Census Bloodbath: Mad Macks

Year: 1981

Director: Richard Franklin

Cast: Stacy Keach, Jamie Lee Curtis, Marion Edward

Run Time: 1 hour 41 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG

It’s a darn-tootin’ shame when I pop on one of my scheduled slasher flicks and it turns out to be a less-than exemplary purveyor of the form. No masked killer, no gore, no body count – it’s enough to make me worry whether or not I made a misstep in my research and accidentally spliced a romantic comedy into my calendar or something.

Road Games is one of those films. It’s about as far from a slasher as you can get while still maintaining the general formula and without, say, starring Meg Ryan. But it compounds the problem by being one of the most genuinely interesting flicks of the flock, much like the worrisomely categorized Motel Hell from way back yonder in 1980. Why oh why do the best movies in this project have to be the ones that turn themselves away from slasherdom?

I mean, we all know the answer to that but I’m electing to ignore it.

Road Games tells the story of the lonesome trucker Patrick Quid (Stacy Keach), who drives he highways of Australia (oh yeah, did I mention that this flick is Australian? They had a surprising wealth of slasher output in the early 80’s) delivering meat, entertaining himself by playing the harmonica along with the radio, playing word games, imagining stories for the other drivers along the road, and engaging in comic banter with his dog, Boswell the Dingo. However, his games begin to go sour when he picks up a hitchhiker who spots a man digging a hole on the side of the road during a game of 20 Questions. The very same man who he happened to see at a motel last night with a beautiful young woman who has since gone missing. In the very same town where a maniac is on the loose cutting up beautiful young women.

Forget 20 Questions. Now Quid only has two: Is this man in the green van a murderer, and will he strike again? On the road he picks up a girl who he calls Hitch (Jamie Lee Curtis) and together they speculate on the identity of the man, chasing the van from truck stop to truck stop along the desolate outback en route to Perth. When Hitch herself is captured, Quid becomes the prime suspect and he finds himself on the run to catch the culprit, save Hitch’s life, and clear his name before the meat in the back thaws.

The meat delivery business is a very high steaks industry.

As you can probably surmise from my description, Road Games is a goofy road movie that slowly boils into a pulse-pounding crime thriller though it’s hardly a dyed-in-the-wool slasher. It’s terrifically strange, strangely terrific, and uniquely Australian, but it’s slasher elements don’t so much occur within the narrative as they do around it. The way that these elements are integrated into Quid’s restless jokes and games is superbly piano wire thrilling, but it’s a through-the-looking-glass entry in the genre to say the least.

The quickest description that comes to mind is that Road Games is like National Lampoon’s take on Duel. Its loony outback sense of humor seeps in through every pore, from the Mont Python-esque names given to its roadside ensemble (who Quid sees time and time again in different combinations at various rest stops along his journey – a clever, realistic touch) like Captain Careful or Sneezy Rider to the casual banter between Curtis and Keach regarding the murderer’s methods. It dances a little too close to the keen knife edge of wackiness in some slapstick scenes, but for the most part the atmosphere of effortless comedy propels the thriller elements straight to the core when they do arrive.

If any single person is responsible for the success of this highly unusual thematic pairing, it’s Stacy Keach. A large portion of Road Games is what can only be described as a one man show, and he has the ability to tune into the needs of each scene with the ease of a skilled chef knowing exactly how much spice to add without overpowering the soup. And naturally Jamie Lee Curtis is great too, but her hardly-a-cameo fifteen minute role is almost more thankless than her appearance as a headshot in Halloween 4. No, this is Keach’s vehicle and he drives it like a well-oiled machine. I’m genuinely dismayed that he didn’t’ work ore outside of the realm of comedy, because his Robin Williams meets Dennis Weaver mien is really working for me.

I’m glad I write about slashers. There’s no way a romantic comedy project would provide this many startling combinations of adjectives.

Of course, if Road Games were the glistening slice of pure cinema perfection that I’ve thus far made it out to be, we’d be talking about it in terms of awards buzz or in conversation with the rest of the crime thriller classics, instead of here in my lowly backlog of slasher reviews. Because no, it ain’t perfect. It’s ramshackle, rough around the edges, and unmistakably Less Than. Whatever it has, there’s never enough. There’s not enough gore, not enough Jamie Lee, not enough incident… It’s terrific at what it does, but it’s low budget and low key, content to stay in the slow lane and ruminate while chomping its cud. This is certainly not a detraction, but it prevents it from entering the upper echelon of true classic films.

That said, for what he had to work with, director Richard Franklin makes his film sing. Although the first two acts are aesthetically competent (smashing lonely wide shots and Duel-esque glimpses at the speedometer), in the third all hell breaks loose. Franklin opens Pandora’s box, unleashing every ounce of directorial talent at his disposal all at once in a glorious visual crescendo. Highway imagery (concrete, glass, and rushing metal) collides with organic matter in a sickeningly beautiful manner, most memorably in a shot where Quid’s eyes are drowned out by the glow of the van’s taillights, giving him demonically mechanical red eyes. His descent into madness is captured by the frenetic, magnetic imagery on display in hat is one of the most visually inventive sequences of the whole year

I liked it a lot, can you tell?

Really, all of these things merely endeavor to make Road Games a more confusing film. The more I fall in love with it, the stranger and more alienating it gets. And while I can admit that it’s far from a masterpiece, it holds an iron grip over my heart. Really, all I can say is that you won’t regret checking this one out for yourself. Don’t expect a slasher, don’t expect to be scared, don’t expect, well… anything. Just get ready for a wild and dusty ride.

Killer: Smith or Jones (Grant Page)

Final Girl: Hitch (Jamie Lee Curtis), sort of

Sign of the Times: People still hitchhiker instead of just using Uber.

Best Kill: Not really applicable, but the girl who died was playing guitar naked, if that’s of particular interest to you.

Scariest Moment: Quid keeps watch on who he thinks is the killer in the restroom while Hitch sneaks into his van.

Weirdest Moment: There’s a mural on a rest stop wall depicting soldiers massacring aborigines. Nobody seems to care.

Champion Dialogue: “No, it’s 'Q-U-I-D'. 'D' as in 'death to young girls'."

