Cardboard Science: The Scorp Trials

Year: 1957
Director: Edward Ludwig
Cast: Richard Denning, Carlos Rivas, Mara Corday
Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

We're halfway to Halloween, so it's time for the second installment of this year's Great Switcheroo with Hunter Allen of Kinemalogue. In honor of this being the 13th year of our annual tradition, we have selected specific sub-subgenres for one another. In exchange for three 1980s slashers about holidays and special occasions, he has assigned me a trio of 1950s B-movies about killer arthropods.

This time around, we're looking at The Black Scorpion. Although director Edward Ludwig isn't nearly as well known around these parts as The Deadly Mantis' Nathan Juran, this remains an All-Star Switcheroo thanks to other folks behind the camera. For one thing, we have Jack Dietz on hand. You probably know him best as the one-time operator of the Cotton Club, but he also produced the Ray Harryhausen classic The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Just four years later, he got to collaborate with another iconic stop-motion artist. That's right, this time around we're dealing with work from the legendary Willis H. O'Brien, Harryhausen's mentor who brought us King motherfuckin' Kong.

And it shows.

The Black Scorpion starts off with a bang. Literally. The first shot is a volcano exploding. And the second and third. You see, the rural Mexican town of San Lorenzo is being besieged with volcanic activity, which is what brings geologists Dr. Hank Scott (Richard Denning of Creature from the Black Lagoon) and Dr. Arturo Ramos (Carlos Rivas of The Beast of Hollow Mountain) into their midst. However, seismic issues are the least of their worries, as it turns out that a species of prehistoric giant scorpions has been unleashed upon the nearby countryside, their underground hideout having been broken open by an earthquake.

As the doctors scramble to help local authorities defeat the menace, Hank begins to fall for Teresa Alvarez (Mara Corday of The Giant Claw and Tarantula), a ranch owner with an hourglass figure to beat the band.

If he fought the scorpion with as much intensity as he pursued Teresa, this movie would only be 40 minutes long. And even then, it's just because the scorpion doesn't show up for the first 30 minutes.

First of all, for a 1950s movie set in Mexico, it actually seems to view Mexicans as human beings for the most part. It even has some in the movie! As far as I can tell, not every Mexican character is played by a Mexican actor or even a Latinx actor (I don't have Corday's 23andMe results, but I'm pretty sure she's just brunette), but there are at least four confirmed Mexican or Mexican-American actors in this cast, and that basically makes this the Roma of 1957.

There are plenty of weird comments about, say, tortillas, tequila, and rattlesnakes, but The Black Scorpion allows itself to depict a Mexico that is just as full of educated, boring urbanites as any old monster movie.

Thankfully, because of this, the characters and story aren't half bad. This is good news, because, as I've said, we have to spend at least half an hour with them before a scorpion is even mentioned. Honestly, the first act is a fun enough "figure out what the hell is going on" yarn that I wasn't even missing him. However, I really started to feel this movie's run time (no 1950s B-movie has the right to edge this perilously close to 90 minutes) once the monster movie plot proper kicked in. 

At that point, the plot falls back on too many hoary monster movie cliches (ie. scientists explaining random bullshit followed by long discussions about how to defeat the monster - the answer is almost always "an even bigger gun!") to be particularly worthwhile.

The monster scenes, though! Oh, the monster scenes. They're far from perfect, but they're a hell of a lot of fun. I personally grew quite bored with the sequence set in their underground domain, which is aping King Kong to the degree that O'Brien literally re-used models from that movie. It's not particularly interesting to see the scorpions fight someone their own size, especially when those monsters have much less unique designs.

However, when the scorpions step out into the human world, we get a series of scenes that are real barn-burners. The stop-motion scorpion looks superb, with eight legs, two claws, and a tail all whipping around in ways that feel perfectly organic and terrifyingly uncontrollable. 

Unfortunately, the movie has a penchant of cutting to close-ups of a puppet scorpion face, and that's where the wheels fall off. 

They don't fall so much as plummet into oblivion.

The face isn't actually terrible. It's thrillingly wet, with moist eyes and non-stop drool dripping from its mouth. Plus, there is a lot of motion thanks to the puppet's moving eyes and articulated pincers and jaw. However, in addition to looking goofy as all get out, these close-ups stick out from the film at odd angles.

It's quite clear that they were shot separately from the rest of the film and randomly inserted later on. The lighting conditions and setting of the close-ups are often completely different from those of the wide shots, and they often break the 180-degree line within the scenes where they're placed, making the whole thing feel muddled and confusing. Which is not the feeling you want to have at the same time that you're struggling to process those googly eyes.

