REVIEW / MOVIE\ BOOGEY MAN' DEEP IN GRATUITOUS GORE\ THE BOOGEY MAN - WRITTEN, DIRECTED AND PRODUCED BY ULLI LOMMEL. STARRING\ SUZANNA LOVE, RON JAMES, AND JOHN CARRADINE. AT THE SACK CINEMA 57\ AND SUBURBS. RATED R. Boston Globe - November 27, 1980
Author: MICHAEL BLOWEN
People are easily frightened. A flight of dark stairs leading to a musty basement or the creak of a door will send our hearts fluttering and perk up our ears. It's an automatic, primal response.
Filmmakers, more than any other show businessmen, realize that we're cowards and that fear is an emotion that can be easily manipulated. All they need is a dark house, a psychopathic killer and a young woman. It's a formula with inexpensive ingredients that can yield big profits.
"The Boogey Man" is merely the latest entry in the slash and bash sweepstakes. A young woman, obsessed with the murder of her mother's boyfriend by her younger brother, is beset by nightmares. Her husband, the stiff rationalist, insists that it's all in her imagination. But that's not the case.
It seems the maniacal ghost of the victim is trapped in a mirror and attacks anyone whose image catches its reflective gaze.
By the time the mirror is put to rest, it has drawn more blood than the local chapter of the Red Cross. A boy has his neck broken by a slamming
window; a girl has her chest punctured by a pair of scissors; an old man is pinned against the wall of a barn by a pitchfork through his neck; an old woman is strangled by a garden hose; the blade of a knife enters the back of a teenager's neck and comes out his mouth just before his girlfriend is compelled, by forces beyond her control, to give him a final kiss. She dies in his skinny arms.
This is not frightening, it's repulsive. Your eyes reel back from the screen in disgust, rather than horror. It's the oozing blood that repels you, not the well-crafted tension of a genuinely frightening movie such as "Don't Look Now" or "Dressed to Kill."
The economics of horror films featuring no-name actresses, such as Suzanna Love, and bulging advertising budgets are a good investment. The overhead is low (usually under $1 million) and the profit potential is high (" Halloween " returned 18 times its capital investment). Unfortunately, no matter how many times moviegoers have been disappointed by a horror movie that promises more in its commercials than it delivers on the screen, crowds continue to buy tickets.
If you're one of those people, you better watch out. "The Boogey Man" is going to get you. Don't say you weren't warned.
REVIEW / MOVIE\ A MILDLY SCARY SCREAM'\ SILENT SCREAM - DIRECTED BY DENNY HARRIS. WRITTEN BY KEN WHEAT, JIM\ WHEAT AND WALLACE C. BENNETT. STARRING REBECCA BALDING, BARBARA STEELE,\ YVONNE DE CARLO, CAMERON MITCHELL AND\ AVERY SCHREIBER. AT THE SACK SAXON AND SUBURBS. RATED R.
Boston Globe - November 19, 1980
Author: Michael Blowen Globe Correspondent
A strange Victorian house overlooks the Pacific. The lace curtains flutter. The stairs leading to the attic are covered with cobwebs. The doors creak and Yvonne De Carlo is hidden away in an upstairs room.
A conventional setting for an exploitation horror film. In fact, everything about "Silent Scream" is conventional. But, given the avalanche of recent slice-and-dice films, it's not bad. After "Prom Night," "Terror Train," "Fade To Black," and "Motel Hell," "Silent Scream" is a welcome relief.
It's not a masterpiece. The acting is mediocre, the script pedestrian and the direction inconsistent. But it has enough cheap thrills to keep you riveted to your seat for its inconsequential 90 minutes.
Cameron Mitchell of television's "The High Chaparral" and Avery Schreiber, the Frito bandido, are a pair of police detectives trying to solve the bizarre murder of a wealthy, snobbish college student who lived in the house by the sea. The grisly manner of the death (the young man was knifed to death and buried in the sand) leads Mitchell and Schreiber back to the house. By the time these two lame-brained investigators discover the truth, several more gruesome murders occur.
The character actors, dredged up from the past, are fascinating. Yvonne De Carlo plays a puffy matron who spends the entire film in a frumpy housedress. Barbara Steele, once crowned Queen of the Bs for her many roles in serials and Republic features, doesn't have a line, but her performance is invested with chilling terror. Mitchell and Shreiber merely get in and out of a few cars.
Director Denny Harris, like most every other horror exploiter, steals most of his bits from Hitchcock. The sequence of killings looks as if he studied "Psycho" and made carbon copies. But he does show the ability to maintain suspense. In one frightening scene, while a young woman climbs up the attic stairs, Harris maintains tension by altering camera angles and quick cuts. It's frightening.
In spite of its obvious flaws, "Silent Scream" is the best low-budget horror film since " Halloween ." If that sounds like damning with faint praise, so be it.
A film directed by Paul Lynch. Screenplay by William Gray. Starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Leslie Nielson, Antoinette Bower and a host of unknowns. At the Sack Saxon and suburbs. Rated R.
My senior prom was a horror show. Everyone dressed in rented formal wear and danced to the music of the Eddie Corcoran Trio. We were kids dressed up like mini-adults indulging in a fantasy conceived and executed by our parents and the school administrators. It wasn't much fun.
Neither is "Prom Night," a low-budget exploitation film, imported from Canada, to fill this summer's quota of quickie horror movies.
The plot is predictably sophomoric. A killer, who six years earlier observed four children forcing a little girl out of the window of a deserted schoolhouse to her death, is stalking the hallways of Alexander Hamilton High School. He seeks revenge.
The concept of a maniac returning to avenge injustice is certainly not new to the genre. " Halloween ," John Carpenter's bargain basement horror film, is only the most recent example. But "Prom Night" isn't half as frightening as Carpenter's movie.
Except for the pre-credit sequence, when the four children tease the little girl by chanting, "The Killer's Coming, The Killer's Coming," as the camera darts around the dark, deserted hallways, there is little else that's terrifying. And when people aren't frightened at horror movies, when the situations are as ridiculous as those presented in this slice and dice exploiter, people begin to laugh. And "Prom Night" is laughable.
The entire cast must have flunked algebra at least 10 times. They all look old enough to be dancing the bop and, when Jamie Lee Curtis and Casey Stevens, the King and Queen of the prom, start to disco, it's uproarious. Their awkwardness is symptomatic of the film's misdirected style.
Director Paul Lynch could have made a witty satire on the nature of proms or a frightening excursion into the terror of locker-lined hallways after dark. But, with the exception of one obvious cut from a bloody victim to the Hawaiian punch bowl, he's humorless and inadequate.
"Prom Night" certainly doesn't give you any moments to remember.
" HALLOWEEN " IS suffering from schizophrenia; it can't decide if it's a cult movie or simply a pedestrain box-office smash.
"It's probably a cult movie in reverse," concluded David Levy, owner of the Key Theater in Georgetown. "Cult movies are supposed to take time to build and this is simply too big to be a cult movie now. But it has a hardcore following of horror-film aficionados, who will still be there long after everyone else has died away."
" Halloween 's" problem is this: Although endowed with some unmistakable ingredients of a midnight classic, it has already grossed over $12 million since it was released last Halloween -- an obscene amount of lucre for any sefl respecting cult film to make in six months.
Made on less than $1 million, without one bankable star, " Halloween " has been on Variety's list of the 50 top grossing films in the country for the past 18 weeks.
To put this in perspective, the legendary "Night of the Living Dead," George Romero's schlock horror classic, grossed under $5 million during its two years on Variety's charts before its copyright problems became so byzantine that it fell into the public domain and beyond financial scrutiny. Anyone with a copy can now distribute it.
"Night of the Living Dead" has grossed millions since it opened in 1968, to be sure; it has been translated into 17 languages. But it has taken years and countless midnight shows to become a big moneymaker.
"The Texas Chainsaw Massacres," another gory film with a hardcore following, has grossed somewhere over $10 million in the five years since it was released and continues to make modest amounts at drive-ins and on late night television.
Enter John Carpenter and his no-name sleeper, " Halloween ." Watch him walk off with $123,000 during the first three days that it opened in the Boston area and $2 million in the Chicago-Milwaukee area alone in half a year.
Critics add to the conclusion by being hopelessly divided over the value of the film. But that in itself is good for sales. Pauline Kael of the New Yorker savaged " Halloween " in one of her reviews last month. But she directed her barbs at those nameless people who think that it has a cult potential. In effect, she acknowledged that it has something going for it, albeit repugnant to her.
"A lot of people seem to be convinced that ' Halloween ' is something special -- a classic" she wrote. "Maybe when a horror film is stripped of everything but dumb scariness -- when it isn't ashamed to revie the stalest device of the genre (the escaped lunatic) -- it satisfies part of the audience in a more basic, childish way than sophisticated horror pictures do."
A prime target of Kael's wrath is Tom Allen of the Village Voice, who first discovered " Halloween " and wrote that "it stands alone in the past decade with George A. Romero's 'Night of the Living Dead' and, before that, with 'Psycho.'"
David Ansen of Newsweek, another " Halloween " fan, called it "one of the scariest flicks in years." "It's a classic grade-B movie with absolutely no pretensions," he concluded.
"You've got reviewers reacting to other reviewers, which is always a good sign," said Peter Kastoff, the man who orchestrates the distribution of " Halloween " for Compass International in Los Angeles.
It would appear that the American public likes the "dumb scariness" of " Halloween "; low-brow brutality has always fared well with audiences in this country. But combine a virtually no-name cast (Donald Pleasance does appear in it), timeless and simplistic terror with underwhelming acting and you're inviting the unswerving loyalty of horror devotees as well. " Halloween " appears to have captured both audiences.