Body Count: 2

1. Naked Guitar Chick is garroted.
2. Some Girl is decapitated and split in half offscreen.

TL;DR: Road Games is a surreally strange, goofy thriller yet an utterly effective one.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1279

Simon Says

Year: 2015
Director: Joel Edgerton
Cast: Jason Bateman, Rebecca Hall, Joel Edgerton
Run Time: 1 hour 48 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

Overhype is a very dangerous thing. It has led to generations of Citizen Kane haters and more incensed comments on Kubrick message boards than there are frames in his films. Overhype can poison the mind and disillusion the soul, and I urge you not to let its sickly sway take hold of you. I would also like to politely point out that, per the Rotten Tomatoes algorithm, 100 reviewers giving a movie three stars out of five is enough to earn it a 93 percent rating. Sometimes a number is only math.

Apropos of nothing, I assure you, I have recently screened The Gift, the new stalker thriller out of the Blumhouse stable. The fewer trailers you’ve seen for it, the better. The fewer Blumhouse movies you’ve seen going into it, the better. The less you expect from it, the more it has to offer.

Like a Secret Santa exchange. Who knows, a $5 TJ Maxx gift card might be useful in an emergency.

The story of The Gift is a relatively simple one. Chicago couple Robyn (Rebecca Hall) and Simon (Jason Bateman) have recently moved to California, close to Simon’s hometown, because he got a new job at a big Corporation doing Business. If he does enough Meetings, he can win enough Handshakes to advance to the next level and earn a Promotion. Meanwhile Robyn is left at home with the frustratingly fruitless and intangible job of trying to start a family. When they run into Gordo (director Joel Edgerton), an old classmate of Simon’s, she invites him over despite her husband’s protestations, thus beginning a brief and uncomfortable friendship.

Over the course of several weeks, Gordo bestows the couple with increasingly expensive gifts, perturbing Simon to the point that he politely suggests that they maybe never see each other again. Afterward, they begin to experience strange phenomena that might be unrelated but may just be Gordo exacting his revenge. During the course of this stress, Robyn discovers that there may be more to her husband than meets the eyes and her entire life is cast into doubt as she delves into the murky past between Gordo and Simon.

It’s more than just embarrassing yearbook photos.

Really, The Gift is typical Blumhouse fare through and through, no matter how much they try to demurely hide behind their “BH” label. There’s not a lot to differentiate the film from the nuts and bots of films like The Purge or Mockingbird, stripped of their horror trappings and sold for scrap. The only true break from the formula is that – aside from two dastardly tawdry bargain bin jump scares – the film focuses exclusively on interpersonal drama rather than thrills and spills.

This is where the film truly garners its reputation of “really not as bad as I thought it was going to be.” Jason Bateman has made a habit of playing barely concealed douchebags, and that sharply honed skill comes in handy when it comes time to cast doubt on his intentions. And he’s flanked by a pair of equally committed performers who provide an emotional human core beneath the slickly impersonal online real estate tour cinematography (which only once arranges a truly striking image – Bateman bathed in the glow of his car’s brake light). And as the plot unspools, a shocking surfeit of character details surface on both sides of the table, giving the audience quite a bit to chew on thematically. It’s a good thing, too, because the thriller elements of The Gift are about as dry and malnutrituous as a mouthful of sawdust.

It’s perhaps not a resounding success, considering that The Gift is first and foremost geared toward psycho thriller fanatics. Bu the sad fact is that the film’s most slack and ill-used elements are also its raison-d'être. Gordo’s stalking is maddeningly ill-paced, hardly escalating above a whisper before it’s cut off at the knees in favor of an abortive subplot that the movie pursues with cheery abandon, before chucking all its plot threads in a blender and wrapping up using the precise wrong device as its emotional lynchpin. Words can’t express how ineffably miscalculated this film’s third act is, and how resolutely it bungles the pristinely entertaining dramatic beats that drive the story up to that point.

It’s like a high school hookup: An hour of intense anticipation followed by a sloppy flurry of motion, a sudden unexpected mess, and embarrassed disappointment. And suddenly you’re out ten bucks on a date you’ll never get back.

The Gift has enough going on in its surprisingly humanistic screenplay to overcome its more egregious flaws and it’s a suitably effective debut for Edgerton, but let’s hope that his next film is all drama, no thrills. On purpose, I mean. If you go into The Gift with an open heart and mind there’s certainly plenty to enjoy, but don’t expect the second coming of Edward Cullen (cinema’s most accomplished stalker). It’s an easy breezy popcorn drama with the best Jason Bateman performance in several years, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

TL;DR: The Gift is a half-decent drama but an abortive thriller.

Rating: 7/10

Should I Spend Money On This? Don't feel obligated. They already made more than their budget back.

Word Count: 894

Census Bloodbath: Happy Birthday To Me

To listen to our podcast episode about this very film, please click here.

Year: 1983

Director: Jim Sotos

Cast: Dana Kimmell, Bo Hopkins, Susan Strasberg

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Today is the day that I turn 21 years old. Considering that I don’t drink, I decided that the next best thing to get me into that emotionally battered, physically nauseated state was a slasher movie from 1983. So here we are at Sweet 16, a flick filmed in the subgenre’s Golden Age year of 1981 but shelved as audience interest started to wane in the hopes that a resurgence was right around the corner.

It wasn’t. Sweet 16 was unceremoniously dumped into the world two years later, during perhaps the single worst year for slasher cinema until the genre well and truly keeled over and died in 1989.

At least its lack of success spared us Sweet 17: B.Y.O.Body.

Sweet 16, for what it’s worth, at least has a unique premise for a meat and potatoes slasher. When pretty city girl Melissa (Aleisa Shirley)- and by pretty I mean literally caked in make-up every second of every day whether she’s sleeping, taking a shower, or even putting on make-up – moves into a small Texas town with her parents [the famed archaeologist Dr. John Morgan (Patrick Macnee) and Joanne (Susan Strasberg AKA the deliciously named Miss Viola Davis from another notable birthday slasher, 1981’s Bloody Birthday), who was born and bred in this town with her sister], all the boys are dying to go out with her. Or rather, they’re dying in general, because every boy she hooks up with ends up at the receiving end of a mad killer’s flashing blade before the night is through.

The local hicks blame the citizens of the nearby Indian reservation, namely the ancient Greyfeather (Henry Wilcoxon) and his grandson Jason longshadow (Don Shanks, who has the slashing distinction of portraying Michael Myers in Halloween 5 as well as appearing in Silent Night, Deadly Night and the Native American shaman slasher The Ghost Dance), leading to ugly racial tension about town that comes bubbling to a boil on the evening of Melissa’s sixteenth birthday party.

