Census Bloodbath: Your Party Could Not Be Reached

Year: 1982
Director: Jerry Jameson
Cast: Lynda Carter, Steve Forrest, Granville Van Dusen
Run Time: 1 hour 36 minutes

1982 seems to be shaping up to be the year of the slasher film masquerading as a "women's picture" drama, foreshadowing the future of, oh, the entire output of Lifetime. Fantasies was a middle-aged romance with a bit of soap opera star murder thrown in, Exposed to Danger exposed us to the inner turmoil to a woman attempting to regain a regular life after being falsely accused of the death of her father, and Visiting Hours was an unusually keen psychological portrait of an outspoken feminist pacifist. Those are three of my favorite slashers of the year so far, so today's topic - Hotline, a CBS TV movie - has some big shoes to fill.

Big, sensible shoes.

In Hotline, Brianne O'Neill (Lynda Carter, of all people) - pronounced "Brian" - is a jack of all trades. She takes art classes, assists her disabled boss Kyle Durham (Monte Markham), the former stunt double to fading movie star Tom Hunter (Steve Forrest), and tends bar at Kyle's four nights a week. When she deescalates a potentially violent sexual advance from a customer, she attracts the notice of Justin Price (Granville Van Dusen), a psychiatrist who could use her help at the West Side Hotline, an emotional support call center he operates in the area. His character never comes to much, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Harry Waters Jr., Marvin Berry from Back to the Future himself, also makes his debut as the lead at the call center.

She takes the job, and almost immediately receives a call from a creepy man who claims to be a murderer and gives her sinister rhyming clues to his identity and past misdeeds. When the body of a woman is discovered on a nearby beach, she realizes that this killer ain't a kidder, and begins to investigate his claims while receiving increasingly threatening phone calls.

(Spoilers abound for the remainder of this review, by the way) 

The thing that concerned me immediately, and then persistently throughout Hotline is that it's really not a slasher movie. It has all the hallmarks of a slasher (and in fact takes its plot wholecloth from the grubby 1980 Don't Answer the Phone), but it just... doesn't have the body count. All the murders committed by our killer have taken place before the events of the movie and don't occur onscreen, even in bloodless, demure, made-for-TV sort of ways. I have grave misgivings about even including this film in Census Bloodbath, but I did include it for several reasons.

First, I didn't want to have wasted my time watching this one. That's probably the biggest motive. Second, the movie and its particular plot quite clearly wouldn't exist without the dozens of slasher movies flooding the market for the previous two years. Third, it was reviewed on The Hysteria Lives, one of my most trusted slasher sites, and a major resource I used in originally building out my To Watch list. There just isn't any murder other than the eventual death of the killer himself.

Unfortunately, what we're left with really doesn't pass muster regardless. The burgeoning romance between Brianne and Justin is shunted offscreen almost as much as the murder - the steamiest thing we get to see is a hot tub scene where he... kisses her on the forehead. I knew I was watching a movie made for network television so I couldn't expect too much of the taboo material, but I frankly don't see the point in barely even hinting at it.

Although they do get to bring to life an intimate couples moment that really resonated with me, when she steals his pillow once he gets out of bed. 

On top of that, the murder investigation frankly isn't even that interesting. Brianne gets most of her information offscreen, and there aren't much in the way of red herrings. They begin to suspect that Tom is the killer, because the killings all occured in places where he traveled to throughout the years, but they offer up the option that it might also be Kyle because they're inseparable. And guess what? It's one of them! Shocking! Hotline doesn't so much twist and turn as gently switchback down the slope toward its destination.

At least the phone calls that Brianne receives are legitimately skin-crawling. They obviously can't resort to the power of the uncanny coarse language used in something like Black Christmas, but there's something about the sinister singsong tone the killer uses that is disturbing in and of itself. And even if the script can't find the energy to really let her work her backstory, Carter knows how to throw herself into the role physically, bringing the final chase scene to electrifying life. Plus, you know I love the deliciously homoerotic undertones of the eventual killer reveal. Actually, come to think of it, it's entirely possible that Quentin Tarantino had this movie, specifically Tom and Kyle, in his head when he was writing Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Really, the most interesting thing the movie has going for it is the random amount of star power it has gathered around it. Obviously there's Lynda Carter, who does a great job as a damsel in distress with fringed sleeves, a capable woman whose terror is just barely starting to show hairline cracks in her strong demeanor. But the writer David E. Peckinpah is the nephew of respected filmmaker Sam Peckinpah, appearing in the role of Leo (a character I don't remember) is Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes, and the film was shot by Matthew F. Leonetti, who just in that year alone shot Fast Times at Ridgmont High and Poltergeist. Certainly this is the least of his efforts, seeing as Hotline includes both a shot of the camera panning past the front of a plane sitting on the tarmac to give the impression that it's taking off, and a scene in an elevator where the frame wobbles every time they stop on a floor.

I didn't hate watching Hotline, I was merely disappointed by it. It squanders its potential to be anything like its sister films, even Fantasies which was itself a television movie for ABC. It wasn't a complete bore to watch, but it offers the bare minimum of what it could possibly have to give, like a corporate CEO donating to Black Lives Matter.

Killer: Kyle Durham (Monte Markham)
Final Girl: Brianne O'Neill (Lynda Carter)
Sign of the Times: Brianne gets paged at the airport because she has a call on the courtesy telephone.
Scariest Moment: Justin breaks into Brianne's home... in order to tell her that somebody else broke into her home?
Weirdest Moment: A gay British sales clerk (who I now suspect to be Julian Fellowes) is selling Brianne a device to record phone calls, which he demonstrates by prank calling some random stranger and telling him, "darling, I'll be home late tonight."
Champion Dialogue: "I think there's a full moon tonight. The fanny grabbers are out in force."
Body Count: 1; though she investigates four murders that took place before the events of the movie.

1. Kyle is shot with a harpoon gun.

TL;DR: Hotline is a wholly mediocre movie that doesn't hurt to watch, but it hardly brings pleasure.
Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 1228

Census Bloodbath: We All Go A Little Bland Sometimes

Year: 1982
Director: Don Gronquist
Cast: Laurel Munson, Janet Penner, Sara Ansley
Run Time: 1 hour 19 minutes

For once I don't have to open a review contrasting how awesome the poster is with how terrible the movie is! Though that said, I do think the little reaper guy is pretty adorable. He's having such a great time swinging that scythe around! Truly if you love what you do, you won't work a day in your life. And I also love what I do, even if it leads me to watching films like 1982's Unhinged, a movie so bland that when the British censorship board looked at it and considered giving it the dubious honor of becoming a Video Nasty (which they bestowed to plenty of movies that aren't worth watching), they shrugged and said "nah."