Meanwhile Kastoff is running a piece that would make Anne Corio jealous. He eschews the saturation-distribution technique of "Jaws" that would splash " Halloween " all over billboards and theater marquees. While that route would be lucrative in the short run, he feels that it would lead " Halloween " to the pastures of late-night television long before its time. Instead, he is running the film sparingly and hopes to milk a little less for a lot longer. He assures us that we won't be seeing it one television for years to come.
After a brief, unspectacular opening last Halloween at a Broadway theater, Kastoff pulled the movie out of New York completely until late in the fall, when it reappeared at the Arty Eighth Street Playhouse along with that redoubtable cult film, "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." After a two month run there, it was pulled again and will not be seen in New York at all until next Halloween , when it will reappear as part of a nationwide promotion.
"It could almost be a seasonal thing," Kastoff said. "We could run it every Halloween for a while and then pull it."
Kastoff operates on the less is more principle, which in this case, appears to be as good as gold. A little "dumb scariness" goes a long way. (ITEM 130) Picture, " Halloween ": $12 million in six months.
FILM: MORE TEENAGE MAYHEM IN ' SLEEPAWAY CAMP ' Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA) - January 23, 1984 Author: Rick Lyman, Inquirer Movie Critic
Dear Mom,
How are you? I am fine. I went to Sleepaway Camp this morning. My editor made me go. She's mean. I had to sit through the whole thing.
There were other people in the audience. I guess their editors made them go, too. Some of them yelled at the screen.
"Hey, man, this is traaaaaash," one shouted. "This is like some weird home movie," another screamed. "When we gonna get some action?" another pleaded.
Here is what happened to the people in Sleepaway Camp : One was stung to death by bees, one was drowned, one was boiled alive, three were hacked to death with a hatchet, one was shot in the throat with an arrow, one was beheaded and one was abused with a hot curling iron. In a flash of originality, one of them was stabbed to death in the shower.
Here is what happened to the people in the audience: nothing. I've had more thrills untangling paper clips. You want excitement, try to walk across Vine Street before the light changes.
I am told that the average cost of making a movie these days is $12 million. Sleepaway Camp looks as if it cost about, oh, 59 cents.
You've heard of the Actors' Studio? The people in this movie appear to have graduated from the Actors' Toolshed.
Oh, yeah. I forgot to tell you about the three people who get run over by a motorboat. Eeeeeek. . . . WHAM! That's how the movie starts.
We flash ahead eight years. The lone survivor of that horrible boating accident is Angela, a shy and troubled teenager who goes off to Camp Arawak with her protective cousin, Ricky.
Everybody makes fun of Angela. Nyah, nyah! Why are you so shy, Angela? You sure act weird, Angela.
Pretty soon all the people who've been making fun of Angela turn up burned, bloated or hacked into julienne slices. Mel, who runs the place, keeps everything quiet because he's afraid that bad publicity will ruin the camp's reputation.
This makes about as much sense as anything else.
You'd think that the big question would be: Who's reponsible for these icky murders? There are plenty of suspects. It could be Ricky, protecting his shy cousin. Or it could be Angela, who's a little too quiet. Or it could be Mel, who looks a little too much like Milton Berle for his own good. Or the big- chested sexpot who torments Angela. Or the smart-aleck older boys who push Ricky around. Or Angela's sweet boyfriend, Paul.
But the even bigger question is: When will we get a daylight scene so I can look at my watch and see how much longer this thing is going to last?
I should warn you - in case your editor makes you go see it - that the people behind Sleepaway Camp seem to think that the climax is a real shocker. A big surprise. If you've been living in Sri Lanka for the last 20 years without television or newspapers, the ending might cause your right eyebrow to lift about one-tenth of an inch. No more.
The only good news is that there seem to be fewer and fewer of these teen- splatter movies, and they seem to make less and less money. That's good news because one more and I'm gonna be going away to summer camp. Either that or the funny farm.
SLEEPAWAY CAMP
Produced by Michele Tatosian and Jerry Silva, written and directed by Robert Hiltzik, music by Edward Bilous, and distributed by United Film Distribution Co.; running time, 1 hour, 19 mins.*
"Sleepaway Camp." A thriller starring Mike Kellin, Jonathan Tiersten and Felissa Rose. Written and directed by Robert Hiltzik. Photographed by Benjamin Davis. Edited by Ron Kalish and Sharyn L. Ross. Music by Edward Bilous. Running Time: 84 minutes. A United Film Distribution release. In area theaters.
* "Wavelength." A SciFi drama starring Robert Carradine, Cherie Currie and Keenan Wynn. Written and directed by Mike Gray. Photographed by Paul Goldsmith. Edited by Mark Goldblatt and Robert Leighton. Running Time: 87 minutes. A New World release. In area theaters.
Ring out the old year, ring in the new. Ring-a-ding-ding.
Well, folks, the annual glut of holiday movies finally has started to subside and we're back to grind, grind, grind.
Last week, we welcomed "Angel" and "Hot Dog - The Movie," not a very auspicious or promising start for the new film year. And this week, well, we have "Sleepaway Camp" and "Wavelength," examples of the poverty and pure gall of "contemporary moviemaking," or whatever.
A bloodied knife penetrating a child's sneaker figures prominently in the ads for "Sleepaway Camp." The ad reads: "You will go there in a bus . . . and come home in a box!"
Give me a break.
That's about as original as "Sleepaway Camp" ever gets. The plot is a replay of gory heebie-jeebies stirred in the "Friday the 13th" and "Halloween" trilogies: White middle-class kids, all sexually promiscuous, get hacked to death by an unseen killer in sunny, meadowy settings.
And as is true with most movies of this ilk, "Sleepaway Camp" prompted the urban audience surrounding me to cheer on the killer and ridicule and scorn the ill-fated white kids.
The film's cast includes a lot of New York stage performers, apparently hard-up for movie work, and features one of the last screen performances of the late Mike Kellin, the gravel-voiced character actor who made a career largely playing ex-cons and sociopaths. His best film roles: the psycho convict in "The Great Imposter" and the sentimental tour guide (who remembers the food and service of every hospital he's ever been in) in ''Paternity."
Mike Kellin deserved a better send-off. We deserve better movies.
Another case in point is "Wavelength," a bit of misguided camp that marks the directorial debut of screenwriter Mike Gray ("The China Syndrome"). This el cheapo flick is the flipside to Steven Spielberg's "Close Entounters of the Third Kind" and "E.T.": Three alien creatures come to earth, hole up in the Hollywood Hills and prove to be not so very cute or benevolent. Neither is this movie.
The creatures are being held there against their will by a short-sighted U.S. Air Force that fails to see that the bald outer-space critters resemble some of Hollywood's lesser denizens. (If you doubt me, check out the aforementioned "Angel.")
It's feared that the aliens will do something awful to humans, like boggle them into a dazed state, but judging from the people on hand here (played by Robert Carradine and Cherie Currie, among others), it wouldn't make much difference. It might even be an improvement.
**SINGLEG* Parental Guide: "Sleepaway Camp" is rated R for its violence, and ''Wavelength" carries a PG for its language.
"Young Warriors." A drama starring James Van Patten, Anne Lockhart, Ernest Borgnine, Richard Roundtree and Lynda Day George. Directed by Lawrence D. Foldes from an original script by Foldes and Russell W. Colgin. Photographed by Mac Ahlberg. Edited by Ted Nicolaou. Music by Rob Walsh. Running Time: 103 minutes. A Cannon Films release. In area theaters.
"Mortuary." A thriller starring Mary McDonough, Christopher George and Lynda Day George. Directed by Howard Avedis from an original screenplay by Avedis and Marlene Schmidt. Photographed by Gary Graver. Edited by Stanford C. Allen. Music by John Cavacas. Running Time: 91 minutes. An Artists Releasing Corp. release. In area theaters.
This week's bottom-of-the-barrel movie entries - sleazoid flicks guaranteed to revolt any civilized moviegoer - cannibalize everything from "Death Wish" to "Pyscho." And for better or worse, they also provide us with a sort of mini Lynda Day George Film Festival.
In "Young Warriors," a young woman is gang-raped and murdered by a bunch of roughnecks. Her brother (James Van Patten) enlists the help of his fraternity buddies to hunt down the street scum.
While they're at it, they decide to root out other killers and, if possible, interrupt other street crimes in progress. Kevin - that's the boy's name - does all of this without the permission of his police-officer father (Ernest Borgnine) or his mother (Lynda Day George) who insists that skull- crashing is the job of the police.
Before long, Kevin and his chums are dressed in military camouflage uniforms and carrying weapons of all sorts as they stumble onto crimes and whip the daylights out of the subhumans committing them.
"Young Warriors" is a half-hearted, simple-minded tribute to vigilantism, telling us that violent sex and brutality are not nice, while wallowing in both. You'll need to empty out your brain cells to make any sense out of this kind of misguided logic.
In "Mortuary," a clone of Norman Bates - named Paul Andrews (and played by Bill Paxton) - is terrorizing Small Town, U.S.A. with the embalming fluid from his mortician-father's lab (workshop?). This unbalanced kid gets a kick out of extracting life juices from people while they're still warm.
Naturally, he comes from a bad home. His daddy (the late Christopher George in one of his last film roles) is heavily into black midnight chants, satanism and things that go bump in the night.
Like other films of this ilk ("Halloween," etc.), "Mortuary" finds true weirdness at the heart of Midwest normalcy. Its "suspense" revolves around Paxton's sick obsession with a sweet girl-next-door type (Mary McDonough of ''The Waltons") and around her deadly involvement with the father-son mortician team. Lynda Day plays the girl's mother, who may or may not be in on the weirdness.
