Summer of Slash: Silent Rage

No one was immune to the slasher craze happening between 1980-1982. Not even Chuck Norris. Therefore, in 1982 at the height of the slasher craze, we got Silent Rage, an odd amalgam of Chuck Norris actioner and Halloween rip-off (I always found Wikipedia’s classification of the film as a “action/romance/science fiction/horror movie” pretty amusing). This is a movie that makes no bones about how blatantly it is ripping off other popular ideas of the time (you’d think this were an Italian genre movie) — it also has a bit of The Terminator in it and even makes time for a little “Dukes of Hazzard” hillbilly hijinks with the obligatory fat deputy character — which, I have to say, makes for a pretty entertaining 100 minutes.
 
The film concerns itself with a former mental patient, John Kirby (Brian Libby), who we’re introduced to on a hectic morning filled with telephones ringing, children screaming, and all sorts of little annoyances that would cause Kirby to further lose his grip on reality. As he wanders around the noise-filled house, he places a phone call to his doctor informing him that he’s “losing it,” and doesn’t think he can keep it together much longer. Well, “much longer” is about two minutes. After failing to distract himself with cutting wood and gathering some chickens, Kirby just decides to take an axe inside and murder two people.

Enter Sheriff Dan Stevens (Norris), who with no help from his incompetent and chubby deputy Charlie (Stephen Furst), takes out Kirby who is transported to the hospital where he is expected to die from his wounds. However, in a secret experimental wing of the hospital, three doctors work on Kirby using powerful drugs that regenerate cells. The head doctor, Spires (Steven Keats), utters lines like, “As beautiful a creature created by nature” so that we know he’s the evil doctor who has no problem experimenting on humans as long as it gets him his Pulitzer Nobel! While Doctor Halman (Ron Silver) says things like, “And as grotesque as anything created by man” so that we know he’s the humane doctor. All of this leads to the inevitable: Kirby’s wounds heal at a rapid pace, turning him into an indestructible monster a la Michael Myers or the T-800. So what could possibly bring down this indestructible monster, you ask? Well, some tight-jeaned roundhouse kicks from Chuck Norris, of course!

And that’s essentially what Silent Rage has up its sleeve: it pits Chuck Norris versus Michael Myers. All of the film’s stalking scenes are just rehashed bits from Halloween and Halloween II; all of the film’s action scenes are just rehashed bits from previous Chuck Norris movies like Breaker, Breaker; and the film’s ending is just The Terminator with its take on the indestructible monster. There’s even a scene at the end — after Norris has hip-tossed the Kirby a well stating that "it's over" so that we know that it for sure isn't over — where the film can't help but milk one last cliche as the camera pans over to the well and then down into the well, and...yeah, you know where this is going. The monster emerges from the waters of the well, springing up into frame before the shot freezes. End credits. It wouldn't be a slasher in 1982 without a retread of the Friday the 13th ending (itself a retread of the Carrie ending...I love horror movies).

Silent Rage is goofy, harmless cheese (I mean just look at that poster...how can you not have at least a little affection for this movie), and it should be seen as nothing more than that. There’s absolutely nothing offensively awful about the film. It’s kind of hilarious to watch the film stumble its way through so many genres (especially the Halloween “dead bodies arranged in a room” scene). The film shoehorns in so many awkward scenes in the hopes that it will appeal to both Chuck Norris fans and slasher fans. Between the typical hillbilly sheriff/deputy interactions, the stupid barroom brawl that feels like it’s from a totally different movie, the hilariously anti-climactic ending, the late Ron Silver's glorious overacting, and the bizarre interlude where Norris seduces an ex-girlfriend (I suppose this is where Wikipedia gets off calling the film a “romance” movie), Silent Rage goes down easily enough. And for a slasher flick, let alone a Chuck Norris slasher flick, that’s all I ask for.

Read More

7 comments

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.

Read More

1 comment

Summer of Slash: Capsule Reviews

Every year I do this Summer of Slash series, I watch more than I end up writing about. This is mostly because I only want to write about the slasher films that I either enjoy enough to write more than two paragraphs on or lend themselves to be written about. And let’s be honest, taking the entire slasher subgenre into consideration, there aren’t too many that fit that criteria. A lot of the movies I watch for this summer series lend themselves better to the capsule format than the essay, so I figured rather than just scraping the notes I had written for these films, I would just present to you a very rough paragraph or two for each film in capsule format. It’s safe to say that the bulk of the movies that get capsule reviews fall into that “for slasher fans only” category. Enjoy.

