Census Bloodbath: Beauty School Escapee

Year: 1982

Director: Alan J. Levi

Cast: Donna Wilkes, Richard Jaeckel, Frankie Avalon

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The slasher genre has featured plenty of celebrities in its time, but it usually only intersects with stars at either end of their career. Big shot celebrities like George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, and Johnny Depp got their start in the slasher genre before moving onto bigger, occasionally better things. And then we get to the other end, where older stars like Farley Granger, Ernest Borgnine, Hal Holbrook, Rod Steiger, and Lauren Bacall show up to collect a paycheck once Hollywood isn't knocking down their door.

Even knowing this, let me tell you that seeing Frankie Avalon's name in the credits here is like getting a bucket of cold water dumped on your head. Sure, the timing was right. Even though he's best known these days for his cameo in Grease, the reason he was invited was because he was a venerable icon who could give that 1950's-set movie its retro cred rather than because he was a hot ticket name in 1978. But still.

He's as shocked as I am.

So here's what we're dealing with. When Paul Foley (Frankie Avalon) was a child, his father killed his adulterous mother and then himself, right after crafting his son a wooden instrument that is called a flute by every character but is pretty clearly an ocarina. His father only ever taught him one song (the lullaby "Go to Sleep Little Baby") and now that he's a grown man that's still all he can play. Oh, he's also in an insane asylum for unclear reasons. Probably because he's Pure Evil, because he escapes and immediately starts murdering everybody in his path.

One of those unlucky people in his path is Marion (Donna Wilkes of Schizoid), a high school student who is in a leg brace following a car accident caused by her alcoholic father Frank (Richard Jaeckel), who has only become more indolent and abusive since then, harassing her at every moment and turning every minute conversation into a harangue about defending her virginity from her fisherman boyfriend Joey (William Kirby Cullen). She and Joey are planning to run away to Portland, Oregon but before that things are getting more and more difficult. After a receiving a blood transfusion sourced from the local asylum, she is having terrible nightmares where she witnesses Paul's murders, and when he begins to stalk her around town, she's having a hard time separating dreams and reality.

"That can't be Frankie Avalon, I must be dreaming!"

Blood Song had the budget for both Frankie Avalon and a third act showdown in an operating sawmill, so I'm going to go ahead and assume there was some money behind it, but it looks like a typical microbudget slasher and certainly has the poster of one, so I bet it wasn't much. There's a lot of chintzy work here, especially with the awkward push-in close-ups on her eye that tunnel out into flashes of the killer's actions.  Or the electronic score that sounds like two cats fucking on a synth keyboard. Or the kills that aren't particularly bloody, though they do get a lot of use out of their axe wound prosthetic. But within those pretty tight parameters, Blood Song is actually extraordinarily competent. We're full of surprises today!

The film succeeds in a lot of areas where its peers fail. Beginning with the fact that it actually manages to drum up a little tension every now and again. Sure, the scenes that openly ape Halloween are just surfing in John Carpenter's wake, but there's one scene in particular with a hitchhiker that keeps you constantly on your toes whether Paul is going to profess his love or brutally murder her, sustaining that tension for a good two or three minutes. That's two or three minutes more tension than anything that something like - say - Blood Lake could deliver.

And despite the killer's motive being absolute dumb movie horseshit (His dad killed himself so now he's a murderer who kills anyone who makes fun of his flute? Psychologically sound, for sure), his calling card of snatches of flute music drifting along the wind is actually quite something. I do wish they did something more fully fleshed-out with Marion's psychic connection to the killer, but let's not ask too much of Blood Song.

Let's just sit here and nurse the fact that I can still enjoy anything in this marathon 180 films deep.

And while we're on the subject, I actually quite like Marion, especially the scenes where we're just hanging out with her and her friends. There's something surprising and satisfying about watching a young woman dealing with a physical disability that makes her vulnerable to the killer, yet who is well-liked, sexually active, and driven to survive by any means possible. A Hollywood studio would never have made that call for the character in 1982.

And this may be faint praise, but I promise it's not damning: the climactic chase sequence is lit properly. That is a luxury you can rarely expect from a slasher movie of this budget and vintage. But in every shot of the heroine running from the killer in the dark, you can see every facial expression, locked door, and improvised weapon that you need to see. It's not just a smudgy black screen with random flecks of color muddily swimming around. I could cry! Also there's a shot that's even kind of beautiful, of a forklift bearing a pallet of wood boards being knocked into a body of water, the machine sinking as the lightweight wood floats up and breaches the surface of the water.

I don't think Blood Song is a movie I would recommend to literally anyone. It just doesn't do enough beyond the exact baseline of not sucking. But coming from someone who is dangerously deep in the weeds on this subgenre, the care and skill put into making it was a real breath of fresh air. It's like a well-built chair. You might not rave about it to your friends, but you've sat in enough uncomfortable chairs to quietly appreciate the craftsmanship.

