Census Bloodbath: I'm Gonna Show You Where It's Dark, But Have No Fear

Note: The version of this Cantonese-language movie that I was able to watch had an issue where longer subtitles were cut off at either side, which diminished comprehension somewhat, but not to a degree that I feel compromises my ability to review it in any meaningful way.

Year: 1985
Director: Philip Chan
Cast: Melvin Wong, Philip Chan, Patricia Ha
Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

Plot: Night Caller (Ping an ye) begins with the brutal murder of model and single mother Jessica (Terry Hu). The only witness is her daughter Edith (not credited in a manner that I can read), who is in shock and has not spoken since the incident. This leads her to be more or less adopted by the detective on the case, James Wong (Melvin Wong of Yes, Madam!), and his wife Kiki (Deborah Sims). Meanwhile, the buttoned-up James and his loose cannon partner Steve Chan (Philip Chan of Hard Boiled, also the director of this here movie) use their investigative skills and, naturally, their kung fu prowess to try and solve the mystery as more bodies begin to pile up.

Analysis: Night Caller has a simply incredible opening sequence. Somebody must have been making a mint off dubbed Dario Argento tapes in Hong Kong in the early 1980s, because just like 1982's He Lives by Night, the introductory kill is giallo as all hell. It's exquisitely crafted from top to bottom, disorienting you with jagged editing as it combines beautiful cinematography and crisp shadows with extraordinarily violent imagery (including an apple being smashed into Jessica's face during her struggle for survival). It is exquisite. It is horrible. It is pure cinema.

Nothing else in Night Caller quite lives up to this sequence, but that's hardly a knock against it. I couldn't imagine improving on that opening. Nor can writer-director-star Philip Chan, evidently, because the buddy cop comedy stuff kicks in more or less instantly after this scene. (Look, it's a Hong Kong movie. If you're not ready for the genre to change every 45 seconds, you're going to have to take two aspirin and go to bed straight away.)

I'm not saying it's a bad buddy cop kung fu comedy romance family drama movie, either. However, it reaches its aesthetic heights in the horror scenes, which also include the scene where James brings Edith back to her dark apartment to try and jog her memory and the movie's second kill (which is also the last proper body count kill, alas). Said second kill can't match the sheer audacity of the opening sequence, but it does involve a man being stabbed and falling from a catwalk, whereupon his corpse dangles upside down from a cable. After having fallen through a box of glitter. A box of glitter that was suspended over a catwalk full of models. On live TV. Y'all, this movie is kind of great.

Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes. The aesthetic value of the movie drops off sharply every time it's not doing a horror scene. And while the inclusion of kung fu fight scenes in a slasher movie should provide a frisson of camp, only one is lit well enough to properly see what's going on. This seems like a peculiar misstep for a kung fu veteran to make, even if working behind the camera was never exactly the thing he was known for.

However, whatever that aspect of Night Caller lacks in camp value is made up for by the killer, Bobby (Siu-Fung Wong), who wanders into the movie at about the halfway mark and simply makes herself known, preventing the movie from adding "whodunit" to its roster of genres. Every time we see Bobby after the "big" reveal, she is wearing a new ludicrous outfit (in one scene, she is simply wearing mud) and psychosexually torturing a shirtless, handcuffed James. Now that's more like it!

I think I like this movie more than I love it, because the extremely tropey buddy cop material is front and center when it really shouldn't be, given how little effort was put into it. However, the horror is effectively horrifying, the comedy is frequently very funny (even during its darkest turns, such as the scene where a woman who discovers a valuable clue suddenly dies of a brain disease before the cops can ask about it), and there is always some inexplicable moment waiting behind every narrative corner (like the gang of punks who squirt ketchup on a restaurant owner's face and try to put his wife's fingers in the toaster).

Killer: Bobby (Siu-Fung Wong)
Final Girl: James Wong (Melvin Wong)
Best Kill: Accept no substitutes for the opening kill of Night Caller.
Sign of the Times: When Bobby's accomplice Mickey (Kei Mai) introduces himself, he starts maniacally singing Toni Basil's "Mickey" (which is honestly the only way to sing it).
Scariest Moment: An off-brand Chuck E. Cheese mascot character who looks like a bedraggled Hills Have Eyes mutant grabs Edith while she's at the arcade.
Weirdest Moment: Mickey performs a scene from Taxi Driver to himself in the mirror while in blackface.
Champion Dialogue: "I'll be back to add a few holes to your ass."
Body Count: 7

1. Jessica is stabbed 29 times, with the final stab going in the gut before she falls through a window.
2. Ho Tak is stabbed in the chest.
3. One-Eyed Neighbor is shot in the head and burned to death offscreen.
4. Lady Who Finds The Ring dies of brain disease offscreen.
5. Newbie Cop is shot.
6. Bobby is shut.
7. Mickey is drowned in a mud bath.

TL;DR: Night Caller is a little more of a generic cop movie than I wish it was, considering its extraordinary facility at being a Hong Kong giallo.
Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 958

Census Bloodbath: I Guess Murdersloth And Murdergluttony Were Busy

People keep asking if I'm back, and I haven't really had an answer, but now, yeah, I'm thinking I'm back! 

Welcome back to Census Bloodbath. For those who have forgotten what the hell this thing is in the years since I last did much of it in earnest, my mission is to watch and review every slasher movie from the 1980s. We're just over halfway through! And it's been more than a decade since I started, so here's hoping it doesn't take another 10 years to finish. 

