Census Flashback: Skewing Younger

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.

In anticipation of Solo: A Star Wars Story, which explores younger versions of characters you know and love, I'll be reviewing a movie that transposes last week's pick of The Phantom of the Opera into a teenage milieu. It's Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge!

Year: 1989
Director: Richard Friedman
Cast: Derek Rydall, Jonathan Goldsmith, Kari Whitman
Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

The Phantom of the Opera musical was already about three years into its medium-defining run in 1989, so it makes sense that Hollywood would want to cash in on that ASAP. But that still doesn't excuse the fact that, even though the slasher subgenre was wheezing its death rattle, it used that precious last breath to cough out two rip-offs of that very same story. Last week we took a look at the chintzy and misguided Robert England period piece, but this week is an entirely different animal. Now Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge is certainly chintzy and misguided, but there's still some spark that the po-faced straight adaptation lacks.

An actually handsome romantic lead doesn't hurt, either.

Phantom of the Mall positions itself as a mystery, but let's not pretend the plot is anything but straightforward and get the exposition out of the way that the movie wastes 40 minutes not telling you. The Midwood Mall - the brainchild of venal businessman Harv Posner (Jonathan Goldsmith, of two episodes of every 80's show you've ever heard of) and local mayor Karen Wilton (Morgan Fairchild, making her second Census Bloodbath appearance after the dreadful The Seduction) - has just opened up, bringing this small town into a world of economic opportunity. Well, for everyone except Eric Matthews (Derek Rydall), a presumed-dead teen whose family perished in a fire that just so happened to clear the plot of land the mall was built on. With a load of scars on his face, hate in his heart, and a Bowflex in his lair to give him that obligatory slasher villain murderstrength, Eric lurks in the underbelly of the mall vowing revenge on those who built it and taking down anyone who threatens his bereaved girlfriend Melody Austin (Kari Whitman of Masterblaster, a credit I'm sure she'd sooner have us forget).

Conveniently, Melody and her friends - the fashionplate Suzie (Kimber Sissons) and the goofball slacker Buzz (Pauly Shore) - have gotten jobs at the aforementioned mall where Eric is doing his phantoming. Oddly for a teen mall slasher, most of the victims are anonymous adult maintenance workers, but also on the potential platter of Meat are Harv's deadbeat greaser son Justin (Tom Fridley, who unforgettably played Cort in Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI), security guard Acardi (horror icon Ken Foree), and intrepid teen newspaper photographer Peter Baldwin (Rob Estes, a series regular on three seasons of Melrose Place, so my crush on him arrives 20 years later than the rest of the world), who has developed a bit of interest in Melody's horrible backstory, and a lot of interest in Melody's beautiful face.

Their love doesn't please Eric much, but really what does?

1989 slasher films don't tend to have a lot to offer in the field of gore, scares, creativity, acting, filmmaking, or reasons to exist, but there's one thing that they all have in common: an abundant supply of 80's cheese. The ridiculous fads and fashions that cropped up around the beginning of the decade had had many years to ferment, becoming as pungent and flavorful as possible in the process, and Phantom of the Mall has a delightful surplus of that excess. It also doesn't hurt that it's set in a mall, the ur-location of 80's cinema.

Everything in sight is a beautiful time capsule, from the music to the technology to the cast (see: Morgan Fairchild) to the outfits (see: Morgan Fairchild's oversized peach blazer that threatens to drown her in fabric). Although the slasher movie had long since run out of steam and couldn't deliver something you hadn't seen before, this was the perfect background onto which a film could regurgitate a decade of well-worn tropes and character archetypes.

Plus, even hough they lack creativity and even at times a coherent pool of victims, the kills - the counterpoint upon which any slasher must balance - are achieved with a crazed live-wire energy that more than makes up for the less than pristine gore. Most of these murders have a hilariously complex Rube Goldberg quality that calls to mind the best of the Final Destination franchise (one singular kill sequence involves a skateboard, a lasso, and an escalator), and their bizarre, unpredictable nature is captivating. Plus, lots of these moments are satisfyingly on-theme with their use of common mall objects and locations, and the ones that aren't are at least f**king bananas, like Eric planting a venomous cobra inside a toilet.

