Census Bloodbath: Xenophobia

Year: 1980

Director: Greyson Clark

Cast: Jack Palance, Martin Landau, Tarah Nutter

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Part of the reason we're going back to 1980 to scoop up extra movies is that some films slipped through my net before I refined my criteria for what does or doesn't qualify as a slasher film. Without Warning, which is about an alien invasion (well, kinda), just didn't seem to fit the bill at first. But the more I looked at it, the more I realized how uncannily it does follow the slasher formula, even considering that this should be pretty well impossible for a film that came out just three months after Friday the 13th. 

We've got a Crazy Ralph and everything!

Without Warning has a lot of slasher royalty behind it, as well. Generally the doddering, inbred kind of royalty, but it was shot by Dean Cundey, so that's nice. At the helm here is Greyson Clark, the director behind my fourth least favorite slasher of 1982, Wacko! There's also an Alone in the Dark pre-reunion going on here, teaming Jack Palance with Martin Landau because apparently they were just doing whatever script scribbled on a napkin was shoved in front of them in the early 80's. Anyway, I digress. Let's cover the plot, insofar as there is one (Another slasher trope! I've said this exact sentence dozens of times!).

A hunter (Cameron Mitchell of The Demon, Blood Link, Trapped Alive, Terror Night, Deadly Prey, and Memorial Valley Massacre) and his son Randy (Darby Hinton of Wacko) are killed out in the woods (as played by California dry brush) by what can only be described as extraterrestrial ninja stars. They're basically little frisbees that look like sand dollars with little fanged sucker mouths that attach themselves to your skin via little tubes and start sucking out your insides. They also take down a comic relief Scoutmaster (Larry Storch of Sweet 16) before four horny teens come careening in with their camper van. Now that's more like it!

These teens are the Horny Sex Couple Beth (Lynn The) and Tom (David Caruso, who I certainly didn't expect to see mucking about in the slasher trenches, and boy what a twink he was 41 years ago) and the Sweet Couple Sandy (Tarah Nutter) and Greg (Christopher S. Nelson). The horny teens are dispatched almost instantly and Greg and Sandy are sent running through the woods and into town, where they encounter the Man Who Cried Alien, Sarge (Landau) and reunite with their harbinger, creepy gas station attendant Joe Taylor (Palance). They do eventually discover that there is a humanoid alien  (Kevin Peter Hall, who would go on to greater glory playing an alien in a little film called Predator) throwing these sand dollars around to murder people for.... reasons, and he's hiding the bodies in... a shed. Spooky!

It really sends a shiver down the spine, dunnit?

If there's one thing I've learned from a long and intensive study of slasher movie posters, it's that if the cool-looking monster or alien is shown in detail, then you're only gonna get to see it onscreen for twenty seconds max. I'm looking at you, The Slayer and The Incubus. If a film has enough of the monster that it wants to keep it a secret to surprise the audience, then that's when you end up with a subtle poster like Alien. So at least I didn't come into Without Warning with any illusions about this alien menace.

Ultimately, the design of the alien once we see it (once in a flash under a swinging lamp, the remaining 1 and a half scenes largely in shadow) is a pretty good, if uninspired variation on the Greys. The sucker discs look a little shoddier (when they're sucking their victims dry they're covered in what is unmistakably ketchup and mustard), but they're at least fun B-movie images if you suspend your disbelief off a cliff. Unfortunately, this hot-dog-esque M.O. is the only way people are killed in the movie, so it wears thin long before the gags peter out. 

But isn't it nice that at one frame of the movie looks like this?

Although the effects bringing the sci-fi elements to life are very 80's, the rest is an extremely effective pastiche of an average 50's B-picture. In that nothing happens for 80 minutes. Greg and Sandy run through empty woods interminably, then sit in a bar during a power outage that I'm pretty sure was engineered because they didn't budget for that many lights. The filmmakers seem to have come to the conclusion that the cheapest special effect is human beings grousing at each other in the dark. And the pacing of the kills is terribly poor (another slasher trope executed with aplomb), with most of the kills happening in the first two reels to leave plenty of time for wandering past some scrub. 

