Summer of Slash: Satan’s Little Helper

Fans of the slasher film will recognize the name Jeff Lieberman. Director of the fun and goofy Squirm (notable for being featured on MST3K, which Lieberman was none too pleased with) and the really great (and not goofy) Blue Sunshine and Just Before Dawn (the best of the backwoods slashers), Lieberman disappeared from the horror genre, claiming that the right project never came up. After Just Before Dawn in 1981, he made only one film (Remote Control in 1988) before finally returning to filmmaking and to the horror genre with 2004’s oddball black comedy slasher Satan’s Little Helper. No, this direct to DVD release is not nearly as cheap looking or awful as its horribly executed cover art would have you believe (just look at that poster. Awful.). I’m tempted to say that the film is even good. But then I would have to ignore the horribly conventional final 20 minutes of the film and the fact that Lieberman's pretty interesting idea loses steam rather quickly. A shame, too, since the first 1/3 of the film is evidence that Lieberman still has a knack for taking banal slasher premises and fashioning them into something much more interesting.

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Summer of Slash: Just Before Dawn

In what will be an ongoing feature this summer I will be reviewing horror films (some with more 'slashing' than others) of varying ilks. All of this will culminate and coalesce into a much larger format/project that myself and other bloggers will unveil at a later time. My thanks to Tim Brayton, who, most likely unbeknownst to him, allowed me to completely rip off his Summer of Blood idea at his blog Antagony & Ecstasy. See what I did there: I replaced 'blood' with 'slash' so not to be too overt about my cribbing. Hugo Stiglitz will invariably be a blog of horror reviews and essays this summer; however, should I come across something not horror related that I feel like writing about I will make sure to do so.

Read any interview with director Jeff Lieberman and he will adamantly insist that he had never seen Tobe Hooper's seminal 1970's horror film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre before writing the screenplay for his 1980 horror gem – and cult favorite among die-hard fans of the genre – Just Before Dawn. Lieberman's backwoods slasher actually has more in common with the natural horror of James Dickey's Deliverance (something that Lieberman also points out in various interviews), and made this horror fan think of the modern man (or woman) vs. nature horror found in Neil Marshall's The Descent. The two films actually share more in common than one might think: Lieberman's film starts off as a story about a group of young people (I say late teens) looking to hike and camp and challenge themselves against the elements; however, not only do they find that the elements are indifferent towards them, but like The Descent, what starts out as a film about people overcoming natural obstacles devolves into a more recognizable kind of horror film where the characters are fighting for survival against a completely different kind of obstacle. However, Just Before Dawn is a step above most dead teenager films, and Lieberman's direction makes for some truly eerie moments in a film that perpetuates dread just as well as any from that era – and it's all punctuated with one of the genre's most famous dénouements.

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