If your slasher movie wasn't nasty enough to offend the British in the early 80's, you made it wrong! Literally they would ban films without even watching them just for having certain words in the title.

Unhinged follows three indistinguishable young women, Terry (Laurel Munson), Nancy (Sara Ansley), and Gloria (Barbara Lusch), on their way to a far flung music festival when a torrential downpour leads them to crash into a ditch. They wake up in the stately rural manor of Marion Penrose (Janet Penner), having been brought there by the handyman Norman (John Morrison). If those names didn't clue you in to the fact that this is riffing on Psycho, the fact that Marion has a controlling, prudish, invalid mother (Virginia Settle) lurking about sure will.

The girls are forced to wait at the house until the storm settles, and things become creepier and creepier. Terry hears heavy breathing in the middle of the night, and starts itching to really explore that shed Marion forbade her to enter... Also there's a scythe-wielding maniac loose on the property, but she'll learn that soon enough.

Although in a film that clocks in under 80 minutes, literally everything in the movie happens soon enough.

While I wouldn't go out of my way to say that Unhinged is particularly bad, there's not a lot here to help it stand out. Even by the standards of the 80's, this came far too late for anybody to be particularly interested in a lousy Psycho rip-off. That sub-subgenre had its place in 1980, with films like Silent Scream, Don't Go in the House, and obviously Dressed to Kill, but 1982? This was a different world. "Come On Eileen" was already out, for crying out loud!

It doesn't assemble any of the Psycho elements properly anyway. The mother-daughter dynamic isn't transgressive enough, the one element of the mother's story we come to understand (she abhors men and hates the mere mention of one) is inconsistent (why exactly has Norman been hanging around the house all this time, then?) and the obligatory transphobic ending doesn't even clearly deliver in what way it's supposed to be transphobic. I at least want to know why I'm mad, people! 

If it can't stand out amidst such a meager pack of films (which also includes Funeral Home and Mother's Day, if you're counting), it certainly can't stand out among the slasher genre as a whole. The girls all perform with identical hollow expressions and flat trancelike deliveries except when they're allowed to scream, which finally gives them a little personality. There is some nudity, but it's so weirdly and haphazardly expressed that I don't see how even people who delight in exploitation of the female form would be able to maintain interest. And the body count is sadly low, necessarily so considering the small cast.

For most of whom this is their only credit, I can't imagine why.

The few kills there are are likewise disappointing. With one major exception (an axe to the face that gives us the one good gore effect the filmmakers have to offer), they are edited with the vision of "Psycho, only worse." We don't see weapons making contact with bodies, only girls writhing around with artfully placed Karo syrup smears on their faces. This works when it's 1960 and you're Alfred Hitchcock. But this is 1982, and director Don Gronquist is barely even Don Gronquist, let alone Hitchcock. 

As far as good elements go... Well, there are some pretty neat helicopter shots of the girls driving, which bely a budget slightly higher than I might have imagined this movie to have. And honestly all in all I didn't hate Unhinged. It's engaging at the absolute lowest level, like a television commercial or a traffic sign. You don't necessarily regret reading "Peoria - 60 miles," but it hasn't added to your life in any way (unless you're going to Peoria, which I guess in this metaphor represents a keen desire to watch women sit in comfy love seats).

Killer: Marion Penrose (Janet Penner)
Final Girl: Terry Morgan (Laurel Munson)
Best Kill: There's only one real option, but it's a goodun. The axe directly to the face would be a standout even in a much better movie.
Sign of the Times: That luscious, glorious score that feels like rejected incidental music from Tron.
Scariest Moment: Nancy steps out of bed and cuts her foot on a tooth that just happens to be lying on the floor.
Weirdest Moment: Gloria gets the worst injuries in the accident and is confined to her room, so we don't see her for a full hour of the movie. When Terry finally goes to her room, I expected her to find a corpse, but no. Gloria was just chilling in there and the movie just kind of forgot to remind us about it.
Champion Dialogue: "I'll be sure to excuse myself when she breaks out the heroin."
Body Count: 4

1. Nancy is slashed with a scythe.
2. Gloria gets a hand axe buried in her head.
3. Carl is shot in the eye.
4. Terry is cleavered to death.

TL;DR: Unhinged is a rote Psycho ripoff with nothing to particularly recommend it.
Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 1004

Census Bloodbath: The Game Of Death

Year: 1982
Director: Scott Mansfield
Cast: Alexandra Morgan, Jo Ann Harris, Sam Groom
Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

No, I'm not going to open another one of these reviews lusting after how spectacular the poster for an 80's slasher movie is. No way. Not gonna do it. So, um... Deadly Games (not to be confused with the 1989 French home invasion film Dial Code Santa Claus, which was released under the same title) is... actually you know what, there's almost no information out there about where the film came from or why it exists, and there's certainly no evidence in the film to answer the latter question. So let's get right into it!

That poster's real cool though, innit?

So. Deadly Games. After Linda (Alexandra Morgan) is menaced in her home by a masked man and falls out a window to hear death, her music journalist sister Clarissa Jane Louise Lawrence (Jo Ann Harris) AKA Keegan comes to town. She is reunited with some old friends and frenemies, including waitress Mary (Denise Galik of Don't Answer the Phone) and her diner owner husband Joe (Dick Butkus, a name created to give playground bullies so many options that their brains melt right out of their ears). She begins a romance with cop Roger Lane (Sam Groom), whose best friend is injured Nam veteran Billy Owens (Steve Railsback of the same year's Trick or Treats among other things you're more likely to have heard of), who skulks around the local abandoned movie theater watching old monster movies and playing a monster-themed board game.

You'd think, given the title, that the board game has a huge part to play with the killings by a ski mask-clad maniac that strike this small town, but you would be wrong.

You would also be wrong to assume that a movie with a poster that awesome couldn't be bad.

I guess I should start with what Deadly Games gets right, because that's a pretty quick conversation. Well, it's actually quite good at jump scares, especially for a slasher movie of this budget and vintage. The killer is always lurking in the the corner of the shadowy frame (very shadowy if you watch a bad VHS rip like I did) that you least expect, grabbing at our victims in sudden jolts of shock. Unfortunately the kills that follow are unfailingly bland. I don't think there's even a drop of blood present in this entire movie, and not one creative weapon spices up the slew of bog standard drownings, strangulations, and whatnot. I might feel like a sociopath for writing a sentence like that, but it's true, dammit! A slasher at this budget level can't dream of having effective gore, so it needs to spice the kills up with literally any amount of imagination. Why not go with the "game" motif the film so obviously could and should have been built around? Shoot spiked dice at people or something, I don't know.

