Shrooms

Today as I prayed to the gods to take my hangover away (it's a particularly violent one, the result of an impromptu dance party, a gay birthday bash, and the consumption of a shot called a Statutory Rape), I watched SHROOMS. Because sometimes you just want to watch something stupid that you don't have to think too hard about because thinking hurts. Thinking really hurts right now. Everything really hurts right now.

It's your standard attractive college kids going into the woods for a weekend of partying but some shit hits the fan and people start dying movie. This one features deadly, eat 'em and you'll see into the future and possibly become evil hallucinogenic mushrooms.

It is no secret that I party. Before you fall out of your chair from the shock of hearing that news, let me tell you, I have never taken mushrooms. I've never dropped acid, either. And I've never wanted to. Something about my brain would probably make me freak out, so I never understood the whole mentality about tripping. It just seems dumb to me. That being said....

This complete dumbasses in this movie have traveled all the way from happy American college life to the middle of fucking nowhere Ireland to pick these crazy mushrooms to brew into a tea so they'll start to see shit. They have a friend that's native to the region and he helps them pick the mushrooms and warns them off of the one's with a black nipple because if you eat those, you'll go fucking crazy as a loon and start fucking everyone's shit up. And you might also become psychic. He also regales them with tales about a nearby abandoned home for screwed up youth where some bad shit went down years before and some people got their asses killed.

Their guide has failed to mention this to Tara, our final girl in the tale, and she eats one of the bad ones - just plucks it right off the floor as if she's compulsed to eat it. She has a seizure and then starts to have prophetic dreams about her friends dying. She also says the best line in the movie, 'I just overdosed on the heroin of mushrooms!' Who says stuff like that? I love it - but that's about all I love here.

There's also two weirdos that live in the forest and some thing about sticking your dick in car windows while there are two people fucking inside to get a blow job. And there's a guy with a sack on his head and another ghostly presence that may or may not be killing everyone. And a twist ending.

Why did I watch this? The characters are horrible people - the jock is just such an asshole - you can't wait for him to die. But the actor that plays him doesn't have the panache to pull off even this stock of a character. His girlfriend's alright, but not particularly memorable, either. The other hippy-ish couple hate the jock and his GF, which is weird, because why you make an international trip with people that you hate? I know I like to go on vacation with people I can't stand. Tara's the good girl, but particularly annoying for no reason at all just because. The ending was abrupt and it's attempt at a twist felt forced.

I hate when there is just absolutely nothing to love in a movie (save for that one piece of aforementioned dialogue). Sometimes it helps if I picture something sucky as a seventies Italian version it makes it better, but even that wouldn't help this shit fest. My brain hurts now. I'm going to watch cartoons.

The Forest

I had to do something before I pulled myself into fishnets and eyeliner for the new year's evening's festivities, so I watched pseudo-slasher with a supernatural element, THE FOREST. Quick aside - the new year's plans did NOT amount to much being as how New Year's Eve is a great big fat amateur night, imo. It's just an excuse for regular dumbasses to get drunk and obnoxious. I don't need a holiday or even a specific reason to get drunk and/or obnoxious, because I'm always representing. So yeah, went and put in an appearance or two and then I'm reinserted myself into pajamas, almost two hours before midnite rolled around and then fell asleep to NEW YEAR'S EVIL on the vhs player. Word. I must be getting old. Anyway, back to the regularly scheduled review -

Two married couples - Steve and Sharon and Terri and Charles - decide over a playfully chauvinistic dinner one evening to take a camping trip to revitalize their marriages. Yes, I said it was a slasher of sorts and if you're as sick of slashers as I am of zombies, there's probably little I can say to sway your opinion of THE FOREST right off the bat. But there is a curious melding of horror flavors here which more than set this apart from its stalk and slash brethren and we'll get to them in a second. The girls set off first, out right defying their husbands (!), with the destination being an agreed upon campsite a few hours hike through the woods. Steve and Charles aren't far behind them, but some radiator trouble and a slow mechanic put them several hours behind the girls.

Night falls and the girls set up camp and are visited not by a hulking brute with a machete and coveralls but a pair of ghostly children who warn them in ethereal voices to beware their daddy. They disappear into the darkness and the children's ominous mommy shows up, telling the girls if they see her kids to send them home for a severe punishment. By the time she disappears, the women are more than a bit freaked out and and Sharon takes off to hide. Terri waits in the campsite, hopefully for the arrival of Steve and Charles, but is instead visited by John, the ghost kids' daddy who is very much alive with a taste for human flesh. When Terri asks John not to hurt her he responds, 'I don't want to hurt you, but I'm starving....' He quickly dispatches Terri with a hunting knife in a rather realistically gory way and then drags her body back to his cave for supper time.

