Half Assed

Editor's Note: This post is rated R for necessary swearing in the plot synopsis. Although considering that it's  Kick-Ass 2, so you should really already know what you're in for.

Year: 2013

Director: Jeff Wadlow

Cast: Aaron Taylor Johnson, Chloë Grace Moretz, Christopher Mintz-Plasse

Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Am I the only one who thinks it's weird that all three of the top-billed cast members have triple names? People have got to calm down. You gotta earn that distinction. When you think you can reasonably compete with Neil Patrick Harris or Sarah Michelle Gellar, give me a call.

First, a caveat. I have little to no recollection of the original Kick-Ass, so forgive me if I sound like an idiot for not understanding a couple minor plot points.

Second, Jim Carrey has renounced his support of this film due to its violent content, and we shall make no judgements on or further mention of this stupidity.

"There's a dog on your balls." 

That quote could be from a number of his movies, to tell you the truth.

KA2 presumably follows the events of the first film, which is but a shimmering mirage on the highway of my memory. Kick-Ass/Dave Lizewski (Aaron Taylor Johnson) has retired from superherodom, but when a slew of copycat vigilantes takes to the streets, he decides high school is too boring and begins his training again under the guidance of his old friend Hit Girl/Mindy Macready (Chloë Grace Moretz).

However, Mindy's new guardian has decided that maybe a fifteen-year-old girl shouldn't be out fighting crime, even if she is awesome at it. She is forced to attempt to assimilate into the world of a normal high school freshman and Dave, rudderless, joins a crew of vigilantes known as Justice Forever, led by Colonel Stars and Stripes (Jim Carrey).

Unbeknownst to the teen, his old arch-rival (or ex-friend. I don't remember, I don't care, but he hates him. He killed his dad with a bazooka. That would make anybody mad. Even Gandhi, probably.), Chris D'Amico (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) has donned leather bondage gear and is parading around under the moniker The Motherfucker, gathering a group of heavy hitters to become the world's first real supervillain and destroy Kick-Ass once and for all.

And then violence and punching, mainly.

And pube beards.

The film's best scenes are invariably the ones where Hit Girl gets the most to do as she takes on hooded baddies and Regina Georges with aplomb. 

During her brief retirement from kicking ass, she is mentored on the art of being popular by a girl who's clearly 20 (The fact that Moretz is 16 in real life only highlights how outrageously old all the other "high school students" in the film are). She auditions for the dance team with some spectacular martial arts-derived moves, falls in love with her first boy band (In the form of a clear One Direction parody that, upon closer inspection, turns out to be a real band. Ouch.), and is left in the dust by what turns out to be a group of very Mean Girls.

Moretz just can't catch a break between this and the whole pig's blood thing at prom, so after getting revenge on the girls in a truly cheap and un-hilarious vomit gag she jumps right on into the best action setpiece in the entire film, taking on a moving van of villains as they try to escape, Kick-Ass in tow.

He's a character too, I guess.

If I could only talk about Moretz for the rest of this review, I would, because she is without a doubt the most accomplished person on the set and a lot of fun to watch, leaping deftly between fish-out-of-water comedy and foulmouthed badassery and taking it all in stride.

The other actors do their jobs, for the most part. I would like to take a moment to call out a certain Mr. Mintz-Plasse, though. Perhaps this is just typecasting rearing its ugly head, but the whole "spitting out your words like a rabid chipmunk" thing just isn't doing it for me anymore.

His performance is clumsy and annoying, much like the film's handling of the overarching themes of identity and bloodletting. I can't begrudge a film with a name like Kick-Ass 2 for wielding its theme with a sledgehammer, but when every scene says some variation of "the mask doesn't define you" or "I may wear a mask, but so do you," it gets old.

Hey she's wearing a mask! I get it now!

The time has come. We had to get to the violence eventually. While some scenes are pretty great action pieces, like the aformentioned "moving van beatdown," the brutality can get a little intense, especially when it comes to characters we care about. Or at least characters with names.

The film spends its entire first half trying to ground itself in reality, exploring the real-world consequences of a man putting on a mask and fighting crime. The second half involves a guy getting his peeper ripped off with pliers and fed to him (to be fair this is implied and may not have actually happened), a man's teeth knocked about before being decapitated, and a lot of up-close gore (stuff like mouths and eyes that hit the audience harder than just seeing somebody get stabbed or punched).

While the best scenes work according to the ancient tradition of suspending disbelief, some of them are far too intense, especially in the face of all the movie's attempts to convince the audience that the world they display is as real as possible.

We watch action movies and enjoy all the face punching and stabbing and explosions because we understand innately that there are no real world consequences. It's only a movie. But when a film tries as hard as Kick-Ass 2 to tell us that it isn't, the more hardcore scenes are just a little too jarring to be truly enjoyable.

All in all, Kick-Ass 2 is a decent action movie with some great scenes and general good humor (and a gay character who is well-written, immediately accepted, and doesn't die to boot!) but sometimes it backslides into something a little bit more sinister, and that's not what you want out of your summer popcorn fare.

