Census Bloodbath: Brou-Ha-Ha

Note: It must be recognized that Evil Laugh was directed and co-written by the late Dominick Brascia. Onscreen, he most memorably played Joey, the character whose death sent his secret father Roy on a murderous copycat killer rampage in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning. Brascia also appeared in Rush Week and They're Playing with Fire and directed Hard Rock Nightmare. It's difficult to get too excited about all of these Census Bloodbath connections, considering the fact that he was accused of sexually abusing Corey Haim amid a flurry of he-said-she-said comments made by him, Haim's mother, and Charlie Sheen following Haim's death, so consider the alleged bullshit acknowledged. Woof.

Year:
1986
Director:
Dominick Brascia
Cast:
Kim McKamy, Steven Baio, Myles O'Brien
Run Time:
1 hour 31 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Plot: Aspiring pediatrician Jerry (Gary Hays of Hard Rock Nightmare) invites his med school friends from the fictional Catalina Island State University (this is pretty funny, if you're from Southern California) to come fix up a closed-down foster home. The home is the site of a heinous crime some 10 years before. An employee named Martin brutally murdered the children after they falsely accused him of molesting them, and his ghost is said to still haunt the area. For his trouble, Jerry is murdered by a masked, uncontrollably laughing assailant.

Into this situation unknowingly steps a group of the horniest med students on planet Earth: Jerry's fiancée Connie (Kim McCamy of Dreamaniac, who followed her banner year of slashers by becoming a pornographic actress and body double under the name Ashlyn Gere); the annoying preppy rich couple Betty (Karyn O'Bryan) and Sammy Douglas Baxter III (Tony Griffin); the studly and cruel urologist Mark (Myles O'Brien); dropout X-Ray tech Johnny (Steven Baio, who produced and co-wrote Evil Laugh and later starred in Hard Rock Nightmare - also he's Scott Baio's brother); the ditsy and horny Tina (Jodi Gibson, who later became known as Sasha, the Hollywood Super Madam, running an escort service that at one time employed Heidi Fleiss - is there anyone in this movie whose resume isn't incredibly complicated?).

Although they are somewhat weirded out by the fact that Jerry is missing, they get to work fixing up the place and sexually manipulating one another, often at the same time. Only the Fangoria-reading horror fan Barney (Jerold Pearson of Tag: The Assassination Game) is wary of the situation, and as the laughing killer targets the students one by one, Barney grows increasingly panicked by the signs that only he seems to see.

Analysis: Evil Laugh is a weirdly perfect double feature with Dreamaniac, which is the most recent 1986 slasher we covered on Census Bloodbath. Both movies star Kim McKamy, for one thing. But both also have a sex scene involving whipped cream and feature copious male flesh, though this one is more equitable in the female nudity department and thus significantly less homoerotic, it must be said.

Being significantly less homoerotic than Dreamaniac still leaves a lot of room for fun, however. Take the friendship between Mark, Johnny, and Barney, which is the most "wouldn't it be hilarious if we kissed?" dynamic I've ever seen in a 1980s slasher movie. My favorite scene is the one where Barney pranks Mark by hiding under the bed while Mark is having sex with Tina, then pushing his hand through a hole in the mattress and stroking Mark's pert bottom. You know. Because it's really funny that Mark briefly thinks it's Tina who's caressing and squeezing those caked-up cheeks. Classic prank!

Thankfully, it is pleasant enough to spend time with these characters cleaning and fucking, because the pacing of Evil Laugh is wonky as hell and the core platter of Meat refuses to fall to the killer's blade for the better part of an hour. That said, it's nice to have a good chunk of slasher Meat in the first place, because a lot of the slashers of 1985 largely eschewed that element of the formula.

The movie does less well with other tropes, unfortunately. For instance, the killer's mask is this desperately uninteresting black and white thing that even the movie itself seems embarrassed by, because we only ever see it in like three shots total. Also, the killer's M.O. of constantly laughing isn't scary, but it also fails to tie into either the story of Martin or the eventual reveal of who the killer really is. 

[SPOILER ALERT - the killer is Sadie Burns (Susan Grant), the wife of the property's real estate agent Roger Burns (Howard Weiss), and she is at least seeded into some early scenes of the movie, but her Mrs. Voorhees moment feels especially Friday the 13th-esque because it comes out of absolutely nowhere.]

The kills themselves are often pretty bland, too. In more than half of them, the uniformly bad actors are failing to sell unconvincing gore gags. Plus, the movie resolutely refuses to have the fact that the characters are med students play into these sequences even a little bit. However, the film does perk up periodically for some standout moments.

Honestly, the thing that truly keeps the film afloat is that it does have these scattered moments of horror brilliance. It just carries on being a run-of-the-mill slasher movie for minutes upon minutes upon minutes, but then it'll have a gem of a scene like the one where Betty is tied up on the bed and gagged for a bit of S&M fun and thus Sammy is unable to heed her warning that a killer has entered the room.

Now, the thing that I haven't mentioned about this movie yet is that people will tell you is that this movie is a meta comedy precursor to 1996's Scream. It certainly has a few moments that predict, Nostradamus-like, the way that the seminal meta slasher will behave 10 years on, including a proto "this is the part where the killer comes back to life" bit from Barney. 

