CinemaBeach: God Save the Sluts and the Whores

Prom Night IV: Deliver Us From Evil

Year: 1992

Director: Clay Borris

Cast: Nikki de Boer, J. H. Wyman, Joy Tanner

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The Canadian Prom Night franchise is one of my absolute favorites. Having dedicated my life to watching a series of weird and terrible movies, these films always deliver. Why, you ask, did I decide to write about the fourth one when you, dear reader, almost certainly haven’t seen all of the others? Because, in the true tradition of direct-to-video slasher madness, Prom Night IV: Deliver Us From Evil has absolutely nothing to do with any of the previous films.

The original Prom Night is about Jamie Lee Curtis’ friends being killed one by one at Hamilton High’s prom on account of a crime they committed as children. Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II completely ignores that, instead opting to be about the ghost of a Prom Queen who died in 1957 who returns to get revenge on her killers and reclaim her title. Prom Night III: The Last Kiss, the only film in the franchise with a returning character, features Mary Lou (still a ghost) stalking a cute boy and killing his enemies. This film takes a long look at its venerable and thoroughly bizarre history and decides to instead be about a mad preacher killing people who have sex in a secluded house in the woods.

Which, to be fair, is a pretty solid slasher concept.

Prom Night IV opens on Hamilton High’s prom in 1957 (a hopeless leap at continuity with the Mary Lou movies that actually muddies up the timeline even worse than before), where a crazed clergyman, Father Jonas (James Carver) kills a couple who are making love in the backseat of a car. The church decides it is more pious to sedate him for the rest of his life and keep him in a dungeon instead of calling the cops.

When young Father Colin (Brock Simpson, the only actor to be in all four movies of the franchise) is given the task of watching over the captive in 1991 (though the film was released one year later), he fails pretty much immediately and is killed by the stigmata-sprouting Father Jonas, who escapes to a mountain retreat that used to be an old monastery.

The monastery is now a house owned by Mark (J. H. Wyman)’s parents, and as fate would have it, he and his friends are having an anti-prom party (this is the film’s only connection to the “Prom Night” idea beyond the 1957 sequence) there that very night. Also in attendance are Mark’s girlfriend Meagan (Nikki de Boer), an overly pious and thoroughly annoying goodie goodie who is without a doubt our Final Girl for the evening; Laura (Joy Tanner), a naughty blonde Catholic schoolgirl who loves sex and rebellion, in that order; and her horndog boyfriend Jeff (Alle Ghadban).

Father Jonas takes the “sex = death” rule of slasher movies far too seriously and starts killing them one by one while whispering harsh diatribes against sluts and whores. The gross misogyny of the film is only leavened by the fact that we’re obviously not supposed to agree with the killer, but still it feels extremely unnecessary. Plus, whispering killers tend to be pretty cheesy.

Complaining about minor details is useless though, because even changing most of them wouldn’t alter the fact that Prom Night IV is a terrible movie. The most obviously direct-to-video Prom Night venture yet, the camera work is grainy and shaky and Paul Zaza’s score is characterized by sharp stabs of music that seem incidental to what’s actually happening on screen. The movie is bloodless, characterless, there are lengthy stalking scenes that go nowhere, a jump scare is so halfhearted that not even the characters are scared, the climactic chase scene spends about two minutes on a character in no danger climbing up a staircase, and the Final Girl is a shrill harpy who is stupid enough to take off her boots before entering a wine cellar where she has already cut open her foot on a shard of glass.

There are major plot holes, my favorite of which is that the killer has been in a coma for 33 years, meaning he’s probably around 60 years old. There is also an obvious body count padding death when Jeff’s little brother shows up outside, spying on the couples only to become the first victim of the angry Father. However, he has no car and the house in the woods is an hour’s drive from where he lives. It’s not worth it to put any thought into how he got there, because clearly the filmmakers didn’t.

Providing the cherry on top of the Sundae of Tears that is Prom Night IV, there are loads of missed opportunities that could have made this film better, perhaps even good. There is a cool shot of two characters’ heads as seen through loops in a statue, but nothing ever comes of it. Evidently the director saw an opportunity to make at least one artistic moment, but didn’t see fit to make it resonant with anything like a theme.

The most lamentable of these missed opportunities is Father Jonas’ stigmata. Whenever he enters a religious fervor, his hands and feet start to bleed, mirroring the body of Christ on the cross. This is a fairly well-known religious phenomenon, and an important part of the extremely prevalent Christian imagery in the film. At one point early on in the film, Meagan cuts her foot on glass and does the same thing again later in the film when she is hiding from the hissing Father Jonas. In the movie as is, this just shows Meagan is much too stupid to have somehow survived.

However, she could have utilized her injuries to convince Jonas that she has stigmata too, convincing him that she is as pious as him and allowing her safe passage. The fact that this doesn’t happen will forever be an annoying thorn in the side of the movie.