Killer: Paul Foley (Frankie Avalon)

Final Girl: Marion (Donna Wilkes)

Best Kill: Marion's dad's death, both because he deserves it and Paul really goes to town on him, axing his chest, face, and knee with some showstopping (for the budget) special effects.

Sign of the Times: I don't know what the hell this guy's problem is, but I know I'm more scared of him than the killer.

Scariest Moment: Literally any time Marion's dad speaks.

Weirdest Moment: The film opens with a Tennyson quote for some unfathomable reason.

Champion Dialogue: "I've got a hangover that would make King Kong climb a wall."

Body Count: 9; not including Joey, who is presumably killed offscreen before the final shot.

Wife and

Lover are shot.

Jack shoots himself.

Orderly is strangled.

Driver is axed in the face.

Hitchhiker is garroted with a necklace.

Cathy is killed offscreen.

Frank is axed to death.

Bill is crushed with a forklift.

TL;DR: Blood Song is surprisingly a totally passable obscure weirdo slasher effort.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1208

Census Bloodbath: No Monster Is An Island

Happy October, everyone! Every year I do a horror franchise marathon leading up to Halloween, but this year I thought I'd do things a LITTLE bit differently. I've been slacking on my Census Bloodbath project, and I want to be finished with it before I'm of retirement age, so I'm giving it an adrenaline shot directly to the heart. I will be covering all 22 of the remaining slasher films from 1982 this month. Wish me luck! I'm gonna need it.

Year: 1982
Director: J.S. Cardone
Cast: Sarah Kendall, Frederick Flynn, Carol Kottenbrook
Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

The British censorship craze in the early 80's that birthed the term "video nasty" is basically a summer reading list for any self-respecting slasher fan. While 1982's The Slayer wasn't fully prosecuted as a nasty, it's still on the longlist, and for that I approached it with a slightly smaller grain of salt than usual.

Just one that was the size of a boulder. What a load off!

The Slayer immediately disappoints by being about a foursome who travels to a remote location for a much-needed vacation (meaning the body count will be prevented from being particularly high), but it is a perfectly formulaic setup that slasher fans will gobble up. The two couples are David (Alan McRae), a.... photographer? the only thing I really know about him is that he's the one with a mustache; his wife Kay (Sarah Kendall), a painter whose latest gallery show has taken a turn for the surreal and become a failure; her brother Eric (Frederick Flynn), a commercial director who is absolutely shitting himself at having the chance to go fishing; and his wife Brooke (Carol Kottenbrook, now a producer who perpetrated 2006's The Covenant), an actress who seems to hate his guts.

The location in question is an unnamed island played by Tybee Island off the coast of Georgia, and things begin to go south almost immediately when the horrifying nightmares Kay has been having for years turn out to be prophetic, and an evil presence is lurking on the island murdering them one by one.

Is it a monster, like she dreamed? Yes, actually. But honestly I'm not sure why. We see it a LITTLE more than in The Incubus, but that is the faintest praise I could possibly damn a monster with.

One thing I've learned is that absolutely nothing exists in a vacuum. While it's true that Wes Craven's 1984 masterpiece A Nightmare on Elm Street changed the course of the slasher genre to exist in a more supernatural rubber-reality space, it didn't invent the subgenre. Here we even get a character who fights to stay awake to prevent her dreams from manifesting as a killer presence. But there's a reason The Slayer didn't have the impact on the horror genre that Elm Street did. It's just not very good.

The dialogue scenes (of which there are many) offer literally nothing to the seasoned slasher viewer. I mentioned that the cliché of the plot setup is serving what any connoisseur of the genre wants to see, but usually the reason the formula works so well is because of the many minute and varied differences in character, dialogue, setting, etc. etc. that are varied over that same basic skeleton. Take American Gothic which has almost exactly the same setup and is an infinitely more wild good time. But in The Slayer, the characters barely have a single dimension apiece (the women complain a lot and the men ignore them a lot) and their dialogue is so rote and uninspired that every time they open their mouths they might as well be saying "lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..."

And how could they be at a loss for something to talk about when that hair is threatening to strangle the life out of her head at any given moment?

Unfortunately, Sarah Kendall is not an actress with the range to compel us to pay attention to the nonsense that she's saying anyway. The vacancy of her performance does work for the character, whose mind is always a million miles away, but the movie severely lacks charisma in the scenes outside the necessarily infrequent killings.

Oh, but the killing that graces the end of the first act is as sublime an act of grisly slasher creativity as there ever was. It begins as many of these scenes often do, with David hearing a noise up in the attic and going up to investigate. But it ends way before most of these scenes. The instant he pokes his head up into the attic, the trapdoor snaps shut, crushing his neck into jelly in a wrenchingly long shot, slowly decapitating him as his body hangs uselessly from the ceiling. It's shocking, it's violent, the special effects are surprisingly well realized, and it leaves an impression that lasts for the rest of the film. The other two setpiece kills aren't bad (one is far too dark to really get an impression of what's happening, other than that it's complicated and horrible, but the other is a solid The Prowler-esque rake impalement), but they succeed largely because the movie has already infused its atmosphere with the manic anything-can-happen energy of that first kill.

