Census Bloodbath: You're It

Year: 1982

Director: Nick Castle

Cast: Robert Carradine, Linda Hamilton, Bruce Abbott

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Tag: The Assassination Game wasn't always on the list of 1982 movies I was planning to cover for Census Bloodbath. I came across it in my initial research, but it just didn't seem like it had enough elements to count as a slasher. Plus, take a look at that poster. This movie was heavily sold as an Animal House-style sex comedy, to the point that even I was almost fooled. However, when I finally took a look at it, it proved to me that it deserved a spot on this list. It's not a good one, but it's a slasher movie alright.

At the very least, I didn't waste my time watching a movie I wasn't even going to review.

OK, as much as it does count by my parameters, Tag still isn't particularly faithful to the tropes of the slasher, which had already been set in stone by this point. The plot revolves around a game of tag where a bunch of college run around shooting each other with dart guns. One night, student reporter Alex Marsh (Robert Carradine of Revenge of the Nerds) is hanging out in his dorm when committed player Susan Swayze (Linda Hamilton of... Linda Hamilton) slips through the door to use it as a hideout. He is instantly smitten and tags along with her under the pretense of writing a human interest story about the game.

What he doesn't realize is that the most interesting human in this game is Loren Gersh (introducing Bruce Abbott of Re-Animator and Bad Dreams), a five time champion who is so committed to winning that he has started using bullets instead of rubber darts. So about halfway through, this finally becomes a serial killer movie. Unfortunately he's using a gun because 1) slasher movies are always more interesting with a variety of edged weapons and 2) yikes, gun on campus stories have not aged well. Anyway, while Susan and Alex live out a noir-tinged flirtation, the missing persons reports are stacking up on the desk at campus administration.

A story Alex's editor urges him to track down, which he absolutely refuses to do until it's almost too late.

Tag is a production stacked top to bottom with recognizable names. We've already seen three of them in the synopsis above, but some of the smaller roles are filled out by Xander Berkeley, Michael Winslow, and even Forest F**king Whitaker. Plus, it was written and directed by Nick Castle, who played The Shape in Halloween. It's slasher royalty directing a cadre of 80's royalty, and it goes horribly, horribly wrong almost immediately.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly where Tag goes wrong, but I'll do my darnedest. I guess a good place to start is the opening credits, a bizarre, poorly executed James Bond parody that promises a movie more in line with what those misleading posters are trying to sell. This wacky, cartoonish quality peeps from behind the curtain from time to time, but never enough that the movie actually commits to being a quirky comedy. There are some genuinely funny moments, like a scene of Gersh disposing of a body, where a woman is in the background talking to her dad about a dude getting her pregnant, or the flock of people rushing the gym when Alex announces there's a free Grateful Dead concert while trying to get somebody off Susan's tail. Or not funny moments that are clearly at least trying to be, like the list of Tag players that includes entries like "E. Presley" and "A. Neuman."

This tone completely fails to gel with the horror elements which are already silly and malnourished, but take themselves quite seriously. Bruce Abbott is solid as a man so obsessed with winning that he's completely relaxed his grip on sanity or morality (I especially love the phone calls he makes to the game master after each kill, where the man encourages him to keep going, not realize he's actually been ending these people's lives), but the game is so ridiculous and complicated in its execution that it's hard to follow what his goals even are in any given scene. And the fact that there is a real game going on makes the first act an exhausting slog through endless fakeout assassination scenes.

At least it afforded Linda Hamilton a chance to prep her Sarah Conner routine.

One interesting thing about the film is that it's very much inspired by the narrative and aesthetic elements of film noir. This is the third tone that completely fails to match the others, so much so that I literally couldn't find an appropriate place to mention it until now. The absolute best way this concept is executed is in Susan's introduction to Alex, where she is lit up by a flashing light outside his blinds, sending harsh rectangles of light slanting across her form in the only shot in the movie that comes even close to being exquisite.

The worst is probably the fact they thought they could get away with including the whole "you know how to whistle, don't you?" scene from To Have and Have Not verbatim. As a whole, this element is the most thoroughly achieved, with enough high key lighting and over-the-top production design to keep the feeling going throughout. But try as Nick Castle might, he's still making a movie where not every scene manages to avoid having the boom mic poke down from the top of the screen. It's a valiant effort, but it needs a little more delicacy to balance everything it wants to be.

