Census Bloodbath: Cry For Help

Year: 1982

Director: David Nelson

Cast: Susan Kiger, Martin Tucker, William T. Hicks 

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

For the first time in a very long time, I've just entered into a slasher movie about which I knew absolutely nothing beforehand. It was kind of an exciting prospect, to be honest. Usually I at least know a log line or an actor or a kill or something, but this time all I had was a title. That title in question is Death Screams, which is just lurid enough to pique the interest. It's certainly better than the film's alternate title, House of Death. And it's a good thing this is the angle from which I approached the movie, because the poster for House of Death writes checks that this film can't cash. 

Observe.

Death Screams has one pound of boring for every ounce of interesting in that poster. We open on the requisite prologue kill, where a couple - Angie (Penny Miller) and Ted (Larry Sprinkle of A Day of Judgment and Trick or Treat) - is making out by a river until a train passes and they... drown somehow? The next morning, their small town is gearing up for the annual carnival, so nobody can really be bothered by them going missing.

There are an infinite amount of characters wandering around the town for the next fifty minutes, but the ones we really need to key into are Bob (Curt Rector) and Kathy (Andrea Savio), a pair of college students who have been assisting the baseball coach Neil Marshall (Martin Tucker); Diddle (John Kohler), who takes the worst traits of every slasher movie prankster character and rolls them all into one obnoxious snowball; Lily Carpenter (Susan Kiger), who is marked as the Final Girl by the fact that she has a last name and that we spend way too much time with her for her not to end up being important, rather than anything actually interesting in her character; and Sheriff Avery (William T. Hicks, also of A Day of Judgment), who wanders around town savagely insulting any citizen he comes across.

After the fair, the infinite teen population of the town gathers at the river for a bonfire, where the killer waits another 25 minutes or so to actually start mowing them down. There are a huge number of red herrings that just kind of sit there doing nothing, including Edna (Helene Tryon, also of A Day of Judgment), Lily's salty grandmother who thinks no man is good enough for her; Casey (Hanns Manship also also of A Day of Judgment - all in all these two movies share four actors and one cameraperson hilariously named Gene Poole), the mentally challenged son of Edna's friend Agnes who loves Coach Marshall so much he wants to defend him from all harm; and Sheriff Avery who, have I mentioned, fucking hates everyone who lives in his town. Oh, and his son died in a car crash four years ago, as we find out in a random soap opera scene shoehorned in at about the hour mark.

To be fair, we do get ONE kill between the opening and closing ten minutes, but I literally don't even know who this is.

I don't want to confuse you into thinking the beginning and ending of the movie are substantially better than the middle. They're not. You're slogging through a whole bunch of nothing to arrive at... a whole bunch of nothing. There are a handful of kills that are fun enough in concept, but for the most part, they're either offscreen jabs with a machete or so underlit and choppily edited that you might be watching a chef prepare sushi for all you can tell. 

I'll admit it: This review has the worst body count I've ever prepared, because I'm entirely unclear as to how many people died in Death Screams, when they died, and what method affected their shuffling off this mortal coil. There's definitely someone who gets shot in the head at one point, but I didn't include it because I'm pretty sure it's someone who already died elsewhere on the list. And the dummy used to achieve this particular effect is so shoddy that it didn't occur to me that it was ever meant to be a person. I literally thought that, within the reality of this movie, the Sheriff was shooting a dummy.

So no, the kills don't work. And there's hardly any attempts at horror, but of the ones made, not much of it really works. There's a full five minute scene where Lily tells a campfire story, which I can only assume was kept in to pad the run time, and thern we get a botched cat scare where the poor creature struggles to wriggle out of its hidey hole so what's supposed to be a shock moment lasts a good twenty seconds. The one solid element is that killer has this trademark shriek that is pretty Llorona-esque and chilling, even if it doesn't make one lick of sense with the eventual reveal (hilariously, the killer's backstory is that their mom was a stripper so they hate sex - one of the most wrongheaded reveals in a subgenre with a history of front and center misogyny). 

If it helps, I'm pretty sure this movie passes the Bechdel test at least.

So if this film isn't full of kills, what is it full of? Well, other than shit I mean. Well, more than anything, Death Screams is about the ensemble of people that populates a small town, and it honestly does a pretty good job at achieving this atmosphere. Of course, capturing the rhythm and reality of small town life comes with an inherent sense of doldrums, but at least it's authentic!

