Cardboard Science: Like A Prayer

Year: 1957
Director: Nathan Juran
Cast: William Hopper, Craig Stevens, Alix Talton
Run Time: 1 hour 19 minutes

Happy October, everybody! It's time for the annual Great Switcheroo with Hunter Allen of Kinemalogue! Somehow, this is our 13th year trading titles from our Census Bloodbath and Cardboard Science catalogues, so we decided to pull out all the stops. I have assigned him three 1980s slasher movies in the beloved genre of "holiday/special occasion" (which you'll hear from him about a bit closer to Halloween) and he has assigned me three 1950s sci-fi B-movies about killer arthropods.

We'll be starting off in the world of insects with 1957's The Deadly Mantis. This is a Nathan Juran joint, and that name should be familiar to anyone who has been keeping up with the Switcheroos over the years. Well, actually, maybe it won't be. Sometimes he was credited as Nathan Hertz. 

Anyway, the man is an Oscar winner (Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration, Black-and-White for How Green Was My Valley - how that mouthful of an award died out, I'll never know) who also directed the Ray Harryhausen classic 20 Million Miles to Earth, the charmingly daffy The Brain from Planet Arous, and the dorm room poster art mainstay Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (which is in contention for being my favorite Cardboard Science movie that doesn't star Godzilla).

I have a sneaking suspicion that the folks who made The Deadly Mantis were also somewhat familiar with Godzilla.

In The Deadly Mantis, a giant prehistoric praying mantis is unearthed from the ice near the North Pole thanks to seismic activity. It begins making a beeline (or, rather, a mantisline) southward to warmer climes, in the process destroying an outpost or two of the American military's northernmost radar fence. I hope you like the word "radar," because it is going to grace your ears several trillion times during this movie.

After an Eisensteinian first act, where the military as a collective is the de facto protagonist, the story finally finds some characters to hang its hat on after about 21 minutes. Dr. Nedrick Jackson (William Hopper of 20 Million Miles to Earth) is a D.C.-based paleontologist working at the Museum of Natural History who is called upon to lend his expertise when the as-yet unknown creature leaves behind a super-sized body part. Along for the ride is Marge Blaine (Alix Talton), a journalist for the "museum magazine" (they were just handing out press jobs like candy in the 1950s) who Girl Fridays herself onto the mission.

Your sign that a Cardboard Science movie is finally starting is when you see a shot of a woman in an impeccable jacket walking through a door.

Actually, let's swing back to the first act for a moment before we dive in deeper. You'll see people complaining because it's mostly a bunch of stock footage with voiceover explaining, say, the various radar lines that were being used to defend good American families during the Cold War. While that is undeniably true, there is magic to quite a bit of this sequence.

I particularly liked the opening shot, which is cheap, yes, but also elegant and downright cheeky. We open on a map, with the camera slowly zooming toward the United States (the center of all culture and storytelling) before - what's this, now? - gliding southward to show the Antarctic region. We sure aren't in Kansas anymore, buddy! Just by moving the camera around a map, The Deadly Mantis tells us that it knows what we expect from this kind of movie and that it wants to have a little fun with us. That feeling doesn't last beyond the first 20 minutes, but I'll take it where I can get it.

There's another cute little moment where the pompous narrator explains a bank of phones by saying things like "in five seconds, this phone can reach your local library; in four seconds, this phone can reach a state official in Oklahoma," and so on. However right when he gets to "in two seconds, this phone can reach the Pentagon," that phone rings. The way the narration interacts so smoothly with the scene and the way the scene unexpectedly begins, practically before he's done speaking, gives you that off-kilter sense of "oh shit, something important is happening right now."

Look, it's not like The Deadly Mantis is a work of genius or something, but there are a few moments where it's snappy and has a bit of flair. I'm a fan of flair! And after four movies, I can confidently say that I'm a fan of Juran.

Juran is The Man... tis.

The Deadly Mantis does lose most of its sparkle once the actual plot kicks in, though. It's very much a meat-and-potatoes giant monster movie. The plot plays out exactly like everything from The Giant Claw to Beginning of the End to Them!, with a few small, isolated attacks leaving behind clues about the creature, which eventually funnel into a big giant setpiece at the end.

The setpiece is pretty neat, sure.  It's fun to watch the mantis puppet zoom around Washington, D.C. and wreak havoc around the National Mall for a bit. Plus, the mantis effects only look super shitty in close-up, so it's nice to give the creature something to play with after a long stretch of seeing it in barren Arctic environments where it's difficult to appreciate its size.

A toast to scale models!

The monster movie portion of The Deadly Mantis is presumably the only reason anybody bought a ticket, so it should probably be a big problem that it's not very interesting. However, I found plenty else to be amused by in the final hour. There were even two big surprises.

First of all, it was genuinely astonishing to me that [spoiler alert, I guess] Marge and Dr. Jackson don't end up together. All of a sudden in the third act, she's trading shockingly steamy kisses with Colonel Joe Parkman (Craig Stevens), a character who I didn't even notice was in the movie until about two minutes before that.

The second surprise was even more fun. Most of these Cardboard Science movies are "horror movies" but really only because they contain monsters. The Deadly Mantis, on the other hand, seems genuinely interested in being part of the horror genre. This movie is chock full of jump scares, including a rare early use of the "hand grabbing your shoulder from behind" trope.

One of them even works pretty well! I'm talking about the scene where the mantis is seen creeping up on a building. When the camera cuts to the interior of the building, a door abruptly bangs open. This is all pretty rudimentary stuff, but given the extremely dormant state that mainstream horror was in throughout the 1950s, it's a huge win to have a movie even admit that horror exists.

That which is indistinguishable from magic:

*Dr. Jackson informs his rapt military audience that "gentlemen, even birds have bony skeletons." Goodness me! Birds, you say? Whatever will they think of next?

The morality of the past, in the future!:

*During the scene where soldiers are being scrambled to respond to a mantis attack, we see a second or two of a Black soldier getting ready for takeoff, which might be the longest any Black person has been onscreen in all 13 years of this enterprise.
*There's some primo 1950s slang being tossed around in this movie. At one point, we learn that "everything is jake," which is a real relief if you ask me.
*In a montage of people watching the news in their living rooms, one of the kids has a flattop so crisp and gosh-darn flat that you could serve dinner on it.

Sensawunda:

*What struck me about The Deadly Mantis is that, in spite of its obsession with radar, nuclear testing and/or radiation have nothing to do either with how the mantis got so deadly or with how it got free from the ice. That's probably not a first, but it sure feels like one.

