Census Bloodbath: No, Canada

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Killer: Janus (Karen Black)

Final Girl: Paul Sharpe (Winston Rekert)

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

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

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

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

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

Body Count: 6

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

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

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 931

Census Bloodbath: Oklahoma, OK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final Girl: Sheriff Ron Wilbois (Charles Ellis)

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

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

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

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

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

Body Count: 7

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

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

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1064

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Killer: El Loco (Luis Canovas)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Body Count: 4

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

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

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 845

Census Bloodbath: Dead, For A Ducat, Dead!

Year:
1985
Director:
Tony Lo Bianco
Cast:
Mike Connors, Anne Archer, Ian McShane
Run Time:
1 hour 40 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Plot: Too Scared to Scream follows a series of slayings that take place in a luxury New York City high-rise apartment complex known as the Royal Arms. Could it be perpetrated by the charming, Norman Bates-esque doorman Vincent Hardwick (Ian McShane), who has a strange relationship with his mother and doesn't realize that absolutely nobody is thrilled by his habit of constantly quoting Shakespeare? Probably not, because the movie keeps refusing to show you the killer's face, so if you know a single thing about murder mystery tropes, you know that the detectives on the case - the hard-bitten Lieutenant Alex Dinardo (Mike Connors of Mannix) and the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed Kate Bridges (Anne Archer of Fatal Attraction) - have their work cut out for them.

Analysis: I'm going to give you a quick peek behind the curtain of Census Bloodbath. I generally watch each year's movies in chronological order by release date, but there is always a random cludge of titles that don't have proper release date information. These are usually obscure video titles or movies that nobody has cared enough about to keep proper records on, and they are usually abysmal for that reason. I used to carve my way through said cludge at the end of each year, but that always killed my drive to want to keep moving forward, so I switched it to the beginning of the year, thus saving the best (or at least the better) for last.

They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore was the last from the "unknown" pile of 1985 (your clue as to it belonging to that elite group was the 2/10 score), which is why we're suddenly finding ourselves with an embarrassment of riches. A beautiful poster and actors whose names we recognize (Murray Hamilton from Jaws and The Graduate is also kicking around here)? An original song that gets credit in the opening titles? Will the wonders never cease?

Yes, yes they will. That is because Too Scared to Scream is boring as shit, but at least it's a well-appointed boring movie that wasn't shot by teenagers with a camera they stole from a junkyard. 

So, here's the problem. Too Scared to Scream wants you to think that it's classy. It's a Psycho riff that would even look down its nose at Dressed to Kill, is what I'm saying. This blatantly ignores the fact that the movie is tacky and exploitative as all get out, shuffling women out of their clothes at a relatively rapid clip, trying to startle you with a cheap spring-loaded bird jump scare (now there's a new one), and featuring multiple tawdry gay reveals. This is back when "gay" meant "psychopathic," of course. Again. Psycho riff.

Anyway, the result of it thinking it's better than being a slasher movie (when it really shouldn't, considering it's a big screen vehicle for fucking Mannix) is that its kills are woefully tedious. The ones that don't take place offscreen might as well have, because they are all delivered in the same Norman Bates stab-stab-cutaway style. This lacks the visceral intensity of Psycho, of course. Tony Lo Bianco ain't no Hitchcock. What we get in between these wan kills is a bunch of go-nowhere romance with Kate and Alex, a final girl sequence where Kate keeps desperately trying to figure out if the screenplay wants her to have skills or not, and Ian McShane reciting Shakespeare. That last part is delivered well, at least. I mean, we'd all go see him do Richard III, right? We're only human.

However, because this is a real movie with a real professional crew making it, there are at least some bright sides to our first soujourn into movies with actual legitimate release dates in 1985. There is a killer thriller moment where a victim is looking through her closet and is confused by a sleeve she doesn't recognize, only to realize that it belongs to someone holding a knife. And a playful scene where what seems to be spilled blood is actually wine. The movie is also a New York-set story that doesn't forget people of color exist, which is nice, even if it doesn't always remember to avoid trapping them in stereotype purgatory for all eternity.

All in all, this is still not a great showing for the slashers of 1985, but one could do worse. And I certainly have.

Killer: Edward (Chet Doherty)

Final Girl: Kate Bridges (Anne Archer)

Best Kill: There's really not much to choose from, but when Cynthia (Victoria Bass), the first victim, is Psycho stabbed, the camera lingers on her prone body while a voicemail from her mother plays, which is effectively tragic.

