Zombie Apocalypse (2011)

Today I went for a walk to get groceries and travelled past a yard with a bunch of items sitting out for free on the lawn. I spotted a stack of dusted-over DVDs and stopped to read their spines. Nothing looked too compelling, though I did see something called Zombie Apocalypse with Ving Rhames on the cover, so I picked it up and put it in with the groceries. When I got home, I put the groceries in the fridge and fed the disc into the player, as I didn't have anything going on for the afternoon.

Zombie Apocalypse isn't very good, nor does it benefit from being spectacularly awful. The worst part of the production is the ubiquity of CGI. With every zombie decapitation, there comes a spill of computer-generated gore, the blood physics wildly unconvincing. The same can be said for the layered-on smoke and fire, which look spectral and otherworldly atop the movie's locales. Some present-day pundits may decry AI, but a lot of AI slop looks far superior to CGI of this caliber. I guess the only upside to CGI vis-a-vis AI is that someone got paid for their efforts. On account of the constantly looming CGI and the preponderance of suburban and small-town backdrops, the arena for this zombie apocalypse feels rather claustrophobic. 

To the credit of the writers and filmmakers, though, they did manage to do some world-building. Regarding zombies, we learn how to discern between "shamblers" and "onesies" and get some additional details about their behavior in packs. Indeed, the writers are very eager to share the terminology of this world. This happens mostly through conversations, so there's a lot of expository dialogue in this film. I found this a bit intrusive, though the filmmakers do manage to make some intriguing conceptual space within the limited physical and digital space onscreen.

I'll give Zombie Apocalypse points for the sense of odyssey that it creates. The party of protagonists are on a quest to reach a ship that will take them to a safe-zone, and they traverse various suburbs and small-city downtowns to get there. They're perpetually stumbling upon zombie ambushes as they do so. The film is picaresque in this way. 

The characters are generic and not especially likeable, at least at first, but as their odyssey carries on, I couldn't help but feel some minimal investment in them. Ving Rhames is the only inherent standout, and he does everything that's expected of him. In 2011, Rhames was seven years removed from Dawn of the Dead, and he clearly knows the drill. By this point, he also had the piss-poor 2008 Day of the Dead remake under his belt and was solidly typecast in the zombie-action subgenre. He's mostly just going through the motions in Zombie Apocalypse.

Eventually, the group splits up unwittingly, and one of the subsequent branches encounters a new group of humans. There's a cute exchange when the protagonists and the new group realize that their terminologies differ—e.g. the latter calls the monsters "the dead" rather than "zombies". These little meta moments work in Zombie Apocalypse because they're not constantly shoehorned in as per recent blockbuster tripe such as Love and Thunder.  

In time, we see group members die, and it's not unmoving. In terms of emotionality and plot, this made-for-TV movie moves, if nothing else. All told, Zombie Apocalypse wasn't a total waste of my Sunday afternoon. So if you see it lying on someone's lawn for free, I urge you to pick it up and give it a watch. Once you've watched it, don't throw it away. It's worth passing on to someone else with time to kill.  

Blood Sucking Freaks (1976)

Last night I went on Tubi looking for a grindhouse movie, and damned if I didn't find one in Blood Sucking Freaks. This 1976 film fully delivers as exploitation horror, depicting various means of torture including thumbscrews, guillotines, and electrocutions. And, delivering as promised on its title, the film features an especially memorable scene involving a mad physician drilling into a woman's skull and gleefully sucking out the blood and cerebrospinal fluid with a straw. He gets his comeuppance, though, as the good doctor is torn apart after being thrown into a cell full of long-captive nude women who have turned feral. He's an outlier, as the victims in this film are almost entirely women in the nude, and so the misogyny is pervasive and undeniable. 

The violent vignettes are tied together by a very loose plot in which a demented dramatist named "Sardu" attempts to gain exposure for his Grand Guignol-style act. To this end, he eventually kidnaps a famous ballerina affiliated with the Kennedy Center (the one now chaired by President Donald Trump) and brainwashes her with his sadomasochism gospel. As he subjects her to assorted forms of psychological torture, his assistant Ralphus—a little person with an impressively tall afro—dances and claps with a leering grin. If it's not already obvious, Blood Sucking Freaks is a wholly rebarbative experience. That said, the film maintains a goofball tone all throughout, which by turns helps mitigate the mean-spiritedness (a bit) but also amplifies the carnivalesque madness. 

Yet Blood Sucking Freaks also contains some genuine flashes of artistry. The film culminates in the ballerina giving a public performance in which she elegantly kicks a bound critic to death, which makes for a rather sublime and unexpected viewing experience. Where else but in a 1970s grindhouse movie are you going to see a ballerina leaving a theater critic in a bloody mess? 

When I heard that name "Ralphus" given to Sardu's assistant, I must confess that I thought of World Championship Wrestling, where a schlubby bald man of that same name served as the personal security guard of future WWE legend Chris Jericho back in the 1990s. In the obligatory post-movie Googling, I learned that Jericho, now running out the clock on his career in AEW, is a huge fan of Blood Sucking Freaks. In fact, Jericho considers Blood Sucking Freaks one of his favorite movies, and he's even written a song about it. I find this to be a very telling revelation. It's one thing to appreciate a film like Blood Sucking Freaks as a product of a unique cinematic ecosystem at a particular time, but it's quite another to say it's one of your favorite movies. I mean, the movie involves nearly constant sadomasochistic violence against captive nude women, the dad jokes flying as liberally as limbs. I would ask Jericho, Just how much has this film shaped your sensibilities as a person and a performer? Perhaps the answer would explain some of the questionable gimmicks, storylines, and projects Jericho has attempted in the long sunset of his career.

Chris Jericho, singing for his band Fozzy
(Credit: Lisa, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

As a further aside, I'll note that when I heard one particular swell in the musical score as the mad physician is introduced, I was reminded of hip hop artist Necro, whose track "Evil Shit" uses a portion of the organ music from Blood Sucking Freaks to great effect. Having revealed my enthusiasm for exploitation movies, professional wrestling, and Necro's raps in the course of this brief article, the reader may now be posing serious questions about my aesthetic sensibilities.