TL;DR: The Deadly Mantis is a mostly bland 1950s monster movie with a few surprises around the edges for those familiar with the genre.
Rating: 6/10

Cardboard Science on Popcorn Culture 
2014: Invaders from Mars (1953) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Them! (1954)
2015: The Giant Claw (1957) It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)
2016: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Godzilla (1954) The Beginning of the End (1957)
2017: It Conquered the World (1958) I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) Forbidden Planet (1956)
2018: The Fly (1958) Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958) Fiend without a Face (1958)
2019: Mysterious Island (1961) Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)
2020: The Colossus of New York (1958) It Came from Outer Space (1953) Rodan (1956)
2021: Robot Monster (1953) Queen of Outer Space (1958) The Cyclops (1957)
2022: Tarantula (1955) The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959)
2023: Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957)
2024: Attack of the Puppet People (1958)
2025: X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes (1963) The Spider (1958) The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)
2026: The Deadly Mantis (1957)

Census Bloodbath on Kinemalogue
2014: My Bloody Valentine (1981) Pieces (1982) The Burning (1981)
2015: Terror Train (1980) The House on Sorority Row (1983) Killer Party (1986)
2016: The Initiation (1984) Chopping Mall (1986) I, Madman  (1989)
2017: Slumber Party Massacre (1982) Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987) Happy Birthday to Me (1981)
2018: The Prowler (1981) Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) Death Spa (1989)
2019: Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (1989) Psycho III (1986) StageFright: Aquarius (1987)

2020: Night School (1981) The Fan (1981) Madhouse (1981)

2021: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 (1986)

2022: Hell Night (1981) Return to Horror High (1987) Cutting Class (1989)

2023: Blood Rage (1987)

2024: Sleepaway Camp (1983)

2025: Superstition (1982) The Carpenter (1988) Visiting Hours (1982)

2026: 

Census Bloodbath: Funny Farm

Year:
1988
Director:
Richard Friedman
Cast:
Michael Rogen, Patty Mullen, Kristin Davis
Run Time:
1 hour 19 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Plot: In Doom Asylum, a group of sexy young people decide to vacation at an abandoned asylum, because... I don't know, maybe the local slaughterhouse was booked solid that weekend. Anyway, this is also the site rumored to be the hunting grounds of The Coroner (Michael Rogen), a former lawyer who was believed to have died in a car crash that killed his lover, Judy LaRue (Penthouse Pet of the Year Patty Mullen) 10 years ago. However, after the part of the autopsy where they flayed all the skin off his face, he jolted back to life and now he hides on the grounds of the now-abandoned asylum/hospital, watching old movies on TV and waiting for young people to show up (for some reason), so he can kill them (for some reason) using autopsy tools and make quips about the murders (because that's what Freddy Krueger did).

The platter of Meat we're being served this time around features Kiki LaRue (Patty Mullen again), Judy's now-grown daughter who has a bad feeling about this place; Kiki's boyfriend Mike (William Hay), who is incapable of making decisions; nerdlinger Dennis (Kenny L. Price), who is obsessed with baseball cards; nerdlingerette Jane (Kristin Davis of Sex and the City, making this an unofficial double feature with the Kim Cattrall slasher Sins of the Past), whose parents are psychiatrists, which makes her spout non-stop psychobabble at all times; and Black character Darnell (Harrison White), who is Black and dies first.

Their bucolic vacation is also interrupted by antagonism from the noise music girl group Tina and the Tots, who have already claimed the asylum as their spot. In addition to the band's bullying frontwoman Tina (Ruth Collins of Cemetery High, Blood Sisters, and Psychos in Love), this includes her pianist Godiva (Dawn Alvan), who is a French communist, and her drummer Rapunzel (Farin, whose mononymous credit led me to believe she was a musician, but I can't find any evidence of this), who is Black and therefore Darnell's love interest. 

Analysis: It's hard to believe that 1989's Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge could represent the peak of somebody's career, but that could very well be the case with director Richard Friedman. After helming the Farley Granger whodunit Death Mask, episodes of Friday the 13th: The Series and Tales from the Darkside, and the music video for Billy Joel's "You're Only Human (Second Wind)", Friedman made his slasher debut in early 1988 with Doom Asylum, a movie so incompetently constructed that I'm shocked he'd even seen a camera before, let alone been behind one.

This is a movie that doesn't seem to understand that there is a meaningful difference between an asylum and a hospital. Or between autopsy tools and other medical implements (I'm pretty sure morticians have no need for stethoscopes). A movie with a scene where one shot is sunny and the reverse shot is rainy. Where an exterior can be moonlit night while the interior shows a noonday sun outside the windows.

The sound design is pretty bad, too. In fact, most of the final conflict is drowned out by the sound of birds squawking. And the editing is bad too. The opening car crash sequence spends waaaaaaay too much time on the people in the car screaming, to the point that you figure they probably had enough time to grab the wheel and move out of the way. And then they cut to a shot from the car's perspective where it looks like they are gliding gently out of the way. And then the crash still happens, somehow. Every subsequent shot in that sequence sells the reality of the moment less and less. It's kind of a mini-miracle they were able to accomplish that.

And then there's the acting. Every single actor in Doom Asylum is terrible. Even Kristin Davis, who in her debut film role is encouraged to shout every line as loudly as possible and indicate her character's emotions with huge, flashing neon signs. But Ruth Collins really is something else. Her viperish line readings are brayed out one syllable at a time and nearly always punctuated with a staccato fake laugh. Her acting is so effortful that she clearly needs to take a breather after every line. It takes a lot out of her.

Plus, Doom Asylum elevates filler into an art form. A fantasy sequence of Darnell and Rapunzel running toward one another in a field in slow-motion lasted so long that I began to calculate what percentage of this 79 minute movie the scene took up. And then the scene played again a few minutes later. I didn't have a stopwatch handy, but I'm thinking 2%. Which is a hell of a lot less than the 6 to 8% of Doom Asylum that is taken up by film clips from old Tod Slaughter movies. Literally, every time he kills somebody, The Coroner returns to his basement hideaway to watch these movies on a tiny portable television. This adds nothing, never connects to anything, and is also boring. An ideal combination.

And yet Doom Asylum is still incredibly watchable. Probably more than any slasher I've watched since... Well, when did I watch Kiss of the Serpent: Snake Island? June.

It has that indelible, lunatic bad-good quality that brings new surprises around every corner, which is a vibe that I crave. While the first two-thirds of the movie could be terribly boring, considering the only plot mechanic they can come up with is "somebody else wanders into the asylum alone and gets killed," the movie only gets boring in the third act when it tries to yoke what it's doing onto a proper plot.