Last Word: If you give your characters racist names and comment on how they're racist, it doesn't change the fact that they are, in fact, racist. Bad doggy.

TL;DR: Kick-Ass 2 is enjoyable but uneven.
Rating: 6/10
Should I Spend Money On This? I'm sure you expected this answer but only if you liked the first film.
Word Count: 1113

Mary Lou Too

Year: 1990
Director: Ron Oliver, Peter R. Simpson
Cast: Tim Conlon, Cyndy Preston, Courtney Taylor
Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Have you ever seen somebody with such a terrible haircut you wonder what prompted them to get it in the first place? Has that haircut ever been made of lime green Jello with gummy snakes swimming around in it playing miniature saxophones? Well this movie is a little bit like that.

Prom Night III: The Last Kiss marks a less than venerable Canadian institution's descent into Direct to Video Hell, and with the concurrent drop in quality came a burst of incoherent colors and shapes that some mad intern seemingly decided to convert into a screenplay.

I know this opener makes literally no sense, but I just needed to get you in the right mindset to think about this movie.

Prom Night III starts off with as much normalcy as it can muster, opening with a singularly bland title card. It's literally just the name of the movie in plain white font. They really broke the bank on that one. And then. And then.

We are transported to some sort of Prom Hell Dimension where chained zombies do the can-can. Mary Lou files through her shackles and escapes, zooming through the halls of Hamilton High in a giddy Steadicam sequence straight out of Evil Dead that proves that these movies weren't quite done strip-mining other people's horror properties.

She lures a janitor into a boiler room (Phew, we're back to ripping off Nightmare. I'm glad they left Evil Dead well enough alone) with a juke box of all things and steps into the light revealing... she's not the same Mary Lou from before. Cassidy and I cry tears of sorrow. This Mary Lou looks like a cardboard cutout and talks like one too. No life. No joy. Only anguish and pain forever and ever.

The eighth circle of Hell is the eternal duckface.

I apologize for the low quality of my screengrabs, but the movie is very low quality.

Anyway, she blows up the janitor's pacemaker and says "Mama always said I'd be a heartbreaker." Here it is, folks. The Prom Night series has finally gotten so desperate and strapped for ideas that we've reached the Quipping Point. You see, this film is a horror comedy, but what attempts to pass for comedy is usually downright abysmal, while the funniest moments can be leached from unintentional terribleness. 

In actuality, it's totally my kind of movie.

Mary Lou Maloney is the only returning character in the entire five movie franchise, if you can even call her that. Mary Lou is virtually unrecognizable from her previous incarnation, both in looks/performance as I mentioned earlier, and in overall motivation and, well, everything that makes a character. Instead of wanting to be prom queen and bandying about her lady parts, she's content with stalking a cute boy and channeling late period Krueger.

And you thought I was kidding.

Young Alex Grey (Tim Conlon) is your typical average American* teen (he has a monologue to this effect that actually channels the "Christmas sucks" monologue from Gremlins quite favorably). His final year of high school is drawing to a close, and he must decide whether to spend the summer road tripping it up with his best friend Shane (David Stratton) or staying on a farm with his shrewish and needy girlfriend Sarah (Cyndy Preston).
*Remember when I said that Canadian slasher movies liked to pretend they take place in America? Boy you're in for a treat.

Sarah and Alex get into a fight, and at a romantic candlelit drive-thru dinner he admits that he's stressed out because his guidance counselor told him his grades are too terrible to pursue his dream of medical school and he should just learn how to fry burgers now because that's how he's gonna spend the rest of his life. Sarah isn't very helpful because she's the worst, and when he goes back to school to collect his Biology book to study, he encounters Mary Lou in the flesh. Well, ectoplasm.

Like any normal pair of high school-aged strangers, they start making out, ripping an American flag off the wall and boning on top of it while the national anthem plays. America, guys.

Because she's apparently a Na'vi from Avatar who mates for life once they have sex, Mary Lou falls instantly in love with Alex and uses her magic powers to protect him, mostly by killing people who are hurting him, like his Biology teacher who flunks him or the guidance counselor who catches wind of his grades being altered.

The kill scenes are so utterly outlandish and bizarre that it seems like the screenwriter watched A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child and saw the scenes that were relevant to each character taking place on garish setpieces (an anorexic model is fed until she explodes, a comic geek is transformed into a paper drawing and slashed to ribbons) and only took away the setpiece part without realizing they all had something to do with the nature of the character being killed.

Instead of killing the Biology teacher with, say, a ton of animals or some weird hanging skeleton or whatever, she just jams her own weird-ass setpiece in there - in this case an ice cream parlor.

You know, like every Biology classroom has.

She kills the guidance counselor with a Battery Acid Hair Salon Torture Chamber™, shoves an entire 50's-era kitchen into a lab room, and even possesses a Sex Ed video.

The movie continues on like this for a while with Mary Lou killing to Alex's benefit in super ludicrous ways and him burying her victims in the football field, then boning her a little bit more to cheesy saxophone music. There's also a couple jump scares thrown in, almost like they think this is a horror movie.