Execrable or not, I have no choice but to appreciate Blood Sucking Freaks, as it is an archetypal grindhouse movie. In fact, were I compelled to identify a single movie as representative of exploitation horror as a whole, I might pick Blood Sucking Freaks. With just one screening, it has forced itself into the mix with movies like I Drink Your Blood and Maniac that could also win the ignominious distinction of quintessential grindhouse horror flick. But with that, let me be clear: I'm not saying Blood Sucking Freaks is one of my favorite movies, or even good. Unlike those other aforementioned grindhouse classics, I'm never going to watch this turd again.

Blue Money (1971)

Blue Money tells the story of a man named Jim who directs adult-oriented movies in early-70s California, a time and place where it is still illegal to make pornography. As such, Jim is perpetually looking over his shoulder while filming, as the threat of police raids is omnipresent. The mother of his child urges him to get out of the business, as she sees the pornographic art form as, rather poignantly, "dead space." Meanwhile, Jim's working on restoring an old houseboat in hopes of getting away to the sea in his life after porn. Oh, and he's also pursuing an extramarital affair with a European woman who's recently made her debut in his movies. Apparently, she's attracted to his quasi-European, French-Canadian sensibilities (Jim is French-Canadian, for whatever reason). 

The movie is terrible, as can be expected of a Crown International release. Alain Patrick, the actor playing Jim, delivers his lines in a muttered, off-hand fashion often resembling that of Tommy Wiseau in The Room. Although Patrick's French-Canadian background makes these difficulties with English forgivable, some of the lines are ludicrously misspoken, e.g. his demand that his crew "pipe it down." You puzzle over the fact that Blue Money's director didn't demand a retake to make "pipe down" happen, until you find out that Patrick was also the director (again, like Wiseau). It's surprising that producer Robert Chinn didn't show a little more investment in getting Blue Money into a more polished form, especially since the film is effectively telling Chinn's life-story. Chinn is perhaps best known as friend and frequent director of choice for pornographic legend John Holmes. No doubt, Chinn and Holmes dealt with the ever-looming threat of police raids as they made their films. But only fragments of that angst and desperation show through in Blue Money.

The film is still interesting, however, as a cinematic ethnography of early-70s sexuality. In this era, pornography existed on a grey market, and audiences could still be impressed by relatively innocent depictions of sexuality on camera. A softcore flick such as Blue Money no doubt looked titillating to much of its 1971 audience, who (unless they'd been hippies), were coming out of a comparably buttoned-down 60s, and were still a year shy of 1972's Deep Throat, which made hardcore pornography mainstream and "theatrical," in some sense. Porn lurked in the shadows, and for that reason even softcore depictions of its hidden culture and ostensibly liberated ethos would have enthralled audiences. And although a hardcore version of Blue Money does exist, even the Crown International version's softcore sequences would have been compelling to the 1971 crowd. I think, for instance, of the scene where Jim pulls his European paramour into a motel room shower fully clothed, gradually taking off her garments to reveal some brief nudity. This doubtlessly looked like libertine behavior to half the people in the audience for this film. You can almost hear the viewers' thought process: imagine it—pulling a fully-clothed girl into a shower. Wild! Perhaps we might liken early 70s cinematic sexuality to the public's first encounter with video games in the later 70s and early 80s. At first, it must have been rapturous to move around blocks on TV screens with the turn of a dial. In that regard, a film like Blue Money is sexual Pong. Bare breasts in a shower were likely enough to make this poorly scripted, shoddily directed film a memorable viewing experience.

But the directorial effort is not entirely awful. Later in the film, Jim is forced to remove his work-in-progress boat from the location near the marina where he's been shoring it up. At this point, Patrick includes a shot of a mother cat determinedly carrying a kitten by the scruff of its neck to the frames on which the boat rested. Apparently, the mother cat had nested her newborn litter in or around the boat, presumably not in a diegetic mode. I guess the incidental image impacted Patrick enough that he felt he had to include it in the final cut. And I suppose the image does parallel that of his significant other perpetually carrying their child in the domestic scenes. But the image struck me as irreducibly agonizing. I hate to be the bearer of darkness, but litters rarely survive in their entirety, and that's the case even when they live in relatively secure environs like farms or loving households. Being out in the no-man's-land of the marina, those kittens would have had even less of a chance, to say nothing of the mother. And those that do survive these kind of environs probably aren't going to amount to much more than alley cats, fighting for every scrap they ever get in their brief and tumultuous lives. And yet nature and instinct dictate that this mother has to parent with determination, no matter the odds against her and the litter. We hear that a hitter in baseball is an all-star if he fails seven out of ten times, but in all honesty, a mother cat is a hall-of-famer if she manages to keep 20% of her litter alive for more than a few months. We know that hers is a losing battle and a lost cause and all those other stock phrases, but still the mother feline goes full bore. (I wish I could take such an approach with my writing.) In that sense, the mother cat is also working in a "dead space." As with the pornographer and porn performers, little will come of the mother cat's efforts. She produces things that last a few months and then are gone and forgotten. It all serves a brief issuance of sperm and then is done. Though it leaves me crestfallen, I appreciate that Patrick took the time to film that cat scurrying with her young. With that second or two of footage, he acknowledged the perpetually unacknowledged, remembering what's inevitably forgotten. This is the only lasting image in Blue Money.

Forget the bare breasts and the sex, softcore or hard—it's the picture of the mother cat that endures in its capacity to compel. Watch Blue Money, then, if only to see these two or three seconds that provide a thematic fulcrum for an otherwise banal and ham-fisted picture. That single image saves this film from becoming The Room.

Halloween II (2009)

I had no memory of watching Rob Zombie's Halloween II, the sequel to the 2007 remake. I could swear I'd seen it before—twice, by my estimation. I purchased the Unrated DVD edition in 2010, and I could find it opened on my shelf. This suggested I had given it a watch back in the day. Tonight, I got the urge to screen the film, and from the opening credits, it felt unfamiliar, save for the faintest traces of what protagonist Laurie Strode looked like, strung out in the aftermath of witnessing brutal murders by Michael Myers. After the first hour, I had serious doubts I'd seen the film twice, let alone once. Perhaps I fell asleep the first time I attempted to watch it. This also puzzles me. The film turns out to be one of the most compelling in the franchise on account of its complex characterization, hypnagogic visuals, and thoroughgoing storytelling. These combine to make it one of the most interesting cinematic experiences the Halloween franchise has to offer.