Otherwise, the movie is like walking through a funhouse full of unexpectedly hilarious line readings, offbeat character moments (just like many slashers of its ilk, the Meat in Doom Asylum all have one character trait apiece, but those traits are fucking odd), and Kiki calling her boyfriend "Mom" in a running gag that is either meant to be sweet or funny, and fails so hard at both of those that it circles back around to being funny again.

The reason I suspect that this is meant to be funny is that Doom Asylum is packed with intentionally humorous moments. Quite a few of them even work! Not the killer's quips. Never the killer's quips. Those are labored, three times as long as they need to be, and delivered with absolutely no gusto. But there are quite a few purposefully cartoonish moments that land quite well, my favorite being Kiki freaking out when asking Mike where Jane is, grabbing his collar and shaking him so hard that she repeatedly slams him against a wall.

On top of all that, at least one person showed up to work, and that's special effects artist Vincent J. Guastini (Spookies, Blades, Elves, Child's Play 3, Silent Night). Many of the kills in Doom Asylum are executed extraordinarily well for the movie's budget level. They never get to the point of looking "real," but Guastini at least pulls out one "how did they do that?" moment. When Dennis gets drilled in the forehead, the gore prosthetic and the actor's face are clearly sharing the frame and it looks pretty seamless. Like, I might need to call OSHA about the working conditions on set, because that shit was pretty convincing.

There are also plenty of fakey gore effects that are nevertheless tremendously gross. The movie kicks off with its best, which is the Hellraiser-esque image of a mid-autopsy Mitch sitting up on the table with his skin peeled off, his brain pulsing, and ooey-gooey blood sliding down his face. Jane's ultimate demise, which involves a bone saw being inserted into her cheek, also made me squirm quite a bit, as did the torture porny moment where The Coroner snips all the toes off Mike's left foot (which I can't imagine killed him, but Kiki leaves him behind at the end of the movie, so I'm going to include him in the body count).

Good kills aren't all you need to make a slasher movie fun, but it gets you most of the way across the finish line. So sue me. I really had a good time with Doom Asylum. I'd say the intentional stuff works about 30% of the time, while the rest of the joy I got was completely accidental on the part of the filmmakers. But fun is fun, and if you're a bad movie sicko like me, this one's run time will just fly by.

Killer: The Coroner/Mitch Hansen (Michael Rogen)

Final Girl: Kiki LaRue (Patty Mullen)

Best Kill: This is actually stiff competition, but I'm going to have to say Jane's, because even though it's not the most convincing effect of them all, the concept of a saw to the face exposing her jaw is pretty gnarly and the execution is still pretty good.

Sign of the Times: No outfit worn by any character onscreen was legally allowed to exist in the 1990s. I think they were all burned on a ceremonial pyre on December 31, 1989.

Scariest Moment: When you realize the movie isn't gonna stop taking breaks between kills to show old film clips.

Weirdest Moment: Tina and the Tots hang out on the roof, eating rotisserie chicken and playing chess on top of a snare drum.

Champion Dialogue: “What's a Wade Boggs? Sounds like some kind of a swamp creature."

Body Count: 11

1. Judy is killed in a car crash.
2. Morgue Intern Marvin is stabbed in the chest.
3. Mortician is stabbed in the neck.
4. Darnell has his head clamped, piercing his temples.
5. Godiva has her face shoved into a sink filled with acid.
6. Dennis is drilled in the forehead.
7. Rapunzel is garroted with a stethoscope.
8. Jane has the side of her face ripped open with a handheld electric bone saw.
9. Mike has his toes cut off to death.
10. Tina is turned into a meat cube via kitchen machinery.
11. The Coroner is stabbed in the neck and face with the handle of Judy's hand mirror.

TL;DR: Doom Asylum is really, really, really bad, but absolutely worth watching.

Rating: 7/10

Census Bloodbath: Death On The L.A. River

Year:
1984
Director:
Paul Leder
Cast:
Stuart Whitman, Greg Mullavey, Jim Bailey
Run Time:
1 hour 41 minutes

Plot: Vultures is an Agatha Christie-style mystery in its purest form. As the wealthy Ramon Garcia's health fails in Pasadena, his relatives gather around him, transparently in the hopes that they will be favored in his will. However, an unknown assailant begins bumping them off one by one. Detective Lou Ryan (Greg Mullavey of the 1986 slasher The Eleventh Commandment, also a Paul Leder joint) thinks the culprit is Ramon's brother, Carl (Stuart Whitman of Deadly Intruder, Night of the Lepus, and the Cardboard Science title The Day the Earth Stood Still), who was accused of murdering Ramon's nephew 14 years ago. Carl, who claims he was wrongfully accused and that the incident ruined his life, dedicates himself to actually getting to the bottom of it, both to get the heat off him and to protect his family.

Now we need to Meet the Meat, and what a sprawling platter we have this time. First, there's Ramon and Carl's siblings Elena (Carmen Zapata, one of the few actual Hispanic people to portray a member of this Mexican-American family), who lives in Mexico City and isn't that interesting, and Rose (Yvonne De Carlo of The Munsters and, equally importantly, American Gothic - but also Cellar Dweller and The Silent Scream), a brassy talent agent who lives in New York. Plus Carl's sons Michael (Kipp "Brother of Stuart" Whitman), a successful business type, and Richard (Jim Bailey), a shy man who is only recently un-estranged from his father.

Then there are the spouses and love interests, namely Rose's husband Wally (Aldo Ray of Terror on Alcatraz, Dark Sanity, and Mongrel), who we don't learn enough about for me to describe him all that well; the strapping young actor Frank Belson (Jimmy Stathis of Hospital Massacre), with whom Rose is having an affair; Ramon's estranged not-quite-ex-wife, Contessa Pamela Windsor (Maria Perschy); and Carl's much-younger girlfriend, Millie Grant (Ann Sidney), who is organizing a benefit. For what? I'm not sure. But it's important to everyone involved for reasons I couldn't wrap my head around.

And that's not even everyone! There's also the beautiful Dr. Baker (Meredith MacRae), who is running his estate with an iron fist while he deteriorates.

Analysis: Vultures makes the incredible misstep of opening with its best scene, but what a scene it is! It introduces us to Rose's philandering ways, blasts us in the face with Yvonne De Carlo's firecracker of a performance, and concludes with the most vicious death in the movie. Not only is the guy's throat slit, but it's slit multiple times. I've never seen anything quite like it. Anyway, it's a blast and it got me sitting up in my seat, ready for a good time at the movies.