The movie ends at a prom, when Alex finally realizes he should stop having people killed and breaks up with Mary Lou, who seeks revenge. The prom part is mostly only there because they must have realized the title of the movie and decided they had to include one in there somewhere. Although the ending is a solid ten minutes too long at least, there is a comic relief cop (Brock Simpson) who is the only element of the movie that's intentionally funny that lands at all. So hats off to him, a two time veteran of the franchise. What a depressing distinction.

Although I guess things could be worse.

Prom Night III is the cheapest movie yet in the series and it wears that badge proudly. The DVD I was watching was clearly a bad VHS transfer with weird fuzz that obscured the image from time to time, and it's not even the actual film. The DVD is a ripped copy of the edited for TV movie that censors some of the language and nudity, neutering an already very uneven film.

The behind-the-camera work is particularly shoddy and anonymous, and I get the feeling the sound department entertained themselves by playing a private game called Boom Mike Apocalypse. I swear, there was a boom at the top of half the frames. The ones that weren't obscured by other means, at least. One shot has a small black cloth diagonally jutting through the top of the screen.

It's not well made. It's not scary. It's not funny. In fact, it's so dizzyingly incoherent that I can barely write about it without descending into primitive madness. But in spite of its massive problems, the careless low budgetry of the film lends it a vibrancy and life it wouldn't otherwise have, and the terrible acting paired with the cheesy quipping and inscrutable kill scenes all add up to a tremendously wonderful B-Movie masterwork.

Killer: Mary Lou Maloney (Courtney Taylor)

Final Girl: Sarah Monroe (Cyndy Preston) with Alex Grey (Tim Conlon)

Best Kill: Alex's biology teacher is stabbed with ice cream cones, gets an egg beater to the face, then is split open and filled with bananas, cherries, various flavors of ice cream, and miniature American flags, accompanied by the Yankee Doodle song. Seriously, guys. We're in America. We can agree aboat that.

Sign of the Times: The word "daddy-o."

Scariest Moment: I'm sorry, I don't understand the question.

Weirdest Moment: When Alex calls his parents on the pay phone at school, they sound like they're speaking in simlish. This is hilarious, and the turning point when you realize this movie has zero hope of getting any better.

Champion Dialogue: "Firstly, you really gotta stop killing people."

Body Count: 9

1. Jack is electrocuted by a jukebox.
2. Mr. Walker is stabbed with ice cream cones and gets a blender in the face.
3. Ms. Richards is locked in a hair dryer and drenched in battery acid. 
4. Andrew is impaled with a football drill.
5. Shane's heart is ripped out of his chest.
6. Policeman #1 is electrocuted.
7. Policeman #2 is electrocuted.
8. Leonard is hung with magnetic tape.
9. Sarah gets punched through the chest.

TL;DR: Prom Night III: The Last Kiss is batsh*t insane, and I love it.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1531

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 Nightmare at Hamilton High

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Year: 1987

Director: Bruce Pittman

Cast: Wendy Lyon, Louis Ferreria, Lisa Schrage

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

This movie exemplifies why I love the Prom Night series. A solid seven years after the original, which was a fairly solid but bland slasher, Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II comes screeching into the mix, throwing around a myriad of paranormal incidents and downright bonkers effects sequences that are completely 100% divorced from the idea of Jamie Lee Curtis' friends being picked off one by one.

Whereas Prom Night was more of a riff on Halloween, Hello Mary Lou owes just as much to A Nightmare on Elm Street as it does to Carrie. It just goes to show that after Wes Craven came along to put in his two cents with his phantasmagoric special effects masterpiece, all the big slasher franchises made wild right turns to follow suit.

The only character from the original that returns is Hamilton High School (Although it is played by a different building. The original let fame get to its head and had an outrageous asking price.), which we revisit during Prom Night 1957. Don't you dare forget that. 1957. 1957. 1957. It's 1957. There. You have just experienced the written transcript of the first scene. 

Mary Lou Maloney (Lisa Schrage) is a maneating vixen and has no qualms about leaving her prom date, Billy, in the dust to go make out with Buddy Cooper behind the stage ("It's not who you come with. It's who takes you home." - Literally the only tie-in with the original aside from the name of the high school). Billy gets jealous and decides to get even by releasing a stink bomb from the rafters as Mary Lou is being crowned Queen of the 1957 Prom.

Unfortunately things go awry and Carrie White Mary Lou accidentally burns to death before she can wear her crown. Cut to Vicki Carpenter (Wendy Lyon), an innocuous Hamilton High student, thirty years later. Although there is no title card to tell us that it's 1987, her hair gets the job done.

Thanks for the heads up.

Her mother is a devout Christian woman who doesn't tolerate such heathen things as motorcycle boyfriends and brand new prom dresses, the former of which Vicki has, and the latter of which she wants.

When her mom puts her foot down (she can't get money from her dad because he cosigns checks with his wife like a fool), Vicki goes to search the prop closet of the school drama department. Instead of finding an assortment of battered cutlery, an out of tune piano, and 800 trench coats like you would if you searched my high school drama department's closet, she finds an old trunk with memorabilia from PROM 1957 !!! !!! !!!

