Census Bloodbath: Heads Will (Rock And) Roll

Year:
1985
Director:
Mats Olsson
Cast:
Jeff Harding, Naomi Kaneda, Michael Fitzpatrick
Run Time:
1 hour 29 minutes

Plot: Blood Tracks follows a crew shooting a music video for the hair metal band Solid Gold (played by the members of the real-life Swedish band Easy Action, including future Europe guitarist Kee Marcello) in the Colorado Rockies (played by Funäsdalen, Sweden). It goes horribly wrong when an avalanche traps them in an isolated cabin. It goes horribly wronger when various members of the party - including director Bob (Michael Fitzpatrick of Scream for Help) wander into the nearby abandoned factory, where a mother (Filippa Silverstone) and her brood of children have been hiding for the past 40 years after she murdered her husband in self defense. Somehow this has turned them into Hills Have Eyes-esque mutants.

Meanwhile, star Suzie (Naomi Kaneda) desperately tries to get in contact with their helicopter pilot liaison John (Jeff Harding, also of Scream for Help), who is already suspicious that something has gone terribly wrong.

Analysis: I love the time capsule nature of 1980s slashers, so when they focus on trendy music of the era, they tend to be interesting, even if those installments are rarely very good (see Terror on Tour, New Year's Evil, Rocktober Blood, Trick or Treat, and so on). Unfortunately, that rule of thumb has been severed with a pair of garden shears, because while I was eager to see what Blood Tracks had to offer, it came up empty at every opportunity. 

All it would have taken to win me over was for the filmmakers to simply set the camera down and let the 1980s happen at the lens, and Blood Tracks is too incompetent even for that. I was willing to let the weird ADR dialogue slide, because even though I didn't know it was Swedish when I turned it on, I can sniff out a European slasher at thirty paces. However, the incompetence is so much more deeply entrenched than that. 

The cinematography is incompetent. Everything is muddy and dark and uninteresting.

The screenplay is also incompetent. There are way too many characters in play here, and the movie never settles enough for any of them to come to the fore among the gnashing throng. You'd think that the fact that the movie has two screenwriters (Mats Helge Olsson and Anna Wolf) would allow them the opportunity to look at one another and figure out at least two different potential personality traits the characters might have, but they can't even come up with one, bless their hearts. 

The killers at least look different from one another, so that's nice. But there are also too many of them, only one of them ever gets a name, and I was never quite clear on exactly how many of them were actually kicking around in the first place.

The editing is also incompetent. It works in tandem with the cinematography and the staging (also incompetent) to render most of the kills completely illegible. I have spent years of my life trying to parse incoherent slasher movies, and I flatter myself that I have gotten quite good at it. So please believe me when I tell you that this is the most difficult time I've ever had merely trying to figure out what happens to the characters onscreen, let alone when and why. The kills are presumably the reason that any slasher movie existed in the mid-80s, so the fact that they are so abhorrently constructed is downright criminal. 

Frequently the editing conveniently leaves out the type of weapon that's in use, the exact part of the body to which it is being put to use, and sometimes even the identity of the poor sap who it is being used upon. Two separate murders involve the killer kind of simultaneously pulling on a person's body while crushing it in a process that seems to be effective but in such defiance of the laws of physics and the language that we have to describe such things that I had to invent the term "yanking" just to find some way to mark it in my notes.

You'll see below that I have failed to give Blood Tracks a completely bottom-of-the-barrel score. But trust me, that is not so much because the movie has merits, but because - as I said - I have been doing this for years and know just how much worse things can get. At least getting to look at the snowy Swedish landscape was nice.

Killer: The Family

Final Girl: Suzie (Naomi Kaneda)

Best Kill: It's technically not a kill, but the best gore effect by far is the lead killer's arm being shot right off.

Sign of the Times: Easy Action knew how to do the 1980s right.

Scariest Moment: The end credits open with a list of the actors that doesn't credit their characters, which felt uncanny and sinister in a way I can't quite explain.