You know, like are found at your average mall pet store.

Basically, the entire theme of this movie is succeeding in spite of the limitations of being exactly what a late 80's slasher always was going to be. Those kills really are something, and they do tend to draw from a well of contemporary urban legend fears (the toilet snake, people! Not to mention the fact that Stranger Danger lurks around every corner here, with predatory men stalking the mall parking lot like it's a prison yard) that elevates them just slightly from typical slasher fare.

And when the movie really digs in, it goes nuts, splashing every dollar of its presumably modest budget right into your face. The third act pulls out all the stops in an orgy of 80's genre tropes, pulling from the best of the worst of horror, action, and soap operas of the time. There's a splashy car chase, a fight between the Phantom and one of the mall's many sex predators that involves at least a dozen spin-kicks, and a Dynasty-esque reveal involving Morgan Fairchild diva-ing it up in a sparkly dress. And there's literally a scene of someone jumping away from an explosion!

He's flying directly into the 80's slasher Hall of Fame.

As a campy, trashy experience, Phantom of the Mall is an especially epic good time. The ensemble of familiar character actor faces provides a reasonably reliable performance quality (Kari Whitman is probably the least recognizable of them, and for good reason, considering that she's by far the blandest presence in the film), the stupidity of translating Phantom into this milieu is wholeheartedly embraced, and the tropes it leans heavily on are some of my favorites. It's certainly no masterpiece, but for once a slasher movie has lived up to its epically ludicrous title, and that's not something to scoff at.

Killer: Eric Matthews (Derek Rydall)
Final Girl: Melody Austin (Kari Whitman)
Best Kill: There are a lot of fun elaborate kills here, but what could possibly beat a cobra rising from a toilet to bite a dude on the dick?
Sign of the Times: The arsonist the teens are hunting down looks exactly like George Michael, stubble, earring, and all.
Scariest Moment: Melody's sex dream about Eric turns into a hideous nightmare of fire and blood.
Weirdest Moment: Suzie finds an eyeball in her frozen yogurt.
Champion Dialogue: "He can ask me probing questions anytime."
Body Count: 9

1. Stanley is stabbed in the gut.
2. AC Repairman has his face shoved in a fan.
3. Devlin is crushed by a cart into a fuse box, electrocuting him until his eyeball pops out.
4. Piano Player is bit in the dick by a toilet cobra.
5. Justin has his neck snapped in an escalator.
6. Christopher is decapitated by a trash compactor.
7. Mayor Wilton is thrown out a window and impaled on a shard of glass.
8. Harv Posner is burned by a flamethrower and thrown onto propane tanks, which explode.
9. Eric perishes at the hands of his own bomb.

TL;DR: Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge is a surprisingly delightful late entry in the slasher genre.
Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 1362

Census Bloodbath: Weight Reduction Through Terror

Year: 1989

Director: Michael Fischa

Cast: William Bumiller, Brenda Bakke, Merritt Butrick

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I have so many thoughts swirling around in my brain about Death Spa that I’m gonna cut to the chase in this introduction so I can get to unpacking what the hell it is I just watched. In short, I resuscitated Census Bloodbath with the adrenaline shot to the heart that was Killer Workout, and I thought it was only fitting that I follow it up with that other late 80’s slasher about murders at a health spa. Other than that link, Death Spa couldn’t possibly have been a more different experience, and I daresay it’s about time to dive into that twitchy mass I’m – for lack of a better word – going to have to call a plot.

There’s less aerobics stock footage at least, though I’m not really sure that’s a positive.