Single-handedly, this scene redeems the 40 minute stretches on either side of it. OK maybe it's not a single hand. This movie has another half a hand or so, in the form of two things: The first is the magic of location. Tybee Island in 1982 has a haunting, desolate beauty that provides a stark relief to the horrors The Slayer visits upon it. And the second is the cinematography, provided by Karen Grossman. Now, I'm not going to overpraise it merely because of the fabulous excitement of seeing a female D.P. for what I believe to be the first time in this project (a female director is hard enough to find), but she finds a delicate interplay between light and shadow that does great things for the tone of the movie, because the dialogue and the acting certainly wouldn't clue you into the fact that this is supposed to be scary.

And I suppose I can't close out this review without mentioning that the monster itself is also a positive aspect of the film, even though it's in so little of it that it hardly counts, and the reason it is there is hardly explored to satisfaction. But please enjoy this GIF of its ooey gooey goodness (in practice, the jaw mechanism maybe didn't work quite as smoothly as they wanted, but it's still a neat look).

Killer: The Slayer (Carl Kraines)
Final Girl: Kay (Sarah Kendall)
Best Kill: You know which one; I wrote this entire review as an ode to it.
Sign of the Times: Kay wanders around on the beach in a chunky cable knit sweater with hair teased to the heavens.
Scariest Moment: Kay has a nightmare about kissing her husband good morning then discovering that he's just a severed head.
Weirdest Moment: The ending, where [SPOILERS] it turns out the whole movie was a (probably prophetic) dream that a five-year-old Kay had on Christmas morning.
Champion Dialogue: "observe the ass, for instance" (yes, this is a quote from Kay reading Mark Twain aloud. There is nothing in this script, I'm telling you)
Body Count: 5

1. Wally is smacked on the head with an oar.
2. David has his neck crushed with an attic trapdoor.
3. Eric has his face wrapped with fishing line and pierced with a hook.
4. Brooke is stabbed through the back with a rake.
5. Marsh is shot with a flare.

TL;DR: The Slayer is a deeply boring and generic movie that is kept afloat by a pretty good location and pretty great kills.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1300

Census Flashback: Doing All The Old Bits

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

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

Year: 1983

Director: Bruce Starr

Cast: Suzanna Love, Ulli Lommel, Shannah Hall

Run Time: 1 hour 19 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

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

Pictured: Lommel's face during the pitch meeting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It must be so fun to be a woman.

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

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

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

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

Killer: The Mirror

Final Girl: Lacey (Suzanna Love)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1250

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

Census Bloodbath: Spring (Psychotic) Break!

Year: 1981

Director: Romano Scavolini

Cast: Baird Stafford, Sharon Smith, C.J. Cooke 

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

Hoping to erase the aftertaste of Absurd from my mouth, I decided to pop in the next 1981 slasher on the list, the notorious Video Nasty Nightmares in a Damaged Brain (primarily known in most territories as Nightmare, but who could possibly prefer that title?). I made a huge mistake. Despite the massive controversy around this particular film at the time, it’s practically a clone of that Joe D’Amato disasterpiece. It’s a Video Nasty from an Italian director with an interminably boring run time interspersed by too few gory blowout scenes, featuring a supernaturally inept police force and a young boy you dearly want to smack upside the head, played by an actor with the same name as his character.

So yeah, I loved it.

A slasher in the post-grindhouse sex monster vein of Maniac or Don’t Go in the House, Nightmares in a Damaged Brain is one of the last vestiges of an exploitation genre I’m happy to see died off by the mid-80’s. George Tatum (Baird Stafford) is in an institution because his vivid nightmares (linked to a traumatic memory of seeing his dad in the throes of S&M passion before murdering him and his lover with a handy axe) fling him into homicidal rages. Once his pompous doctors are convinced that they have rehabilitated him, they release him onto the streets of New York City, where he more or less immediately begins killing again. Good work, team.

Seemingly arbitrarily, Tatum steals a car to drive down to Daytona Beach (woohoo!) and stalk single mother Susan Temper (Sharon Smith), her lover Bob (Mik Cribben), and her brood of children, the only relevant one of which is C.J. (C.J. Cooke). C.J. is the kind of prankster imp that only exists in slasher films like a serial killer and fake his own stabbing. You know, the classics. C.J.’s malfeasance inevitably provokes his mother into a tempestuous rag that’s shrill and kind of hilarious to watch as she tuckers herself out.

So. WHY is Tatum stalking this family? HOW can he be stopped? WHEN will C.J.’s family finally believe his boy-who-cried-wolf story of a man following them around? And WHO the f**k cares?

Certainly not me. I’m actively rooting for this twerp to meet his maker.