And it's true that there are quite a few moments where other slasher movies are referenced and a few where the tropes of horror (sex = death, mainly) are discussed, particularly by Barney. However, at least to my eyes, these moments were much more similar to the vein of humor you found in the same year's Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives than anything Kevin Williamson was up to in the Scream franchise. It was late enough into the 1980s that screenwriters were more and more tempted to put a hat on the slasher tropes they were using, without the added element of having the majority of the characters genuinely seem to be aware that they were in a horror movie.

That's about the extent of the comedy in this movie, which is otherwise a run-of-the-mill slasher. However, the presence of a strong comic thread makes certain moments play wrong, particularly the absurdly dark backstory given to the foster home. The details we learn about Martin's rampage grow more and more ludicrously shocking, in a way that never plays as humor but also never appropriately bleeds into the level of horror at which the main story is operating. It's just kind of gross and edgelordy for no reason.

All in all, while I am content with giving Evil Laugh the same score as Dreamaniac, it's one that I'm less keen to recommend. It just barely crawled its way across the threshold of being worth watching, whereas the other Kim McKamy joint of the year was a blast from start to finish.

Killer: Evil Laugher (Dominick Brascia when masked)/Sadie Burns (Susan Grant when unmasked)

Final Girl: Connie (Kim McKamy)

Best Kill: Johnny has his head shoved into a microwave, which cooks him to the point that blood explodes out of his cranium. This absolutely isn't how it would work in real life, but who cares. 

Sign of the Times: They say picture is worth a thousand words.

Scariest Moment: Chief Cash (Hal Shafer) is talking to a wannabe cop, Freddy (Johnny Venokur of Hard Rock Nightmare), who is stationed in the bushes to watch over the house. Freddy is wet behind the ears and unsure about how cop things work, so he asks why there is somebody in the backseat of Cash's car. Somebody that Cash was unaware of until that moment...

Weirdest Moment: In the closing sequence, Connnie is seen walking past a signed headshot of her late fiancé.

Champion Dialogue: “If I were a girl, I'd become a lesbian."

Body Count: 12

1. Jerry is stabbed in the back and has his heart removed.
2. Donald is drilled in the torso.
3. Chief Cash has his throat slit offscreen.
4. Freddy is stabbed in the gut.
5. Sammy is macheted in the back of the head.
6. Betty is killed offscreen.
7. Mr. Burns is stabbed in the crotch.
8. Mark is axed in the forehead.
9. Tina is strangled and has her neck snapped.
10. Johnny has his head microwaved.
11. Sadie Burns is shot, both by Connie and Barney.
12. Barney is stabbed with scissors by Connie.

TL;DR: Evil Laugh is a threadbare slasher, but it is intermittently horny enough, funny enough, and scary enough to be worth watching.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1528

Census Bloodbath: Won't You Take Me To Twunkytown?

Year:
1986
Director:
David DeCoteau
Cast:
Thomas Bern, Kim McKamy, Sylvia Summers
Run Time:
1 hour 22 minutes

Plot: Aspiring heavy metal musician Adam (Thomas Bern) makes a deal with a succubus named Lily (Sylvia Summers). According to multiple plot synopses online, this deal is to make him better with women. The audio on the absurdly shitty VHS transfer used for the movie's official DVD release was too muddy for me to hear exactly what he asked for, but that request doesn't really make sense to me, because he already has a cool punk girlfriend, Pat (Kim McKamy of Evil Laugh). 

Whatever it is that he actually asks for, he ends up being enslaved by the succubus, who shows up at a sorority party thrown by Pat's sister Jodi (Lauren Peterson) and begins killing people left and right. She is somewhat indiscriminate when it comes to the gender of her victims, but she does try to seduce as many of the men as she can before eliminating them.

Analysis: Let me introduce you to Dreamaniac director David DeCoteau, if you've never had the pleasure. He is a gay icon, and a director with many fascinating behind-the-scenes stories to tell. The only problem comes when you get in front of the scenes. 

His movies, from Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama to A Talking Cat!?!, are usually shoestring budget productions that are produced at breakneck speeds to capitalize on whatever the latest trend is. It's fascinating to hear him speak about how he does what he does, but usually the answer is "let the camera roll on an actor walking around for 10 minutes without cutting."

Another fun thing about the man is that, between mockbusters like Hansel and Gretel: Warriors of Witchcraft and 90210 Shark Attack, he has built entire franchises (1313, The Brotherhood) out of watching twunks wandering around in their tighty whities and having nasty things happen to them. Because of his filmmaking approach, however, the results are usually terminally boring. Nevertheless, you gotta admire him.

Anyway, very few things get between David DeCoteau and a quick buck, so I can't say that I was surprised to find him in the director's chair for one of the first slasher movies to capitalize on the popularity of 1984's A Nightmare on Elm Street. 