The principal characters in Halloween II are not hollow slasher movie victims-in-waiting. The film centers upon Laurie, charting her transformation from the bookish, bespectacled high-schooler of the first film to the haggard, gloomy alt-girl who survived the murders and shot the killer. Between her therapy sessions, flashbacks, and assorted freak-outs, we see the very real PTSD that would be inevitable for anyone who survived the kinds of events documented in slasher films. We also see the aftermath for Annie, who survives Michael Myers' attack in the first film (unlike in the original John Carpenter continuity). Annie and her father, Sheriff Bracket (played by Child's Play legend Brad Dourif), have taken Laurie into their home, helping her through her breakdowns and attempting to provide some semblance of family life. Annie's pain is also very real, not only on account of having been scarred by Myers, but also from living with Laurie's constant anguished outbursts. Laurie feels inexorable guilt for what happened to Annie, and Annie must constantly convince Laurie it's not her fault. These factors deepen the psychological fault-lines, the kind that were only superficial in previous Halloween offerings. Dr. Loomis, meanwhile, the psychologist (psychiatrist in the prior continuity) responsible for Michael's care, has become something of a diva, profiting off sales and speaking engagements related to his book documenting the murders. Played by Malcolm McDowell, his venality raises the question of whether or not he'll do the right thing in the end and do something to prevent further slaughter.

Michael Myers' own motivations remained vague at best in the prior Halloween films. But in the unrated version of the Zombie sequel, the visual representation of his motivators makes for some of the most compelling imagery ever to appear in a Halloween film. Myers is haunted—or better yet guided—by the spirit of his deceased mother in a white gown leading a white horse. The horse, we are told by a rather heavy-handed epigraph, is a symbol of emotional release. Also accompanying Myers' mother is Myers in child form. Together, they advise the mute Michael on his journey through the film, orchestrating his reunion with Laurie, whom we the audience know, based on the first film and the earlier franchise lore, to be his sister. The appearance of these specters and symbols throughout Halloween II gives the film decidedly surrealistic and even Lynchian qualities. I would not have expected as much from a Halloween film; perhaps in oscillating between sleep and waking in my first viewing, I assumed I was dreaming all along.

In charting the mental and physical journey of Michael Myers, the unrated cut of Halloween II goes places no other Halloween film goes before, providing the kinds of interstitial storytelling we could only speculate upon in the previous films. Throughout the film, we see Michael trekking through fields and forests to reunite with Laurie. Surely he made such treks in prior films, but we were only ever left to imagine the logistics. On the way, Myers has neither his typical work-suit, nor his iconic mask. Rather, we see a massive bearded man, his face veiled only by long hair and a hood. He seems like something out of high fantasy, perhaps an itinerant barbarian guided by ancestor spirits. This is not the shadowy Michael Myers who has persisted throughout the series. Rather, he is out in the open. As the climax approaches, his face is shown on multiple occasions. He actually sort of looks like a steroidal Rob Zombie. Whatever the case, the horror baddie who travelled between shadows has been brought out into the light.

Here's what a Barbarian Michael Myers might properly look like

And this, no doubt, provides the main failing of the film for diehard fans of the series. Less has always been more with Halloween. Until this film (and, to an extent, the Zombie film that preceded it), Michael Myers has been a blank slate. The viewer had only the bare bones of his background. The man behind the mask was left almost wholly ambiguous, as were his motivations, and that's what informed the horror, to a large degree. The fact that an unstoppable killing machine could stalk victim after victim for no particularly good reason was a bottomless reservoir of terror. With Halloween II, that mystique is gone. We see the nuts and bolts of Michael's lunacy, and we have a good sense of his every move when he's not killing. This, undoubtedly, alienated some fans, who surely brayed that "this isn't our Michael Myers!" (I'm not even going to Google that so as to get a direct quote—I have a good enough sense of internet fan culture to know for certain that this was the criticism.)

This, however, is not a major flaw in the film, to my mind. Rob Zombie's reboot was committed to reimagining the series, and he delivered. That said, the film has plenty of other faults that keep it from being a classic. The film starts to lose focus around the three-quarter mark when, in the aftermath of learning the traumatic truth about her relationship to Myers, Laurie has a breakdown and then, on the spur of the moment, decides to go to a Halloween party. Why would Laurie be in the mood to party? And how often does a party scene with a live concert actually serve to the benefit of a movie? Rarely, if ever. It certainly does not work here. In typical fashion, the director gets distracted by the band and the (nude) dancing girls and the random MC who takes the mic and starts telling jokes. And it's Rob Zombie directing, so he gets doubly distracted and spends way too much time gazing on this Halloween rockabilly concert. As with most every party scene, it takes the viewer out of the movie.

Still, this is not enough, in my view, to write off the whole movie as a failure. I will not cast off the Halloween II unrated cut as utter crap, as so many others have (cf. The Halloweenies podcast on this film, which I've heretofore not listened to; nonetheless, they've referenced the Zombie films negatively in prior analyses, so it's safe to assume they shat all over this one). The concluding scene offers climactic surrealism, blurring the lines of hallucination and diegetic goings-on. In the final shots, Zombie makes a bold move with all the principal characters (the kind that, spoiler alert, typifies some of his other films), making the ending particularly memorable. Again, I'm shocked I didn't remember it the first time—again, a likely symptom of having fallen asleep. The film is definitely worth another watch, and this time I won't be waiting fourteen years before I fire up Halloween II again.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child (1989)

Until last night, I had never seen A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child.

I don't know how I could have gone this long without watching it. I'm a ravenous fan of franchise slashers. Friday the 13th is basically scripture to me, and I've watched each of the films dozens of times. Halloween marks another favorite, and I've viewed all the movies, including the extended editions and alternative cuts, on multiple occasions. I even screen the Rob Zombie versions with some frequency. I love Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers, and my feelings are much the same for Freddy Krueger. I've seen most of the Nightmare films several times. But for some reason, The Dream Child slipped through the cracks.