So, to conclude, Prom Night IV is flawed. But in spite of its many many many problems, I still love it wholeheartedly. Being a grubby cash-in slasher film is exactly what I expected of it, being the fourth film in a chain of increasingly low budget movies. This level of mediocrity and insipidity is something I expect and demand from most every slasher film I watch and it delivers in full force. This is a film only for the genre faithful, but it a prime example of the depths to which the slasher could sink but still exist in its purest form.

Killer: Father Jonas (James Carver)

Final Girl: Meagan (Nikki de Boer)

Best Kill: Father Jonas puts on a wig (or possibly a scalp) to look like Laura, kisses Jeff on the mouth, then crushes his skull.

Scariest Moment: When Mark is about to fall off the roof, he must hold onto the Father Jonas’ weapon as it pokes through the tiles, cutting his hands in the process.

Weirdest Moment: Father Jonas starts spraying holy water and things catch on fire!

Champion Dialogue: “Here’s to Prom Night!” “To Jamie Lee Curtis!”

Body Count: 8; 2 killed in 1957, the rest in 1991

1. Lisa's throat is slit with a crucifix.
2. Brad is stabbed in the chest with a crucifix.
3. Father Colin is garroted with cord.
4. Dave is killed offscreen.
5. Jonathan is stabbed in the chest with a crucifix.
6. Laura is scalped with a crucifix. 
7. Jeff gets his head crushed.
8. Mark gets a crucifix thrown into his chest. 

TL;DR: Prom Night IV: Deliver Us From Evil is a disaster, but a pretty fun by-the-books slasher film.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1292

Reviews In This Series

Prom Night (Lynch, 1980)

Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (Pittman, 1987)

Prom Night III: The Last Kiss (Oliver/Simpson, 1990)

Prom Night IV: Deliver Us From Evil (Borris, 1992)

Prom Night (McCormick, 2008)

Census Bloodbath: A Boy's Best Friend Is His Mother

If you're new to Census Bloodbath, click here.

Year: 1980

Director: Charlie Kaufman

Cast: Tiana Pierce, Nancy Hendrickson, Deborah Luce

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: UR

First a caveat: This film has nothing to do with the actual holiday Mother's Day. I no longer feel guilty for watching it in September.

This movie marks the first (and far from last) entry into the slasher genre from the cult beloved production company Troma. Always at the forefront of sleaze cinema, it is no surprise that Lloyd Kaufman's craptastic brood jumped on the slasher bandwagon long before most copycat killers. Troma is a company that revels in making terrible films (the most prominent of which is the campy The Toxic Avenger) and, for better or for worse, they have been going strong since their inception in (dear God) 1974.

Always toeing the line between bad-good and bad-bad, Troma approaches each and every film with an undeniable sense of humor which is already evident in the poster for Mother's Day. Though I appreciate the effort, something about movies that are intentionally bad will eternally be less funny than films that are bad by accident, but the manic glee with which Troma throws together films almost makes up for their shrieking insincerity. We will revisit this execrably delightful company time and time again during this series for Graduation Day, The Last Horror Film, Frightmare, Blood Hook, and the inimitable Splatter University.

But for the moment, we are here. 

And thankfully not here.

A brief word about the DVD. Although skeletal and bare, completely devoid of extras, the film was lovingly rendered and supremely easy on the eyes. The bar has been set very low as of late with the fuzzy and oversaturated Funeral Home and the ghastly dark Silent Scream and Humongous, so compared to those guys, Mother's Day is practically The Godfather.

The film opens with the closing moments of the inspirational seminar known as Ernie's Growth Opportunity (EGO, in the first of many Troma mandated background gags) as a young hippie couple (Kevin Lowe and Marsella Davidson) hitch a ride home with a kindly old woman (Beatrice Pons). The couple sours quicker than milk in the Sahara and it's clear they plan on robbing and killing the old lady.

Unfortunately for them, Mother is one step ahead of them. After she stops on the side of the road to fix the engine, the man is brutally decapitated and his girlfriend is swiftly dispatched via rope. This is the scene where Troma finally tips its hand, with editing possibly perpetrated by blind squirrels. The decapitation itself is pretty swell even if the head is pretty clearly prosthetic, but the clincher is that the hippie's girlfriend turns, screams, gets sprayed with blood, and then he gets decapitated. I had to rewind this scene twice to let it fully sink in.

Oh, Troma. What are we going to do with you?

Kill it with fire.

The opening credits are almost overwhelmingly the best sequence in the entire movie as we see a slideshow of pictures from Wolfsbreath College in 1970 accompanied by the commentary of three best friends known as the Rat Pack. The girls' banter is unforced and natural (two words which have no business being in a review of this film) and do a great job of setting up character relationships, establishing a shared background, and placing the movie in time.

Cut to ten years later and the Rat Pack has reunited for their yearly girls weekend away. There's Trina (Tiana Pierce), the blonde and stuck-up socialite who'd obviously much rather being chewing out a poolboy at a coke-fueled Hollywood pool party than meeting with her college roommates in dumpy little Drexford, New Jersey. There's Abbey (Nancy Hendrickson), a shy girl with an overbearing and sickly mother. And finally there's Jackie (Deborah Luce), a bubbly and optimistic girl who keeps getting dealt bad hands in life, not the least of which are her divorce and her boyfriend who is the living embodiment of of every negative masculine stereotype ever invented (he thinks strangling her is funny, steals money from her wallet, and is just super gross).