It's not a total waste of time. Some of the shots that aren't too enshrouded in shadow to see anything are actually quite pretty. And obviously it's kind of a blast being surrounded by so many familiar faces slumming it with such a ludicrous concept. But being a fan of Terminator movies doesn't entirely carry over to watching Linda Hamilton play with a dart gun for 90 minutes. Maybe 20, at best. 

Side Note I Didn't Have Room for Elsewhere in the Review: A hippie character has a pet rat perched on his shoulder, which he names Ratatouille, inventing Pixar in the process.

Killer: Loren Gersh (Bruce Abbott)

Final Girl: Susan Swayze (Linda Hamilton)

Best Kill: Gersh times his shooting of Nancy with the gunshot beginning a track race. He then pulls her crumpled body through the bleachers and it is disturbing.

Sign of the Times: A bunch of college students are very excited to attend a Grateful Dead concert.

Scariest Moment: Loren chases Susan through the music department, surrounded by the sound of clicking metronomes.

Weirdest Moment: The bodyguards of a particularly intense player (one of whom is Forest Whitaker) have a moment alone, and they mime getting into a car and driving down the hallway.

Champion Dialogue: "I haven't seen you this high since last June when you were hanging out with a communist."

Body Count: 5

1. Dwayne is shot in the shower.
2. Nancy is shot in the butt.
3. Wallace is shot.
4. Security Guard is shot.
5. Gersh is shot and falls off a building.

TL;DR: Tag: The Assassination Game is a weird tonal mishmash that sometimes works but mostly doesn't.
Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 1225

Census Flashback: Borderline Personalities

On our Fright Flashback/Census Bloodbath crossover, every week this summer we'll be exploring an 80's slasher film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to the weekend's upcoming blockbuster.

This week we’re anticipating The Emoji Movie, entirely populated by characters that have a single dominant personality trait. In honor of this animated tour de force, we’ll be exploring 1988’s Bad Dreams, about a therapy group for borderline personality disorders.

Year: 1988

Director: Andrew Fleming

Cast: Jennifer Rubin, Bruce Abbott, Richard Lynch 

Run Time: 1 hour 20 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I’ve noted before that the biggest trend in late 80’s slasher films is the incorporation of a supernatural element following the success of Freddy Krueger and the Elm Street franchise. There are certain tiers to this trend, the lowest being the sudden inclusion of elements like a telekinetic girl in Friday the 13th Part VII or a vengeful beauty queen ghost in Prom Night II, Then you get to the second tier of rip-offs, where films have transparently desperate titles like Deadly Dreams and Dreamaniac. Bad Dreams doesn’t belong in this tier. Hell, it doesn’t even belong in the top tier, where the Bollywood dream demon Mahakaal: The Monster resides. Bad Dreams is the grotesquely blatant, enormous cake toper straddling this entire trend and threatening to topple the whole thing over.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors gets a chill down its spine anytime someone utters the name “Bad Dreams.” Let me paint you a picture: starring Dream Warrior Jennifer Rubin (who played Taryn, the “beautiful and bad” drug addict), Bad Dreams revolves around members of a group therapy circle and their bland white doctor as they’re menaced by an incorporeal killer with a burned face who makes their deaths look like suicides. The details are slightly different, and we’ll get to them when we Meet the Meat, but hot damn is this not a subtle ploy for the throne.

There was no Wes involved, but they were certainly craven.

So, Bad Dreams follows Cynthia (Jennifer Rubin), the only survivor of a Peace and Love and Suicide cult who were burned alive at Unity Fields in the 70’s. She has just awoken from a 13-year coma and must acclimatize to the 80’s in a psychiatric hospital run by Dr. Barrisford (Harris Yulin). She joins a group therapy session run by Dr. Karmen (Re-Animator’s Bruce Abbott, who must be very tired of hospital sets), but soon realizes that she’s putting the other patients at risk when the burnt specter of her cult leader Harris (Richard Lynch) returns to claim her life, killing her friends in the process.