My slasher writing got interrupted by a few very good updates in my life, including getting paid to write about other things full time at ScreenRant and penning a murder mystery novel that I hope to drag out into the light of day at some point. I'm not going to sit here and promise five reviews a week or nothing, but I'm hoping to get back to posting semi-regularly, in the new, slightly truncated format I developed the last time I didn't have time to do this project. Without further ado, let's hop back into 1985. Where were we...

Year: 1985

Director: Donald M. Jones

Cast: Eli Rich, Rochelle Taylor, Dennis Gannon

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

Plot: Murderlust follows Sunday school teacher Steve (Eli Rich of The Jigsaw Murders) using his free time to pursue his secret passion: murdering prostitutes and dumping their bodies in the desert, a nasty habit that has earned him the moniker "The Mojave Murderer." 

Analysis: As I've worked on this project, I've noticed multiple sub-subgenres emerge from the overall morass of the 1980s slasher. Over the years, you get stuff like the "rubber reality" slashers inspired by A Nightmare on Elm Street, the Lifetime-esque movies that I have dubbed the "women's picture" slashers, and so on. 

One sub-subgenre that I have considerably less enthusiasm for is the "women be dying" slasher. These titles combine the faults of the "hero killer" format (by following the killer rather than the victims, the victims frequently become paper-thin characters whose deaths have no import) with intense indulgence in the misogyny that is always quietly simmering beneath the surface of the slasher genre. These movies, which are largely a hangover of the grindhouse pictures of the 1970s, typically feature a string of rapes and violent murders of women that are barely hung together on a "story" about a male killer wandering around, seeking out new victims. 

Some of these movies, or others like them, can be quite good, or at least compelling. I was pleasantly surprised by Eyes of a Stranger (which, to be fair, has two final girls as its protagonists rather than being a hero killer movie). But when you're getting down and dirty in the muck with the likes of Don't Answer the Phone, it can be an entirely unpleasant experience. While Murderlust seems to fancy itself a successor to Maniac, another of the better examples of the sub-subgenre, it is instead just another speck of grime on the undercarriage of the slasher. Literally the best thing I can say about it is that at least Steve isn't a rapist. Mostly.

Murderlust is a scummy, scuzzy experience with no redeeming value. The best down-and-dirty horror movies leave you with the feeling of needing to take a shower, in a good way. But this one just rubs your face in muck and kicks you in the ribs out of pure meanness, because there are no aesthetic, tonal, or narrative niceties that allow you to feel like you've actually gleaned something from the experience.

It's a go-nowhere movie that just sits there idling for the majority of its runtime. It seems to be trying to horrify the audience by juxtaposing Steve's prim and proper Sunday school persona with his violent nature behind closed van doors, but we spend too much time with him for that to feel like a clear divide. Even in other professional/public parts of his life such as his job as a parking lot security guard or his interactions with his weird neighbor-cousin Neil (Dennis Gannon), who seems to be an ancestor to Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, Steve is a crude, boorish, lazy lout who is constantly braying at people who annoy him. Which is everyone. Rather than being horrifying or enlightening, spending time with him is simply irritating.

The slasher element is also repetitive and boring. He kills all of his victims in the same way (garroting them with rope), and their slayings are all overseasoned with misogynistic rambling. If Steve blaming women for all the world's problems and lobbing insults at them is meant to lend insight into his motive, Murderlust has defaulted on this loan.

The only thing that prevents this movie from becoming absolute bottom-of-the-barrel garbage like Victims! is the fact that its dialogue is frequently actually kinda good. When Steve is flirting with women before revealing his true colors, their repartee tends to sparkle, and the movie opens with him having a tête-à-tête with a sex worker that actually manages to have a little insight into how someone can wield various forms of social currency (charisma, money, power) to convince someone to do something that would otherwise go against their better judgment.

I suppose I'll leave this part of the review on a high note, so I'll add two more things that I write. Although the movie only barely lurches toward having a proper final girl at the very end, her fight for her life is chaotic and brutal in a compelling way. Also, the real-life Mojave Desert scenery that pops up every 20 minutes or so is lovely to look at, but this is simply more proof of how hard it is to fuck up shooting a nice landscape, because the cinematography is doing its darndest to make everything as bland and flat as possible otherwise.

Killer: Steve Belmont (Eli Rich)
Final Girl: Cheryl (Rochelle Taylor)
Best Kill: They're literally all the same, so I'm going to pick Debbie's, because it takes place offscreen and saves us from wasting another three minutes of our lives on this movie.
Sign of the Times: When Steve is accused of molesting a Sunday school student, the board of the church doesn't believe the alleged victim for even one single second. They don't even pretend to consider believing her, which is what I assume they would do nowadays.
Scariest Moment: The opening shot of the movie is Steve staring directly into the camera with a blank look for like five full seconds.
Weirdest Moment: Steve badgers Neil into helping him move a trash can containing a corpse into his van and he keeps bleating, "it's traysh, Neil, now push!"
Champion Dialogue: "God is a big drag, and he doesn't exist anyway."
Body Count: 5

1. Prostitute is garroted with a noose.
2. Prostitute #2 is garroted with a noose.
3. Teenage Girl is garroted with a noose.
4. Debbie is killed offscreen.
5. Steve succumbs to his gunshot wounds while crawling through the desert.

TL;DR: Murderlust is a complete waste of time, in spite of boasting slightly sharper writing than one might expect from a down-and-dirty, misogyny-forward slasher movie.

Rating: 3/10
Word Count: 1193