Census Bloodbath: Heads Will (Rock And) Roll

Year:
1985
Director:
Mats Olsson
Cast:
Jeff Harding, Naomi Kaneda, Michael Fitzpatrick
Run Time:
1 hour 29 minutes

Plot: Blood Tracks follows a crew shooting a music video for the hair metal band Solid Gold (played by the members of the real-life Swedish band Easy Action, including future Europe guitarist Kee Marcello) in the Colorado Rockies (played by Funäsdalen, Sweden). It goes horribly wrong when an avalanche traps them in an isolated cabin. It goes horribly wronger when various members of the party - including director Bob (Michael Fitzpatrick of Scream for Help) wander into the nearby abandoned factory, where a mother (Filippa Silverstone) and her brood of children have been hiding for the past 40 years after she murdered her husband in self defense. Somehow this has turned them into Hills Have Eyes-esque mutants.

Meanwhile, star Suzie (Naomi Kaneda) desperately tries to get in contact with their helicopter pilot liaison John (Jeff Harding, also of Scream for Help), who is already suspicious that something has gone terribly wrong.

Analysis: I love the time capsule nature of 1980s slashers, so when they focus on trendy music of the era, they tend to be interesting, even if those installments are rarely very good (see Terror on Tour, New Year's Evil, Rocktober Blood, Trick or Treat, and so on). Unfortunately, that rule of thumb has been severed with a pair of garden shears, because while I was eager to see what Blood Tracks had to offer, it came up empty at every opportunity. 

All it would have taken to win me over was for the filmmakers to simply set the camera down and let the 1980s happen at the lens, and Blood Tracks is too incompetent even for that. I was willing to let the weird ADR dialogue slide, because even though I didn't know it was Swedish when I turned it on, I can sniff out a European slasher at thirty paces. However, the incompetence is so much more deeply entrenched than that. 

The cinematography is incompetent. Everything is muddy and dark and uninteresting.

The screenplay is also incompetent. There are way too many characters in play here, and the movie never settles enough for any of them to come to the fore among the gnashing throng. You'd think that the fact that the movie has two screenwriters (Mats Helge Olsson and Anna Wolf) would allow them the opportunity to look at one another and figure out at least two different potential personality traits the characters might have, but they can't even come up with one, bless their hearts. 

The killers at least look different from one another, so that's nice. But there are also too many of them, only one of them ever gets a name, and I was never quite clear on exactly how many of them were actually kicking around in the first place.

The editing is also incompetent. It works in tandem with the cinematography and the staging (also incompetent) to render most of the kills completely illegible. I have spent years of my life trying to parse incoherent slasher movies, and I flatter myself that I have gotten quite good at it. So please believe me when I tell you that this is the most difficult time I've ever had merely trying to figure out what happens to the characters onscreen, let alone when and why. The kills are presumably the reason that any slasher movie existed in the mid-80s, so the fact that they are so abhorrently constructed is downright criminal. 

Frequently the editing conveniently leaves out the type of weapon that's in use, the exact part of the body to which it is being put to use, and sometimes even the identity of the poor sap who it is being used upon. Two separate murders involve the killer kind of simultaneously pulling on a person's body while crushing it in a process that seems to be effective but in such defiance of the laws of physics and the language that we have to describe such things that I had to invent the term "yanking" just to find some way to mark it in my notes.

You'll see below that I have failed to give Blood Tracks a completely bottom-of-the-barrel score. But trust me, that is not so much because the movie has merits, but because - as I said - I have been doing this for years and know just how much worse things can get. At least getting to look at the snowy Swedish landscape was nice.

Killer: The Family

Final Girl: Suzie (Naomi Kaneda)

Best Kill: It's technically not a kill, but the best gore effect by far is the lead killer's arm being shot right off.

Sign of the Times: Easy Action knew how to do the 1980s right.

Scariest Moment: The end credits open with a list of the actors that doesn't credit their characters, which felt uncanny and sinister in a way I can't quite explain.

Weirdest Moment: One couple is having sex in the car when an avalanche buries said car, and even though the rescue operation takes several minutes, the woman is still buck naked when she is pulled out of the snow.

Champion Dialogue: “We're buried! We're buried, you fool!"

Body Count: 15; not including several characters who are kidnapped by the killers and never heard from again, which means they're probably dead, though I have no proof of it.

1. The Father is stabbed in the back.
2. Frank is pushed off a platform.
3. Dave gets yanked.
4. Kee is decapitated offscreen. 
5. Nick is doused in gas and lit on fire.
6. Linda is killed in some way by a pulley-based trap.
7. Carrie is thrown from a platform and impaled on a spike.
8. Mary (I think) is killed in the face offscreen.
9. Sarah is yanked.
10. Fuck-Ass Bob Killer is shot.
11. Bob has a hatchet thrown through his forehead.
12. Louise is impaled with a blade pendulum thing.
13. Dark-Haired Killer is shot.
14. Leper Killer is stabbed in the neck and shot.
15. The Mother dies of... smoke inhalation? Falling?

TL;DR: Blood Tracks has a solid premise that it wastes with a scattershot, muddy approach.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1024

Census Bloodbath: Can We Reschedule?

Year:
1985
Director:
Ramsey Thomas (as Alan Smithee)
Cast:
Michele Little, Kerry Remsen, Douglas Rowe
Run Time:
1 hour 36 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Plot: Appointment with Fear is about... um.... Hold on, I need to stretch before I do this.

OK. Appointment with Fear is about four female friends holding a high school graduation party at an isolated mansion: Samantha (Pamela Bach, later Pamela Bach-Hasselhof, no points for guessing how that name change came about), who likes to take her top off and go swimming; Ruth (Deborah Voorhees of Innocent Prey and Friday the 13th: A New Beginning), who likes to take her top off and go swimming; Heather (Kerry Remsen of Pumpkinhead and A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge), who works as a mime and has a dark, never fully-explained story about having a younger brother who died; and Carol (Michele Little), who carries a shotgun mic everywhere to record audio from far away, as one does. 

Also hanging around are Carol's boyfriend Bobby (Michael Wyle), who rides a motorcycle with a mannequin in the sidecar and dresses like John Bender, and Heather's boyfriend Cowboy (Vincent Barbour), who is never not wearing a cowboy hat. Oh, and Norman (Danny Dayton), the unhoused man who hears voices who Carol sometimes lets sleep in the bed of her truck while she drives around. She brings him to the party, where he just sort of chills outside the mansion and parks the girls' cars as they arrive.