Dreamaniac came still early enough in the slasher timeline that it was merely retitled (from Succubus) and given a new poster, rather than fully ripping off Elm Street storywise, in the manner of something like Bad Dreams. This means that, instead of forcing us to watch an insipid Freddy Krueger imitation quip his way through scenes (à la Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama), DeCoteau has instead leaned in on what would soon become his standby narrative mode: twunk-watching.

Almost without exception, the male characters in this movie doff their tops, pants, and even underwear in the pursuit of maximal titillation, while the women among their number mostly make do with low-cut dresses and sexy lingerie (if I recall correctly, there is only one female character who goes topless in this movie, which is a rarity for this level of slasher sleaze).

While we did get some other inexplicably male-flesh-heavy 1980s slasher movies (like Girls Nite Out and The Majorettes) from time to time, the fact that Dreamaniac was also directed by a gay man, written by two women, and stars a nonbinary actor (Lauren Peterson) makes it more or less unique among the slasher sludge of the 1980s.

Its queer sensibility extends way beyond its obsession with male flesh. Without this group of people behind the camera, I don't think the resident mean girl Francis (Cynthia Crass) would have half as many deliciously cutting things to say, for instance. There are only a few rare moments of actual homoerotic subtext (that said, the men in this movie are unusually incurious about what sex with their dates might be like), but there is an overall sense of playfulness that I think would be lacking if Dreamaniac was made by cishet male filmmakers.

Having women pen the screenplay also gives the movie an additional layer. It's hardly a feminist text, but it ultimately leans much more Slumber Party Massacre than I might have expected, especially with its dual final girls and a few well-placed drill-related moments.

Having said mostly nice things about this movie, so far, I don't want to be mistaken for saying it's some kind of long-lost masterpiece. David DeCoteau's less exhilarating filmmaking instincts do shine through on occasion (including the loooooooong opening credits sequence where the names of the cast and crew appear on the screen one by one by one in an implacable, stately march), and the acting ain't all that great for the most part. Plus, despite a few major exceptions, the kills are fairly tame and unoriginal.

However, it succeeds far more often than it fails. And most of the times it does fail, it does so in a zesty way, like the closing sequence that randomly posits that (SPOILER ALERT) the events of the movie are the contents of a novel written by the real-life Adam. This sequence includes a joke that winks at the fact that the movie is called Succubus. Which, of course, it isn't. Don't you just love that?

Killer: Lily (Sylvia Summers)

Final Girl: Pat (Ashlyn Gere) feat. Jodi (Lauren Peterson)

Best Kill: Adam's death is gruesome. Pat uses the world's longest drill to sever his head, and we get a gnarly insert shot of his flesh ripping in the process.

Sign of the Times: Everything that is said or worn is incredibly 1980s, but a small moment is what really caught my eye this time: Adam fiddling with his guitar while watching a kaiju movie on his tiny portable rabbit-ear television evoked a very realistic vibe of a bored dude at home that would look entirely different if it took place in 2025.

Scariest Moment: The opening establishing shot of Adam's house lasts like 40 seconds, and I worried that this would be another interminable David DeCoteau joint.

Weirdest Moment: One scene in the kitchen keeps panning past the fridge, which has four different canisters of Quaker Oats on top of it.

Champion Dialogue: “I remember Brad. Big-hearted, and it stops there."

Body Count: 10; give or take a smothering that I think was committed on Lily and was thus unsuccessful, but the visuals were too murky to tell if it was accidentally perpetrated on a different character.

1. Cat dies offscreen.
2. Valley Girl is stabbed in the top of the head.
3. Ace is electrocuted while tied up, then later impaled through the eye.
4. Foster is stabbed in the back of the neck while drinking from the punch bowl.
5. Jan has a poker jammed into her chest.
6. Brad has his dick bitten off.
7. Francis has her throat slit by Adam.
8. Jamie is garroted.
9. Adam is decapitated by Pat with a drill.
10. Real-Life Adam is clawed in the throat.

TL;DR: Dreamaniac is a gleefully cheesy softcore slasher with a welcome queer sensibility.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1173

Census Bloodbath: Paint Me Like One Of Your Final Girls

A Note: This movie was only available to me in unsubtitled Tamil, so obviously my review is to be taken with a few huge grains of salt. However, I have made a point of focusing only on visual styling, music, and slasher structure rather than plot, characters, etc.

Year:
1986
Director:
M.R. Bhoopathy
Cast:
Mohan, Revathi, Nalini
Run Time:
2 hours 13 minutes

Plot (according to a translated synopsis that matches up with what I saw): When women around town begin mysteriously dying at the hands of a killer wielding a lethally sharp palette knife, Inspector Vinoth (Nizhalgal Ravi) takes on the case and targets local painter Chandru (Mohan) as the prime suspect. Chandru's new girlfriend Annam Poornima (Revathi) finds herself caught in the middle.

Analysis: As Census Bloodbath continues plowing through the slasher movies of the 1980s, we're kicking off 1986 proper in December, and I can hardly think of a better way to mark that occasion than by starting with a review of the Indian slasher December Pookkal (December Flowers).