Weirdest Moment: One couple is having sex in the car when an avalanche buries said car, and even though the rescue operation takes several minutes, the woman is still buck naked when she is pulled out of the snow.

Champion Dialogue: “We're buried! We're buried, you fool!"

Body Count: 15; not including several characters who are kidnapped by the killers and never heard from again, which means they're probably dead, though I have no proof of it.

1. The Father is stabbed in the back.
2. Frank is pushed off a platform.
3. Dave gets yanked.
4. Kee is decapitated offscreen. 
5. Nick is doused in gas and lit on fire.
6. Linda is killed in some way by a pulley-based trap.
7. Carrie is thrown from a platform and impaled on a spike.
8. Mary (I think) is killed in the face offscreen.
9. Sarah is yanked.
10. Fuck-Ass Bob Killer is shot.
11. Bob has a hatchet thrown through his forehead.
12. Louise is impaled with a blade pendulum thing.
13. Dark-Haired Killer is shot.
14. Leper Killer is stabbed in the neck and shot.
15. The Mother dies of... smoke inhalation? Falling?

TL;DR: Blood Tracks has a solid premise that it wastes with a scattershot, muddy approach.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1024

Census Bloodbath: Meh-Sommar

Year: 1983

Director: Hans Hatwig

Cast: Åke Eriksson, Sussi Ax, Eva Danielsson

Run Time: 1 hour 18 minutes

It's undeniable that the 80's slasher film is primarily a North American tradition. America was churning out the bulk of the chum, and Canada was batting clean-up with a lot of movies that were actually good. However, the whizzing of that money-printing machine was so loud it could be heard across oceans, and so far we've covered slashers from territories as far afield as West Germany, Australia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Spain, Brazil, the UK, and The Netherlands. However, it's always nice when another country gets in on the fun and throws their hat in the ring. Today's subject under the microscope is Blödaren AKA The Bleeder, Sweden's first (and only? I'll keep you posted) grab for the slasher brass ring. Let's see how they fared!

You do have to assemble the pieces yourself, unfortunately.

In Blödaren, the rock band Rock Cats (as played by the members of actual Swedish band Revansch) has finished their latest gig and is heading to their next stop in their tour van, which of course breaks down immediately. They grab their instruments and head to the nearby village of Bifors, the now-empty hometown of a boy whose family drowned 25 years ago, leaving him with brain damage from staying underwater too long. And wouldn't you know it, but this boy is now a man (Åke Eriksson, the drummer of the band Attack) dressed like a bad Chris Elliott character, and he has escaped from the local institution.

The girls (who are all blonde, and only distinguishable by their differently colored pants) wander around this abandoned village, peel off one by one, are kidnapped, and then killed. Meanwhile forest ranger Danne (Danne Stråhed), who has been investigating the abandoned van, canoes up and down the river and generally fails to get anywhere near helping any of them.

The authorities really need to learn that they have no business in a slasher movie anyway.

I'll say this one thing about Blödaren. They certainly did their horror movie homework. The music is stolen from Halloween, the squealing, dragging around of women, and bone decorating prowess of the killer is straight out of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and the baby carriage and bouncy ball that are his strange markers seem to randomly have been lifted from The Changeling. Look, there's nothing inherently wrong with stealing tropes from other movies. If James Wan has seen further, it is because he has stood on the shoulders of giants. You just need to deploy those tropes well. Which Blödaren doesn't do.

Yeah, did I forget to mention this movie is bone-crushingly terrible? Blödaren only has two scenes, which it repeats ad nauseam:

1) The girls explore an empty building that is covered floor to ceiling in blood, but don't get freaked out until they discover a skull somewhere in the premises, at which point they scream and run out. It's like a twisted Where's Waldo.

2) The killer kidnaps one of them, attempts to play with them, and then drags them offscreen when they attempt to escape. We hear them scream, and this means that they are dead. 