Read More

1 comment

John Carpenter: Halloween

I'm always amazed with Halloween. Here's a film that I could easily write about from memory, yet I was glad to give it another viewing for this retrospective. I found myself pulled into it yet again. I wrote about Halloween a couple years ago for the great blog Wonders in the Dark as a part of their Horror countdown. My dilemma then revolved around two assignments I had: write about Alien and write about Halloween (the two are natural companions, actually, despite the former taking in place in space). What does one write about such films? How does one approach a film that has been written about ad nauseam? I feared that anything I wrote would sound silly since so many better than me have covered those great films. What was there left to say? Well, the truth is nothing. There’s nothing left to say about a lot of films, but that doesn’t mean we are less thrilled by them and that we cease talking about them. So, let’s talk about John Carpenter’s magnum opus Halloween.

Read More

11 comments

John Carpenter: Someone's Watching Me!

Even though John Carpenter had himself a cult hit with the wacky sci-fi spoof Dark Star, and found success in Europe with the critically loved but little seen Assault on Precinct 13 (he also wrote the script for The Eyes of Laura Mars), he still wouldn’t be a hot commodity until he made Halloween. In between Assault and Halloween Carpenter took a job on television, making a thriller for NBC. Someone’s Watching Me! (yes, there is an exclamation point in the title, and it makes me laugh every time I look at it) isn’t anything special — the film was made before Halloween but released on television a few months after Carpenter’s seminal horror films was released in theaters —as there’s no hidden gem to discover here. Sure, the film is pretty sleek in some scenes, more than serviceable as a nice homage to Hitchcock, and an early example of what the stalk-and-slash film looked like prior to Halloween’s release, but there’s nothing wholly memorable about it.

Read More

2 comments

Summer of Slash: Communion (AKA Alice, Sweet Alice)

More like a Hitchcock film or the British exploitation film Frightmare, Communion is nothing like what I’m sure those coming to the film late – with the idea in their head about what a slasher movie is supposed to be – think it is. In fact, the best way to describe Alfred Sole’s horror film (which is very good, by the way) is that it’s probably the closest thing America ever got to an honest-to-goodness giallo. The reason it feels more like giallo – which were essentially Italian slasher movies before we knew what slashers were (or, more specifically, before John Carpenter decided that it’s more effective – and more profitable – if teens are in peril instead of grown women) – is due to the tone and the pacing of the film which is very much of its time and perfectly encapsulates ‘70s, pre-Black Christmas/Halloween horror). Communion may not be as influential as Bob Clark’s film or John Carpenter’s film (or, if you want, Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre), but it’s one of the true hidden gems of 1970’s American horror and arguably (and it’s an argument I would be willing to make) deserves to have a spot at the table of those two giants of the subgenre.

Read More

0 comments

Summer of Slash: Friday the 13th Wrap-up

Frequent commenter Michael Grover has graciously offered to write up more in-depth reviews at his blog Filmiliarity, so click on that link and check for updates on his blog if you’re interested in more than the pithy way I blitzed through these final six entries in the series.

In my last edition of this series on the Friday films, I mentioned that after The Final Chapter was released in 1984 the series took on a different gimmick with each subsequent film. The series would never be the same; it would never look like what we thought slashers were supposed to look like. After 1984, the slasher genre changed thanks to upstart New Line Cinema and the movie that revived horror maven Wes Craven’s career, A Nightmare on Elm Street. Because of this shift in the subgenre, the likes of Jason just didn’t seem to cut it anymore. Sure, people were still paying money to see these movies (they would always be profitable, even until the horrible tenth installment which just barely made its budget back, a first for a series that usually had no problem making three-to-six times what they put into it), but it seemed that the slasher landscape had changed. Part of this is due to New Line’s popularizing of Freddy Krueger by turning him from a scary boogeyman to a murderous quipster. Obviously Jason Voorhees couldn’t compete with this (nor could Michael Myers, probably the most inert of all slasher series), so the producers decided to try and keep with the times by placing him in wacky situations.