That paragraph was about as long as most of my Meet the Meat summaries even though there are far fewer people in the core cast than usual, which is actually a good sign - the characters have a lot of room to breathe and develop their own distinct personalities.

The girls have decided to retreat to the woods to get away from it all and after a quick, rousing topless water fight, the girls are abducted from the campgrounds by a pair of brothers, Ike (Holden McGuire) and Addley (Billy Rae McQuade), who bring them home to Mother.

This is her day after all.

Mother, it seems, hasn't taken her medication in about two decades and has been teaching the boys how to kill. She grins in delight as they tie up their prey and runs a series of exercises with them to practice properly attacking defenseless women. The relationship between Mother and her sons is also thoroughly explored (overbearing Mother refuses to be left alone, insisting that if both her boys leave her side, her evil sister Queenie will attack - a tale which smacks of old wivery and the boys start to catch on) excpt for, you know, the reason they kill people, which you think would be important.

Troma.

Jackie is taken first and the movie takes a sharp turn south as she is raped repeatedly (and it is implied this continues all night) and left for dead in a dresser drawer. It is at this point that the mildly pleasant Troma badness (numerous weird elements waft about in the background like an opera singing hobo and a coat stuck in a car door) devolves into something much more exploitative and sinister.

It quickly swings up again as Jackie's friends seek revenge in beautifully colorful ways (that color is red, through and through. Ike gets Drano in the throat, a TV in the kisser, and an electric carving knife everywhere else while Addley is taken down by the twin powers of an antenna in the neck and a claw hammer to the groin), but that moment of unnecessary misogyny poisons the picture and prevents it from rising through the mire of the Troma swamp.

The acting is pretty atrocious across the board (Pierce is by far the worst - hacking her way through a script that is far from dense), but Mother's Day is unique for subverting genre tropes before they were even set in stone.

Most notably, the three girls are all still alive with only 25 minutes left to go.

It by no means stays that way as the one girl I had pegged as the Final Girl croaks.

And I'm not even gonna talk about the twist ending where Queenie turns out to be real and attacks the other two girls after they dispatch the entire family. That's just great filmmaking right there.

This is all I ever wanted.

I know what I've been describing doesn't sound like a slasher movie at all, and really it's not. Mother's Day is a backwoods torture grindhouse revenge movie that was unceremoniously shoved into a slasher format the second that coins started to ring in the bottom of Sean S. Cunningham's coffer.

Coming four months on the heels of Friday the 13th, it's no accident that Mother's Day is set in the New Jersey woods. That and the deaths opening ten minutes were crudely grifted on to a movie that was probably already far into production by the time Jason saw the light of day. But say what you will about Troma, but they know a cash cow when they see one and they jumped on the slasher bandwagon before it was even completely built.

You gotta admire that kind of anti-integrity.

So all in all, Mother's Day isn't a total travesty, not by a long shot. It has some shockingly good characterizations for the time period, a wildly off-kilter and genre-bending script, and is really pretty OK.

I just wish they'd stop raping people.

Killer: Ike (Holden McGuire) and Addley (Billy Rae McQuade)

Final Girl: Trina (Tiana Pierce) and Abbey (Nancy Hendrickson)

Best Kill: Mother is smothered with a pair of blow-up breasts with pink nipples.

Sign of the Times: Mother wears a shimmery silver cardigan with fluffy green cuffs.

Scariest Moment: Abbey's hands are split open by a rope as she tries to lower Trina down to safety.

Weirdest Moment: The family practices killing by dressing Jackie as Shirley Temple.

Champion Dialogue: "What are you afraid of? Being jumped by a gang of wild Puerto Rican chickens?"

Body Count: 6; including the killers and their mother.

1. A boy is decapitated.
2. A girl is strangled to death with a rope.
3. Jackie is raped and left to die.
4. Ike has his throat burned, a TV in the face, and is stabbed with an electric knife.
5. Addley gets an antenna in the neck and a claw hammer to the groin.
6. Mother is smothered with inflatable breasts. 

TL;DR: Mother's Day is too exploitative to recommend but the good parts are nothing to scoff at.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1542

1D 3D

Year: 2013

Cast: Louis Tomlinson, Zayn Malik, Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Harry Styles

Director: Morgan Spurlock

Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

The biggest problem inherent in making a One Direction documentary is that none of them have been alive all that long, really. At 21, Louis Tomlinson is the eldest, and how many truly insightful stories does a 21-year-old have to tell?

Granted, much has happened in One Direction's meteoric rise to fame since the seventh series of The X Factor in 2010. But the fact still stands that this entire documentary spans what would be the fifteen minute "early life" segment of any other artist's onscreen story. Heck, even 28-year-old Katy Perry has lived veritable eons compared to these fresh-faced young lads (And don't even get me started on Katy Perry: Part of Me, which I can say with no guilt is my favorite documentary film).