Reader, this movie has no onscreen deaths, and hardly a drop of blood to be found beyond the obligatory "this person is dead so they have to have a dribble of blood coming inexplicably from their mouth" makeup.

Usually a bad slasher featuring a rock band at least features them performing a lot of fun-bad music, but despite the rock cats carrying their instruments with them for the entire movie, the only glimpse we get of musicality is a snippet of a song from the end of their concert in the intro. Blödaren is content to be flavorless and empty for the bulk of its run time, an impulse I can't say I respect. The only thing that is pleasurable to gaze upon during the interminable Bifors sequence is the costumery on display. The girls are all kitted out in their best ridiculous mid-80's Eurofashions.

Each woman is bedecked in a cascade of fabric that will send your eye on a journey through colors and patterns previously unimaginable by the human soul, but the MVP has to be Nulle's legwarmers, which have little jingle bells sewn in that make her sound like a tambourine every time she moves. And the only genuinely terrifying moment in this horror film is when forest ranger Danne takes off his big jacket and reveals that he has been rocking a rat tail padawan braid this entire time.

OK, can I scrounge up anything else good to say about Blödaren? Well, there are some reasonably effective POV shots when some of the girls try to defend themselves with pitchforks and the like. The Swedish countryside is pretty, and I love a slasher movie that has the killer strike during daylight for a change (especially considering that, if this film is anything like its dozens of crummy contemporaries, the action in a night scene would have been essentially invisible). Oh! And there's a random blooper at the end of the credits that is surprising and made me giggle. End of list.

I always hope that when a new region generously coughs up a slasher for us to peruse, it'll give us a unique angle on the formula that you couldn't have gotten anywhere else, and Blödaren is a gargantuan disappointment in that regard. It's not even generic in a white noise-y, basically pleasant sort of way. It's more like a buzzing insect that you've heard a hundred times before, and it's annoyed you each of those hundred times.

Killer: Blödaren (Åke Eriksson)

Final Girl: Mia (Mia Hansson), or at least I'm pretty sure that's her name. We only ever hear these character's names when they're already dead and somebody else is looking for them, so nobody ever needed to look for her

Best Kill: There really isn't any. Although the best business surrounding a kill is the one where Eva uses the flash from a Polaroid camera to frighten the killer, and the next girl discovers the pictures she took of the killer scattered around the floor.

Sign of the Times: The hikers are wearing Fjällräven backpacks decades before they became trendy in the U.S.

Scariest Moment: The hikers discover a grotesque display involving a tarp and a skull (which they dutifully ignore).

Weirdest Moment: One of the girls wakes up with the killer playing a drum right next to her.

Champion Dialogue: "I don’t care about the telephone, I want a hot dog.”

Body Count: 6

1. Male Hiker is killed offscreen.
2. Female Hiker is killed offscreen.
3. Maria is killed offscreen.
4. Eva is killed offscreen.
5. Nulle is killed offscreen.
6. Axet is killed offscreen.

TL;DR: Blödaren is repetitive, derivative, and boring as sin.

Rating: 2/10

Word Count: 1144

Popcorn Kernels: Fangs For The Memories

Everyone, please welcome back our dear friend Scream 101! The podcast has risen from the grave for a second season, and this September we’re all about vampires. Please enjoy a set of mini-reviews about the first two flicks in the lineup.

Dracula (For the Scream 101 episode about this film, click here.)

Year: 1931

Director: Tod Browning

Cast: Bela Lugosi, Helen Chandler, David Manners 

Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

MPAA Rating: Approved

C’mon.

I do my best to approach classic horror with the respect it deserves, bringing as much context as possible to understand why people might have been scared of it back in the day, even if it doesn’t phase modern audiences. I get how Psycho shocked a post-Code audience and respect its tense thriller mechanics. I understand Halloween’s game-changing, stylish approach even if it doesn’t particularly spook me. And every time I watched The Exorcist… OK, The Exorcist is still terrifying. I’m just saying, I’m not speaking as a live Tweeting, torture porn-bred millennial when I say that the massively important, influential-even-to-this-day 1931 Universal smash hit Dracula is a pretty awful movie.