A few beats later, Steve and Charlie arrive at John's lair, which is decorated with cane furniture and a candelabra. There's a nice looking roast cooking on a spit and John shows up outta nowhere and offers the men some dinner. Steve, Terri's husband, obliges, eats some of the meat, which John claims is deer meat, and then has a weird cold chill. John then regales them with the tale (told through an over the top flashback) of how he killed his cheating wife after he caught her in bed with the refrigerator repair guy. Oh yeah, and she had the kids locked in the closet as she fornicated.

So John had no fucking choice but to off her and leave their two children suicidal and move to a cave in the middle of the wilderness. Sounds reasonable, non? And now Steve and Charlie are at his cannibalistic mercy. Trust me, a compound fracture will be suffered and more blood will be spilled as the rest of this supernatural stalk and slash unfolds....

I mentioned how this is a curious melding of horror flavors and I wasn't joking. The setup at the beginning is your straightforward slasher set up, and almost reminded me a little bit of Jeff Lieberman's JUST BEFORE DAWN. It's efficient as far as staging and atmosphere goes, and as I mentioned, the gore is gratifyingly realistic. So if this was the sum of its parts, which it's not, this would be a great Friday the 13th riff. But add a dash of ghostly kids, a vindictive ghostly mama, and a crazy, almost sympathetic, murderous daddy, and you've got yourself something wholly unique. The ghost kids make it almost bittersweet and Gary Kent ( who plays the lunatic dad) brings a pathos to his character that makes the whole affair seem almost vindicated. BUT, he's a freakin' cannibal, and while we never see him in all out human flesh tearin' mode (i.e. chowing down on a liver or anything) we can't get too sentimental about his state of affairs.

So what of the themes, my fellow perverts? You know I'm an English teacher and I need to discuss the undercurrents. All good slashers aren't without them, and I'd safely put this on the list of basically unheard of, or at least unhailed, good slashers. There's definitely a theme of marital discord running through the whole deal, hence the beginning and the whole plot setup as we have it. Although, some of it does seem a little offensive (were you surprised?) in that the women are perpetually patronised. But then it falls back on its chauvinistic head when the girls find themselves in the woods alone and are praying for the men to arrive. I don't quite know what to make of it all...So I'll move on, because I've had some wine and also worked New Year's Day brunch, which trust me, is not fun...

Despite the frustrating aspects of woman's portrayal in this film (and many others, mind you), I'm also frustrated that we never learn the catalyst for John's cannibalism. Sure, he lives in a region teeming with wildlife, yet never resorted to hunting? How could he count on the occasional passerby to provide him with a food source? This is frustrating in and of it self, but with a cast of only four victims, my bloodlust is also hardly sated. Sorry, ya'll know I'm not a gorehound, but I love a high body count, especially if the kills are inventive. Here they're just kind ho hum.

Everyone is pretty darn believable, if not unintentionally amusing (think the placement of some cheesy 'feminist' rock songs, not that I even know what that means), in their prescribed roles. Suspense is dealt out in believable doses and, while there's plenty left wanting in the end, as far as unanswered questions are concerned, this is still a pretty enjoyable romp. It's neither classifiable as a slasher or a ghost tale or any other subgenre really, but still holds its on for this strange amalgamation alone. Worth checking out at only an hour an half, for reals.

Check it out..if you give it a chance you might even find yourself harkening back to Fulci's HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY. There are some similar elements, at least enough to warrant a pretty close comparison.

Happy New Year, pervs.

Unhinged

Stop me (don't really) if you've heard something incarnation like this before - three hotties (a blond, a brunette, and a much younger in relation to her two hottie friends naive chick) set out out on a road trip to a music festival. Something goes wrong in the middle of nowhere, car ends up wrecked, and the trio find themselves under the care of a family that seems, uh, not quite right. Shit hits the fan and everyone starts winding up dead at the end of pickaxe. Pedestrian, I know. Boring, probably. But UNHINGED (1980) does it just a little bit better and it has enough scenery chewing, weird dialogue, and a you-might-be-able-to-figure-it-out twist ending, to keep me laughing and singing it's praises at least for the length of this blog post.

I swear, this movie has Cavalcade written all over it. From the late seventies/early eighties? Check. Hottie protagonists? Check and check. Eschewing men and sex to the point of psychosis? Double check. Cross dressing and androgyny? Yep. A retarded sibling that 'wouldn't harm a fly'? Oh yeah. Lots of peeping/heavy breathing while girls take showers together? Got that too. Blood and guts? A little (there's only three girls to kill and it's gotta take up a running time of 1:20).

Incorporate all these elements, add a bit of a Norman Bates type of antagonist with just as domineering a mommy, toss with a little bit of overt psychosexual subtext, set the whole damn thing in a crumbling mansion, and give the actors the same lines to say over and over when explaining stuff that's already been explained, and there ya go! Cinema perfection, at least as far as I'm concerned!