Suffice it to say, One Direction: This Is Us just couldn't have had enough to say to justify a 92 minute feature, and really it doesn't. It's just a corporate product shoved out by Syco Entertainment in an attempt to ride the tidal wave that is 1D's success before it evaporates into thin air.

I am being relentlessly bitter here because I can afford it. You see, One Direction: This Is Us has a few tricks up its sleeve. First and foremost is director Morgan Spurlock who, despite his films' spurious claims having recently come under fire, is a darn good documentarian, perhaps the first veteran doc filmmaker to tackle a project of This Is Us's bubblegum magnitude.

With a strong hand at the wheel and the boys' charming personalities at the forefront, it might not have a lot to tell, but the manner in which it is told is flashy, precise, and a lot of fun.

Shirtless boys provide a valuable thematic arc throughout.

The beginning of the film is, by no coincidence, the first song of their 2013 concert tour and right off the bat This Is Us proves itself as a work of cinema. Summertime popcorn cinema, yes, but there is a lot of talent behind (and in front of) the camera. Crisply shot and thrillingly edited, the opening sequence pairs modern quick cuts and flashy cutaways with a more traditional sense of introducing characters and location (let us never forget that documentaries and fiction are very similar in the way they tell stories).

Concert footage thankfully doesn't dominate and the songs get room to breathe as we delve into the history and interactions of these five boys. Their interrelationship is at the forefront as it should be, and it is not hard to see that there's a lot of love and attention that goes into keeping One Direction what it is - a purely enjoyable experience no matter how you slice it.

Or pants it.

And for once in a concert doc, the 3D is put to good use. While the staging of a One Direction concert is fairly simple (empty stage, big ol' screens behind them), the material displayed onscreen during the performance is laid over and intercut with the live footage in a way that makes the performances immensely tactile and aesthetically pleasing. These creative twists elevate the movie from simply repeating a live show, a trap which their previous DVD venture Up All Night: The Live Tour enthusiastically fell into.

There were less shirtless boys in that one.

Now if you'll allow me to indulge myself for a couple of paragraphs, I'd like to discuss the nature of One Direction's appeal. They've oft been criticized for being just another dumb boy band that girls wet themselves over and love them though I do, this isn't exactly far from the truth (It's a mark of my professionalism that I don't jump into the ring and defend their singing abilities, which are showcased to great effect in This Is Us).

What rubs me the wrong way is that these girls are criticized just as much for loving the band the way they do. Many reviews reduce them to shrieking harpies paralyzed by their hormones or the first signs of the apocalypse from the dumbed down "Me Generation." This could not be further from the truth. Yeah, maybe the ten-year-old girls with smeared mascara and "You Are My Heroes" posters are overreacting.

But let me ask you a question.

When was the last time you were so ecstatically happy that you cried? Or danced without fearing that other people will see you? Have you ever been happy enough to scream at the top of your lungs?

I know I haven't (well, maybe not the dancing part). That's just a sad truth of growing up. For a limited time only, these young girls have access to emotions the likes of which most of us have never seen. They experience happiness so pure and positive that it colors their entire experience on this Earth. We shouldn't judge them for loving a dumb boy band. We should be jealous.

I would give every last cent I had just to be as happy as one of those girls for twelve seconds.

Who are we to say the reason they feel this way is invalid?

Happiness is happiness is happiness is happiness and there's not enough of that in the world as it is, so let it be.

For some extra fun, check out the KidsInMind review of the film. They're a "parental review" web site that makes sure your precious children don't see such violent things as "five teen boys cry[ing]" or filthy smut like a girl whose "T-shirt rises up partially to reveal her navel."

America.

TL;DR: One Direction: This Is Us is a piece of cotton candy fluff, but it features beautiful editing and is packed with buoyant energy.

Rating: 7/10

Should I Spend Money On This? Only if you're a One Direction fan, but if you aren't, you're probably not reading this anyway. 

Word Count:  1000

Census Bloodbath: A Grave Mistake

If you're new to Census Bloodbath, click here.

Year: 1980

Director: William Fruet

Cast: Kay Hawtrey, Lesleh Donaldson, Dean Garbett

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

At this point do I even need to tell you that this film's quality is extremely cruddy and low-fi? Can we just take that for granted? OK. It's oversaturated, blurry, grainy, and the music sounds like it's stuck somewhere between Gone With the Wind and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

First, an anecdote. I got this DVD for about 3 bucks at Fry's because I am an extremely discriminating individual. When I popped it into Alan, my computer, Alan popped it right back out at me. As it happens, it was a Region 0 DVD. In case you didn't know, every DVD has a region code that shows which part of the world's DVD players it is compatible with. The US code is Region 1 (We're number one! USA!) and there are seven or so other codes that correspond with different sectors of the planet.

Region 0, however is a universal region. Meaning, much like Esperanto, it is useless universally. Macs are hardwired for it to be extremely tough to change regions so I had to scrounge up my old portable DVD player from home before I could even watch this film. And let me tell you, it was not really worth my time. Aw well, that's what you get for toeing the waters of forgotten 80's horror.