And by that, I am referring entirely to the title featuring the word "December," because otherwise, I have generally found that the vibe of the Indian film industry's output in the 1980s allowed for very few genuinely thrilling horror movies. While Cheekh and Haveli had their moments, for every mildly sparkly diamond you unearth, you find multiple grimly mediocre efforts like Sansani. Or Sannata. Or Saboot. Or, god help you, Moodu Pani. Are you catching my drift?

December Pookkal certainly follows in the footsteps of those latter titles when it comes to its quality as a slasher. Even though it has a nice giallo-esque touch by featuring a black-gloved killer with a unique weapon, its kills are infrequent, bloodless, and so elliptically edited that, while you're aware that the killer has a consistent M.O. (putting the sharp palette knife in the general vicinity of a victim's neck before striking), you never understand even once what actually happens to the victims.

Simply put, it's a shit slasher. Thankfully, it's not a half-bad musical dramedy. The choreography is quite lovely, in fact. Particularly when it comes to the first big romantic number. That sequence, which places Mohan and Revathi in a forest of towering trees, mimics the push and pull of the early stages of a romance in a way that is completely charming, if not entirely inventive.

The movie's innate sense of rhythm isn't limited to its musical moments, either. Both the laughs and the thrills benefit from a strong sense of timing. The comedy is mostly driven by the performers and their rat-a-tat back-and-forth line deliveries, while the thrills are elevated by the rhythmic editing that punctuates moments like an early torture scene and a disorienting party where Poornima gets overwhelmed as the dancing and drinking around her spin wildly out of control.

This all makes for an exceedingly pleasant watch. But don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying that December Pookkal is some kind of masterpiece. I appreciate the kinda twisted romantic denouement and the fact that characters keep randomly getting hit by cars, but the slasher scenes are never anything more than boring, for one thing. And there are too many characters populating the periphery of this story, forcing the movie to stop dead whenever it periodically drags them back in.

It's just not quite a good movie, even though it approaches being one in a variety of ways. Certainly not one that's good enough to be worth overlooking the language obstacle for non-Tamil speakers.

Killer: Chandru (Mohan)

Final Girl: Annam Poornima (Revathi)

Best Kill: I usually abhor gun deaths in slashers, but the other deaths are so bland and samey. So I'm picking Chandru's demise, where he is shot by the police and subsequently milks his death throes, thrashing and squirming for what feels like a full minute and a half.

Sign of the Times: Two characters listen to a radio report via the biggest boom box I've ever seen.

Scariest Moment: Chandru and Poornima stroll along the beach while giant waves are crashing to the shore, and I became increasingly worried that they might get swept out by the tide.

Weirdest Moment: A character wanders into some sort of art collective/den of sins, where a dude is covered in fake cobwebs and a little person is poking the ceiling with a giant stick. 

Champion Dialogue: N/A

Body Count: 5; I think? The kill scenes weren't super legible, and my lack of understanding of the dialogue may have led me to misread a discrete kill as a flashback explaining the preceding one. But I'm pretty sure my count is correct.

1. Well Woman is stabbed in the neck.
2. Woman is drowned offscreen.
3. Shower Woman is stabbed in the neck.
4. Blue Dress Woman is stabbed in the neck.
5. Chandru is shot.

TL;DR: December Pookkal is a reasonably charming Indian musical drama, but offers very little in the realm of slasher fun.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 839

Census Bloodbath: 1986

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

So I may have taken a years-long hiatus in the middle of 1985, but from now I do intend to keep on moving forward at a semi-regular pace with Census Bloodbath, my project to watch and review every slasher movie from the 1980s. Of course, that will get more and more difficult as the decade careens straight into the video boom, allowing a higher number of lower quality movies to flood the market all at once, but in 1986, that hasn't 100% kicked in yet.

That doesn't mean we don't have a lot on our plate though. At my latest count, the year has a whopping 48 titles to get through! While 1985 had just two more slashers than 1984, we're now inflating that year's number by an additional 18 titles. So let's take a look at what lies ahead, shall we?

I've already reviewed all the big franchise titles and most of the major releases from 1986. So what's left? Some of these titles are Z-list classics that I'm excited to finally take a look at (Hunter's Blood, Spookies, Crawlspace), some I had literally never heard of before doing the research for this list (Escape from Coral Cove, Neon Maniacs, Las Vegas Serial Killer), and at least one is recognized as a good movie by actual real people who exist outside of the cult film space (Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer). I can't wait to find out which ones I love, which ones I hate, and which ones are so baffling I have no choice but to respect them!

Census Bloodbath: 1986

Movies in bold are films I had already reviewed at the time this was posted. Once I write each review, I will link to it from this page.