What else do you really need to know? It's only an hour or so long, so it's not gonna totally take that much of an investment of your precious time but it does suffer from long periods of talking, so if you're a complete 80's gorehound, carry your ass somewhere else. But for my money (actually I didn't pay anything for this since Bruce gave me the copy), I'll invest my time watching an aging matriarch in a wheelchair lambast her daughter for being a complete slut in front of company and then menacingly attack the salt and pepper shakers. That, my dears, is my idea of entertainment.

Here, have a picture of the after-effects of the excesses of Thanksgiving. Bruce and Tuna relax on the couch drinking spiked iced tea while watching Naschy do his thing in WWvVW.

The Prowler

Gone are the days when one referred to a weirdo lurking in the shadows outside a simple graduation dance a 'prowler.' Such an antiquated term, no? I don't think I've ever uttered the word 'prowler' to refer to such an intruder. I usually say crackhead. For example, way back in the day, the BFF and I used to live together in this crappy apartment downtown. My car was forever getting broken into, there was always some bum in the alley shooting up, and it was just one step away from a pornographic bookshop, and what I swear was a Yakuza fronted Chinese restaurant. Anyway, I was liquored up one night (we drank malt liquor back then) and was in the bathroom and I looked out the window and I swear I saw a crackhead freaking out by my car, oh, excuse me, a prowler. I started yelling and called the cops screaming there's a crackhead by my car! Well, look who's the crackhead, it was a plant blowing in the wind. True story. It has nothing to do with the movie I watched last night, concerning an actual prowler. But I thought I would relate it you all, if not to solely entertain you with my drunken shenanigans.

So yeah, The Prowler (1981). It begins in 1945, with a vintage commercial for war bonds. Then Rosemary pens a letter to her boyfriend, breaking up with him because he's been gone fighting in the war too long. She said she'd promise she'd wait for him - but you know how these things go. She then takes off for the college graduation dance with new rich, roadster driving Roy. The dance proves to be a big fat yawn (even though it does sort of seem to be authentically 1945 - the costumes don't look all too bad and the band's got that swingin' sound), and Roy and Rosemary take off to find a secluded spot to make out and swill booze from a flask.

They find a lit gazebo and start doin' their PG rated thing, when someone kills the lights. No bother, they continue making out whilst a pitchfork-toting, black glove and helmet wearing, combat-booted madman comes out of the shadows and skewers the happy couple straight through. It really looked kinda cool (Savini, I think, was in charge of the bloody stuff), and I even found myself wincing a little bit. We're off to a good start, Prowler.

Next thing ya know, it's 1980 and go-getter Pam has organized a new graduation dance. Seems Rosemary's dad, the wheelchair bound Major Chatham (played by the always entertaining lump, Lawrence Tierney) has prohibited a dance from taking place for the last 35 years on behalf of his grief following Rosemary's death. He hasn't died or anything, I think he's too sick or something, to prevent Pam and her friends from throwing the new party. But he's not to sick to position his wheelchair directly across from the girl's dorm, to peep on them while they take showers and rub lotion on their nubile flesh. Slutty Lisa even takes it upon herself to show him the goods every now and again. Oh, she'll get what's coming to her, she will.

So the dance must go on - and the usual stuff happens, the band plays, students twirl about on the dance floor, the punch gets spiked and everyone gets wasted. Lisa takes off for a dip in her underwear in the pool and gets her comeuppance for her flashin' ways via the hands of the prowler. Our prowling friend also manages to knife a fornicating couple in the shower, in a really actually suspenseful scene, and the only time we get to see boobs.

I must say this about the movie - the score is dead on. It's really perfect. It does much to enhance the atmosphere and there are really a lot of great suspenseful moments. You still know what the fuck is gonna down because we've seen it all a thousand times. I gotta hand it to the score here. And I'm normally not one that pays attention to such things. Maybe I'll pay a little bit of attention.

Still, the movie is slow and has some really strange non-sequitur moments. Out of nowhere, a grocery store owner alerts the police that there are kids in the cemetery. Deputy Mark goes to check it out and takes Pam with him. Why would you take your maybe girlfriend to the scene of a possible crime? They find Rosemary's open grave with Lisa's body inside. Another out of nowhere moment is when another horny couple goes down to a basement to make out and an old teacher dude peeps on them from the stairs. Also, Mark and Pam go to Major Chatham's house and just walk inside, calling his name, looking for him, and investigating with flashlights, even though all the lights are on. They find pictures of Rosemary and put two and two together, but we already knew all that. As did they. It coulda been the wine on my part. It always coulda been the wine.