So, the Death Spa in question is Starbody Health Spa, owned by one Michael Evans (William Bumiller), a widower who has struck up an affair with his customer Laura Danvers (Brenda Bakke of Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight). After Laura sustains a chemical burn from a malfunctioning sauna, mysterious accidents and deaths plague the spa, and as the crew prepares for its annual Mardi Gras party (unintentionally minting this a proper holiday slasher), bodies – and suspects – begin piling up. Investigators Sgt. Stone (Rosalind Cash of Tales from the Hood) and Lt. Fletcher (Francis X. McCarthy of Interstellar and a bunch of Steve Martin comedies) might suspect Michael at first, but almost everyone in this overpacked cast starts to smell a little fishy.

High on the list is David Avery (Merritt Butrick of Fright Night Part 2 and Star Trek II and III), the twin brother of Michael’s ex-wife Catherine (Shari Shattuck) and the computer programmer in charge of the spa’s preposterously high-tech control room. Not since Chopping Mall has an 80’s movie so vastly overestimated the amount of flashing buttons and dials that are required by the average local business. David also hates Michael’s guts, blaming him for his sister’s miscarriage and suicide.

Anyway, we’ve also got Michael’s lawyer Tom (Robert Lipton) who wants to keep the club open at all costs; the manager Priscilla Wayne (Alexa Hamilton), who was the first to find Laura despite supposedly having left the spa earlier that night; Marvin (Ken Foree of Dawn of the Dead, From Beyond, Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, and just so many cult movies), the… I don’t know, janitor? Security guard?; and Dr. Lido Moray (Joseph Whipp, who played a sergeant in A Nightmare on Elm Street, a detective in Chiller, and the Sheriff in Scream, so apparently Wes Craven was pleased with his work), a parapsychologist investigating the scene.

And why exactly is a parapsychologist here? Well you see, Michael keeps having dreams of his dead wife demanding that he kill himself, and he’ been receiving creepy computer messages from her before that was a thing people could just do. Is there something paranormal going on, or is this just a plain and simple hack and slash routine with some gaslighting thrown in for flavor?

Spoiler alert: it’s very confusing, but it’s not neither and maybe both.

Death Spa is one of those bad movies where everyone introduces themselves with their full name, and I’m so glad the filmmakers assumed we were all idiots, because if this script wasn’t dumbed down a smidge, it would be absolutely impenetrable to anyone but the people who wrote it. The characters aren’t quite distinct enough in looks or personality to be able to tell who is doing what (except for the one recognizable face, Ken Foree, but his character is useless and onscreen for maybe five minutes), the unclear reveals are a series of bizarrely elliptical paranormal happenings, and the deaths are shot so poorly it’s almost impossible to tell who is being killed by what implement except for the fact that it’s happening and it’s gross.

But there’s the thing. As difficult as it was for me to put together a coherent body count list for this review, the murder sequences have an untamed power that is absent from most toothless 1989 slashers. The viscera is present and unrelenting, whether it’s an eyeball exploding out of a burning corpse, a man’s brains splashing onto a sauna bench, or a blender converting an arm into a bloody smoothie. The effects aren’t exactly stellar, but for a film of this vintage they’re both surprising and relatively innovative. One death in particular, in which a girl is sprayed with either boiling water or acid (if I haven’t made this point already, Death Spa has a clarity problem) is so nauseatingly rendered that it sent a chill up my spine and had me asking some hard questions about why I continue watching these movies. That might not sound like a compliment, but it is. 

A slasher being physically affecting in any way is rarer than finding a four leaf clover made of leprechaun gold.

The confusion isn’t really helped by the sheer amount of noise this movie produces. Not enough people die to justify the alarming abundance of characters in this movie, including  comic relief schlub with an inexplicable British accent who gets two laugh lines, then promptly exits the movie. But all of this contributes to a sense of never really knowing what’s going to happen next, and this movie is packed to the gills with delightfully bizarre little moments and details around every corner that are satisfying for the lover of strange cinema. There’s even a scene of inappropriate football tossing (across a desk in an office, in the middle of a conversation), a hallmark of bad filmmaking as written in stone by The Room.