December Pookkal (January 14)

The Killer is Still Among Us/L'assassino è ancora tra noi (February 7)

The Hitcher (February 21)
Night of Fear/Nag van Vrees (February 28)

Girls School Screamers (March)

Spookies (March)

Revenge/Blood Cult 2 (March)

Chopping Mall (March 21)

April Fool's Day (March 27)
The Zero Boys (March 27)

Torment (April)

Carnage (April 23)

Midnight Killer/Morirai a mezzanotte (April 24)
Doorman (May)
Mr. Wrong/Dark of the Night (May 2)

Killer Party (May 9)

Crawlspace (May 21)
Escape from Coral Cove/Tou chuet sam woo hoi (May 21)

Truth or Dare?/A Critical Madness (June 1)

Knife Under the Throat/Le couteau sous la gorge (June 18)

Psycho III (July 2)
The Fantasist (August)
Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (August 1)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (August 22)
Psycho Girls (August 29)

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (September 24)
Mark of Cain (September 24)
Hunter's Blood (September 26)
Sorority House Massacre (October)
Deadly Friend (October 10)
Trick or Treat (October 24)
Bodycount/Camping del terrore (October 28)
Neon Maniacs (November 14)
Slaughter High (November 14)
The Wind (November 17)

Dreamaniac (November 26)

Bestia Nocturna (December 6)

Into the Darkness (December 19)

Cards of Death (unknown)
Evil Laugh (unknown)

Goremet, Zombie Chef from Hell (unknown)

Hour of Fear/A hora do Medo (unknown)

The House of the Blue Shadows (unknown)

Las Vegas Serial Killer (unknown)
Lucker the Necrophagus (unknown)
Night Ripper! (unknown)

Spine (unknown)

Word Count: 530

Census Bloodbath: 1985 Post Mortem

Well hello there! We've dragged ourselves across the finish line of another year of Census Bloodbath, my project to watch and review every slasher movie from the 1980s. And only three years after we finished 1984! 1985 brought us 29 slashers, as listed here. And we're now 57% done with the overall list of 487 titles, isn't that neat? At this rate, by the time I've watched the final slasher of 1989, you might be reading this blog via a microchip in your brain. 

Anyway, without further ado, it's time to break down the state of the slasher for this year of Census Bloodbath...

1985: Post Mortem

1985 was neither fish nor fowl, really. There were a lot of different factors that were changing the way slashers looked, what their stories were about, and how they were consumed, but none of those had really struck just yet. 

The video boom that resulted in many direct-to-video and shot-on-video slashers flooding the market wouldn't really kick in until late 1986. And while the success of 1984's A Nightmare on Elm Street would shift the slasher genre's focus from meat-and-potatoes killings to more supernatural hijinks, that movie debuted in November, so the Freddy ripoffs needed more time to get off the ground.

Honestly, 1985 feels like 1979, when the genre was drawing a deep breath between the releases of 1978's Halloween and 1980's Friday the 13th. Unfortunately, this means we were mostly getting the movies from the tail end of the first slasher cycle, so they were nearly unilaterally terrible this year. To the point that I had to include a movie that I gave a score of 5/10 to on my Top 5. Woof. Regardless of the torment and misery of the year, which has now thankfully passed, we must press on and break down the best and worst of the year's movies, kills, final girls, and more!

The Five Best Slashers of 1985

#5 Terror at London Bridge

It's perhaps not quite as good as the elevator pitch "David Hasselhoff fights Jack the Ripper" would lead you to believe, but Terror at London Bridge is still wonderfully charming. It's a peculiar combination of tense supernatural slasher and boots-on-the-ground realist drama depicting the lives of townies at a tourist trap, and yet it totally works, up until the point where the Hoff rolls up his sleeves and turns the third act into a dumb action movie.

#4 The Hills Have Eyes Part II

Look, 1985 was really rough on me. That's how Wes Craven's 19th-best movie ended up here on the list. But I'm a defender of this one, nonetheless. That dog flashback? Pure camp! And I like the popcorn fun of the "BMX bikers vs. hillbilly mutants" storyline. Even though it's a total betrayal of the vibe of the original movie, I'm not a huge fan of that movie anyway. So there!

#3 Friday the 13th: A New Beginning

Wouldn't you know it, but here's another much-hated sequel that I enjoy more than is strictly necessary. I don't care that it's Roy copying Jason's M.O. A dude in a hockey mask kills teenagers, and everything that isn't dripping in mid-80s glam is dripping in mid-80s sleaze. That's a Friday the 13th movie to me, baby!

#2 Night Caller

We are very pro-Canadian slasher here at Census Bloodbath, but Hong Kong has really risen as a territory that is almost as reliable when it comes to cranking out fun, genre-bending slashers. While I have previously enjoyed 1981's Phantom Killer and 1982's Devil Returns and He Lives by Night, Night Caller blows them all out of the water.

In between gonzo, live-wire murder sequences, Night Caller has roving punk gangs, kung fu, psychosexual torture, and much more. While the A-plot leans a little harder on the "buddy cop" genre than I'd prefer, it's a delight more or less from start to finish.

#1 A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge

The remarkable lack of fealty to the Elm Street mythos is exactly why this early sequel is so compelling. You truly never know what's coming around each corner, except that it's going to be ludicrous and gay. And that's exactly the mode I like my movies to operate in.

The Five Worst Slashers of 1985

#5 Bloodstream

Bloodstream has a few nice kills and a couple good moments, but that doesn't make up for the fact that like 50% of it is made up of clips from movies-within-a-movie that are all unwatchable and have less than no bearing on the actual plot.