A saving grace: This is a Canadian film so at least it works better than its spiritual forebear, Silent Scream.

More on that later.

Funeral Home follows the "adventures" of the "character" Heather (Lesleh Donaldson, aka the girl who dies in the first ten minutes of Happy Birthday to Me) as she helps her stout and matronly grandmother, Maude Chalmers (Kay Hawtrey, who has minor roles in Videodrome and Urban Legend, both of which I'd rather be watching), convert her old funeral home into a sort of bed and breakfast. After her grandfather Mysteriously Disappeared, the business went downhill and Maude needs to rake in a little cash.

Maybe sell the dolls on eBay. I say sell the dolls.

Heather (whose only description on the back of the DVD box is "easily frightened," and I can't argue that there's any more to her than that) slowly discovers that her grandma is not all there, frequently talking about things her religious grandfather would disapprove of as if he were still alive and with her today. Almost as if he were hiding in, say, the basement, where she frequently slips away in the dead of night to have whispered conversations.

Also on hand are Billy (Stephen E. Miller, who we will later revisit in The Stepfather), the mentally handicapped and sexually frustrated groundskeeper, and Rick (Dean Garbett of literally nothing else), the young swain who lives nearby and inexplicably finds Heather interesting. Let me commend the filmmakers for not turning Billy into a hideously grotesque stereotype, opting to keep him as a mildly uncomfortable one.

So with the religious and unstable Maude, the lonely and confused Billy, and the angry whispers from the basement, we can get the ball rolling! But first, some nothing.

I'd much rather watch this scene than somebody getting cleavered in the face. Totally.

Heather wanders around the funeral home like Dorothy in Oz (another character aptly compares her to Alice in Wonderland) being scared by black cats and coffins and leering groundskeepers. When a door-to-door salesman and his mistress (Harvey Atkin and Peggy Mahon) come to town, they liven things up  by being uniquely acidic and horrible people. They go around being mean to everyone (except for one scene where the mistress goes apesh!t over some flowers and squeals like a little girl) until Maude discovers they've been "living in sin."

This word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

She asks them to leave but they refuse. They won't leave, and Grandfather would definitely not approve of this. To add the cherry on top, the mistress teases Billy in ways that only a sociopath could dream up, so there's enough ire to go around for all three of the potential killers. It doesn't help that she's Fran Drescher's evil twin.

But that mystery will have to wait so we can watch a brawl at a barn dance.

Eventually, they are killed when their car is shoved into a quarry.

This is half of the body count right here.

Back to the barn dance thing. The plot of Funeral Home is not so much a sustained narrative as a collection of events, like colorful glass beads on a bracelet. Whereas in a real person story, the situations rise from the characters and their reactions to the world around them, the plot demands that the characters bend and twist to its demands (insofar as this film has "plot" and "characters"). Rick gets the brunt of it, teleporting across town at will to be there when important events go down.

Combine this with a bumbling cop narrative straight out of the weird hillbilly subplot from Last House on the Left and you've got, well, a fairly typical 1980 slasher film. Rick's brother Joe (Alf Humphreys) is new on the police force and doesn't get the respect he deserves as a native son of the small town. As he stumbles into cow pies and fumbles around interrogations, I can't help but wonder if David Arquette's character from Scream might be a little bit based on him.

Things trundle along and a black cat attempts to be symbolic.

Hi!

Another tenant, Mr. Davis (Barry Morse) is suspicious of Mrs. Chalmers and he is bumped off quietly in the night as he investigates his wife's disappearance in that very same funeral home.

Things build to a climax as Billy is murdered during a basement investigation and Heather whimpers in a corner as Maude goes a little axe-crazy. This is actually pretty boring save for one shot in the end. Oh, also guess what. Surprise of the century! Maude was the killer! The grandfather in the basement was....

Norman Bates' Mom!

Evidently Grandpa was sleeping around with Mr. Davis' wife and Maude quite rightly took an axe to them both and kept her husband in the basement so she wouldn't be lonely. So here we have a bland slasher film with a paucity of deaths that's really just another riff on Silent Scream which was just a riff on Psycho.

It's all there. The deranged matronly caretaker of a run-down guest home. The corpse in the basement. The killer pretending to be somebody else due to... Psychosis. 

It's not really that interesting.

The Final Girl is a damp dishtowel who whimpers behind a coffin in the basement as her boyfriend is beaten and resigns to her fate, just burying her face in her arms as the axe is raised above her. Disgraceful. Heather is one of the few Final Girls that lends credence to the hard-to-dispute theory that slasher movies were intensely misogynistic.

Luckily Donaldson got something more interesting to do in Happy Birthday to Me, another Canadian product, so she could redeem herself from this travesty of a character. 

Let me say though that Kay Hawtrey actually gives a pretty delightfully hammy performance as Maude Chalmers.

So there's that.

One to miss.

Unless you want to check out this sexy swimsuit scene.