I was briefly jazzed about this movie after seeing Tom Savini’s name in the credits, but even without knowing about the controversy surrounding that (I found out later that Savini was falsely credited after giving the film a cursory consultation and not much more), I could have told you it was a sham. I’m a huge Savini fan, and while I recognize that some of his effects have aged better than others, he would never have tossed together something so chintzy and artificial as Nightmares’ throat-slitting scene, with its neck that looks one degree down from papier-mâché. 

This film’s gonzo gore sequences are the reason it’s revered in certain horror circles, but personally I feel that its notoriety outweighs its delivery. I have a certain admiration for the effects supervisor’s penchant for melodramatic, gushing geysers of blood, but the kills are too routine for this type of slasher (throat slashing, beheading, strangling, and is it alarming that these feel boring to me? Perhaps it’s best not to think about it) and they’re rendered spectacularly poorly. When they’re rendered at all. 

Much like Absurd (which is an apt comparison, not just because it’s the most recent one I watched), the notorious gore is oddly demure, leading to a frustratingly large proportion of offscreen kills or murder sequences that are edited so poorly that you can’t see who is being killed or how. Why is certainly beyond me, because as much as these filmmakers attempt to create sympathy for the killer, their screenwriting textbook must have had gum on the chapter about character development, because anything even resembling a real human being is suspiciously absent.

Because of this film’s post-grindhouse mien, our two protagonists are the killer himself and his most obvious counterpart: the unpredictable, devilish, and easily threatened C.J. Because George Tatum has no motive that’s visible to the human eye (we won’t find out what his deal is until the final frames in a tossed-off moment that is both predictable and sublimely idiotic), following him is a wash, and any time we switch over to C.J.’s perspective, we’re dunked in an ice cold barrel of hatred because he’s the worst human being ever to walk this godforsaken planet. Speaking in a shrill whine that only dogs can hear, he prowls through the film like a Terminator programmed to perform only the most annoying acts his human form is capable of. So that's a bust, and everybody else in the film is a slackly acted, one-dimensional blob that doesn’t even have a solid stereotype to cling to.

Only Susan stands out from the crowd, and that’s just because she tends to lose track of her lines halfway through saying tem.

There’s not much there to redeem Nightmares in a Damaged Brain. The best moment in the film is a montage where various local radio station intros track Tatum’s progress down the coast toward Daytona. So the bar isn’t terribly high. There’s some mildly amusing camp simmering in the background (the doctor pursuing Tatum is as comically inept as Wile E. Coyote, there’s a particularly prominent example of an 80’s Movie Magic computer, and the film screeches to a halt to spoil the ending of Antonioni’s Blow-Up for no particular reason) and an early nightmare sequence displays some giallo-esque surrealism, but the movie’s ineptitude is a weighty juggernaut that crushes all pleasure.

When it’s not being grim and grimy, Nightmares in a Damaged Brain is either listlessly repeating its key flashback scene, displaying some of the least erotic bumping and grinding ever put to film (the babysitter’s boyfriend tilts back and forth on her pelvis like a rocking horse), or pounding us with incomprehensible, amateurish gore. I have no clue why this film gleans any sort of respect from otherwise sane horror fans. It’s a boring, impotent dribble of blood and it ought to be put away for good.

Killer: George Tatum (Baird Stafford)

Final Girl: I guess C.J. Temper (C.J. Cooke)

Best Kill: S&M mistress’s decapitation is a delightfully lurid affair, with her neck spurting blood like a fire hose.

Sign of the Times: Susan entices the babysitter to come over by offering her the high, high price of $20 for two hours. That’s literally minimum wage at this point.

Scariest Moment: While taking pictures of the house for a realtor, Susan and Bob notice that in one of the Polaroids, there’s  man’s silhouette in the window.

Weirdest Moment: When young George Tatum walks in on his dad having sex, he’s wearing a bow tie for some reason.

Seriously, does he work at a catering company or something?

Champion Dialogue: “What if you marry her? Will you be my father or something like that?”

Body Count: 8; including the killer and 2 in a flashback, which is a startlingly low number for a 1981 joint.

1. Mr. Tatum’s lover is decapitated by an axe.
2. Mr. Tatum is axed in the forehead.
3. Barbara has her throat slit.
4. Candy is killed some damn way.
5. Tony is killed offscreen.
6. Joey is garroted.
7. Cathy is hacked to death with a claw hammer.
8. George Tatum is shot.

TL;DR: Nightmares in a Damaged Brain is a boring, tawdry slasher that doesn't deserve the notoriety it has achieved.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1267

Census Bloodbath: Feta Sleaze

Year: 1981

Director: Joe D'Amato (as Peter Newton)

Cast: George Eastman, Annie Belle, Edmund Purdom

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

As we inch toward the dregs of Census Bloodbath in 1981, we’ll be seeing that, despite its reputation for being the Golden Year for slasher cinema, there’s still plenty of crap to go around. This was the slasher genre, after all. It’s not exactly renowned for its consistency and integrity, even in the early days. And there’s perhaps no genre in cinema history more prone to lapses in integrity than 80’s Italian horror, which is where we find ourselves right now.

