Census Bloodbath: Get Stuffed

Year: 1981

Director: Netti Peña

Cast: Jake Steinfeld, Vinessa Shaw, Peter De Paula

Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

One of the fake trailers in Grindhouse was “Thanksgiving,” directed by Eli Roth. The thesis of this trailer was that slasher movies love to be set on holidays (Christmas, Halloween, Valentine’s Day, April Fool’s Day, New Year’s… even birthdays and prom night got in on the fun), but none have ever been set on that most quintessentially American celebration of gluttony, Thanksgiving. Well, here’s Home Sweet Home to prove poor young Eli wrong, a forgotten flick that fell off the back of the slasher truck in 1981. To be fair, the word “Thanksgiving” is only mentioned on the poster and aside from a turkey dinner, there’s not much holiday cheer to be found, but hey. I didn’t make the rules.

And get this – Home Sweet Home is also one of those rare 1980’s slashers to be directed by a woman. In fact, it’s the very first of the decade. Does this alter my perception of it in the slightest? No, a crummy slasher is a crummy slasher, and the decade was infested with ‘em. But I want to publicly salute Nettie Peña for breaking that oh-so barren ground.

You paved the way for Slumber Party Massacre, and for that we thank you.

In Home Sweet Home, we gather at a secluded California ranch for a hearty Thanksgiving meal, but it’s unlike any holiday celebration I've ever been to. I went ahead an assumed that everybody in attendance was related (as the poster’s tagline would lead me to believe), but that thought quickly turns sour when the event pretty much becomes an orgy ten minutes in as couples pair off for some quick, pre-tryptophan canoodling. After a very confusing and sweaty half hour, I’m pretty sure I finally have all the proper pieces in place. Let’s Meet the Meat!

OK. Deep breath. The ranch belongs to Bradley (Don Edmonds of Ilsa, Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks and Gidget Goes Hawaiian), who so helpfully provided the name for the now even more confusing tagline. He has a son named Mistake (Peter De Paula) who runs around in KISS makeup with an electric guitar on an amp strapped to his back, as you do. Nobody likes Mistake, especially Bradley’s girlfriend Linda (Sallee Young), with whom he may or may not have had his second child, the 4 or 5-year-old Angel (Vinessa Shaw). Linda has invited her personality-deficient friend Gail (Leia Naron) and Bradley has invited his business associate Wayne (Charles Hoyes). At least I assume that’s what he is, because every line he grunts is either about wanting to talk business or griping about missing the game. He’s brought along his feisty Latina girlfriend Maria (Lisa Rodríguez of Terror on Tour), who doesn’t speak a lick of English but it very excited about everything anyone says. Also in attendance are Scott (David Mielke), the boarder who lives in the apartment upstairs, and his girlfriend Jennifer (Colette Trygg), who is a human woman.

Phew. That’s over with. On hand to help us keep track of who’s who by bumping them off one by one is escaped mental patient Jay Jones (Jake Steinfeld, fitness guru and uncle to Hailee). Backstory? Mask? A reasonable body shape? Who needs ‘em?

And is it just me, or do the buff men of yesteryear look weirdly like overstuffed scarecrows compared to the buff men today?

Home Sweet Home maybe has the best slasher opening scene ever. Fade in on a station wagon parked in what looks to be the concrete waterway where they had the motorcycle chase in T2. A man in the driver’s seat looks directly at the camera and proffers an ice cold can. “Hey, wanna beer?” Reverse shot: A hulking man leaps into frame snarling, and strangles him to death. Who are these people? We don’t know. Where are they? Who cares. All I know is that this movie starts with a bang, tossing you into a disorienting, violent fever dream and then immediately follows that with the beefy killer running over an old lady in a crosswalk, cackling like the Wicked Witch of the West while her raspberry jam blood slides down the windshield. Now that's how you open a movie.

Home Sweet Home plunges you into a universe entirely askew from our own, and that sense of total unpredictability carries over into the rest of the first act, something we’ve already discussed during my epic struggle to nail down the characters. Nothing in Home Sweet Home makes sense until about 45 minutes in. It’s like wandering through a funhouse showing twisted mirror visions of an idyllic American Thanksgiving where people say things like “She’s really hot! A jalapeño!”, decide to siphon gas from nearby cars on the way to the Arco, and threaten to kill themselves while swinging a bat at the teen KISS wannabe who just play hot guitar licks in her their faces while they were trying to make love to his father. That vigorously weird spirit is the only thing that carries the film across the finish line, because once the horror kicks in, it sucks the life from the film like a Dementor.