I can only hypothesize why things turned out the way they did. While I'm very fond of what Robert Englund brings to the Freddy experience, I found Krueger's increasingly quipster-ish behavior in the later films somewhat grating. In parts three through six, Freddy seems more like an insult comic than a horror icon. (By Freddy's Dead, he's an outright cartoon character.) And while I've generally enjoyed the imagery in the Nightmare films, I've often found the metaphysics perplexing. I know we're dealing in dreams here, but in almost every Elm Street movie, there's some point where Freddy crosses into reality, and I'm like, "wait, what?" (Part 2 is the most egregious in this regard.) The dream sequences make for the most creative and horrifying elements of the series, but by the time the plot of any given Elm Street movie resolves itself, it usually does so at the expense of coherence, I find.

But with that said, I've bracketed more serious issues in watching the later Friday the 13th and Halloween films. All told, the lacuna in my Elm Street viewing may simply be due to the fact that it's hard to find a good box set for the series. For years, the 8-film DVD box set has hovered around the same price as the 7-disc Blu-Ray collection. And while that Blu-Ray collection spent years on my Amazon wish list, it was sparse in nature (2 movies per disc and no Freddy vs. Jason) and generally overpriced. 

Finally, last week, Jeff Bezos dropped the price markedly, so I picked up the Blu-Ray box set. My first order of business was to watch The Dream Child.

This put me at a unique juncture. For all the other Friday the 13th, Halloween, and Elm Street films, my first viewing happened between the ages of 12 and 21, often on VHS. So now, at age 40, I had a chance to delve back into my youth, screening a franchise horror film for the first time. Perhaps the promise, wonder, and mystery of inserting a rental into the VCR would be recreated. Certainly, the anticipation was palpable as I pressed play on The Dream Child.

As it turns out, I was disappointed, but only mildly so. Regardless, a lot of my expectations were fulfilled. You see, a big part of renting horror movies in my youth was building up my preconceptions and then being moderately disappointed. Horror films, after all, rarely live up the cover art and screenshots on the back of their case. In this sense, The Dream Child helped me relive my youth.

What was the issue with A Nightmare on Elm Street 5? Well, once again, overly complex metaphysics bogged down a Freddy picture, and in the worst way. The Dream Child was a goulash of bizarre imagery and mythologies, overcooked in some places and undercooked in others. The writers gave every indication that they were making up the rules as they went along, pulling a means for defeating Freddy out of their asses at the very end. This is somewhat par for the course in Nightmare films, but in this case the end contrivance involved the combined efforts of the pregnant lead character Alice, the dream-manifestation of her future son at age five, and Freddy's deceased-nun mother, all in the dream world. There may have been other elements I've forgotten. There were simply too many variables for my simplistic, movie-reviewer mind to keep up with.

But the film has its strengths, too. Kudos go to the director and screenwriter for having Alice do what she wants with her baby in the latter third of the Reagan-Bush era. She spurns others' attempts to urge her toward abortion and adoption. Further to that, a lot of the nightmarish birth-canal imagery deserves some praise, as it takes viewers right into the Fallopian tubes, though the filmmakers go to the well a little too often. I also detected some effective Lynchian influence in the depictions of the cretinous infant Freddy, which is reminiscent of the baby in Eraserhead. The set-piece deaths generally deliver, as one expects from Elm Street films. The car-accident kill scene that takes out the father of Alice's baby is fantastic, as skeins of wires on a Knight Rider-esque talking motor bike piloted by a robotic Freddy entrap the victim in his dream, leading to a real-life car crash. Additionally, the kill scene where the comic-book fan gets eviscerated by "Super Freddy," a jacked super-villain Krueger in a cape, is particularly memorable. In these scenes, I felt some of that sense of wonder and awe I experienced as a teen (though I wouldn't have been able to designate filmic imagery as "Lynchian" at that age).

But the feeling that won out was disappointment. And this is okay. Because for me, I think disappointment provides its own brand of inspiration, and this is an important component of my creative process. For every horror movie I rented or bought or viewed on Tubi that didn't deliver on the promise of its box art and/or blurb, I felt the urge to sit down and write something that did meet my expectations. So maybe there's a nightmarish birth sequence in my literary future. 

Thanksgiving (2023)

John Carver, the new face of American Horror

With Thanksgiving, director Eli Roth has succeeded in creating a slasher film that feels authentic to the early-80s "Slasher Cycle." Thanksgiving accomplishes this feat by refusing to fall victim to the endless subgenre metacommentary that has clogged up neo-slashers ranging from the 90s Scream films to Scream VI or even the recent trilogy of Halloween sequels. Instead, Thanksgiving recaptures the vibe of true ur-slashers—that is to say, the ones based on days of sinister significance (to borrow a phrase from Vera Dika) such as Friday the 13th (1980) and Halloween (1978). More than a few scenes in Thanksgiving legitimately feel like Halloween II, with a pinch of Graduation Day's fuzzy detachment thrown in for good measure. All told, Roth effectuates the feel of a go-nowhere town racked by murderous brutality. The whodunit elements are well-executed and compelling, as they benefit from a healthy helping of red herrings to keep audiences guessing. I screened this film in a half-full theater, and all the teeny-bopper couples in attendance spent much of the runtime incessantly whispering to their squeezes with speculations as to who the killer behind the John Carver mask would be. All that said, the film doesn't take itself too seriously. Rest assured, my associate and I laughed uproariously for both the abundant one-liners and the uncompromising kill sequences (though we were the only ones in the theater who saw comedy in the latter, apparently). In 2023, guffawing at a depiction of abject slaughter feels far more satisfying than snickering at some "meta" wisecrack—the murder-laugh is just more honest nowadays. The jokes and absurdity do not compromise the gravity of the horror, though, as the gore and body count are taken very seriously. Of course, some of the kill sequences aren't entirely new, as we got glimpses of them in the supposedly standalone trailer for Thanksgiving that Roth produced for inclusion in the middle of 2007's Grindhouse double-feature. If you've viewed that brilliant piece of schlock, then you know exactly what's coming when you see the trampoline appear in Thanksgiving's much glossier 2023 fleshing-out. And if I do have one lasting criticism of the feature-length Thanksgiving, it's how sleek the cinematography looks. It's a far cry from the stark, grainy footage in the 2007 trailer, thereby eschewing the unsettling straight-to-VHS aesthetic. Nevertheless, Thanksgiving is an otherwise bona fide New Testament for the slasher canon. Eli Roth has solidified himself as a doyen of contemporary horror, and he deserves a place alongside Jordan Peele as one of the preeminent scare-slingers of the 2020s. I just hope that, over the remainder of the decade, we'll get invited back to dinner for Thanksgiving 2 through 8. 