**SINGLEG* Parental Guide: Both are rated R for language and violence.
"Possession." A thriller starring Isabelle Adjani, Sam Neill and Heinz Bennent. Directed and co-authored by Andrzej Zulawski from an original script by Frederic Tuten. Photographed by Bruno Nuytten. Music by Andrzej Korzynski. Special effects by Carlo Rambaldi. Running Time: 78 minutes (cut from original 128 minutes). A Limelight International release. In area theaters.
Any movie that has the gall to reach back to 1973 and attempt to redo "The Exorcist," whose own imperfections can be re-examined on TV these days, deserves every odious comparison it gets.
"Possession" is a boringly camp-elegante attempt by a group of reputable French, German and Polish filmmakers (most notably director Andrzej Zulawski) to find Art in the ooze and bile that monopolize most demonic-possession flicks. All we end up with is a movie that's even more fatuous than most exploitation thrillers of this ilk.
There's nothing on screen here that we haven't seen before. This is not to imply that "Possession" is without its interests or curiositites. Not so. The film's history alone should command our attention: "Possession" is - now get this - 50 minutes shorter than the version that played the Cannes Film Festival two years ago and won star Isabelle Adjani her Best Actress award there.
In the seriously truncated version being distributed in America, nothing makes sense, least of all Adjani's babbling, incoherent and yet arresting portrayal of a woman who has given birth to some slimy, other-worldly monster (which could be a demon or even a god).
Adjani's character, Anna, is a little unstable and more than a little bonkers. When she isn't abusing her little ballet students, she's carving up herself with an electric knife or terrorizing her wild-eyed husband (Sam Neill), who also seems possessed.
Anna keeps her repulsive monster-child stashed in a suite of rooms in a decaying hotel in Berlin. Amidst a flurry of flashbacks, flashforwards and scenes involving Anna's demure alter-ego (named Helen), our madwoman and her evil ward spend their days killing off nosy intruders (and sutffing their entrails in a refigerator) and their nights making . . . love. The lovemaking scenes in "Possession" are fairly gross.
I think it is safe to assume that the film's American distributor edited out everything except the excess and and frenzy. The missing 50 minutes most certainly contains exposition, common sense and an explanation or two, quiet, introspective scenes that might have brought rationale to the excess and frenzy (and perhaps even made them more vivid).
Adjani works herself up in a succession of self-abandoning scenes that seem to be a takeoff on her role in "The Story of Adele H," and Neill, always fascinating, remains the screen's most civilized psycho.
Complementing the stars - and also suffering from the indiscreet editing (garroting?) - are the contributions of cinematographer Bruno Nuytten and effects wizard Carol Rambaldi ("E.T." and "Alien").
Rarely has so much been so senselessly wasted.
**SINGLEG* Parental Guide: Rated R for its violence and gory effects. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FILM: 'POSSESSION' IS A THRILLER ABOUT A LADY AND A CREATURE
Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA) - November 15, 1983
Author: Rick Lyman, Inquirer Movie Critic
I sat through Possession because it's my job. Why anybody else would want to do it, I can't imagine. Take my word for it: If today's Inquirer does nothing more than steer you away from this movie, you will have gotten your quarter's worth.
Possession, in its present form, is one of those movies that's so awful, so unclean, that it clarifies for you exactly what it takes to make a movie bad. It's as if someone had taken every wrong technique and simmered them down into a thick, unpleasant broth.
Isabelle Adjani, the beautiful French actress who came to stardom with Francois Truffaut's Story of Adele H and has never, for my money, lived up to her hype, is humiliated in the lead role.
It's kind of hard to figure out what's happening most of the time, but she plays a crazed young woman with a thing for Jesus and another thing that she keeps in a run-down apartment house. This other thing, a gruesome sort of creature that she loves dearly and often, helps her knock off the curious souls who venture into their decaying refuge.
Ostensibly a thriller about demons, Possession is really an attempt to raise the gore movie to a level of pseudo art. There's plenty of spitting-up and contortions and people getting sliced and impaled, but there's also this moronic attempt to invest the images with an artsy weirdness. There are so many fisheye-lens shots that I thought I was at the aquarium.
But nothing is worse than Adjani's performance. She gurgles. She rants. Icky fluids comes out of her mouth. She screams her inane lines directly into the camera like a preschooler's idea of the way crazy people act.
And she won best actress honors at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival. For this movie. It's unbelievable.
The original version of Possession, shown in Europe, was much longer. Perhaps her better scenes were left in the trash bin. Maybe they cut the movie in half and released the wrong part.
Suffice it to say that I don't think we're dealing with a lost masterpiece here. True, the movie is halfway hacked to shreds, but if they're looking for volunteers to finish the job they can add my name to the list.
There were a few unfortunates who went the distance the afternoon I saw the movie. It's a prodigious achievement and I salute them. But I'm not sure whether to give them a medal or a saliva test.
Maybe both. Just to be safe.
POSSESSION
Produced by Marie-Laure Reyre, written and directed by Andrzej Zulawski, photography by Bruno Nuytten, music by Andrzej Korzynski, and distributed by Limelight International Film Releases; running time, 1 hour, 18 mins. *
"Alone in the Dark." A thriller starring Dwight Schultz, Jack Palance, Donald Pleasence and Martin Landau. Written and directed by Jack Sholder. Photographed by Joseph Mangine. Edited by Arline Garson. Music by Rentao Serio. Running Time: 92 minutes. In area theaters.
Jack Sholder's "Alone in the Dark," I am happy to report, is a tidy little thriller that deserves to surmount the overall disagreeable reputation that the splatter genre has earned.
It is more than a little competent, often brutal and surprisingly witty as it kicks off a series of trauma dramas, each set in either a very clinical asylum or an attractively creaky country home where everything is dark, dark, dark, thanks to a convenient electrical blackout.
The horrorfest kicks off with a nightmare. Martin Landau - playing a character called The Preacher, a chap with pyromaniacal tendencies - wakes up screaming from a recurring dream that has him being castrated by a cleaver- toting butcher, Donald Pleasence. Landau sweats a lot during his bloody dream work.
Cut to: a shrink's office, where a most serene Pleasence is greeting his new assistant, Dan Potter (the stage actor Dwight Schultz).
As it turns out, he's the director - or mad doctor - of a New Jersey mental asylum called The Haven. Here, the patients are called "voyagers" and their stay is described as a "vacation." There's no violence at The Haven, despite the free-flowing blood, just a lot of "cries of pain."
Pleasence, as Dr. Leo Bain, turns out to be the screwiest outpatient at The Haven, and he has a lot of competition: Besides The Preacher, there's Fatty (Erland Van Lidth), a child molester; The Bleeder (Phillip Clark), a chap who gets a nosebleed whenever he kills someone, and Hawkes (Jack Palance), a gung-ho warmonger. All are incurable.
Cut to: The Potter homestead, where we meet Dr. Dan's sexy, liberated wife (Deborah Hedwall), his sexy, punky sister (Lee Taylor-Allan) and his daughter (Elizabeth Ward), just the kind of child that Fatty likes to molest. Anyway, the aforementioned blackout loosens The Haven's security system, and the psychos bust loose.
"Alone in the Dark" then swings to and fro between the asylum and Dan's house. The men have an uncontrollable urge to dismember and/
or kill Dan because they believe he killed his predecessor, the beloved Dr. Harry Murton, who actually is alive and well and working in a hospital in Wynnefield, Pa.
Sholder neatly contrasts the certifiable behavior of the patients with the panicky behavior of the usually laidback Potter clan, and he has come up with one particularly clever twist (involving The Bleeder).
"Alone in the Dark" also is more eloquent than other films of its ilk and has the kind of humor that perfectly balances the gore. "All right!" Pleasence finally (and calmly) admits. "All right, they're crazy." A pause. ''Isn't everyone?"
One of the most engaging aspects of "Alone in the Dark" (running a close second to Schultz's very appealing performance) is that Potter's home is somehow much creepier than the asylum. Parental Guide: Rated R for its intense violence and adult language
HORRORS! 'MANIAC' ENOUGH TO MAKE YOU SICK, BUT NOT ENOUGH TO MAKE THEM STOP
Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA) - February 27, 1981
Author: DESMOND RYAN
By Desmond Ryan
Inquirer Movie Critic
There are a fair number of films that make you want to throw up your hands in despair. Maniac simply makes one want to throw up.
To call this horror film the work of sick and irresponsible perverts is to demean the honor of perverts. In seven years of watching films for a living, I have walked out before the often-bitter end on only two occasions. This review is based on the first 40 blood-drenched minutes, which was as much of this unspeakable and genuinely depraved film as I could stomach.
Anyone ill-advised enough to venture into the presence of this disgusting venture should adopt the tactic favored by the fans of the woeful New Orleans Saints last season. This involved sitting in the stands with the head covered by a large, brown-paper bag, which afforded the double benefit of disguising one's attendance and obscuring the countless errors of the team on the field. For Maniac , it should also help with the nausea to which anyone with a claim to humanity will undoubtedly succumb.
For some time, it has been clear that, having exhausted themselves of original ideas, horror-film directors are now engaged in a blood-slinging contest. The situation in these movies is always the same - a woman alone and in peril is murdered in gruesome circumstances. Sometimes her companion - usually her lover - is done in for good measure.
In the normal run, I would ignore Maniac in the same way that one might cross the street to avoid a dead cat. However, there are aspects of this film that demand denunciation. And because the City Council and the Human Relations Commission are too busy condemning Fort Apache , to worry about what a film like Maniac does to the mental health of the citizenry, the matter has to be raised here.