Give or take a few "huh?" moments in the character descriptions, that seems pretty straightforward, right? Honey, we're just getting started. While the party prep is happening, Sgt. Kowalski (Douglas Rowe) is hot on the tail of a man who he put in jail but was recently let out, the murderous Attis (Garrick Dowhen). Attis kills his unnamed wife, The Woman (Sergia Simone), in an attempt to steal their baby (who she hid behind the railing of the staircase she's sitting on, which is like two feet to her right, and Attis somehow doesn't hear or see it). As she dies, The Woman gives her baby to Heather, who just kinda carries it around for the rest of the movie, eventually bringing it to the party. Attis continues tracking down the kid, killing those who get in his way. The catch? Attis has actually been in a coma since last night.

That's right, this is the second astral projection slasher of 1985 after Eternal Evil. Anyway, Attis' motivations are pretty clear. He wants to kill his baby because he is the King of the Woods and he needs to make a sacrifice in order to ensure that he remains the King of the Woods for another year. Egyptian mythology is also involved, of course, but I didn't need to tell you that.

Analysis: So let me take you on a journey. As a longtime slasher fan I was becoming increasingly intrigued during the opening credits as the roster of B-tier slasher royalty kept scrolling by (Appointment with Fear was also produced by the Halloween franchise's Moustafa Akkad - the presence of a silent killer and a Dr. Loomis-esque character make it quite clear that he was hoping this would launch another slasher franchise, but no such luck). And then the whammy comes right at the end: directed by Alan Smithee.

The iconic pseudonym that directors used when they wanted to disavow projects certainly didn't make me less intrigued, but it did immediately dash my hopes that this might be a good movie. That said, it's a fucking weird movie, and that's just as good of a thing to be.

That plot synopsis just barely scratches the surface of what a bizarre film this is. Every character beat and dialogue scene has at least one odd thing about it, if not more, and merely keeping your grasp on what is happening moment to moment is enough to keep you engaged. These little moments also keep building. What starts as little details (like Samantha's mom hosing down the lawn in a bikini or the arbitrary mention that the architect of the house where the party is being held recently died) snowball into larger weirdnesses (like the running gag of Kowalski accidentally setting his own car on fire multiple times) which eventually explode into a dazzling crescendo with a spontaneous aerobics maypole dance sequence where even the characters don't seem to understand why it's happening, and which lasts for like 10 minutes.

All of this is a delight, and it's the only reason that Appointment with Fear is watchable, because it is a frankly awful slasher. It is tedious, the pacing is ruinously caddywompous, and the kills almost all take place offscreen. Plus, the ones we do get to see have the most boring, rote M.O.s, which offer nothing in the way of blood or creativity. And there are very few of them to begin with, because this slasher leaves way too many characters alive by the end.

Also, I have no idea why this movie is called Appointment with Fear. Nobody makes an appointment of any kind, scary or otherwise. And if the title is meant to refer to the audience's experience of the movie, calling it an appointment makes watching it sound like a chore. Sadly, in spite of the movie's brighter moments, it pretty much is one.

Killer: Attis (Garrick Dowhen)

Final Girl: Carol (Michele Little)

Best Kill: Ugh... I guess The Woman's, but mostly because of the aftermath of her being stabbed in the side, which is that she just kind of slumps indignantly against the stoop, is clearly lucid and capable of holding a conversation, and pretty much only bleeds out because Heather didn't think to call an ambulance.

Sign of the Times: Why tell you when I can show you?

Scariest Moment: Carol asks Norman about the gods that he talks to in his head and he says that maybe she'll get a chance to meet them tonight.

Weirdest Moment: This is a real Sophie's choice, but probably the scene where Carol tells Samantha about a sex dream that she had last night where Samantha fucked a dude on the floor of a discotheque while she watched.

Champion Dialogue: “All the crazies in here think he's the craziest of the crazies."

Body Count: 6

1. The Woman is stabbed in the side.
2. Ruth is stabbed offscreen.
3. Norman is decapitated.
4. Cowboy is killed offscreen.
5. Samantha is killed offscreen.
6. Attis is pierced with a maypole.

TL;DR: Appointment with Fear is a very bad, bad, boring slasher, but it makes up for that somewhat by being one of the weirdest goddamn movies ever made.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1113

Census Bloodbath: Computer? I Hardly Know Her!

Year:
1985

Director:
Andy Anderson

Cast:
John S. Davies, Lauren Lane, Michael Hendrix
Run Time: 1 hour 18 minutes

Plot: Interface follows Professor Rex Hobson (John S. Davies), who teaches a computer class as a local college and moonlights as a hacker. He becomes the primary suspect in a series of slayings that is being perpetrated by the Circle of Logicians, a cult of masked computer programmers who believe that they are ridding the world of evil. He reluctantly teams up with Amy Witherspoon (Lauren Lane of The Nanny), the resentful wife of his student Bobby (Michael Hendrix), when she shows up brandishing a gun and attempting to get to the bottom of things. Honestly, I'm not actually sure what her goal is, and she's mostly not sure how to accomplish it, so at least we're in the same boat. Anyway, the distrustful pair begin to fall for one another as they become targets of both the police and the computer cult.

Analysis: Weirdly, immediately after watching Post Mortem - Return to Carnage Hall, we are encountering another Texas-based student film, this time produced by the film program of University of Texas at Arlington. Even more weirdly, this one was also a pretty good time.

But let's make one thing clear. Interface is a weird movie, and that is not a word I throw around lightly. The fact that the original goal of the Circle of Logicians was merely to throw paint on evildoers is but the tip of the iceberg. Eventually the movie mutates into this bizarre femme fatale romantic comedy of errors that blends a 1970s conspiracy thriller and a 1980s slasher into the mix. And the thing is, that rom-com mode is actually where it really shines.

Interface is simply not a good slasher. Anything fun that it manages to accomplish with its techno-horror backdrop has already been done better in Evilspeak and much better in Murder by Phone, at least in terms of the kills it doles out to its victims. The body count deaths are bloodless and bland, and the movie eventually gives up on them in favor of a whole lot of gun violence, which as we know is a cardinal sin of the slasher genre. If you're not in the third act of a Scream movie, guns have no place here. Slasher murders demand flair!

The wide variety of inhuman masks worn by the Circle of Logicians (one of which is featured on the poster above) are at least very eerie and well-rendered, but the characters mostly just use their robotic voices to whine at one another in their big scenes. (That said, you do hear a robo-voice say "oh shit" at least twice in this movie, which is worth the price of admission alone.)

