Summer of Slash: Superstition
Watching nothing but straight forward slasher movies for an
entire summer can be a bit of a slog; this is why I prefer mixing it up by
finding different kinds of horror movies with elements of the slasher. Earlier
in this series I covered the sci-fi/slasher hybrid Without Warning, and last year I tackled The Boogeyman – a weird mix of supernatural horror that often
detoured into slasher tropes. That brings us to Superstition; a film very similar in tone to The Boogeyman in that it mixes (not nearly as well, unfortunately) the
supernatural horror film with the slasher.
The movie just jumps right in with both feet: two teens
making out in a car in the driveway of an abandoned piece of property where a
creepy house lies on the other end of the driveway. The girl wants to go
somewhere else since the location they parked at – and get this – creeps her
out. Yeah, no points for originality here. There is then a false scare that
must follow as it is written in the canon of all horror movies made in the
1980s, and the false scare is kind of executed well. Two other teens, we find
out, are spying on the necking lovers and proceed to drop a fake ghoul-looking
thing on the roof the car. This freaks the couple out and they drive away. Those
pranksters – one being stationed in the upstairs of the abandoned house as
apparently there was a zipline involved in this elaborate prank – are then brutally
dispatched by mysterious forces (one is cut in half by a window and the other’s
head is cut off only to be put in a microwave so it can explode). So yeah, that
opening is, well, it’s something alright, and it’s probably the main reason
that police in the UK were looking for the film to confiscate even though it
didn’t officially appear on the DPP’s Video Nasties list. It sets the tone for
the rest of the movie which is firmly footed in the ever-so-popular category
amongst die hard horror fans of being “so-bad-it’s-good.”
From the opening you have your basic haunted house plot:
family wants to move into house; the county wants to condemn the house since no
one has been living there for years and teens are dying on the property; county
is frustrated because the church owns the house so only they can make the final
decision on whether the house stays or goes; family where the father is an
apprentice to the town priest moves in; weird things begin to happen; people
start to die. Yeah, there’s a little bit of backstory about how a witch was
burned sent drifting, tied to a cross and lit aflame, across a lake adjacent to
the house. It’s all very tired and banal (and I’ve never been a fan of these supernatural
horror movies), and straight-away one can catch the obvious influences here. Ideas
are cribbed from such films as The Omen (supernatural
deaths) and The Amityville Horror (family
moves into haunted house) – also, much like The
Boogeyman, the film has a mixture of references from much better horror
movies (The Shining and The Exorcist are also referenced here). But
that was the template for these kinds of horror films back in the day, and they
figured if they could make a buck off of it, then why not?
The deaths happen fast and furious – and I like the way the
filmmaker just fades in and out between every death piece. Essentially, a character
will die and then the film will fade out; it’ll then fade back in for a little
exposition and then another death scene and the fade out again and so forth. Despite
the many references to better horror films, at least Superstition is certain about one thing: it knows what its bread
and butter is (wacky death scenes) and doesn’t waste the audience’s time by
trying to be legitimate. Still, it’s much too boring to be anything more than a
curiosity for die-hards of the subgenre; never mind the short running time
(which just ekes out being more than 80 minutes), which is a huge plus, the
film still feels like a chore to get through.
The acting is terrible; an assembly of soap opera actors (and
Stacy Keach Sr.!!) that aren’t helped by their incapable director (James
Roberson mostly worked as a DP – so even though he knew how to set up a shot,
and there are some doozies here – he knew nothing of how to get these already
limited actors to at least be passable when delivering their lines) who so
lazily cribs his material (especially the ending which is right out of Friday the 13th) that I felt
like I was watching an Italian horror movie from the same era (this feels like
something Lenzi would have directed). Still, if you’ve got some like-minded
friends that love watching these types of horror movies, the atrocious acting and
the rat-a-tat pacing of the deaths in Superstition
make for a fun “pizza and beer” movie experience.
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