Those close-ups aside, though, The Black Scorpion is actually quite well shot. The black-and-white cinematography has tremendous contrast and depth, and while you would never be able to fool yourself into thinking you're watching, say Casablanca, most of the individual images in the human scenes are quite pleasant to look at, especially when compared to some of the flat, washed-out tripe that gets ladled onto other B-movies of this vintage.

Ultimately, I'd cut a good 15 to 25 minutes out of the movie, but even as it stands, it's an immensely pleasurable watch. The Black Scorpion hasn't scuttled into my top tier of Cardboard Science pictures, alongside movies like Godzilla, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Attack of the Puppet People, and Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman. However, I'm very happy to slot it into the "silver medal" tier with Journey to the Center of the Earth and It Conquered the World.

That which is indistinguishable from magic:

*The scientist character keeps calling the scorpion's venom "poison," which is not correct! I know this is a pedantic point to make, but he's a scientist! He should know things.

The morality of the past, in the future!:

*Honestly, I think I'm mostly just impressed by The Black Scorpion's depiction of Mexico because all I really have to compare it to in Cardboard Science is The Cyclops, which famously decided that "Guayjorm" was a credible name for a Mexican town.
*Because seriously, in this movie, not only does English seem to be the national language of Mexico, it's the type of English you might hear coming out of Katharine Hepburn's mouth.
*I can't be certain, but I'm pretty sure that Mara Corday says "grazie" to a group of vaqueros.

Sensawunda:

*I adore the scene where Hank and Arturo think they hear a rattlesnake and Hank pulls out his gun. Once they discover that the noise is coming from an abandoned baby playing with a rattle in its crib, Hank makes a sardonic joke about fatherhood while using the gun to point at the baby. 
*I'm also a huge fan of the man who is tasked with shooting an electrified harpoon at the scorpion, misses, and ends up electrifying himself while trying to reload the weapon. Cinema could use more hapless failures like him in serious movies. It lends them a sense of realism.

TL;DR: The Black Scorpion is a bit goofy and overlong, but otherwise a hell of a solid entry in the 1950s giant bug movie subgenre.
Rating: 7/10

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) The Black Scorpion (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: Guess Who's Coming To Dinner

Year:
1985
Director:
John McCauley
Cast:
Molly Cheek, Christopher Holder, Tony Crupi
Run Time:
1 hour 26 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Plot: In the prologue of Deadly Intruder, we see mental institution inmate Robert Harvey (shown only in silhouette) escaping after killing guards Wayne (porn star and criminal scammer Ben Dover) and Jim (Kurt Bryant, a stunt performer and stunt coordinator who has been a part of basically every marathon I've ever done, having played one of the costumed Ghostface killers in Scream 2 and worked on titles including Fatal Games, Maniac Cop, Wishmaster, Candyman: Day of the Dead, Jack Frost 2: Revenge of the Mutant Killer Snowman, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning, 2009’s Friday the 13th, 2010’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Curse of La Llorona, and, for some reason, The Jane Austen Book Club). I use the phrase "we see" rhetorically, because this scene is so dark you can only see murky shapes shifting like blobs in a sludge-colored lava lamp.

Midvale's Captain Pritchett (Stuart Whitman of Vultures, making this an accidental Census Bloodbath double feature) assigns his deputies Carlos (Santos Morales) and Danny (Daniel Greene, who had the good fortune to later play Elvira’s love interest in Elvira, Mistress of the Dark) to keep abreast of the situation. But first, Danny needs to go to a dinner party thrown by his friend Jessie (Molly Cheek, and if she looks to you like the type of person who'd react well to seeing Jason Biggs engaging in sexual congress with baked goods, you'd be wrong, as proven by her role as Jim's Mom in American Pie).

Jessie has just had an unsettling encounter with a strange, axe-wielding drifter (Tony Crupi, who also provided the screenplay for this very movie), but she won't let that put her off from serving a roast to her friends. The invite list: Danny; Danny's shrill and irritating girlfriend Cathy (Marcy Hansen); clothing shop owner and amateur chef John (Danny Bonaduce, firmly out of the "child actor" phase of his career); John's amiable wife Amy (Laura Melton); and John's new employee Bob (Christopher Holder), a Canadian journalist who's taking part-time jobs for a story, and who John is trying to set up with Jessie.

Naturally, people in the orbit of the dinner party keep turning up dead. Otherwise, we wouldn't be here.

Analysis: I had a pretty good time watching Deadly Intruder, but I'm honestly not even sure why. It's an absolute mess of a motion picture. But it doesn't have much of an attention span, at least. It's about four movies welded together, so whenever the movie gets boring (and boy, does it get boring), you don't have to wait more than 10 minutes until it becomes something else.

