for dead in a dresser drawer. It is at this point that the mildly pleasant Troma badness (numerous weird elements waft about in the background like an opera singing hobo and a coat stuck in a car door) devolves into something much more exploitative and sinister.

It quickly swings up again as Jackie's friends seek revenge in beautifully colorful ways (that color is red, through and through. Ike gets Drano in the throat, a TV in the kisser, and an electric carving knife everywhere else while Addley is taken down by the twin powers of an antenna in the neck and a claw hammer to the groin), but that moment of unnecessary misogyny poisons the picture and prevents it from rising through the mire of the Troma swamp.

The acting is pretty atrocious across the board (Pierce is by far the worst - hacking her way through a script that is far from dense), but Mother's Day is unique for subverting genre tropes before they were even set in stone.

Most notably, the three girls are all still alive with only 25 minutes left to go.

It by no means stays that way as the one girl I had pegged as the Final Girl croaks.

And I'm not even gonna talk about the twist ending where Queenie turns out to be real and attacks the other two girls after they dispatch the entire family. That's just great filmmaking right there.

This is all I ever wanted.

I know what I've been describing doesn't sound like a slasher movie at all, and really it's not. Mother's Day is a backwoods torture grindhouse revenge movie that was unceremoniously shoved into a slasher format the second that coins started to ring in the bottom of Sean S. Cunningham's coffer.

Coming four months on the heels of Friday the 13th, it's no accident that Mother's Day is set in the New Jersey woods. That and the deaths opening ten minutes were crudely grifted on to a movie that was probably already far into production by the time Jason saw the light of day. But say what you will about Troma, but they know a cash cow when they see one and they jumped on the slasher bandwagon before it was even completely built.

You gotta admire that kind of anti-integrity.

So all in all, Mother's Day isn't a total travesty, not by a long shot. It has some shockingly good characterizations for the time period, a wildly off-kilter and genre-bending script, and is really pretty OK.

I just wish they'd stop raping people.

Killer: Ike (Holden McGuire) and Addley (Billy Rae McQuade)

Final Girl: Trina (Tiana Pierce) and Abbey (Nancy Hendrickson)

Best Kill: Mother is smothered with a pair of blow-up breasts with pink nipples.

Sign of the Times: Mother wears a shimmery silver cardigan with fluffy green cuffs.

Scariest Moment: Abbey's hands are split open by a rope as she tries to lower Trina down to safety.

Weirdest Moment: The family practices killing by dressing Jackie as Shirley Temple.

Champion Dialogue: "What are you afraid of? Being jumped by a gang of wild Puerto Rican chickens?"

Body Count: 6; including the killers and their mother.

1. A boy is decapitated.
2. A girl is strangled to death with a rope.
3. Jackie is raped and left to die.
4. Ike has his throat burned, a TV in the face, and is stabbed with an electric knife.
5. Addley gets an antenna in the neck and a claw hammer to the groin.
6. Mother is smothered with inflatable breasts. 

TL;DR: Mother's Day is too exploitative to recommend but the good parts are nothing to scoff at.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1542