Unfortunately, literally nothing else in Vultures is as bawdy and salacious as that opening, even though De Carlo does have a few more standout moments (during her all-too-brief appearance in the movie, she prances circles around the rest of the cast as a diva for the ages). The intro feels like it was spliced in from an entirely different project, because everything else is as staid and bland as a TV movie (I tried to look up if this was made for TV, and it doesn't seem to have been). 

While nothing and nobody in the rest of the movie is especially bad, Vultures proceeds through the remainder of its intricate whodunit storytelling with a minimum of fuss or fun. Thankfully, that storytelling is quite satisfying. I particularly like the wrinkle that Elena and Ramon were raised by their dad while Carl and Rose were raised by their mom and the pairs haven't seen one another in decades, which fuels some unique dynamics and pours more fuel on the fire for everyone to be suspicious of each other.

Perhaps because I am a dyed-in-the-wool Christie fan, I was able to see through the red herrings and figure out who the killer was pretty quickly. But I don't think that will be the case for many viewers, and even if you call the reveal ahead of time, it's fun to watch them set up the pins they're going to knock down during the big parlor room sequence. However...

[SPOILER ALERT from here through the end of the review]

The big finale is ultimately a mixed bag. In addition to being easy to predict if you're a fan of Agatha Christie, it's very easy to predict if you're a fan of Jim Bailey. Going into the movie, I didn't know he was a famous female impersonator, but anyone who does know that will see the ending coming from a marathon's worth of miles off.

It's fun to see just how many characters they can get Bailey to play by the end of the movie (including, for some reason, his onstage go-to Barbra Streisand). He does a great job at bringing them to life well enough to differentiate them and make it seem believable that nobody would notice that the characters are played by Richard in drag (the makeup team is less good at making this convincing, but good enough that I think viewers who haven't already cottoned on might not notice).

Unfortunately, he flubs his big reveal moment at the end. His final monologue weirdly has zero energy, and it all culminates in some transphobic hogwash (though that's not his fault). His one-man performance of multiple characters at once should have been a big, gonzo finale, but all it does is highlight his faults as a screen performer. He never did that much on-camera work, and now I understand why.

At the end of the day, Vultures is good enough at what it does to be entertaining, but the flaws with the middle and the end do pile up enough that you sure wish it wasn't more than 100 minutes long.

Killer: Richard Garcia (Jim Bailey)

Final Girl: Carl Garcia (Stuart Whitman)

Best Kill: Michael's death is the most elaborate and bizarre, as it involves him being swung on a rope across a stage, which sends him careening into a fuse box, where he is electrocuted. However, it gets even more interesting afterward, when his still-smoking corpse swings back and forth over the stage like a pendulum.

Sign of the Times: After Jim Bailey's Barbra finishes crooning, the most 1984 band on the planet takes the stage, but I can't for the life of me figure out who they are or what song they're singing. It's the curse of digging lost media out of garbage chutes.

Scariest Moment: This movie honestly isn't even trying to be scary, so I got nothing. I did get scared when I saw how much time was left after they had killed both the best actor in the cast (Yvonne De Carlo) and the hottest (Jimmy Stathis).

Weirdest Moment: What's wrong with this picture?

Champion Dialogue: “Knock it off, I can't fuck and think at the same time."

Body Count: 7; not including two people who are killed before the events of the movie, whose bodies are later discovered.

1. Wally has his throat slit multiple times.
2. Rose is rammed repeatedly with a truck.
3. Pamela dies in a boat explosion.
4. Frank is stabbed in the back.
5. Elena is shot offscreen.
6. Michael is hung from a rope and swung into a fuse box.
7. Dr. Baker is shot by Carl.

TL;DR: Vultures is a serviceable slasher whodunit, even if it's a little long in the tooth.

Rating: 6/10

Census Bloodbath: What Dreams May Come

Year:
1984
Director:
Manivannan
Cast:
Vijayakanth, Mohan, Nalini
Run Time:
2 hours 14 minutes

Plot: Schoolgirl Devi (Nalini of December Pookkal) has a dream prophesying the death of her sister, which unfortunately comes true. Years later, Devi gets married to her rich neighbor, Ram Kumar (Mohan of Nalaya Manithan and Moodu Pani), but the first 100 days of her married life are less full of conjugal bliss than they could be when she has another prophetic dream witnessing a man she doesn't know killing a woman she doesn't know. Much to the dismay of Ram Kumar, she teams up with her cousin Raju (Vijayakanth) to get to the bottom of things.

Analysis: The Indian Tamil-language slasher Nooravathu Naal is a loose remake of Lucio Fulci's The Psychic that was itself loosely remade in Malayalam two years later as Aayiram Kannukal. That's a whole lot of pedigree for an Indian slasher, especially considering the fact that India has thus far never really nailed the slasher format. Thankfully, Nooravathu Naal has enough going for it that it almost earns that remake that I'm inevitably going to have to review.

Indeed, it's a much more than half-decent horror movie. It's no great shakes as a slasher (there are too few kills, presented too bloodlessly, to the point that I have no idea how one of the victims died). But visually, there's quite a bit going on here. I'm particularly partial to a shot of a lit-up phone booth glowing against a dark, rainy sky, as well as a scene where a mirror is being unwrapped piece by piece, so when the first bit of wrapping is removed, it looks like an eye is staring through the hole.

I was even pretty engrossed in the amateur gumshoes' investigation and the various methods they used to try and track down the killer's next victim.

Unfortunately, like many Indian movies, they had more than two hours to fill, so they decided to slop a bunch of other nonsense in on top of the horror-mystery stuff. The movie is at its worst when it's trying to be a comedy, putting a spotlight on Ram Kumar's bumbling assistant Mr. John (Janakaraj), whose flop-sweaty schtick is shriekingly unfunny.

I'm partial to horror movies having musical numbers, so I was slightly less bothered by those, even though they're for the most part indifferently executed. The best I can say for the film's three numbers is that they improved as they went along. The first love song - which is staged like you're tripping balls while watching an ABBA music video through a kaleidoscope - is a meandering slog that really rubs our noses in the fact that Mohan can't sing as well as Nalini can. But their second love song at least has the good sense to take place in an abstract cocoon of glitter, so that was fun to look at. And the third song, which is sung by the ghost of Devi's sister (who never does get a name, poor thing), is genuinely eerie and fun.

I also can't get mad at the scenes that feel like they're pulled straight from an Indian TV melodrama. The over-the-top editing of Devi discovering a body is delectably campy, as are the action scenes that keep spontaneously erupting in the third act. Raju goes from mental health professional to action hero in 60 seconds, suddenly leaping all around the joint like Super Mario. It's pretty fun!