Sign of the Times: More than anything, this is a sign that the movie was shot in 1981 and shelved for a couple years, but it sure was a pleasure to see The Burning on the marquee of a Times Square movie theater.

Scariest Moment: Alex finds suspect Barry (Beeson Carroll) naked, bound, and gagged, with cigarette burns on his ass, under a pile of cushions in his apartment, and when he ungags him, Barry begins screaming his lungs out. It's all very Se7en.

Weirdest Moment: Kate grabs a telephone receiver to use as a makeshift weapon, and it works! Twice! You can't do that with an iPhone.

Champion Dialogue: “I've been in and out of so many clothes, I feel like a dancing coat hanger."

Body Count: 8

1. Cynthia is stabbed to death.
2. Mrs. Horner is stabbed to death.
3. Sidney is killed in the head offscreen.
4. Nadine has her throat slit offscreen.
5. Mike is killed offscreen.
6. Irma is killed offscreen.
7. Vincent is stabbed in the back offscreen.
8. Edward is shot.

TL;DR: Too Scared to Scream puts on airs of being classier than it is, which results in it failing to be much of anything at all.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 998

Census Bloodbath: Can't We All Just Get A Lawn?

Year:
1985
Director:
Nathan Schiff
Cast:
John Smihula, Adam Berke, Mary Spadaro
Run Time:
1 hour 10 minutes

Plot: They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore follows Texas gardeners Billy Buck (John Smihula of director Nathan Schiff's previous slasher The Long Island Cannibal Massacre) and Jacob (Adam Berke) moving to Long Island, where they proceed to murder the shit out of a bunch of people, mostly women, while occasionally complaining about rich Northerners often enough that the movie can pretend it has a theme.

Analysis: 1980's The Long Island Cannibal Massacre is a movie that is bad but exuberantly bloody in a way that only a teenage filmmaker could bring to life. This is indeed what writer-director-producer-cinematographer-editor Nathan Schiff was at the time. However, as we catch up with him five years later for his follow-up slasher, he is now in his early twenties and we can begin to expect at least a little more from him. Unfortunately, with They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore, we get even less.

Oh, it tries to do things. It really does. It even makes a stab at having arthouse themes. Or at least that's what I assume the monologue over a shot of a dismembered Barbie doll is meant to be doing at the beginning of the movie. 

Unfortunately, the end result is completely incoherent. For instance, if this is meant to be about a war between the classes, why are the gardeners such cartoons? (Billy has on Alice Cooper eye makeup and a dark black fright wig, whereas Jacob's meant to have a disfigured face that is brought to life by what seems for all the world to be a dime store witch mask.) 

But forget about the macro level of themes, the movie doesn't even have a grip on the micro level of scenes. There is a baffling moment in the third act where the gardeners kidnap one dark-haired woman, only to have the next scene feature two identical women tied up in a room while Billy proceeds to murder other women who look exactly like them outside, and it is dazzlingly unclear if he is attacking multiple women one at a time or a couple women over and over again.

On top of being incoherent, it is also boring. Even with a 70 minute run time, it finds ample opportunity to show us long scenes of, say, Billy messily eating from a can. Plus, The filmmaking is top-to-bottom amateurish (which, again, makes sense from amateurs, but you don't have to like it). Smihula and Berke's performances aren't exactly groundbreaking, but any time anybody else opened their mouth I felt a profound sense of relief that the gardeners were the characters we spent the most time with. Every other performance is as flat as the Long Island lawns that they have tended to so lovingly.

They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore at least retains the unrestrained Herschell Gordon Lewis messiness of the kills in Long Island Cannibal Massacre. They are uniformly poorly rendered (intestines look like shoelaces, somebody pulls a spleen out of a skull, and so on), but that sense of low-budget glee is still palpable. And, poorly rendered or not, some of the grotesque acts depicted onscreen truly are stomach churning (including multiple women having their faces peeled from their skulls - which seems to be the only bone that the filmmakers are aware of in the human body).

I think it goes without saying that the manner in which the plays out is also grossly misogynistic, in a variety of repellently ugly ways (including - be warned - the line that I chose for Champion Dialogue, which is vile but also too hilariously unhinged to ignore). But that is just one sin of many that this movie commits, a list that also includes having a complete lack of narrative thrust (there is no rhyme or reason to the murders, and at one point the killers literally just take a break to go to the movies) and boasting characters that fail so hard to even be one-dimensional that they might as well just collapse into black holes.

