The first line in my notes for Phantom Brother, the 1988 shot-on-video (SOV) horror flick from screenwriter Joseph Santi and director William Szarka reads, “Well, it’s trash.” That may be harsh, but my movie notes are written in the heat of the moment, without considering the trials and tribulations of the filmmaking process. Of course, like so many other low budget projects, Phantom Brother is a movie made despite the mountain of barriers that had to be overcome. It is a movie of passion, persistence, and…it’s trash. I’m glad it got made, but this is an obscure movie for a reason. Many reasons, in fact. Continue reading “Phantom Brother”
Tag: Slasher Flick
Terrifier
As of this writing, Terrifier, the 2016 gorefest from filmmaker Damien Leone, has a critics/audience rating of 63% and 51% on Rotten Tomatoes. This flick is polarizing, and it really turned some people off.
A spinoff of a segment from Leone’s horror anthology film All Hallow’s Eve, Terrifier follows Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton), a mass murderer who sets his sights on a pair of young women who are wrapping up a night out on the town during Halloween.
Tara and Dawn (Jenna Kanell and Catherine Corcoran) are regular, everyday urban twenty-somethings who just want to drive home, but need to sober up a bit before one of them gets behind the wheel. It’s too bad for them, then, that Art the Clown happens to be out and about looking for some victims. Halloween is the perfect night for Art, as his creepy regalia isn’t out of place, although it garners a lot of side-eye. Continue reading “Terrifier”
Fatal Images
In the decades since the 1989 release of Fatal Images, filmmaker Dennis Devine has staked out quite a place in low budget, trash horror cinema. Of the thirty-four directorial credits on his IMDb page that have viewer ratings, the average score is 3.8 out of 10. That’s pretty bad. Any single movie that garners a score that low is probably not worth the effort to watch, and that number covers Devine’s entire career. Some would say he should have thrown in the towel a long time ago, but shit on that. Devine is a filmmaker. It doesn’t matter that he makes crap. He makes movies, and no matter how bad they are, there is an audience of mutants out there who reject force fed studio movies — who experience culture outside the big corporate stranglehold on media. Sure, his movies stink. But every blown line, every plot hole, every frame of bland, desaturated magnetic video is a ‘fuck you’ to the moneyed gatekeepers of cinema.
Fatal Images, also written by Devine, with Mike Bowler and Steve Jarvis, is a supernatural slasher flick. Shot on glorious videotape, the film tells the story of deceased serial killer Kurt Cosgrave (David Williams); the camera that holds his murderous spirit (played by a Panon Widelux); and the photographer who buys the camera at a pawnshop, Amy Stewart (Lane Coyle). Continue reading “Fatal Images”
Silent Night, Deadly Night
People get all twisted over small stuff. We see it often. A large chunk of modern media thrives on the outrage machine. It drives engagement, sputters out after a week or so, then the talking heads find something else with which to rile up the masses. This has been going on for a long time. Even way back in 1984, before the World Wide Web kicked the machine into overdrive, we were carving out chunks of our lives to be outrageously pissed at something that didn’t matter.
Silent Night, Deadly Night, the classic slasher flick from director Charles E. Sellier Jr., caught the attention of the outrage machine. Groups picketed theaters that were showing it, and Phil Donahue dedicated an episode of his talkshow to it. Why? Because the killer in this movie dresses as Santa Claus. That was it. That was the outrage. Santa was such a sacred cow to enough people that they were offended by the very idea of a killer Santa. The behavior of a fictional character was an attack on an institution — Christmas — that they held dear. This is familiar ground today for a certain subset of cable news viewers, but what a stupid thing to get angry about. The anger got so intense that the film was pulled from distribution after only a couple of weeks, home video releases were few, and the intact film was in danger of being lost, despite cult success and a string of sequels. Anyway… Continue reading “Silent Night, Deadly Night”
Blood Tracks
From 1985, right in the middle of the decade of the slasher flick, comes a joint UK/Swedish production titled Blood Tracks. Directed by Mats Helge Olsson and Derek Ford, from a screenplay by Olsson and Anna Wolf, Blood Tracks follows a small film crew, a hair rock band, and some scantily clad dancers, who all head up into some snowy mountains to shoot a music video. But, as would happen, they become stranded by an avalanche, while a crazed family of hermits hunts them down in bloody fashion. This isn’t a franchise slasher, or one of the countless American entries, but it is a prototypical example of the genre, wallowing in the conventions and tropes that have done so much to make these flicks successful. Continue reading “Blood Tracks”
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2
In a business that is so laser-focused on exploiting intellectual property, it’s amazing that it took over a decade for a sequel to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to see release. Sure, it’s not unusual for a sequel to take so long to be made, but it is uncommon. This is especially so in horror, where movies can be made for miniscule budgets and, if lucky, see huge returns.