But once Amy and Rex are tossed in a box together and Interface starts shaking that box vigorously, everything comes alive. Their nagging, circular, back-and-forth dynamic felt punishing at first, but it eventually coheres into this bizarre blend of alt-comedy and slapstick that produces some genuinely funny moments with great timing, without sacrificing any of the movie's signature weirdness. Case in point - Rex (who is not a pinup hunk, nor does he pretend to be) spends a good chunk of the movie in a towel, having been forced to escape after coming out of the shower. Once he gets some pants, he's then forced to run around shirtless for the next 20 minutes or so. You just haven't lived until you've seen a man in a towel run away from a shotgun-wielding computer hacker. And basically every choice the movie makes is both as inexplicable and as deeply committed as that ever-so-long-running gag.

Another thing that helps boost the weirdness of the movie is the casting. The core cast is perfectly competent by the standards of this kind of amateur production, but there are some baffling choices around the edges. For instance, the movie opens on a scene where Lou Diamond Phillips (in his first credited role, already looking for all the world like a proper movie star with an innate command of the camera) battles the shortest crime boss you've ever seen. But the biggest whiff is the character of the jock bully (already a no-no for a college movie - jock bullies simply do not exist at universities, because they have already evolved into frat bros), who is portrayed by the world's most middle-aged man.

At the end of the day, none of this really adds up to Interface being "good." The first half is too tedious and packed with interchangeable characters for it to accomplish that. Whatever things it is good at, being a slasher certainly isn't one of them, and that's the reason we're here in the first place. However, it is a compellingly strange motion picture that earned a few genuine laughs from me, and that is something I desperately needed now that we have gotten this deep into 1985, which is so far shaping up to be the worst year of the 1980s for the slasher genre. At least, I sure hope it never gets worse than this.

Killer: The Circle of Logicians

Final Girl: Rex Hobson, Ph.D. (John S. Davies) and Amy Witherspoon (Lauren Lane)

Best Kill: Honestly, none of them, but the death of the prostitute Bambi (and how 1980s of this movie to assign the sex worker as "evil" rather than her pimp) at least involves her talking to a john who appears on a television screen and then exploding, so that's kinda weird.

Sign of the Times: The conversations about how computers need to be connected to phones in order to do anything was just as mystifying to me now as it probably was to people at the time.

Scariest Moment: Honestly, any time the scene lingers in the cult's lair, just staring at those masks is pretty spine-chilling.

Weirdest Moment: Midway through the third act, about 15 minutes before the movie ends, Rex takes a potty break and we just sit there watching Amy impatiently waiting in the foreground while he pisses like a racehorse for 52 straight seconds, the sound of which then makes her need to pee.

Champion Dialogue: “What's the matter? You seem more pathetic than usual."

Body Count: 12

1. Punk Sidekick is shot.
2. Crime Boss is shot.
3. Nervous Punk is elbow-choked.
4. Bodyguard is shot in the forehead.
5. Lead Punk is killed offscreen.
6. Bambi is killed in a hotel room explosion.
7. Paul is electrocuted by his phone.
8. Sidney is killed offscreen.
9. Male Cop is shot.
10. Security Guard is shot.
11. Female Cop is shot.
12. Cult Member is bonked on the head.

TL;DR: Interface is not a particularly good cyber-thriller slasher, but it's got a surprising amount of vim and vigor as a warped romantic comedy.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1133

Census Bloodbath: Let There Be Carnage

Year:
1989
Director:
John Harvey
Cast:
Rhett Pennell, John Harvey, Kevin Schmidt
Run Time:
1 hour 49 minutes

Plot: Post Mortem - Return to Carnage Hall takes place five years after the events of 1988's Carnage Hall. The Einstein-masked killer has returned as a ghostly apparition who possesses various people and causes them to commit murders in and around the Tom Brown Hall dorm at Texas Christian University. The only people who can stop him are the people who accidentally summoned him in the first place during a seance gone wrong - wide-eyed freshman Danny Hughes (Rhett Pennell), his free-spirited roommate Wesley "Elf" Worthington (John Harvey), Elf's girlfriend Cassandra (Kimb Shiver), and Cassandra's roommate/Danny's love interest Lisa (Marisa Murray) -as well as the ghosts of two of his previous victims, Kevin Schmidt (Kevin Schmidt) and Todd Camp (Todd Camp), who need to do a good deed to avoid being stuck in Purgatory forever, watching endless reruns of The Love Boat.

Analysis: Why watch Return to Carnage Hall without having seen Carnage Hall, you ask? Great question. I have been doing dogged research on exactly how to watch 1988's Carnage Hall for years now. It is literally the only movie on my slasher list that I have never been able to find access to, either online or out in the world (VHS tapes and import DVDs usually help a lot in this department). For all intents and purposes it is a lost film, even though it was tantalizingly screened in Ontario exactly once about a decade ago. However, during my latest round of research, I did discover that it has a sequel. While this sequel is so obscure that it literally doesn't even have a page on IMDb, it clearly exists, because I watched it with my own two eyes.

Why watch said sequel now instead of waiting until it's time to cover 1989 slashers, you ask? An even better question. I was only able to access the movie via a non-downloadable video file hosted online, and I wanted to make sure I watched it ASAP in case the link ever went dead. Now. Enough dithering. Let's get to the movie.

Made on a slim budget by actual college students at Texas Christian University, the Carnage Hall movies are pure amateur hour, shot-on-video, microbudget nonsense, which is why I didn't feel terribly bad about writing off the first installment as a lost film. However, my experience of watching its sequel has transmogrified my feelings about the situation into those of profoundest regret.

While everything I said about the movie is true (and it must be said, the only available copy online looks like absolute dogshit), it is also an utter delight. This is clearly the result of a group of friends throwing anything and everything they thought might be funny onscreen, which usually results in sheer tripe, but in this case harnesses a sort of deranged comic energy that uplifts the entire experience. Not every joke lands, but like all the best comedies, there are enough gags delivered at such a rapid pace that you hardly notice the duds as they're going by.

It's no Airplane!, mind you, but there is a delirious "let's put on a show" energy to the whole affair that is buoyant and effortlessly charming. And some of the jokes are genuinely funny, if a bit broad. Take, for instance, the scene where Cassandra first meets Danny and instead of shaking his hand, reads his palm and mutters "five kids, good luck." Or the bits where Cassandra and Lisa are trying to interpret the words they caught during their seance, which turn out to be Kevin and Todd singing along to the Love Boat theme song.

