The Texts Are Coming From Inside The House

Year: 2011

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Neve Campbell, David Arquette, Courteney Cox

Run Time: 1 hour 51 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Here we are at the end of yet another of my franchise marathons. However, like so many of these slasher villains have proven, it’s never truly the end. Betweens remakes, reboots crossovers, and recalibrations, all our favorite killers remain indestructible. In fact, Scream itself is experiencing new life as a surprisingly watchable teen soap on MTV. Nevertheless, let’s take a moment to reflect on where some notable franchises have left us, in honor of the Scream tradition of contemplating the rules and formulas of horror films.

Friday the 13th left this world in a blaze of glory with the one-two punch of the insane, alternately blisteringly gory and leadenly dull Jason Goes to Hell and the zippy but senile Jason X. A Nightmare on Elm Street gave us Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, a thoughtful, chilling masterpiece that reflected on the decade of crap that came before it and recycled it back into something great. Halloween (reviews yet to come) tossed Michael Myers to the winds of the new millennium, letting him get torn apart by the twin evils of web television and Busta Rhymes. Texas Chainsaw introduced Leatherface to Illuminati nipples. And Saw forgot they were even making a film halfway through, leaving their main character quite literally on the cutting room floor.

So what are we to take from all of this? Well, mainly that late sequels suck, except where Wes Craven is involved. Now, 2011 Wes Craven was a much different, softer man than 1994 Wes Craven, and that’s the truth. Scream 4 is no New Nightmare and it doesn’t go around changing any games that I can see. But it’s a damn sight better than it has any right to be, especially coming on the heels of the appalling Scream 3.

I mean, just by extent of not having that dumb-ass voice changer box, this film is like Casablanca in comparison to Scream 3.

Scream 4 begins by retracing its roots. Wait, let me back up. Scream 4 begins with a tongue-in-cheek, self-devouring, instantly divisive opening sequence that I am loathe to spoil if you haven’t seen it, though I err on the side of liking it. Then it retraces its roots, for the first time bringing consummate survivor Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) back to her hometown of Woodsboro, California. It’s been over a decade since the series of three murder sprees that defined her life, launching the wildly popular Stab series of horror films (the first three of which were based on her life, the rest of which get increasingly inane, all of which I hope somebody makes one day), and sending her to the top of the best-seller list as the author of a book about stepping out of the shadows, denouncing your role as a victim, and becoming a survivor.

Of course, the second she arrives in town a new murder spree begins as the villainous Ghostface (the evergreen Roger Jackson) turns his attentions to Sidney’s young niece (Emma Roberts) and her bland teen friends, of whom the only important one is the inimitable Kirby (Hayden Panettiere), a horror buff who oozes confidence and androgynous apathy. Sidney must once again team up with Sheriff Dewey (David Arquette) and his wife Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) to solve these murders and just maybe save their crumbling marriage.

At least fictionally. Sometimes meta scripts can be painful.

Scream 4 is neither the apotheosis of what a modern take on Scream could be, nor is it the black mark on the franchise that some die-hard fans make it out to be. It politely engages with some modern technological advances (Facebook, Twitter, speakerphone, that sort of thing – trés Gossip Girl), mulls a bit over what it means to be a horror film in the Age of Remakes, and waves at new distribution technology and torture porn in the hallway before realizing it doesn’t actually recognize them and pretending it was swatting a fly or something. There are a few ideas that it bats around about as smoothly as a 46-year-old screenwriter and a 71-year-old director can be expected to (ie. about as well as asking them to navigate Tumblr). But otherwise it finds a fairly solid amount of actual material to work with.

It helps to think of it as Scream Lite, for the viewer on the go who wants to watch their brain cell expenditure. Sure it can be a little goofy (like their dogged assertion that naming a deputy “Anthony Perkins” is a subtle in-joke/veritable laugh riot), and maybe it’s a little flabby around the middle and during its extended finale, and yeah it is never ever scary, but it’s also a great deal of fun. Which is more than I can say for the embalmed gags and McDreamy preening of Scream 3. It’s an excuse to drop into the world of these characters one more time, and though it might be fleeting, it’s hard to find fault in that.

And now that the 90’s are over, we’ll never ever have to look at an all-denim ensemble again.

Admittedly, a lot of Scream 4 is coasting, though when it’s on autopilot it’s at least on the level of a Halloween: H20 rather than an I Know What You Did Last Summer, if that’s any comfort. And when the film is shaken awake, there are some moments that genuinely come alive. The film plays with the ubiquity of video cameras in the modern world, utilizing the technology to create multiple angle perspectives on some of the more effective tension sequences.

Now that I’m done making a total nerd of myself, it’s time to… do that a little bit more. Because the continuity editing in Gale’s scenes is just embarrassing, and I would be remiss if I didn’t bring that up at least once.

Anybody agree? No? Just me?

OK, I need to get my act together with some semblance of a conclusion here. Scream 4 has just really distracted me with its baffling uncategorizability. Scream 4 is an ultimately satisfying bumpy ride with veteran franchise actors squaring off against airbrushed MTV personalities, wooden quips rubbing shoulders with chewy subtext about victimization and American celebrity, and a kick-ass mod rock soundtrack by The Sounds not quite clashing with a romantic Western Marco Beltrami score that reminds us just how valuable he is to this series. In short, it’s a hot mess, but a happy one. Like a plate of nachos. Or a Sia music video.

After all I’ve been through, I can’t say I’m disappointed by that.