I call this movie irresponsible for two reasons. First, it caters to instincts and feelings of a baseness that I don't even want to think about. This is not entertainment or the mild titillation of being scared. This is gross pandering. Secondly, the people who made Maniac - its director is a man of 26 named William Lustig - don't seem to know or care about what effect it might have on a sick or deranged mind. I have no way of proving such a connection, but the thought of certain men seeing it and then creeping off to a subway does not sit well with me.
The maniac in this instance is played by Joe Spinell. He has a penchant for selecting victims at random, scalping them and using the hair to adorn mannequins. The credits are preceded by one throat-cutting (woman) and one garroting (man). They are followed by one strangulation and scalping and one shotgun blast at a head. At this point Ileft the screening room and an ashen- faced veteran projectionist.
Beyond the specifics and a ghastly love of detail with which these killings are depicted is a more urgent issue. Maniac is the epitome of the new pornography, propaganda for an attitude about women that is obscene in a manner not found in sex films. Hard-core pornography tends to dominate women, but at least it does not exude the festering hatred of them to be found in Maniac . There is some incredibly twisted Calvinism at work in these films that says that women whose conduct is "loose" should be punished in ever more dreadful ways.
The film is doing well at the box office in New York, which means there are a lot of people who think of this as entertainment. That should terrify and appall anyone who cares about the state of our country. Mr. Lustig obviously does not. His film belongs in an abbatoir, not a theater. Space and the restraints of language imposed by a newspaper prevent me from discussing where he belongs.
"The Hills Have Eyes II." A thriller starring Michael Berryman and John Laughlin. Written and directed by Wes Craven. Running time: 100 minutes. A Castle Hill release. At the Duke and Duchess exclusively.
The local showing of Wes Craven's "The Hills Have Eyes II" must be some sort of marketing experiment.
The movie is being screened exclusively in only one theater (the Duke or Duchess - I've never been able to figure out which is which) and, to the best of my knowledge, it is playing nowhere else in the country. So, I suppose that the eventual national release of "The Hills Have Eyes II" depends on how well it does here.
Judging from the local reaction at the performance I attended, Craven's film won't be released.
This movie is so shallow and pointless that it goes beyond the usual horror idiocy and enters the realm of anti-humanity. Its plot is so simple I couldn't even follow it.
It goes something like this: A bunch of kids jump on a bus and, with the money made from the stud fees of their communal pet dog, Beast, they head for the desert. Why? Who knows? (Anyone who figures this much out must have serious emotional problems.)
Anyway, one of the kids, the overaged Ruby, has reservations about the desert trek because she was involved in the murder and mayhem there that laced the first film. The original "Hills Have Eyes" was a fairly disgusting to- do about the systematic extermination of a family of vacationers by a family of hermits. Ruby was one of the hermits, see; now she's a good guy.
Much of the film recaps the previous movie via flashbacks. Ruby has flashbacks. Even Beast, the dog, has a flashback or two. Honest. Meanwhile, the fresh-faced kids - Jane and Harry, Foster and Susan, Cass and Sonny and something called The Hulk (John Laughlin of "Crimes of Passion") - start dropping like flies.
The bald Michael Berryman encores from the first film, once again exploiting his birth defects as the movie's most horrific villain.
He keeps telling the rest of the cast - the victims - to "choke on your puke."
I almost did.
Parental guide: Rated R for its senseless violence.
TROLL' MAKES A NOBLE TRY FOR A NEW TONE IN HORROR -BUT MISSES
Seattle Post-Intelligencer - January 23, 1986
Author: William Arnold P-I Film Critic
After a decade-long cycle, movie audiences seem to have lost interest in traditional horror films. Except for ''A Nightmare on Elm Street,'' it's been ages since one has had any impact at all at the box office.
In reaction to this, horror filmmakers have been trying some variations on the standard form lately, and whatever else you may say about ''Troll,'' a new horror programmer that has been playing several local movie houses this week, it is at least a stab at something different.
The film is about a family that moves into a San Francisco apartment house that is being terrorized by a troll - a gruesome creature who is moving from apartment to apartment killing off the inhabitants and using their bodies as energy to create more troll creatures.
A kindly witch who lives upstairs makes friends with the son of the family and soon explains to him that the troll is using the apartment house as a base to take over the world - unless the boy can somehow kill him first and save his family.
The movie follows this familiar horror formula closely, while at the same time it tries for a strange new tone - a combination of terror, whimsical cuteness and out-and-out comedy the like of which I have never seen in a horror film before.
Unfortunately, it never quite finds the unique tone it is searching for - the experiment is, I think, a kind of noble failure - and the film is ultimately more disorienting than charming. It also fails pretty miserably in the big test of any horror movie: It's not scary.
The special effects, on the other hand, are quite good. Director and special-effects designer John Buechler has created an impressive menagerie of trolls, and in its more frantic moments his film looks for all the world like a Scandinavian gift shop come to life.
Less impressive are the humans in the cast, which includes June Lockhart, her daughter Anne Lockhart, Gary Sandy, Shelley Hack, Sonny Bono, and the wreck of Michael Moriarty, who, not that long ago, was considered to one of the two or three most promising young actors in America. Memo: MOVIE REVIEW * * Troll, directed by John Buechler. Produced by Albert Band. Cast: Noah Hathaway, Michael Moriarty, Shelley Hack, Sonny Bono, Gary Sandy, June Lockhart, Anne Lockhart. Empire Pictures. Several theaters. Rated PG-13. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TENANTS HAVE CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE 'TROLL' KIND
San Jose Mercury News (CA) - January 20, 1986
Author: GLENN LOVELL, Mercury News Film Writer
THANKS to Steven Spielberg and "Gremlins," there's a whole new movie genre with which to contend. It's called family horror -- funny, cuddly, gruesome spook shows that delight and amaze Mom and Dad, as well as Sis and Little Timmy.
The latest in this line of wholesome shockers is "Troll," an ingenious U.S.-Italian fantasy that combines Brothers Grimm lore, morbid Spielbergian yocks and a magical kingdom of naughty but basically benign puppet-trolls obviously inspired by Jim Henson's Muppets.
``Troll" opens with the impossibly wholesome Potter family moving into a San Francisco apartment. Little Wendy (Jenny Beck) chases her rubber ball into the basement laundry room and is there captured by Torok, a drooling, pointy-eared troll. The ring on Torok's finger allows him to take on Wendy's likeness whenever he chooses to infiltrate the building and raise general havoc.
What follows is a cross between "Poltergeist" and "The Bad Seed," with the suddenly willful -- and abnormally strong -- Wendy turning the tenants, one by one, into frolicking elves and wood sprites.
The forces of good reside upstairs in the person of that feisty eccentric Mrs. Eunice St. Clair (June Lockhart). St. Clair is a good witch with a talking mushroom sidekick right out of "Fantasia." She counsels Wendy's brother, Harry (Noah Hathaway of "Neverending Story"), and sends him off to save the world from a troll takeover.
Though "Troll" is only adequately directed by John Buechler, the film comes with wondrous stop-action effects, another winning performance by Michael Moriarty as the boogaloo-ing Daddy Potter and all those chattering, snaggletoothed beasties from a parallel fairy kingdom.
Also, we get Sonny Bono as the gauche swinger upstairs, and two generations of Lockharts as the scrappy June turns before our eyes into radiant daughter Anne for the climactic face-off with Torok's giant, horned demon.
Often as enchanting as it is scary, "Troll" comes highly recommended to those families who do everything together, including raising goose flesh.
TROLL. Directed by John Buechler; scripted by Ed Naha. PG-13 (profanity). (star)(star) 1/2 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
'TROLL' MIXES FRIGHT WITH FUN
Boston Globe - January 17, 1986
Author: Michael Blowen, Globe Staff
The Potters are a relatively normal American family who move into an old apartment in
San Francisco. Harry (Michael Moriarty) and Anne (Shelly Hack) have two cute children, Harry Jr. (Noah Hathaway) and Wendy (Jenny Beck). Everything seems serene until little Wendy follows her bouncing ball down the stairs into the laundry room, where a slobbering troll transforms her into a little monster. (Judging from her rude behavior, he didn't have much to alter.) That is the beginning of "Troll," a movie that's surprisingly wry for an independent, apparently low-budget horror film.
The story revolves around a troll who, centuries ago, was banished into the netherworld after losing a battle with the humans. This particularly nasty little creature, complete with a runny nose and the power to turn upstairs neighbor Sonny Bono into a pod, eventually assumes control over most of the building.
Aside from a few shoddy special effects, including a background matte painting of the Golden Gate Bridge that looks as if it was painted by Bonzo, "Troll" is an imaginative, passably frightening monster movie that never takes itself too seriously.
Screenwriter Ed Naha, author of " Horrors - From Scream to Screen," borrows from sources as divergent as "Invaders From Mars" (1953) and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1978), but it's all in good fun. In fact, "Troll" has 10 times more laughs than "Spies Like Us.
Memo: MOVIE REVIEW TROLL - A film directed by John Buechler. Written by Ed
Naha. Starring Jenny Beck, Noah Hathaway, Michael
Moriarty, Shelly Hack and June Lockhart. Produced by
Albert Band, executive produced by Charles Band. Music by
Richard Band. At the Pi Alley and suburbs. Rated PG. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Horrors ! `Troll' nothing more than flight of fancy - MOVIE REVIEW
The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution - January 17, 1986
Author: RINGEL, ELEANOR, Eleanor Ringel Film Editor: STAFF
Movie review on "Troll," a horror /fantasy movie starring Michael Moriarityand directed by John Buechler.
More and more Michael Moriarity is becoming a name to look for when deciding whether to take a chance on an otherwise unheralded low-budget horror movie. He has
steered us right with "Q" and "The Stuff" and now there's "Troll," a droll little tale of the misuses of enchantment.