And boy does this movie make a habit of chucking in the most insipid good-bad false scares ever conceived (in a  scene where we’re emend to believe Laura is dead, it’s revealed that she’s merely taking a nap face down on the couch. You know, as humans do.) All of this is a little disappointing considering that when Death Spa is on it’s on, providing some truly macabre imagery that’s more than a little shocking from a horror flick of this vintage. Fortunately, the bad scenes are pretty amusing, but the good scenes almost get in the way of them and vice versa.

I’m almost at a loss for words to describe how I feel about this film. It’s utterly perplexing and frustrating, but that might just be the most delightful thing about it. I commend the filmmakers for going to the extra mile and not just turning this into some aerobics slashing boilerplate, but I just have no idea what it actually is. Death Spa is beyond description, and thus inherently worth giving it a look.

Killer: [Caroline Avery (Shari Shattuck), as channeled by her brother David (Merritt Butrick)]

Final Girl: Michael Evans (William Bumiller) feat. Laura Danvers (Brenda Bakke)

Best Kill: Priscilla is frightened by a violently wobbling mirror in the bathroom, which then explodes outward, sending shards of glass – along with her face – smashing to the floor.

Sign of the Times: When the douchey beefcake Robert rebuffs a girl who’s flirting with him, he smirks and says, “I’m Beta. You’re VHS.”

Scariest Moment: Possessed fish begin screaming at Lt. Fletcher in the gym’s walk-in freezer.

Weirdest Moment: suspicious of Tom, Michael barges into his apartment to confront him – but first he compliments his short shorts.

Champion Dialogue: “You’d resort to the only weapon in your system file: jock violence.”

Body Count: 9; not counting many trampled/burned alive partygoers, or whatever the hell happens to whoever the hell the villain was

1. Robert is bent in half backwards by a weight machine.
2. Marcie is impaled through the back of the neck.
3. Linda is sprayed with acid from a fire sprinkler.
4. Dr. Moray’s hand explodes and he’s thrown down a stairwell.
5. Jeffrey has his face crushed by a phantom hand.
6. Sauna Dude is impaled through the back of the skull.
7. Bartender’s arm is devoured by a rogue blender.
8. Lt. Fletcher is impaled in the neck with a swordfish.
9. Priscilla is diced by an exploding mirror.

TL;DR: Death Spa is confusing, gruesome nonsense, which means it's a pretty great late 80's slasher.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1399

Don't Mess With Texas

Year: 1990

Director: Jeff Burr

Cast: Kate Hodge, Ken Foree, R. A. Mihailoff

Run Time: 1 hour 26 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

"They just get dumber and dumber, don't they?"

This line from Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III is meant to be about the victims that wander in the way of the treacherous Sawyer family, but it's quite accurate in describing the franchise itself. It's a true marvel how ineffably, ludicrously dumb the filmmakers in charge of horror sequels tend to be, but the people behind Texas Chainsaw III just about take the cake, ripping continuity to shreds and replacing it with goreless, gibbering claptrap.

Although in retrospect, we all should have seen it coming when New Line Entertainment picked up the property in the late 80's. Sure, it's the company behind the beloved Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, but New Line in the 90's was like quicksand for horror franchises, sucking up everything good about them and spitting out dreadfully bizarre and bizarrely dreadful films like Freddy's Dead and Jason Goes to Hell.

Heck, even the teaser trailer tried to warn us it was a piece of crap.

Texas Chainsaw III "tells" the "story" of Michelle (Kate Hodge) and Ryan (William Butler of Friday the 13th Part VII), an annoying couple who are taking a road trip from LA to Florida by way of Texas. After a run-in at the Last Chance gas station and an unfortunate trunk-chainsawing, they get into an accident on a back road, flipping weekend survivalist Benny's (Ken Foree of From Beyond and Dawn of the Dead) Jeep and sending their own car careening into the forest.

After an interminable amount of Noises Off antics in the forest (up to three crazed hillbilly cannibals and up to four crazed victims appear and vanish between scenes at the whims of some unknown but certainly unmerciful god), Michelle arrives at a house in the woods (for the first and only time shot somewhere other than Texas - in this case Valencia, California though it looks more like the swamp planet Dagobah) just in time for the obligatory dinner party sequence.