In addition to being genuinely funny with an unusually well thought-out screenplay, the movie has a lush sense of creativity in spite of its ramshackle production value, and this results in a great deal of dynamic staging the likes of which usually can't be found within miles of a 1980s slasher this cheap. The filmmakers' creative impulses run roughshod over the movie, leading it to peter out in the third act as the movie runs a good 20 minutes too long, but that's a trade I'm willing to make for moments like the wailing electric guitar on the score that perfectly matches the cadence of a professor who is blowing her top at Danny and Elf (whose names, by the way, are for some reason a reference to Danny Elfman).

On top of all this, Return to Carnage Hall is a perfect time capsule. As is the case for almost any movie too cheap to afford such nonessential things as costumes, sets, and the like, the camera simply captures what things really looked, sounded, and felt like in the late 1980s. This adds a great deal of texture to the experience, particularly during a gloriously campy dress-up montage. But the jokes about, say, people up in Heaven throwing on a tape of Beetlejuice or the boys doing an impression of Zelda Rubinstein in Poltergeist offer some great insight into what was truly stuck in the craw of big time horror fans during the waning years of the decade.  A decade that I might remind you was one of the best times for the horror genre that there ever was.

The movie is hardly a masterpiece, but I had a hell of a time watching it. Given how brutal slogging through 1985 has proven to be, it really was a breath of fresh air to be watching a movie so joyously invigorated by the mere idea of being a goofy slasher.

Killer: The Einstein-masked killer, in various forms

Final Girl: Danny Hughes (Rhett Pennell) and Wesley "Elf" Worthington (John Harvey) feat. Lisa (Marisa Murray)

Best Kill: Elvis is stuck to the wall with telekinetically tossed CDs and has his head split in half vertically with a vinyl record.

Sign of the Times: The boys' rooms are plastered with totally radical mid to late '80s movie posters, including The Blob, A Fish Called Wanda, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, Sleepaway Camp II, Summer School, Beetlejuice, Spaceballs, Die Hard, Monster Squad, and From Beyond (the latter of which is featured prominently in Elvis' death scene).

Scariest Moment: Kevin and Todd use their ghostly powers to distort their faces and voices in order to make Danny and Elf listen to them.

Weirdest Moment: The entire movie opens on a fake commercial for a store that sells globes that ties into the actual movie in basically zero ways.

Champion Dialogue: “Have a little respect for the dead, asswipe!"

Body Count: 10

1. Travis is decapitated after having his head pulled into a toilet.
2. Chelsea is drowned in a fountain.
3. Janitor is impaled with a mop handle.
4. Makeout Point Guy has his head slammed in a car door.
5. Shoplifter is shot.
6. Mall Cop shoots himself while possessed.
7. Liz has an 8 ball thrown into her forehead.
8. Random Dorm Guy is strangled and hanged with a phone cord.
9. Elvis has his head split in half with a vinyl record.
10. Cassandra is stabbed with a machete by Elf while possessed.

TL;DR: Post Mortem - Return to Carnage Hall is a charming amateur slasher, even if it overstays its welcome.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1212

Census Bloodbath: Marriage Can Be Murder

Year:
1985
Director:
Alberto De Martino
Cast:
Christina Nagy, David Warbeck, Carroll Blumenberg
Run Time:
1 hour 36 minutes

Plot: Formula for a Murder (AKA 7, Hyden Park - La casa maledetta) is set in New York state and follows Joanna (Christina Nagy), a rich woman who has had paraplegia since she was sexually assaulted by a man dressed as a priest and thrown down a flight of stairs (there's your clue that this is an Italian movie, if the title didn't already tip you off). After marrying her athletic trainer Craig (David Warbeck of The Beyond and The Black Cat), she finds herself in the middle of a tangled web of deceit, as (mid-plot spoiler alert) he is working with her friend Ruth (Carroll Blumenberg) to murder her and inherit her fortune, killing anybody who gets in the way of this plan.

Analysis: I would have straight-up removed Formula for a Murder from my Census Bloodbath list if not for two things. 1) There is a dream sequence that adds an additional onscreen kill, proving that the movie was at least slightly interested in being a slasher and not just a Hitchcockian thriller with occasional plot-necessary murders. 2) This is unmistakably a giallo movie.

It's a late-period giallo, certainly, but director and co-writer Alberto De Martino (who also made 1982's vividly unmemorable Blood Link) put in a black-gloved killer and some overheated murder melodrama, and you simply can't ignore that, even though the movie mostly revolves around a single, constantly-foiled murder plot than a constant string of body count murders.

Anyway, one major reason I was highly motivated to try and remove the movie from the list, beyond its failures as a slasher, is that it is a deathly dull experience. A movie with this little happening requires a strong character study to prop it up, and nobody onscreen has the barest wisp of a personality. And while Ruth and Craig are at least brought to life by competent actors, the actual lead delivers her poorly translated dialogue with all the fervor of a stoned teenager offering you pretzel samples at a mall. Formula for a Murder is Christina Nagy's only credited film role, and if you ask me, her resume coulda done with one less.

That said, it's not an entirely terrible slasher. There is a profoundly creepy recurring motif of a priest slowly approaching Joanna while holding a doll that both has these unsettling, swollen eyes and tinkles out a high-pitched nursery rhyme. Every time that comes back, it'll send a shiver down the spine. And the kills, while infrequent, aren't half-bad. They're not particularly gory by any stretch of the imagination, but they're more brutal and affective than they have to be, particularly a throat slashing via straight razor that shows how much effort it might actually take to carve through all that irritating gristle contained in the human neck.

There is also a scene where Joanna has a literal screaming orgasm that feels like it belongs in a proper 1970s giallo, so that's something. However, the fact that we are forced to spend so much time with her outside of that scene has a profoundly deleterious effect on the movie. She's tedious even at the best of times, but she can't even get survival right, because her Final Girl sequence one-ups Laurie Strode's "hit 'em once, take a nap" strategy by having her mostly just assume that because Craig has briefly passed out, this means that he has simply expired of his own accord. Maybe she figured that she had bored him to death.

Killer: Craig (David Warbeck)

Final Girl: Joanna (Christina Nagy)

Best Kill: This is probably my pick because it's the only one that feels different from the others, but one of the priests is slammed ruthlessly about the face with a shovel in a protracted and quite intense sequence. 

Sign of the Times: There's a whole lot of business about trying to reach a cordless phone handset that has been tossed down the stairs.

Scariest Moment: In Joanna's nightmare, she is wheeled away helplessly by an increasingly menacing priest.

Weirdest Moment: Dr. Sernich (Rossano Brazzi of Fear City) patiently explains that, even though Joanna's condition is fragile, hardcore sex won't kill her as long as it is an act of love.