Today’s topic of discussion is the Joe D’Amato flick Absurd, also sold as Rosso Sangue (Red Blood). Also sold as Horrible. Also sold as Monster Hunter. Also sold as Zombie 6. But mostly sold as Anthropophagus 2, the supposed sequel to Anthropophagus, a movie I quite like. For that reason only, I was jazzed for Absurd.

I should have known better.

In Absurd, two Greeks descend upon small town “America” without explanation during the night of the Big Football Game. One of these is Father Andres (Edmund Purdom, who made bad movie history as the Dean in Pieces), a priest who also studies biochemistry. The other is Mikos Stenopolis (George Eastman), a bloodthirsty killer with the power to heal dead tissue and coagulate his blood like, crazy fast, so wounds don’t hurt him or something. Science! It’s worth noting that he almost never actually uses this power, because they don’t have the budget to manage such extravagance. This is just a pseudoscience explanation for his Michael Myers strength.

We don’t know why this now officially superhuman Michael Myers and his perhaps even more useless Dr. Loomis appear in this small town, nor do we care. The Halloween riffing doesn’t end there (they literally call him the Boogeyman) as Mikos ditches the hospital and closes in on the Bennett home where a babysitter is taking care of the kids while their parents are out watching the Big Game, which has more or less incapacitated the entire police force as well. Not that the active officer Sgt. Engelman (Charles Borromel) is much help anyway. He spends most of his time asking the priest to recite exposition over and over again and then not investigating things until it’s already too late.

Anyway, these kids are Katia (Katya Berger) and Willy (Kasimir Berger). Katia is bedridden with a brace to correct her spinal column (rendering her as helpless as the deaf, mute, and blind Jennifer Jason Leigh in the same year’s Eyes of a Stranger), and Willy has a full time job being the most annoying child eve put onscreen, constantly whining and defying the instructions of every single adult trying to keep him alive.

If the goal was to make you sympathize with Mikos’ urge to kill children, it worked.

After finally watching Absurd/Anthropophagus 2, I feel like one of its alternate titles would fit the movie better: Horrible. Although there is a heaping helping of hilarious “Italians faking America” gimcrackery and some truly inexplicable bad-good scenes (one of my favorites is a surgery scene where the doctor snips vaguely at some intestines with scissors, frantically switching pairs of scissors once every .25 seconds like he’s doing a challenge on The Amazing Race), Joe D’Amato is working very hard to earn his reputation as Most Boring Italian Director.

What I have long come to associate with Italian horror is a certain reluctance to adhere to a straightforward plot but a masterful sense of composing surreal, horrifying cinematic images. D’Amato is the opposite. Absurd’s plot is an extravagantly cavalier rip-off of Halloween (besting even He Knows You’re Alone, which essentially cribs John Carpenter’s entire score wholesale), chugging flatly through a Babysitters in Peril subroutine with nary a narrative fillip in sight. 

So it’s at least comprehensible, but it comes at the expense of anything interesting to look at. D’Amato (also credited as cinematographer) shoots his scenes like they’re horses with broken legs. The devastatingly frequent woodland shots are brutally inelegant, murky, and ill-framed (trees tend to block half the action, because who has time to plan ahead when the director is heading two departments), and the interiors are lit like somebody told a sitcom lighting designer to achieve a “Walmart ambience.”

It’s not fair to compare Absurd to Anthropophagus (it’s also pointlessly romantic, considering that the only thing this “sequel” shares with that film is its director, star, and a certain predilection for disembowelment.), but this movie couldn’t even dream of achieving one iota of that film’s class, beauty, and elegance.

Remember, that’s the movie where a pregnant woman gets her fetus ripped out.

Absurd is just plain bad. No matter how much the score squeals, desperately proclaiming its terror, it can’t punch up the deathly dull chase scenes that perforate Absurd’s already tenuous pacing. There’s a chase scene between a hobbling handicapped girl and a blinded killer and it’s still the fastest, most action-packed moment in the film. Plus, the gore that’s meant to be Absurd’s shot in the arm curbs its creativity, limiting its especially grotesque kills like it’s on a blood-free diet. And the kills we actually get (most notably a wholly useless character getting his head split open by a band saw) are full of bungled close-ups so extreme you can’t tell whether you’re looking at flesh, bone, or maybe just the wall.

And don’t even get me started on the acting! Edmund Purdom is tedious as the useless priest, his only trick being holding his hand feebly to his collar in a sickly approximation of pious shock. But even worse is Kasimir Berger as Willy, who alternates between reading his lines like a robot whose batteries have just been removed and shrieking at the top of his lungs. Everybody else reaches a median of overly showy woodenness that the at least blends into the background.