As always, our Final Girl (insofar that she survives and is a female) gets to meet the family. And here's where things get hairy. If you recall from my previous entry in this franchise, Part 2 ended with the entire clan being blown up by a grenade and/or chainsawed and tossed into a turbine. I'll give the filmmakers a pass on bringing back Leatherface (R. A. Mihailoff) because a beloved franchise does need its main villain. But evidently the Sawyer family is like a Chia pet - just sprinkle some blood and new families will sprout around you, as many as you want!

You want three new brothers? Sure thing! Here's Tex (a pre-Aragorn Viggo Mortensen), Tinker (Joe Unger), and Alfredo (Tom Everett), each more unexciting and derivative than the last. You want Grandpa back? No problem! Here's his corpse to tide you over. You want a little girl (Jennifer Banko) in spite of the fact that there's no possible combination of sexually healthy humans in the film that could have borne her from their coition? You want a Mama (Miriam Byrd-Nethery) in a wheelchair with an electrolarynx? Screw you, you lunatic, but you got it!

The true modern family.

I haven't even mentioned that the family now lays traps in the woods like they're the frickin' Most Dangerous Game of the American Southwest and that Leatherface now has a leg brace as well as the ability to drive. Not to mention the film completely overestimates the importance of the chainsaw, elevating it to totemic power within the family.

For all this we're given no explanation. No delicate tiptoeing around continuity. Not even a gentle nod. The new world order for the Sawyers simply exists. And your ability to enjoy this movie is contingent on your ability accept this turn of events. But hey. I'm an easygoing horror fan.

I've laughed my way through Jason's dead child body teleporting from the New York sewers back to being a full-grown man at Crystal Lake. I've endured Freddy Krueger miraculously sprouting a wife and daughter and being given his dream powers by ancient worm demons. I've cheerily skipped through Michael Myers' induction into the Cult of Thorn. 

But Texas Chainsaw III just plain pisses me off. It's one thing to make a dumb horror sequel. It's another to create a film that dares to spit in the face of continuity itself, then devotes all its resources to a slavish imitation of the aesthetic of the original film, all the way down from the heat dripping off the frame to the insert shots of the sun to the armadillo in the road. And then attempts to dispel any potential claims of plagiarism by sticking earrings on that armadillo.

The cherry on top? That doll is named Sally.

This is infuriating to any hard-won fan of the franchise. But if one could manage the Herculean task of looking past that anger and being completely objective... The movie still is a piece of crap. But at the very least an amiably daffy piece of crap.

This is the first film where the acting slips below the slasher threshold, landing firmly in camp territory. Mihailoff's Leatherface is supremely unimpressive either way you slice it (be it chainsaw or what have you), but Mortensen's Tex is a delightful nutcase with an accent like slow-churned molasses. And Everett filters the Hitchhiker impression that provides the character of Alfredo through an accent that can only be described as "Elvis with a penny up his nose." And man oh man can Ken Foree be a bad actor when he wants to be, shouting his lines with little to no concern upon whom they fall.

There's just slightly enough gore to wet a neophyte's whistle, though even in the five-minutes-longer unrated cut, the grue is rather subdued. But the hamhanded dialogue more than makes up for it with its Screenwriting 101 tricks (use a random token from Act 1 to pay off a kill in Act 3, mirroring character situations before and after they make a change), which spill out from the screen like a magician's handkerchief.

Or, if you prefer, neckerchief.

And luckily for bad movie enthusiasts, the Final Girl is one of those "shout at the screen" types who always turns back after running seven feet and yells at her boyfriend to hurry up fixing the tire while continuously taking away the flashlight she's holding to aid his repairs. And did I mention that all of this is scored with a soundtrack that feels like a Trapt album run through a garbage disposal?