Champion Dialogue: “You won't have time to feel sorry for yourself when we're married."

Body Count: 5

1. Father Peter has his throat slit with a straight razor.
2. Father Davis is bludgeoned repeatedly in the face with a shovel.
3. Dream Priest is stabbed to death by Joanna.
4. Ruth has her throat slashed with a straight razor.
5. Craig succumbs to his stab/falling-out-a-window wounds.

TL;DR: Formula for a Murder is boring as all hell, but it has a few exquisitely creepy moments to its name.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 803

Census Bloodbath: La Forma

Year:
1985
Director:
Rubén Galindo Jr.
Cast:
Hugo Stiglitz, René Cardona III, Eduardo Capetillo
Run Time:
1 hour 28 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Plot: Cemetery of Terror (Cementerio del terror) has a lot of moving parts because the idea of "genre" is a wet bar of soap in its hands. First and foremost, we have a pretty traditional slasher setup. Two friends, Jorge (Servando Manzetti) and Óscar (René Cardona III, who later became a director just like his father and his grandfather, the latter of whom directed the iconic 1960 movie La Llorona), conspire to lie to their girlfriends Olivia (Edna Bolkan of Don't Panic and Grave Robbers) and Mariana (Jacqueline Castro) about going to a high society party in order to get them to an abandoned mansion where they can spend the night and have sex. Their himbo friend Pedro (Andrés García Jr. of Like Water for Chocolate) is also tricked by their lie and invites his girlfriend Lena (Erika Buenfil, also of Grave Robbers and approximately 100,000 telenovela episodes) along. The only character traits differentiating any of these characters are that Olivia is a little vain, Mariana is a little horny, Pedro has a mullet, and Lena is observant and thus reluctant to enter the mansion. While there, they find a mysterious Satanic book and the guys plan the prank of the century: steal a body from the morgue and pretend to resurrect it, in order to scare the girls into having sex with them.

This plan works, in more ways than one. The girls do warm up to the boys (because they kinda did want to have sex with them in the first place). However, unbeknownst to the teens, they do also successfully resurrect the corpse, who just so happens to be the Satanist serial killer Devlon (José Gómez Parcero), who the obsessed Dr. Cardán (Hugo Stiglitz, Mexican character actor par excellence) has been warning Captain Ancira (Raúl Meraz) about all night. The corpse uses his Satanist claws (?) to rip his way through the teens while Cardán chases around after him, until at some point the killer gets his hands on the book and causes a zombie uprising at the nearby cemetery, threatening a group of kids that includes ringleader Tony (Eduardo Capetillo) and Ancira's children Anita (María Rebeca of Grave Robbers) and Raúl (César Adrian Sanchez). Oh, and this all takes place on Halloween night. Was everyone taking notes? This will be on the test.

Analysis: So, I had a lot riding on Cemetery of Terror being good, because the Mexican slasher mashup was the directorial debut of Rubén Galindo Jr., who we will be revisiting multiple times during Census Bloodbath with 1987's Don't Panic and 1989's Grave Robbers. It would be a shame to have to be dreading those titles. Thankfully, I think we've at least avoided "dread," but the strongest feeling I'm able to muster about those titles based on this one is "curiosity."

There certainly is a lot going on here. The bizarre mishmash of genres plays very much like a post-Nightmare on Elm Street supernatural slasher, which it obviously couldn't be because it was shot before the Craven masterpiece was unleashed upon an unsuspecting world in late 1984. That supernatural wave wouldn't truly crest until 1986, so this is ahead of the curve while also being miles behind it by dint of being a rip-off of Halloween a good four years past the sell-by date for something like that. In addition to some Carpenter-esque music and a "go get me a beer" scene that I haven't mentioned, I assume you noticed the Dr. Loomis we have scurrying around here. Cardán's breathless monologues about Devlon being pure evil only avoid being exact copies of Donald Pleasence's because of the liberal sprinkling of Catholic fears of Satanism.

It is halfway decent as a Halloween riff. The teens have good chemistry even though Andrés García Jr. is giving such a questionable performance that he can't even kiss convincingly. And while the kills are pretty samey, largely just involving Devlon using his claws to rip people apart in vaguely defined ways, some of them have their moments, including a pretty gnarly arterial spray. There's also a fun fakeout where Lena is so obviously the final girl thanks to her keen eye for things being awry that it comes as a shock when she is given one of the most violent deaths yet.

And while there are a few aesthetic missteps (Galindo Jr. seems unaware that you don't have to wait until a car, boat, etc. completely exits the frame before you cut to a new scene), in general it's a pretty good-looking movie. There are some excellent compositions that make good use of light and shadow, a beautiful cherry red hospital hallway, and an unforgettable sequence of a woman screaming at the blood on her hands while mist swirls disorientingly around her.

However, the movie's abrupt shift from a Satanic slasher movie to a full-on zombie siege movie is unsustainable. At this point, the entire teen cast has been dispatched, so we're stuck with a bunch of shrieking Goonies running in circles while zombies slowly shamble toward them. The stakes are also lowered right through the floor, because it's quite obvious early on that there is no way that Cemetery of Terror is actually going to kill off a child.

Plus, there are even fewer reliable actors in the child cast than the adult cast. Eduardo Capetillo delivers all of his dialogue in a hoarse scream, including in a domestic moment where he's just hanging out having dinner with his older sister. And one of the other kids performs "tired and afraid" so poorly that I genuinely thought the scene was going to be about him getting possessed. At the end of the day, the slasher stuff is not strong enough that I would have loved the movie anyway, but the entire third act makes such a tedious hash of things that it would have scuppered feelings stronger than the ones the movie had already managed to generate in me.

Killer: Devlon (José Gómez Parcero)

Final Girl: A fuckton of children

Best Kill: Even though it makes no sense that Pedro's death is the only one to involve some sort of ghostly or telekinetic force, the floating axe impaling itself in his forehead is too cool to pass up.

Sign of the Times: One of the assorted children has a caricature of Michael Jackson on the back of his jacket, which he is wearing literally the entire time. MJ might actually have more screentime than Devlon.

Scariest Moment: The kids reach the gate of the cemetery, which rises out of the ground, becoming a huge, insurmountable barrier.

Weirdest Moment: Captain Ancira says he went to the school to talk to the kids' friends in an attempt to find out where they might have gone, but it's the middle of the night. Why are these kids at school?! It's not a boarding school, either. I spent minutes trying to puzzle this all out.

Champion Dialogue: “This is the 20th century. The Devil does not exist."

Body Count: 8; the first of which takes place in a nightmare that is probably a flashback but might not be.