There are moments that unspool infinitely forth of interactions between a numberless combination of characters pulled from the massive ensemble. Any time this involves the character of Diddle, one of those vexatious class clowns who is Always On (two standard slasher tropes he indulges in with gusto are the Unsolicited Impression and the Outhouse Scene), I want to rip this movie in half and throw it in the river. But otherwise it's vaguely pleasant, even if every cheerful scene is caked in ubiquitous, manic electronic music that sounds like the loading screen of an Atari game.

However, if the only thing you're coming to this for is that small town atmosphere, you'd do much better with My Bloody Valentine or Strange Behavior, which have actual good movies on top of that. Truly the only interesting things about Death Screams are that alt poster, maybe a couple kills, and the fact that the director is the brother of 50's teen idol Ricky Nelson. And to be honest, I had a small amount of fun at the expense of some of the sillier moments, but they're not in an abundance that would make this flick worth anybody's time whatsoever.

Killer: [Coach Neil Marshall (Martin Tucker)]

Final Girl: Lily Carpenter (Susan Kiger)

Sign of the Times: Every man who doesn't show interest in Ramona is called a "queer."

Best Kill: There's a throat slash with a piece of glass that's actually pretty gnarly.

Scariest Moment: Ted and Angie's corpses float up to a girl who's skinny dipping, and she starts to thrash around in fear in the mist.

Weirdest Moment: We've been watching Angie and Ted's corpses float downriver for hours, and yet they're discovered in the exact same place they were killed, so I suppose they must have circumnavigated the globe.

Champion Dialogue: "Shut your mouth before your brains fall out."

Body Count: 11; though the final number is unclear, as are most of the deaths themselves.

1. Ted and
2. Angie are drowned by a train passing?
3. Water Fountain Girl is shot with an arrow and smothered with a plastic bag.
4. Ladder Boy is macheted.
5. Sandy is killed in the neck.
6. Diddle is slashed offscreen and strung up upside down.
7. Walker is decapitated offscreen.
8. Walker's Girlfriend is decapitated offscreen.
9. Party Boy is macheted in the hand to death.
10. Ramona falls through the stairs and becomes in half.
11. Neil Marshall is slashed in the throat with a piece of glass.

TL;DR: Death Screams is passable at creating small town atmosphere and almost nothing else.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1389

Census Bloodbath: Jesus Loathes Me, This I Know

Year: 1981

Director: Charles Reynolds

Cast: William T. Hicks, Harris Bloodworth, Deborah Bloodworth 

Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

Although 1981 slashers never went as crazy as their late 80’s counterparts eventually would, we’ve been through a lot this year. We’ve met ghost cowboys, been haunted by scarecrows, and battled kids, demons, giant puppet spiders, and even mad scientists. But all that could never have prepared me for our penultimate slasher of the year: A Day of Judgment, a period piece Christian morality tale that could – without controversy – be screened at a church movie night.

I mean, I suppose it’s at least minimally more fun than a sermon.

Set in the late 1920’s, (on a budget presumably less than $1920), A Day of Judgment tells the story of a small town whose citizens have turned away from the church. Although we spend a good ten minutes with the dismayed, potentially violent Revered Cage (Charles Reynolds) – who looks like he was prepping to audition for the Aaron Eckhart role in Erin Brockovich - he literally vanishes from the movie when a hooded, scythe-wielding figure comes to town to extract the souls from the town’s sinners.

These unholy men and women, as depicted in Love, Actually-style criss-crossing vignettes, are Mr. Sharpe (William T. Hicks of Death Screams), the wicked bank manager who cheats people out of their money but – even worse – refuses to stop working on Sunday; Charlie Milford (Brownless David), a ranting drunk who exacts violent revenge on the man who fired him (Harris Bloodworth); George Clay (Toby Wallace), a young man who tricks his parents into signing a form that allows him to sell their business and put them in a home; Mrs. Fitch (Helene Tryon, also of Death Screams – side note: I’m starting to get pretty nervous about Death Screams), an old shut-in who hates the children who live in her neighborhood; and Ruby (Careyanne Sutton), a gold digger who married the owner of the local department store but is dallying with his star employee Kenny (Larry Spinkle, who shared the screen with Gene f**king Simmons in Trick or Treat).