Nevertheless, I'm hard-pressed to find much here that is an absolute good. I do like the movie's score, which is a cool, layered synthy track that is the rare 1980s slasher score to ape John Carpenter without ripping off Halloween. It feels a lot more like one of his action scores, and that adds an exciting new texture to the proceedings. Unfortunately, composer John McCauley (who also aped Carpenter in that he pulled double duty by directing Deadly Intruder too) clearly only made the one three-minute main theme, so it's repeated ad nauseam and constantly crops up in scenes that don't really match its vibe.

And I suppose the acting isn't bad. Except Marcy Hansen's, but she is thankfully only in a couple scenes before her character kicks the bucket. While there are a number of cast members who only ever appeared in this one movie (a hallmark of the shitty 1980s slasher movie), the majority of the actors had long, if not particularly noteworthy careers, and their decent performances here prove why they had what it takes to become reliable fourth bananas. 

Oh, and Molly Cheek is a great screamer, which is good news because Jessie is one of the least active final girls we've had in a long time. She not only waits to be rescued by a knight in shining armor, she is so incompetent that she needs to be rescued by three at once (the final sequence is charmingly overstuffed, involving two different men fist-fighting the killer simultaneously and a cop racing to the scene).

The final alloyed good element is that Deadly Intruder does have some fun with its kills. There isn't a lick of blood in this slasher movie, but the murders often involve semi-elaborate setups, which give them a smack of creativity that helps liven them up. And sometimes they're shockingly brutal, absolutely out of nowhere. One of the killer's first murders is so propulsively violent that it reminded me of Don't Answer the Phone. Which isn't something I particularly want to be reminded of, but at least it's trying something.

[SPOILER ALERT FOR THE REST OF THIS REVIEW]

The movie also has a fun little Psycho moment, because I was absolutely under the impression that we were going to be following Danny the whole time, and he's one of the first to die. 

But beyond that, it's mostly a slog. First and foremost, this movie has a Big Twist that you can see coming from a mile away: The drifter isn't the killer. "Bob" is actually Robert Harvey. If you're shocked by this, congratulations on watching your first-ever movie! Even if they hadn't just shortened the killer's name, the clues are loud and obvious. So it's frustrating that they wait until the final 10 minutes to tell you what's actually going on, making you wait and wait and wait for the movie to finally happen.

Plus, the drifter isn't a very flavorful red herring. We're forced to watch him wander around outside for minutes on end, not doing much of anything and not going anywhere in particular. The movie is at its most boring whenever he's onscreen, which is saying something, because the dinner party that forms the crux of the plot is composed of some of the most brutally uninteresting small talk ever committed to celluloid.

That said, even the bad parts of Deadly Intruder are at least a little weird. This includes the bizarre sequence where the drifter ties up Jessie and traps her in her own home. This is also pretty boring, because she has no survival skills and mostly just sits there and screams. But I can't say I've ever seen anything like the moment where he takes a tied-up Jessie out for a picnic and angrily calls dibs on the Coke. Or the post-killer-reveal moment where he simply unties Jessie and apologizes for kidnapping her, explaining that he just needed someone to talk to. 

Deadly Intruder isn't a hoot and a half. It's more like half a hoot. But I'll definitely take that over an insipid slog like When Dreams Come True.

Killer: Bob (Christopher Holder)

Final Girl: Jessie (Molly Cheek), through no fault of her own

Best Kill: Cathy's death is both a relief (she's really annoying) and a pretty cool sequence. The movie has already cut to a few insert shots of the car's engine fan whirring when the hood is popped on the side of the road, and Danny has just been killed, rudely refusing to fall on that spinning blade. Cathy, however, has her face forced into it by virtue of the car hood being shut on her head. A good time!

Sign of the Times: When Danny and Cathy are late for dinner because of car trouble, they can't just call Jessie and let her know.

Scariest Moment: Bob starts to freak out about the possibility of Jessie lying to him and dating someone behind his back. John and Amy calmly try to talk him down, not realizing how much danger they're in.

Weirdest Moment: Amy leaves the room to "go mash the potatoes," and like two seconds later, Jessie announces that dinner is ready. Girl, no it isn't!

Champion Dialogue: “Cooking without garlic is like making love without foreplay."

Body Count: 10

1. Wayne is beaten to death with a board.
2. Jim is conked on the head with a board and falls down the stairs.
3. Woman is drowned in a kitchen sink.
4. Mechanic is crushed under a car.
5. Danny is axed in the back.
6. Cathy has a car trunk closed on her, pushing her face into the engine fan.
7. Lineman is stabbed in the face with a screwdriver.
8. John has his head slammed through a TV.
9. Amy is lift-strangled.
10. Motorist is beaten to death with a poker.

TL;DR: Deadly Intruder is mildly entertaining but also mostly bad.

Rating: 5/10

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) The Black Scorpion (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