However, I don't think either the good or the bad outweighs the other, here. There's simply too much material about Ram Kumar whining that he's not getting enough sex, or that he isn't respected enough for being rich. It's too tedious for me to recommend the film as a whole, but I do think that this is the Indian slasher from the first half of the 1980s that gets the most right.

Killer: Ram Kumar (Mohan)

Final Girl: Devi (Nalini)

Best Kill: Even though it's a little silly that he accidentally does it to himself, a man who attacks Raju ends up getting chased away, climbs over an iron gate, slips, and impales himself. I love a good gate kill, what can I say?

Sign of the Times: Mr. John's bow tie is about the size of an adult bat.

Scariest Moment: Devi starts unpacking newly delivered furniture and unveils various objects that were in her premonition.

Weirdest Moment: Ram Kumar and Devi open their wedding presents, and every single person got them a telephone.

Champion Dialogue: “Why are you looking so fuzz, sir?"

Body Count: 4

1. Devi's Sister is stabbed in the gut.
2. Assailant is impaled on an iron gate.
3. Parvathi is killed.
4. Jagannathan is choked by Raju with a wooden pole.

TL;DR: Nooravathu Naal is almost definitely the best Indian slasher of the 1980s, but that's not a particularly lively bunch.

Rating: 6/10

Census Bloodbath: Psychically Susan

Year:
1985
Director:
John Llewellyn Moxey
Cast:
Cindy Williams, David Morse, Lee Horsley
Run Time:
1 hour 35 minutes

Plot: In When Dreams Come True, museum tour guide Susan Matthews (Cindy Williams of Laverne & Shirley) is in a rough patch with her workaholic cop boyfriend. Alex Kazloff (Lee Horsley). He's too caught up with chasing a serial killer - the lazily named Perfect Murderer - to pay attention to her needs. She has dreams about meeting and being seduced by the mysterious stranger Robert Wynton (David Morse), and when he shows up at the museum, she finds him just as tempting in real life.

However, her prophetic dreams aren't limited to just booty calls. She soon begins to suspect that her dreams are informing her about who the Perfect Murderer is targeting next.

Analysis: As I continue catching up with older titles that slipped through the cracks during my first few rounds of research for Census Bloodbath (I'm getting close!), some trends have begun to emerge First of all, we've been covering a lot of international titles, which makes sense. Obscure non-English films can be hard to categorize. We've also gotten a whole heap of TV movies that managed to escape the Internet's notice. I'm less sure why that might be the case, but it's possible that people simply wanted to spare me from watching When Dreams Come True. And I thank them for their valiant effort.

When Dreams Come True lives up to its title by being a goddamn snooze. While I really appreciate the TV movie slashers that focus on women's stories (Fantasies is great! Sins of the Past is a hoot!), true feminism means accepting that some women can be boring, and Susan is one of the most tedious protagonists in the business. 

Girl needs to dump her awful boyfriend, sure, but I find it hard to believe that the best replacement she can find is this wet dishrag with the hair of Ludwig van Beethoven who is in serious need of a rizz transplant. Any scene she spends with any of the men in her life sucks, and almost every scene features some combination of those three characters. 

Also, almost every time she hangs out with Alex (who is of Romani origin), they say a lot of racist stuff about his family and his ancestors. Though I suppose racism is interesting, even if it's in a negative way. I almost wish their conversations were nothing but epithets. At least then I'd feel something.

Needless to say, it's a bad slasher too. Not only are the kills bloodless (they were always going to be), but they also take place offscreen and for the most part happen to characters who we never get to know anything about. Plus, the killer reveal is so blindingly obvious that I'm not entirely sure they were actually trying to hide his identity from us.

Anyway, When Dreams Come True only ever really comes alive when Susan is hanging out with her horny, witchy coworker Annie (cult film icon Jessica Harper, of Suspiria, Shock Treatment, Phantom of the Paradise, and Bones and All). Harper waltzes away with the movie every second she spends onscreen, using every tool at her disposal (Those giant eyes! That husky voice!) to ooze charisma like a poorly sealed toothpaste tube in a carry-on bag. Oh, and the banishment ritual she does at one point in the movie is the only well-executed special effects sequence.

The only other saving grace here is when they remember that Laverne & Shirley was a comedy and find anything for poor Cindy Williams to do other than look vaguely anxious. She comes alive when she gets to be funny, whether it's reacting with annoyance to her overbearing neighbor's dogs, trying to parse what Annie is saying about her weird dream about being chased by bats through the Grand Canyon (the film's best scene!), or fucking around with her snippy older coworker Mrs. Colton (Norma Young, who we've seen before in a whole other review series as a Venusian girl in the Cardboard Science title Queen of Outer Space).

All in all, When Dreams Come True is more boring than truly bad, but who needs that? Let me be mad!

Killer: Robert Wynton (David Morse)

Final Girl: Susan Matthews (Cindy Williams)

Best Kill: It would have to be the death of the security guard Jack (Eli Cummins) - he is stabbed in the gut - both because it's the only body count death that's actually shown onscreen and because Jack is annoying and sucks.

Sign of the Times: This was acceptable hair for a date at a fancy restaurant.

Scariest Moment: The opening dream, when Susan is running away from an unknown assailant and nobody is helping her, is actually pretty frightening and disorienting.

Weirdest Moment: Susan and Robert go on a date to see The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe and I find out that that's the name of a real movie and not just something they made up.

Champion Dialogue: “Making love in a hallway with just about anybody would certainly thrill me. Especially Richard Gere."

Body Count: 5

1. Woman is killed offscreen.
2. Woman #2 is killed offscreen.
3. Jack is stabbed in the gut.
4. Annie is killed offscreen.
5. Robert is shot by Lee.

TL;DR: When Dreams Come True is a tedious TV movie slasher that is only good when Jessica Harper is onscreen.

Rating: 4/10

Census Bloodbath: Sex Work-Life Balance

Year:
1984
Director:
Peter H. Hunt
Cast:
Barbara Carrera, Kim Cattrall, Debby Boone
Run Time:
1 hour 34 minutes

Plot: Sins of the Past follows a group of former sex workers who were part of a call girl cooperative that broke up when one of their number, Ellen Easton (Megan Gallagher), was murdered. Now it's 15 years later, none of them have aged a day, and they've settled into new, respectable lives. One by one, the girls are sent newspaper clippings about Ellen's death, then they in turn are killed. They think the killer is Ellen's abusive father, Ralph (Gene Dynarski), but in order to get to the bottom of the crime and keep their former lives secret (they almost all have high-stakes reasons to want to keep it quiet), they reunite in LA to try and track down the killer themselves.