But what’s a birthday bash without a little lynching among friends?

Sweet 16 does not put its best foot forward. As a slasher, it is a daft, crummy mess and for the first twenty minutes or so it shows no indication that it might change its ways. Its muddy cinematography and cheap sets give way to even muddier night exteriors and even cheaper gore, which is invariably of the lazy Psycho-esque, “knife raise – scream – cut away” variety without a teaspoon of Hitchcock’s flair or talent. Or ability to see anything in the frame. 

The truly upsetting thing is that early on, while reading a mystery novel, a character inquires how one might murder somebody with a rake, and then the film has the sheer foolhardy audacity to go ahead and kill exactly zero people with zero rakes. There’s not even a gardening scene. It just carries on with its dishwater knife twaddle like it didn’t clearly have an ace up its sleeve.

It’s a testament to my perseverance that I haven’t yet set my hair on fire during this project.

Luckily, Sweet 16 does have an ace up its sleeve, though it’s completely unrelated to the woebegone slasher twiddling its thumbs in the wings. That ace is Marci Burke (Dana Kimmell of Friday the 13th Part 3: 3D), the daughter of the local Sheriff (Bo Hopkins of Uncle Sam). She’s the reader of the aforementioned mystery novel and a Nancy Drew-ish curiosity-seeker who would much rather accompany her father on visits to murder sites than go to the mall or play with dolls. She’s spunky, funny, and the amount of rouge blast-sanded onto her cheeks to de-agify her is frankly riveting.

Unfortunately, as happens more often than not with the film, Sweet 16 fails to follow through on the promise of a fun slasher whodunit about a young woman solving the mystery of the murders in her town. But at the very least, Marci’s presence elevates it from crappy slasher to mildly diverting crappy slasher, and that’s a distinction I do not make lightly. And as it turns out, the mystery does have a half decent reveal, even though it’s completely obvious to anyone with a veteran’s ear for clunky dialogue.

Marci and that reveal are the only genuinely good things about the movie however, save a comic relief records clerk and a shot of a moonlit lake so beautifully composed, it makes up every scrap of publicity material for the film. Beyond that it’s just a jumble of half-digested ideas that fail to come to fruition: not enough boys die by Melissa’s seductions to give the mystery any juice, the racial undercurrent is only valuable as a red herring rather than any sort of cultural statement, and nobody gets killed with a freaking rake.

I’d even be happy with a Stooge-esque face smashing. Cut me some slack here.

I think one of the most essential rules of thumb when telling apart bad movies from the good ones (it’s harder than you think – they’re still making Transformers sequels) is to listen to the incidental music. That’s the music that plays in the non-monumental moments which aren’t as high profile as the main theme (which, incidentally, is a deliciously syrupy lyrical ballad entitled “Melissa” that calls to mind a caramelized Air Supply B-side). Let me give you an example – in a steamy love scene between Melissa and her new beau, Johnny, (Glenn Withrow), listen closely: What you hear is nothing. Complete, staticky silence.

That’s a telltale sign of a bad movie. You know, that and its dull plodding pacing, the outrageously uncharismatic kills, and utter lack of atmosphere. Sweet 16 couldn’t scare the pee out of a baby and that’s pretty much all those cherubic little bastards know how to do. It slightly attempts to make up for it deficiencies with a thin sheen of camp (especially a staccato shuttering zoom effect during its horror sequences that dates it more accurately than a calendar printed in the corner of the screen would), but it’s too little too late.

Sweet 16 isn’t the worst slasher one could find themselves chancing upon on a lonely video shelf, but it’s a film I can’t imagine ever revisiting of my own volition. If you’re a sick freak like me looking for some classic slicing and dicing action to gift yourself with on your birthday, you’re better off sticking with tried-and-true titles like Happy Birthday to Me or even the killer kid flick Bloody Birthday.

Killer: [Joanne/Trisha Morgan (Susan Strasberg)]

Final Girl: Marci Burke (Dana Kimmell)

Best Kill: Not applicable. I’m still fuming about the rake thing.

Sign of the Times: Nearly every item of clothing is a precise shade of Violet Beauregarde blue.

Scariest Moment: Melissa’s mother screams in fear that her dead father is coming to get her.

Weirdest Moment: The sheriff attempts to research on the microfiche while the lonely records clerk lavishly describes the steak dinner they could be eating right about now.

Champion Dialogue: “Why does he always laugh when I propose?”

Body Count: 6 [uniquely, all men, except for the killer.]

1. Johnny is stabbed to death.
2. Tommy is stabbed to death.
3. Greyfeather is hung.
4. Billy is stabbed in the back.
5. Billy’s Friend is stabbed to death.
6. [Joanne/Trisha stabs herself in the gut.]

TL;DR: Sweet 16 is a dull slasher redeemed only by a unique teen character.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1258

Amazing Amy

Year: 2015

Director: Judd Apatow

Cast: Amy Schumer, Bill Hader, LeBron James

Run Time: 2 hours 5 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Fall to your trembling knees, peasants! The great Judd Apatow has returned to the director’s chair at long last, after a long period of cinematic drought, in which hardly any overgrown manchildren were foisted upon an unsuspecting public! Perhaps you detect a hint of irreverence here. It might interest you to know that I feel the man peaked as a director with The 40-Year-Old Virgin. It’s all downhill from here, folks.

Now, Trainwreck is certainly the most intriguing recent film of his directorial oeuvre for two reasons: 1) The script was not written by himself, and 2) the script was written by and stars a woman, Amy Schumer, 2015’s red-hot comedian. Both of these things are a first for Apatow and I respect his branching out.

Probably as a reaction to the heavy-duty misogynist accusations I leveled against him naught but last Monday. He works fast.

In Trainwreck, Amy (Amy Schumer) is a commitment-phobic purveyor of harlotry. While she sleeps her way through the Manhattan phone book, her job at a bro-y magazine sends her to interview Aaron (Bill Hader), a well-to-do sports physician. Despite her congenital hatred of sports and monogamy, they begin to fall in love of all things. How will these two crazy kids ever make it work?

Trainwreck pretty closely adheres to the Apatow ill-adjusted manchild formula, just copy-pasting a vagina where applicable. It’s well-worn territory and it falls prey to the exact same pitfalls as every other of his films, but with a new voice at the wheel of the script, at least the jokes feel fresh.