That group includes the cripplingly shy Lana (Elizabeth Daily AKA Tommy Pickles on The Rugrats), and this film takes a page from Friday the 13th Part V in what exactly constitutes an emotional disorder; Gilda (Danita Jo Freeman), who seems to be psychic and acts only as a mouthpiece for Harris rather than an actual character – seriously, what is she even doing here?; Miriam (Susan Ruttan), an addled ex-reporter at a Weekly World News type publication; the requisite slasher movie sex couple Connie (Susan Barnes) and Ed (Louis Giambalvo), but the only difference is they’re both middle-aged for no reason; and Ralph (Dean Cameron, who I’m suddenly rocking a major 80’s crush on), a self-harmer with a  cynical sense of humor.

And dreamy eyebrows.

The most interesting element Bad Dreams brings to the table is the inclusion of the cult subplot. Although its hardly smart enough to really mine the psyche of a cult escapee (hell, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt does a better job) or even that of a coma patient’s culture shock waking up in a different time, the cult itself is divinely creepy. I mean come on, the film literally opens with women and children being set on fire! Richard Lynch is a reliably creepy presence, hiding his malice beneath a too-thin veneer of pure love, and capturing the emotional whiplash of a cult brainwasher.

Of course, this all pretty much goes to waste, because nobody had any pretentions about being anything but Elm Street fan fiction. Luckily, in terms of that angle, Bad Dreams is at least passable. The deaths are toothless as a newborn babe, but at least the supernatural goings-on allow them to pirouette around the MPAA, providing scenes that are mildly eerie and impactful, if not particularly gory.

Naturally, the film also fails to follow through on the idea that mental institutions are as much a cult as Unity Fields, but hey. Dean Cameron gets a couple good self-mutilations scenes with scalpels, so it all evens out. 

God, I should be put in jail for this blog.

I think we’ve established that Bad Dreams is lethally stupid, and the jumbled, reality-warping third act does it no favors. But at the every least, it is presented with a basic level of cinematic competence that was tragically rare in 1988. Naturally, it’s all cannibalized from other, better films (like the shot where Harris’ face slowly fades into frame like Michal Myers in Halloween), but it’s at least enough to maintain a basic level of attention.

Really, at the end of the day, generic is much better than bad, so Bad Dreams passes with flying colors. The cast is above average, the action is visible, and the plot is mildly interesting. If this were a summer blockbuster, it would be bottom of the barrel, but on the sliding scale of Census Bloodbath it’s a breath of fresh air.

Killer: [The deaths were mostly suicides or accidents, but they were influenced by Dr. Barrisford (Harris Yulin)]

Final Girl: Cynthia (Jennifer Rubin)

Best Kill: Connie and Ed are chopped up in an air turbine and their blood and guts come pouring from the overhead vents.

Sign of the Times: One of the cultists is wearing a headband and overalls with no shirt.

Scariest Moment: A patient silently gesticulates her distress at a doctor who’s looking the other way.

Weirdest Moment: “Sweet Child O’ Mine” plays over the closing credits.

Champion Dialogue: “That man’s a candidate for shock therapy. A jumper cable right up his ass.”

Body Count: 7; not including the cult engulfed in flames.

1. Lana drowns in the pool.
2. Miriam falls out a window.
3. Connie and
4. Ed are chopped up in a turbine.
5. Ralph commits seppuku with scalpels.
6. Gilda drinks formaldehyde.
7. Barrisford is pushed off the roof.

TL;DR: Bad Dreams is passable, despite being a transparently obvious Dream Warriors rip-off.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1083

Undead Again

On that fateful day in May 2012, Cassidy and I sat down to watch this Spanish movie called [REC]. We were both profoundly affected by the experience and that summer we pretty much exclusively watched zombie films, trying to sate our desires for more bloody mayhem.

We tore through Land of the Dead, Zombie Diaries, [REC] 2 and countless others, both good (Dead Snow) and bad (Zombie Diaries 2: World of the Dead). Despite our voracious appetites, we barely skimmed the surface of the fertile fields of zombie cinema and when second semester ended, we set out to plow through even more.

Summer of the Living Dead: 2013

Dawn of the Dead

Year: 1978
Director: George A. Romero
Cast: David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott H. Reiniger
Run Time: 2 hours 7 minutes
MPAA Rating: X

A group of zombie outbreak survivors holes up in a Pennsylvania Mall.