The finale especially is pure dumb fun, with one moment of humor (Leatherface plays a Leapfrog-style kids' game) that lands with intentionality. And at least two of the deaths are chainsaw related, which is far more uncommon than would seem possible in a franchise that has built its entire mythology around the implement.

So perhaps it's not quite as soul-poisoning as I first made it out to be. But the fact remains that this is the first film in the franchise that outright defaces the original masterpiece with its sheer ineptitude. There's certainly plenty more crap to come, but we must never forget this sad day in 1990 which finally felled the savage beast that is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

TL;DR: Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III is dumb and terrible and spits on continuity but at least it doesn't take itself too seriously.

Rating: 4/10

Body Count: 6; not including an armadillo. Or Benny and Leatherface, who looked rather dead last time I saw them, but were revived without a scratch thanks to tampering from Lucifer the studio.

1. Gina is hit in the head with a sledgehammer.
2. Sara is chainsawed to death.
3. Ryan is chainsawed and hit in the head with a hammer.
4. Mama is shot three times with a shotgun.
5. Tex is stabbed in the back and set on fire.
6. Alfredo is shot in the chest with a shotgun. 

Word Count: 13

Reviews In This Series

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper, 1974)

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (Hooper, 1986)

Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (Burr, 1990)

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (Henkel, 1994)

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Nispel, 2003)

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (Liebesman, 2006)

Texas Chainsaw 3D (Luessenhop, 2013)

Leatherface (Bustillo & Maury, 2017)

Splatter University 4: Cockneys and Werewolves and Lovecraftian Lamprey Monsters, Oh My!

This Monday was the last official lecture class in my Horror Seminar for the semester. It's a darn shame, because that class was the light of my school week. Anyway, I'm really excited to see a final exam with the phrases "Wes Craven" and "re-animated corpses" on it, so there's a silver lining.

This is the last set of mini-reviews for my class (I have two more big reviews coming - I've been a little backed up due to finals and the fact that I had a fifteen page script due today that I began yesterday) and as we drew closer and closer to my revered decade of the 80's, the more exciting everything got.

Hold onto your butts.

Village of the Damned

Year: 1960

Director: Wolf Rilla

Cast: George Sanders, Barbara Shelley, Martin Stephens

Run Time: 1 hour 17 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

A massively successful British import, Village of the Damned is a slow boil, but is a lot more fun than the leaden horror fare the country cranked out for the entirety of the 50's. From German director Wolf Rilla (whose name sounds like it could be a SyFy Original movie), this tale based on John Wyndham's novel The Midwich Cuckoos is creative and enthralling.

One day, every single person within the town lines of Midwich falls unconscious for several hours. When they wake up, every single woman of appropriate age is bearing a child. These children grow quickly and their blonde hair and glowing eyes start to freak out the inhabitants. After a rash of mysterious incidents their parents must discover a way to save themselves while struggling with the idea of fighting their own offspring.

It's really a fascinating premise and although it's only explored in a genteel English manner, it still has the means to frighten despite the now supremely outdated glowing eye effects. Even though it's clearly a negative superimposed on a still frame, those moments remain spine tingling to this day. Perhaps not  film to recommend to most of the MTV generation, but any fan of classic horror could do worse.

Rating: 7/10

The Howling

Year: 1981

Director: Joe Dante

Cast: Dee Wallace, Patrick Macnee, Dennis Dugan

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The first film screened during "Werewolf Week," The Howling was a film I was looking forward to greatly. My excitement was entirely predicated on that it was mentioned in one line in Scream, but it was genuine nonetheless. You can imagine my disappointment when it was really kind of terrible, and not even in the fun way.

Although my professor insists that The Howling is a horror comedy, I was hard-pressed to find a chuckle anywhere except the feeble wolf puns in the background (Somebody eats a can of Wolf chili. A man is reading "Howl.") 

The opening scene is quite nice, in which an intrepid reporter (Dee Wallace) is accosted by a werewolf in the red light district. It was interesting to see a werewolf scene set smack dab in the middle of urban America as opposed to some creepy far-off woodlands. 