Though it must have taken years to clear out the odor of stale pot fumes.

“Yes, that’s all fine and dandy,” you say, tapping your well-manicured fingernails on your desk, “But here’s the important thing: Is Trainwreck funny?”

If you’re really in a hurry, I’ll give it to you straight: Yes. And your cuticles look great.

Alright, now that we’ve got those pushy, well-groomed bastards taken care of, let’s dive into things in a little more detail, shall we? There are a lot of laugh-out-loud funny moments in Trainwreck, some irreverent, some ribald, some just plain surreal, but the two funniest people in the film –Schumer and Hader – are woefully underserved by the script, Hader especially. His considerable talents are poured into what must be the Guinness world record holder for most skim milk, white bread, boring ass straight man role ever conceived, and Schumer keeps on forcing herself into prototypical rom-com scenarios, only occasionally managing to convince us that she isn’t enjoying herself.

The real standouts of the film are a variety of Apatowian fringe regulars (including my BFF Randall Park) and three utterly shocking, bewildering, and unrestrainedly hilarious, left-field performances from (in ascending order) John Cena, LeBron James, and Tilda “Motherf***ing Space Queen” Swinton. Cena pulls out all the stops in a fearless turn as Amy’s clueless musclehead boyfriend, James effortlessly switches between intimidating mountain lion and doe-eyed screwball as Aaron’s best friend, an Swinton is sharp as a tack and unrecognizable with laceratingly perfect comic timing as Amy’s acid-tongued boss.

Thus, in typical Judd fashion, does the comedy seep in from around the edges of the film instead of naturally flowing from the center. It’s a flawed, herky-jerky delivery system but it gets results.

Kind of like when I go bowling.

So, yes, Trainwreck is funny, which is pretty essential for any comedy (It’s nuggets of cinematic wisdom like this that keep my avid readers coming back). But when the film lunges toward treacly emotion, it stumbles. Much like Katherine Heigl in Knocked Up before her, Schumer proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that she has the acting chops to pull off the dramatic scenes that are handed to her on a silver platter, but fails to satisfactorily answer the question of why they’re there in the first place. Their sheer profusion bites into Trainwreck like a rabid dog, tearing its pacing to shreds and rendering its tight, generic plot periodically aimless, hopelessly unspooling past the two-hour mark.

Brevity is the soul of wit, and 125 minutes is the soul of making my damn bladder implode. If nobody gets on Apatow about his grotesquely overlong comedy run times soon, I’m going to have to go vigilante and sneak into his editing bay with a giant electromagnet to cull what I possibly can. But hey, Trainwreck is an alright time at the movies, even if it’s a longer one than you may have bargained for.

TL;DR: Trainwreck is overlong and generic, but features some terrific, out-of-left-field performances from unexpected actors.

Rating: 6/10

Should I Spend Money On This? Sure, grab a matinee. Movie theaters have free air conditioning.

Word Count: 806

It's Hard Out Here For A Pimp

Sharp-eyed readers may have noticed some of the movie posters schizophrenically flickering along the "Coming Soon" section of my blog's sidebar. Rest assured, everything truly is coming soon. "Soon" is an exquisitely relative term chosen for its very nebulousness. But over this summer, between work, the Scream 101 podcast (which I am very proud of), and the inordinate amount of movies that I have been watching, it's just been a struggle to prioritize which reviews to get out first according to the system of extremely complex algorithms I have set in place for myself.

My accountants are hard at work figuring things out and you can prepare for an onslaught of reviews like you've never witnessed before, but in the meantime, please enjoy these two mini-reviews for films that I watched recently, but about which I had only relatively minor thoughts to share.

Hustle & Flow

Year: 2005

Director: Craig Brewer

Cast: Terrence Howard, Taryn Manning, Taraji P. Henson

Run Time: 1 hour 56 minutes 

MPAA Rating: R

A small-town pimp thinks he has what it takes to make it in the hip hop business.

Some movies with that exact plot line are inspiring. Some are treacly and shrill. Most are painfully generic. But a very special few anchor themselves around a protagonist so vehemently, ho-slappingly unlikeable that you actively root against him. Perhaps this isn’t what Hustle & Flow was going for, but that’s at least what makes it interesting.

“Interesting” does not always mean “good,” but Hustle & Flow flirts with the combination when it’s not being nauseatingly misogynistic. Which is most of the time. You see, Mr. Pimp, played by the terrifyingly good Terrence Howard, lives with three of his hos, one of whom is pregnant, one of whom he kicks out on the street with her baby, and all of whom he menaces with precise regularity like the world’s most evil cuckoo clock. And then he turns around and records songs like “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” or “Whoop That Trick” about how these skanks need to understand that he’s actually a super sensitive guy who’s beating them for their own good. As he performs a job that they could easily do themselves. If they even wanted to. Which they don’t.

It’s tough to process the urge to strangle your protagonist with 8-track tape when you’re not watching a horror movie or some other genre actively meant to shock or horrify you. The really disheartening thing about Hustle & Flow is that it doesn’t seem to notice any of this. There’s an awe-inspiring level of cognitive dissonance going on between the Take the Lead/Freedom Writers story that it imagines it’s telling and the GTA XXI: Harlem Shake amorality that actually plays out onscreen. In the film’s most triumphant, romantic moment, a kiss between Howard and Taraji P. Henson, it’s hard not to think, “What, she suddenly forgot that the only reason he’s not forcing her to sleep with a stranger is that because she’s carrying another stranger’s baby so she’s damaged goods?” It’s not exactly Sleepless in Seattle.

As a character study, there is a mild degree of nuance, but the film is far more interested in exploring how the man’s ambitions and talent have led him to believe that he deserves instant success and the consequences of his realization that that’s not exactly how it works. The film’s acknowledgement of reality – that just being a good rapper is only a start to getting big, that there’s a lot of hard, thankless work involved, is its biggest strength.

Its second biggest strength is its setting, which effortlessly evokes the town’s poverty in simple, sad, beautiful details: a splash of garish neon in a rain puddle, water slowly dripping into buckets through the leaky roof of a strip club, and the ever-present, grotesquely un-Hollywood sheen of sweat that glistens on every performer, a la The Fighter or Do the Right Thing. And Howard is admittedly terrific, bolstered by strong, committed performances by his side-hos, Taryn Manning and Taraji P. Henson. But damn, is this film unpleasant to watch.