As I think about the subsequent films, only one stands out. The series devolved into an even more frustrating template and malaise than the first three sequels. Whereas the early sequels (2-4) seem somewhat of a piece (interestingly, Part 2 and Part 3 were the only sequels not assigned a subtitle) since they were rooted (or, they were supposed to be, but Part 3 seems to exist in a vacuum) in exploitation, the subsequent films adopt the feel of the more postmodern, detached slasher film of the post-1985 horror era – a slasher that is too self-reflexive and almost mocking the audience paying money to watch it. It was an interesting era for the slasher because so much nothing came from it; the only thing worthwhile being released that even resembled the early slashers were coming out of Italy. It was not the best time to be a horror fan, and I think that people tend to forget just how close the slasher subgenre was to being completely dead by the time Jason took Manhattan and Paramount sold the rights to their most profitable film series to New Line.

Here are my thoughts on the rest of the series (I will not be including the abomination that is Freddy vs. Jason or the 2009 remake of Friday):

Read More

2 comments

Summer of Slash: Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter

1984 was probably the year most agree that the slasher died. It had an amazingly productive and successful (financially more than artistically) run for studios as they pumped out slasher after slasher with little to no budget. Despite these miniscule budgets, the films still made a good amount of money for the studios. As we’ve talked about already, Friday the 13th was the first film to really kick of the idea of the must-have sequel, and what followed was a torrent of films that adhered to the tested and true template laid out by the original Friday and its sequels (most specifically Part 2). Feeling that the subgenre was nearing its end, the producers of the Friday films felt they needed one last hook to bring in the waning audiences: in Part 3 it was the tired, old 3-D gimmick, and for the fourth entry in the series, the producers decided to name it The Final Chapter. Yep, they were going to kill Jason. That was their promise. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter isn’t as gimmicky as the Friday films that follow, but it’s the most apathetic of the first four films; a film so blatantly and lazily adhering to a template without a care for its characters or its audience. The filmmakers present the Meat, they present Jason, and then there’s a whole lot of killing, and then there is the most goddamn annoying ending that would be repeated ad nausea in subsequent Friday films.

Read More

1 comment

Summer of Slash: Friday the 13th, Part 3

By 1983, “the template” – that which the original Friday the 13th helped create and, more importantly, make profitable – had pretty much been sucked dry. We knew the score: psycho killer seeks revenge, group of sex-hungry teens meets somewhere remote for the weekend, and psycho killer finds group of sex-hungry teens and quickly dispatches of them in ways that in 1983 were beginning to feel rather ordinary. And that’s the thing with the third entry in the Friday series: it (being the producers) knows that simply offering up another tale of teenagers being slashed might not be enough (even though they would continue, familiarity be damned, for TEN more movies), so how do they try to make this already old chestnut seem like a fresh and new entry? 3-D, of course! In what has to be one of the most laughable of all 3-D films to be released during that weird era in the ‘80s, Friday the 13th, Part 3 (no I will not say Part 3-D, I have standards here) is one of the more laughably bad of the lot (and this is a lot that contains Jaws 3 and Freddy’s Dead). Friday the 13th, Part 3 is bad, bad, bad; however, it’s cheesy and harmless enough that if you watch the film with a group of friends, you can get yourself through it. But make no mistake, aside from Part 5 and maybe Part 8, Part 3 is arguably the worst of the series.

Read More

5 comments

Summer of Slash: Friday the 13th, Part 2

A few things right out of the gate: Friday the 13th, Part 2 is not only better than any other films in the series – including the much beloved but horribly dull original – but it’s one of the best slashers to come during the subgenre's peak period (1981-1984); the reason for that is because Steve Miner is a better director than Sean Cunningham, the villain is a lot more effective (duh, we’re introduced to Jason), and the film contains one of the very best Final Girl sequence I’ve seen in any slasher film. The film is not without its faults (what slasher film doesn’t have faults?), but I will gladly look over those faults and sing the praises of Part 2 because it is, in almost every conceivable way (with the exception of the missing Tom Savini), better than the first film.

Read More

3 comments

Summer of Slash: Friday the 13th (1980)

Since we have a Friday the 13th coming up next week, I thought I would, gulp, look at the series for the Summer of Slash series. Here we go...