Moriarity is less the star here than a stalwart supporting player to a gallery of sprites, elves and gnomes up to no good, all designed with fiendish glee by John Buechler who apparently had a few creatures left over from "Ghoulies." (Remember the infamous ad with the whatz-it in the toilet?)
Harry Potter (Moriarity), his wife (Shelley Hack), and their two kids, Harry Jr. (Noah Hathaway) and Wendy (Jenny Beck), have just moved into a new apartment. Along with the usual problems of getting settled (including Harry's 3,000-record collection), there's the small matter of the troll in the basement laundry room.
Little Wendy goes on an ill-advised trip downstairs by herself and is zapped by the creature. Meaning, the real Wendy is spirited away to some fourth-dimensional fairy land and the troll assumes her human form. Her parents notice there's something wrong with their fair-haired baby when she starts behaving like a cross between the bad seed and little Linda Blair pre-exorcism. But they figure she's just a bit upset by the new surroundings.
However, Harry Jr., who exists on a steady diet of horror movies and monster magazines, knows something is up. At the very least, Sis is a pod person from Mars. At the very worst, well. . . .
Meanwhile Wendy/Troll is busy trollifying the neighborhood, transforming all the neighbor's apartments into one-bedrooms in the fairy kingdom. If Harry Jr. and the wisecracking witch upstairs (June Lockhart) don't do something, the entire building - perhaps, the entire world -will become one big slice of non-real estate.
"Troll" is less a fright film than a flight of fantasy put together by people who actually appreciate Spenser's "The Faerie Queene." It may be a major disappointment to the teen audience at which its ad campaign is so wrongly aimed. There's not much in the way of blood 'n' guts, but there are some very unsettling scenes - such as the transformation of Sonny Bono (the ex-Mr. Cher) into a lit eral forest primeval. However, on the whole, the movie has a relatively gentle, once-upon-a-time tone . It's more like a Muppet's nightmare than anything else.
Moriarity and Miss Hack (former Charlie Girl turned failed Charlie's Angel) are amusing as the parents blissfully oblivious to the changeling in their home. Noah Hathaway is a believably reluctant hero, and Miss Beck is fine as the possessed little girl hiding a demonic imp under her angelic features. June Lockhart, making up for years of milk-and-cookiedom on "Lassie" and "Lost in Space," has a ball as the capable conjurer who firmly believes trolls should stay where they belong: under Bill y Goat Gruff's bridge.
"Troll" has a fractured fairy-tale appeal that's scary and knowing, all at the same time. In one scene, the Potters open their door to discover a lobby filled with otherworldly flora and fauna, some of it not very friendly. A sympathetic talking tree stump tells them to get back inside immediately; even magic has its rules, and the fairy world can't intrude unless it's been invited. A properly upset Moriarity slams the door shut and says, "I don't know what's going on out there, but I'm listening to that tree."
Proving, I guess, that he has the same good taste in talking trees that he has in horror scripts.
"Troll." A horror /fantasy movie starring Michael Moriarity. Directed by John Buechler. Rated PG-13 for some graphic special effects and occasional profanity.
All definitely not calm, quiet in `Silent Night' - Movie review
The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution - April 1, 1986
Author: RINGEL, ELEANOR, Eleanor Ringel Film Editor: STAFF
When it was originally released in 1984, "Silent Night, Deadly Night" was just another so-so splatter film. Then certain parents in the Midwest decided there was nothing so-so about a film whose killer went ho-ho-ho. Their protests - led by a group calling itself Citizens Against Movie Madness - gave the movie an unintentional publicity boost and probably brought it a few extra dollars at the box office.
The picture is both too little and too late. Don't be fooled by the ads or by its so-called lurid past; "Silent Night" is nothing more than yet another ho-ho-hum "Halloween" rip-off that happened to pick the wrong holiday (or the right one, depending on your point of view).
When it was originally released in 1984, "Silent Night, Deadly Night" was just another so-so splatter film. Then certain parents in the Midwest decided there was nothing so-so about a film whose killer went ho-ho-ho. Their protests - led by a group calling itself Citizens Against Movie Madness - gave the movie an unintentional publicity boost and probably brought it a few extra dollars at the box office.
The distributor, Tri-Star Pictures, rode the crest as long as it was profitable but, in the face of mounting unfavorable P.R. and dwindling grosses, pulled the picture instead of opening it nationwide. "Silent Night" was then dumped on the cable and videocassette circuit, where it has slumbered peacefully until some greedy bookers figured there were still a few bucks to be made from a two-year-old non-scandal. To that end, the film has been re-released with a "Caligula"-ish ad campaign -i. e., "The movie that went too far . . . they tried to ban it . . . Now you can see it . . . uncut." - and Atlantans are "enjoying" Christmas in April as "Silent Night, Deadly Night" finally limps into town.
A kid named Billy is badly traumatized when a killer dressed in a Santa suit kills his parents one Christmas Eve. This happens just after the family has visited Grampa in the mental hospital and the loony old man has hissed in Billy's face, "Christmas is the scariest damn night of the year. You see Santa Claus tonight, you better run away."
Billy's next stop is an orphanage run by a Nazi nun (Lilyan Chauvin) who ties naughty little boys to their bedposts and says things like, "You will learn what it means to be sorry." By the time he's grown up, Billy (Robert Brian Wilson) is nuttier than a Christmas fruitcake - though it takes being forced to dress as a toy-store Santa on Christmas Eve to get his psychoses flowing.
The last 45 minutes of the film is an On Dasher-On Slasher rampage as Billy, still dressed as Santa, folds, spindles and mutilates the rest of the cast. To help get those psycho-juices flowing in the audience, the film intercuts the carnage with flashbacks to various naked breasts Billy saw while he was growing up (including those of his mother, who was almost raped by the original killer Claus).
Frankly, if you want to see a really scary movie about a psycho-Santa, let me suggest 1972's horror anthology "Tales From the Crypt," in which Joan Collins (!) tries frantically to keep an escaped lunatic in Santa-drag from getting inside her house, only to have her efforts thwarted by her own little girl who welcomes "Santa" with open arms. That film's final shot - of a slavering madman, d ressed in a red-and-white suit, with mayhem in his eyes - is more frightening than all of "Silent Night's" imbecilic impalings put together.
The director of "Silent Night, Deadly Night" is Charles Sellier Jr., whose previous credits include "Grizzly Adams." That ought to tell horror connoisseurs something. But I don't know what you tell people like the guy who sat across the aisle from me in an almost-deserted theater and explained that he was there because he was bored. His boredom means more bucks for more movies like this and more of my time wasted. I'd personally appreciate it if the other bored young men and women out there would try a movie they think they might like instead of supporting one they expect to be awful. It would make my job a lot easier - and a lot less insulting.
"Silent Night, Deadly Night." Horror film about a psycho Santa starring Robert Brian Wilson. Rated R for sex, female nudity and excessive violence.
'Terrorvision' will never be a legend in its own slime
San Diego Union, The (CA) - April 17, 1986
Author: David Elliott, Movie Critic
"Terrorvision" 1/2 * An Empire release. Directed, written by Ted Nicolaou. Produced by Albert Band. Photography by Romano Albani. Music by Richard Band. Rated PG. In local theaters. The Cast Gerrit Graham-Stanley Mary Woronov-Raquel Bert Remsen-Grampa Alejandro Rey-Spiro Diane Franklin-Suzy Chad Allen-Sherman
"Terrorvision" will be gone from local theaters by Friday. There's no review as damning as a one-week run. But I'll try.
Is it a comedy? Is it a horror film? Is it a space fantasy? No, it's just dung. Not that I expected much -- you don't go to see a movie called "Terrorvision," doubled at the Casino Theater with "Zone Troopers," expecting the movie experience of a lifetime.
Seems the planet Pluton is using monsters to scavenge its garbage. One of the mutant uglies, called Hungrybeasts, beams across the cosmos thanks to some technical foul-up and enters Earth through the TV satellite dish of the Putterman family, headed by swinger Stan (Gerrit Graham) and his slut wife Raquel (Mary Woronov). Their cute kid Sherman (Chad Allen) plays with handguns, and the cute Grampa (Bert Remsen) is a full-time paranoic, beaming into his own crackpot channel.
Right away the Hungrybeast smells out the best garbage -- bad acting -- and munches Grampa into a mess of goo. If there's art here, it all belongs to special-effects creator John Buechler, who makes the monster into a fairly lovable grotesque. The thing has enough slime to lube a dozen Godzilla pictures, and indeed we see a dozen cheapo monster movies flash by on the Putterman's TV screen.
The writer and director, Ted Nicolaou, seems to be making a satirical swing at bad television. He sinks below it, and pea-shoots upward. This is the sort of intentional spoof so bad that it doesn't give us unintentional laughs, which are the main reward of lousy movies. Though made in Italy, it won't be matched on double bills with Federico Fellini's new satire on TV culture, "Ginger and Fred."
This beauty is shot in some sort of psychedelic '60s BlazoVision, or LuridScope. The colors are so raw that after 20 minutes I put on dark glasses, and found some relief. (Better to lose some nuances than get a migraine.) To go with the retro-visuals, there are dated jokes about heavy-metal music and Sammy Davis love chains, and lines that get the big-belch treatment, such as, "Hey, he's a gross-lookin' booger, ain't he? I'd nuke that sucker!"
That whiff of Noel Coward comes from Bert Remsen, whom devotees of '70s films will recall as one of the funniest actors in Robert Altman movies like "California Split" and "Brewster McCloud." Gerrit Graham, blithely retching his way through the part of Stan, was long ago hilarious in Brian DePalma's "Phantom of the Paradise." Big, cartoon-faced Mary Woronov was once funny in "Eating Raoul," and Alejandro Rey, badly playing a Hefner-lizard called Spiro, was the amusing Cuban lawyer in "Moscow on the Hudson."