Like I said, there are some campy fun moments sprinkled throughout like garnishes, almost apologizing for what you had to sit through to get to them: the biker gang that drives back and forth down the same street like they’re stuck in a Groundhog Day-esque time loop and the enormous suit of armor replete with battle ax decorating this rural Southern home are but two of the inane delights you can come to expect from D’Amato’s anti-masterpiece, but they’re hardly worth the hour and change of relentlessly boring, pallid horror they’re ensconced in.

Killer: Mikos Stenopolis (George Eastman)

Final Girl: Katia Bennett (Katya Berger)

Best Kill: The nurse is drilled in the temple using a magic bit that extends like Pinocchio’s nose all the way through her head.

Sign of the Times: Emily’s hair makes her look like a botched Annie Lennox clone.

Scariest Moment: The town drunk laughs maniacally after handing Emily something she dropped.

Weirdest Moment: The Forrests enjoy the game while chowing down on that classic, All-American football snack: spaghetti.

Champion Dialogue: “We’re just going down the road. After all, it’s not as if we’re leaving for South America.”

Body Count: 7

1. Nurse is drilled in the temple.
2. Mechanic has his skull sawed in half.
3. Biker is strangled.
4. Peggy is pickaxed in the head.
5. Emily has her head stuffed in the oven and is stabbed in the neck with scissors.
6. Father Andres is strangled.
7. Mikos Stenopolis is decapitated with a battle axe.

TL;DR: Absurd is a tedious, occasionally unintentionally silly slog.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1247

Census Bloodbath: Intensive Scare Unit

For our podcast episode about this very film, please click here.

Year: 1982

Director: Jean-Claude Lord

Cast: Lee Grant, Michael Ironside, Linda Purl

Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

For all their reputation of politeness, the Canadians really know what they’re doing when it comes to making movies about serial murder. On average, any Canadian slasher flick is miles ahead of its U. S. counterpart. My Bloody Valentine is way more loveable than the thematically similar The Prowler, the States’ Bloody Birthday couldn’t hold a candle to Happy Birthday To Me, Terror Train rattles the fraternity prank revenge flick Hell Night right off its track, and Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II is pretty much the Empire Strikes Back of slasherdom.

Sure, they’ve made their share of duds (I regret renting a tux for Prom Night and Humongous has miniscule worth), but in general the country knows what’s up when it comes to sticking sharp objects in people. Which is how we come to Visiting Hours, a 1982 hospital slasher that came late in the game but still lacerates the competition. Halloween II might be the medical horror people put on a pedestal form that era, but Visiting Hours is a filthy, gorgeous thoughtful treat.

As if we needed any more reasons to be scared of hospitals. Did you know they keep sick people there?

In Visiting Hours, outspoken TV anchorwoman Deborah Balin (Lee Grant) espouses nonviolent philosophies and vows to defend a woman who is being tried for shooting her husband after he beat her. Unfortunately this sets off misogynist serial killer Colt Hawker (Michael Ironside of – drumroll – Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II), a daddy’s boy whose mother severely burned his father after he hit her. After Colt attacks Deborah in her home, she is sent to County General Hospital to recuperate.

As she heals with the help of devoted/elfin and gorgeous nurse Sheila (Linda Purl) and her doting producer/boyfriend Gary Baylor (William Shatner of William Shatner), Colt stalks her over the course of Labour Day weekend. It’s a holiday, he can afford to take his time with it. Killers need to relax, too. In his deadly pursuit, he murders anystaff or patients who get in his way.

This is not, shall we say, a trivial pursuit.

The really exciting thing about Visiting Hours is that – uniquely in the slasher genre – it doesn’t just depict violence against women, it’s about violence against women. At every level, in nearly every scene, Visiting Hours engages with the real problems that manifest both in society and the media. Of course this means that the film isn’t free from the unpleasantness of those very same films, occasionally dipping into the post-grindhouse unpleasantness akin to Don’t Answer the Phone or Eyes of a Stranger.

But despite its scuzziness (most prevalent in a pretty arbitrary sequence I dubbed the Rape Interlude), Visiting Hours never asks you to enjoy the violence you’re watching. That’s a very important distinction, and its unrelenting focus brings it to a level that very few slashers even dream of reaching: it’s actually scary. From the opening attack on, Visiting Hours toys with your nerves, constructing tension sequences with all the right ingredients: well rounded, sympathetic characters, unpredictable outcomes, and multiple threads coming together for a big reveal.

The whole thing culminates in a Final Girl sequence so drawn-out and harrowing that she can hardly even scream by the end. Deborah is vulnerable, resourceful, indomitable, and very worthy of being at the center of the most meaningful character arc of early 80’s slasherdom. [SPOILERS This nonviolent woman is relentlessly pursued by Colt – an emissary of the rampant cult (geddit?) of misogyny. He so doggedly attacks her that she is eventually driven to thwart he ironclad morals and end her suffering with a violent act: gutting Colt like a fish. She is a pacifist driven to violence by a patriarchal society that devalues women and only creates more evil in the world.] It might not be perfectly expressed, but damn if it isn’t one of the most engaging slasher storylines I’ve seen in months.