When her friend Jess (Beth Gondek) breaks one of the jewels off of the crown, she unwittingly releases the ghost of Mary Lou Maloney, who promptly strangles her with a prom cape (this is a thing in Canada maybe) and makes it look like suicide. Oh, and Jess is pregnant. Yeah, that happened. Things just got real.

Now that she's out, all Mary Lou wants is three things: revenge on the man who killed her, who is now the principal (Michael Ironside, an actual actor! What?), the title of Prom Queen, and a brand new body to celebrate in.

Poor sweet Vicki is slowly going insane with hallucinations of Mary Lou as she tries to possess her body. She is becoming more rebellious against her mother as the downright sacrilegious (and F-bomb spewing) Mary Lou starts winning the battle.

Also Vicki's friends die sometimes because this is a slasher movie after all.

Real quick, here's the Meat: Kelly (Terri Hawkes), who has a valley girl accent, pastel eyeshadow, and a mean demeanor (I was super confused, because in the previous film I kept mixing up Kelly the bland one with Wendy the evil one. As soon as I got that straight, this was thrown into the mix. Not cool, guys); Monica (Beverly Hendry), Vicki's best friend who laments not finding a date to the prom in the middle of shooting down a boy; Craig (Louis Ferreria), the motorcycle-riding principal's son who is also Vicki's loving boyfriend; and Josh (Brock Simpson, who played Young Nick in the original Prom Night), the lovable A.V. nerd.

A moment of silence for the death of the A.V. Club. Apple has ruined high school for us all.

That was a lot of words. Here's a picture of a scary horse to spice things up.

I'm sorry I'm still on plot summary, but this movie endlessly fascinates me.

Mary Lou finally accomplishes possessing Vicki through a variety of special effects setpieces (including a Water Fountain of Blood, a weird cockroach-filled dystopian lunchroom, a whirlpool chalkboard, and Evil Volleyball.) and the new Vicki spouts 50's slang and oozes sexuality.

Maybe this is a good time to mention her four minute nude scene. Maybe not. OK, I'll wrap up quick. Mary Lou and Billy are trying to kill each other, and Craig is trying to save Vicki and get rid of Mary Lou for good. 

Things get super weird and Mary Lou kills a series of people and rigs the election, but before she can be crowned Bill shoots Vicki's body, at which point Mary Lou's corpse bursts out of her skin to attack the prom and kill Craig but his father shows up to give Mary Lou the crown and they make out and she fades away and then her grave explodes and then there's a tacked on shock ending.

Whoops, spoilers.

Ain't no thang.

Do I even need to mention the performances are mostly bad? I haven't been noting that in these reviews, I just figured that was a given. Likewise, the directing has lost its personality and spark. Although there is a clear predilection for looming shots of buildings, the forces behind the camera feel mostly anonymous. Fortunately, it's what's in front of the camera that's important.

Like this little beauty.

Watching the film over again makes me wonder if I should include A Nightmare on Elm Street in my body count calculation because this film clearly murdered that one and rifled through its pockets. Vicki is attacked by bedsheets, Mary Lou scrapes her nails against a locker like Freddy's claws, the hanging scene is exactly like Rod's prison cell, and the plot is also eerily similar to the sequel, Freddy's Revenge in which Freddy takes advantage of a boy's burgeoning sexuality to take over his body and murder people.

The clincher? The science teacher is named Mr. Craven.

Right through the heart.

With the religious undertones of Carrie and the everything of Nightmare, this film could easily be a ripoff but it has so much energy and kooky charm that it plays it off perfectly.

Although there are spurts of post-Jason Lives meta comedy (a Linda Blair reference, a funeral sermon mentions the negative impact of violent movies), this movie plays it straight, much to its benefit. It is so much more fun when your stupid movies spend more time being stupid than making fun of their own stupidity, although I do love myself some meta humor.

It's cheesy, it's fun, and Schrage eats it up despite her limited screentime. There's a scene where she goes to confession and it's honestly one of my favorite cheesy movie scenes in the entire world. She's gorgeous and hammy and perfect, embracing - and embodying - how loopy the whole thing is and when I said Hello Mary Lou, I had to say Goodbye Heart.

It's a Prom Night I want to remember forever.

Cassidy: "Why does something have to blow up at the end of every 80's movie?"

Killer: Mary Lou Maloney (Lisa Schrage)

Final Girl: Vicki Carpenter (Wendy Lyon)

Best Kill: A girl hides in a locker, but is crushed into a jelly. A wop bop a loo bop, a lop bam boom.

Sign of the Times: Ladies and gentlemen... Jess.

Scariest Moment: This freaking rocking horse

Weirdest Moment: Vicki (possessed by Mary Lou) makes out with her dad.

Champion Dialogue: "She looks like she's in a fashion coma."

Body Count: It's hard to tell because the ending is a little wonky, but I can feel pretty confident saying 8, counting Mary Lou.

1. Mary Lou burns to death at her prom.
2. Jess is hung by a prom cape.
3. Buddy is stabbed in the face with a crucifix.
4. Monica is crushed inside a locker.
5. Virginia is blown through a glass door by telekinesis.
6. Josh is electrocuted through a computer.
7. Kelly is impaled by a falling light.
8. Principal Bill is possessed by the spirit of Mary Lou. 

