Census Bloodbath: I Haven't The Foggiest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Killer: Victor

Final Girl: N/A

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

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

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

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

Champion Dialogue: N/A

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

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

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

Rating: 4/10

Census Bloodbath: The Screams Of Seagulls

Year:
1982
Director:
Nestore Ungaro
Cast:
Prunella Ransome, Jeremy Brett, Nicky Henson
Run Time:
1 hour 42 minutes

Plot: Englishwoman Barbara Carey (Prunella Ransome) leaves her nonspecific job in New Orleans to meet her little sister, blind pianist Mary Ann (Sherry Buchanan of Crawlspace), in Rome, only to find that she disappeared three weeks ago. She teams up with hot 'n horny consulate employee Martin (Nicky Henson) to try and solve the mystery, which brings them to the private island of the rich archaeologist David Malcolm (longtime TV Sherlock Holmes Jeremy Brett), who may or may not be keeping secrets on said island.

But where is Mary Ann? And who is responsible for the dead blind women that keep turning up around the area? David? Lascivious seaman Enzo Lombardi (Gabriele Tinti of The Murder Secret)? David's cousin Carol (Pamela Salem, who played Miss Moneypenny in Never Say Never Again), who obviously has the hots for him? David's creepy henchman Giulio (Vassili Karis)? Or somebody else entirely? Like, say, David's dead son Frederick, who might not be as dead as we previously thought?

Analysis: The provenance of The Secret of Seagull Island is confusing and circuitous, even by the standards of 1980s slashers. The British-Italian co-production started its life as a five-episode 1981 miniseries called Seagull Island, which was eventually cut down to 102 minutes and distributed as a TV movie. It was made by an Italian director of no repute and distributed in a way that necessitated a stricter standard for depicting nudity and violence, which kind of nips the possibility of being a solid giallo right in the bud.

And while the British have contributed many great things to pop culture (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Hammer monster movies, Maggie Smith, this), slashers are probably their second worst contribution to the world after colonialism. They simply never figured out how slashers ticked. 

I suppose it makes sense that a region smack dab in the middle of the Video Nasty panic wasn't going to throw themselves at the subgenre hammer and tongs, but most of the slashers they put out in the 1980s were simply pitiful. The Last Night sucks. Don't Open Till Christmas sucks even harder. Bloodstream could suck a bowling ball through a straw.

Surprisingly, The Secret of Seagull Island doesn't suck. Maybe that's because one thing the British actually understand better than most is how to put horror on television. I couldn't say. But it was actually not an unpleasant sit.

It completely lacks atmosphere, sure, beyond the fact that they invested in an underwater camera and by jove, they were determined to use it. And it's quite slow. I can't imagine what the 115 minutes they cut out could have possibly contained, because the story hardly races by as it is. But the plucky heroine is reasonably compelling, and her chemistry with her male love interest is strong enough to sustain the movie until it can get her to the island and turn up the heat on the melodrama. 

In fact, pretty much all the acting is pretty solid, give or take some severely patchy moments from Jeremy Brett, who briefly turns into a Looney Tunes character from time to time. They bring to life a charmingly tacky story that wears its influences on its sleeve, including the gialli (the killer targeting blind women is an excellent Italian touch) and Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (minus the transphobia, for once).

It's better to approach it as a solid slow-burn TV mystery (complete with evil hands constantly grasping the corners of buildings and the gratings over windows) rather than a proper slasher - the kills are pretty much a wash, as is to be expected - but it's a reasonably entertaining example of one of those. Plus, it has a seagull attack! That was fun.

Killer: David Malcolm (Jeremy Brett)

Final Girl: Barbara Carey (Prunella Ransome)

Best Kill: A blind woman who recently escaped Seagull Island gets the most giallo-y death, with the killer playing a tape of seagulls crying that causes her to freak out, jump through a window, and plummet shockingly far to her death.

Sign of the Times: Martin's "going out" outfit consists of three pieces that are all different shades of tan.

Scariest Moment: Enzo's dog barks and Enzo thinks it's barking at him, but all of a sudden a scuba-diving killer bursts up from the water in front of him.

Weirdest Moment: David sleeps next to a framed shirtless photo of his son.

Champion Dialogue: “My sister seems to have gone through half the male population of Italy."

Body Count: 7; not including a blind woman who was killed six months before the events of the movie, whose body we see.