Killer: Maude Chalmers (Kay Hawtry)
Final Girl: Heather (Lesleh Donaldson)
Best Kill: Billy is stabbed with an embalming needle.
Sign of the Times: Rick's shorts are even shorter than Heather's.
Scariest Moment: Maude raising the axe as a hanging lamp swings wildly - the only even slightly scary or off-putting moment in the film.
Weirdest Moment: After Maude snaps and destroys everything in the basement with an axe in her pursuit of Heather, the police run in, calm her down, and they all go for a cup of tea.
Champion Dialogue: "He was just playing mean... and he had a bad drinking problem too."
Body Count: 4

1. A man is pushed into a lake inside his car.
2. A woman is pushed into a lake in a car.
3. A man is beaten in the head with a shovel. 
4. A man is stabbed with an embalming needle. 

TL;DR: Funeral Home is just another thin manifestation of the ghost of Psycho.
Rating: 3/10
Word Count: 1404

You'll Get A Kick Out Of This

Attention Universe: I have now become a corporate shill. I've been asked to write a promotion for an indie horror film called Carver that needs help on its Kickstarter campaign. Now, I don't just whore myself out for anybody who comes calling, but I've done my research and this is a project I'd love to put my (extremely limited) weight behind.

I'm an extreme proponent of the indie horror genre, which has produced some of my favorite scary movies of the year like V/H/S 2, You're Next, and 100 Bloody Acres. Despite their low budgets, indie films are unencumbered by the messy red tape of the studio system and have a lot more freedom to explore being insightful - and scary!

This particular film was dreamed up by an avid horror fan (and 13-year-old girl) while she was recovering from surgery. Cowritten with her father, Carver is an homage to classic 80's slasher films with a group of teens, a mysterious accident, and all practical effects. For a more thorough plot synopsis, you can click here.

Indie horror is a great game to get behind if you're a fan of the genre and if you could donate even a couple dollars, I'm sure they would appreciate it (and if they don't meet their Kickstarter goal in time, you will not be charged). I support the genre, I support young horror fans (Can you believe there are people alive today who have never seen a Freddy Krueger movie? The last good one came out just a few months after I was born), and I support Carver.

You can reach the Kickstarter here!

And in honor of young horror buffs everywhere, here is

THE TOP TEN CHILDREN IN HORROR MOVIES

10. The Obligatory Inclusions (Poltergeist, The Exorcist, The Sixth Sense, The Shining)

Played By: Heather O'Rourke, Linda Blair, Haley Joel Osment, Lisa and Louise Burns

These are the kids that absolutely needed to be on the list but are too standard to really be interesting. It's like saying your favorite band is The Beatles. Everybody knows. Nobody cares.

9. Freddy's Entourage (the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise)

Played by: Every child actor in the 80's.

One, two, Freddy's coming for you...

One of the creepiest parts of a very creepy movie, these little girls are so mysterious it's not even clear that they actually exist. As the sequels got bigger and more clownish, the number of children multiplied in accordance and by the sixth movie, there's an entire church balcony filled with a chorus of creepy children. It's pretty hilarious to watch the progression.

8. Debbie (Bloody Birthday)

Played By: Elizabeth Hoy

Little Debbie is ruthless. Although she is part of a trio of sociopathic children, she's the blank-faced ringleader and the only creepy thing in a run-of-the-mill slasher film. She exploits her slutty sister by charging boys money to look through a peephole in her closet, she kills her dad for no reason, and she's the only one who makes it through unpunished, free to kill again.

7. Isaac (Children of the Corn)

Played By: John Franklin

Would you believe Franklin was 25 when he played this role? At an early age he was diagnosed with growth hormone deficiency, which severely stunted his aging process and allowed him to absolutely own the role of Isaac, bringing an adult sensibility to a child's body. Fun facts: He played Cousin Itt in The Addams Family and also he's gay, so I'm pretty proud to call him a brother in arms.

6. Karen Cooper (Night of the Living Dead - 1968)

Played By: Kyra Schon

My intense apathy toward Night of the Living Dead has been noted before, but that doesn't change the fact that this little girl zombie stabbing her mother with a trowel is a powerful and unforgettable moment.

5. Jennifer ([REC])

Played By: Claudia Silva

She just has tonsilitis, guys...

4. Toshio Saeki (Ju-On)

Played By: Yuya Ozeki

Ozeki's only role was Toshio Saeki, the ghost son of Ju-On's resident stringy haired denizen of the night. Played to perfection four times in a row, Toshio is consistently my favorite part of any of these movies. He rarely brings death directly, he'd rather hang out and look creepy in the corner, heralding the arrival of his mother.

3. Lindsey Wallace (Halloween - 1978)

Played By: Kyle Richards

Lindsey is the best because she just don't care. Her babysitter tries to boss her around (Shut this dog up!  Help me get unstuck from this window!) but she just ignores her and watches monster movies on TV.

2. Jamie Lloyd (Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers)

Played By: Danielle Harris

Jamie Lloyd takes after her mother (Laurie Strode, in an alternate universe. Things get weird in the later sequels) and is the second most effective final girl in the franchise. She managed to escape Michael Myers' wrath twice before she hit double digits.

1. Tommy Jarvis (Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter)

Played By: Corey Feldman, of all people

He fought Jason Voorhees three consecutive times and lived to tell the tale.