Palance and Landau don't liven up the proceedings, barely showing a shadow of even the screen presence they display in Alone in the Dark. But then again it's hard to breathe life into a character when you're asked to spout dialogue like "Alien! Alieeeeen! ALIEN!" The only performer who is doing anything remotely interesting is Larry Storch, in an unfathomable turn as a Scoutmaster who warns the boys against picking up rattlesnakes because they "carry germs" and tries to light his cigarette by holding it against a rock and striking it with flint. He is carted in from a completely different movie and carted back out more or less immediately. 

All in all, despite its mild B-science fiction charms, Without Warning presents us with almost nothing to recommend itself. It's a dreadfully tedious motion picture experience that wastes every ounce of talent spent on it (and once you get past those two veteran actors and Dean Cundey, that well is already shallow as hell). This kind of film is why I'm glad to mostly be free of 1980. It doesn't have the vigorous excesses of the later 80's, but it's not sober or serious like the late 70's, so it's really just a waste of time all around.

Killer: Alien (Kevin Peter Hall)

Final Girl: Sandy (Tarah Nutter)

Best Kill: They're legitimately all the same, but the death of the Scoutmaster has the ooziest gooiest blood splatter, so I'll pick that one.

Sign of the Times: Greg has to use a dial to turn on his windshield wipers.

Scariest Moment: Martin Landau points his fun at Greg and starts yammering about how the aliens are all his fault.

Weirdest Moment: In the spooky gas station, the gang discovers an upside-down baseball cap in which a rat is snuggled with its litter of babies.

Champion Dialogue: "I saw something outside that bar I've never seen before, and I have no desire to see it again."

Body Count: 9

1. Hunter gets suckered.
2. Randy gets suckered.
3. Scoutmaster gets suckered.
4. Beth gets suckered offscreen.
5. Tom gets suckered offscreen.
6. Greg gets suckered.
7. Sarge gets suckered.
8. Joe Taylor and
9. Alien die in an explosion.

TL;DR: Without Warning is a dire sci-fi B-movie that wandered its way out of the 50's and got itself some decent special effects that are hardly used.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1211

Census Bloodbath: Pull The Other One

Year: 1982

Director: Greydon Clark

Cast: Joe Don Baker, Stella Stevens, George Kennedy 

Run Time: 1 hour 23 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

It makes perfect sense that 1982 would be the year with the highest concentration of slasher parodies. The boom began in earnest in mid-1980 with Friday the 13th, and reached its highest theatrical concentration in 1981 (Night School, Friday the 13th Part 2, Graduation Day, The Burning, and The Fan were all released in a single three-week period). Combine that with the enormous success of Airplane! in 1980, and you've got yourself a recipe for a glut in that very specific sub-subgenre. 

The trend kicked off with the star-studded and decent Pandemonium and the execrable National Lampoon's Class Reunion, which began John Hughes screenwriting career and somehow didn't tank him immediately (he's white). The capper of this trilogy was Wacko, a film that lands somewhere between them quality-wise, though (spoiler alert) it's much closer to Class Reunion on that very limited scale.

Maybe humor didn't get funny until 1983?

Wacko "tells" the "story" of Mary Graves (Julia Duffy of Night Warning and a million TV shows you've actually heard of), whose older sister was killed by The Lawnmower Killer 13 years ago during the Halloween Pumpkin Prom. Wouldn't you know it, now it's time for her Halloween Pumpkin Prom, and someone else has donned the pumpkin mask to kill some kids. She's attending with her boyfriend Norman Bates (Scott McGinnis), who makes lawnmower noises every time he gets horny, and boy they just weren't even trying with naming this character, huh?

The other notable teens are her best friends Bambi (Elizabeth Daily of Bad Dreams and also she's the fucking voice of Babe), Rosie (Michele Tobin), and Rosie's date Tony Schlongoli (Andrew Dice Clay in his first film role), who has a dick so huge that he bursts through his pants whenever he gets a boner. Comedy! Unfortunately we don't get to spend a lot of time with the actual characters, because the producers spent a third of their budget on the name actors playing the adults, including George Kennedy (seen similarly slumming it in Just Before Dawn the year prior) as Mary's father, Stella Stevens as her mother, and Joe Don Baker as film noir-esque detective Dick Harbinger.