I don’t really want to be that guy, so let me just get this out of the way: Friday the 13th took everything from other, better, movies. Setting, kills, style, everything. It’s only as famous as it is because it was the first American film to make a shit-ton of money using such a low-budget, exploitation-y premise; it’s not famous because it’s a good horror movie. There. This way I don’t have to spend tons of time invoking Bava’s Bay of Blood or other films of its ilk that American audiences didn’t know about yet, but that Friday the 13th cribbed from. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about these Friday movies, shall we. I’ve spent a lot of time this year and last talking about all of the films that were influenced by Sean Cunningham’s Friday the 13th (primarily by the fact that thanks to all the money Friday made, more and more studios were willing to bankroll what would become known as the slasher film), but I haven’t taken the time to actually cover the film. Friday the 13th is probably the only film of its kind; meaning, it’s probably the only film ever to be this influential and spawn better movies of its ilk. Oh, don’t get me wrong, during the glut of slasher films (1981 – 1984) there were some doozies – some of the worst films ever made no matter the subgenre – but the good ones really showed what the subgenre was capable of stylistically and allowed for filmmakers to be creative with a subgenre of film where, all of a sudden (thanks to Cunningham’s film), all bets were off.

Read More

4 comments

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. 

Read More

0 comments

Summer of Slash: The Burning

I wrote about The Burning when I first started my blog four years ago. The review – which was really short – sucked. I believe it’s still on here somewhere, so if you’re so inclined to search for it – all-the-while seeing what a horribly inept writer I was when I started this thing in 2008 – do so at your own risk (I believe it was part of the first Halloween-themed series I did for the blog, and I unfairly attached my review of the film to the sort-of-similar, but annoyingly tongue-in-cheek, Hatchet). So this is to say that I don’t think I’ve ever given The Burning – certainly one of the most important slasher movies to come out in that oh-so-fruitful year of 1981 – a fair shake on this blog. I’ve seen the film about five times now (so really how bad can it be?) and each viewing improved on the one before. After my most recent viewing, I think I’ve come around quite a bit on The Burning; a film that certainly stands out as one of the best examples of the early ‘80s slasher film. 

Read More

0 comments

Summer of Slash: The Final Terror

The Final Terror is yet another backwoods horror tale about a group of young college students who embark on a hiking trip only to be stalked by those pesky killers in the woods. However, what makes The Final Terror a great curiosity is the talent that worked on it. Like the ‘80s slasher, The Burning, Final Terror is really only sought out by horror fans because of the people involved in making the film and path their careers would take afterwards. The film was directed by Andrew Davis (The Fugitive) and stars Daryl Hannah, Joe Pantoliano, and Adrian Zmed (!) in what basically amounts to just another run-of-the-mill backwoods slasher that’s trying to be Deliverance and Just Before Dawn. The performances are indeed good, and the direction by Davis is good enough (there are some sequences that hinted at his future skill for directing action scenes) with some memorable scenes near the end, but I had to obtain a copy of the movie from an old VHS that looked like it was a copy from a copy. The picture and sound were terrible, and I think that, even though it’s part of the charm of being a horror fan, the quality of the copy I had really made it hard for me to invest (if there was even anything to invest in) in the movie. The Final Terror doesn't produce any memorable kills or scares; it's just kind of there -- a perfect example of how so many filmmakers cut their teeth with the horror film. This film is nothing special and it's really nothing more than a curiosity of the subgenre for the most diehard fans.

Read More

1 comment

Summer of Slash: Hitcher in the Dark

Wow,what a movie! Umberto Lenzi directing under his “Oh boy are these American movies I’m making terrible” pseudonym (Humphrey Humbert) that he used for other “stellar” horror films such as Welcome to Spring Break returns with this 80 minute Ray-Bans and Winnebago commercial. Yes, this entire film consist of a creepo in a Winnebago who may or may not pick up hitchhikers on a regular basis (we only see him pick up one, the rest of the film he simply stalks a girl and kidnaps her) and kills them. Basic slasher premise, right? In the words of John Matrix, “WRONG!” Nothing happens in this movie. Nothing. The guy drives around wearing his Ray-Bans, kidnaps a girl and cuts her hair so that she looks like his former girlfriend (Lenzi trying to make his Vertigo, no doubt), while the girl's doofus boyfriend drives around in his Suzuki jeep looking for her…you know what, the whole film can be summed up by this compilation. Enjoy (WARNING: this is definitely NSFW).

God bless you, Lenzi!