It's probably telling that the one paragraph that contains a compliment about something other than the poster devolved so quickly.

Deadly Games fails as a slasher movie in pretty much every way. Literally every character looks alike so you're too busy asking yourself "Is that Carol? Or Chrissie? Ruby? Was there even a Ruby?" to actually care about whether or not they live or die. And the body count is just pathetic, taking a severe dip after a pair of opening kills, briefly flirting with becoming a cheesy romantic comedy more than anything else.

Complete with a cheesy "Beauty and the Beast" esque love ballad over a montage.

No, not an effective slasher. But it's the things that make Deadly Games an ineffective film that are the most interesting. Remember the kinds of movies I make myself watch on any given day so you can let the full gravity of the statement I'm about to make really sink in: This is one of the most incoherent films I've ever seen.

Deadly Games puts on a good show at first, arranging genre tropes in such a way that it almost disguises itself as a normal movie, albeit with some jags into weirdness like the fact that Linda stands on the front porch of her house topless and massaging her own breasts but then puts on a shirt when she needs to go inside to answer the phone. Or the endless circuitous conversations about people we'll literally never see onscreen (the cavalcade of names making it even more impossible to tell who is onscreen at any given time) filled with lines that are almost, but not quite, like things actual people in a small town might say.

It's at the halfway point that this facade crumbles away, and Keegan emerges from her cocoon of bland competence and performs the rest of the film like she's a drunk baby. She babbles to herself in high pitched voices, performs entire scenes as multiple characters all interacting with one another, and laughs and claps gleefully at every boring thing she, Roger, and Billy get up to. Her truly bizarre energy permeates the rest of the film, and suddenly every character is going off on unmotivated Tennessee Williams monologue rants, or casually pointing guns at their wives over the dinner table, or saying lines of dialogue like (and I quote) "rag mops with towels on their head don't normally go out until at least March or April."

This all culminates in a finale that feels like every other scene was accidentally cut out. Characters just sort of arrive places, knowing things we never saw them learn, and rushing the film to its dramatic [sic] conclusion with literal seconds to spare. It is pure chaos, and while it was somewhat fascinating to watch unfold, it certainly doesn't equal a good movie in any sense of the word.

Killer: Roger Lane (Sam Groom)
Final Girl: Clarissa Jane Louise 'Keegan' Lawrence (Jo Ann Harris)
Best Kill:  Chris is buried alive in a setpiece that is neat first because it's lit well enough for you to actually see it.
Sign of the Times: There is a long conversation about the women's husbands maybe having "homosexual tendencies."
Scariest Moment: Keegan rushes to answer the telephone in the dark and when she reaches for it she discovers that a man is sitting on her bed by the phone.
Weirdest Moment: One of the gals hanging at the diner orders a low cal burger plate with a side order of spaghetti and a Tab. You know, as one does.
Champion Dialogue: "I haven't told anyone my name in ten years..."
Body Count: 5

1. Linda falls out a window.
2. Annie is drowned in a pool.
3. Carol (?) is strangled.
4. Chris is buried alive.
5. Billy is shot.

TL;DR: Deadly Games is a completely incoherent mess that manages to disguise itself as an only slightly incoherent movie for about half the runtime.
Rating: 3/10
Word Count: 1156

Census Bloodbath: Cannes You Dig It?

Year: 1982

Director: David Winters

Cast: Joe Spinell, Caroline Munro, Judd Hamilton

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I don't know what I was expecting when I sat down with The Last Horror Film. Maybe I was expecting The Last Horror Movie, which is a totally different film from the early 2000's. It certainly wasn't something good, given the introduction from Lloyd Kaufman before my copy of the movie that informed me that this was distributed by Troma Entertainment. But whatever it was I was expecting, it didn't come to pass when all of a sudden splayed across the screen was a surreal meta-horror that reteamed the leads from Maniac in footage shot guerrilla-style at the actual Cannes Film Festival in 1981.

It's like Escape from Tomorrow, but not pretentious and unbearable!

So. Vinny (Joe Spinell, of the aforementioned Maniac and also Cruising, so he's never not been sweaty in 80's slasher movies). He's a cab driver with dreams of becoming a big shot Hollywood director, so he saves his money and buys a ticket to Cannes, where he stalks movie star Jana Bates (Caroline Munro, who spun her appearances in Maniac and The Last Horror Film into a mini scream queen run that also included Slaughter High and Don't Open Till Christmas - and whose hair in this movie looks like a skunk got electrocuted on her head), who is there for the premiere of her new movie, titled (and I'm not kidding) "Scream". The people who prevent him from accessing her all meet mysterious deaths at the business end of a variety of sharp instruments. 

Spoilers: He does eventually kidnap her and force her to unwillingly play a part in a Dracula movie he has outfitted in a French castle, and if the directing doesn't work out, he might just have a future in set design.

There's a lot going on with The Last Horror Film, which is good news because the plot is the barest thread of gossamer. First off is the sheer pleasure of getting to visit Cannes in 1981 around the edges of this silly slasher movie. The beauty of this style of filmmaking comes both in its inherent realism and the fact that if you ignore what's going on in the middle of the frame, it might as well be documentary footage of a bygone era. This is aided by the inclusion of the ripped-from-the-headlines real events of John Lennon's recent murder by a fan and John Hinckley Jr.'s attempt to assassinate the president to impress Jodie Foster, both of which foreshadow the film's plot bluntly but effectively.

Second off is the soundtrack! After a ripping opening with Depeche Mode's "Photographic" (which probably cost more than the cast's salaries combined), we get a glorious arrangement of pastiches of every popular early 80's genre provided, weirdly, by Jesse Frederick, the guy who wrote the theme songs for Full House, Family Matters, and Step by Step. Speaking of the astonishing pedigree of the filmmakers, this was directed by David Winters, whose career took him from playing A-Rab in West Side Story to being the choreographer of The Star Wars Holiday Special to producing Killer Workout, so don't say people can never change.