TL;DR: Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II is weird and wonderful.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1477

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: Disco Madness

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Cassidy leaves on Friday. 

Please take a moment to find your tissues, then return to reading this post. We were trying to decide what to do to give her a proper sendoff when I mentioned my love of the Prom Night franchise, with its increasingly bizarre storylines that get more and more divorced from the original concept. She was enthralled and it was decided that one day before she left, we would watch all of them in one gigantic marathon.

Well it happened, and as luck would have it, the next film on my Census Bloodbath list is (by the hammer of Thor) Prom Night! It was meant to be.

For the next week or so, I will be posting a film-by-film retrospective of the Prom Night series, starting with the 1980 original! Let's get crackin'!

Year: 1980

Director: Paul Lynch

Cast: Leslie Nielsen, Jamie Lee Curtis, Casey Stevens

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Legend has it that Canadian director Paul Lynch was struggling to find a backer for Prom Night until Jamie Lee Curtis signed on to the project. He got an offer from Paramount to put it in 300 theaters, but ended up teaming with Avco Embassy as their offer of 1200 theaters was too good to refuse. Instead, Paramount pushed out another film, a low-rent Halloween knockoff called Friday the 13th.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Despite accidentally enabling the Voorhees Dynasty, Prom Night does have its fair share of fans among slasher buffs and sane people alike. This is palpably for one reason above all - Jamie Lee Curtis. Other than that, you see, Prom Night is a pretty tame and exceedingly average Dead Teenagers movie. 

It is of interest mainly as a sort of slasher textbook. Here you can see the pieces of the genre fall exactly into the places where they will remain until the slasher's first decline. The mysterious accident that occurs in flashback, the masked killer, branches being pulled back out of frame during long shot stalking scenes, sex and death and the virgin reigning supreme... They're all here in the purest, most distilled form.

The DNA from this frame can be traced to Scream, Valentine, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and countless others.

The second point of interest - one only devout followers of the genre are aware of - is that this is a Canadian production. It is a general agreement that Canadian slasher movies, despite their intense desire to pretend that they take place in America (Prom Night's high school is called Alexander Hamilton High despite the Canadian license plates in the parking lot and the repressed accents bubbling beneath the surface - "Sorey aboat that. We'll fix it to-more-ow.") are just plain better than their American counterparts with characters that tend to be more fleshed out and better handling of the material.

Though Prom Night is a lesser example, Terror Train, Happy Birthday to Me, and My Bloody Valentine support that theory, among many others.

But enough dithering. This is a review, after all.

The film opens on a group of four children playing a game in a building that is the most menacing character in the movie. Halfway between an abandoned mental institution and some sort of old monastery, this is clearly no place for young ones, no matter how Canadian they are.

They're playing a loosely defined game that mostly involves hiding, then running around and chanting "KILL! KILL!" at the top of their lungs. The three Hammond siblings approach and Kim, the eldest, goes back to get a book she forgot (You can tell she's going to grow up to be Jamie Lee Curtis, because she has the slipperiest fingers when it comes to school supplies. And sharp weapons for that matter.) leaving her twin siblings Alex and Robin to play with the others.

The game gets a little too intense for Robin (Tammy Bourne), and she bolts, pursued relentlessly by the four. As they chant "KILL! KILL! KILL!" and back her into a corner, their words come true as she falls through a second story window to her death. The four vow never to speak of this again, and a local sex offender is accused of the crime. After a botched police chase, he is badly burned (this tends to happen. Again, this is a textbook example later to be found in The Burning, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and many of this film's sequels) and slides into a coma so the kids get off scot-free.

In an effort to disguise her identity, the one on the left dyed her hair black and was adopted into the Addams household.

Cut to six years later. The kids are all grown up and are preparing for their senior prom. Jude (Joy Thompson) is funny, smart, and single. She's quite a catch. Unfortunately she has such low self esteem that when she is catcalled on the street by this creep

she not only takes him up on his offer of a ride to school, but agrees to go to prom with him. She even puts out and enjoys it despite evidence to the contrary. All the Oscars to Joy Thompson.

Wendy (Eddie Benton) is rich, gorgeous, and an all-around terrible person who you want to die from the very bottom of your heart the first time she walks into frame.

Nick (Casey Stevens) has gone through puberty and learned a couple life lessons, has dumped Wendy and is now deeply in love with Kim (Jamie Lee Curtis). To top it all off, they are Prom King and Prom Queen! Little Kimmy's done well for herself since her sister's death. During the procession, the announcer even says (literally) that they have been chosen as the most popular kids on campus.

Kelly (Marybeth Rubens) is also a character in the movie.

This is all established quite quickly, but Lynch isn't anxious to move on just yet, and these characters just sort of jangle around for about an hour before the prom sequence (and the killing) begins in earnest.  While it's not necessarily boring, it's also not really... well, anything.