#4 Atrapados en el miedo

This obscure Spanish slasher is forgotten for a reason. It has a meat-and-potatoes slasher setup (two couples are vacationing in an isolated mansion near an asylum from which a homicidal patient has just escaped), and yet it squanders it completely with a series of empty, meaningless scenes of the killer puttering around doing nothing. Literally, he doesn't even manage to kill any of the four main characters. We're just forced to watch them be irritating for 90 minutes; it's excruciating.

#3 Murderlust

What's worse than being an entirely empty movie? Being filled with misogynistic tripe, that's what! The script sometimes shows sparks of life, but it's mostly a tedious trudge through a miserable character doling out bland kills.

#2 They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore

Speaking of misogynistic tripe... They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore is an incoherent mess that is literally directed by a teenager, from which springs some of the most pointlessly vile scenes you'll ever see. 

#1 Victims!

Victims! heard we were talking about 1985 slasher movie misogyny and said "hold my beer." It doesn't even pretend that the main female characters are anything but meat puppets for a killer to manhandle. Nothing that you can make out through the muddy shot-on-video footage is worth the tremendous effort it took simply to discern it.

1985 Body Count: 266 (including 10 decapitations and 11 slit throats)

That is an average of 9.17 kills per movie, making 1985 the slashiest year yet. 1984 previously beat 1981 with an average of 8.96 kills, but we have now surged another .21 ahead. Can any future years go higher than this? Only time will tell.

Highest Body Count: Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (21)

Even without Jason Voorhees around, Friday the 13th is still ahead of the pack, far surpassing Bloodstream (18), which had a huge advantage by featuring kills that both take place in the "real life" story and in the movies within the movie.

Lowest Body Count: Nothing Underneath & Atrapados en el miedo (4)

Atrapados en el miedo is barely a slasher movie, so that body count makes sense, but the lurid giallo movie Nothing Underneath has no excuse for going this low. It was even bested by the year's big TV movie, Terror at London Bridge (6).

Five Best Kills

#5 Donuts, Atrapados en el Miedo

Even bad movies can have remarkable kills, and the quartet of survivors dispatching the killer by getting in a car and doing donuts on his prone body is a hell of a way to put an exclamation point on the end of a movie that is otherwise just ellipses.

#4 The Rake, Horror House on Highway Five

This bizarre-ass movie includes a dude falling face-first onto a rake. Sideshow Bob, eat your heart out!

#3 The Opening Scene, Night Caller

It's more about the filmmaking than it is about the kill itself, but this giallo-inspired sequence is brutal, beautiful, jagged, disorienting, and one-of-a-kind. Insult is added to injury with jarring grace notes like an apple being smashed into the victim's face as she tries to flee to safety.

#2 Dynamite, They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore

Here's another terrible movie with one redeeming moment. The Wile E. Coyote-ass kill where a stick of dynamite is placed into a victim's mouth isn't exactly worth the price of admission, but at least it's creative.

#1 The Strap, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning

Where did the strap come from? Why does it tighten no matter which way Roy/Jason turns the stick he has stuck through the ends of it? Who cares! This is a wholly unique kill, combining the terror of being unable to see with the sheer torque required to crush a human skull.

Best Decapitation: The Dark Power

I mean, come on. An actor named Lash LaRue uses a goddamn whip to decapitate an undead killer. You gotta respect a man who knows his way around a lassoo.

Three Best Final Girls

#3 Amy Witherspoon, Interface

Her rat-a-tat His Girl Friday chemistry with the hero of this weird techno-thriller does a whole lot to make it delightful. Honestly, she's doing so much of the heavy lifting that without her it might not even be tolerable.

#2 Cass, The Hills Have Eyes Part II

Leave it to Wes Craven to make the hero of his Hills Have Eyes sequel a blind psychic named after Cassandra. Once an English professor, always an English professor. 

#1 Tammie and Beth, The Dark Power

While The Dark Power is incredibly racist in other ways (see: the depiction of the mystical Toltec killers), it is one of the rare 1980s slashers to feature a Black final girl. It is also one of the few slashers to have two final girls given equal weight in the story, and their combined efforts to survive do a lot to help this otherwise pretty abysmal movie deliver a solidly fun third act.

Three Worst Final Girls

#3 Pam Roberts, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning

All Pam does is trip and scream and turn into a quivering puddle. Basically all the final girls who are sidekicks to Tommy Jarvis pale in comparison to his antics, but Pam suffers the most because she had so little to offer to begin with.

#2 Kate, Too Scared to Scream

Kate is one of those characters who becomes a final girl through sheer luck more than actually being an active participant in her own survival. While there are quite a few of those this year, the moments that make her stand out are the scenes where the movie decides to give her a skill, only to have her flail uselessly again right after. It's more frustrating to watch somebody almost become a good character than just watch her be bad the whole time.

#1 Laura & Co., Atrapados en el miedo

I've already said enough about these losers, so let's just move on.

Four Best Killers

#4 The Killer, Haveli

The Bollywood slashers of the 1980s have been pretty uniformly bland, but Haveli has a killer who doles out murders at a steady pace and wears a hell of a mask while doing so. Not mad about it!