I suppose I should close out with a few nice things, just for fairness' sake. First and foremost, the theme that plays over the opening credits is pretty neat, showing off the same deft hand with picking library music that The Long Island Cannibal Massacre had. And the gag that [SPOILER ALERT] the gardeners end the movie by giving up and getting corporate jobs is actually pretty amusing. But beyond that, this is a blighted wasteland that is not worth spending a second of your precious time on.

Killer: Billy Buck (John Smihula) and Jacob (Adam Berke)

Final Girl: N/A

Best Kill: After knocking one of his employers out with a wrench, Billy puts dynamite in her mouth (well, the mouth of the doll that has suddenly replaced her), which is a move that I appreciated for its sheer Wile E. Coyote-ness.

Sign of the Times: One character is solely (and repeatedly) defined by her relationship to cocaine.

Scariest Moment: The first time Jacob is revealed, while peeping on a necking couple, his tongue is poking out of the witch mask and copious drool is pouring out.

Weirdest Moment: A woman who has been captured by the gardeners insists that she can get herself and her fellow captive out of the situation because of her skills as a psychiatrist. She then proceeds to tell Jacob to look at himself in a mirror and informs him that he's "fuckin' ugly." This works!

Champion Dialogue: “I ain't gonna rape you, bitch, you smell like fish."

Body Count: 14; or somewhere thereabouts - I'm unclear exactly how many dark-haired women there actually were in the final act. I suppose it's possible he propped some of them back up to shoot them again.

1. Ricky is smacked in the back repeatedly with a machete.
2. Sally has her intestines pulled out.
3. Movie Woman is stabbed.
4. Alan is impaled in the ass with a hot metal spike and then he's shot in the back.
5. Alan's Girlfriend is dismembered with a saw.
6. Sunbather is drowned.
7. Barbecue Girl is disemboweled.
8. Ms. Reynolds has her head battered with a wrench, and then her head is exploded with dynamite.
9. Dark-Haired Woman #1 is shot.
10. Dark Haired Woman #2 is shot.
11. Dark-Haired Woman #3 is chainsawed.
12. Dark-Haired Woman #4 is shot.
13. Dark-Haired Woman #5 is decapitated with a machete.
14. Dark-Haired Psychiatrist is chainsawed in the torso.

TL;DR: They Don't Cut the Grass Anymore has some moments of handmade charm, but they don't redeem its bottom-of-the-barrel storytelling.

Rating: 2/10

Word Count: 1103

Census Bloodbath: A Girl's Best Friend Is Her Sister

Note: The American VHS release of Psycho Girls was heavily edited (the mid-1980s were extremely unfriendly to gore, if you recall). The version I was able to get my hands on had the gore footage spliced back in from an Italian dub, leading to certain death scenes becoming intensely saturated halfway through, at which point the characters all started speaking Italian until the sequence was over with. If anything, this enhanced the experience, but be aware I was not capable of fully understanding the dialogue in those scenes. 

Year:
1986
Director:
Jerry Ciccoritti
Cast:
John Haslett Cuff, Darlene Mignacco, Rose Graham
Run Time:
1 hour 37 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Plot: As told via the framing device of pulp novelist Richard Foster (John Haslett Cuff) at a typewriter explaining the story of That Terrible Day, Sarah Tusk (Darlene Mignacco) escapes from an asylum and murders her sister Victoria (Agi Gallus) - who poisoned their parents via breakfast in bed and blamed Sarah for it. She replaces Victoria as the cook for Foster and his wife Diane (Rose Graham), who are holding a dinner party for their anniversary.

In attendance are the obnoxious psychologist Dr. Dekker Wilson (Dan Rose), his Marxist wife Femme (Doren Ferber), failed screenwriter but professional womanizer Anthony Zippo (Frank Procopio), and his wannabe actress girlfriend Wendy Fields (Kim Cayer, who played an uncredited porn actress in Blue Murder). They are all drugged by Sarah and spirited away to the abandoned asylum where she spent 15 years, where she and her fellow escapees Kazma (Silvio Oliviero) and Waldo (who does not seem to be credited, unless he is the Pier Giorgio DiCicco who is mysteriously credited as the mononymous character "Tony") torture and kill the majority of them.