1. Elevator Woman is clawed to death.
2. Mariana is clawed in the neck offscreen.
3. Óscar is clawed in the guts.
4. Jorge is lift-choked and has the back of his head impaled on some sort of spike fixture thing.
5. Mariana is disembowled by claws.
6. Lena is clawed to death.
7. Pedro is axed in the forehead.
8. Devlon combusts due to the book being burned.

TL;DR: Cemetery of Terror is a game attempt at a supernatural slasher, but loses whatever amount of steam it was able to build up in the boring third act.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1302

Census Bloodbath: Madman With A Movie Camera

Year:
1985
Director:
Michael J. Murphy
Cast:
Patrick Olliver, Jacqueline Logan, Caroline Aylward
Run Time:
1 hour 23 minutes

Plot: Bloodstream follows a disgruntled horror filmmaker named Alistair Bailey (Patrick Olliver) who decides to seek revenge on the craven producer William King (Mark Wells), who stole his movie, which is also titled Bloodstream. To do so, he decides to create a snuff film involving everyone King loves before killing King himself. He is aided in his quest by his very own dime store Lady Macbeth, King's secretary Nikki (Jacqueline Logan).

Analysis: Another day, another slasher from a storied director. Well, maybe "storied" isn't the right descriptor for British filmmaker Michael J. Murphy, who we last encountered in 1983 with his not-even-an-hour-long slasher epic The Last Night. He sure does exist, though. And a known quantity in Census Bloodbath is always intriguing, even if you know you can only expect cheap ineptitude. 

To be fair, The Last Night was cheap and inept, yes, but it had its share of charm to it. Bloodstream also has this quality, but it turns out that while Murphy's charm might be potent enough to fill 50 minutes, it sure ain't gonna cut it for 83 minutes. Murphy seems to be aware of this himself, as he has padded the majority of the run time with random death scenes from movies-within-a-movie that Alistair Bailey endlessly watches at home on VHS for no real reason that I can discern.

There is only one case where the tapes have any bearing on the plot: he imagines himself being burned at the stake while watching a witch movie, in a pretty neat sequence that effectively tells you where his head it at. Otherwise, this is all useless inflation of the movie's body count with characters who don't even exist in the context of the story. It's not like Alistair is getting ideas for his murders from watching these faux movies, because he doesn't seem to draw inspiration from them. He just kind of sits there watching tape after tape after tape. Maybe this is an indictment of the horror audience or what have you, but if you're so aware of what that audience wants, then maybe don't wait until a full 40 minutes have passed to give it to them.

Once he does get his killing spree started, he still periodically takes breaks to watch more tapes! It's infuriating! Plus, the tapes look even cheaper than the actual movie does. This is a movie that was, by the way, literally made for a budget of 400 pounds.

It is difficult for me to imagine an approach that could be more extravagantly useless than this. However, Bloodstream does begin to suck considerably less when it does get the body count a-rolling. The death sequences are reasonably lively (give or take a slasher cardinal sin or two, like using a gun. I ask you!). Though I say "lively" rather than "creative," because I can't in good conscience apply that term to a movie that rips off the weight bench sequence from Happy Birthday To Me more or less shot for shot.

Also, do I need to tell you that the cinematography is shit and the acting is uniformly flat and affectless? I don't think so, but if I'm wrong, there you go. It has been said. The movie shows enough Theatre of Blood flair by the end that I didn't totally hate it, but it's an immense waste of time that I would only recommend to a completist as foolish as me. Unfortunately, I'm not sure such a person exists.

Killer: Alistair Bailey (Patrick Olliver)

Final Girl: N/A

Best Kill: A gagged Judy having a knife stabbed through the gag and into her mouth is pretty gross!

Sign of the Times: A dude who's camping with his girlfriend in one of the horror tapes looks more or less exactly like Steve from Stranger Things.

Scariest Moment: When you think the movie is over and then Alistair Bailey pops in yet another tape.

Weirdest Moment: Lisa makes her (very handsome) boyfriend leave the house because her father is coming over any moment, then she promptly draws a bubble bath.

Champion Dialogue: “My dear, you're eating your husband's ass."

Body Count: 18; I considered not including any of the kills from the movies within this movie, but frankly if you cut those, Bloodstream doesn't exist, so I'm just going to mark the "fictional" kills with a lil' asterisk.

1. *Zombie Victim has his guts pulled out by zombies.
2. *David is axed in the back of the head by a slasher.
3. *Male Egyptologist is garroted by a mummy.
4. *Quasimodo impales himself on a woman's knife.
5. *Male Vampire is staked through the heart.
6. Greg has a weight dropped on his crotch and his barbell slammed onto his neck.
7. *Biker is shot.
8. *Biker is decapitated.
9. *Suspenders Biker is hit in the chest with a battle axe.
10. Lisa is electrocuted in the tub.
11. Simon is shot, has his arm chainsawed off, and is decapitated with the same chainsaw.
12. Boo the Dog is lit on fire.
13. Sally has her throat slashed with an electric carving knife.
14. *Exorcist has electrodes shoved into his eyes.
15. Judy is stabbed in the mouth.
16. William King is shot through the mouth in a faux suicide.
17. *Werewolf is shot with a silver bullet.
18. Nikki is garroted with a film strip.

TL;DR: Bloodstream has a few charming moments, but those don't a movie make.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 910

Census Bloodbath: No, Canada

Year:
1985
Director:
George Mihalka
Cast:
Winston Rekert, Karen Black, John Novak
Run Time:
1 hour 25 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Plot: Eternal Evil follows disaffected TV commercial director Paul Sharpe (Winston Rekert), who learns how to astral project from former dancer Janus (Karen Black, who should be a very familiar name for lovers of cult and horror cinema, and who we've already encountered for Census Bloodbath in The Last Horror Film). When people who have crossed him begin to die from severe internal hemorrhaging, Paul begins to suspect that he may be subconciously responsible, though he tries his best to keep this fact from the investigating detective Kauffman (John Novak). 

Analysis: Eternal Evil, also known as The Blue Man (this was two years before that phrase would have been associated with a "group" of any kind), was directed by George Mihalka. That might not necessarily mean anything to the casual reader, but I have been doing this for a long time, my friends, so I immediately clocked that he was the director of 1981's My Bloody Valentine, a very good movie to have been the director of. 

This also clued me into the fact this movie was Canadian, which should also have been a good sign, considering the fact that the Great White North has an unconscionably solid track record with the slasher genre. Unfortunately, sometimes people only have one home run in 'em. While this supernatural slasher movie came out after A Nightmare on Elm Street, it was almost certainly produced before the movie became a hit and taught slasher filmmakers that fantastical entries in the genre should also look fuckin' bonkers on top of being surreal.