By far the most exciting fact about this movie.

I do understand that the slasher subgenre is fundamentally about punishing sinners, but there’s something about interacting directly with that theme that makes A Day of Judgment deeply unpleasant. First off, instead of intoxicated, libidinous teens, our character set is a handful of Prohibition-era assholes who speak like they watched one episode of Masterpiece Theatre and decided they could take it from there. The ensemble approach prevents you from engaging with the story through the arc of an actual protagonist, and each of the six sinners is such a loathsome, abhorrent piece of pestilential garbage that their chaste, blood-free death sequences just don’t make up for the ingloriously long time we’re forced to spend with them. We’re condemned to suffer with these degenerates for 100 minutes, a run time a slasher just can’t sustain, especially one that’s as poorly constructed as this.

There aren’t even any kills for the first half hour, so we’re forced to watch dozens of people pootle around town doing everyday activities like dancing the Charleston and talking about penny candy in between being miserable sods. Mrs. Fitch literally poisons a goat! It’s a hideous combination of tedious and repugnant and only two deaths are worth mentioning at all (a man is decapitated in the film’s only bona fide gore effect, and Mrs. Fitch is dragged into Hell by hands bursting from the Earth, which is admittedly pretty cool). A Day of Judgment is the barest wisp of a slasher film, perhaps holding even less claim to the genre than Road Games, and that film only features one onscreen kill!

In fact, A Day of Judgment half-heartedly evokes a lot of genres. In any given moment, it can switch between erotic thriller, corporate espionage, wacky redneck adventure, period drama, and Grapes of Wrath-esque misery porn. There’s about 19 different movies jostling for attention in this slasher, and the only thing they have in common is that they all suck.

Am I making my point clear enough? I hated this movie.

The easily distracted script that shoves so many different genres in here is also responsible for some of the most egregious subplot erosion this side of The Room. The film spends an inordinate amount of time setting up elements that will literally never come into play, like the aforementioned Reverend who was pretty clearly gearing up to be the killer before his position is usurped, three old women in black who lurk in the background of every first act scene like an elderly Greek chorus who likewise vanish without a trace, and then the opposite – a subplot that bursts out of nowhere, fully formed, in the third act as if we’d been watching it this entire time. The timeline can’t even keep itself straight, with scenes haphazardly flipping between day and night so abruptly and so frequently that I’m pretty sure the movie technically takes place over a calendar year.

Yeah, A Day of Judgment is a mess. It’s poorly acted, interminably plotted, spectacularly unfocused, and packed with insufferable characters. And then it has the audacity to [SPOILERS, but who cares] 1) Reveal that this has all been a dream, having its characters emerge fully converted like a sextet of pious Scrooges, cavorting about and smiling like saps at the people they’d screwed over or murdered literal minutes before, and 2) close on a title crawl of the 10 Commandments, as if we’d learned an important message from watching this godforsaken movie. You know what? F**k A Day of Judgment. Toss this one to the lions.

Killer: The Devil? (Fred Roland?)

Final Girl: Yeah, no.

Best Kill: The decapitation is actually pretty great, but nothing beats a good, old fashioned dragging to Hell.

Sign of the Times: A car that falls to the bottom of a gulch immediately explodes because, period piece be damned, this was 1981.

Scariest Moment: A figure with glowing red eyes appears behind Mr. Sharpe.

Weirdest Moment: An out-of-his-mind, vengeful Charlie forces a newspaper photo to drink beer.

Champion Dialogue: “I remember the things you told me in the barn after the lightning had struck the oak.”

Body Count: 10

1. Noodles the Goat is poisoned.
2. Mrs. Fitch is dragged to Hell.
3. Morgan shoots himself.
4. Harvey falls and hits his head.
5. Mr. Sharpe is locked in the icehouse and killed by the camera rushing at him.
6. Sid Martin is shot.
7. Grace is shot.
8. Ruby and
9. Kenny die in a house fire.
10. Charlie Milford is decapitated with a scythe.

TL;DR: A Day of Judgment is a tedious, hateful quasi-slasher with almost no redeeming qualities.

Rating: 2/10

Word Count: 1132