Body Count: 15

1. Trudy is stabbed in the chest.
2. Sherrie has her throat slit.
3. Rachel is stabbed in the gut.
4. Marnie is killed offscreen.
5. Jenny is stabbed to death.
6. Olivia is stabbed to death.
7. Rebecca is stabbed in the gut.
8. Hoss is stabbed in the back.
9. Perkins is stabbed in the forehead.
10. Mrs. Roberts is stabbed through the back of the neck.
11. Robbie is stabbed to death.
12. Kirby is stabbed in the gut.
13. Trevor is shot in the head.
14. [Charlie is stabbed in the heart.]
15. [Jill is shot in the chest.] 

TL;DR: Scream 4 is a messy, but decent franchise ender (for now).

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1217

Reviews In This Series
Scream (Craven, 1996)
Scream 2 (Craven, 1997)
Scream 3 (Craven, 2000)
Scream 4 (Craven, 2011)

Chartreuse Overkill

Year: 2015

Director: Pierre Coffin & Kyle Balda

Cast: Sandra Bullock, Jon Hamm, Pierre Coffin

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

Two films came out this weekend. One was about an eternal, murderous presence laying ruin and waste upon all who come across it, and the other was The Gallows. I’m not kidding when I say that – of these two films – Minions left the most lasting emotional scars. Children’s films have a long history of embracing the macabre*, but it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a kiddie flick so grimly invested in depicting murder, torture, and mayhem.

It’s all tangential of course, like in the equally inexplicable Seinfeld insect massacre classic Bee Movie, but it’s quietly alarming all the same. And that’s but one facet of the massive, hyperactive, inert conglomerate that forms the sweaty, heaving, surreally self-deluded mass that is Minions, the spin-off of the Despicable Me franchise that focuses on its most marketable and least narratively viable characters: the thousands of tiny yellow sight gags that bumble around Gru’s villainous laboratory.

*I still have physical injuries from the tunnel scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Bello.

Minions tells the story of three Minions in particular, who set off in 1968 to find a villain to serve and thus save their tribe from extinction: Kevin (director Pierre Coffin), the headstrong leader, Stuart (director Pierre Coffin), the lazy musician, and Bob (renowned egotist Pierre Coffin), the obligatory Dumb One. Bob has a teddy bear named Tim who you will grow to love far more than any of the malign growths we shall henceforth call characters. Through a series of delightful (to someone, I’m sure) misadventures, these Three Minionteers end up in the service of the baddest villain in all the land: Scarlett Overkill (Sandra Bullock), and her groovy, gadget-peddling husband Herb (Jon Hamm).

Scarlett enlists the Minions to help her steal the crown of the Queen of England because this films feints at empowering women include her sole motivation being “wanting to be a pretty princess.” Through a series of delightful (see above) escapades, the Minions end up accidentally overthrowing the monarchy. Scarlett hangs out in her lair while this is happening, because Sandra Bullock doesn’t come cheap. Beyond this, I’m at a loss to explain the plot because there really isn’t one.

Despite its surprising ingenuity in creating a scenario for this cash-in prequel that has potential and feels organic to the universe of Despicable Me, Minions has an astonishing lack of narrative drive. It’s like a building abandoned in the middle of construction. The framework is there, but the wind echoes hollowly through it.

Coincidentally, that's the title of my upcoming poetry collection.

It’s a curious thing. Show the opening scenes of Minions to any producer or screenwriter worth their cocaine and they could fill in the rest, giving you a generic but marketable movie: Kevin wants to save the tribe himself. Bob and Stuart accidentally save the tribe. Kevin learns to swallow his pride and value teamwork over fame and recognition. Bam. It’s treacly but its sells. 

And that’s clearly where Minions wants to go, but despite its obvious setup, it forgets its purpose, sloughs off any recognizable conflict or resolution, and sets its villain on a bungee cord of incomprehensibly shifting motivations, all in order to fit in a series of scatological gags, high-pitched jabbering, and heaps upon inexplicable heaps of nostalgia for a franchise that began a scant five years ago and has only had two films, only one of which was any good, all of which relies on an interminable series of jokes extrapolated from literally one line in the first film about bananas.

That would be like a Star Wars spin-off all about Wookies playing chess.

That said, Minions isn’t all bad. It’s shallow and childish, of course, but it’s family entertainment in 2015. We’re not exactly re-animating Walt Disney’s frozen head here. Relying heavily on the cultural touchstones and iconography of the 1960’s is a peculiar touch, considering that this film’s target audience was still in diapers when Britney was shaving her head, but it provides a quirky, groovy backdrop for some of the film’s silly humor.

Here’s the thing, though. The Minions were consistently the breakout stars of the previous two films, but - as we have constantly been failing to learn, seeing as we got a second season of Joey – giving a beloved side character an expanded role is an exercise in despair. Where the Minions were charming in small doses, here they are wan and overwrought, wrung out and exhausted of every last ounce of their potential. They still show glimmers of their previous buoyance, but are crushed by the sheer weight of the material they are called upon to perform.

Kind of like Britney, actually. Maybe that’s why they’re bald.

And, of course, it wouldn’t be a Despicable Me flick if it wasn’t trafficking in hideously distorted stereotypes! Nobody is safe from the broad scope and closed mind of the film. The British, of course, get a thorough dress-down, as is to be expected (nobody cares), but Minions also goes out of its way to mock the Indians, the elderly, and the gays before the credits roll, fret not. Before this franchise is buried in its tiny yellow grave, it’ll have achieved a blackout on its minority bingo card.