Rating: 6/10

Knocked Up

Year: 2007

Director: Judd Apatow

Cast: Seth Rogen, Katherine Heigl, Paul Rudd

Run Time: 2 hours, 9 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

An entertainment news presenter accidentally finds herself impregnated by an unemployed pothead.

Speaking of movies by noted misogynist filmmakers starring a pregnant woman and a less than credible romantic lead…

OK, obviously I took a lot of creative license with that description, but surely it hasn’t escaped the notice that in Judd Apatow’s parables of schlubby man-children learning about the splendors of adulthood and heteronormative pair-bonding, the women are vehicles for this transition more often than they are thinking, breathing, flesh-and-blood human beings. That said, Knocked Up is one of his better efforts, thought I believe I can be forgiven for slightly preferring Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

First and foremost, Knocked Up is funny. That’s the important thing, I suppose. However, much like Trainwreck (review pending) and many other flicks in his filmography, he film is funniest when Apatow throws open the floodgates on his massive stable of comic actors, allowing thrilling fringe performances from Jason Segel, Kristen Wiig, Ken Jeong, Adam Scott, Bill Hader, Charlyne Yi, Craig Robinson, and Alan Tudyk to wring laughs from the sidelines. In the midst of such a squall, Heigl and Rogen hardly make any impression at all, finding themselves likewise outshone by co-leads Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd, as the squabbling married couple providing a benchmark for how our unhappy pair shouldn’t strive to be.

In fact, the strongest scenes with any of the leads are when they buddy off into same-sex pairs: Mann with Heigl and Rudd with Rogen. It hobbles this romantic comedy somewhat that its romantic pair is by leaps and bounds its weakest link, also stunting the flow of several of its major story arcs, but there is enough genuinely good material at work here to buoy the movie past any obstacle.

At the end of the day, it’s quippy, poppy, and a lot of fun, and I can’t begrudge it of that. It doesn’t leave me with a strong sense that I truly understand the mechanics of this couple or the reason they decided to keep this baby and raise it together, but damn it, it’s a good enough time that it’s hard to care too much. Nothing a nice, even slicing of fifteen minutes couldn’t fix. Even in the early years, Apatow never knew how to edit himself.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1093

Fright Flashback: The Eternal Grinding Of The Hollywood Machine

Welcome back to Fright Flashback, where every week until the end of summer we will visit an older horror film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to an upcoming new release. This week we are anticipating Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, the fifth of the seemingly endless Mission: Impossible movies. In celebration, we'll be revisiting Slumber Party Massacre III, another late sequel in a franchise with a mystifying number of entries.

Year: 1990

Director: Sally Mattison

Cast: Keely Christian, Brittain Frye, 

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

The Slumber Party Massacre franchise is an alarming combination of fascinating and frustrating: In short, it is a Roger Corman production. The original Slumber Party Massacre was written as a feminist pastiche of the genre, but filmed totally straight, leaving it clever but muzzled and ladled with a steam helping of nudity in levels heretofore unseen this side of the “Adults Only” curtain. Slumber Party Massacre II drops the parody angle but adds a heavy dose of Krueger-ific dreamscapes and a rock ‘n roll killer that noodles tunes on his guitar (complete with nifty drill bit attachment) before mowing down pillow fighting co-eds, one of whom is the little sister of the original survivor’s neighbor. Hey, it makes more sense than the Terminator coming back as a good guy. Sequels are tough.

Slumber Party Massacre III throws its lot wholeheartedly in with the rest, featuring authentic female behaviors in an almost neoreliast, documentary-like fashion, including spontaneous double stripteases, cookie dough finger licking, and the like. That’s all fine and dandy, really. I love me some unabashed tawdriness in a film. Not everything has to be Gone With the Wind. But in a franchise with such a strong subtextual core – the killer’s drill represents his penis, his killings are psychosexual release, and his death is castration - being saddled with such a abundance of shallow exploitation seems disingenuous. The real clincher though, is that this terminally exploitative franchise has been directed and written by women from the start, the only slasher series in existence to do so.

Being a feminist slasher blogger is like trying to hug a cactus.

Slumber Party Massacre III tells the story of – you guessed it – the 1986 NATO summit. Just kidding. It’s about, of all things, a slumber party. After a fun day of volleyball at the beach (this film very explicitly takes place in the coastal town of Playa Vista – one thing I love about this franchise is that it makes no attempts to hide its (cheap) California roots – it feels like home), a buxom group of guys and gals prepares for the night of their lives. For many of them, it will be their last. 

Let’s Meet the Meat, shall we? There’s Jackie (Keely Christian), the girl hosting the party while her parents are out of town looking at real estate; Frank (David Lawrence), her new boyfriend who looks like a Play-Doh statue of Sam Smith; Tom (David Kriegel), a schlub who sucks at volleyball; Susie (Maria Claire), who has low enough standards to overlook Tom’s total lack of personality; Maria (Maria Ford of the arthouse classic Stripped to Kill II: Live Girls), who looks like Elvira but more corpse-like and with a bigger wig, and has a thing for men over 50; assorted light and dark Meat, overstuffed; and Juliette (Lulu Wilson), who I would call the “slut” character if that title hadn’t already been claimed by literally everybody else.

As the party goes on, the attendees begin to get picked off one by one (and then all at once) by a killer in a clear mask brandishing a power drill. Could it be the creepy lurker, credited only as Weirdo (Yan Birch), who wears a black gi and a hideous blonde goatee that makes me want to break some Entourage DVDs in half, who found the house thanks to an address book that Jackie left at the beach for some inscrutable reason? Or is it the creepy neighbor Morgan (Michael Harris), who spies on the girls with a telescope, walks through unlocked doors at random, peruses anatomy textbooks in his downtime, and who clearly attended the Creepy Suspect seminar of the raw meat-eating Orville Ketchum from Sorority House Massacre II?

Or maybe it’s one of the newcomers to the party: Duncan (David Greenlee), the nerdy outcast who has been shunned by the group, and Ken (Brittain Frye of Hide and Go Shriek), the too-perfect hunk who Juliette met at the beach, whose ex-cop uncle just mysteriously committed suicide.

Also his name makes Ken doll jokes suspiciously easy.