What we get instead is a slasher that is so far afield from what a slasher actually does that the first 30 minutes had me convinced I had made a misstep at some point during the research that got this title on my list in the first place. The kills are few and far between, and when they do come, they are uniformly tedious, involving the victims grunting and falling over while the camera twirls around their heads and seems to peck at them like a hungry bird.

Slashers that feature killers with non-traditional M.O.s can definitely work. Just look at the delightful Murder by Phone. But these boring kills are but brief interludes between boring exposition scenes, including Kauffman watching a documentary that explains exactly what's going on about 45 minutes before anybody in the movie seems to twig to it. Honestly, it reads like one of those 1950s sci-fi B-movies that fancied themselves hard sci-fi and really took to the blackboard to teach you about everything that's going on in the story. Maybe Canadian audiences really needed a crash course on astral projection in 1985, but I sure didn't. Although... if a local 1980s TV news report about the advent of a wacky new food trend that I saw online is in any way accurate, the general public seemed to have similar trouble grasping the concept of a pizzeria back then, so if that was indeed the case, learning about astral projection was probably the equivalent of a year of grad school.

Anyway, it's dull and the cinematography is trying so hard that at first I thought I might like it until it kept reminding me of the cinematic overexuberance of a student film. Unfortunately, there is not much good to temper the bad. Karen Black is woefully underused until the glorious moment toward the where she is suddenly not. And there's exactly one striking shot in the movie. Which is also used for the poster, because everything you love to complain about Hollywood doing now was just as annoying back then.

It wasn't a terrible movie at the level of true bottom-of-the-barrel 1985 trash like Victims!, but it's absolutely a huge step down for Mr. Mihalka, who made one of the greatest masterpieces of one of the greatest years for slasher cinema. The only other thing I can point to about Eternal Evil that is even in the realm of "interesting," let alone "good," is the fact that it is definitely interested in queerness. It doesn't really understand it, but there's a lot of gender and sexuality fuckery going on that I would never have expected from an exploitation movie of this vintage.

Killer: Janus (Karen Black)

Final Girl: Paul Sharpe (Winston Rekert)

Best Kill: They're pretty much all the same, but at least the murder of Paul's father-in-law Bill involves a ghostly force slamming him against a wall, which is neat.

Sign of the Times: The majority of the score sounds like one of Depeche Mode's drum machines slowly falling down the stairs.

Scariest Moment: An astral voice that is controlling Paul's young son Matthew (who definitely has the shining) commands him to drink bleach.

Weirdest Moment: A quiet scene in Paul's home smash cuts to an adult man in a diaper talking directly to the camera. This turns out to be a commercial that Paul is shooting, but we haven't even learned what his job is at this point.

Champion Dialogue: “It's hard having an appetite when your food smells like paint stripper."

Body Count: 6

1. Dr. Meister is astral projected to death.
2. Bill Pearson is astral projected to death.
3. Jennifer is astral projected to death.
4. Scott is killed offscreen.
5. Monica is shot in the gut.
6. Janus is shot in the back of the head.

TL;DR: Eternal Evil is a muddled mess that takes up too much time on its way to nowhere in particular.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 931

Census Bloodbath: Oklahoma, OK

Year:
1985
Director:
Christopher Lewis
Cast:
Juli Andelman, Charles Ellis, James Vance
Run Time:
1 hour 29 minutes

Plot: Blood Cult is set at what the opening crawl calls a "small Midwestern university." Central State College can't be that small, though, considering that it has a seemingly inexhaustible supply of sorority houses, which are being preyed upon by a cleaver-wielding killer who dismembers their victims. After local sheriff Ron Wilbois' (Charles Ellis, who we'll see reprising this role in the 1986 sequel Revenge) daughter Tina (Juli Andelman of Silent Scream) uses her job at the university library to find him a book about the occult, he begins to suspect that the slayings are being perpetrated by a witch cult who are creating a Frankensteinian effigy to sacrifice to their canine god.

Analysis: With Blood Cult, we get a glimpse into the bright, shiny future that lies ahead for Census Bloodbath. While Blood Cult's ad campaign's claims that it is the first-ever shot-on-video horror movie are spurious, the regional production from Tulsa, Oklahoma is certainly one of the first. The video marketplace was just starting to heat up in the mid-1980s, and without it the slasher wouldn't have survived beyond 1986, even with the Elm Street franchise doing its best to liven up the place.

This is why the number of movies I have coming at me per year through the rest of the 1980s will shoot up precipitously come 1987, so I'm can't say I'm always sure I'm happy about the way things turned out with that there video market. However, history is history, so it's pretty neat to finally be covering Blood Cult.

Unfortunately, the movie combines two of my least favorite slasher subgenres: the police procedural and the cult movie (shoulda seen that one coming). The reason I don't like cult movies is that I prefer my slasher formula to be delivered a little more cleanly, with just one killer doling out deaths. Or two killers, if it's an absolute necessity. Thankfully, that turns out not to be a huge concern here. The death scenes are delivered in a pretty meat-and-potatoes slasher movie way, so the cult stuff doesn't really come to eclipse the movie with its ooky stupidity until late in the game.

Meanwhile, the reason I don't like police procedural slashers because they focus on the law enforcement officals tracking down the killer rather than the victims, usually resulting in the victims becoming paper-thin characters. I wasn't so lucky in this case. Not only do the victims have no discernible personalities (the most we learn is that one of them likes anchovies on pizza, which is hardly a selling point), most of them don't even get names.

Unfortunately, they don't even function properly as body count padding, because the kills here are uniformly terrible. Here is how each of them plays out: A killer with a vaguely defined weapon (even the coroner seems unsure if it's a cleaver or a knife) skulks around in the dark for a while and then kind of flails the limb holding the weapon in the general direction of a victim's body, for a very long time. Eventually the victim dies(out of sheer boredom, presumably) and catch a glimpse of the dismembered body part being collected, as represented by a prop that looks so cheap that it wouldn't even have made the Spirit Halloween catalogue.

So, it's not a very good slasher movie or a very good cult movie. Hell, it's a pretty incompetent movie all around, with a generally loose grip on acting, continuity, the 180-degree line, where to put the film gate (hint: not in the frame), and so on. And at best it's only a half-decent procedural. So why did I not hate Blood Cult? 