It’s a shambling disappointment to say the least, especially after the trailers made it look like maybe somebody tried even a little bit to make it palatable. The best thing I can say about the film is that it at least provides us a solid Jon Hamm performance, though he is forced to deliver lines across from Bullock who is phoning it in something fierce. Heck, she’s texting it in for everything but the lines they play in the trailer.

What I’m trying to say is that I like the Minions, the characters. I really do. But I did not like Minions, the film. I don’t suppose there is any reason on Earth that anybody with more than a single digit in their age should particularly want to go see this film anyway, but if you do, stop. Just watch Despicable Me again. Give Steve Carell your money, not this pile of squeaky toys masquerading as a film.

TL;DR: Minions is a spectacularly messy, plotless, if slightly charming kids' film.

Rating: 4/10
Should I Spend Money On This? No.
Word Count: 1078

No Noose Is Good Noose

Year: 2015

Director: Travis Cluff & Chris Lofing

Cast: Reese Mishler, Pfeifer Brown, Ryan Shoos

Run Time: 1 hour 21 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I suppose one of these days I should stop getting excited about found footage horror films. They’re this generation’s carnival hucksters, promising spectacular thrills and spills, pouring all their genuinely impressive showmanship into the marketing for what is inevitably a ramshackle display, stuffed with straw and patched with safety pins and gum.

I fell for As Above, So Below, an insipid Parisian adventure movie with more ideas than intellect. I fell for Devil’s Due, a bland, unnecessary demonic pregnancy flick that gives away its own ending in the first two minutes. And, god help me, I fell for The Pyramid, which had the gall to drag one of the heavy hitters of Egyptian mythology down with it. That said, I am beyond excited for Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, which seems resigned to being apocalyptically insipid (it’s found footage, a combo prequel/sequel, and in 3D, for crying out loud – this is my Holy Grail), so I respect it for that. But I digress.

The slop filling up our trough today is The Gallows, which burst onto the scene a couple months ago with one of the best teasers I’ve ever seen, before proceeding to rip it to shreds by pre-releasing about 8,000 clips, only about half of which actually ended up in the movie, but all of which betray the dreadfully generic quality of literally everything in the film but the single two minute segment displayed in the teaser. I suppose it’s appropriate that a film geared toward the millennial generation should be defeated by over-sharing, but it beaks my heart that my enthusiasm had to be nibbled to death by tiny gnashing jaws instead of – as per usual – swallowed in one massive gulp.

Being a horror fan is like hugging a woodchipper and hoping you don’t get splinters.

The Gallows begins in 1993 with a home video of a high school play – a stuffy, Crucible-esque bore titled The Gallows, in which a squire dresses as a nobleman to win the heart of a fair maiden or some drivel. He is sentenced to death by hanging, but when the gallows prop goes wrong, the young actor is accidentally killed during the performance. I honestly don’t know what they expected, considering that the prop was literally just a fully functioning gallows sitting on a high school stage, but I suppose we must forgive a horror film its premise.

Seriously, please tell me the way this kid was not going to die. Did they forget to do a dress rehearsal?

Anyway, cut to 2013. Ryan (Ryan Shoos) is a football player who has been hired by the drama department to film their goings-on because this is a found footage movie. The school is putting on a revival of The Gallows, led by the spirited and irritating Pfeifer (Pfeifer Brown). Ryan’s best friend and teammate Reese (Reese Mishler) is playing the lead because he has a crush on Pfeifer, but he sucks as an actor, so Ryan suggests that they sneak into the theater the night before the play with his girlfriend Cassidy (Cassidy Gifford) and wreck the set. That way the play won’t go on and Pfeifer can fall into Reese’s comforting arms. It’s a win-win. He says they’ll need utmost stealth so they don’t get caught, but he brings his camera along, because this is a found footage movie.

During their escapade they run into Pfeifer, so they call it off, but they find themselves locked in for the night. And who should show up but the angry ghost of Charlie (the kid who died), dressed as the hangman, grown to adult size – don’t ask questions – and eager to play, noose at the ready.

As if high school theater wasn’t nerve-wracking enough, man.

After wasting what feels like weeks of our time on exposition that amounts to nothing more than “the dudes are stereotypical douchey jocks and the screenwriters think people still use the word schnozz” in a laboriously hyperextended sequence utterly devoid of scares or nuance, finally something happens. And by “something,” I mean “still nothing.” The characters rattle around the empty school for a couple more weeks, argue with each other in that most found footagey of fashions, wander off alone in blatantly incorrect directions down creepy maintenance hallways, flirt with making it an even month, then shake their camera at a ghost. I really don’t think I would even bother with these things if [REC] hadn’t screwed me up so bad. I suppose it’s either this or trauma counseling, and at least movie tickets are ten bucks an hour instead of a hundred.

To the film’s credit, the production design and lighting scheme are at times genuinely spooky. The cinematographer lovingly bestows the stage dressing with weight, always launching the noose into the shot in stark silhouette, allowing it to eat up the frame with its sheer presence. And the night vision color scheme has been done to death, but The Gallows finds a unique aesthetic presence, using the school’s cherry red emergency lights to flood the sets – intensely flattening the film’s dimensionality, pushing it into your face and drenching it in the color of blood. In fact, this trick is used in the film’s single best scene – the one used for the teaser and which has absolutely no valuable context in the narrative. Wheee.

Beyond those two elements (and that one, insolubly terrific scene), The Gallows doesn’t have much going on for it above the typical found footage fare. Once it gets kicking, it’s a decent jack-in-the-box of jump scares, but any feeling it generates will evaporate the instant the credits roll.