Tommy is an expert mask maker and boob ogler and he kicks butt, wailing on Jason's skull with his own machete. Also he grows up to look like this

A trade-up from Corey Feldman, to be honest.

Word Count: 888

Census Bloodbath: Happy Labour Day, Eh?

If you're new to Census Bloodbath, click here.

Year: 1982

Director: Paul Lynch
Cast: Janet Julian, David Wallace, John Wildman
Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Well, happy belated Labor Day. But Henri and I watched this movie on the holiday Monday, I swear. This is authentic.

Seeing as I'm always keen on topical slashers movies, Humongous was the perfect film for this holiday because not only does it take place on Labor Day Weekend but it's a Canadian production, which gives me great pleasure for two reasons. One, Canadian slasher movies generally tend to be of a higher quality than American ones. Two, Canada doesn't have a labor day. In another desperate bid to fit in with their American brethren, this film takes place on a holiday that, to them, doesn't even exist. Basically, Humongous is a fantasy on the level of Lord of the Rings in Canada.

The fact that the entire cast speaks like they're two loonies away from becoming a Mountie is a source of unending joy.

The film opens with its most unpleasant scene (which, after extensive film major training, I have learned is a bad thing) in 1946 at a Labor Day Party on a remote island in the center of a large lake. A woman is raped by a partygoer, who is summarily eaten alive by her guard dogs (She may or may not have some sort of Dog Magic. This is unclear.).

Cut to 36 years (and one sitcom title card) later.

Wholesome family entertainment.

And of course she had the baby and of course it's hideously deformed and we also know it's a giant because it's in the title. A pat on the back for us on that one.

A group of teens who aren't as savvy as we set out on the lake to enjoy their three day weekend and they bring plenty of Meat. There's Eric (David Wallace), a handsome and sweet, if a little bland young man; his girlfriend, model Sandy Ralston (Janet Julian); his brother Nick (John Wildman), a toking pranking douche of epic proportions; and his girlfriend Donna (Joy Boushel), who provides the bulk of the nudity. Tagging along with them is Carla (Janit Baldwin), Eric and Nick's younger sister, and what a shrill, annoying, slut-shaming piece of work she is. With her thick glasses and virginal ways, you just know she's gonna be the Final Girl. Oh also there's this dude Bert (Lane Coleman) who they found adrift in a rowboat.

To the surprise of absolutely nobody, their boat runs into some rocks and to the surprise of what I imagine to be a considerable amount of people, the boat freaking explodes.

I know, right?

So here we have our castaways washed up on the beach and ripe for the picking. The interpersonal drama that ensues isn't quite captivating and the acting is uniquely terrible (Wildman in particular sounds like he tried to mark down which syllables to emphasize but spilled coffee on his notes), but it's charming in an 80's nostalgia kind of way.

The monster doesn't waste much time, nabbing Nick as he hides in a boathouse. We hear him scream, but he dies offscreen. Then he heads down to the sand and flings a Bert-straddling Donna to the ground. Cutaway.

And then I cry. You see, Humongous is utterly stingy with its gore sequences, which would have elevated a pretty OK movie into the stratosphere of 1982 slashers. Unfortunately, it is positively toothless and as such loses a lot of fuel. It sputters and starts for its middle third, puking up botched jump scares and tedious sequences where we learn that yes, there's a monster and yes, he wants to eat them.

Luckily, Humongous seems to become aware of what a low-fi crock of BS it is and picks up the pace for the Final Girl sequence. After an "I'm Your Mother" bit lifted directly out of Friday the 13th Part 2 (Somebody plagiarizing a Jason movie? Something is dangerously wrong here. It's supposed to be the other way around!), Sandy escapes the monster's lair and meets up with Carla at the boat house. Much to my delight, Carla gets her face crushed.

She wasn't too cut up about it.

What follows is a fairly routine final scene. Hiding in the Boat House, The Killer Isn't Dead, Oh Wait Yes He Is. But the one thing Humongous has going for it, and it's a fairly big one, is that Final Girl bait and switch. Allowing Sandy the luxury of survival is an unprecedented move. She's a model who shows ample cleavage (Well, she does what she can. We can't all be spectacularly endowed.) and we even see part of her butt in an early scene.

Allowing such a woman to live and killing off the virginal square is a huge step forward for the genre. It's perhaps a little too bad that it's this movie that makes such a remarkable leap, but this is what we get and Humongous is a better film because of it.

And though it may seem like I'm complaining a lot (And I am. To be honest, the movie wasn't very good at all.), this movie has a secret weapon. It's directed by Paul Lynch.

The hack auter behind Prom Night, Lynch movies are characterized by excessively dark night scenes (The final thirty minutes of the film are almost completely pitch black) and seedy low fi gore scenes that are few and far between, but somehow in spite of it all remaining absolutely lovable.

Filled with scenic ocean vistas and spurts of creative effort (the canted shots in particular show that at least he was trying), this film, much like Prom Night before it is hopelessly idiosyncratic and somehow more joyful than other slashers of its ilk.