So here they all are together, making a living that looks like dying. Seeing the film is on a par with acting in it. That's like a draw in a duel where both sides get killed.
Trying to limit the damage, I caught only a section of the companion feature, "Zone Troopers." In this treat, another Italian effort with international zilch appeal, some rather pleasant space aliens beam into World War II, and give our boys a hand against the Nazis. It's "E.T. Meets Klunks vs. Krauts."
Starring such ticks on the underbelly of cinema as Art LaFleur and Biff Manard, the film gives the GI Joes lines like this (to an alien): "You have any women with ya, like blondes from Venus?" Connoisseurs will chalk that up as a nod to the 1966 cheapo classic, "Mars Needs Women." -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
'TERRORVISION': FULL OF GORE AND SEXUALITY
Philadelphia Daily News (PA) - February 18, 1986
Author: JOE BALTAKE, Daily News Film Critic
"TerrorVision." A horror comedy starring Gerrit Graham, Mary Woronov and Bert Remsen. Written and directed by Ted Nicolaou. Photographed by Romano Albani. Music by Richard Band. Special gore effects by John Buechler. Running time: 83 minutes. An Empire release. In area theaters.
The new pornography of movies - namely, aggressive violence, laced with overall inhumanity - comes to a head with something called "TerrorVision."
If you're an aficionado of junk, this one has everything - a plot about a TV set that houses a monster, ripping off "Poltergeist;" a cast of perfectly awful characters, representing an assortment of perversions; a monster made of slime and, seemingly, snot; lots of dirty jokes and bad dialogue, and a sprawling set that's supposed to be a suburban home but that looks like a studio soundstage.
Heads roll. Limbs fly. Bodies are sucked into televison sets and hot tubs. Bad taste abounds and, if you're into such things, let me assure you that there's more blood and bile here than there was in "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."
If you're not into such things, but just have to see "TerrorVision" because it stars B-movie greats Mary Woronov ("Eating Raoul") and Gerrit Graham ("Phantom of the Paradise"), then by all means, go - but take a No- Pest strip along with you.
Parental guide: Rated R for its gore and leering sexuality. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FILM: A MONSTER OF A GARBAGE PROBLEM IN 'TERRORVISION'
Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA) - February 17, 1986
Author: Desmond Ryan, Inquirer Movie Critic
Near the beginning of Terrorvision, an undertaking that lives up to the terrible promise of its title, a boy looks at a horror film on cable TV and opines, "This is the dumbest movie I've ever seen."
That might well be true, with the exception of the movie he's in. Terrorvision is the third Charles Band production to be foisted on America in a still-young year - the others being the unforgettable Troll and Eliminators. Low in budget and lower in mind, Band's projects ally transcendent dumbness with dime-store effects. Indeed, he seems to have been listening to his accountants because the monster in Terrorvision sounds exactly like its counterparts in Troll, which is to say like a stopped drain.
Terrorvision tries to have fun with the sleazier aspects of popular culture, but only proves that it is impossible to satirize trash when you have only garbage at your disposal.
Joe Dante combined humor and horror in this vein, most notably in The Howling, which was both a homage to and a loving spoof of the genre and its conventions. But the chemistry eludes Ted Nicalou, who wrote and directed Terrorvision. His one honest idea is to suggest that his monster from outer space is the result of an interplanetary sanitation problem and that the wonders of satellite dish reception can put the creature on the screen and then in the family room.
Moving with the storied alacrity of the Philadelphia Streets Department, the sanitation people on the monster's home planet of Pluton occasionally interrupt terrestial television broadcasts to warn of the dangers. But Nicalou doesn't have the slightest notion of what to do with this premise beyond making the family in question more repellent than the creature from the landfill on Pluton.
The Putterman family boasts parents who are swingers, a pastiche punk daughter and a nutty survivalist grandfather. Their antics are the subject of some awful jokes before they provide various repasts for the monster. Nicalou has contrived to make these meals as revolting as possible.
In each case, the creature leaves only the head and sucks out the brains. This leaves a terrible mess on the carpet, but at least serves as fair warning that Terrorvision is strictly for the empty-headed.
TERRORVISION *
Produced by Charles Band, directed and written by Ted Nicalou, photography by Romano Albani, music by Richard Band, distributed by Empire Pictures.
Running time: 1 hour and 23 minutes
Stanley Putterman - Gerrit Graham
Raquel Putterman - Mary Woronov
Grandpa - Bert Remsen
Suzy Putterman - Diane Franklin
Parent's guide: R (violence) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`Terrorvision' misses mark
Houston Chronicle - February 15, 1986
Author: JEFF MILLAR, Staff
Nothing would please me more to say that "Terrorvision" (rated R) is a little jewel of a comedy that I have discovered, just for you. I can't. The movie's made by B-teamers and has all the characteristics of same. If a laugh is located at 34 degrees north, 27 degrees south, they spud in at 38 degrees north, 22 degrees south. They try, but they just can't produce. That's why they're B-teamers. Like the basketball coaches say, you can't teach height.
To characterize the film: It's a facetious gross-out horror film. By error, an extraterrestrial is teleported into an American living room via a backyard satellite dish. The ET squishes people with pincers, injecting a solvent which turns flesh into multicolored gelatin, which the ET then slurps up. He's actually rather cute. Introduced to Earthling television, the ET becomes quickly becomes addicted, sitting in a Jacuzzi and gurgling, "Tee-vee, tee-vee."
But the film was made so much on the cheap that the ET is virtually all the filmmakers have to offer in exchange for a ticket. After 20 minutes, you've seen all the cleverness the filmmakers have on their shelves. The dialogue and direction, both by Ted Ninicolaou, are just close enough to funny to make you wish this premise had been taken up by the A-teamers who could have made it actually funny.
It would do none of these actors - one is genuinely talented and may have done this because of financial distress - any good to list their names, so I won't.
"Poltergeist II" may be looming enticingly on the horizon, but for now the horror genre is getting no respect.
In Austin, independent producer Cannon Films is making a cut-rate sequel to "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" with almost none of its original stars, a fact that has set fans howling.
And in Houston, MGM has just released a miserable indie production it picked up for distribution called "Killer Party," a horror potboiler that rarely rises above a simmer. The movie was made in Toronto with a cast of unknowns, save for nominal stars Paul Bartel and Martin Hewitt. Bartel has earned some respect for the black comedy "Eating Raoul," but Hewitt starred with Brooke Shields in the classically bad "Endless Love," and if that film didn't finish his career, this one will.
Metro is touting "Killer Party" as a horror movie with humor, though the film is really more of a feeble campus comedy with horror trappings. The filmmakers seem to change their minds about tone and thrust with every reel, starting with the opening scenes, which turn out to be a horror movie within a heavy-metal music video within the movie proper, which is then scored with hopelessly dated and prissy pop. The "raison de scare" is an April Fool's party in a decrepit old frat house where, as any viewer of the "Halloween" or "Friday the 13th" films can guess, a pledge died from a hazing incident 20 years before. Old ghosts die hard and, naturally, someone is stalking the stupid students.
After much scene-setting with hysterically overwrought high jinks and hormonally imbalanced kissy-face, the corny conventions reign, with an inevitable array of heavy-breathing point-of-view shots, followed by the usual decapitations, impalings, disembowelings, electrocutions and bathtub drownings. For the most part, these slayings are all good, clean fun, in the sense that they're almost bloodless - an oddly innocent incongruity for an R rating.
But the film turns seriously sinister toward the conclusion, with some respectably good "Exorcist-"style possession scenes, followed by more prissy pop ("These are the best days of our li-i-i-ives") over the end titles. Say what? The acting is monumentally bad - grossly overplayed and obnoxious enough to merit a new chapter in "The Golden Turkey Awards" book.
As for the production staff, they tout such credits as "Funeral Home "and "Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter," which tells you where they're coming from. They may mix the brew a bit differently here, but if they think they are giving the teen slash-'em-up genre a new dimension with this mindless melange, they are sadly mistaken. "Killer Party" isn't worth crashing - just trashing.
Poster Art from The Mark Of Naschy @ www.naschy.com
`The Craving' leaves you hungry for ticket refund - Movie Review
The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution - May 28, 1986
Author: RINGEL, ELEANOR, Eleanor Ringel Film Editor: STAFF
Eleanor Ringel reviews "The Craving."
The scariest thing I saw during the couple of hours I wasted at a supposed horror movie called "The Craving" was a young mother brow-beating an elderly ticket-taker into disobeying the law and letting her underage children into this R-rated movie while she wandered the mall. The sheer ferocity with which she insisted that the gentleman allow her kids' psyches be exposed to this picture's sub-level blood-letting was a chilling reminder that all moms are not created equal.
"The Craving" itself is actually not all that terrifying. Rather it's an exceedingly cheap (the first movie I can remember without any credits), poorly-dubbed monster mash about three women who go vampire hunting and end up creatures of the night themselves. The object of their quest is an 18th-century vampiress who can be brought back to life by having the blood of a maiden dripped on her ashes. The least scrupulous of our heroines, having already strangled a wheelchair-bound professor, cheerfully sacrifices one of her roomies.
Meanwhile, the most virtuous of the three has fallen for a werewolf (also 18th-century vintage) who tries to be good between full moons and does his best to help destroy the vampiress.
Since all three leading ladies are long-limbed, well-built brunettes, it's often difficult to tell who's doing what to whom. What you can see is more women nibbling women than on an average night at a gay bar and more false blood than in an archival tape of an Alice Copper concert.
