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