CODA (with mild spoiler alert):

One of my favorite parts of this movie is when the credits roll to "Where Eagles Dare" by the Misfits—that is, the genuine, Danzig-era Misfits. The leap from turkeys to eagles might be a bit of a stretch, but the throaty, bellowing strains of Glenn Danzig never hurt in the context of horror. In the end, the choice of song and band makes for a well-earned victory lap, as Thanksgiving rekindles the Slasher Cycle's legacy of brutality.

The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978)

The Eyes of Laura Mars should be of obvious interest to slasher-flick historians. Written by John Carpenter and released just before his masterpiece Halloween, it represents a sort of spiritual prequel to Michael Myers' first movement. To wit, Laura Mars utilizes first-person perspectives to capture stalk-and-slash sequences, the very same that were perfected in Halloween. These sequences mark the central gimmick of the film, as the eponymous Laura Mars can see murders through the eyes of a killer on account of some unexplained psychic mind-meld. All told, this is among the least slasher-like of the proto-slasher films (that is, those films that predate the inception of the "slasher cycle" in 1978 with the aforementioned Halloween), and is probably better classified as a psionic whodunnit noir flick. The Eyes of Laura Mars seems almost giallo-like at times, blending Manhattan chic with late-70s NYC grime. The peerless Faye Dunaway, fresh off her deranged Oscar-winning performance in Network, turns in a serviceable performance as the titular character. A unrecognizably young Tommy Lee Jones delivers a solid supporting role as the detective investigating the murders. Raul Julia, the eventual M. Bison, plays Mars' alcoholic and histrionic ex-husband, while Brad Dourif, the eventual voice of Chucky, serves as her sketchy limo driver. This all-star lineup comes to comprise the prime suspects as more and more of the cast gets knocked off in murder-mystery fashion. Without offering any spoilers, I'll note that the killer turns out to be the person you least suspect (or, if you're into game theory, it's perhaps the person you most suspect, as inverting all expectations is a matter of course for game theorists). What really sets The Eyes of Laura Mars apart is its soundtrack, most notably a lengthy sequence backed by Michael Zaeger's disco classic "Let's All Chant." The arrangement is orchestral (at least by disco standards), juxtaposing jarringly with the vapid lyrics. This fits the uneasiness of both the 70s New York backdrop and Mars' confounding cognitive affliction exceedingly well. In the end, the visual and sonic experience offered by The Eyes of Laura Mars allows the film to hold up as a worthy period-piece for both slasher and noir fans alike.

X-Ray (1982)

If you consult a typical reviewer's take on the 1982 film X-Ray (a.k.a. Hospital Massacre), you will inevitably get a negative diagnosis. What you need, however, is a second opinion, as these reviewers are quacks. X-Ray is a well-conceived, well-executed slasher that benefits on two fronts. First, it depicts the harrowing process of dealing with hospital staff and trying to get information therefrom in accurate and Kafkaesque fashion. Secondly, it benefits from a memorable and convincing villain, a masked surgeon who absolutely massacres his victims. With his heaving breaths and medical mask-and-hood combo, the killer is simultaneously reminiscent of Kane Hodder's Jason and Mortal Kombat's Sub-Zero. But he's also something quite unique unto himself, as he hacks people to death with an unbridled fury not often seen in conventional, non-exploitation slashers. In this way, he's in contradistinction to the stereotype of the surgeon as methodical, precise, and dexterous, proceeding with a reckless abandon that makes Jason and Sub-Zero look downright surgical by comparison. Moreover, some praise is due for the female lead, Barbi Benton (pictured), whose acting sometimes gets a bum rap because she's a former Playboy Playmate. In X-Ray, she's convincing in her frustration and exasperation as both the confused patient and then the killer's prime target. That said, the scene in which a male doctor examines her while she's in the nude goes on exploitatively long and ends up being more uncomfortable than alluring. Still, this isn't enough to pull the plug on X-Ray. My diagnosis: X-Ray is a salubrious slasher that's essential to a healthy horror-fan lifestyle.

Sorority Party Massacre (2012)

Sorority Party Massacre (2012) starts off very promisingly. There is legitimate frisson in the opening sequence, where a woman en route to a sorority meeting pulls over to a roadside scrapyard only to find that she's being stalked via her cellphone by an unseen man. Sure, it's more than a little reminiscent of Scream, but the sequence presents a capable homage. At the conclusion of this opening sequence, we're introduced to an intimidating and visually compelling villain with a distinctive, foreboding laugh. A raspy click that sounds looped, this laugh could have been iconic.

Kevin Sorbo appears briefly in this movie.
I didn't want to post a photo of Ron Jeremy. 

To this point, the viewer is geared for a serviceable horror flick, but what follows after the opening credits is a faltering horror comedy that tries harder to be funny than horrific. What we get are fart jokes, consciously hammy acting, dialogue punctuated with sound effects, shameless over-reliance on montages, superfluous nudity, a “mongoloid” character, and Ron Jeremy cameos. In short, Sorority Party Massacre becomes that kind of movie. The titular sorority girls are little more than T&A, which in all fairness should have been obvious to this reviewer going in, given the title. The film is neither funny nor horrific, and it looks and feels amateur all throughout—a far cry from the intro. It's as if the opening sequence and the movie proper were directed by different people. We never do see that cool killer from the opening sequence again, at least not as he originally appears, sounds, and behaves. This viewer does not recall hearing that raspy, clicking laugh again.

But in the end, there is a half-decent denouement. Here we have the privilege of seeing Ron Jeremy brutalized by the main-character cop. This part has aged well, given Jeremy's recently litigated sex crimes. The Jeremy beat-down may even be enough to justify checking out the movie. But if you do seek out Sorority Party Massacre, just watch the opening sequence and then skip to the ending. The "movie" sandwiched in between is unwatchable.