High school drama ensues and the four grown-up kids receive obscene phone calls and hear strange noises when they're alone. After what I can only imagine was an intense discussion, the filmmakers decided to keep most of the focus on the high school drama. This would be welcome in another movie - one with characters that aren't Dixie Cups with faces drawn on, preferably. It was a team effort to even be able to tell the girls apart.

It all just feels very indulgent, almost like Jamie Lee funded the movie herself in order for us to see scenes of her being awesome at tennis and disco dancing and to show us how great her boobs are.

Clothed, of course. This is still Jamie Lee we're talking about.

The first real Body Count killing begins at the one hour mark, and it still leaves something to be desired. As does the second. And the third. Really, they're all pretty toothless especially when you consider that the Tom Savini-led Friday the 13th was still blowing through theaters at the time.

A prowling man in a ski mask whispers vaguely threatening... well, threats, as he mows down the core four and anyone who happens to get in the way. And let me just take a moment to say that whispering killers are hard to keep from crossing the line between scary and silly. Guess which side this one landed on?

Throats are slit, guts are stabbed, and a head rolls onto the catwalk (that one's actually pretty cool), but it's all playing second string to what they clearly thought was the most important part - the mystery.

Who is the killer?

There are a number of clear-cut suspects including Lou (David Mucci), a dirtbag who Wendy hires to pull a prank at prom; Principal Hammond (Leslie Nielsen. Yes, that Leslie Nielsen.), Kim's father who is understandably upset - prom is on the anniversary of his youngest daughter's death; the man who was wrongly accused of Robin's death and who has since escaped his mental institution; and Sykes (Robert Silverman), the groundskeeper who can't help but stare at the high school girls as they walk by. Mostly because they moon him, but still.

Once Lou is killed, the escapee is caught fifty miles away, and Groundskeeper Willie is exonerated, it's pretty clear who the killer is.

Or is it?

But first, some disco songs.

Prom Night frequently cuts back to the dance, not to establish time or keep up pacing or whatever, but rather to show off Jamie Lee's fancy moves. Full of super on-the-nose original songs like "Prom Night (Everything is Alright)," "Love Me Till I Die," and "Time to Turn Around," that it's keen to show off, the film's weak killings are interspersed with some truly bizarre scenes straight out of the outtakes to Saturday Night Fever. Keep an eye out for composer Paul Zaza. Just like Jason Voorhees, he keeps coming back movie after movie (Recent credits include Baby Geniuses and Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2. This guy's a winner.).

In addition to being totally bananas, these scenes are indicative of a bigger problem, editing-wise. The scenes just don't make any sense in the order they're displayed. They frequently end too soon, leaving the audience with a weird jolting feeling, and at one point a couple is seen at a drive thru and then immediately in the middle of class.

OK yes, this movie has flaws. Allow me to alleviate some of the pain though.

With some experimental shots that work sporadically, like a series of smash cuts from telephone cord to the receiver or the high-vaulted ceiling shot that follows a little girl around a corner, it is clear that, for better or for worse, there is some sort of directorial hand involved in this movie. Most slasher films are cheap cash-ins, completely devoid of personality and despite its shabbiness, Prom Night is not one of them.

As I mentioned before, the obvious greatest strength the movie ever had (and they knew it) was Jamie Lee Curtis, the Scream Queen herself. While she's not exactly at her Laurie Strode Gold Standard, she fully immerses herself in the role and brings such natural charm it's impossible not to love her. Despite its myriad flaws, through whatever miracle she is in this project. She's the real takeaway here.

And you know what they say:

It's not who you go with.

It's who takes you home.

Killer: Spoilers [Alex Hammond (Michael Tough)]

Final Girl: Kim Hammond (Jamie Lee Curtis)

Best Kill: A kid is strangled behind the wheel and his van flies off a cliff, hitting the bluffs and exploding.

Sign of the Times: Dear Jesus all of this

Scariest Moment: The opening scene, in which the camera pans around a creepy abandoned building as children chant "The killer is coming!"

Weirdest Moment: There is a prolonged disco dance sequence that lasts for 3 minutes and 7 seconds. I counted every microsecond of it. Let Prom Night go down in history as the only slasher movie to ever need a choreographer.

Champion Dialogue: "For a guy so fast on the disco floor, you are the slowest."

Body Count: 8; 1 nurse murdered on the sidelines, 6 on Prom Night, and 1 six years before.

1. Robin Hammond falls to her death during the children's game.
2. Kelly's throat is slit.
3. Jude is stabbed in the throat.
4. Slick falls off of a cliff in a burning van.
5. Nurse is killed offscreen. 
6. Wendy is hacked to death with an axe offscreen.
7. Lou is decapitated with an axe. 
8. [Alex Hammond is hit on the head with an axe.]

TL;DR: Prom Night is a shabby but earnest by-the-book slasher, and the presence of Jamie Lee Curtis knocks it up a couple of points.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1997

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: This Girl Is On Fire

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

Year: 1980

Director: Joseph Ellison

Cast: Dan Grimaldi, Robert Osth, Ralph D. Bowman

Run Time: 1 hour 22 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Ah, Don't Go in the House, the last proto-slasher to be released before Friday the 13th burst onto the scene and changed the game forever. As such, it deviates a lot from the genre norms by having a low body count, no clear-cut final girl, and roots still sucking the final droplets of water from the arid soil of the grindhouse genre.