Kind of like your appreciation for trailers by the time the fifth one comes on.

It’s fun enough if you’re into that sort of thing: expect a lot of dumb teens making the exact decisions that are most statistically likely to lead to their doom, actors with blank CVs portraying blanker characters, and a camera that craps out at the exact moments that things begin to get interesting.

The plot is at least mildly more layered and interesting than your average “teens trapped overnight” fare, though its various twists and turns can literally be extrapolated from the film’s first two lines by anyone with even an ounce of genre savvy. In fairness, when Sergio and I accurately predicted the ending of this film, we each foresaw equal and opposite halves of the climax. So maybe you’ll be mildly surprised by a slight unforeseen detail, and in a film as rote as this, that’s as monumental as freaking Rosebud.

Of course this is all torn apart by an utterly unnecessary epilogue that overexplains, contradicts, and actively spits upon everything that’s already happened in the movie. I mean, I’m not saying there’s nothing worth spitting upon in The Gallows, but that’s my job, not the film’s. SPOILERS: [The ending rips the ghost from his final resting place, implying that he haunts his girlfriend’s apartment, hanging up his noose on the coat hook, all “honey, I’m home!” a la Desi Arnaz.] Well, that’s what I get for trying to be nice.

TL;DR: The Gallows is a laborious, generic found footage movie.
Rating: 4/10
Should I Spend Money On This? Bring a date who's never seen one of these before and cuddle. Otherwise, skip it.
Word Count: 1244

Census Bloodbath: Marz Attacks

For our podcast episode about this very film, click here.

Year: 1982

Director: Joe Giannone

Cast: Gaylen Ross, Tony Fish, Harriet Bass

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The slasher film has always had its flaws, even during the golden years of 1980 and 1981. That’s the nature of a genre built on the credo “if you built it and slop twelve cents of red paint onto it, the box office will come.” But the genre as a whole hit its first big stumbling block in 1982, the year following the slasher’s period of highest quality – and market saturation. It wasn’t enough to be a meat and potatoes hack and slash picture anymore, but producers weren’t quite on the cusp of realizing that.

Enter Madman. Released on New Year’s Day in 1982, it was the second 80’s slasher film to be based on the Cropsey campfire legend (after the superior The Burning), the fourth 80’s slasher film to be set at a summer camp, the ninth 80’s slasher film to take place in the forest, and the fifty-ninth 80’s shlasher film in general. In short, it was nothing special. In long, it was a tedious, wretched exercise in the least interesting slasher tropes meted out in a hideously incompetent manner, redeemed only by an inexplicable profusion of scenes so incredibly strange they can’t help but be arresting.

I don’t know what I expected.

Madman tells the tale of the North Sea Cottages, a forest retreat for gifted children and their not-so-gofted counselors. When the camp director Max (Frederick Neumann) tells a campfire story about Madman Marz (Paul Ehlers), the local maniac what stalks these woods, young douchenozzle in training Richie (Tom Candela) calls out to him, unleashing the dormant menace upon the horny counselors as they celebrate the last day of camp.

The platter of Meat includes Betsy (Gaylen Ross of Dawn of the Dead, under a fake name so she won’t be embarrassed, and keeping a studiously blank face so she won’t accidentally be mistaken for an actress), a translucent blonde who is the main character for some inscrutable reason; TP (Tony Fish), Betsy’s douchey boyfriend, who gags on a hideously pronounced New Yahk accent; Stacy (Harriet Bass), Betsy’s best friend, a horny sweetie who speaks in advice column platitudes; Bill (Alex Murphy), who has an Oates mustache; his girlfriend Ellie (Jan Claire), who has a Hall perm; and Dave (Seth Jones), a blondie with some exciting new ideas from Philosophy 101 class.

It’s pretty routine. The counselors bumble off into the woods alone looking for one another while Madman Marz bumps them off with whatever implements he finds handy. Meanwhile Richie makes himself completely useless and wanders around Marz’s home, watching him drag bodies around without lifting a ginger to help them. Kids these days…

Don’t lynch me for this, but I think I used to own that jacket…

Madman is not the worst slasher I’ve ever seen (Psycho Santa), nor is it the dullest (The Outing), but in fact it’s perhaps even less appealing for not being so hyperbolically bad. It’s so staunchly middle-of-the-road in every aspect that you can’t muster up the energy to hate it, but rather sit through it numbly as shot after shot filters by of one character after another ferreting around in the dark. There are a few instances of quality here and there that patch up the threadbare entertainment value enough that I don’t hate the film to any thorough degree, but it’s an awfully dog-eared entry in the genre, to say the least.

The editing is challenging in the way that digesting a week-old hard boiled egg is challenging: epic length shots of wandering bodies are jaggedly interspersed with rapid-fire close-ups of indeterminate patches of dirt with no discernible geography. It’s like a high school student’s final project where they’re attempting to pull a David Lynch but they fell asleep twenty minutes into Eraserhead. There are some admittedly pretty damn majestic silhouette shots of the killer, but beyond that everything on the filmmaking is basely incompetent.

The gore, usually the saving grace of such subpar backwoods splatter films, is likewise inconsistent. The vast majority of the kills look like a host of particularly dull, all-red Jackson Pollock pieces with two exceptions. When Tony Fish is hung from a tree, his eyes roll back and his face turns purple, in a reliable paroxysm of asphyxiation (which may or may not have had something to do with the fact that he was actually choking himself), and the grand finale in Madman Marz’s house of horrors is reliably gruesome. But it’s all too little too late after 80 minutes of grueling drudgery.