Third off? There's a vein of surrealism that runs through this film and is absolutely captivating. Joe Spinell takes his work from Maniac and pitches it to the rafters in a series of bizarre fantasy sequences where he envisions an alter ego who's a slick film director and constantly mocks him. Sound and image seem to slip past each other and blur together in these fantasies, which get more and more bizarre, at one point showing Spinell as a stripper onstage in a bra and panties, which is one of the most special sights that cinema has ever given me.

Whatever is happening here is a close second.

The Last Horror Film is like Maniac tried to market itself as a warm and fuzzy comedy and got lost somewhere along the way. It's bizarre, surprisingly effective (Spinell's intensity sweats out of him, and it's glorious to witness), and the kills are even decent! There's no work at the level of Maniac's Tom Savini (which could hardly be expected from anybody who's not... Tom Savini), but there's a gag where a severed head splashes into a bathtub that I can't describe any other way than delightful. And while a lot of the other in-film kills are in silhouette or shadow (there are a couple more intense ones displayed in movies screening at the lightly fictionalized Cannes - in real life none of the French people would give half a shit about these shitty horror pictures), the actors sell the intensity well enough that they still hit a nerve. 

My experience with this movie was wholly engrossing and entertaining in a way that I never thought could have happened this deep into 1982. It's far too weird to have penetrated far beyond the 80's in the public imagination, sadly, but it's exactly the kind of semi-precious gem I created this project in order to stumble across. It's no masterpiece of the form, certainly, but it's going for the brass ring. It only gets a finger on it, but it still sticks the landing, and who could blame it for that?

Killer: Bret Bates (Glenn Jacobson)
Final Girl: Jana Bates (Caroline Munro)
Best Kill: Suzanne's death itself is by gunshot, which is not, what you want from a slasher movie, but afterward she falls from the roof of a building and smashes her head open like a watermelon. So, y'know. Pretty cool.
Sign of the Times: Literally every movie poster displayed in the Cannes footage (The French Lieutenant's Woman! Polyester! For Your Eyes Only!).
Scariest Moment: Vinnie bursts through the window of Jana's bathroom while she's showering.
Weirdest Moment: When a kid is looking up at an airplane with a banner hanging from it, he drops a piece of cake between the breasts of a topless sunbathing woman.
Champion Dialogue: "Every side of your face is the best side."
Body Count: 6; although numbers 1 and 3 take place in films within the film, which in and of itself is in another film, so why split hairs?

1. Hot Tub Blonde is electrocuted in a pool.
2. Martin is axed in the back.
3. Alley Man is slashed and his guts are ripped out.
4. Stanley is stabbed.
5. Suzanne is shot.
6. Bret is chainsawed.

TL;DR: The Last Horror Film is thin, but only in plot, and who really needs one of those in a slasher anyway?
Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 1100

Census Bloodbath: Beauty School Escapee

Year: 1982

Director: Alan J. Levi

Cast: Donna Wilkes, Richard Jaeckel, Frankie Avalon

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The slasher genre has featured plenty of celebrities in its time, but it usually only intersects with stars at either end of their career. Big shot celebrities like George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, and Johnny Depp got their start in the slasher genre before moving onto bigger, occasionally better things. And then we get to the other end, where older stars like Farley Granger, Ernest Borgnine, Hal Holbrook, Rod Steiger, and Lauren Bacall show up to collect a paycheck once Hollywood isn't knocking down their door.

Even knowing this, let me tell you that seeing Frankie Avalon's name in the credits here is like getting a bucket of cold water dumped on your head. Sure, the timing was right. Even though he's best known these days for his cameo in Grease, the reason he was invited was because he was a venerable icon who could give that 1950's-set movie its retro cred rather than because he was a hot ticket name in 1978. But still.

He's as shocked as I am.

So here's what we're dealing with. When Paul Foley (Frankie Avalon) was a child, his father killed his adulterous mother and then himself, right after crafting his son a wooden instrument that is called a flute by every character but is pretty clearly an ocarina. His father only ever taught him one song (the lullaby "Go to Sleep Little Baby") and now that he's a grown man that's still all he can play. Oh, he's also in an insane asylum for unclear reasons. Probably because he's Pure Evil, because he escapes and immediately starts murdering everybody in his path.

One of those unlucky people in his path is Marion (Donna Wilkes of Schizoid), a high school student who is in a leg brace following a car accident caused by her alcoholic father Frank (Richard Jaeckel), who has only become more indolent and abusive since then, harassing her at every moment and turning every minute conversation into a harangue about defending her virginity from her fisherman boyfriend Joey (William Kirby Cullen). She and Joey are planning to run away to Portland, Oregon but before that things are getting more and more difficult. After a receiving a blood transfusion sourced from the local asylum, she is having terrible nightmares where she witnesses Paul's murders, and when he begins to stalk her around town, she's having a hard time separating dreams and reality.

"That can't be Frankie Avalon, I must be dreaming!"

Blood Song had the budget for both Frankie Avalon and a third act showdown in an operating sawmill, so I'm going to go ahead and assume there was some money behind it, but it looks like a typical microbudget slasher and certainly has the poster of one, so I bet it wasn't much. There's a lot of chintzy work here, especially with the awkward push-in close-ups on her eye that tunnel out into flashes of the killer's actions.  Or the electronic score that sounds like two cats fucking on a synth keyboard. Or the kills that aren't particularly bloody, though they do get a lot of use out of their axe wound prosthetic. But within those pretty tight parameters, Blood Song is actually extraordinarily competent. We're full of surprises today!

The film succeeds in a lot of areas where its peers fail. Beginning with the fact that it actually manages to drum up a little tension every now and again. Sure, the scenes that openly ape Halloween are just surfing in John Carpenter's wake, but there's one scene in particular with a hitchhiker that keeps you constantly on your toes whether Paul is going to profess his love or brutally murder her, sustaining that tension for a good two or three minutes. That's two or three minutes more tension than anything that something like - say - Blood Lake could deliver.

And despite the killer's motive being absolute dumb movie horseshit (His dad killed himself so now he's a murderer who kills anyone who makes fun of his flute? Psychologically sound, for sure), his calling card of snatches of flute music drifting along the wind is actually quite something. I do wish they did something more fully fleshed-out with Marion's psychic connection to the killer, but let's not ask too much of Blood Song.

Let's just sit here and nurse the fact that I can still enjoy anything in this marathon 180 films deep.

And while we're on the subject, I actually quite like Marion, especially the scenes where we're just hanging out with her and her friends. There's something surprising and satisfying about watching a young woman dealing with a physical disability that makes her vulnerable to the killer, yet who is well-liked, sexually active, and driven to survive by any means possible. A Hollywood studio would never have made that call for the character in 1982.