The most striking thing about Slumber Party Massacre III is that for a crappy direct-to-video slasher sequel it actually serves up a pretty decent mystery for a good chunk of the time. This is an entirely new feature. In the first two films, there is absolutely no question that the murders are being perpetrated by Russ Thorn and… Weird Elvis Guy. So it’s doubly unexpected when this DTV 1990 flick with the dialogue about hips and thighs and Barbie commercial performances manages to keep you on the hook for so long. And the mask is genuinely creepy, too! Halfway between The Purge and Alice, Sweet Alice, it’s a slick little number that has no business being anywhere near a dunghill like this.

At least this film is honoring the franchise tradition of staunchly defying black or white categorization. But we’re here to attempt to review this rat’s nest, so let’s step back and take a look at the facts:

• Slumber Party Massacre III is the worst Slumber Party Massacre movie.

The law of diminishing returns strikes again. Never a big budget franchise, this films seems to have been made for less than the cost of a routine nipple reduction surgery (at least, circumstantial evidence seems to prove that this is so), with a series of kills that are either goreless or intimately repetitive, presumably so they could reuse the same prosthetic over and over again.

• Slumber Party Massacre III is not scary.

Well-crafted scares require a well-crafted, well, anything. Beyond an attack in a car that introduces the drill via the rearview mirror and stages the killing pretty explicitly as a penetrative sexual act, there is an utter lack of style evident in the film. Non sequitur dialogue and bland medium shots smash into one another at regular intervals, occasionally combining serendipitously into something borderline coherent.

• Slumber Party Massacre III is still… kind of good.

Damn it!

The profoundly vexing thing is that the frequently bad-good campy charms sometimes (though very rarely) shade into genuinely good-good territory. Now what am I supposed to do with that? In addition to the aforementioned first act mystery (which is no Agatha Christie but keeps you guessing for longer than most rote hack ‘n slash whodunits), there are some laugh-out-loud comic relief moments that betray this film’s buried parodic pedigree. I’ll only spoil one of these for you: Frank wants to go check out the basement, but Jackie urges him to take Duncan’s fireplace poker with him.

“Actually, these are tongs.”

OK, maybe you had to be there. But the fact remains that this film is actually a half-decent slumber party flick. You and your friends can place bets on the murderer, shiver (but not too much) at the masked driller killer, laugh yourselves silly at the wooden performances and genuine humor, and shout at dumb characters to not go in the basement when there’s an open sliding glass door twelve feet from you, ya dipstick! And thought the low budget prevents the kills from spilling more than a thimble or so of blood, there’s some extravagantly cheesy compensation, including someone being stabbed with a swordfish and a particularly clever death involving the house’s “For Sale” sign.

SPOILERS PEPPER THE REMAINDER OF THIS REVIEW!

Of course, Slumber Party Massacre III still isn’t a good film, as the entirety of the third act labors tirelessly to prove. The killer turns out to be Ken, which is interesting in its own right (the handsome, unassuming killer brings Psycho to mind – plus I like to think of it as backlash against the yuppiefied 80’s), but Frye plays psychosis like a six-year-old having a temper tantrum, and his implied, undernourished molestation backstory gets too dark too quick. After he reveals himself, there are still a good five or six girls still alive, and he begins chasing them around the house in a scene that begins exciting but rapidly deteriorates into a sloppy Caligula of idiocy.

The girls scuttle right past one another as they bleed to death, refusing to render aid or exit through the unblocked front door. Time endlessly unspools as scene after scene ticks by of girls hiding, smashing lamps over Ken’s head, then practically handing his drill back to him and starting it all over again. It’s like the final scene of Halloween, only Jamie Lee Curtis has been lobotomized and it’s played simultaneously on five different screens like one of those a cappella YouTube videos.

Nothing can take away the surprising quality and fun of the first half of Slumber Party Massacre III, but its third act can damn sure try. With some proper editing, this film could have been just as memorable as its wacky brethren, but as it stands, it’s still one big hunk of crap that I can’t say I’m sorry I saw. This unknowable, ineffable franchise is finally finished. It’s been a bumpy ride, but certainly a wild one.

Killer: Ken (Brittain Frye)

Final Girl: Jackie Cassidy (Keely Christian)

Best Kill: Juliette is electrocuted when a vibrator is tossed in the tub. It’s not even hers. She’s borrowing it.

Sign of the Times: Jackie’s jeans have a higher proportion of patches on them than actual denim.

Scariest Moment: The masked killer pursues the Pizza Girl (Marta Kober of Friday the 13th Part 2) down a moonlit street.

Weirdest Moment: After Tom complains that his ankles hurt sometimes, Ken chainsaws his Achilles tendons, admonishing, “Never ever admit your weaknesses.” Somehow, I feel like pretty much everyone has a weakness to being chainsawed in the ankles.

Champion Dialogue: “If you can’t stop your parents from moving, why don’t you just move in with us? My mom wouldn’t notice. She’s going through menopause.”

Body Count: 11; I’m not counting Tom, because unless he bled out through the ankles, he sure as patoot didn’t die.

1. Sarah is drilled through the back.
2. Michael is stabbed through the chest with a For Sale sign.
3. Pizza Girl is drilled in the gut.
4. Juliette is electrocuted with a vibrator.
5. Weirdo is stabbed in the mouth with a swordfish.
6. Duncan is slashed across the stomach with a drill.
7. Frank dies from being hit in the face somehow.
8. Janine is drilled in the gut.
9. Maria is drilled in the gut.
10. Diana is stabbed to death.
11. Ken is drilled in the gut.

TL;DR: Slumber Party Massacre III is a bad-good movie with more than occasional glimmers of brilliance.
Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 1837
Reviews In This Series
The Slumber Party Massacre (Jones, 1982)
Slumber Party Massacre II (Brock, 1987)
Slumber Party Massacre III (Mattison, 1990)

Through The Fire And Flames

Year: 2007

Director: David Yates

Cast: Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint

Run Time: 2 hours 18 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

The first four Harry Potter movies are like distant relatives overstaying their welcome during the Christmas holidays. They devour the full stock of your pantry (i.e. any working British actor above “street mime” caliber), they keep you up with their excessive snoring (or rather their brobdingnagian run times), and to your consternation, they just keep coming back every year without fail.  They are all jagged, ungainly narrative detritus usually brought back from the brink of stultifying despair on the strength of a veritable army of veteran adult performers and production designers so untouchably brilliant that they could literally murder someone, make their ribcage into a lampshade, and it would be so beautiful that nobody would find any problem with it.