Even the acting, the last bastion of the ironic slasher watcher, isn’t quite vapid enough to mock, though I wouldn’t go so far as to call anybody genuinely good. I have too much respect for the virtue of truth and the purity of my soul to do that. Only Ross is up to anything remarkably inane, looking like she was dumped on set after major dental surgery and was performing through a dopamine haze. And Ehlers is the only cast member that attempts to do anything at all above and beyond the script, barreling around the screen and grunting like a gorilla – an effect which combines with Marz’s inexplicable rat claws to create an utterly baffling effect. But at least it has any sort of impact, which is more than I can say for any of his castmates.

Out of all the slasher villains I’ve seen, Madman Marx is voted Most Likely to Appear in a Production of The Nutcracker.

The one truly, indelibly, unmistakably remarkable thing about Madman is this; it has perhaps the loosest grip on reality of any early 80’s slasher I’ve ever seen. Sure, late 80’s flicks get goofy and gloopy and campy, but that was in the genre’s desperate, decadent phase. Madman is a straightforward, stone-faced slasher packed to the gills with some of the most ludicrous, out of context scenes that have ever been gathered in one place. This is the film’s saving grace.

The film is full of people discovering severed heads in car engines, hiding from killers in fridges, and blowing raspberries at hillocks, all riddled with dialogue pulled from the greatest hits of fortune cookies, like “the biggest test is letting go,” or, “play the game with a fair heart and look on.” But the pièce de résistance is a three minute sex scene in a hot tub where two characters revolve around each other for two full minutes, grinning like idiots and spinning merrily in their orbits while a trashy jazz song penned and performed by the actor himself squeaks and croons in the background before they finally converge and make their way underwater.

You can’t make this stuff up. None of it’s played for laughs, and it’s all mystifyingly riveting. Unfortunately, it’s all sandwiched between those ponderously dull stalk and slash sequences, but if you’re the kind of person that I am, just reading that previous paragraph will give you an uncomfortably nasty itch that only Madman can scratch.

Plus Madman Marz has a ballad. Like Friend Hunter says, you can never go wrong with a ballad.

Killer: Madman Marz (Paul Ehlers)

Final Girl: Betsy (Gaylen Ross)

Best Kill: Stacy is decapitated with a car hood.

Sign of the Times: Seriously. Denim coats lined with white fur were outlawed after 1989.

Scariest Moment: Madman Marz swipes at Dave with an axe after he discovers TP’s body.

Weirdest Moment: I want to frame that Jacuzzi scene and put it on my wall.

Champion Dialogue: “I love to feel the flames devour the wood. Who says there’s no beauty in destruction?”

Body Count: 10

1. Mrs. Marz is axed.
2. Baby Boy Marz is axed.
3. Baby Girl Marz is axed.
4. Dippy has his throat slashed.
5. TP is hung.
6. Dave is decapitated with an axe.
7. Stacy is decapitated with a car hood.
8. Bill has his back broken.
9. Ellie is axed in the chest and shot in the face.
10. Betsy is impaled on a meat hook.

TL;DR: Madman is a dull, threadbare slasher slog redeemed only by a slate of inexplicably bizarre scenes.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1374

Census Bloodbath: They Must Be Working For The Skin Trade

Year: 1981

Director: Michael Laughlin

Cast: Michael Murphy, Dan Shor, Fiona Lewis

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

It’s a miracle that any Australian films get made at all, let alone in the slasher genre, let alone relatively good entries in the slasher genre. So let’s take a moment to respect how incredibly improbable it is that Strange Behavior (AKA Dead Kids) even exists.

I’ll wait.

That said, Strange Behavior is about as far from the slasher formula as it’s possible to get while still being on the same general framework. It’s like somebody gave the Australians a car chassis and they built a mechanical elephant.

Strange Behavior centers around the small town of Galesburg, (cough) Illinois. Pete Brady (Dan Shor) is a high school senior and the son of the sheriff, John (Michael Murphy of Shocker). Pete doesn’t know why, but John is strangely resistant to letting him apply to the local university, to the point of refusing to give him money for the application fee. His friend Oliver (Marc McClure of Freaky Friday) tips him off about a behavioral research program at the college’s psychology department that will give him cash quick and Pete agrees to check it out.

What Olivern neglects to tell Pete is that this research program, led by the beautiful and wicked Dr. Parkinson (Fiona Lewis) is brainwashing teens into murderous acts by stabbing them in the eyes with syringes, with the final target being Pete’s own father, who wanted to destroy the department’s program years ago when their experiments ended up killing his wife. This is the final revenge of the murderous mad scientist Dr. LeSange (Arthur Dignam), whose motives seem rather small-minded for a man who can make anybody do anything he wants.

I guess it’s the simple things in life that really matter.

The most striking thing about Strange Behavior is that its screenplay is almost supernaturally well-constructed. Every piece of it fits together perfectly, forward and backward, in ways both obvious and subtle. Foreshadowing and payoffs twirl together in a delicate dance, but it never asks more of the viewer than they can handle. You could write textbooks off the thing.

The film was penned by Bill Condon, who would go on to make a name for himself with films like Gods and Monsters, Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh, and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1. Hey, we can’t all be Spielberg. In addition to his deft plotting (which hews more toward a sci-fi/small town soap structure with a smattering of slasher kills for flavor), Condon leaves us with a variety of simple, but shaded characters that make the setting feel incredibly present. The film lives in its tiny character interactions, building the relationships between the townspeople and quietly curating a picturesque American idyll before it begins to heartily wrench it apart.