And that’s saying something. Pray for me.

Happily, much of the grittiness of Colt Hawker is scrubbed away by either circumstances (the girl he brings home to torment later plays a key role in his downfall) or a hearty inoculation of camp. Because you can’t have existed in 1982 without being inherently embarrassing, there’s plenty of silly moments to cheer you up. A big source of amusement is the fact that Colt Hawker changes costumes more often than a Lady Gaga concert, including a bizarre tribal getup complete with clip-on piercings. He actually stops to change in the middle of a chase sequence! My current working theory is that Visiting Hours is an aborted prequel to the Dana Carvey classic, Master of Disguise.

Another plot point that will have you and your friends debating for hours is Sheila’s “babysitter.” She’s always around, has no qualms about using the shower or the bed, and drapes herself lovingly over the duvet wrapped only in a towel. They’re about as explicit as a lesbian couple could get back in the day, while remaining maddeningly determined to act like there’s nothing unusual going on beyond being the hired help.

Although my dream job does involve nobody giving a damn what I wear, so maybe she just hooked it up.

As if that weren’t enough, the movie is just plain good. I know I’m a sucker for a bold color scheme, but the hospital exterior and many key scenes are lit with a chilling blue that creates a dark fairy tale atmosphere that’s hard to shake off. The cinematography is as classically skillful as Canadians could get, and they’re even on the ball enough to sneak in a little symbolism hither and thither.

So there you have it. Visiting Hours is a fun, well constructed, frightening, smart, satisfying slasher flick. The fact that I could write for this long without even bringing up William Shatner speaks to how arresting it is. I do wish that some of Colt’s scenes were a little less… rapey, but they’re tolerably managed and play a huge part in the thesis of the film. Oh, Canada. What would I do without you?

Killer: Colt Hawker (Michael Ironside)

Final Girl: Deborah Balin (Lee Grant)

Best Kill: An elderly patient has her air tube cut and Colt takes her picture as she asphyxiates.

Sign of the Times: Lisa wears a leather jacket over a hot pink outfit with diagonal stripes and she isn’t arrested.

Scariest Moment: Sheila gets a call revealing that the killer is at home with her daughter.

Weirdest Moment: Colt squeezes a stress ball as he murders people.

Champion Dialogue: “You’ve got a lot of friends. Or else you know a lot of florists.”

Body Count: 7

1. Francine is killed offscreen.
2. Mrs. Corrigan has her air tube cut.
3. Connie is stabbed in the gut.
4. Vinnie is stabbed in the chest.
5. Cop #1 is thrown through a window.
6. Cop #2 has his jaw broken.
7. [Colt is gutted.]

TL;DR: Visiting Hours is a grimy but intelligent slasher that engages very well with the violence against women inherent to the genre.

Rating: 9/10

Word Count: 1210

Census Bloodbath: Suffering Is Good For Pleasure

Year: 1981

Director: Jesús Franco

Cast: Olivia Pascal, Christoph Moosbrugger, Nadja Gerganoff

Run Time: 1 hour 24 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

European slasher films are something special. Whether they're top shelf fare like Suspiria and Twitch of the Death Nerve or low rent knock-offs like Trhauma and Murder Syndrome, there's always a spark that dances in the eyes of the Eurotrash flicks. Perhaps its just that I've grown used to the Western modes of storytelling or that I allow the language barrier to gloss over simple mistakes, but whatever it is, these films are truly, undeniably different.

1981's Bloody Moon (AKA Die Säge des Todes) is one of these films. What would have otherwise been an unremarkable smear on a forgotten footnote of cinema history is double-filtered through the addled mind of Spanish sleazemeister Jesús Franco and the resources of West Germany, then slathered with the most literally transcribed, un-emphatic dub ever created by stoned Americans trapped overnight in a recording studio with nothing else to do.

It's not a film you'll want to take home to mama, but it's unique in that ineffable way that the American films of the time couldn't capture. It's certainly not better than the bulk of its peers, but its logistical missteps, overwrought dialogue, and surreal scene structure at least create an indelibly memorable experience.

Case in point.

Bloody Moon takes place on a remote resort in Spain, which one Professor Alvaro (Christoph Moosbrugger) has converted into a language school. The estate is the home of Countess Maria Gonzales (María Rubio), an elderly spinster in a wheelchair. Although her niece Manuela (Nadja Gerganoff) takes care of the place, she has bequeathed her fortune to her nephew Miguel (Alexander Waechter), who has a deformed face (it's burned, I guess, but it just looks like spilled oatmeal crusted around his forehead) and the unfortunate quirk of murdering women who won't sleep with him.

As the new crop of students arrives for the semester, late arrival Angela (Olivia Pascal) begins to suspect that a mysterious prowler is stalking her and her friends. There's barely enough characterization of the women in this film to even qualify them as Meat rather than Wallpaper, but they are Inga (Jasmin Losensky), a whiny, unlucky in love type - think the beginning of a Jennifer Aniston movie, Eva (Ann-Beate Engelke), a blonde, and Laura (Corinna Drews), a blonde who dies wearing cheetah print hot pants.