Their roles are all embarrassing, but they're laughing their way to the bank.

I suppose we should talk about the comedy, because there's literally nothing to this movie other than an endless litany of gags layered over one another. Sometimes that can be successful. That structure is one of the reasons people praise Arrested Development to high heaven. But in order for that to work, the gags need to be good (see: Arrested Development season 5). 

There is some mildly amusing stuff that crops up every now and again, because out of 100,000 jokes, there's a statistical improbability that not a single one will make you laugh. But none of these successful gags (including a rope hanging out of the window of an escaped mental patient's first floor room, and a student saying of her chemistry teacher "he makes science so believable!") have anything to do with Wacko's ostensible purpose to parody the slasher film formula in any meaningful way.

There are very forced gags pointing out the tendency for these films to have unnecessary dream sequences or perverted gardener red herrings, but in a style that recalls Scary Movie, a lot of the gags feature totally unrelated horror properties (including The Omen, The Exorcist, and Alien) and scattershot cultural detritus (the West Side Story musical number that introduces Tony is both hideously staged and resolutely unfunny, and it does not shock me to find out that it was Andrew Dice Clay's idea). Wacko is so lackadaisically committed to the slasher conceit that the only death in the first hour isn't even perpetrated by the killer who is supposedly stalking around town.

That said, the film's third-best line comes when Mary worries that her father might kill someone with the replacement medical instruments he's been using because he can't find his scalpel, and her mother calmly chides her: "Your father is a doctor. He kills people EVERY day."

And once the kills kick in during the film's Prom Night-inspired final act, they prove to be entirely bloodless and starved for creativity. Even a death involving a teen's head being shoved into a garbage disposal is just an excuse for a flood of gags (the lunch lady shows up to tell the killer he needs to be running the water to turn on the disposal, and then it's randomly revealed that she is the teen in question's mother) rather than a fun, outré death. There is not one drop of blood, or even a little motion implying the jiggling of the machine. It's just static and demure in every possible way.

It's surprising that the kills are so underplayed, because everything else in the movie is played up to the rafters. Any running gag is repeated no fewer than one thousand times, and the jokes are so crammed into every single element of the movie that any time it stops to breathe for even a two second shot like somebody walking across the lawn, the sound designer throws in a random elephant trumpet sound... just because?

Other than the occasional, incidental laughs, there are only two things I liked about Wacko. The first is that Julia Duffy is a great casting choice, and her cartoonish baby voice provides a heightened, over-earnest register that the whole movie should have taken and run with. And the second thing is that the band that plays at the prom is a group called Avalon, who I actually quite like. So this movie has at least added to my "Slashdance" playlist of songs from slasher movies, even if it hasn't benefited me to watch in any other way.

Killer: Dick Harbinger (Joe Don Baker)

Final Girl: Mary Graves (Julia Duffy)

Best Kill: The chemistry teacher saws a woman in half to prove something about matter, and seems mildly disappointed when he finds out he's murdered her.

Sign of the Times: Andrew Clay hadn't even earned the "Dice" in his name yet!

Scariest Moment: The dad spying on his scantily clad daughters and constantly being laughed off is just... bone-chilling.

Weirdest Moment: There's a random car chase scene where one car uses a ramp to launch over another car as it explodes.

Champion Dialogue: "I'm really honored that you're still a virgin."

Body Count: 6

1. Lady is sawed in half in Chemistry class.
2. Vice Principal has his head squeezed in a vise.
3. Bambi is decapitated with an axe.
4. Tony has his head shoved in a garbage disposal.
5. Rosie is put into some sort of... meat grinder conveyor belt?
6. Dick Harbinger is impaled with an American flag, stabbed a bunch, and probably shot; frankly I'd stopped paying attention at that point.

TL;DR: Wacko is funnier on paper than it is in practice, and it's not that funny on paper.

Rating: 2/10

Word Count: 1174