Read More

0 comments

Summer of Slash: Hell Night

A really fun (a theme this summer with the slasher films I’ve chosen) slasher about a group of college rushes who must endure what is known as “hell night.” What they don’t realize is that the abandoned Garth Manor where they must spend the night (on the very night its former tenant murdered his family 12 years ago, naturally) is still inhabited by someone. A mix between wacky Halloween goings-on (think Terror Train and April Fool’s Day) and good, cheesy pizza and beer fun (think any of the slashers I’ve covered so far this summer) and you get a good idea of what Hell Night is. There isn’t anything necessarily tense or scary about the film, but it’s earnestly made (seriously, there isn’t a hint of sarcasm here…something I really appreciate about these early ‘80s slasher films) and contains a good amount of cheese to keep you and your friends entertained. Plus, there’s Vince Van Patten walking around with his shirt off in ridiculous boxer shorts for most of the movie; he’s predictably slimy and you just can’t wait for him to get it. The film uses silence well as a set-up for all of the false scares before the real scares happen, and it uses its setting extremely well (it even looks nice considering its small budget), reminding me of Canadian slashers in that regard.

There isn’t a lot of gore (the film’s producers were already aware of the growing impatience from the MPAA in regards to violence in horror films), but I don’t think director Tom DeSimone really wanted to make that kind of a horror film; he takes more pleasure in his creepy setting and the pacing (the end is pretty well done despite its obvious cribbing from Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but hey, what horror movie hasn't shamelessly cribbed from those two seminal films?). DeSimone does a decent job letting things unfold as the wacky moments are well spaced-out between what are supposed to be the genuinely scary moments (I like that he doesn’t try to confuse the two and just keeps it simple); it’s just the right amount of craft and cheese as it has that early ‘80s horror aesthetic that I found appealing about The Boogeyman. It also kind of reminded me of another of my favorite gems from last year's project, Tourist Trap -- another early entry into the genre that didn't quite know what it wanted to be, but had really great, creepy moments interspersed between some really wacky ones. As long as you don’t take yourself too seriously (or the genre too seriously), Hell Night is definitely a fun entry into the genre that I highly recommend for slasher aficionados.

Read More

5 comments

Summer of Slash: The Boogeyman (1980)

“They say that when you break a mirror, you unleash everything it’s seen.” That is your premise for this wacky, supernatural horror film that is more indebted to the slasher film than you would think (hence it appearing in this summer series). If you can get past the bizarre, somewhat grotesque opening (an opening that definitely earned its Video Nasty label, and something I don’t really want to type out), The Boogey Man settles into a pretty fun, goofy horror movie. The film has the charm of an early ‘80s horror movie that is so shamelessly ripping off more successful horror movies (I can count at least six different movies The Boogey Man is trying to be), and it if it weren’t for the horribly misplaced tone of the film’s opening, then The Boogey Man would be somewhat of a under-seen classic of the genre.

Read More

6 comments

Summer of Slash: He Knows You're Alone

Released in 1980, He Knows You’re Alone is one of the very first slashers to be released by a major studio (MGM) in response to the success of John Carpenter’s Halloween. That’s about the only similarity it shares with that seminal horror film. It’s not that He Knows You’re Alone is a bad movie – it’s actually got some decent acting, and, for those interested, the tone and pacing of a giallio – it’s just that the film is on a whole pretty damn uninvolving as a thriller. There’s some good framing of the death scenes here. I mean, credit where credit is due: the murder scene where one of the girl’s is listening to music is so well paced and shot that it made me really want to like this movie…as did the subsequent shot of her head in a fish tank. There’s also a nice scene where Amy – our final girl who is being stalked by a killer who is murdering brides on their wedding night – is on an amusement park ride (The Scrambler!) that is pretty well done, too, but it’s cut too short before any tension can really build (and the subsequent haunted house scene is just too cheesy). And therein lays the biggest problem with He Knows You’re Alone: It feels like a TV movie at times. And that’s no surprise considering director Armand Mastroianni worked primarily in television working on shows like “Dark Shadows” and “Nightmare Café.”