We waited a long time for this one, having unsuccessfully tried to watch it in late August and again in October. So naturally we opted to open our summer with Dawn of the Dead - only the most critically acclaimed zombie film of all time, at the top of every list and carrying a solid 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. We excitedly popped in the DVD and found it... underwhelming.

Now, I can definitely see why this movie made a splash in the 70's. Tom Savini's gore effects (which later landed him on a little slasher film called Friday the 13th) are decades ahead of their time and the score by Dario Argento's frequent collaborators, the band Goblin, is delightfully weird and off-putting (I thought it worked, but Cassidy found it hilarious).

The satire of American consumerism provides a level of depth uncommon to most undead pictures (and let's face it, the lauded anti-racist undertones of Night of the Living Dead are mostly accidental). It is a good, well-made film in terms of the art of cinema but it features a slate of thoroughly unlikable characters (especially its pregnant heroine) and does not do quite enough to earn its punishing run time. These factors don't totally diminish the film's historical power, but in today's world where we have access to hundreds of other movies like this one, I'd much rather shoot for a film that's less well-made but more fun.

Rating: 7/10


Re-Animator

Year: 1985

Director: Stuart Gordon

Cast: Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott, Barbara Crampton

Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

MPAA Rating: UR

An ambitious medical student creates a serum that can bring the dead back to life.

About as related to H.P. Lovecraft as a McDonald's hamburger, Re-Animator is nevertheless a loose adaptation of his short story "Herbert West - Reanimator." It is a barrel of campy fun that critics have somehow mistaken for a good movie. Holding a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, this makes Re-Animator rated higher than Dawn of the Dead, Halloween, and The Texas Chain Saw Masssacre. There is no world that exists in any of our manifold alternate universes in which this is true.

Re-Animator is a bad movie. But it is so gleefully, irrepressibly bad that it's a blast to watch. Barbara Crampton (who's featured in my go-to movie of the summer, You're Next) gives a hilariously uneven performance in a hilariously uneven sweater opposite Bruce Abbott's "only hot in the 80's" heartthrob performance and Jeffrey Combs's hammy mad scientist deadpan.

Featuring my first experience with a post-coital Spring-Loaded Cat scare, a German physician named Hans Gruber (3 years before Die Hard, so let's not call it a rip-off), a secretly pretty great severed head performing cunninglingus, a man being strangled with a large intestine, and a doctor's office full of battered silver trophies, I have no doubt why this film became a cult classic.

Top it off with music cues that rip pages directly from Psycho's songbook and an evil doctor that looks exactly like John Kerry whose "acting voice" is so affected that he sounds like Siri, and you've got an A+ B movie on your hands. Gory, silly, and effortlessly cheesy, this is one to treasure.

Champion Dialogue: "He's got a secret folder filled with napkins and hair!"

Rating: 8/10

Diary of the Dead

Year: 2007

Director: George A. Romero

Cast: Michelle Morgan, Joshua Close, Shawn Roberts

Run Time: 1 hour 35 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Film students capture an account of the zombie apocalypse on tape.

Ah, Diary of the Dead, the much maligned black sheep of Romero's Living Dead franchise. Being found footage, it didn't find a lot of friends in the horror community at large. However, it is frequently ignored that in the beginning, Diary solves a lot of problems of the shopworn found footage genre. It is made very clear that the footage is edited (by one of the characters, at that) and that she added in some music at crucial moments.

This is not cheating.

Many films like The Last Exorcism, The Zombie Diaries, and portions of the V/H/S anthologies have used multiple camera angles and background score without ever once addressing that the very presence of such things flies directly in the face of the nature of the genre. Romero took that flaw and made it a strength - at least in the relative authenticity of the film itself. Unfortunately this also creates a lot of problems that certainly would not and could not be present otherwise.

The editing is episodic, and after each episode we get a bit of pointless narration to accompany some pointless recapping of previous footage. This sucks, except for in the final moments of the film. If I wanted to listen to a deadpan film student pontificate about what makes us human ("It's us against them... Except... They are us), I'd have taken that summer course.

Also, being film students, most of the characters are supremely unlikable to the point where I actively wished for their throats to be chomped out by hordes of the undead. The main character, Deb (Morgan) has such an acidic personality that she treats even her boyfriend, whom she at least nominally loves like a piece of gum on the bottom of her shoe.