#3 Barbara, Nothing Underneath

Spoiler alert, I guess. But this movie's "psycho lesbian" plot twist is as deliciously ludicrous as it is easy to predict. Points to Barbara for going out in a blaze of glory that deserves to be immortalized in the Census Bloodbath firmament.

#2 Freddy Krueger, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge

Even though his powers make no sense in this movie, we have a Robert Englund Freddy Krueger performance to chew on this year. He'd still be a shoo-in for this list even if 1985 was full of instant classics.

#1 Bobby, Night Caller

While Night Caller pretends to be a whodunit for the first half-hour or so, Bobby eventually waltzes in wearing a variety of extraordinary outfits and more or less announces that she's the killer blasting any sense of mystery to smithereens. This is worth it, because in exchange we get to spend more time in her elegant, transfixing company.

Four Worst Killers

#4 Jack the Ripper, The Ripper

Bonus points for casting Tom Savini as Jack the Ripper. However, his version of the character only appears in a single scene, and Savini clearly has no idea what's going on. He's clear slightly embarrassed about whatever it is, so the moment is a total bust.

#3 Daniel Ray, Confessions of a Serial Killer

I still haven't seen Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, but Michael Rooker's performance on the poster is already so much better than Robert A. Burns' flat, affectless drone as Daniel Ray (a character who is also based on the real-life killer Henry Lee Lucas). The only moments when Burns comes alive are the scenes where his character gets to drink a milkshake. And while I totally get that impulse, it hardly makes for a compelling villain.

#2 Alistair Bailey, Bloodstream

A guy who just sits at home and watches VHS tapes all day isn't a slasher killer. He's just a blogger.

#1 El Loco, Atrapados en el miedo

Yes, I'm complaining about this movie again. El Loco is just as generic as his name. He has no backstory, no personality, and no M.O. to speak of, unless you count aimless wandering. Boo! Hiss!

Handsomest Lad: Melvin Wong, Night Caller

Being tied up and tortured can't have been fun for you, Melvin, but it sure was fun for me.

Best Location: Blood Tracks

Maybe it's the fact that I grew up in Southern California and have basically never known a temperature below 40 degrees Fahrenheit, but I love a good "snowed in at an isolated cabin" movie. 

Best Title: They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore

It's wordy but compelling. It poetically tells you who exactly who the main characters are and begs the question "so what do they cut now?"

Three Best Costumes

#3 The Nixon Mask, Horror House on Highway Five

This killer in a Nixon mask is indeed a crook.

#2 Mud, Night Caller

Bobby wears so many incredible outfits in Night Caller, but perhaps none are so memorable as when she is wearing nothing but mud. Honestly, she could walk the red carpet at the Met Gala in this.

#1 The Circle of Logicians, Interface

Every single member of this movie's bizarre computer killer cult has a mask that is so terrifying and inexplicable that the movie can't help but have atmosphere, even though it really doesn't deserve to.

Best Poster: Blue Murder 

Does it have fuck-all to do with the movie? Not really. But there's something very graphically compelling about the disembodied clown head dangling from that noose, the way the tagline slashes through the negative space, and the ransom note-esque typeface of the title.

Best Tagline: Friday the 13th: A New Beginning

A tagline so good that they said, "fuck it, just make it the whole poster."

Best Song: "His Eyes" Pseudo Echo, Friday the 13th: A New Beginning

Violet dancing the robot to this terrific yet kind of sinister synthwave gem is maybe the zenith of slasher filmmaking in 1985.

Best Score: Nothing Underneath

One benefit of being a tawdry Italian giallo movie is the fact that you can just call up Pino Donaggio at any time to deliver a lush, elegant score.

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

Word Count: 2513

Census Bloodbath: Nailed It

Year:
1985
Director:
Bill Leslie & Terry Lofton
Cast:
Rocky Patterson, Ron Queen, Michelle Meyer
Run Time:
1 hour 25 minutes

Plot: The Nail Gun Massacre follows a killer wearing camo fatigues and a motorcycle helmet targeting a group of men who were involved in a violent sexual assault at a Texas construction site. The town's sheriff (Ron Queen) and doctor (Rocky Patterson) are not quite hot on the killer's trail. Let's say they're room temperature on the killer's trail.

Analysis: We've finally made it. The Nail Gun Massacre is our last slasher movie of 1985! I wasn't sure if we'd be ending the year with a bang or a whimper, but it turns out that the movie is kind of both simultaneously.

The Nail Gun Massacre is... peculiar. As the only feature ever made by Dukes of Hazzard stuntman Terry Lofton, the Texas-based slasher is very clearly a labor of love. However, the stuntperson-to-director pipeline that brought us the John Wick movies clearly hadn't been constructed yet in the mid-1980s, because this movie is slapdash as all get out.

Essentially every aspect of the filmmaking goes wrong at some point or another, often multiple times in a single scene. The camera can never quite find the right place to view the action from, the cast seems not only untrained but completely unfamiliar with the concept of acting, and the dialogue is almost always completely drowned out in the mix.