The Astro Zombies (1968)

The Astro Zombies sometimes gets heralded as a schlock sci-fi/horror classic, but this is a gross misconception. I doubt if anyone who has ever suffered through this film in full could earnestly put forward a positive evaluation of the experience. Some might defend the movie by saying it's "so bad that it's good", but The Astro Zombies is just bad. The "so bad that it's good" designation really only applies to well-paced crap. The Astro Zombies may actually be the worst-paced movie of all time. It's ostensibly about alien-looking "quasi-men" who have escaped a lab run by John Carradine to commit "mutilation murders", but there's very little action of that nature depicted on-screen. Director Ted V. Mikels chews up most of the runtime with interstitial shots of driving, parking, and sci-fi babble, all of which makes for excruciatingly boring viewing. The only redeeming aspect of this movie is that it inspired The Misfits' song "Astro Zombies", a recording that accomplishes a lot more in two minutes and eleven seconds than The Astro Zombies does in an hour and thirty-one minutes.

Wrong Turn (2003)

Wrong Turn tells the story of a group of college-educated youths who take a shortcut through the West Virginia mountains and run afoul of a family of Republicans. It all starts with some tire damage caused by traps set by the Republicans. A quartet from among the college kids peels off in search of help and locates a ramshackle hutment, but when they find human remains inside, they realize that Republicanism is none too far away. Soon enough, the Republicans arrive home with the freshly riven corpse of one of the college students who’d stayed with the vehicle. From their hiding places, the surviving college kids have no choice but to watch as the Republicans dismember and devour their friend. When the Republicans fall into a satiated sleep, the college kids attempt to escape, but the Republicans are jolted awake and chase them into the forest, picking them off one by one. The urbanized college youths hide in trees, lookout towers, and caves to evade their pursuers, but the Republicans doggedly sniff them out. Can young, college-educated Americans survive the relentless Republican onslaught?

Upon its release, critics were initially hard on Wrong Turn. Scott Foundas of Variety describes the film as “frightless torpor”; Rotten Tomatoes calls it an “unremarkable slasher flick.” But these reviews come from a much different point in history. For those of us who survived the Trump presidency, the film rings irrefutably true and even prescient. In both mood and manner, these inbred, cannibalistic Republicans remind us of the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. As such, Wrong Turn is not a “slasher flick,” but rather a fictive, filmic ethnography of America. While it is not nearly as deranged as the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the ne plus ultra of American ethnographic cinema, Wrong Turn is nonetheless an honest film in perfect fidelity with the base culture that spawned it. Even more than it entertains, Wrong Turn educates us about a subspecies of Republican that American civilization would do well to avoid.

All told, Wrong Turn comes highly recommended, as it's an unrelenting thrill-ride that doesn’t let up, not even after the Republicans have been neutralized and the plot has resolved itself (hence, a mild spoiler alert here). Stick around for the credits, and you’ll learn along with an unfortunate deputy sheriff a harsh lesson about American life—the truest Republicans are the hardest to kill.

Friday the 13th: The Hunt for Jason

Any viewer’s search for the best Friday the 13th fan film needn’t go much further than The Hunt for Jason. The film grips its viewer by the throat from the get-go and holds steady at full throttle until its finish. There is little if any dialogue. If the characters do speak, it’s not memorable. Rather, The Hunt for Jason is all about meticulously choreographed action sequences. In fact, its brisk runtime plays out more like a fight scene, or perhaps a particularly well-conceived pro wrestling match or even a brutal ballet. Jason and his Special Ops pursuer trade various blows and grapples while countering one another’s attacks. This film’s Jason is styled after Richard Brooker’s performance in Part 3, and the actor portraying him achieves the shambling gait, the hanging arms, and the knuckle-dragging impeccably. The actor playing the Spec Ops guy isn’t so bad either. They complement each other so compellingly, you almost forget they are both teenagers. Together, they’ve come up with some truly virtuoso stuff and culminate in a few undeniably cinematic moments. All people involved should end up working in films or gaming. Of course, The Hunt for Jason is a fan film so, as could be expected, it’s not perfect. Sure, it’s mostly set in a desiccated Southern California backyard, but the departure from the lake setting is not to its disadvantage. The Hunt for Jason is about claustrophobic, non-stop action, and it delivers that. Any description provided here will do little justice to the kinesthetic brilliance the players in Hunt for Jason embody. So with that said, I urge you to fire it up on YouTube, and to be awed.

Watch it here.

Friday the 13th: Fan Film(s)

There are two Friday the 13th fan films that go by the rather unimaginative title Friday the 13th: Fan Film, both of which were released in 2016. One of them is classically bad, and the other especially terrible. 

The bad one is directed by Riley Lorden and, to its credit, features a body-positive Jason. It offers little else in the way of positives. The dialogue is so bad it seems improvised—either that or it was just particularly poorly written. It may very well be the latter, as the script provides no real story arc. The only other commendable feature is that it closes on a pretty adept drone shot. The reward for sitting through the credits is a shot of another slasher, this one in a Shatner mask, picking up one of Jason’s discarded weapons. This teases a crossover, which is cool in and of itself, but the viewer is left hoping that Riley Lorden et al. won’t be the ones to make it. 

Nor should the guys who made the other Fan Film. This flick is credited rather obliquely to “The Cast,” and with good cause, as even the most superlative ironist would not want their name associated with this steaming pile. The cast is a thirty-and-over sausage fest; indeed, it seems like the guys who put this together were having a party in the midst of filming (or vice-versa). This film’s Jason is dollar-store quality, with a street-hockey style mask that looks more fitting for Lord Humongous than Jason Voorhees (now there’s a worthwhile crossover, fan-filmmakers) and Halloween-decoration plastic ribs that he wears like a necklace. Moreover, this Jason proceeds almost daintily with his kills. I guess the guys who made this were going for laughs. That said, they seemed to earnestly sketch out the homosocial and outright homoerotic trajectories between some of the characters, an element that would be more praiseworthy had the film taken itself a little more seriously on the whole. If nothing else, this Fan Film’s only redeeming quality might be that it stands as the only really queer-friendly Friday the 13th fan film. It offers some strangely intimate moments between the characters, as if the boys were working things out between one another in real-life as the party was happening and as the movie was being filmed. This is the only conceivable reason why it should be watched. In fact, this so-bad-it’s-good aspect actually makes this Fan Film better than Riley Lorden’s not-as-bad but still unremarkably crappy fan film of the same name. If you find yourself confused, I’d suggest watching neither film.