And this may be faint praise, but I promise it's not damning: the climactic chase sequence is lit properly. That is a luxury you can rarely expect from a slasher movie of this budget and vintage. But in every shot of the heroine running from the killer in the dark, you can see every facial expression, locked door, and improvised weapon that you need to see. It's not just a smudgy black screen with random flecks of color muddily swimming around. I could cry! Also there's a shot that's even kind of beautiful, of a forklift bearing a pallet of wood boards being knocked into a body of water, the machine sinking as the lightweight wood floats up and breaches the surface of the water.

I don't think Blood Song is a movie I would recommend to literally anyone. It just doesn't do enough beyond the exact baseline of not sucking. But coming from someone who is dangerously deep in the weeds on this subgenre, the care and skill put into making it was a real breath of fresh air. It's like a well-built chair. You might not rave about it to your friends, but you've sat in enough uncomfortable chairs to quietly appreciate the craftsmanship.

Killer: Paul Foley (Frankie Avalon)

Final Girl: Marion (Donna Wilkes)

Best Kill: Marion's dad's death, both because he deserves it and Paul really goes to town on him, axing his chest, face, and knee with some showstopping (for the budget) special effects.

Sign of the Times: I don't know what the hell this guy's problem is, but I know I'm more scared of him than the killer.

Scariest Moment: Literally any time Marion's dad speaks.

Weirdest Moment: The film opens with a Tennyson quote for some unfathomable reason.

Champion Dialogue: "I've got a hangover that would make King Kong climb a wall."

Body Count: 9; not including Joey, who is presumably killed offscreen before the final shot.

Wife and

Lover are shot.

Jack shoots himself.

Orderly is strangled.

Driver is axed in the face.

Hitchhiker is garroted with a necklace.

Cathy is killed offscreen.

Frank is axed to death.

Bill is crushed with a forklift.

TL;DR: Blood Song is surprisingly a totally passable obscure weirdo slasher effort.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1208

Census Bloodbath: Stocking Stalking

Year:1982
Director: Po-Chih Leong

Cast: Sylvia Chang, Eddie Chan, Kent Cheng 

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

There comes a point at the end of every Census Bloodbath year when we're stumbling through the darkest,  dustiest corners of the subgenre and find a foreign movie that is either so obscure or too old to have reliable translation services provided. That is how I ended up viewing the 1982 Hong Kong slasher movie He Lives by Night in unsubtitled Cantonese. Actually, if we're splitting hairs, it was subtitled. It's just that the subtitles were also in Cantonese, which wasn't exactly helpful.

So, as I always like to say but especially with these entries, take my review with a grain of salt. There are certainly nuances I missed by not understanding a single line spoken outside of the opening sequence, which is inexplicably in English. But, as I also always say, it's a slasher movie. It's not hard to understand even without the benefit of a screenplay. I relish these opportunities to experience a film in its purest visual form, unencumbered by the intricacies of dialogue, and He Lives by Night has a lot to dig into.

Exhibit A.

Here's the plot from what I could gather (along with what's available in the IMDb description). After a man (who the synopsis describes as a graphic designer even though he clearly works in the shoe section of a department store) discovers his wife cheating on him with a man dressed as a woman, he murders them both and takes to the streets in drag, stalking any woman he sees wearing white fishnet stockings and strangling her with said stockings. The police chief and his deputy team up with a spunky female radio DJ to attempt to catch the killer.

So, even if it's from a totally different milieu, He Lives by Night joins the grand tradition of slasher movies that depict men who dress as women as psychotic killers, nestled snugly between Dressed to Kill and Sleepaway Camp.

It turns out the true international language is transphobia.

It's a damn shame that He Lives by Night has that albatross hanging around its neck, because its murder setpieces are actually quite spectacular. We hit the ground running, with a woman being menaced in an alley full of sheets that have been hung out to dry, the killer's face appearing through a slash in the fabric (I would accuse this film of ripping of Tenebrae if this one hadn't actually come out first), the initial slashes from a razor causing the woman's blood to blossom against the sheets she gets tangled in while trying to escape. There's a maniacal energy to the scene that recalls early Dario Argento at his most bonkers, and the kills that follow don't lose that spark.

The murders are brutal, protracted, and really use every inch of the space they take place in. They aren't simple shocking gore gags that get in, do their thing, and get out. These scenes have stages. A woman can't simply be strangled. She must be stabbed in the leg, climb up the stairs, be dragged away, kick her foot into a fishtank in a billowing cloud of blood, topple some chairs, and then be strangled. It's daring, electrifying filmmaking that is frankly beautiful to witness. Although being beautiful to witness doesn't prevent them from being incredibly misogynistic, also like early Dario Argento.

We're at least lucky that the filmmakers don't seem particularly interested in exploiting the nude female body, because those grains of salt would form a huge snowdrift at that point, burying the movie entirely.

The visual splendor of He Lives by Night isn't limited to the kills, either. In every scene, the camera is gliding and pivoting, a sinewy snaking presence that captures its story in endless, unsettling motion. And the main setpieces are well constructed, creating geographically coherent, whole spaces for the killer to chase folks around in (the finale takes place in the radio studio, a labyrinth of glass and soundproof foam that brought to mind one of the best sequences of Scream 2). 

But before I get too lost in the visual sphere of the movie, I should bring up that the story being brought to life here is wacky as all fuck. It is obvious even without subtitles that this film was conceived as a convivial comedy as well as an effective stalk and slash thriller. While it succeeds on almost all counts as the latter, I think its unbridled gusto at creating the former is what gives the film it's totally unique energy. Perhaps the instinct that has cops running around in their underwear so they can't be impersonated by having their uniforms stolen or the Chief doing a full disco dance in glittery eye makeup in his apartment is the same one that creates such wickedly bizarre but effective moments as the killer chasing the DJ down a hallway by pushing a huge 7UP machine toward her at terrifying speed.

It is broad, it is deliciously weird, it is fiercely problematic, but there is truly nothing else like it. I don't know if all of that coalesces into an explicit recommendation, but I sure had a hell of a lot of fun here.

Killer: The Stocking Killer

Final Girl: The Radio DJ

Best Kill: The opening kill in the alley really is something to behold.

Sign of the Times: At a casino, a man in a Michael Jackson jacket does the robot.

Scariest Moment: When the DJ is hiding in her sound booth, the killer's face lights up on the other side of the glass.

Weirdest Moment: At a restaurant, the cops and the DJ order so many bowls of rice that they form huge skyscrapers of rice on the table.