From 1986, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 sees Tobe Hooper, working again with Cannon and Golan-Globus, return to the well one more time. But, if viewers are expecting a simple retread of the first movie, they are in for a surprise. The original movie has a reputation for gore, and Hooper also viewed the film as black comedy. Well, neither is accurate. There is not a lot of gore in the first movie, and only Hooper seems to have found much humor in it. All that is fixed in the sequel. Hooper went all-in on some sicko campiness, and gave so much free reign to f/x guru Tom Savini that the film was released unrated in the States, and remained unreleased for decades in several large overseas markets. Continue reading “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2”
In a Violent Nature
At some point, filmmaker Chris Nash had a revelation. Maybe it was in those moments right before sleep takes hold, when the head carnival, against all sense, is at its most raucous. Maybe it happened while watching another movie, or when his mind was drifting away from a banal or uncomfortable conversation. Whenever it was and whatever the situation, Nash must have thought, “What if a Friday the 13th movie were told from Jason’s perspective?”
That simple idea is what drives In a Violent Nature, from earlier this year. At its core it is a classic 1980s slasher flick, but it’s boiled down until there is nothing left but bright white bones. The movie follows Johnny (Ry Barrett), the Jason Voorhees analogue, as he stomps through the woods and kills people. Continue reading “In a Violent Nature”
Shocker
Wes Craven is one of the giants of horror cinema. With The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes, he mastered the art of dread in horror. He seemed less concerned with frightening his viewers than with making them deeply uncomfortable. He lightened up in the 1980s, though, introducing one of horror’s most wisecracking antagonists with Freddy Krueger. That new style of his continued, less effectively, with Shocker, the story of another mass murdering serial killer with personality.
Mitch Pileggi plays Horace Pinker, a ruthless killer terrorizing the fictional California town of Maryville. It seems not a week goes by when there’s a news report of a home invasion where Pinker murders an entire family. One of those is the family of the detective investigating the murders, Lt. Don Parker (veteran That Guy Michael Murphy), and his adult foster son, Jonathan (Peter Berg), a star football player at the local college. Continue reading “Shocker”
Click: The Calendar Girl Killer
For about two-thirds of Click: The Calendar Girl Killer, the movie flirts with being an erotic thriller, featuring a passel of middle-aged Hollywood b-listers cashing checks. Then, for the final act, the movie makes a hard turn into slasher horror. It’s a change in tone that’s unusual, only because there is no indication this will happen. It’s obvious to viewers that violence will be coming in the final act, but not the scale, and not how it is depicted.
Something of a vanity project in the world of b-movies, Click was written by Hollywood acting stalwarts Ross Hagen and Hoke Howell, with David Reskin and David Chute. Hagen also directed alongside longtime stunt man John Stewart. To make it a family affair, Hagen’s wife, Claire, co-produced. Continue reading “Click: The Calendar Girl Killer”
Sorority House Massacre
Ecclesiastes 1:9 states, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” Every single maker of slasher flicks in the 1980s must have read that verse and taken it to heart. Especially Carol Frank, writer/director of 1986’s Sorority House Massacre. Not only does her movie crib from a decade’s worth of slasher flicks, it also cribs from The Slumber Party Massacre, a film on which Frank worked. According to the internet, so it must be true, that similitude was intentional, as Roger Corman, the uncredited executive producer, wanted a flick with a slumber party theme. Continue reading “Sorority House Massacre”