When it finally gets around to doing this, it’s not particularly terrifying, but that comes with the territory. The slasher genre was so well worn by even that point in 1981 that any variations, while welcome, were still about as scary as a glass of warm milk. It’s odd to say this about a film where a character slits his own wrists to a jangling Tangerine Dream soundtrack, but Strange Behavior is soothing. It’s comfort horror: not bad, not great. It fills you up and keeps you warm. But it doesn’t scare you or turn your stomach.

Unless you’re deathly afraid of bro perms.

Everything about Strange Behavior, save its slasher savant screenplay, coasts along at a level just a tick above “acceptable.” The cinematography is crisp, clear, and professional. It makes sure we can see everything but doesn’t try any funny business in the meantime. The sets are similarly wrought. They are provided the exact amount of dressing needed to believe that they might house actual humans, then they call it day (save for one diner set, which looks like someone spilled pink puffy paint on everything so they had to clear away the props, but an emergency forced them to film that day anyway).

The typical campiness of the 80’s slashers (which wouldn’t kick into high gear for another year or so) was also at a low ebb, save for a strange, fully choreographed dance sequence to “Lightnin’ Strikes” that I can’t for the life of me find any reasonable explanation for other than the fact that Bill Condon liked that song. At least the deaths are decent. They’re not particularly numerous or gory, but they’re reasonably chilling, especially considering the unwilling nature of their murderers. And two chase sequences in particular muster up some crumbs of tension – one as a teen girl is harassed in a swimming pool and the killer cuts the string of beads that she clings to, the other as a housekeeper discovers a body and learns that the killer’s still in the house.

By far the biggest actual flaw of the film is the shift in focus from Pete to John in the third act. Scriptwise, it’s an interesting reversal, but this forces the emotional crux of the film to fall on the shoulders of Michael Murphy, who is by far its weakest actor. Imagine if all of a sudden during the climax of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Audrey Hepburn stepped out for a smoke break and Mickey Rooney took her place. It’s something like that. But he’s not enough to totally knock the movie off its feet.

In short, Strange Behavior isn’t a film for anybody who wants to have a great time at their slumber party. For miserable lowlifes like me, it’s a breath of fresh air, but otherwise it’s nothing special.

Killer: A variety of teenagers orchestrated by Dr. LeSange (Arthur Dignam)

Final Girl: Pete Brady (Dan Shor)

Best Kill: Mrs. Haskell’s throat is slit as she describes her killer over the telephone.

Sign of the Times: Pete attends a costume party with an I Dream of Jeannie and a Flying Nun in attendance.

Scariest Moment: Pete pees blood after passing out in the diner.

Weirdest Moment: Pete walks into the bathroom bare-ass naked while his father is getting ready for work.

Champion Dialogue: “You couldn’t get an ‘A’ on Sesame Street.”

Body Count: 5

1. Brian has his eyes gouged out with a scalpel.
2. Waldo is stabbed in the throat.
3. Timothy has his hand cut off.
4. Mrs. Haskell is stabbed in the back and has her throat slit.
5. Dr. LeSange is stabbed in the neck.

TL;DR: Strange Behavior is an off book, only decent slasher.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1096

They Don't Move In Herds

Year: 1997

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Vince Vaughn

Run Time: 2 hours 9 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG -13

In between the release of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park in 1993 and The Lost World: Jurassic Park in 1997, two very important things happened: 1) Jurassic Park became the highest grossing film worldwide, and 2) Schindler’s List. Both of these explain, in turn, exactly why The Lost World exists and why it’s not so great.

Much like Scream 3, which I also happened to review recently, The Lost World is a sequel helmed by an auteur that had, quite frankly, checked out. Spielberg had already mentally moved on to his, arty, Important phase and was only directing the film out of a beleaguered sense of commitment to the fact that – if the franchise had to be screwed up, it might as well be by him.

It’s the popcorn movie version of senioritis.

The Lost World is helmed by returning screw-up Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum), the rock star mathematician – an oxymoron which could only exist in a Crichton novel. In a scene that’s clunkily written and contradictorily sequelly in the most threadbare, irritating way possible, he learns from the defamed billionaire John Hammond (a palpably bored Richard Attenborough) that not only is there another island of dinosaurs (on which the monstrous creatures have roamed free for four years, only recently revealing themselves by attacking a young Camilla Belle in a desperate attempt to prevent her from remaking When a Stranger Calls), but his girlfriend Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore) is already there, part of a crack team that Hammond has put together to study these creatures in the wild.

When Malcolm joins the team along with Nick Van Owen (Vince Vaughn) and Dead Guy (Dino Meat), he only does so to rescue Sarah and get the hell out of there. Unbeknownst to him, his daughter Kelly (Vanessa Lee Chester) has snuck along for the ride because she feels neglected. The lesson here is the becoming an Important Filmmaker does not make the daddy issues go away.

Once on the island, Ian and the team discover that Hammond’s company InGen, which has been taken over by his nephew Peter Ludlow (Arliss Howard), is leading a safari team to capture the animals and take them to the mainland and create a zoo, because that idea worked so well the first time. So it’s Good Science vs. Bad Capitalism until Big Scary Monsters get pissed and start eating everything that moves, leading the groups to band together in an attempt to escape the island intact.

Also, Sarah is studying the parenting habits of T-Rexes because dinosaurs can have daddy issues too.