Champion Dialogue: "Shit bitch!"
Body Count: 7

1. Casino Woman is strangled with stockings.
2. Punk Girl is strangled with stockings.
3. Shopper Girl is strangled with stockings.
4. Drag Dude has his throat slit.
5. Wife is strangled with stockings.
6. Security Guard has sharp brass knuckles slammed into the back of his skull.
7. Killer falls out a window.

TL;DR: He Lives by Night is problematic like a lot of its slasher brethren, but it's got the deranged energy of early Argento and that serves it well.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1052

Census Bloodbath: Love Island

Year: 1982
Director: Harry Preston
Cast: Paul Iwanski, Bob Wagner, Cheryl Black 
Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

We're witnessing a little slice of history right here. The 1982 slasher movie Honeymoon Horror is one of the very first movies that was ever released direct-to-video, following the meteoric rise of the video store in the early 80's. Not only was it a harbinger of things to come (the video market was so ravenous that by the late 80's more slashers were direct-to-video than not, with many even being shot on video for that express purpose), it set the bar of quality that the public would come to reliably expect from the direct-to-video market, because it's not all that good.

Not that a lot of the theatrical efforts of 1982 were that much better.

We open on a couple named Frank (no actor listed) and Elaine (Cheryl Black). The second Frank leaves the house, Elaine goes next door to dally with her lover Vic (Bob Wagner). When Frank comes back for cigarettes and catches them en flagrante, he attempts to murder Vic but Elaine smashes a bottle on his head, in the process knocking over a candle and setting the man and the house on fire. She tells Vic to let him burn, because if there's one thing I've learned from watching 80's slasher movies it's that wives with sexual needs have no soul. We catch up some time later with Vic and Elaine, now married and opening up an island resort designed for honeymooning couples. Three sorority sisters are set to stay on the island with their new husbands on opening day (the fact that they're sorority sisters accomplishes nothing other than hearkening to the slasher genre's perennial favorite pool of victims and implying they probably had a creepy triple wedding)

The couples in question are Sue (Kari Addington) and Gary (James Caskey), the only two brunettes so at least they were easy to tell apart because I know nothing else about them other than they like champagne; Linda (Leslie McKinley), who is pouty and complains a lot, and Dwayne (Philip Thompson), who is a bodybuilder with a Rocky Horror blonde bowl cut; and Kay (Margi Curry), who... exists, and Jeff (Paul Iwanski), who kind of becomes Vic's protege when attempting to fix things and protect everybody. And the reason they need protection? Frank, horribly burned but still very much alive, has arrived on the island to murder only the women (and maybe Vic) because misogyny!

Even though the men definitely deserve it!! 

As you might have been able to surmise, the characters here are thin as a low-carb crepe. If there had been more to hang onto in that regard, Honeymoon Horror might actually have been salvageable, because its biggest weakness isn't so much being bad as it is being bland. There's not a single thing this movie is doing differently than a million other slasher movies, As an exercise in going through the motions, it's at least watchable, but here at Census Bloodbath we strive for a little more than that. Not much more, but still.

If we can't have good characters, we might as well have good kills, and Honeymoon Horror doesn't have much to offer on that front either. For a minute there I was worried that every kill was going to be offscreen, so thankfully they invested in a little Karo syrup a third of the way through. But the murder scenes we actually do get to see in camera have an inelegant sameness to them. The killer brandishes an axe, some blood squirts out of somewhere a little off cue, repeat. The only difference between the kill sequences is that sometimes they're edited like a hurricane blew through the cutting room, and sometimes you can actually see what is happening.

I will give Honeymoon Horror's editing credit exactly once: a girl wonders what exactly Elaine sees in Vic, and the film immediately cuts to a shot of his ass as he walks up to a porch. I don't know if this was intentional (though it might be, given the film's unusual reluctance to show naked female flesh even though every male character has his shirt flap open at every opportunity), but it's certainly delightful and redeems a film's worth of horrible editing decisions, including a two-shot that cuts to a slightly closer two-shot of the same people. Or the part where an actress clearly forgets her line in the middle of a take and we sit with her for an excruciatingly long three seconds while she tries to remember what it was.

Not every three seconds is excruciating though, if you catch my drift.

In case it wasn't clear, I don't harbor any ill will toward Honeymoon Horror. It gets in, does what it needs to do, and gets out in under 90 minutes. It's not filet mignon, but it's not dog food either. You clean your plate and are neither the worse nor the better for having finished it. Obviously this is not an experience I particularly recommend, but hey. There are many worse movies you could waste your time with.

The only thing I genuinely hate about Honeymoon Horror, with big flaming letters five feet high, is the material with the Wacky Cops played by Bill Pecchi (who was a grip on Silent Scream and Beware! The Blob, two things I also hate) and Jerry Meagher. On the bad cop comedy scale between The Last House on the Left and Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, Sheriff and Deputy Jerry fly right off the chart and land on the surface of the sun. Jerry is a too-dumb-to-live Gomer Pyle type, and Sheriff screams at him nonstop in some artless, shrill attempt at comic relief.

It's excruciating to spend any time with them, and we get to spend a lot of time with them (legend has it that their material was added later to pad the run time of the movie). And once the island shenanigans draw to a close, we just spend a grueling ten minutes following them around before they discover that hey, something bad happened on that island last night. It's not just rubbing salt in the wound. It's crafting a dagger out of salt to give you new pre-salted wounds. It's torture. I hated it. Please make it stop. I'm not saying I would have given the film a higher rating if their scenes were cut. It's still a mediocre movie. But they turn Honeymoon Horror from insipid to rancid every time they rear their heads. And the movie certainly didn't need the help to be impossible to recommend.

Killer: Frank Barlowe (actor not listed for some reason)
Final Girl: Kay (Margi Curry), but that's really just through process of elimination.
Best Kill: When Sue is axed to death in the kitchen, her slaying is intercut with the overturned kettle dripping boiling water onto the floor. Pretty neat!
Sign of the Times: Elaine very casually uses the R-word multiple times in reference to their mentally handicapped groundskeeper.
Scariest Moment: When Frank is stalking a woman through the woods, her husband leaps out from behind a tree to scare her.
Weirdest Moment: The maid Emily only has one scene, but it's her monologuing to herself in a plummy Cockney accent straight out of Dickens.
Champion Dialogue: "Liquor's like a man, it's best taken straight."
Body Count: 9; not including Dwayne and Gary, who attempt to swim to the mainland and presumably drown because they're never heard from again.