Watch the bad one here. Don't watch the terrible one anywhere.

Camp Crystal Lake

Camp Crystal Lake is not the best Friday the 13th fan film, but it might just be this author’s sentimental favorite. The film was purportedly made in one night, but watching it, you’d think it took a full three or four days’ work. There’s not much of a storyline here beyond a “Mr. K” having purchased the camp with hopes of fixing it up. There are, however, lots of lovely visuals. The director, Rickey Bird, found some prime abandoned camp locations, to which the editors have overlaid various augmentations, including on-the-fly VHS tracking fixups. Perhaps the finest piece of cinematography in all the Friday the 13th fandom is this film's shot of Jason in a meadow in the moonlight, looking perplexed. Also easy on the eyes are the female cast members. Your author doesn’t mean to get caught up in matters of male gazing here, but the female lead, one Erica Morgan, is so pretty that she almost takes on a translucent quality. Her runway-ready beauty in combination with her pixyish voice establish her as a truly unforgettable fan-film female lead (if not the only one). When she (mild spoiler alert here) finds Mr. K’s corpse and squawks “Mr. K! Holy fuck!” it is one of the most hilarious and unvarnished moments in any Friday the 13th fan film. And while Camp Crystal Lake doesn’t have much of a plot to resolve, it does clear up some questions circling  around (at least for this reviewer) Jason’s sexuality. The final image (another mild spoiler alert) has Jason taking an incapacitated Erica Morgan back into the lake as a prize, of sorts, suggesting that the hockey-masked maniac is moving towards a more distinctly heteronormative sexuality. And although I’ve given several spoilers in this review, this shouldn’t deter anyone from watching Camp Crystal Lake. Among Friday the 13th fan films, it’s an atmospheric triumph that must be experienced.

Watch it here.

2000 Maniacs! (1964)

I just watched 2000 Maniacs! and by god is that a prescient film. It's redneck horror at its most carnivalesque.

Herschell Gordon Lewis looks eminently prophetic as his 1964 film sets a template for a subgenre of horror that would thrive in the 1970s. Texas Chainsaw Massacre would give us the male remnants of a family of cannibalistic rednecks living just off the main road. The Hills Have Eyes would give us an extended family and/or clan of inbred hicks cannibalizing wayward travellers. Both of these films are better made and more artistically sophisticated than 2000 Maniacs!. But Lewis's film is more demented and visceral: after all, it gives us not a family or a clan but rather a whole town of Southerners, all 2000 of whom are berserk and bloodthirsty and cannibalistic, at least when dealing with Northerners.

And so the film presents us with the multifarious maimings of our Yankee protagonists, making way for a tide of that orangey blood that was a hallmark of Lewis's films. Oh, sure, there's dismemberment and cannibalism, but for me, the piece-de-resistance comes when the locals cajole a Yankee man into a barrel under the pretext that they’re going to roll him down a hill in good fun. This is a risky enough proposition to begin with, but then the yokels gleefully proceed to drive nails through the barrel. By the time the Yankee gets to the bottom of the hill, he's no more than a shredded, red-orange rag. The rednecks rejoice. They have collaborated successfully on a slaughter.

And in these carnographic, set-piece scenes, after the violence has been wrought, Lewis provides us time and again with panning closeups of the faces of the mongrel herd. The vibe is reminiscent of a story that appeared in EC’s Vault of Horror but a decade before, specifically issue 34 from 1953. In this yarn, the supervisor of a psychiatric institution is placed in a casket by inmates. Through a square window in the very top of the casket, all the unhinged inmates peer in, prodding and poking and gaping at their captive. And in 2000 Maniacs!, we get comparable images of the deranged visages, with their gap-toothed smirks and their moon-eyed leering.

The psychiatric holding-tank, then, is the South itself, and every single son and daughter of the soil can be counted as one of the inmates. They betray an unabashed giddiness as they mutilate. They exude joie-de-vivre while they deprive their Northern countrymen and women of their lives. This is inestimably jarring.

So while Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes are better films, hands down, the former more artistic and the latter far more tightly plotted, 2000 Maniacs! is more horrifying. To stare into that joyous, murderous, and cannibalistic Southern horde is to stare into the faces of our present-day countrypersons. It is to stare into the faces of the Trump supporters and, more recently, the anti-maskers and the anti-vaxxers. Sorry Leatherface, but real-life horror doesn’t wear a mask.

And while the film sort of cops out at the end by suggesting (spoiler alert) hallucinatory or supernatural causes for the town with the eponymous population of 2000 sadistic rednecks, the implication is very real. There are people like this in our country, not just thousands of them but millions of them. They are the abscess on America that will never die. Worse yet, they are a cancer that might just kill you—that might just eat you alive.

Friday the 13th: The Legacy Begins

Fan films are ineludibly regionalized. In the Friday the 13th fandom alone, you can find Deep South, South Californian, British, Canadian, and French versions of the Crystal Lake mythos, among many others. As such, it was inevitable that there would eventually arise a French Canadian iteration of Friday the 13th (or Vendredi Treize, as it were). The Legacy Begins fills (or better yet embodies) the French Canadian void. Perhaps the most immediately noteworthy feature of the film is that the characters aren’t actually speaking French, or even Quebecois. Rather, the writers have opted to let their cast of unanimously Francophone actors struggle it out with barely serviceable CEGEP*-level conversational English. The viewer gets the full Quebecois experience with a dash of Friday the 13th overlaid. Quebecois males are a subspecies unto themselves—shaggy and smirky and stammering—and the lead dudes fully fit this billing. Quebecois females, meanwhile, are their own subgenus. Vine-like, frazzled, and foul-mouthed, the two female leads in The Legacy Begins are nothing less than archetypal Quebecois. The dialogue that passes between these characters is charmingly stilted, chock-full of strained English vocabulary. But as complete as the Quebecois experience is in this film, the Friday the 13th elements don’t translate well. Jason is terribly staged, and he stalks about with almost a hip-hop swagger. This interpretation doesn’t mix well with the various pratfalls around which much of the action is based. On the whole, The Legacy Begins suffers on account of what we might call a cap-and-bells sensibility: What I mean here is that the film is shot through with a deeply Quebecois comedic aesthetic—one that basks in gestures fit for jesters, rubbery and exaggerated facial expressions, and reliance on folly and circumstance as a key driver of plot. To put it simply, this film is too regional. Instead of taking what it can from the local backdrop, as per A New Wake (the Friday the 13th fan film from France), The Legacy Begins has simply spiraled deeper and deeper into its local color and subsequently crash-landed in a tailspin in that French-Canadian void. The only highlight comes when a 40-something mom karate-kicks Jason, and manages to do it in rather unceremonious fashion. This image, I’d say, is an apt synecdoche of the banal silliness of Quebecois culture.