That last one may not be a terrible thing, because the script ain't all that good, either. Plot elements float in and out and are sometimes swapped at random (a trio that is clearly a mother and her two sons is at one point referred to as a group of friends), and the screenplay swirls woozily around a few recurring characters without ever committing to actually making any of them a proper protagonist. In fact, it was looking for a while like the aforementioned two sons would become the main characters, but they vanish from the movie completely about 30 minutes before it ends.

However, the movie's ineptitude actually does it a major service. The fact that the plot keeps shifting at random leaves you without solid ground to stand on. There are no rules to The Nail Gun Massacre, and you never know exactly what's going to happen next or which characters are going to live or die. 

That unpredictability, combined with the film's inches-thick layer of sleaziness, the cast being attractive but in a normal civilian type of way, and the fact that the unpolished nature of the footage lends it an almost documentarian verisimilitude, makes it genuinely dangerous. Your awareness of the camera and the people behind it gives it a home movie feel, like you're watching real people actually have sex and die onscreen. 

In fact, there's a sex scene that's so sleazily presented from every possible angle that it seems almost like it must be real, to the point that there is an apocryphal story that the male actor's girlfriend broke up with him after seeing the movie, even though he is gyrating his hips in a way that would probably snap his penis in half if he was actually mid-coitus. 

There are times when this unsophisticated realism is a demerit, such as the sexual assault scene that opens The Nail Gun Massacre (as in the first frame of the movie is a sexual assault, before the credits even roll). However, for the most part, it effectively makes you feel like you're being grabbed by the hair and dragged inexorably through a hillbilly nightmare.

This vibe is boosted by the two elements of the movie that are actually quite good. First, the kills are pretty decent. In addition to the nail prosthetics and stage blood looking pretty solid (give or take a wobbly rubber moment or two), a fair amount of the kills are cleverly staged. While their primary instinct (a good one) is to lean in on hand trauma, there are a lot of grace notes that make the kills feel different and freshly violent, even though the killer's M.O. basically never changes and the violence doesn't always make biological sense (one girl gets her hand nailed to her open mouth - did the nail hit her uvula, or what?).

Speaking of the killer, the Night School motorcycle helmet is a decent look, though I could have done without the constant, laconically delivered Freddy Krueger quips that are so exaggeratedly voice modulated that they're almost indecipherable.

However, the killer's voice leads us into the second element of The Nail Gun Massacre that works more often than it doesn't: the soundscape. In any dialogue-free moments, Whitey Thomas' surprisingly girthy synth score blends with Vocoder-ized evil laughs and pained moans that bathe the imagery onscreen with an enormously unsettling, surreal blanket of sheer noise that is reminiscent of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in a way that isn't merely ripping it off.

While The Nail Gun Massacre is many things (including, for a brief and bizarre moment in the final confrontation, a Dukes of Hazzard rip-off), it is also a rape-revenge movie, after a fashion. It's too incoherent to really have subtext (it's never quite clear if the victim, Linda, is the killer or not, though the final few shots imply she might be), but there is something effectively subversive about the choice of a nail gun as a weapon meaning that the men being targeted are violently penetrated multiple times before they die.

All in all, I think The Nail Gun Massacre is neither a bad movie nor a good movie. It's too slippery to be put in a box like that. But whether the good elements are intentional or not, whether it's effectively disorienting or just slapdash and grimy, I found it to be a hypnotic, transfixing movie to sit through. And I suppose that's a recommend, especially when the movie is taken in the context of 1985, which has given us dud after dud after dud.

Killer: Bubba Jenkins (Beau Leland), but I'm still inclined to believe it's actually Linda Jenkins (Michelle Meyer)

Final Girl: N/A, but kind of Doc (Rocky Patterson)

Best Kill: I am most partial to Mark's death, because he gets nailed while chainsawing a tree and the still-functioning chainsaw slices off his hand as he falls, adding insult to injury.

Sign of the Times: A young man wearing a M*A*S*H is told that he is being "bogus."

Scariest Moment: The opening sexual assault scene had me worrying that this movie was going to be infinitely more unpleasant than it turned out to be.

Weirdest Moment: A group of friends has a picnic where they talk about eating both sandwiches and hot dogs, but all they seem to have brought with them is Ritz crackers and beer.

Champion Dialogue: “Do you remember when you could sit outside and not worry about the mosquitoes and the killers?"

Body Count: 16

1. Leroy Johnson has his hand nailed to his forehead.
2. Brad is nailed in the stomach and the dick.
3. Mark is nailed in the back and accidentally chainsaws his own hand off.
4. Hitchhiker is nailed in the chest, through the hands, and (the killing blow) in the shoulder.
5. Woman is nailed offscreen.
6. Hal is nailed in the back of the head.
7. Ann is nailed in the hand and boobs.
8. Ben is nailed to a tree via the hands.
9. Rick's Friend is nailed in the face.
10. Rick is nailed.
11. Jethro is nailed.
12. Jethro's Date is nailed in the boob and the neck.
13. Dad is nailed and falls stomach-first onto a grill.
14. Curly Haired Woman is nailed.
15. Blonde Woman is nailed.
16. Bubba falls from a great height.

TL;DR: The Nail Gun Massacre is a poorly made movie, but its ineptitude gives it a verisimilitude that makes its nastiness really sting.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1308