1. Emily is killed offscreen.
2. Jill is killed offscreen.
3. Robin is killed offscreen.
4. Kelly is dismembered with an axe.
5. Linda is axed in the shower.
6. Sue is axed in the chest.
7. Elaine is axed in the head.
8. Frank is shot with a shotgun.
9. Vic has an axe thrown into his back.

TL;DR: Honeymoon Horror is trying its best, it's just that its best isn't very good.
Rating: 5/10
Word Count: 1328

Census Bloodbath: Lost In The Woods

Year: 1982
Director: Don Jones
Cast: Dean Russell, Gary Kent, Tomi Barrett 
Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Camping-based slasher movies were pretty de rigeur in the early 80's after the massive success of Friday the 13th spawned a million imitators (and given how deep we are into this project without cracking 1983 yet, that number is barely an exaggeration). 1981 saw five of the damn things, and in fact, 1982 kicked off with one on January 1: Madman. They had reduced to a slow trickle by the time The Forest stumbled onto the scene in summer '82, but who was going to wring the very last drop of blood out of a concept if not for slasher producers?

They're just doing their due diligence.

After a satisfyingly cliche intro scene where a hiking couple gets murdered by an unseen maniac, The Forest begins in a huge L.A. traffic jam. Charlie (John Batis), a weedy suburbanite, and his friend Steve (Dean Russell), a Brawny man type with a Tom Selleck mustache decide to go camping this weekend to escape the smog (and their nagging wives). The nagging wives in question are Sharon (Tomi Barrett), the more capable of the two, and Teddi (Ann Wilkinson of Boogeyman II), whose name isn't spoken aloud until a good forty minutes after she bites it, just before the credits roll. I was sitting there, pencil poised, through infinite dialogue scenes where she is never addressed by name, straining to pin down literally anything about this woman's character. Even when the men go searching for their wives in the woods, Steve calls out "Shaaaroooon!" and Charlie calls out nothing. This poor woman's name was the biggest slasher movie reveal of 1982, as far as I'm concerned.

Anyway, Sharon and Teddi have camping plans of their own. They insist on going out a couple days ahead of the men, with the tacit understanding that the men should arrive the first night they make camp. It's a whole Thing. But the men are delayed by car troubles and by the time they reach the site, the women have already been besieged by a cannibalistic knife-wielding maniac (Gary Kent), as well as the ghosts of his cheating ex-wife Jennifer (Jeanette Kelly) and their two kids (Becki Burke and Corky Pigeon).

Which ruins my plans to name my firstborn Corky Pigeon.

I'm going to be unusually nice to The Forest, so let me make one thing clear going in: it's not a very good movie. Almost every aspect of it is completely inept. 

The acting is like a community theater troupe decided to restage their favorite porno, with three major exceptions. The children, who hollowly deliver Little House on the Prairie dialogue with an echo filter to highlight the fact that they're g-g-g-ghosts. Dean Russell, who projects every line directly into the camera with proud bravado like he's in the opening number of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, clearly relishing when his character is injured by a riverbank and he gets a chance to loudly wail among the reeds. And Jeanette Kelly, playing John's cheating wife with drag queen vamp gusto, practically licking her lips at how deliciously evil her character is. 

The villain also fails to be terrifying, looking more like somebody's drunk uncle who spent the night in a dumpster. He's not helped by the wan chase choreography that asks him to toddle around the woods in full sunlight, attacking in wide shots that keep you annoyingly far from the action but still not hiding how both performers are clearly waiting their turn to make their next move. Or by the editing, which intersperses night footage with material that isn't so much "day for night" as it is "day for day and let's hope nobody notices."

And yet... The Forest was a pretty OK movie.

Yes, I know my brain has gone rotten from watching too many of these things.

I will say that the things I liked come with a grain of salt so big it could wipe out the slug population of a small country, but I work with what I have here. First off, the soundtrack is lavishly overproduced, and you know I love digging up weird 80's earworms that never got a chance to make it to the big time. The film is slathered in delightfully shitty rock ballads, including one I believe to be called "The Dark Side of the Forest," and even the incidental score music is bizarre and delightful. There's the beatific TV drama theme song that plays over the opening credits, the synth stings that sound like knocks on a wooden door, and a bunch of other music that is both entirely random and generally better produced than the scene playing out onscreen deserves.

Then there are the kills, which are pretty anemic in the gore effects department, but are actually a little harrowing to sit through. Teddi's death especially is an extended, brutal sequence that is gruesome in its unrelenting approach of staccato bursts of violence rather than its slight smears of Karo syrup blood. And Jennifer's death, revealed in flashback, has even less blood but is even more impactful, her skull loudly colliding with the nightstand it's slammed against to gruesome effect. The scenes find a way to be intense without a lot of blood, and even accomplish a pretty great visual moment when John waves his bloody knife in front of a hiker, reflecting red-tinted sunlight across her face.

The Forest even accomplishes two things I never expect in slashers of this budget bracket: solid pacing and lighting. The film moves along at a pretty brisk clip, only slowing down in the final 20 minutes, which are largely just people wandering through the woods aimlessly. And I've already said my piece about night shifting into day randomly, but that's more of an editing problem, and the thing is that when it comes to properly lighting woodland scenes at night, not even Friday the 13th got that right, so you gotta respect the craft.

As I feel like I've had to say in too many of these reviews recently, no, I don't think anyone should rush out and watch this movie. But if you're someone whose brain is broken like Yours Truly and really needs to get their hands dirty with the slasher genre, it's not an unpleasant hour and change.

Killer: John (Gary Kent)
Final Girl: Sharon (Tomi Barrett)
Best Kill: The blood effect is underwhelming, but the sheer gruesome auditory quality of the thump when Jennifer's head hits the nightstand gets my teeth a-grinding.
Sign of the Times: The men are scandalized that their radiator repair cost $140.
Scariest Moment: When Charlie mentions there might be rapists in the woods, Steve playacts a rape on a visibly uncomfortable Sharon at the dinner table. No, thank you.
Weirdest Moment: In a flashback, John walks in on Jennifer sleeping with another man, which she treats totally nonchalantly, and then reveals that her kids have been locked in the bedroom closet the entire time.
Champion Dialogue: "The only backpacking you ever did was in bed."
Body Count: 7; not including the ghost children, who we never see die onscreen. Cowards.

Jack is stabbed in the gut.

Jack's Girlfriend has her throat slashed.

Teddi is stabbed a bunch and her throat is slit.