The Lost World is to Jurassic Park as a paper cut is to an axe wound. It’s much shallower, less visually interesting, and you can make a big deal about it if you feel like it, but it’s just not the same. It’s an utterly flat film. Where the original comes alive and crackles with tension at nearly every second past the hour mark, The Lost World squelches along, reading a newspaper, pausing only at intervals to look up and remember that it’s supposed to be doing something and ramp up the tension once more.

The film is wracked with a profound sense of weariness, going through the motions without ever challenging itself to be something more than a routine popcorn pic, save for two sequences. One of these sequences I have the profound and annoying pleasure of being able to name drop: My father was the film’s liaison from Fleetwood, the company which provided the mobile home that hangs off the cliff in the only truly memorable scene. So you’re welcome. Without him the film would have nothing to recommend itself save a raptor attack so short it could buy ad time on the Super Bowl without breaking the bank.

Industry jokes always kill in these reviews, you’re welcome.

Of course, John Williams has the audacity to score all of this – even the pulse-pounding, genuinely thrilling RV sequence – with some hideously limp, sanctimoniously light bongo music. It is perhaps the single worst tune the man has ever composed, and I’m counting any particularly on-key flatulence. What the film hasn’t already torn to shreds in terms of tension, characters (Ian Malcolm’s behavioral traits are put in a blender and almost completely rearranged for this film), and logic (Did I not mention that they bring a T-Rex to San Diego? Well, they bring a T-Rex to San Diego), are blasted into smithereens by this woeful, dreadful score and flushed straight down the U-bend.

With that out of my system, it must be said that, for all my complaining, this film is only truly bad by the high standards set by Jurassic Park. Except for that John Williams score. Screw that John Williams score and the whimsical island mule it rode in on. It’s a disappointment that The Lost World is nothing more than a popcorn movie, but it’s reasonably diverting and at the very least, it’s not as woefully idiotic as Jurassic World.

Again the film is well shot (this time by long-time Spielberg compatriot/best friend bracelet-sharer Janusz Kaminski), with well placed shafts of lights delicately playing amidst the dusky forest. Again the dinosaurs are well realized, though none have the sheer weight and terror provided by pre-Schindler Spielberg’s keen direction. Only the effects on the raptors are in any way improved from Stan Winston’s master class in animatronics.

And finally we get some goddamn stegosauruses!

The thing about The Lost World is that it’s outrageously uneven, which is why this lumpy review is jerking from place to place like a scooter on a gravel driveway. There’s a dollop of cheery humor here, a dash of undercooked gore there… It’s like Spielberg got out the Jurassic Park mix packets and was busy whisking the ingredients together in the bowl when he noticed the he’d accidentally thrown away the box with the instructions on it.

There’s some jabs at a theme in the beginning (Malcolm is only a good boyfriend/father when he can make dramatic gestures, not in the everyday things) that get completely lost by the finale (a T-Rex visits a swimming pool!), the acting is largely decent but totally forgettable (Moore hasn’t quite yet settled into her talents, and Chester is at least more palatable than the Murphy siblings), and the action is shallow but present.

The most I can say about The Lost World is that it’s there, and I don’t begrudge it of that. It’s an absolutely workable film and sometimes that’s all a film is. It’s not awful. It’s not great. It’s not Spielberg, that’s for darn sure. And that’s why it’s so painful to watch, despite its blandly pleasant qualities. The loss of what could have been is so plainly, palpably there, throbbing behind the screen.

Oh well, at least they never made any more of these.

Ah. Damn.

TL;DR: The Lost World: Jurassic Park is a disappointment after the high standards set by the first film.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1185

Reviews In This Series
Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1993)
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1997)
Jurassic Park III (Johnston, 2001)
Jurassic World (Trevorrow, 2015)
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (Bayona, 2018)

Census Bloodbath: Slash Fiction

To check out our podcast episode about this very film, please click here.

To check out our interview with Stephanie Hodge, who played Mona in this film, please click here.

To read the crossover review of this film over at Kinemalogue, click here.

Year: 1989

Director: Tibor Takacs

Cast: Jenny Wright, Clayton Rohner, Randall William Cook

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

1989 was the year that closed the gates of the non-postmodern, non-remake slasher film for good. It was the year of the worst Friday the 13th film of the 80’s, the worst Halloween film of the 80’s, and the worst Nightmare on Elm Street ever (remakes notwithstanding). It was the year of Slash Dance, Death Spa, Moonstalker, and Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge. And yet, in the midst of all this, a film called I, Madman came into being.

I, Madman is a cerebral, stylish offshoot of the Nightmare onElm Street paranormal vein of slasherdom that refrains from merely being a callous rip-off. It’s gorgeous, reasonably well acted, exciting, and the inspiration for the title of my 2014 horror-comedy short film, iMadman.

The slasher is dead. Long live the slasher.

I, Madman tells the story of a story. Virginia (Jenny Wright) is a young actress living in Hollywood who loves to read. She finds herself freaked out but compelled by a pulp horror novel by a man named Malcolm Brand and searches the used bookstore where she works for a copy of his other book, I, Madman. When one arrives at her doorstep, she assumes it was sent by her coworker, the sarcastic, horny Mona (Stephanie Hodge) – the human equivalent of the worm at the bottom of a tequila bottle – who has a museum-worthy perm and eyeshadow that looks like someone hit her in the face with a brick and the bruises are just now fading.