People wander off into the woods, open the doors to strange men, and generally behave like lobotomized toddlers, and I swear if the movie were only this, it would be a dreary mess.

But when it's good, it's good, babydoll.

To start, there's some fabulous gore here including a zombie child stuck to a wall with an arrow, a horde of zombie shot through a hole in another zombie's head, a man stabbing himself in the head with a scythe to get to a zombie who's biting his neck, and a zombie head dissolving in hydrochloric acid.

Huzzah! All we need is the red red krovvy and Romero delivers.

The very best parts of Diary of the Dead are often the weirdest, but that's probably because it is so divorced from any other zombie film or even any of the director's previous work. 

Here's my two absolute favorite parts of the film:

1) When a dude in a mummy costume is driven crazy alone in a house full of zombies. It is unexpectedly sweet and truly hilarious, like Stu Macher's scene at the end of the first Scream.

2) A deaf Amish guy (I know, right) throws a stick of dynamite at a horde of zombies (I know, right?) and then... this.

Precious.

And the obligatory social satire - this time of the tendency of our generation to mindlessly record events and post them online without considering their real impact - is solid. Honestly, I found this to be one of Romero's most well-developed satires thematically. Unlike some of his other movies, where it comes in fits and starts, it actually feels like a deeply considered thought process.

Champion Dialogue: "He's a state trooper."

"How do you know?"

"His hat is a stupid looking hat."

Rating: 8/10

Now, because Cassidy and I got distracted by unimportant things like work and major life events like Prom Night, we actually didn't get around to as much zombie mayhem as we were hoping. My final review is going to be of a classic, one that we watched ages ago but that I recently revisited with my friend Henri.

Dead Snow (Død Snø)

Year: 2009

Director: Tommy Wirkola

Cast: Vegar Hoel, Charlotte Frogner, Jeppe Beck Laursen

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

A group of young med students decides to spend their break at a secluded cabin in the mountains, but unfortunately a clan of Nazi zombies has the same idea.

Norway, man. Those American-fed lunatics are at it again with a gory romp through the alpine heights, think Cold Prey but instead of the mountain man it's an army of undead Nazis. Due to Norway's seemingly intense fascination with slasher films, we get a fairly straightforward Meet the Meat section when we're introduced to our characters.

The characters are virtually indistinguishable, but as far as I can figure, there's Martin (Hoel), a med student who's scared of blood and thinks smothering his girlfriend with a pillow makes for a fun Saturday night; Hanna (Frogner), his dread-sporting girlfriend; Erlend (Laursen), a movie buff; Chris (Jenny Skavlan), Hanna's cousin who apparently thinks it's appropriate to bang dudes while they're sitting in an outhouse; Roy (Stig Frode Henriksen), the horniest man in Norway; Liv (Evy Kasseth Røsten), who is blonde and nothing else; Vegard (Lasse Valdal), the only reasonably attractive member of the group; and his girlfriend Sara (Ane Dahl Torp), who has the brilliant idea of skiing to the cabin alone. Needless to say, she doesn't make it.

The first act good-naturedly stabs at some meta humor with Erlend pointing out what a common trope a group of teens going to a cabin in the woods is. Unfortunately, the ensuing conversation about movies with that plot prove how very few there actually are. This is only a minor nitpick, but April Fool's Day? That's in a mansion on an island. Friday the 13th? A campground. Maybe their translations are off.

Anyway, it turns out when World War II ended, a squadron of Nazi officers was driven out of a nearby town, left to freeze to death in this very mountain range. And who should come a-knockin' but Colonel Herzog himself, looking for his long lost Nazi gold?

What the film might lack in technical prowess (the lighting is a little flat, some equipment can be spotted along the edge of a couple frames, and those zombies have some awfully healthy pink skin if you peek between the folds of their jackets), it more than makes up for in pure ambition as the second half picks up and transforms the peaceful cabin into a whirling dervish of bloody hilarity.

Heads are pulled in two, a man is separated from his limbs like a starfish, and Vegard hangs off a cliff, using a zombie's intestines as a rope. It's gross, it's fun, and it's a thrill ride that doesn't let up, all accompanied by typically bizarre Norwegian death metal.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1863