The women in question are Terry Halloran (Barbara Carrera, fresh off her stint as a Bond girl in 1983's Never Say Never Again), their former leader who is now hilariously working at a temp agency providing young girls with very different types of jobs - she's also in the middle of a vicious custody battle; Paula Bennett (the Kim Cattrall, two years before Big Trouble in Little China, three years before Mannequin, and 14 years before Sex and the City), a pragmatic woman who got her medical license and is now fighting to turn her temporary job as the head of pediatrics into a permanent position; Clarissa Hope (Debby "Daughter of Pat" Boone), who has found God and now performs songs to support televangelist Rev. Donald Randolph (John Anderson, who played the used car dealer in Psycho); Maureen Warren (Tracy Reed), who is a wife and mother living in domestic bliss; and Patrice Cantwell (Kirstie Alley, whose closet is too full of skeletons for us to consider this movie one of them - also of the same year's Blind Date), a Hollywood actress who has fallen on hard times.

As Terry tries to rally the girls, she becomes the prime suspect and eventual love interest of Lieutenant Malovich (General Hospital mainstay Anthony Geary), who is gunning for a promotion and will do anything to figure out why bodies keep piling up whenever Terry's around. Oh, and he doesn't matter at all, but Paula has a horny coworker played by Matthew Faison, who is one of the corporate paintballers who die via triple decapitation in Jason Lives!

Analysis: TV movie slashers get a bad rap. Obviously, the idea of a genre whose foundational tenets are boobs and blood being subject to network censorship is a suspicious one. And sure, some of them are barrel-scraping piles of pond scum like Hotline or . However, there are quite a few exquisite little TV movie gems scattered throughout slasher history, like Fantasies or Dark Night of the Scarecrow. So I didn't walk into Sins of the Past feeling biased against the format, and I was well rewarded for my faith.

Of course it's not particularly good as a slasher. It has the bloodless, mostly offscreen deaths that I've come to expect from this sub-subgenre, and it doesn't even have the decency to imply that any of them were committed with a sharp weapon. However, just like Fantasies before it, it makes up for its deficits as a slasher by leaning in on being a soapy, Lifetime-y melodrama about women.

The scenes where the women alternately work together and at cross-purposes gives them all an exciting amount of agency as they're propelled through some extreme emotional twists and turns. Plus, the slasher mystery at the center of it is deliciously cozy - more about lounging on couches while discussing the clues rather than gumshoing their way around the problem.

The movie even ages kinda OK in its depiction of sex work. It mostly lands on "it's OK that you did it, because you regret it and you're not doing it anymore," which is kind of a cop-out, but it does allow these sex workers to be complete human beings with lives and flaws and strengths, respecting them even though they committed those sinful, wicked acts in their pasts. There's even a lovely scene where one of the women reveals her past with her current partner, whose immediate instinct is to shun her, but who ultimately comes to accept it.

And the cast is quite good, for the most part. Kirstie Alley is really quite terrific as an amoral diva (no comment), and Tracy Reed delivers a phenomenal monologue in the final third. Unfortunately, Barbara Carrera is not up to their standard. The Nicaraguan-American actress is a Gal Gadotian level of unprepared to deliver lines in English. She wends her way around her dialogue with a sense of blind panic that results in a completely vacant character, leaving a gaping void at the center of the movie.

[SPOILER ALERT, through the end of the review]

And we must talk about Kim Cattrall, of course. Although she does deliver a perfectly Samantha-esque line comparing marriage to sex work, she's confident and competent here rather than truly marvelous, which is a shame considering the fact that it's revealed that her character contributed two kills to the body count. Her final scene is solid, but it fails to deliver the Ghostface campiness that it could have had.

That said, as a whole, the third act (when everyone converges on one of the reverend's telecasts, which Clarissa refuses to back out of in spite of the fact that the killer is clearly planning to murder her there) is actually deliciously tense. Director Peter H. Hunt, who mostly takes a backseat elsewhere, finally stirs to life as he guides us through all the different pieces being set on the board.

Although I'm not saying the movie has nothing to offer artistically. There's exactly one good shot in the movie, of a slash of light revealing Maureen's eyes as she explores a dark Mission. 

Speaking of, there are a lot of real-life Southern California locations being used, which gives the whole thing a lived-in realism. All in all, in spite of Barbara Carrera's alarming limitations, Sins of the Past is a real nice warm bath of a movie, which is the highest-possible tier that a TV movie slasher could hope to reach.

Killer: Ralph Easton (Gene Dynarski) & (gasp) Paula Bennett (Kim Cattrall)

Final Girl: Terry Halloran (Barbara Carrera)

Best Kill: Oooh baby, watching the dummy playing Kim Cattrall falling from the catwalk at the end is why television exists!

Sign of the Times: The article that the girls are being sent has the hilarious headline "Dad Kills Prostie Daughter."

Scariest Moment: Terry is followed by an unknown man after Patrice's funeral.

Weirdest Moment: Ralph Easton takes aim to kill Clarissa with a rifle, but realizes he forgot to put his glasses on.

Champion Dialogue: “A meat cutter is drop-kicking pot roasts around the kitchen and demanding a tryout with The Raiders."

Body Count: 5; not including Amy (Mallie Jackson), whose offscreen death occurs during the time jump.

1. Ellen is killed offscreen.
2. Diane (Kristen Meadows) is struck by a car.
3. Patrice is killed offscreen.
4. Ralph Easton is shot by Lt. Malovich.
5. Paula falls from a great height.

TL;DR: Sins of the Past is charming TV movie slasher that blends women's picture melodrama with a cozy mystery vibe.

Rating: 7/10

Census Bloodbath: Gland Guignol

Note: The English subtitles that were available to me for this Cantonese-language movie were very poorly translated, so take my review with a huge grain of salt. Also, I do not have access to translated credits, so I unfortunately cannot credit actors for their roles. Though it's worth noting that the cast includes Hong Kong Butcher producer Wai-Leung Cheng, Dress Off for Life star Lau Kong, and Hell Has No Boundary stars Ping Ha and Hak-Shun Leung (the latter of whom was also in the extraordinary He Lives by Night).

Year:
1984
Director:
Dan Pan
Cast:
Wai-Leung Cheng, Han Chiang, Ping Ha
Run Time:
1 hour 23 minutes

Plot: Pituitary Hunter follows, perhaps naturally, the police on the hunt for a serial killer who removes the pituitary glands from their victims, presumably to eat them. While the unnamed (in my subtitles, at least) Inspector is hot on the trail of the killer, hospital janitor Dr. Kwok keeps up a secret medical practice out of his apartment. He was trained in China, you see, and he isn't licensed to practice in Hong Kong. This seems like it might give the movie subtext of some kind, and that is an illusion.