Watch it here.

*CEGEP refers to the mandatory year of pre-University college undertaken by Quebecois students.

Friday the 13th: The Curse of Jason

Among the most pathetic and execrable of the Friday the 13th fan films is The Curse of Jason. It’s made in Indiana and does not lack for local color; once again we see the solidly mid-western Hoosier state doing its best to stay at par with the Confederate South. If you want to see Jason slaughtering a cast of fleshy-faced men in camo hats, then this is the fan film for you. The Trump-Supporter sensibilities make most of the victims wholly unsympathetic. The only really interesting thing that Curse of Jason does is managing to shoehorn several iterations of Jason into the mix. At first, he’s got a bag on his head as per Part 2. Then, during an early kill sequence, he conveniently finds a hockey-mask sitting on a bureau, and he upgrades to that. Variations of Jason from Part 5 and Part 3 make appearances in the ensuing scenes, thanks in part to a (spoiler alert) fake Jason “subplot” (I’ve opted for quotations because there’s not much a plot to begin with). The acting here is atrocious even relative to other fan films. In one case, a young man shows up at his sister’s soiree only to find all the partygoers slaughtered. He is mildly perturbed by the discovery. Jason appears, only to have the young man’s sister emerge from a back bedroom and push him aside, her facial expression pacific all the while. The kill scenes are moronically choreographed. In one scene that marks the nadir of the filmmaker’s imaginative capacities, Jason throws a portly fifty-something guy with a neck tattoo into a shallow marsh. But the worst directorial decision is by far the depiction of the lone African American character, whose conceptualization is southern-fried, to say the least. Playing on Southern Caucasian stereotypes of the oversexed black man, this character is introduced in the midst of seducing a white woman. When Jason appears, the African American man pushes his paramour into Jason so that he may flee. It’s no spoiler alert, to my mind, to tell you that the African American guy gets his comeuppance after the credits roll. I guess this black man’s murder is something of a parting shot or a punchline…if you’re going in with massively racist assumptions. Steer clear of The Curse of Jason unless you want to suffer through the Birth of a Nation of Friday the 13th fan films.

Don't watch it here.

Friday the 13th: Repetition

Friday the 13th: Repetition takes a schlocky, mirthful approach to Jason-related fan filmmaking. Lensed on Canada’s pacific coast, it benefits from trashy, Western-Canadian sensibilities. The script features some truly good badinage, such as the quip offered by the South Asian camper who is skeptical of his Caucasian friends’ idea to go into the woods looking for Jason: “This is what white people do,” he says, pretty much distilling the whole Friday the 13th franchise and even, dare I say, the entire slasher genre along with it. All told, the players’ performances are overblown, none more so than that of the Crazy Ralph analog, who really doesn’t look or sound like Crazy Ralph and is better off for it. With a straw, he drinks from a bandaged wound on his hand. He also issues another of the script’s restaurant-quality one-liners when he breaks the fourth wall to tell the viewers: “It’s not easy being creepy.” Amen to that. With the cinema-vérité camerawork and the occasional, purposeful graininess, the director almost lends the Friday the 13th materials a House of 1000 Corpses vibe. Indeed, the film smacks more heavily of early (and tenuous) Rob Zombie directorial efforts than it does of Friday the 13th. The cast is mostly on the heavy-set side, and I bring this up not to fat-shame the players but rather because the script itself draws attention to its body-positivity. Jason himself is fairly portly, and appears to be winded for many of the pursuit scenes. Still, he catches up with his victims eventually, though the kills are nothing special, marred by unconvincing effects. Nonetheless, Friday the 13th: Repetition is worth watching for a few chuckles, as it does not take itself too seriously—which is, surprisingly enough, rare among horror fan films.

Watch it here.

Friday the 13th: A New Wake

Fan films necessarily allow for some refreshing regionalized re-imaginings of ossified franchises. A New Wake places Friday the 13th in Europe, specifically in France. As could be expected, the dialogue is in French with English subtitles. Hopefully that’s not a bridge too far for the average American consumer, because if it is, then they are missing out on a fantastic visualization of the Voorhees milieu. The European locations add a Gothic stateliness to the Friday the 13th experience. In this way, A New Wake is reminiscent of Part VI, Jason Lives, one of the few canonical Friday the 13th films that actually benefited from the unique look of its filming location, in that case the American South. And fittingly, A New Wake has patterned its Jason after C.J. Graham's Part VI performance as the hockey-masked maniac. The staging of Jason is outstanding, easily among the best in the fan-film world and on par with any canonical Jason, save perhaps for the Kane Hodder version. This Jason has musclé, as the French say. A New Wake is lean on dialogue, which only serves to emphasize its fantastic visuals. The best example is the day-dream sequence, of which I will say very little since it is better watched than described. If A New Wake has a flaw, that would be its anemic story and short run-time. What it gives you, however, wets your appetite for more. Tres bien!

Pour le film, cliquez ici.

Friday the 13th: Extraction

Friday the 13th: Extraction stands out among its fan-film kin on account of its well-framed shots and fantastic locations. The exteriors are full of driftwood and escarpments; the interiors are constituted by claustrophobic and convincing military bunkers. The story is short and to the point, centering upon a tactical team tasked with the mission of taking down Jason. The script brims with great tough-guy dialogue, and it even addresses in some detail Jason’s persistent ability to regenerate tissues. The only downside is that Extraction's ending comes a little too abruptly, leaving the viewer wanting more.

Watch it here.