The tradition of the vampire-lesbian film is a long and semi-honorable one (a recent addition was "The Hunger," with Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon), but this poor excuse for a picture doesn't even count as a fatuous footnote. The only thing right about "The Craving" is its title; you leave the theater hungry to see a real movie.
"The Craving." Rated R for sex, nudity and violence.
"Crawlspace." A thriller starring Klaus Kinski. Written and directed by David Schmoeller. Photographed by Sergio Salvato. Edited by Bert Glastein. Music by Pino Donaggio. Running time: 77 minutes. An Empire release. In area theaters.
'You have to learn how to laugh, Martha," mad Dr. Karl Gunther tells his cowering caged prisoner, whose tongue he has extracted. "It makes getting through life a lot easier."
If only Dr. Gunther's methods of treatment were as comforting as his bedside manner. Once attracted to pain and the cure of it, Gunther now delights in creating it. "I am addicted to killing," he writes in his daily journal. These words are spoken in voiceover in English but are actually written - in German!
The son of a Nazi, Gunther studied and practiced medicine in Argentina, where his parents took refuge and where Gunther obviously picked up his father's penchant for inflicting pain and suffering on others.
Now, he spends most of his time, alone, thinking up assorted tortures - er, treatments - for the nymphomaniacs who live in the apartment building that he owns. For diversion - and perhaps incentive - he regularly slithers through the building's crawlspace, spying on his tenants and their various sexmates.
I don't know about you, but there's something about a horror -comedy about the activities of a Neo-Nazi that makes me quite ill. Enough already.
Poor Klaus Kinski. As the mad doctor, he's perfect, afflicted with the kind of face that makes him suitable only for horror comedies or Werner Herzog movies - which, more often than not, are one and the same.
"In the Shadow of Kilimanjaro." A thriller starring John Rhys-Davies and Timothy Bottoms. Directed by Raju Patel from a screenplay by Jeffrey M. Sneller and T. Michael Harry. Photographed by Jesus Elizondo. Edited by Paul Rubell. Running time: 97 minutes. A Scotti brothers release.
Who says they don't make movies like they used to?
More than 30 years ago, "The Naked Jungle" had Charlton Heston as a South American plantation owner fighting off an army of man-eating red ants. That was in 1954. And in 1963, Alfred Hitchcock trained a flock of crows to feast on Rod Taylor and Tippi Hendren in "The Birds."
Now, here we are in 1986, watching Timothy Bottoms as an African game warden contending with a band of bloodthirsty, marauding baboons.
In "In the Shadow of Kilimanjaro," an exotic new horror film, a recurring real-life situation is exploited with lip-smacking enthusiasm. It's a problem that has starving wild animals periodically attacking Kenya's national parks and eating people.
The site of the attacks in this movie is the Amboselli National Park and the culprits are primates that are not only three times stronger than man, but also as intelligent. That makes for a nasty combination - and a lot of bloodletting.
Bottoms is the senstive voice of reason, a ranger who wants to protect man and beast alike, and John Rhys-Davies is the trigger-happy macho miner who is beefy enough to keep a family of baboons fed for a full year. (I don't know. There's something about a big, burly man with a gun that makes one want to urge on the beasts.)
The movie surrounding them, about something we all fear, is old-fashioned hokum, predictable, funny, more than a little frightening.
Parental guide: Rated R for violence. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`KILIMANJARO` FILM APES REAL THRILLERS
Sun-Sentinel - June 11, 1986
Author: Roger Hurlburt, Entertainment Writer
Move over Stallone, Bronson and Eastwood -- when it comes to revenge in the movies, nobody does it better than Mother Nature.
In the past, moviegoers have braved the effects of killer bees, chomping sharks, voracious grasshoppers, spiteful killer whales, angry birds, ravenous frogs, squadrons of bats and even hordes of killer tomatoes. All have had a bone to pick with mankind at one time or another.
But compared to the hirsute horrors prowling about In the Shadow of Kilimanjaro, any other marauding managerie becomes child`s play.
How about an army of 90,000 man-eating baboons?
It seems that a severe drought on the African plain has made food scarce. So armies of baboons come out of the foothills to turn the natives and a group of mine developers into the breakfast of chimps.
Supposedly based on a true story, In the Shadow of Kilimanjaro is a film that makes a monkey out of the viewer.
Disjointed and contrived, the film is nothing more than an overblown, fictionalized account of what actually happened in Kenya a few years ago when starving baboons attacked and killed a few people. The events were indeed tragic, but not the fodder films are made of.
"Anything can happen when an animal is starving," comments game warden Timothy Bottoms. And sure enough -- just about everything does in this shoddy film.
Bottoms wants to evacuate the area. He knows the dangers of dealing with a "thinking, intelligent primate." Baboons, we learn, like to hunt in packs and are three times stronger than a human.
Unfortunately, we also learn that humans like to walk around in the bush at night alone -- proving they are three times dumber than an ape.
John Rhys-Davies, who gives a fine performance despite the story, isn`t scared. He has a mining operation to run. So what if bands of hungry baboons are looking for dinner? Time is money and he`s in a hurry.
As if there aren`t enough problems, enter Bottoms` nagging Beverly Hills girlfriend Michele Carey. Garbed in designer fashions, she arrives at the game preserve to get him to stop all the conservation nonsense and come back to California. Bottoms has too much at stake to leave -- namely, a sick cheetah and a neurotic water buffalo.
Though filmed on location in Africa, In the Shadow of Kilimanjaro rapidly reveals its threadbare story about a bizarre, singular incident. The screenplay barely supports the drama, so director Raju Patel goes out of his way to spice up the sequence of events.
Top honors must go to the bit where a crazed baboon, unknowingly placed in a crate inside a plane, climbs out at 20,000 feet and decides to have the pilot and passenger for lunch. Come on.
While one or two shots of the throng of baboons racing across the plain are visually disarming, the characters are not. Bottoms sleepwalks through his role and at one point is upstaged by a rhinoceros. Rhys-Davies bellows and stomps around in enjoyable fashion, but even he labors to keep a straight face.
Mostly, it`s the choppy editing, myriad of distracting subplots and a wealth of dialogue padding that makes time spent In the Shadow of Kilimanjaro a decidedly dark and dank experience.
Appropriately enough, it is a gravedigger who provides the mot juste for "Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives."
Drunk and clearly not a part of what's happening now, the old man looks straight into the camera and says "Some folks have a strange idea of entertainment!"
Then - sploosh! - the undead machete-wielding maniac Jason Voorhees strikes again, adding the gravedigger to the pile of corpses for the entertainment of gore fans.
Violent horror movies have pretty much lost their popularity, except for the deadening butchery of the hugely lucrative "Friday the 13th" series. But the gravedigger's dying words do mark something of a change in the series. Actually, it's a change for the better, although it doesn't take much to be better than the morbid movies that presented strings of graphic killings and little else.
The gravedigger represents all those - including critics, parents and most adults in general - who have decried the movies in the past. Bumping him off is one of several inside jokes aimed at the fans, jokes that occasionally work.
Credit must go to director-screenwriter Tom McLoughlin, directing his first feature and showing some real promise. Suspense and humor were almost absent from these geek show movies, but McLoughlin manages to squeeze in some of both. He has characters who are more than cardboard targets, moves the series in the direction of gothic horror movies and de-emphasizes grisly killings somewhat, alhtough there are buckets of blood. At the end, however, it collapses back into form.
But it's all relative. McLoughlin's work is derivative, but at least it's not entirely derived from "Friday the 13th" Parts I through V.
Still, the formula absolutely requires an opening in which it is learned that - gasp - Jason isn't dead. He's the worse for wear, though, dripping maggots when Tommy Jarvis (Thom Matthews) pries open his coffin. Tommy, the character who as a boy "killed" Jason in an earlier episode intends to completely destroy the corpse to end his nightmares. Instead, Jason springs back to life, dons his hockey mask and sets out to kill a new generation of young campers.
The local Chamber of Commerce, tired of being associated with endless slaughter and sequels, has changed the name of the town from Crystal Lake to Forest Green, but Jason finds it anyway.
Tommy runs afoul of the local sheriff, who can't believe the killer is back. Tommy has more luck convincing his beautiful daughter (Jennifer Cooke) who - as coincidence would have it - is also a counselor at the fatal camp. The movie has moments as a middling horror thriller before it changes into mostly the same old chop.
"Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives" is rated R for violence and vulgar language. * 1/2 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
JASON UP TO OLD TRICKS IN LATEST "FRIDAY 13TH'BY CARYN JAMES NEW YORK TIMES
Fresno Bee, The (CA) - August 5, 1986
It is a dark and stormy night. Tommy Jarvis escapes from the mental institution where he has been since he killed Jason, the town terror who hacked his way through dozens of bodies in five previous "Friday the 13th" movies. Tommy is a driven man, compelled by a logic known only to scriptwriters of sequels. He is determined to dig up and destroy Jason's corpse, just to make sure he's dead, like going back to make sure you've turned off the stove after you've left the house. Tommy digs up the decomposing body, the music swells, lightning strikes Jason through the heart and . . . well, you know the rest. This movie, after all, is called "Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives." Why Tommy couldn't let dead enough alone is just one of the trifling questions you can amuse yourself with while watching the film. You might also wonder why Tommy was thoughtful enough to bring along Jason's hockey mask, so the reborn monstrosity can pick up right where he left off, without even a change of apparel.
And why do the sheriff's daughter and her friends become counselors at the camp that was the site of most of Jason's murders? How did their parents convince them Jason was not real, when the series has only been around for six years and these kids are old enough to drive?
Teen-agers with no sense of history, they seem doomed to repeat the victims' roles in Jason's cut-'em-up rampage, because repeating history is what the "Friday the 13th" series is all about. It has fans who admit it's trash but watch just because it's there and don't expect any surprises.