When last we left our heroes, it was with 2005’s Goblet of Fire, the last stage of Harry Potter’s “childish” phase. That entry was marked by a particularly devout slash and burn approach when it came to the story, leaving the film a smoldering rubble with only Ralph Fiennes standing triumphant amid the flames. But after all that painful slogging, David Yates stepped up to the plates, and like its titular bird, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix rose from the ashes of the franchise, heralding a new dawn for us all.

Plus, it’s the shortest film of the series. Rejoice!

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, in case you yourself are a book and haven’t grown self-aware enough to discover the concept of reading, is about the fifteen-year-old wizard Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe). At the end of last term, he saw the Dark Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) rise again, but the paranoid Minister of Magic Cornelius Fudge (Robert Hardy) believes that his claims are false, brought on by the promptings of the avaricious headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon). This is patently untrue, of course, but he appoints the syrupy and officious Professor Umbridge (Imelda Staunton) to the post of Defense Against the Dark Arts to ensure the Ministry’s hold over Hogwarts while he continues his smear campaign on Potter and Dumbledore from the outside.

Torn between the inordinate responsibility he feels toward the Order of the Phoenix (a secret society leading the charge against Voldemort – to which his godfather Sirius Black (Gary Oldman) belongs), the very adult bureaucratic and political pressures of the Ministry, the surge of teenage hormones and exam stress that lead to infighting with his best friends Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson), and the sudden urges to storm off and listen to Simple Plan alone in his room, Harry is going to have a very rough year.

Being 15 is just a barrel of dicks, isn’t it?

So a hawk- or particularly talented pigeon-eyed viewer may ask, how exactly does one accomplish the Herculean feat of adapting the doorstopper Order of the Phoenix into the shortest movie of the franchise? And that includes the two films that tackled only half the final book apiece, thank you very much. Screenwriter Michael Goldenberg might tell you this or that about writing while standing up or the miraculous powers of lime extract, but the answer is very simple: He actually cared about telling a coherent story that doesn’t rely on a thousand page children’s book to fill in the alarmingly huge gaps that could (and frequently did) fit a grown man.

Mind you, the storytelling of Phoenix is not airtight. Several of its marbles roll irrevocably out of bounds, most notably with the character of Tonks (Natalia Tena) who may well have been a large chocolate gateau for all the purpose she serves the film. But when narrative corners are cut (and with source material as extensive as this, it requires more cutting than a Flock of Seagulls reunion tour), Goldenberg uses pre-established elements (like alternate characters or story beats) to bridge the gaps instead of just skipping past the difficult bits like the faulty record needle of the previous four films.

In addition to the first generally coherent script of the franchise, Order of the Phoenix also boasts a remarkably adept visual schema courtesy of cinematographer Slawomir Idziak. As I said before, the films have always had nut-busting production design (a tradition continued here with Stuart Craig’s glittering obsidian Ministry of Magic and the defined yet somehow infinite complexities of the Room of Requirement), but only Goblet of Fire’s encroaching gloom came close to resembling a unifying aesthetic. Here, the knobbly yet prim structure and stolid lighting of Umbridge and her domain contrast sharply with the heavy shadows, vivid blues, and bright slashes of light that define the clutter of Harry’s reality. This helps emphasize the central conflict of the film, between the Ministry’s careful restructuring of the media narrative and the grim reality they’re hoping to conceal from the world at large as well as themselves.

Perhaps my favorite detail of the film, Phoenix in a microcosm, is the mirror in the Room of Requirement, where Harry and his friends secretly practice defensive spells under the nose of the Ministry. Over the course of the film, the mirror begins to fill up with newspaper clippings and photographs depicting the missing and the dead as Voldemort and his Death Eaters continue their wicked work in the shadows. This collection is never explicitly mentioned in the dialogue, but it fleshes out the dangerous and terrifying world that lies in wait outside the walls of the school. It’s subtle, powerful, and entirely visual, and a big part of why Phoenix is the best Potter yet.

Plus, Daniel Radcliffe was 18 at this point and beginning his conversion into a fully weaponized cute person.

So, have we had just about enough of Film Major Brennan for one article? Let’s just tuck him away again until he can wax poetic about slasher sound cues where he can’t hurt anybody. Because Order of the Phoenix is also a remarkably fun movie. It’s dark, brooding, and deals with mature themes, yes, but it’s also a school rebellion flick. There are moments that capture that summer camp rush of subversive mischief, finally giving the caretaker Filch (David Bradley) something genuinely amusing to do, and allowing the ensemble – especially Neville Longbottom (Matthew Lewis) and newcomer Luna Lovegood (the incomparably dizzy Evanna Lynch) – to truly inhabit their roles and create a living tapestry to support Harry and his exploits.

The acting is likewise much improved, especially after the discouraging Goblet, which almost led to a series of costly psychotherapy sessions. Emma Watson’s eyebrows still clearly long to be set loose in the untamed wilderness, but as a whole, the trio at the core are improving markedly as they age, and the adult performers are back on track as the fossil fuel that keeps the engine running smoothly.

Alan Rickman and Maggie Smith carry on as always, because they are untouchable denizens of Mount Olympus, Michael Gambon has finally settled into his wizened peak as the powerful but ancient headmaster, and Ralph Fiennes returns with his excellent, bored Drawl of Evil, but two newcomers steal the show. Helena Bonham Carter’s performance as the insane prison escapee Bellatrix Lestrange is like an exploding nail gun, pure menacing power, and Imelda Staunton provides a perfectly pitched, sickeningly sweet performance reminiscent of a genius pantomime villain. You boo and you hiss when she comes on and you love to hate her, but the depths of her wickedness turn your stomach, especially in the showstopping detention scene. 

It’s saying something when Emma McFreaking Thompson turns in the worst performance of your entire adult cast, I’ll just leave it at that.

Please note that I don’t say these things lightly. I’m literally sitting next to a VHS copy of Dead Again as we speak.

However, for all the massive improvements Phoenix amasses upon its predecessors, it’s still weighed down by certain demining flaws. The purely anonymous score by Nicholas Hooper would be damaging enough, but when it shades into out-and-out lyrical rock songs, the film dives directly into the nearest dumpster. And the climactic battle sequence that closes the film alternates between electrifying thriller imagery (and some truly impressive visual effects, especially between Dumbledore and Voldemort) and wimpy light shows hardly more arresting than a game of laser tag. It too frequently slides into camp territory to sell its emotional climax, which it then immediately forgets about anyway. Also there’s a shot where it looks like Voldemort is doing jazz hands.