But, like I said, there are things to like here. I like how they had no qualms about showing who the killer is in the first scene of the movie (and that’s what makes this film a slsher more than anything, the fact that there is no mystery who the killer is). There’s some good acting (it was a lot of fun watching a young Tom Hanks, not to mention James Rebhorn and Paul Gleason) going on here by its young stars Don Scardino and Caitlin O’ Heaney that definitely rises above the usual slasher film acting, and, finally, there’s a nice Goblin-y musical score to accompany the action in the film. But those elements aren’t enough to save this clunky 90+ minute attempt at a slasher movie. This clunkiness comes out most in the pacing of the film’s procedural moments (the straight horror scenes are pretty good), or in the way it strains too hard to be a meta horror film like when Tom Hanks’ character, a Psych major, talks about why people pay to be scared by horror movies, or when he talks about how when people go see movies like Psycho, they don’t want to take a shower, and then a few scenes later we have a character, for no reason, take a shower with Mastroianni finding a way to get a shot of the drain in there even though it doesn’t really fit. Obviously MGM and its director wanted to ape the success of Halloween with its minimalist take on terror (light gore, good use of widescreen, and minimalist musical score); however, He Knows You’re Alone is nowhere near as tense as Carpenter’s film (and it wasn’t nearly as successful, either). But, if you take the film as more of a suspense/thriller (it reminded me of Visiting Hours in this way) than a slasher, then you’re left with what is a pretty interesting, if wholly uninvolving, look into the strange era that was the post-Halloween and pre-Friday the 13^th American horror film.

Read More

2 comments

Summer of Slash: Cheerleader Camp

Like a bad amalgamation of drive-in comedies of the ‘80s (think G.O.R.P., King Frat, et al) and bad slasher movies (with the word camp in the title it’s pretty obvious which slasher movie this one is cribbing from), Cheerleader Camp is for the diehard slasher fan only. Most of the film is played as a wacky comedy with lots of gratuitous nudity while the horror parts aren’t worth talking about. Basically a crazed cheerleader who is somewhat of an outsider is knocking off cheerleaders at the annual camp for said cheerleaders. It’s all your basic, generic hack-and-slash set in the woods. Who is responsible for the murders? Could it be the big fat guy (who likes to eat bananas, you see, because he's a big ape...brilliant!) who's stuck in the wrong type of ‘80s movie? Could it be the misunderstood cheerleader whose dreams are convincing her that she’s the killer? Could it be the creepy town sheriff who likes to ogle the young ladies? Or, how about the crusty old camp groundskeeper, who, of course, in one scene watches the girls cheer while he's hosing something down and then the water sprays up into his face (never not funny)? Is it Leif Garrett?!? Does it really matter? No, it doesn’t, but like a lot of these types of so-bad-they're-good horror movies, it’s short and harmless; and hey, it has Leif Garrett in it, to boot! It’s also a lot of cheesy fun if you’re with a group of friends. Generic characters; gratuitous shots of boobs; bad cheers by Garrett and his big fat friend (pictured above), horrible gore effects, and everything else you’d expect in a late-era slasher movie. It’s everything that makes hating slashers so easy, and it’s everything I love about ‘em. Hang out with some friends and rip this movie apart; or, go spend your time doing something valuable and go see The Tree of Life…or do both…it’s not impossible to enjoy both extremes of the high-low spectrum. 

Read More

9 comments

Summer of Slash: Slaughter High

For a slasher from 1986, Slaughter High is better than it has any right to be. And the reason may be because the film doesn’t take itself seriously at all and contains just enough slasher cheese to make the 80 minutes go by in a flash. Sure, the film’s production isn’t that great, and the actors (mostly Brits doing a Yank’s accent) are universally awful, but there are enough clichés at play here to make this one go down easier than most slashers that take themselves too seriously. What struck me most about Slaughter High was that despite the necessary later-era slasher requirements – boobs, booze, and blood – there’s actually a well constructed chase scene at the end and a pretty damn bizarre musical score that makes the film standout above its peers. It’s also kind of dark; I mean, yes there are requisite false scares and the plot is the old chestnut of the prank gone awry causing people to die ten years later at a reunion, but I was surprised by the end of the film. There are no survivors in this film, no Final Girl, and really no explanation as to why such a cheesy movie contains such a nihilistic ending. This inconsistent tone actually lends the film a bit of eeriness that it otherwise doesn’t seem too interested in establishing. It’s part April Fool’s Day and part legitimate slasher. Now, the big reveal at the end helps explain this tinge of nihilism, but I was still shocked when a movie that seemed so content on just being another light-hearted slasher affair (especially for 1986, an era in the subgenre where EVRYTHING had been done to death) ended with no female survivors, a doctor getting a syringe in the eye, and the killer staring into the camera while he peels a chunk of skin off of his face. Despite its uneven tone, Slaughter High is still a pretty good slasher that didn’t piss me off with its cop-out ending. Plus, the opening 45 minutes is definitely a great piece of cheese that makes for a wonderful pizza and beer movie.

Read More

5 comments