1. David's Second Wife (Alée? Alaine? I don't know, it's never written down) and
2. Frederick die in an underwater rock slide.
3. Blind Woman jumps through the window of her hospital room.
4. Giulio is stabbed in the chest by Enzo.
5. Enzo either dies by succumbing to being stabbed in the crotch or is killed offscreen in some other way.
6. Carol is drowned.
7. David traps himself in a burning building.

TL;DR: The Secret of Seagull Island is a pleasant TV melodrama blended with a mostly OK giallo.

Rating: 6/10

Census Bloodbath: Drown By The Seashore

 

Year:
1982
Director:
Peter Medak
Cast:
Patrick Duffy, Cindy Pickett, Lawrence Pressman
Run Time:
1 hour 32 minutes

Plot: Cry for the Strangers follows psychiatrist Brad Russell (Patrick Duffy) moving to the small seaside town of Clarks Harbor with his wife Elaine (Cindy Pickett, Ferris Bueller's mom!) for some peace and quiet while he writes his book. Unfortunately, he finds neither peace nor quiet in the storm-ravaged area. Every time the wind picks up, somebody who wasn't born in the town (a "stranger," some might say) dies under mysterious circumstances. Who is the culprit? Is it a human being? A series of dreadful accidents? Or the indigenous American ghosts who haunt the nearby beach? Speaking of, the ghosts seem to have a special interest in possessing Robby Palmer (Shawn Carson of The Funhouse), a young boy who is a former patient of Dr. Russell's.

Analysis: Just getting through the opening credits of Cry for the Strangers gave me whiplash. First, there was the disappointment of learning that it was a TV movie (for CBS, to be precise). TV movie slashers can be good (Dark Night of the Scarecrow, Fantasies, Deadly Lessons), but more often than not they are bloodless, plodding affairs. So imagine my shock when I learned that this particular movie was directed by Peter Medak, just two years off from helming the exquisitely atmospheric haunted house movie The Changeling.

The man who made the single scariest seance scene in horror cinema does have a few tricks up his sleeve here, even on a TV movie budget. There are plenty of ambitious shots, including the camera constantly spinning around a central axis and a pretty fun mirror shot introducing a scene in the local tavern. He also knows what to do whenever the tension of the movie grows to a crescendo, giving the spine-tingling moments room to breathe, then wanging you on the head with a surprise jump cut.

He also imbues the movie with a solid sense of place. It helps that they used real locations on the coast of the Pacific Northwest, but there's also a strong sense of community threaded throughout, especially in the body discovery scenes.

Unfortunately, Cry for the Strangers is also boring as fuck. I could have done with about 12 fewer scenes of somebody walking across a quiet beach, shouting somebody's name (usually Robby - that fool did love to wander off onto the beach over and over and over again). There's "slow boil" and then there's "under heavy sedation," and this movie is in the latter camp.

It's also deathly dull as a slasher movie. Indeed, if it weren't for the fact that (SPOILER ALERT) it is revealed that there is an actual human being perpetrating the killings, I was going to kick this movie off my Census Bloodbath list completely. I wasn't shocked that the kills in this TV movie almost entirely took place offscreen, but not once does an edged weapon come into the equation even a little bit. And the movie is so dead set on being a (generic, racist) ghost story that the slasher elements recede into the background most of the time.

All in all, it's a bit of a whiff for ol' Peter Medak. But looking at his filmography, it honestly seems like The Changeling might have been more of a fluke than anything else.

Killer: Chief Whalen (Brian Keith)

Final Girl: Dr. Brad Russell (Patrick Duffy) & Co.

Best Kill: The opening scene is kind of clunkily paced, but the closing gag - young Whalen finding his grandparents' bodies buried in the sand on the beach - boosts up the eeriness something fierce.

Sign of the Times: Fisherman/body count padder Chip wears a red headband at all times, day or night.

Scariest Moment: The newly widowed Miriam arrives on Brad and Elaine's porch out of nowhere, with a dire warning.

Weirdest Moment: When Chief Whalen drops off Brad and Elaine at their new home, he lets them know they won't be able to turn on the power for a few days. Excuse me, what?

Champion Dialogue: “Robby! Robby! ROBBY!"

Body Count: 8

1. Grandma and
2. Grandpa are buried up to their necks in sand and drowned offscreen.
3. Pete is found dead in his fishing net.
4. Miriam is hanged offscreen.
5. Max is killed offscreen in a boat explosion.
6. Chip is drowned offscreen.
7. Riley dies offscreen. 
8. Chief Whalen is shot.

TL;DR: Cry for the Strangers is appropriately atmospheric at times, but it's also dead boring.

Rating: 4/10