Jennifer has her head slammed on the nightstand.

Carl is impaled on a table saw.

Charlie is drowned.

John is stabbed.

TL;DR: The Forest is pretty bad, but in a slightly pleasant way that elevates it above a very bad slasher movie.
Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 1275

Census Bloodbath: No Monster Is An Island

Happy October, everyone! Every year I do a horror franchise marathon leading up to Halloween, but this year I thought I'd do things a LITTLE bit differently. I've been slacking on my Census Bloodbath project, and I want to be finished with it before I'm of retirement age, so I'm giving it an adrenaline shot directly to the heart. I will be covering all 22 of the remaining slasher films from 1982 this month. Wish me luck! I'm gonna need it.

Year: 1982
Director: J.S. Cardone
Cast: Sarah Kendall, Frederick Flynn, Carol Kottenbrook
Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

The British censorship craze in the early 80's that birthed the term "video nasty" is basically a summer reading list for any self-respecting slasher fan. While 1982's The Slayer wasn't fully prosecuted as a nasty, it's still on the longlist, and for that I approached it with a slightly smaller grain of salt than usual.

Just one that was the size of a boulder. What a load off!

The Slayer immediately disappoints by being about a foursome who travels to a remote location for a much-needed vacation (meaning the body count will be prevented from being particularly high), but it is a perfectly formulaic setup that slasher fans will gobble up. The two couples are David (Alan McRae), a.... photographer? the only thing I really know about him is that he's the one with a mustache; his wife Kay (Sarah Kendall), a painter whose latest gallery show has taken a turn for the surreal and become a failure; her brother Eric (Frederick Flynn), a commercial director who is absolutely shitting himself at having the chance to go fishing; and his wife Brooke (Carol Kottenbrook, now a producer who perpetrated 2006's The Covenant), an actress who seems to hate his guts.

The location in question is an unnamed island played by Tybee Island off the coast of Georgia, and things begin to go south almost immediately when the horrifying nightmares Kay has been having for years turn out to be prophetic, and an evil presence is lurking on the island murdering them one by one.

Is it a monster, like she dreamed? Yes, actually. But honestly I'm not sure why. We see it a LITTLE more than in The Incubus, but that is the faintest praise I could possibly damn a monster with.

One thing I've learned is that absolutely nothing exists in a vacuum. While it's true that Wes Craven's 1984 masterpiece A Nightmare on Elm Street changed the course of the slasher genre to exist in a more supernatural rubber-reality space, it didn't invent the subgenre. Here we even get a character who fights to stay awake to prevent her dreams from manifesting as a killer presence. But there's a reason The Slayer didn't have the impact on the horror genre that Elm Street did. It's just not very good.

The dialogue scenes (of which there are many) offer literally nothing to the seasoned slasher viewer. I mentioned that the cliché of the plot setup is serving what any connoisseur of the genre wants to see, but usually the reason the formula works so well is because of the many minute and varied differences in character, dialogue, setting, etc. etc. that are varied over that same basic skeleton. Take American Gothic which has almost exactly the same setup and is an infinitely more wild good time. But in The Slayer, the characters barely have a single dimension apiece (the women complain a lot and the men ignore them a lot) and their dialogue is so rote and uninspired that every time they open their mouths they might as well be saying "lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..."

And how could they be at a loss for something to talk about when that hair is threatening to strangle the life out of her head at any given moment?

Unfortunately, Sarah Kendall is not an actress with the range to compel us to pay attention to the nonsense that she's saying anyway. The vacancy of her performance does work for the character, whose mind is always a million miles away, but the movie severely lacks charisma in the scenes outside the necessarily infrequent killings.

Oh, but the killing that graces the end of the first act is as sublime an act of grisly slasher creativity as there ever was. It begins as many of these scenes often do, with David hearing a noise up in the attic and going up to investigate. But it ends way before most of these scenes. The instant he pokes his head up into the attic, the trapdoor snaps shut, crushing his neck into jelly in a wrenchingly long shot, slowly decapitating him as his body hangs uselessly from the ceiling. It's shocking, it's violent, the special effects are surprisingly well realized, and it leaves an impression that lasts for the rest of the film. The other two setpiece kills aren't bad (one is far too dark to really get an impression of what's happening, other than that it's complicated and horrible, but the other is a solid The Prowler-esque rake impalement), but they succeed largely because the movie has already infused its atmosphere with the manic anything-can-happen energy of that first kill.

Single-handedly, this scene redeems the 40 minute stretches on either side of it. OK maybe it's not a single hand. This movie has another half a hand or so, in the form of two things: The first is the magic of location. Tybee Island in 1982 has a haunting, desolate beauty that provides a stark relief to the horrors The Slayer visits upon it. And the second is the cinematography, provided by Karen Grossman. Now, I'm not going to overpraise it merely because of the fabulous excitement of seeing a female D.P. for what I believe to be the first time in this project (a female director is hard enough to find), but she finds a delicate interplay between light and shadow that does great things for the tone of the movie, because the dialogue and the acting certainly wouldn't clue you into the fact that this is supposed to be scary.

And I suppose I can't close out this review without mentioning that the monster itself is also a positive aspect of the film, even though it's in so little of it that it hardly counts, and the reason it is there is hardly explored to satisfaction. But please enjoy this GIF of its ooey gooey goodness (in practice, the jaw mechanism maybe didn't work quite as smoothly as they wanted, but it's still a neat look).

Killer: The Slayer (Carl Kraines)
Final Girl: Kay (Sarah Kendall)
Best Kill: You know which one; I wrote this entire review as an ode to it.
Sign of the Times: Kay wanders around on the beach in a chunky cable knit sweater with hair teased to the heavens.
Scariest Moment: Kay has a nightmare about kissing her husband good morning then discovering that he's just a severed head.
Weirdest Moment: The ending, where [SPOILERS] it turns out the whole movie was a (probably prophetic) dream that a five-year-old Kay had on Christmas morning.
Champion Dialogue: "observe the ass, for instance" (yes, this is a quote from Kay reading Mark Twain aloud. There is nothing in this script, I'm telling you)
Body Count: 5

1. Wally is smacked on the head with an oar.
2. David has his neck crushed with an attic trapdoor.
3. Eric has his face wrapped with fishing line and pierced with a hook.
4. Brooke is stabbed through the back with a rake.
5. Marsh is shot with a flare.

TL;DR: The Slayer is a deeply boring and generic movie that is kept afloat by a pretty good location and pretty great kills.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1300