Please keep in mind that I don’t hate all Universal horror. Bride of Frankenstein is a doggone triumph. It’s just that Dracula is cut off at the knees twice over by its source material. While Dracula works well as an epistolary novel, its meandering, country-hopping plot is not the stuff of great cinema. And then our Dracula goes one step further by actually adapting its script from a stage play based on the novel, confining that addled narrative into one suffocating location.

The pacing chokes on its own blood as a handful of characters shout at one another, circling back to the same points over and over again. And far be it from me to knock an iconic performance, but Bela Lugosi is no Karloff. His slow-as-molasses line deliveries are just exhausting. The word “boring” is bandied about a lot when it comes to movies released more than a decade before our time, but Dracula truly earns that description. 

There are exactly three things that are genuinely good about Dracula, and they are what prevent it from teetering over a precipice of despair and tedium. First is Dwight Frye, our Renfield. Frye just goes for it, bringing an immutable energy to the role that sends him careening up into the rafters, but appropriately sells the character’s stylized insanity. The second stems off from that over-the-top quasi-expressionism: the production design of settings that aren’t the main mansion. Dracula’s castle is an excellent chiaroscuro nightmare, and the staircase in his London hideout is a deliciously overwrought jagged cliff.

The third and final element is one scene, a bedtime conversation between Mina and Lucy that thrums with naturalistic chemistry, providing a tiny breath of fresh air between all the hammy tagines. But a couple gasps do not a full lung make. I’d rather be buried six feet under than spend an eternity with Dracula, and that’s exactly what this 80 minute expanse of celluloid felt like.

Rating: 3/10

Let the Right One In (For the Scream 101 episode about this film, click here.)

Year: 2008

Director: Tomas Alfredson

Cast: Kåre Hedebrant, Lina Leandersson, Per Ragnar

Run Time: 1 hour 55 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A young Swedish boy falls in love with the girl who moves in next door, only to discover that she’s a vampire.

I love the book Let the Right One In, as it’s one of the few works of modern literature that has turned my stomach as I was reading it. That might explain why I’m so chilly toward its film adaptation, which defangs most of its more questionable content in favor of a languorous arthouse vibe. Now I’ll be the first to admit that Let the Right One In is a great arthouse horror movie, but I’m well aware of what it could have been, which is supremely frustrating.

But it’s only fair, I suppose, to focus on what it is. Which is beautiful. Like many a Scandinavian film, Let the Right One In uses sprawling fields of snow as giant canvasses of negative space onto which it paints its frame. Given that vampire films tend to predominately feature blood, this aesthetic is especially suited for the subgenre, juxtaposing lurid reds against the pure white snowfall. This is especially especially meaningful when you consider that both our monster and our twisted protagonist falling for her are children, the traditional innocents.

Yeah, there’s a lot going on in Let the Right One In, though you might not suspect that from its sedate pacing. It truly succeeds in combining thoughtful, thematic imagery with intensely visceral horror, sometimes even in the same frame. Certain moments are achieved so elegantly that they could be framed and put in a gallery, even though they depict, say, a woman being engulfed in flame or a man burning off his own face with acid. … Maybe I’m being too harsh when I judge this movie for not being hardcore enough.

And let’s not discount the film’s love story, which is believably clumsy, childish, sweet, and dark. The two child actors are superb, especially Lina Leandersson, whose Eli has the eyes of someone who has seen a million lifetimes come and go.