Virginia cracks open the book and the book cracks back. When the titular Madman (Randall William Cook) – a lovelorn but ugly psycho who cuts off all his facial features in order to impress a pretty actress – begins to stalk and kill Virginia’s acquaintances in real life, collecting bits of their faces to win her love, she tries to convince her homicide detective boyfriend Richard (Clayton Rohner of April Fool’s Day) that she knows what’s actually going on. Although he slightly begins to believe her when she accurately predicts the next few murders, an erroneous assumption and her frequent tearful exclamations that the book is nonfiction start to discredit her in the eyes of his boss.

Horror fans get no respect.

When I, Madman is good, it’s absolutely incredible, especially considering its pedigree (1989 was no time to be thoughtful or original, or in fact, a film). Perhaps the cause of this is that, while it still remains in structure and essence a slasher, it is neither a body count film nor an attempt at a Gran Guignol gorefest, at least where the kills are concerned. Removing the raison-detre of the derelict slasher genre allowed the film to focus all its energies on the killer-Final Girl relationship, creating a truly macabre, classical story at its core.

The film is about fiction intruding on the reality of a woman with an overactive imagination. She fears it, but she can’t help herself from going back to it, mirroring many people’s relationships with the horror genre itself.

In achieving its more cerebral ends, I, Madman goes to great lengths of style and panache. Just showing some chick reading over and over again would be about as boring as an ex-C-SPAN moderator reunion tour, so the film punches it up, showing Virginia entering the fantasy world of the books as one of the characters with seamless editing and costume/set changes. In fact, the film begins on one such scene depicting [SPOILERS] a mad scientist’s hybrid jackal boy creation, a supremely startling Claymation creature and a jarring introduction into what was seemingly a straightforward slasher film.

As the film goes on and these fictional, stylized settings begin to clash with the gritty Hollywood reality, the film outdoes itself in an explosion of neo-noir spectacle, all deep focus sets with billowing curtains, smoky exteriors cut with hard shafts of light, and interiors lit from the outside with sticky pink neon or cherry red police lights through slats in the blinds. Shadows and silhouettes dominate the madman’s world, which is like an issue of Dick Tracy Meets the Phantom of the Opera.

It’s enough to make Candyman jealous.

And when the film finally gets down to the gore, it is rather terrific. The kills themselves are mostly implied, offscreen, or in silhouette, but every ghastly act is reflected in the piecemeal collection of the Madman’s face, which evolves from a pitted mass of flesh to a Frankensteinian puzzle of sewn-together grue, expertly applied to himself by FX supervisor Randall William Cook, who would go on to make hi craft count in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, of all things.

The man’s a double threat, because his Madman is a legitimately menacing monstrosity, harking back to the Lon Cheney silent era of looming, melodramatic villains. He’s not a trained actor and, as such, doesn’t one hundred percent physically inhabit the role  he runs a little bit like an ostrich in swim flippers – but for the most part he does a remarkable job in a mostly remarkable cast.

Jenny Wright is a solid anchor, luminously beautiful yet sharp and self-motivated with a heavy amount of open vulnerability. And Clayton Rohner is decent, though he’s mostly eye candy – one more remarkable thing about I, Madman is that – while there’s actually no nudity at all, it exploits Rohner far more than any of its actresses. I thank it on the grounds of feminism and personal taste. The true standout of the cast is – surprisingly – Stephanie Hodge, a comedian whose Mona provides a terrific biting edge of comic relief and whose chemistry with Wright provides one of the most genuine friendships I’ve ever seen in a slasher film.

Three cheers for Mona. Sorry about the outfit jokes.

I, Madman plugs along for quite a while being pretty extraordinary until –seemingly for no reason – it sputters and stalls. It doesn’t get bad. I, Madman is not at any point a bad movie. It just devolves into a woefully generic sort of police procedural topped with a fantastical nonsense finale with a great sense of set dressing but no clue how to edit a confrontation in close quarters. A half hour of dull material followed by an ambitious but sloppy ending isn’t enough to derail the stylish, intelligent slasher that is I, Madman, but it’s certainly enough to knock it down from top marks.

I would highly recommend the film for anyone looking to dip a toe in the weirder end of 80’s horror without blowing their faces off with body axes and lamprey monsters, because with its innate sense of style and class in its storytelling, I, Madman is a pretty decently crafted film qua films, not just among its leprous peers languishing at the end of the decade. Oh, and if you’re worried that it might be scary, it’s not. Slasher films are never scary.

Killer: Malcolm Brand (Randall William Cook)

Final Girl: Virginia (Jenny Wright)

Best Kill: A shattered window pane falls and guillotines the jackal boy in half.

Sign of the Times: I would take this opportunity to make fun of Mona’s makeup again, but honestly it’s more jarring to see people smoking indoors.

Scariest Moment: The Madman reveals his mutilated nose and mouth to Virginia in her kitchen.

Weirdest Moment: Any moment with the Claymation jackal boy.

Champion Dialogue: “If it will make you feel any better, first thing after breakfast I’ll cut myself shaving.”

Body Count: 7; 1 in a book, 6 in real life, if you count the Jackal Boy and the Madman as actually being real, which I do.

1. Hotel manager is killed offscreen by the jackal boy. 
2. Collette is scalped. 
3. Piano Guy has his ears cut off. 
4.  Lenny has his nose cut off.  
5.  Mona has her lips cut off. 
6.  Jackal Boy is guillotined in half by a window pane.  
7. Madman is launched out the window and explodes into book pages.

TL;DR: I, Madman is a stylish, cerebral slasher with a saggy finale.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1364