Of course, after this scene, Wallace is immediately transported to some creepy far-off woodlands and my rapport with the film is immediately lost. 

The film does have some interesting things to say about werewolfism as a metaphor for hedonism and exploring your base animalistic instincts but it is weighed down by highly dubious (and inconsistent) alterations to the classic werewolf mythology, a screechy protagonist, and an early transformation sequence in which some VFX artist clearly just drew a wolf onto the frame.

Although I did like the ending. [Dee Wallace gets shot in the face.]

Rating: 4/10

An American Werewolf in London

Year: 1981

Director: John Landis

Cast: David Naughton, Jenny Agutter, Joe Belcher

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Now this is more like it. A violent werewolf movie influenced by A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court directed by the guy who did Animal House that opens to the strains of "Bad Moon Rising?" Already an infinitely better film than The Howling.

David (David Naughton), our young (hot) protagonist has his vacation in England hampered by a wolf attack on the moors that leaves his friend Jack (Griffin Dunne) dead and him in a coma for several weeks in a London hospital with a nasty bite on his arm. 

When he is visited by the mauled ghost of his dead friend (complete with flapping jaw skin every time he opens his mouth - brilliantly disgusting), he learns that he is to become a werewolf and that if he doesn't die and end the curse, all werewolf victims are doomed to be trapped in Limbo for all eternity.

It's heavy stuff, but the film is hilarious. A pretty young nurse (Jenny Agutter) takes David home and they do it. A lot. This is a patient that every doctor in London is convinced is a mental case that this young nurse took home without telling anyone. But hey, there's no closed door in the world that beauty can't open.

One great werewolf transformation scene later, David is on the rampage across central London, making good on the film's title. For a lot of films that claim to take place in a major city (cough cough Jason Takes Manhattan), the city scenes feel brief and unsatisfying but David's mayhem in Piccadilly Circus is very worth it.

The film really is quite hilarious, my favorite part being the scene in the porn theater where Jack and his ghost friends suggest suicide techniques while the silliest sexy film in the history of cinema plays out in front of them. And though the ending disappointed many of my classmates, it is deliciously (and very darkly) funny and I honestly don't know what they were expecting.

Rating: 8/10

From Beyond

Year: 1986

Director: Stuart Gordon

Cast: Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Ken Foree

Run Time: 1 hour 26 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The first film in our double feature screening was Re-Animator, a fun cult classic that I have previously reviewed. From Beyond, another H. P. Lovecraft-based film from the same director, producer, and returning cast members Barbara Crampton and Jeffrey Combs seemed like it would be in the same vein, with silly over-the-top gore and pure camp splashed across the walls.

We did indeed get a silly, campy B-movie with some outdated effects, but one that was filled to the brim with flesh-twisting Lovecraftian horrors. Among the staff of the large make-up department was gore legend John Carl Buechler (who also directed my favorite Friday the 13th film, Part VII: The New Blood) and his incredible influence is truly felt.

I was nailed to my seat, looking up at the screen with a mixture of awe and abject horror. A Lovecraftian nightmare of incredible proportions, From Beyond tells the story of a machine that resonates at a frequency that stimulates the pineal gland in the brain, allowing those in its vicinity a sixth sense - the power to see into an alternate dimension that coexists with our own and is filled with bizarre monsters.

The only problem is that when the machine is on, they can see us, too.

Young scientist Jeffrey Combs and psychologist Barbara Crampton are investigating the effects of this machine and are drawn into a psychosexual nightmare of epic proportions, accompanied by Dawn of the Dead veteran Ken Foree.

A perfect mix of campy humor and gore and some truly terrifying and batsh!t insane effects pieces sent From Beyond into the stratosphere and I really can't recommend it enough. If you have one shot to explain to somebody the bizarre excesses of 80's horror, this film vies with John Carpenter's The Thing for the title of being that one film you should show to them.

Wow.

Rating: 9/10

Word Count: 1313

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

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