I think. It really is hard to tell what we're looking at. I may have been watching The Cosby Show the whole time.

Killer: Ida's Son (Garry Robbins)
Final Girl: Sandy Ralston (Janet Julian)
Best Kill: Eric is hugged to death by the monster.
Sign of the Times: Nick's outfit of choice is Daisy Dukes and nothing else.
Scariest Moment: The monster's eye is spotted through a keyhole.
Weirdest Moment: Donna collects blueberries in her cleavage.
Champion Dialogue: "You're not the only one who can do things!"
Body Count: 7; including the killer, but not the dog he stangles.

1. A man is savaged by dogs and hit in the head with a rock.
2. A boy is killed offscreen.
3. A girl is thrown onto rocks.
4. A boy is decapitated.
5. A boy is bear hugged to death.
6. A girl's head is squished.
7. Ida's son is set on fire and impaled on a spike. 

TL;DR: Humongous is overly dark (literally) and tame, but the presence of Paul Lynch makes it palatable.
Rating: 5/10
Word Count: 1145

Forrest Butler

Year: 2013

Director: Lee Daniels

Cast: Forest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey, David Oyelowo

Run Time: 2 hours 12 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

For those of you who think Mr. Daniels needs to get his ego in check, let me clear the air. Due to copyright issues with a 1916 silent short film, of all things, the production company was unable to use their original title, The Butler. Thus Lee Daniels' The Butler was unceremoniously shoved into existence, and it is an enormously cumbersome title that I shall only use as a mark of solidarity to the poor filmmakers who were saddled with it.

Written by Danny Strong (who most notably played Jonathan on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it's hard to tell if this is a step up or a step down), Lee Daniels' The Butler is ostensibly based on a true story. Yeah, so is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Adapted loosely from the life of White House butler Charles Allen, basically the only element they retained was that he was a butler. Oh, and he was black.

Well, we're off to a good start.

People have been up in arms about this film's dubious depictions of certain presidents and historical events to which I respond "duh." It's a historical film about how terribly black people were mistreated in America. The details are gonna be fudged a little to emphasize the emotion rather than 100% accurate historical fact. And anybody who thinks Martin Luther King, Jr.'s last words were about how awesome butlers are probably also thinks that Leatherface is still out there in a nursing home somewhere.

The film follows Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker), a man who was born on a plantation and watched his mother (Mariah Carey who doesn't open her mouth once, thankfully) raped and his father killed by a white landowner (Alex Pettyfer, and a role that is essentially pure evil still doesn't stop me from wanting to make out with him). This super slavey narrative takes place in 1926, and correct me if I'm wrong but that one does feel a little off to me. 

Anyway he is taken in, taught how to serve in a house, and eventually makes his way to the whitest house of all (in more ways than one) serving a variety of stunt casted actors wearing prosthetics. I mean... American presidents. Here's where the Forrest Gumpiness really kicks in as Cecil serves his way through critical presidencies and his son Louis (David Oyelowo) finds his way smack dab into the middle of the Civil Rights movement.

And some pretty fantastic hairstyles.

Louis sits in at Woolworth's, Freedom Rides, hangs out with Black Panthers, and is even in the hotel room with Martin Luther King the day of his assassination. The length to which Strong reaches to cover every last expanse of the movement leads to a scattershot narrative led by events and setpieces that are not so much defined by the world of the movie as they are by the audience's previous knowledge of history.

If you sat a six-year-old, or perhaps a foreigner with little knowledge of American history in front of Lee Daniels' The Butler, all the meaningful lingering shots and presidential imitators in the world wouldn't help them decipher the main storyline. The script relies heavily on narration (Come on, Danny Strong! I trusted you!) and meanders through history from the Eisenhower presidency to Nelson Mandela, eventually skipping freaking decades to the 2008 election.

Now for all the flaws and mostly generic filmmaking in LDtB, it does get its point across. White people were truly awful to black people in America. Even today, that message has value and is an important thing to remember. This is where we came from. Slavery, segregation, and the KKK aren't just fairy tales from a long forgotten time. Some of this stuff happened less than half a century ago. The film's depiction of the atrocities committed against the black community are immediate and affecting in a way that makes one realize history isn't just in books. This all played out on the national stage and there are people alive today who saw it happen.

And one scene in particular stands out as the Greensboro sit ins are intercut with a White House dinner party. This artistic touch shows finally that there was somebody alive behind the camera with a few tricks up his sleeve. Only a few, but at least they're there.

So the movie isn't boring, no not at all. It was quite engaging in terms of raising awareness despite its flaws as a narrative. On the backs of Whitaker, Oyelowo, and Oprah Winfrey especially as Cecil's put-upon wife Gloria, the film is elevated above what could have been a tepid and thoroughly mediocre affair.

As if She would put her support behind something subpar. 

TL;DR: Lee Daniels' The Butler is generic but its depiction of historical events make them more real than any textbook.

Rating: 6/10

Should I Spend Money On This? Catch it on Netflix when it comes out in a year, you won't mind missing it in theaters.

Word Count: 853