It's certainly not because of all the good qualities it has. I could count those on one hand: 1) There is exactly one excellent shot of a foggy alleyway, 2) The father-daughter relationship is well-established and genuinely sweet, 3) The instrumental score has this radical Miami Vice-esque synth motif that makes scenes seem more dynamic than they are, and - oh, would you look at that, I didn't even need the whole hand.

Nevertheless, there is something effortlessly charming about its regionalisms and its insistent hokiness. One does get the sense of a bunch of people taking the week off work and throwing together a movie, just for fun (which is exactly what happened, by the way). Nobody in this movie can really act, but it does have a magical time capsule quality that is completely free of Hollywood polish. Everyone in this movie just looks like a normal human being from the mid-1980s, doing their thing with their worries about the outcomes of local elections and their toilets with carpeted lids and all that jazz. I just think that's nice.

Killer: The Blood Cult, including Doc White (Peter Hart, who also returns in Revenge) and Tina (Juli Andelman)

Final Girl: Sheriff Ron Wilbois (Charles Ellis)

Best Kill: I suppose this is telling about how tepid the movie is, but the best kill is the offscreen murder of the dog Sparks, which is presented as a wide exterior shot of a house and a barn where the noise of the dog barking at the chickens and subsequently being decapitated plays alongside dialogue of Sparks' owner Gracie (Bennie Lee McGowan of both Christopher Lewis' Revenge and his other 1985 slasher The Ripper) wondering where he's run off to.

Sign of the Times: For a time, Sheriff Ron is terrified that these murders might somehow be related to Dungeons & Dragons.

Scariest Moment: While Ron is talking to a potential witness at her home in the boonies, the movie keeps cutting to her creepy kids just like... whittling on the porch and staring. They have nothing to do with anything, but it's unsettling!

Weirdest Moment: At one point, the killer appears to be stepping to the beat of the instrumental score.

Champion Dialogue: “Please, please, please don't kill me. Please, please, please... Please don't."

Body Count: 7

1. Shower Girl is cleavered.
2. Debbie's Roommate is decapitated.
3. Jill is chopped.
4. Sparks the Dog is decapitated offscreen.
5. Dumpster Girl is killed offscreen.
6. Joel is cleavered.
7. Tina falls from a height onto a dumpster.

TL;DR: Blood Cult isn't very good, but it's more charming than it has any right to be.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1064

Census Bloodbath: I Am In Spain, Both With And Without The S

Note: The copy I was able to find of this Spanish-language movie did have subtitles, but they were extremely literal translations that frequently misunderstood homophones such as "un hombre" and "un nombre," so they were practically useless. I do know enough Spanish to get by, but Mexican Spanish, not Spain Spanish. So take my review with a grain of salt, if you're curious about this movie. But you really shouldn't be. PS: Check out one of my favorite mistranslations in the "Champion Dialogue" section.

Year:
1985
Director:
Carlos Aured
Cast:
Adriana Vega, Sara Mora, José Luis Alexandre
Run Time:
1 hour 23 minutes

Plot: Atrapados en el miedo (also known by the far inferior English-language title Caught in Fear) follows two couples: the more established (and thus hornier) Antonio (José Luis Alexandre) and Ana (Sara Mora) alongside the newly-set-up José (Joaquín Navarro) and Laura (Adriana Vega), who is Ana's sister. They hang out for the weekend in an isolated manor home that just so happens to be quite close to the psychiatric hospital from which a killer known as el Loco (Luis Canovas) has just escaped.

Analysis: Atrapados en el miedo has absolutely glorious opening credits. And I'm not even trying to damn the movie with faint praise, though admittedly there isn't much more praise coming its way. The credits are meant to evoke dripping blood, I think, but they have this red-brown-black dripping aesthetic that makes them seem more like a lava lamp. Anyway, whatever is going on, the opening is jaunty and lively in a way that had me feeling a certain amount of goodwill toward the movie right away.

Reader, the movie eventually drained every last ounce of said goodwill. I haven't seen director Carlos Aured's Spanish giallo movie Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll (aka The House of Psychotic Women) from 11 years earlier, but that enjoys a certain reputation that this movie completely fails to live up to.

I mean, sure, there are a few brutal moments scattered throughout. For instance, the unnamed lesbian who tries to seduce her friend in the opening scene gets her neck snapped for her troubles, and that foley gives a mean crunch. It's hard to deliver an impactful kill when you don't have the budget for gore, but that scene delivers. However, the exploitative angle of the opening scene (this isn't the first Spanish-language movie I've seen to start with some lesbian sex-murders, and it won't be the last) is instantly dropped in favor of spending time with couples who love talking about sex way more than actually doing it.

If the filmmakers intended on deriving terror from evoking the feeling of being a fifth wheel on a vacation with two of the most annoying couples in the world, then they accomplished their goal, one hundred percent. And we don't even get to see them die! Spoiler alert, I guess. That's right, not a single one of the four main characters I listed in the plot synopsis is dead by the end of the movie. We are forced to watch them laboriously make grocery lists, go to and from town, and trade boring stories, and they don't even have the decency to perish for our amusement!

The killer (whose face is kept unseen until one late scene where it just randomly isn't) kinda just wanders around the outside of the house, dicking around. He frightens the gals once or twice, and he has a habit of flexing his thumbs like he's just itching to strangle, which is a unique little gimmick. But he has no backstory, no personality, and really no M.O. because he only kills a few people on the outskirts of the narrative. Forget attempted murder, this whole movie is an attempted slasher.

There's just enough going on in the movie that it almost feels legit for the first act and a half, but eventually it becomes so tedious that when one of the characters goes into a fugue state out of fear, I was terribly envious of her ability to dissociate.

Killer: El Loco (Luis Canovas)

Final Girl: Laura (Adriana Vega) feat. everyone else

Best Kill: The killer is eventually defeated by being run over with the car. And run over again. And again. They're just doing donuts to repeatedly smush the guy. It's excellent.

Sign of the Times: I mean, it's not like this brand isn't still around, but something about the sign in the background telling us to "Beba Fanta" (aka "drink Fanta") really felt like a perfectly 1980's sight to behold.

Scariest Moment: The shadow of el Loco's head rises up the stairs toward where Laura and Ana are standing.

Weirdest Moment: There's a cuckoo clock jump scare.

Champion Dialogue: “The sailboat is completely virgin virgin."

Body Count: 4

1. Mónica is choked with a tree branch.
2. Lesbian has her neck snapped.
3. La Sobrina Marcela is strangled.
4. El Loco is done donuts upon.

TL;DR: Atrapados en el miedo isn't exactly as bad as a slasher can get, but it makes an absolute hash of the format nevertheless.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 845