Let’s just say it’s a bit of a bumpy landing. But it’s the least turbulent Potter thus far, and I could see myself rewatching this one without wanting to stick a fork in an electric eel, so three cheers for Order of the Phoenix!

TL;DR: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is a fun, flashy, aesthetically precise film.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1497

Reviews In This Series
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Columbus, 2001)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Columbus, 2002)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Cuarón, 2004)
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Newell, 2005)
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Yates, 2007)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Yates, 2009)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (Yates, 2010)

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (Yates, 2011)

Beerly Departed

Year: 2015

Director: Tomm Jacobsen, Michael Rousselet, Jon Salmon

Cast: Alec Owen, Patton Oswalt, Greg Sestero

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

In the interest of full disclosure, it might benefit you to know that I donated to the Kickstarter to bring Dude Bro Party Massacre III into this world, and if you believe that this will bias my review, so be it. Also in the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I didn’t like the movie very much. I have nobody to blame but myself.

A little bit of background: 5-Second Films is a YouTube comedy group that – for a period of several years – released a short comedy video every single weekday. It was an exercise in bite-sized Internet absurdism, sometimes clunky, sometimes gut-splittingly hilarious. Over time they began to attract the attention of other famous personalities, and they’ve worked with people as varied as BriTANick, TomSka, Weird Al Yankovic, Larry King, and Patton Oswalt.

One of their videos, a short slasher parody about a bunch of exaggerated frat guys, eventually expanded into a full parody trailer. From there they got the idea to make their very first feature film: a full-scale slasher parody ostensibly recorded from a lost midnight movie broadcast in 1989. They’re not the first to have this sort of idea.

Slasher parodies have been attempted before, to varying degrees of success: One of the very first, 1981’s Student Bodies, is a shrill, sophomoric effort, but where it goes right is in skewering the already hoary tropes of the nascent subgenre: overuse of holidays and anniversaries, virginal Final Girls, and desperately gimmicky kills. The 1996 satire Scream perfected this angle, tossing teens who knew the genre inside and out into a typical slasher scenario. And the mockumentary Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon flipped to script to terrific effect, showing how a wannabe killer manipulates the scenario to create his own movie. On the other hand, where flicks like Scary Movie and its endless bevy of sequels failed lies in an overreliance on cheap pot gags and pop culture references so instantly dated that they even make the Baha Men roll their eyes. This same fate befell films likes Shriek if You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th and a host of other pseudo-comic bandwagoners.

In short, a slasher parody can be successful, but only to the degree to which it actually genuinely engages with the material it’s parodying. That requires research. That requires dedication. That requires focus. That requires…

More than five seconds.

DBPMIII tells the story of the Delta Bi fraternity, which has survived two previous attacks from Motherface (Olivia Taylor Dudley, known for such classy horror titles as Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension and Chernobyl Diaries), a hideously burned house mother, and her revenge-seeking daughter. Now somebody else has donned the Motherface mask and slit the throat of the only survivor of the two previous massacres, Brock (Alec Owen). His twin brother Brent (Alec Own) arrives on campus to infiltrate the Delta Bi’s – led by the handsome and totally not too old Derek (Greg Sestero of The Room) – and solve his brother’s murder while the frat parties it up at the old sorority house by the lake.

Meanwhile, the Police Chief (Patton Oswalt – somebody bake this guy some cookies, he’s a damn good friend for agreeing to be in this) sends the nerdy Officer Sminkle (Brian Firenzi) to the lake as a virgin sacrifice to end Motherface’s rampage on the pretense that the Delta Bi’s are secretly bags of oranges and that by bopping them on the nose he can return them to their true form and end Chico’s orange crisis. …Yeah.

I paid for this movie.

I suppose it was probably too much to ask that the guys who do five second online videos make a masterpiece 90 minute feature right out of the gate. That’s be like asking a fortune cookie writer to pen the next great American novel. Or asking Michael Bay to make a movie that passes the Bechdel test. But much like their YouTube channel, it hits as often as it misses. DBPMIII is full to the brim with zany experimentation and cinematic risk-taking like no comedy I’ve ever seen, and I wouldn’t trade that sense of gung-ho adventure for the world, but I dearly wish the results were more coherent.

I mean, really? Bags of oranges?

It’s an immensely frustrating film, and a pristine example of Newton’s Third Law of Film Comedies: For every great joke, there is an equal and opposite sucking turd: For every moment that toys with the mechanics of film in an interesting, clever way, there’s a dancing attic robot. For every opening montage that deftly summarizes an infinitely gorier, more hilarious slasher flick that supposedly came before, there’s a bag of oranges. And then the film finally has the f**king audacity to turn its goddamn orange gag into one of the best postmodern surrealist jokes of the entire godforsaken affair and I weep bloody tears of sheer hubris.

God help us all.

The biggest issue with Dude Bro Party Massacre III is that it has no identity. Is it an 80’s slasher parody? Or is it an absurdist Internet comedy film? Being both is not an option. The eras are mutually exclusive. So the film drifts by in a flux of indecision, dipping a toe here and there where it sees fit. I’ve already splanted my flag in support of films that embrace their slasher leanings, and this one is no different. When DBPMIII is operating at its unequivocal best is when it’s wholeheartedly engaging with the genre, like a pan-searingly funny gag poking fun at ominously foreshadowing song lyrics. And the film is at its spoon-gagging worst when it forays into the broad, spasmodic realm of online humor, from whence crawls the film’s most abhorrent character, the beer-crazed party boy who’s so unfunny he sucks the fillings right out of your teeth.

Unfortunately – funny or not – the entire film is unforgivably marred by a flabby second act which is a full, deathless slog populated by an endless parade of useless character moments. Which, ironically, is the single thing that it has most in common with the average 80’s slasher.

At the end of the day, Dude Bro Party Massacre III is not an unfunny film. At any rate, I’d toss it a couple extra points just for an out-of-the-blue Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead reference. But watching it is like panning for gold. To find your nuggets, you have to sift through the silt, and there’s just so damn much of it.

TL;DR: Dude Bro Party Massacre III has its moments, but its attention span is too poor to sustain the hilarity.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1135