But I love the word 'prowler.' And the prowler looks great - he's pretty scary looking, what with his whole WWII getup and pitchfork and long knife which he uses to penetrate unsuspecting victims. He's got issues, that's for sure. Sex issues. And while I won't reveal his identity, 'cause I know ya'll are all gonna rush out to see this one, it's not who you suspect. Or maybe you will because you're smarter and less alcoholic than me.

I kinda get a My Bloody Valentine vibe off of this one, maybe it's the killer's ensemble, maybe it's the plot. Probably both. I think they came out the same year. Anyslasher, if I had seen this one as a kid, I probably would've been scared and bored or a little of both. But I still would have noticed that when the prowler gets out of the pool after killing Lisa that he's not wet.

Let's get the word 'prowler' back into circulation. Let's start using 'cat burglar' too.

Bloody Birthday

First thing, aren't movies that have been transferred to DVD supposed to have been cleaned up - the audio, the picture quality? I know that not every movie warrants the Criterion treatment, but if the movie is going to go onto DVD, shouldn't it be a little cleaned up? Granted, my knowledge of this process is extremely limited, aka nonexistent, but still. This version of Bloody Birthday had not been cleaned up in the slightest, which, I came to discover, added to its gritty charm. I really did feel like I was watching the VHS tape from 1981.

Bloody Birthday is the tale of three kids who all happen to be born during a eclipse in 1970. This is evidenced by some very apparent stock footage of a lunar eclipse overdubbed with the sounds of three women's screams of labor pains. We don't see any kind of birth, we do get to see the outside of the hospital, though. We are supposed to assume the kids are going to be really fucked up somehow because of the eclipse thing. Okay, leap ahead ten years. Insert typical scene of young man and woman making out in a cemetery. (Sidenote: I spent most of my teen years as 'goth' and some might even go as far as to still qualify me as such, but I never ever in my life made out/had sex with someone in a cemetery. You would think....well, anyway. I don't get why a non-goth couple would want to make out in a cemetery. You would think that they would be grossed out by it. Who knows.) So the couple is in the cemetery and they are playing Ambulance (don't ask! - kind of like a version of doctor, I think) by the light of the full moon. They begin by a mausoleum and progress into an open grave (!) only to get their asses killed by a few (?) off-screen killers.

Next day: The sheriff is interviewing a grade school class about the murders in the cemetery, why we don't know. Does anyone know what a murder is, he questions the nine year olds. Three students obviously slump down in their seats. A little blond girl jumps up and says a murder is when someone kills someone. Seriously, truer words were never spoken. This same little girl happens to be the sheriff's daughter. So at this point, I might have closed my eyes, I do that a lot when I watch movies, especially late at night and often during the afternoon too, gone to start the dryer, or to feed a meowing Moochie, but this movie started to get fucking interesting.

So obviously the sheriff's daughter is one of the killers, as are the two other little boys who slumped down when Sheriff was asking about murder. They wind up racking up quite the body count, the couple in the cemetery, the Sherriff himself (!), another fornicating couple, this time in a van, and a slutty sister who dances in her underwear (Julie Brown of MTV fame, but not Downtown Julie Brown, the OTHER Julie Brown - I think she was in Shakes the Clown too). The murders also become increasingly elaborate, especially for a group of nine year olds. The most memorable scene is in a junkyard, it's most entertaining, if not utterly ridiculous. Seriously, I'm surprised no one has culled from it, it's so great. The styling of the whole thing is just dead on. How three children could get away with something this elaborate is absurd, if not wonderful. One is steering, one is pushing the gas and the break, all in pursuit of nubile teen girl, running around a junkyard screaming! It's the highlight of the film, seriously.

And the performances! The little girl, Debbie, is strait-up channelling Rhoda from the Bad Seed, and the brunette little boy, Curtis, pulls off his murderous act with such glee and charm, it's a wonder he didn't go on to be typecast for the rest of his days ala Anthony Perkins. The third child, Stephen, however, is a weak link, with a leaden performance. He also wears the same outfit throughout the whole thing. I IMDB'ed the cast, mostly the kids, because Debbie and Stephen were just so good and somewhat familiar looking. With the exception of some obscure 80's television, they both hadn't worked in over a decade. A shame, truly.

Bloody Birthday, though, it's one of those I might have watched back in the day and dismissed it, but now that I have a taste for such crap as an adult, I'm going to call this one upper-echelon. I enjoyed it a helluva lot more than the overlong Happy Birthday to Me and then it got me started thinking about other Birthday themed horrors out there and I couldn't think of any, but I'm sure I will sometime or will at least look it up. It has some great inventive kills too, crossbow through a peephole right into Julie Brown's eye, anyone? And where the hell does a kid get a crossbow anyway?