The second film in what is informally known as the "Don't" Series (having come out a month after Don't Answer the Phone and being followed by Don't Go in the Woods... Alone!, among others), the title is definitely more relevant to the plot than its predecessor, in which zero people were in any danger from telephones.

Donny Kohler (Grimaldi) works at a Fire Factory (at least, that's what I called it in my notes until later dialogue revealed that it was an Incinerator, which I'm still not entirely convinced is a thing), where the little pyro happily burns stuff up and bashes homos until the serene balance of his life is thrown out of whack by the death of his overbearing mother (Ruth Dardick).

This is no great loss, apparently. He is free to play his music as loud as he wants, jump on the furniture, listen to the voices in his head as they hiss for revenge (At least, as far as I can tell. The sound dubbing is notoriously sub-par.), and build a little steel torture chamber in the guest room in his spare time.

You know. For... beekeeping.

Evidently, when he was a child and did something bad, his mother would punish him by burning holding his arms over a lit stove. Turns out, this is not an Oprah-approved child rearing practice and as such, it has left him a little scarred (figuratively and literally) and keen to punish random women he picks up off the street.

First on the roster is Kathy (Johanna Brushay), a kind florist who lets him into her shop after closing. When she misses her bus, he offers her a ride home, although he needs to stop by his house on the way. Once inside, Kathy becomes alarmed (possibly because her host sounds like he's reading his lines off of cue cards), but a swift knock to the head renders her unconscious, and when she wakes up naked, chained to the ceiling, it comes as a bit of a shock.

What's the matter? This would be a regular Tuesday night for some people.

He burns her to a crisp with a flamethrower in the most convincing effects shot of the entire film and repeats this recipe twice on a woman with car trouble and a fellow customer at a convenience store. Neither of these deaths are shown (in fact one of them I wasn't aware had happened until about ten minutes later), which is actually kind of a relief for this kind of movie, especially after the unrelenting misogyny of Don't Answer the Phone. Not that this film is free from that, as it certainly has some heaping helpings of anti-woman sentiment, but it's overall much more palatable than the thoroughly depraved acts from DAtP. Basically it only escapes harsher judgment because I watched the other film first.

With a lot of mumbo jumbo about voices in his head, his childhood punishments, arrested development, and a intense mother fixation, this is just another psychological thriller that is a lot closer to, say, Stephen King than Sigmund Freud but at least the supremely unscientific depiction of mental illness is fairly straightforward this time. It is easy to understand within the confines of its own universe, and that is something we should all be grateful for.

On top of that, the scenes where Donny's dead mother and his three victims seem to speak to him and haunt him around town actually have some crumbs of tension and there are a couple shots that are quite frightening. The makeup could use a little work, but the scenes themselves show some glimmer of competence on the part of the filmmakers and I wouldn't be against seeing another one of the director's films, maybe one where he has a budget higher than a gumball.

Man, that outfit really clashes with her skin tone.

When Donny picks up two hitchhikers on the way to a bar, he is interrupted mid-kidnap by his friend (Osth) and a priest (Bowman), who went looking for him after he caused a scene at a discotheque. The girls get away, providing me with something to write about in my Final Girl section. Hey, the slasher rules haven't been written yet. They didn't know what they were doing. Next time though, guys. Final Girl.

As I mentioned before, in opposition to the slasher template, the film has a surprisingly low body count. This is because it elects to concern itself more with the inner workings of its schizophrenic protagonist than show a slew of teens being bumped off. This is a mistake, but certainly a forgivable one. In a better made movie, a thorough exploration of his mental state would be welcome, but the filmmakers mostly just continue riffing on their Cliff's Notes interpretation of Psycho.

Despite its many lackluster qualities and generally poor production values, the movie doesn't necessarily lack entertainment value. The time passes quite quickly and it has a thankfully short run time, so it's never boring. Don't Go in the House really isn't good enough to be worth the time of anyone with anything less than an obsessive interest in the genre like Yours Truly, but it didn't make me regret donating the last 80 minutes of my life.

That's really the best thing I can say about it, though.

Stay tuned for Prom Night, when we can get into the real slicin' and dicin' with Jamie Lee Curtis of all people!

Killer: Donny Kohler (Dan Grimaldi)

Final Girl: Suzanne (O'Mara Leary) and Patty (Gail Turner), but their survival is only incidental.

Best Kill: N/A - only one kill is shown and the rest follow the exact same M. O.

Sign of the Times: There is a lengthy scene where Donny shops for disco clothes.

Scariest Moment: Dan is pulled into a pit by the burnt corpses of his victims in a nightmare.

Weirdest Moment: When a woman in a disco attempts to coerce him to dance, Donny ignites his fist with pure fury and punches her in the head, setting her hair on fire. Apparently he hits her with a candle but I'll be darned if I could see one.

Champion Dialogue: "You mean I haven't canned the garbage jokes?"

Body Count: 3; 4 if you count his mother.