Anyway, after he gives an abortion to sex worker Manna Chan, she begins to fall for him. However, as she learns more about the secretive doctor, she begins to suspect that he has something to do with all the pituitary thievery.

Analysis: Hong Kong's Pituitary Hunter has a hell of a title, and I wish that I could report it was also a hell of a movie. And perhaps it almost gets there? There's certainly enough moments in the movie that, were I to describe them, would sound very bonkers and fun on paper. However, this straightforward story is incoherently told from the jump, and once it gets complicated... woo, it's a toughie.

The subtitles I had are certainly to blame for part of my difficulty. The name Dr. Kwok is also incorrectly attributed to Dr. Ng all the way through the first act up until the latter's death. Also the killer is referred to by two different full names in the subtitles and a nurse is consistently misgendered. So that didn't help, but the movie also has fundamental flaws that are ruinous in any language.

First, scene placement is a nightmare. One scene almost never naturally flows into the next. For instance, let me explain opening. A man standing behind a bush eats a dead rabbit, which cuts to family members loudly weeping over an old man's corpse in a hospital. When they follow the gurney into the morgue, a different corpse in a body bag falls on them, which cuts to the opening credits, which play over a young girl doing a dance routine. If this was meant to set anything up, hell if I know what it was. Though the mourners are weeping so loud that they're annoying another patient, which is a very funny The Host-style gag, though nothing else in the movie is really overtly comic like that, so I don't know if they did that on purpose.

Second, this movie is too damn dark. During the nighttime scenes (aka the kills), it is almost impossible to tell who is doing what, to whom, and where. These are pretty important things to know, I'd say.

Speaking of the kills, they're mostly not bad. They're often weirdly elaborate, and the black-gloved killer is sometimes shown in what looks like an awesome porcelain demon mask. There's also a "killer in the backseat" moment that happens right after a couple hooks up in the front seat, which has an added element of creepiness.

Once the story gets cooking, it also finds a few threads of pathos that are ultimately unusual in this type of slasher. [SPOILER ALERT FROM THIS POINT ON] It turns out that Dr. Kwok has a daughter with dwarfism, Siu-Hua, and he is trying to use a blend of human and animal pituitary glands to "cure" her (paragraphs and paragraphs of text at the end of the movie, as far as I can tell with Google Translate, overexplain that this can't actually be done - thanks, credits! I was about to crack open a few skulls, but now I won't bother!). This makes him a good red herring, because it turns out that he only ever wanted the pituitaries from corpses, and the real killer - a bodybuilder with dwarfism who gets two names but is most consistently called Tsang Kwok On - has gone rogue in an attempt to force the doctor to cure his own dwarfism.

It's not a storyline that holds up super well under an anti-ableism lens, obviously, but the movie has sympathy for Kwok, Siu-Hua, and Tsang in spades. In fact, even when Tsang goes off the deep end and threatens to burn a blind old woman alive, he is given a sympathetic and melancholy death scene à la Frankenstein or King Kong or Rodan. However, while there is some good in Pituitary Hunter, all of this adds up to nothing much, since the bad is so bad and the good isn't great to begin with.

Killer: Tsang Kwok On

Final Girl: Manna Chan

Best Kill: The kill itself is kind of a nothingburger, but I admire Tsang Kwok On's idea to get a victim out of the tent she's in by unleashing a bunch of mice into it.

Sign of the Times: In his bodybuilding lair, Tsang Kwok On has some epic posters of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone.

Scariest Moment: We watch a nurse lean a group of corpses against a wall, start commanding them like a drill sergeant, and then bite the shoulder of the one who's "disobeying orders."

Weirdest Moment: The police lure an unhoused man out of a sewer tunnel with a duck, which he wants to devour raw, and as he chases it, they drop a metal cage on him.

Champion Dialogue: “Human's pituitary is useful when he is alived."

Body Count: 9; not including Siu-Hua, who may have died from stress during the final confrontation. That's left unclear in the final moments.

1. Cannibal Nurse dies of fright.
2. Dr. Ng dies offscreen.
3. Junkyard Watchman is lifted into the sky in a burning van, which is dropped and then crushed by the crane.
4. Tent Lady is stabbed.
5. Car Guy is stabbed from behind.
6. Lily is stabbed in the back.
7. Big-Mouth So dies offscreen.
8. Dr. Kwok is stabbed in the side.
9. Tsang Kwok On is shot by the police.

TL;DR: Pituitary Hunter is an incoherent movie that has some sparks of life to it, but is mostly confusing and unsatisfying.

Rating: 4/10

Census Bloodbath: Don't Break Daddy

Note: I don't have access to full, translated credits for this Cantonese-language movie, so unfortunately I can't accurately credit every role.

Year:
1983
Director:
Lee Siu-Wah 
Cast:
Eddie Chan, Olivia Cheng, Git-Leung Chan
Run Time:
1 hour 28 minutes

Plot: The Hong Kong movie Crazy Blood (Feng xie) follows police photographer Wei Ming (Eddie Chan of the delightful He Lives by Night), who is frustrated that his wife Chen Ching Min (Olivia Cheng) is constantly too busy with her job as a social worker to either have sex with him or help him take care of their son, Chia Pu.

Her job eventually introduces too many criminal types into their life, particularly serial arsonist MiMi  and her creepy gymnastics coach boyfriend David. Eventually, Wei Ming's sister So Fong is sexually assaulted by David when she's supposed to be babysitting. Meanwhile, an unsupervised Chia Pu climbs out the window in an attempt to get ice cream and falls to his death. This sends Wei Ming on a violent spiral where he attempts to exact revenge on everyone involved in his son's death, including his wife.

Analysis: You're welcome for making Crazy Blood sound legible in that synopsis. A better title would be Crazy Structure. It starts with the death of MiMi (in an illegibly edited sequence where she's climbing a fence, it gets struck by a car, and she tumbles gently to the asphalt, apparently dead), which is followed by a flashback that lasts for about 50 minutes and had me constantly asking "so is this taking place in the past, or did I not understand the opening scene?" This flashback is not slasher-y even a little bit, and spends most of its time expounding on the thesis that it's super annoying when women have jobs.

Once the movie finally catches up with itself (and makes us watch MiMi's bad death scene again), an entire slasher movie happens in the space of a cut. Suddenly, Chen Ching Min is like "hey, did you know all the girls I've been caring for are dead?" While we do get a couple proper body count kills after that, it's shocking how little this slasher is interested in actually being a slasher.