Hell, Let the Right One In is terrific. I don’t love it, because I sometimes have trouble penetrating its icy exterior, but I’d be a liar if I didn’t sing its praises and recommend it to fans looking for more intellectual horror fare.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 926

Ready for Takeoff

Tonight is a night my whole life has been preparing me for. Sergio and I are going to make the unnecessarily long trip to Lake Elsinore to see Basshunter, a Swedish Eurodance artist for whom I have an inexplicably strong affinity. I'm so excited that my joy and warmth spilling out all over everything so I'd like to cast my net wide for this special concert post with

TEN FANTASTIC THINGS TO THANK SWEDEN FOR

Literally everything I've ever encountered from Sweden is the best thing I've ever seen. Also I really just want a chance to write as many Swedish words as I can.

#10 The A*Teens

Members: Marie Serneholt, Dhani Lennevald, Sara Lumholdt, Amit Paul
Hometown: Stockholm

The ultimate 90's pop superstars for a good 13 seconds, The A*Teens were a Swedish teen quartet that started off doing ABBA covers but then exploded onto the scene with songs that are still stuck in the heads of people my age.

#9 The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Original Title: Män som hatar kvinnor
Author: Stieg Larsson
Hometown: Skellefteå

Hugely successful book series leading to a hugely successful Swedish film series leading to... well, Daniel Craig was in it. Anyhow, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo captured the imaginations of the American literary world in a way that hadn't been seen since Harry Potter ended. Although the first book was full of dry business dealings, audiences fell in love with the tough as nails Lisbeth Salander and stuck with her for two more books (and would have continued to do so had the author's premature death not rendered that an impossibility).

#8 Noomi Rapace

Hometown: Hudiksvall

The best gift the Swedish film series could ever have given us. Noomi Rapace's talents successfully made the crossover to America in films like Prometheus and Sherlock Holmes: Shadows of the Colossus. Or whatever it was called.

#7 IKEA

CEO: Peter Agnefjäll
Hometown: Älmhult

OK, everybody knows by now that IKEA instructions were written by the devil. But building IKEA furniture is a great bonding experience. Watching Shannon build a desk singlehandedly really makes you respect her infinitely. And hey. Cheap, colorful furniture and meatballs. I'm not complaining.

#6 Alexander Skarsgård

Hometown: Stockholm

Just look.

#5 Let the Right One In

Original Title: Låt den Rätte Komma In
Author: John Ajivide Lindqvist
Hometown: Blackeberg

People have certainly by now heard of this Swedish vampire film and its surprisingly well-received American remake. But did you know it all started in 2004 with one of the best vampire books ever written? The movies might be intense, but the book is utterly horrifying in ways that could never be committed to celluloid. I strongly suggest that any horror fan pick up a copy. Swedish fiction is intense, man.

#4 The Sounds

Members: Maja Ivarsson, Félix Rodríguez, Johan Bengtsson, Jesper Anderberg, Fredrik Blond
Hometown: Helsingborg

The Sounds fueled my entire first semester of college. This Swedish rock group makes great use of alternative... sounds. Their interesting aural aesthetic is what drew me to them and their chick power rock is what made me stay. Also they were featured heavily on the Scream 4 soundtrack so you know I'm down for that.

#3 H&M

CEO: Karl-Johan Persson
Hometown: Västerås

Basically the place where all my outfits are born. Maybe Sweden is so full of snow that everything they produce needs to be colorful to combat the overwhelming white. I'm not sure, but I do know I am forever in debt to Swedish fashions for being brave enough to actually use colorful dye in their men's clothes.

#2 ABBA

Members: Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson, Anni-Frid Lyngstad
Hometown: Stockholm

Don't you ever talk down on ABBA unless you want a knuckle sandwich. Their genre-spanning pop  is one of the most important and artistically viable musical acts of the 70's. Sure, they can be over the top, campy, and sparkly, but from the hits all the way down to the deep tracks, ABBA has been committed to trying new things in disco and their magical influence can still be seen today.

#1 Robyn

Hometown: Stockholm

For a long time being one of the best kept secrets of the dance world, Robyn recently hit it big with "Call Your Girlfriend," a massive pop sensation that perfectly combined her unique lyrical lilt and infectious energy. Robyn is the dance-pop/punk whiz kid the world never knew it needed.
Word Count: 735