Jason's new director and screenwriter, Tom McLoughlin, tries to liven up the formula with traces of humor and acknowledges the film's cult status with some self-directed irony. "I've seen enough horror movies to know any weirdo wearing a mask is never friendly," says one of Jason's first victims, when she and her husband encounter the killer on a lonely road.
But despite a few lighter touches, the film is still a gory waste of time that plays its murders for all the blood and guts they're worth.
There are plenty of cliched reaction shots of faces in terror, more than enough frames filled with bloody knives and severed heads. There is not, however, any suspense about Jason or his victims. He stalks, they scream, he kills. None of it is enough to make you jump out of your seat, though it may be enough to make your stomach churn. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bolt brings Jason back in `VI'
Houston Chronicle - August 5, 1986
Author: BRUCE WESTBROOK, Staff
"Nothing this evil ever dies," the ads proclaim.
And nothing this profitable.
After five box-office hits, the R-rated "Friday the 13th" films have reached a half-dozen Roman numerals - the first series since James Bond to last that long. The latest incarnation has the unwieldy title of "Friday the 13th", Part VI: Jason Lives (try remembering that at the box office).
Like the "Nightmare on Elm Street" and "Halloween" series, the "Friday the 13th" films have a conveniently indestructible bogyman - in this case, Jason Voorhees, the mute, crazed survivor of a legendary summer camp tragedy who wears a hockey goalie's mask as he runs murderously amok amid nubile camp counselors and terrified kiddies.
The new film opens with Jason in his grave, buried by "Part V." But a tormented survivor of Jason's crimes is compelled by his worst nightmares to unearth the fiend, thus assuring himself that Jason is nothing more than a moldering, maggot-ridden and far from ambulatory corpse.
He needn't have worried. The only activity in Jason's casket is that which inspires the ditty "the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out. . ." But our anguished hero isn't satisfied, and he thrusts a spearlike pole from the cemetery fence into Jason's gooshy gut. Naturally, all this occurs in an ominous thunderstorm. And, naturally, lightning strikes the pole and brings Jason to Frankensteinian life.
From then on, the film could be called a remake as much as a sequel. Jason returns to his old stalking grounds, and the body count mounts (it's 17 at the end, plus one squashed bug) until a final confrontation "seems" to put Jason down at last.
Ah, but we know better, don't we?
Fortunately, director-writer Tom McLoughlin spikes the punch this time. His basic plot may be slavishly imitative of his predecessors, but he paces the film well and adds some stylish visual flourishes and wry humor, including the obligatory in-jokes ("Cunningham Road" is clearly named after the first "Friday the 13th" film's director).
The acting isn't much, but that can be part of a low-budget horror film's charm. David Kagen, in particular, chews the scenery with relish as the skeptical, tough-talking sheriff whose daughter is a typical "Friday the 13th" heroine - a camp counselor who looks like a fashion model for Seventeen.
The film was shot almost entirely at night on locations just outside Atlanta, where the scenery is handsomely verdant but oddly autumnal for summer camp, with lots of fall leaves blowing across Jason's path of carnage.
McLoughlin, who has written two episodes for Steven Spielberg's "Amazing Stories", shows a fine hand with the young kids who populate the luckless camp. The sweet little girls are properly terrified and disarming; the slightly older little boys - one of whom is reading Sartre's "No Exit" - ruefully speculate that they're all "dead meat." Not to worry - none of the children are victims. Bloody this series may be, but it's not "perverse."
Some would argue that any violent film is perverse. Fine. Don't go. There probably are three minutes of violence in this entire 90-minute production. The violence is swift, it's sudden and it isn't always bloody. No one agonizes slowly.
Jason may be insane, but as a murderer he is cooly efficient, quickly dispatching victims with a wrench of their necks or a thrust of his machete.
That's entertainment? No, that's horror fantasy, a genre that makes no more pretense of echoing reality than a thrill ride at the amusement park. Neither should be taken seriously, and you're a lot more likely to grow queasy from the latter. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
'JASON': YOU CAN'T KEEP A GOOD MADMAN DOWN
Philadelphia Daily News (PA) - August 4, 1986
Author: JOE BALTAKE, Daily News Film Critic
"Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives." A thriller starring Thom Mathews and Jennifer Cooke. Written and directed by Tom McLaughlin. Photographed by Jon R. Kranhouse. Music by Harry Manfredini. Running time: 85 minutes. A Paramount release. In area theaters.
As I approached the box office of the Eric Route 38 Twin (in South Jersey), it seemed to pull away from me, just like one of those elongated corridors in horror movies.
What I was experiencing was the feeling of dread - and more than a little embarrassment.
"I-I-I'm ashamed to say this," I stuttered, "but I want to see 'Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives."'
"What?" the cashier asked.
"'Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives,"' I repeated.
Her piercing eyes seemed to look right through me. "That'll be $2.50," she snapped, without any humor in her voice. My blood ran cold.
I stood there in a catatonic state for a few seconds, prompting her to point me towards the entrance. Inside the theater, I bought a small popcorn and a small coke.
"What movie are you seeing?," the salesperson inquired.
"' Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives,"' I repeated.
She smiled. It gave me the creeps.
As I walked into the auditorium, all eyes seemed to be on me - deadly, lifeless eyes. Who are these people? - I thought - what do they want?
The answer was fairly obvious: blood. They were there to see some bloodletting. But would the film be enough? Would they want mine?
The theater darkened and the movie was preceded by a trailer for ''Extremities," with scenes of Farrah Fawcett slicing and dicing some guy who apparently had broken into her home. It was the nastiest preview that I think I've ever sene, but the audience seemed to enjoy it - and wanted more. Their appetites were successfully whetted. Mine was ruined: My popcorn container seemed to stumble off my lap.
The movie opened with the usual Paramount logo, followed by a maggoty grave-digging sequence during which the infamous Jason Vorhees is resurrected for the fifth straight time. Then the title comes on the screen, not "Friday the 13th, Part VI: Jason Lives," but "Jason Lives: Friday the 13th, Part VI."
I missed the next five mintues or so of the movie because I was trying to figure out why the film has an on-screen title that differs from the one in its print ads.
I tuned back in to catch the moment when the now completely revived Jason stops a VW bug and kills the two kids inside. As the woman fearfully squirms away from our killer's bloody blade, she offers him money to spare her. She even takes out her credit cards. As she dies clutching her American Express card, the camera lingers on her as if to remind us that, well, at least she didn't leave home without it.
Farther down the road, Jason bumps into a trio of people indulging in war games and makes meat out of all three. In the meantime, the kid (Thom Mathews) who dug up Jason is trying to explain what happened, but the local sherriff (David Kagen) thinks Tommy - that's the kid's name - is a psychopath and is responsible for all the murders. The sheriff's daughter (Jennifer Cooke), who has developed the hots for Tommy, thinks otherwise.
By this time, Jason, wearing his usual goalie's mask, has made his way to Crystal Lake, the camping site where he originally made his name. Only now, it's called Forrest Green.
At the camp, Jason kills an assortment of young camp counselors in the throes of sex. There's something about sex that bothers him, particularly if the young woman of the duo is especially hot for it.
Suddenly, it occurred to me that this is serious stuff. Not only have the makers of this series made the same exact film six times (and that ain't easy) but they've conveyed the same point six times - namely, that sexually free young women have robbed insecure men of their sexual identity. Hence, Jason's mask.
The people around me had no idea that these movies appeal to their most puritanical attitudes toward sex. They seemed to enjoy Jason's purgative violence as he hacked away at couples enjoying sex.
Now, that's really scary.
Parental Guide: Rated R for the usual (i.e., violence and sexuality). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FILM: THE SIXTH 'FRIDAY THE 13TH'
Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA) - August 2, 1986
Author: Carrie Rickey, Inquirer Movie Critic
Calling all counselors, calling all counselors. Friday the 13th, the slice- and-dice series about Jason, the vengeful camper who put the splat in splatter movies, has added yet another chapter to its bloody saga.
How can this be? When last we saw the remains of the lumbering zombie in the hockey mask, Jason Voorhees was dead and buried, right?
Well, let me tell you, Jason's alive. Which means everyone in the vicinity of Forest Green (also known as Crystal Lake) is dead meat. And that includes this movie.
Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI, like the previous five installments, is a real crowd-sleazer. You've got your cemetery on a thunderstormy night. You've got your bodysnatchers trying to make sure Jason's really dead. (To the honchos at Paramount Pictures, Jason is unkillable. This series is such a cash cow that they'll raise the dead just to make more bucks.) You've got the maggoty corpse of Jason reanimated by a lightning bolt.
At one point during this picture - after Jason kills a survivalist by pulling his arm out of its socket, but before he decapitates a pretty counselor by twisting her head off - I was reminded of kindergarten sadism.
I went to a pretty tough grade school in East Los Angeles where Dion, a male classmate, liked plucking out strands of my hair. He tied one end of a follicle to a scrap of construction paper. With the other end, he made a slipknot and tied it around the body of a fly he had trapped. The fly would struggle with this excess weight, trailing its confetti-sized sign, then collapse. I felt like an unwitting accomplice in Dion's sadism. Jason Lives provokes the same sensation.
As one of Jason's soon-to-be victims says when she sees the indelible hulk in the middle of the road on a rainy night: "I've seen enough horror movies to know well enough that any weirdo wearing a hockey mask isn't friendly."
Neither is Jason Lives. Oh, Jason, go take a spike.
JASON LIVES: FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VI *
Produced by Don Behrns, written and directed by Tom McLoughlin, photography by Jon R. Kranhouse, music by Harry Manfredini, distributed by Paramount Pictures.