Of the actual body count kills, 50% of them are falling-related deaths, which also takes a lot of wind out of this movie's sails. In fact, everything was so wonky that I would have taken Crazy Blood off my slasher longlist entirely if not for two scenes.

The first is that David's death scene involves an exquisite kung fu-flavored chase sequence that takes place in multiple rooms of an empty gym. In perfect Hong Kong movie fashion, both Wei Ming and David use every possible bit of gym equipment as improvised weapons, including weights and - at one point - an entire tanning bed. The second is the final sequence (which is also pretty solid) where David is menacing his wife in their apartment, picking up a meat cleaver and finally going full Jack Torrance.

Anyway, I think this movie could learn a thing or two from Death Wish and its rip-offs. If you give a character a kid and you mess with that kid, the audience will get why he's mad. You don't need to spend more than half the movie explaining why he loves the kid. Crazy Blood is so goddamn boring, which is a shame because it features some deeply unhinged moments that would have played better in a more well-structured action-slasher. 

The behavior of the criminal element in the movie makes absolutely no sense, for one thing. This movie exists in a culture beset by Mad Max style cartoon criminals who are giddy hedonists that do hyperbolically evil acts non-stop for the simple pleasure of being outrageous, including trying to light a car on fire while a couple makes out inside it.

Oh, and there's exactly one shot in this movie that is aesthetically pleasing, showing Chen Ching Min staring out the window as seen in a fragmented mirror. Beyond that, though, Crazy Blood doesn't have much to offer, unless you like interminable scenes of people buying ice cream. 

Killer: Wei Ming (Eddie Chan)
Final Girl: Chen Ching Min (Olivia Cheng)
Best Kill: I guess I'd have to say David's death by drowning, but only because it comes at the end of that really cool chase scene.
Sign of the Times: When Chia Pu and Wei Ming watch TV together during one of their many cheesy "daddy-son time" montages, they're watching one of the original 1970s Doraemon episodes.
Scariest Moment: In the final sequence, Wei Ming acts increasingly unhinged while holding a butter knife as his wife prepares dinner.
Weirdest Moment: David and MiMi drive a jeep onto the beach and randomly start trying to run over So Fong, who they've never met. When Chen Ching Min finds out who they are, she casually introduces them to Wei Ming.
Champion Dialogue: “I thought she'd change after being shaved bald."
Body Count: 6

1. MiMi falls from a fence that she's climbing when it's hit by a truck.
2. Chia Pu falls to his death offscreen.
3. Jenny is pushed out a window.
4. Unnamed Child falls to his death offscreen.
5. David is drowned in a swimming pool.
6. Wei Ming is slashed with a box cutter (I think by MiMi, who then succumbs to her injuries).

TL;DR: Crazy Blood is a somewhat enjoyably demented family drama, but it's crap as a slasher.
Rating: 4/10

Census Bloodbath: I Haven't The Foggiest

Note: This movie was only available to me in unsubtitled Spanish. While I'm not half bad at Spanish, I'm full bad when it is rapidly spoken by people from Spain, so take my review with a grain of salt. Also, the copy doesn't come with proper credits, making it hard to determine who played who.

Year:
1982
Director:
Silvio F. Balbuena
Cast:
Terpy Ibir, Carla Celis, Antonio Mayans
Run Time:
1 hour 19 minutes

Plot: Written in the Fog (aka Escrito en la niebla) kicks off with a literal bang when young boy Victor shoots his mother's lover, Tomás, with a shotgun and pins the crime on her. Many years later, the adult Victor (Terpy Ibir, who also wrote the movie) is running the restaurant Bar Julia. As his guilt over his crime bubbles over, he monologues nonstop to his now catatonic mother while she stares into space in her wheelchair. 

For some reason, various men bring women to the bar to get them jobs. Victor kidnaps one of them and hides her in his basement. He is then driven to murder anybody who tries to investigate this, as well as anybody who tries to flirt with him. Dude's got problems.

Analysis: You know what other slasher movie came out of Spain in 1982? Goddamn Pieces. It's probably not fair of me to compare Written in the Fog with one of the all-time trashterpieces of slasher cinema, but it hurts knowing what we could have had here if anybody put their mind to it.

Written in the Fog is no Pieces. It is unfortunately more in the Atrapados en el miedo camp, though very few films could be worse than that mess, thankfully. What we get here is about an hour of tedium where Victor goes about the business of managing a restaurant while hiding a woman in the basement. For a little bit of variety, in between repetitive scenes of him trying and failing to feed his captive, they throw in plenty of repetitive scenes of him ranting to his mother.

Other than the vague Psycho stink that hangs in the air, there's nothing remotely slashery about this part of the movie. I think more people die than we actually see die onscreen (it would be helpful to have been able to understand the dialogue, yes), but if they're dying offscreen, why even bother making it a slasher movie?

Once it finally remembers what it's here to do, though, Written in the Fog perks up a bit. The first body count kill (which takes place about 25 minutes before the "Fin" title card) is a shocking burst of violence, and each of the kills that follow swiftly on its heels feel the same way. And while the gore effects aren't top notch, there's plenty of dripping blood to go around.

Hell, they even throw in a non-kill gore moment for good measure, in a scene where Victor attacks a goofy but perceptive detective (I took to calling him Puáro) by bonking him on the head with a sharp hoe. It's all very lively and reasonably dynamic in a way that the rest of this movie isn't. It's not enough for me to recommend Written in the Fog - not nearly enough - but at least it has redeeming qualities. Random regional slashers don't always even have the courtesy to pack a few of those in. (Here's looking at you, Blood Lake.)

Killer: Victor

Final Girl: N/A

Best Kill: The Inspector being beaten around the head with a poker is startlingly savage and quite bloody.

Sign of the Times: We see Victor lugging around a beautiful old-fashioned crate of 1980s Pepsi bottles.

Scariest Moment: That opening sequence with Victor being an evil little kid is pretty startling.

Weirdest Moment: Late in the game, it is revealed that Victor has an open-top fishbowl shaped like a giant wine glass.

Champion Dialogue: N/A

Body Count: 5; not including the short-haired waitress, who we don't see die, but who vanishes and whose offscreen death I'm sure must be mentioned in dialogue that I missed.

1. Tomás is shot with a shotgun.
2. Blonde Waitress is slashed in the neck.
3. Basement Lady is poisoned (I think?).
4. Inspector has his head beaten with a poker.
5. Dark-Haired Waitress is hit in the head with a rock.

TL;DR: Written in the Fog is mostly boring, but when it puts its energy into actually being a slasher, it's watchable.

Rating: 4/10