1. Mrs. Kohler dies of illness offscreen.
2. Kathy is burned to death with a flamethrower.
3. Linda is burned to death with a flamethrower.
4. Girl In Market is burned to death with a flamethrower.

TL;DR: Don't Go in the House is a poorly made and forgettable psychological thriller, but it isn't an offense to cinema.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1199

CinemaBeach: Music of the Night

My newest post on Killer Waves is up!

It's called The Ten Most Well-Used Songs in Horror Movies.

One of the most important aspects of any film, especially a horror film, is the music. As this video exemplifies, the background score can make or break the mood of the scene. Most movies, especially low budget ones, use an original score to avoid copyright issues, but sometimes movies utilize pre-existing songs already recorded by other artists to enhance the mood or ground the film in a particular era. Sometimes this is a complete disaster (think of any film that used a Duran Duran song in the 80′s) but sometimes a perfectly chosen song can make for a historic scene.

Horror movies are notorious for finding the creep factor in innocuous songs, so here are the best uses of pre-recorded songs to date.

10. Mr. Sandman, The Chordettes (Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later)

Now, this song works the best because it was already previously used during the closing credits of 1981′s Halloween II. Halloween H20 was Jamie Lee Curtis’ way of wrapping up her character’s story arc and as such, it spent a lot of time hearkening back to the previous movies in the franchise that featured her character Laurie Strode. Although smell is the sense most associated with memory, sound is a close second and the use of this song in the opening scene immediately brings any fan of the franchise back. Also, its innate cheerfulness is an unsettling juxtaposition with the brutal stabbings it precedes.

9. Something to Die For, The Sounds (Scream 4)

Yes, Scream 4 might be an uneven movie. But nothing can beat that opening sequence. Sidney is returning for the first time to her hometown of Woodsboro after the bloodbath. Now a successful author and an empowered woman, she sweeps into town with a newfound confidence, accompanied by the pulsing rhythm of this chick-led Swedish rock band. “Something to Die For” isn’t used to scare – it’s used to inject the film with energy as we are reintroduced to a protagonist we haven’t seen in a decade.

8. Vudú, Carlos Ann ( [REC] )

[REC], otherwise known as the Spanish found footage film that Quarantine is based on and my all-time favorite horror film, is the grueling story of a small time news anchor and her cameraman who are tailing a team of firefighters when they get trapped in an apartment building with a horde of rage virus-infected zombies. To preserve the authenticity and realism of the film, no soundtrack is used until the final scream fades and the screen goes black. The credits burst onto the screen to the opening chords of this song, which can only be described as Spanish rockabilly. The perfect credits song, it provides us with a sense of relief that the film is over and punctuates the energy of the film in an indescribably perfect manner.

7. Tiptoe Through the Tulips, Tiny Tim (Insidious)

Do I even have to explain this one? Not only is the song outrageously creepy on its own, it accompanies a scene where absolutely nobody should be in the house. Horror movies figured out pretty early that cheerful songs can stab you like a knife with the right visuals, and James Wan’s recent works are nothing if not for calling upon classic moves like this. And boy this one is a doozy.

6. American Girl, Tom Petty (Silence of the Lambs)

Don’t tell me you’ve never been afraid when pulling up to your parking spot in the middle of the night. This is the quintessential American nightmare. A normal night, a normal girl, a normal song playing on the radio, a night stalker lying in wait to harvest your sking.

5. Don’t Fear the Reaper, Blue Öyster Cult (Halloween) and Gus (Scream)

Death stalks, silent, almost invisible. In the original Halloween, the original Blue Öyster Cult song is playing softly on the radio as Laurie Strode and her friend Annie Brackett are being followed by a madman in a William Shatner mask. Wes Craven’s postmodern mid-90′s horror masterpiece Scream has a similar scene when Sidney is visited by her creepy boyfriend in the middle of the night in a direct homage to John Carpenter’s seminal classic.

4. Don’t Stop Me Now, Queen (Shaun of the Dead)

In the funniest scene of an outrageously funny horror comedy, Queen’s classic song is used to great effect in the rhytmic destruction of the shambling undead.

3. Singin’ in the Rain (A Clockwork Orange)

If you’ve seen Kubrick’s adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ classic novel, you know exactly what scene I’m referring to and I’m not about to link to it from here. Here’s the original song, in case you need a cheerful break from this list.

2. The Star-Spangled Banner (Poltergeist)

The famous TV sign-off that signaled that the night’s horrors were about to start. I’m so glad televisions don’t do this anymore, because I don’t think any of us would ever sleep again. They’re heeeeeeeere.

1. Turn Around, Look At Me, The Lettermen (Final Destination 3)

The Final Destination films are chock full of foreshadowing and in jokes. Usually, when the spirit of death is about to claim another soul, he is accompanied by a song. In the first film, it’s John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High” (because he died in a plane crash, which is a major plot point) and in the fifth it’s Kansas’ “Dust in the Wind” for obvious reasons. However, despite the third film’s lack of grace, this song is a masterpiece of unintentional creepiness that brings a huge amount of atmosphere to a film that desperately needs it.

Word Count: 928