After a series of gruesome murders, Angela must rush to discover the identity of the killer. Is it Miguel, who is always hanging around, peeping into windows? Is it Manuela, who seduces her brother and leers up at the moon topless every night? (See? European films are something special.) Alvaro, who is having trouble paying his rent and is so despicably lazy that his "school" is just a set of booths with headphones where the students listen to language tapes? Antonio (Peter Exacoustos), the resident tennis stud/gardener with a hive of jealous women orbiting around him? Or is it Paco (Otto Retzer), the groundskeeper who always seems to be quietly hallucinating in the background while handling sharp objects?

Well, that's for me to know and you to find out, but rest assured the central mystery draws from the best and brightest tropes of the giallo film. A suspect list of biblical proportions? Check. An elderly stateswoman with a dangling inheritance? Check. A nonsensical plot that exists only insofar as it is scooting helpless women toward their untimely demise? Check, check, and check.

I've learned so much about garden tool nomenclature while watching these films.

As a low budget Eurotrash slash picture, do I even need to tell you that Bloody Moon isn't scary to the slightest degree? Sure, there's sequences that drum up some semblance of a gut feeling, but these are generally through the defiance of expectations, like "Deary me, they killed a real snake. Someone call PETA." or "Yeah, I legitimately didn't expect them to run that child over with a car." They even manage to screw up the perennial Spring-Loaded Cat scare, making our fateful feline nose open a door and then somehow leap up at the unsuspecting victim from floor level. 

It's cartoonishly terrible, but at least this allows the film to lean into the curve and embrace its campiness. The actors chew the plaster off the walls, the music sounds like either Pac-Man's death throes or Frankie Avalon and Ritchie Valens' attempt at Gone with the Wind, and the cinematographer ambles along, liberally applying zooms wherever he deems necessary. And that's everywhere. There's plenty of trash panache littered around, like the obligatory roller disco sequence, the wooden dummy that appears in a bungalow during the height of a chase sequence, or the conspicuously foam-textured boulder inexplicably careening from the bluffs toward our heroine.

There's dozens of these moments floating around the film, completely separate from any sense of narrative motivation or realism, buried like chestnuts in the thick bed of indigestible dialogue. I know I mentioned the laughably bizarre dub earlier, but it's time to dive in. Each line is tortuously wrenched from its mother tongue, fastidiously converted word by unrelenting word until it's nothing but an incomprehensible, slavering mash. 

One of my favorite chestnuts takes a place of honor as the title of this review, but other favorites include "Caress me everywhere, melt in my arms," "I could use a drink like beer," and "As a lover, he's fantastic." The entire film is like this. It's like Yoda reading Shakespeare and it is exquisite.

And come to think of it, Miguel kind of looks like the illicit love child of Yoda and Shakespeare.

The only straightforward appeal that Bloody Moon has lies in its gore sequences, which are tremendously fake, but fun and blood-soaked in the best kind of slasher tradition. These sequences were enough to earn the film an honored spot on the UK's Video Nasties list, and they are a veritable Ice Bucket Challenge of grue, splattering its victims every which way with scissors, gardening tools, granite blocks with giant buzz saws, and much much more.

The plot is far too dull and rudimentary to carry the weight of its superior camp sequences, but Bloody Moon is worth checking out for the amateur masochist on the prowl. It's the perfect movie for a low pressure evening hangout if you have friends who aren't too great at paying attention. A less than hearty, but feebly determined thumbs up from me!

Killer: [Alvaro (Christoph Moosbrugger) and Manuela (Nadja Gerganoff)]

Final Girl: Angela (Olivia Pascal)

Best Kill: Inga lets a man with a stocking over his face tie her to a cement slab because she thinks it's kinky, but then he cuts her head off with a circular saw.

Sign of the Times: I don't know whether this is supposed to be a towel or a dress, but it's doing both jobs poorly.

Scariest Moment: The language students are forced to learn the "vosotros" conjugation.

Weirdest Moment: Inga pretends she has a lover in her bungalow by bouncing on her bed and moaning.

Champion Dialogue: "For progress in Spanish, nothing beats lessons in bed."
Body Count: 9; not including a snake that gets decapitated with garden shears.

1. Party Girl is stabbed in the gut with scissors.
2. Aunt Maria is burned to death with a torch.
3. Eva is stabbed through the boob.
4. Inga is decapitated with a circular saw.
5. Souvenir Kid is run over with a car.
6. Laura has her neck crushed with tongs.
7. Miguel is stabbed through the neck with a knitting needle.
8. Alvaro is sliced in the chest with a chainsaw.
9. Manuela is strangled. 

TL;DR: Bloody Moon is a suspenseless giallo riff, but the campiness and gore slightly make up for it.
Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 1295