Look, if you were born in the 90’s, Harry Potter is never too far from your mind.

The endless chase scenes through the forest are dull, underlit fiascos, and Jay Jones’ innocent victims hardly seem invested in their own survival. Colette Trygg especially seems to be actively bored by the proceedings. Or maybe she was just saving up every ounce of acting energy for the final scene, where she peels the paint off the walls with a cacophony of terrible, ceaseless, identical shrieks. The entire third act, which mostly focuses on her, is a desiccated husk of a horror film, flapping limply in the breeze.

But damn if that first half isn’t the most energizing slasher sequence I’ve seen in a good long while. If a slasher can’t be particularly good or particularly scary or particularly gory (once again, 1981 was a weirdly chaste year in terms of depicting bloody death onscreen), I’m at least happy if it can rustle up some weirdest, and Home Sweet Home delivers the kooky goods in its character sequences.

The movie is a completely unpredictable jumble with surprises around every corner: perhaps the biggest is a pointedly un-campy scene where perennial annoyance Mistake has a tender moment with his little sister. It was even, dare I say, kind of sweet. I’m so lost with this film. Home Sweet Home is a careening ten-car pileup of a motion picture with a whirligig cartoon score and a devastatingly atrocious third act, but I still kind of adore it, at least a teensy bit. This is not a recommendation, but it was a nice, whimsical interlude during a tough end-of-year period for census Bloodbath 1981.

Killer: Jay Jones (Jake Steinfeld)

Final Girl: Jennifer (Colette Trygg)

Best Kill: None are particularly eventful, but Mistake is electrocuted with his own guitar, which carries a twinge of poetic justice.

Sign of the Times: I could carry on about Scott’s pastel yellow polo or Jennifer’s Debbie Harry bangs, but just look at Mistake. This character could only have crawled from the sewage pit of 1981.

Scariest Moment: Jay jumps out at Jennifer after she spends all night hiding.

Weirdest Moment: Mistake offers to play his guitar for the killer in exchange for letting Maria live.

Champion Dialogue: “She won’t drink anything. She hates to go to the bathroom.”

Body Count: 9

1. Beer Guy is strangled.
2. Old Lady is run over with a car.
3. Bradley is crushed under a car hood.
4. Wayne is garroted with his own gold chain.
5. Gail is thrown over a car and hits her head on a rock.
6. Linda is stabbed to death.
7. Maria is stabbed in the chest.
8. Mistake is electrocuted by his own guitar.
9. Scott has his throat slit.

TL;DR: Home Sweet Home is an atrocious, but weirdly captivating slasher gem.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1344

Census Bloodbath: Kiss Of Death

Year: 1980

Director: Don Edmonds

Cast: Rick Styles, Chip Greenman, Rich Pemberton

Run Time: 1 hour 24 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

When will I learn to never trust slasher movies with cool titles? 

Friday the 13th, Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Burning, The Initiation... All great titles for great movies, but their names are low key in the grand scheme of things. But give me a Christmas Evil, To All A Goodnight, or Memorial Day and things get down in the dumps pretty quickly. Can you guess which camp Terror on Tour falls into?

If you guessed the former, you're just as optimistic as me. And just as stupid.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

You see, Terror on Tour was produced by Alex Rebar and Sandy Cobe, two slick types who also perpetrated To All A Goodnight earlier in 1980. Add in the ingredient of director Don Edmonds' history of producing trash like the notorious Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS and you've got the perfect recipe for a crap sandwich. Luckily, this film doesn't descend to quite the level of nuclear suckage that that might imply, but it would take a gentler soul than I to find anything substantial to praise about it. 

This film tells the story of The Clowns, a rock and roll band played by real life band The Names. Their show involves over the top KISS style costumes, makeup, and the murder of a mannequin onstage. Classic stuff, really. Their tour, which takes them to exotic locations as far and wide as this one rinky dink theater in middle America to.... the same rinky dink theater in middle America. 

But let us not get caught up in the minor crappy details when there's so much major crap to deal with. The band consists of Fred (Rick Styles), a real hit with the ladies; Ralph (Chip Greenman), who is succumbing to the lifestyle and battling a drug addiction; Henry (Rich Pemberton), the drummer with a heart of gold; and Cherry (Dave Galluzzo), who is a real sensitive type who doesn't really like the drug and violence addled personas they have had to take on to appeal to the crowd. I made those four sound much more interesting than they actually are.