Analysis: Fun fact. This movie was made by the same guy who directed Netflix's Hot Frosty. This kind of thing is actually not uncommon these days, because Canadian tax shelter cinema changes with the times. What was once lucrative during the slasher boom is no longer en vogue, so plenty of former slasher filmmakers have transferred their attention to Hallmark and Hallmark-adjacent projects. Perhaps most notably, Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II screenwriter Ron Oliver has gone on to direct Christmas at the Plaza, A Timeless Christmas, Christmas Everlasting, and approximately 800 other movies with a straight white couple on the poster delivering Stepford smiles while wrapped in tinsel.

But let us not get bogged down in that strange corner of cinema history. If you've been paying attention to Census Bloodbath for any amount of time, I hope my mention of Canada had you pricking up your ears. That's right, the Great Blood-Red North, home to some of the best-ever examples of the 1980s slasher, is at it again. And by "it," I don't just mean saying "abote"an average of two dozen times per scene, though that does also happen here.

True to its lineage, Psycho Girls is considerably better than it really has any right to be. It's certainly not the cream of the crop like My Bloody Valentine, Visiting Hours, or the aforementioned Prom Night II, but for a grindhouse cheapie like this, it's downright extraordinary how many things go right. 

Those things do not include the acting or the cinematography, which are never abysmal but infrequently rise above "flat." However, the screenplay is absolutely tops. The dialogue writing here counts among the best of the entire genre, and it can thank its frequent homages to pulp fiction for the fact that it had like a dozen runners-up for my Champion Dialogue selection ("My head feels like it's got menstrual cramps," anyone?). The story isn't always great, because it loses any sense of forward momentum once the torture starts and the third act mainly involves lots of running around echoey hallways, but it's got a strong sense of character, a cheeky surprise ending, and an unrelenting approach to brutality.

And let me tell you, these kills are a lot. Even before the movie gets torturey and toenails are being pulled out and whatnot, it's a lot to swallow. The movie is chock full of intense, bloody, disturbing moments that really land, though thankfully they are delivered with a certain amount of Herschell Gordon Lewis glee rather than the grimdark drudgery of the latter Saw sequels. This brutal sensibility spills out into its general atmosphere, as well.

In fact, there might not be anything more intense than the opening scene where little Victoria poisons her parents, and that doesn't even feature any gore. What it does have is an appropriately off-kilter child performer giving a dead-eyed stare and asking her parents to come back and tell her what God looks like. I mean... holy shit. 

All in all, there is a lot going on here that really works, sometimes in spite of itself. Really, the only flaw I can find with this movie that it doesn't share with other low-budget horror movies of its ilk is the fact that we spend way too much time witnessing the Fosters' incredibly boring dinner party. But having sat through plenty of boring dinner parties in real life, I knew I had to just grin and bear it and pray for something interesting to happen. And you know what, it sure did happen.

Killer: Sarah Tusk (Darlene Mignacco) feat. Waldo (?) & Kazma (Silvio Oliviero)

Final Girl: Diane Foster (Rose Graham)

Best Kill: Dr. Hippocampus (don't ask) has this bizarre telescoping pair of shears attached around his neck that are slowly squeezed, messily decapitating him, which is then followed by a disgusting moment where Sarah is washing off his skull and seems to be whittling the remaining flesh off of the bone with a knife.

Sign of the Times: I'm not saying Chappell Roan didn't base her whole makeup look off the floor show drag that Sarah puts on for torturing her victims.

Scariest Moment: That murder via breakfast in bed is eerie as fuck.

Weirdest Moment: Diane and Richard rapidly lift weights while staring at one another and then have sweaty, writhey, single-artwork-for-Olivia-Newton-John's-Physical sex.

Champion Dialogue: “What's money, anyway, except paper with germs on it?"

Body Count: 13

1. Pearl and
2. Victor eat poisoned pancakes.
3. Head Matron has her throat ripped out by Sarah's teeth offscreen, as described later.
4. Dr. Hippocampus has his head severed with telescoping shears.
5. Victoria is stabbed with her own knife.
6. Anthony has his throat slashed with a straight razor.
7. Wendy is electrocuted in a tub.
8. Dekker is shot in the head.
9. Femme has her throat slit.
10. Sarah is stabbed with her own knife.
11. Waldo is garroted with a fire hose.
12. Kazma has his head smashed with a rock.
13. Roger is repeatedly struck with a meat cleaver.

TL;DR: Psycho Girls is astonishingly brutal and surprisingly sharp, which allows it to overcome what it lacks in filmmaking craft.

Rating: 7/10

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