The movie would have perhaps been a shade more interesting if it had focused on fleshing out their characters and enhancing their terror at their situation, but in that wall-to-wall 80's rock fashion, the killings this time are carried out while they're onstage and the film preoccupies itself with the machinations of the band's tour manager Tim (Larry Freaking Thomas, aka Seinfeld's Soup Nazi and the only "big" name in the entire film), their makeup artist Herb (Jeff Morgan), and their handsome roadie Jeff (David Thompson).

Oh, did I mention that the killer is decked out in full Clowns regalia?

Oh, did I mention that this regalia is comprised of Kiss makeup, a black unitard, a Phantom of the Opera mask, and an afro wig?

It had to come out sooner or later.

During the concerts and the afterparties, a whole horde of sexy young women are dispatched with a butcher knife that makes my crappy student film rubber knife look like a Ginsu. These scenes are interspersed with the copious nudity that is the trademark of these producers and this genre, but the murders leave something to be desired. It's all just people getting stabbed in the gut with a Big 'Ol Knife. Nothing groundbreaking here.

It's like the filmmakers watched Friday the 13th and pieced together that the formula for success was a high body count, crappy cinematography, and listless characters talking about nothing in particular. They even stole the CHA CHA CHA score! Unfortunately, they skipped over the magnificently rendered gore while compiling their list and the film loses a lot of the cheesy 80's impact it could have had. 

Although the costumes certainly work to make up for that.

The acting in the film is... well, what would you expect? The band members surprisingly hold their own, but the rest of the cast is pretty standard for a slasher of this pedigree. The men are too unattractive to make it in Hollywood, the women too untalented. Although ironically, the director and star of the 1982 slasher Boardinghouse (John Wintergate and Kalassu) make an appearance here as "Mod Boy" and "Mod Girl."

There are actually a surprising amount of slasher regulars in the supporting cast. Sylvia Wright, who played some chick named Carol would go on to make a name for herself in Bloody Birthday as "Girl in Van." And Verkina Flower, who played the charming "Well Endowed Girl" would go on to be a wardrobe consultant on Frightmare and Silent Night, Deadly Night, one of the very few truly good Christmas slashers.

But when that's the extent of your film's talent... Well, things aren't exactly the best. The songs are uniformly subpar, although they're not as grating as the endless slate in the same year's New Year's Evil. I already spoke of the acting. Since there's hardly any gore to speak of, at least I can't complain about its poor quality.

Although to be completely honest, I'd really rather have buckets of terrible chalupa sauce blood than nothing at all.

He gets it.

The only thing saving the film is those unforgettable costumes. Half KISS, half Juggalo, all ridiculous. The fact that at any given point, up to 75 percent of the cast is dressed like this gives the film a lot of mileage. Unfortunately, besides that and the presence of Larry Thomas who is at best a D-List celebrity, there's absolutely nothing else to recommend it.

OK, maybe there's one more interesting thing. Let's jump into SPOILER territory here. The killer, as anybody with a pulse could guess by the 30 minutes mark is, in fact, the Soup Nazi. He's killing the topless chicks for the usual reasons. They're whores, sex is a sin, he's a religious zealot, we get it. But there's an intriguing addition to this motive.

He kills them because he thinks they're morally unscrupulous and doesn't want them to bear children. Isn't that strange? I mean, it's not enough to amp up a dull, plodding final act that follows a goreless second act and a wholly boob-fueled first act, but it's certainly more creative than what we normally get in the end of these early slashers.

So it's not a total waste of time? But I wouldn't spend your time on it. Only mine. Because at least when I watch it, I can chalk it up to this Census Bloodbath project and feel productive. For you, it would merely be madness.

Killer: Tim (Larry Thomas)

Final Girl: None; Although the entire band survives, which is highly odd.

Best Kill: One of the girls is stabbed right in the boobs.

Sign of the Times: There's a character named "Mod Girl." Come on.

Scariest Moment: There is a room in the venue used exclusively for sex. It is decorated with red splatters. And a noose.

Weirdest Moment: The band members start to sing a song in the green room that actually isn't a pile of crap.

Champion Dialogue: "He's popping enough pills to put an elephant into orbit."

Body Count: 8

1. Drug Dealer Girl is stabbed in the stomach.
2. Horny Cocaine Girl is stabbed to death.
3. "Next" Girl has her throat slit.
4. Too Turnt Topless Girl is stabbed in the chest.
5. Drummer's Girlfriend is stabbed to death. 
6. Lt. Lambert is stabbed in the gut. 
7. Narc Girl is stabbed in the stomach.
8. Herb is stabbed in the back. 

TL;DR: Terror on Tour is not good, but at least it has funny outfits.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1292