Movie Review- Vile `Bloody Birthday' celebrates evil doings
The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution - August 13, 1986
Author: CAIN, SCOTT, Scott Cain Staff Writer: STAFF
There's a good reason why "Bloody Birthday" has been sitting on shelves for six years: This is a vile picture. Would you believe that the killers are 10 years old? Isn't this going entirely too far? Do we need movies like this?
A prologue explains, as if this bit of information answered every question, that three babies were born during a solar eclipse in Meadowvale, Calif., in 1970. The story then picks up during the week of their collective 10th birthdays. Debbie, Steven and Curtis are angelic-looking classmates and accomplished murderers.
For exercise, they polish off horny teenagers. Their first chosen victim is Debbie's father, the sheriff. The Gang of Three wants him out of the way to gain possession of his pistol. Their teacher is eliminated because she insists that they do homework. How about that for motive?
A spunky classmate named Timmy becomes suspicious and, during an outing in a junkyard, Curtis attempts to lock Timmy inside a refrigerator. This incident is not sufficient to alarm Timmy's older sister, Joyce, the film's theoretical heroine. In the unlikeliest occurrence, Joyce accepts Debbie's request to baby-sit for her, and Joyce obligingly brings Timmy, conveniently setting up an ambush of the only two people who pose a threat.
Of many alarming events, one of the most repellent involves the suggestion that Curtis is putting ant poison in three huge birthday cakes. (Defenders might say that "Bloody Birthday" anticipated the poisoning of headache powders and other consumer goods, but the glee with which the idea is presented is reprehensible.)
The best-known actors in the cast are Jose Ferrer and Susan Strasberg, who pr obably completed their scenes in a single day. Ferrer plays the town doctor, and Miss Strasberg is the ill-fated teacher. You have to wonder what persuaded them to take these roles. Ferrer and Miss Strasberg can't have made much money, and "Bloody Birthday" is not a film they will want to list on a resume. They only cheapen themselves by participating. Doesn't professional dignity count for anything?
"Bloody Birthday." Horror . Rated R for violence and nudity ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FILM: A TERROR TALE LOOKS AT KIDS GONE VERY BAD Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA) - July 1, 1986 Author: Carrie Rickey, Inquirer Movie Critic Splatter-movie directors are either graduates of Animal Guts Tech or of Creepy Music/Razor Sharp Academy. Rest assured that Ed Hunt, writer and director of Bloody Birthday, went to the latter. And he wasn't an honors student.
Its title notwithstanding, Bloody Birthday (1980) is a relatively bloodless experiment in terror, recalling The Bad Seed with a trio of blithely homicidal 10-year-olds who stalk adults to the accompaniment of shrieky, high-pitched violins.
This is California terror, you can tell, because the explanation for their juvenile delinquency is astrological. The kids were born during a lunar eclipse on June 1, 1970. An amateur astrologer they terrorize suggests that ''the eclipse caused something to be missing from their personalities." Something like conscience.
These squeaky-clean brown noses do well in school, ingratiating themselves with teachers and parents. When no one's looking, however, they garotte teenagers with jump-ropes, bludgeon adults with shovels and kill police officers with baseball bats. Who would suspect?
One line for the horror hit parade: The astrologer confides to her beau, ''I'm not going to college. I want to be a reporter."
BLOODY BIRTHDAY *
Produced by Gerald Tolson, directed by Ed Hunt, written by Ed Hunt and Barry Pearson, photography by Stephen Posey, music by Arlon Ober, distributed by Judica Productions.
Running time: 1 hour, 25 mins.
Susan Strasberg - Miss Davis
Jose Ferrer - The Doctor
Parent's guide: MPAA Rating: R (nudity, sex, violence)
ITALIAN GORE-FEST WITH GRISLY VIOLENCE THAT`S NEVER SUBTLE
Sun-Sentinel - September 23, 1986
Author: BILL KELLEY, Entertainment Writer
Pity the poor fool who attends a showing of Demons thinking it will be a routine, supernatural horror thriller. The only routine ingredient in this stomach-churning Italian gore-fest -- unrated to avoid an "X" for its explicit mayhem -- is that B-movie staple, the sub-par dubbing of its European cast`s dialogue.
Demons is the latest low-budget extravaganza from director Lamberto Bava, son of the late Mario Bava (Black Sabbath). Bava Sr. single-handedly launched the giallo cycle of vividly brutal -- if elegantly photographed and staged -- Italian horror movies of the `60s.
Lamberto has inherited his father`s flair for the audacious, but, alas, not much of his talent. He has lately collaborated with Dario Argento (Suspiria), the poor man`s Mario Bava of the `70s.
Bava Jr. and Argento are the principal writers of Demons, and their screenplay`s springboard is the most original thing about it: Patrons in a cavernous urban movie theater the Metropol, (exteriors filmed in West Berlin), which is operated by demonic cultists, are turned into monsters on a night that fulfills a prophecy of Nostradamus.
In the ways the victims are infected (initially by images from the screen itself), transformed into demons and then made indestructible, the movie owes much to Night of the Living Dead (`68) and its grisly descendants. Buffs will trace the twist ending to several earlier Italian horror movies, including Michael Reeves` The She-Beast (`67).
Bava and Argento have no use for the more subtle, refined styles of suggestive horror . They believe less is too little and more is never enough.
Demons is unabashedly, clinically brutal -- within an hour, the screen is awash in glistening blood, putrescence and viscera.
Not only does Bava`s camera not flinch; it savors each opportunity for excess. The bloodletting is accompanied by a noisy sound track of songs by Motley Crue and other heavy metal rock bands.
Since Demons intermittently exhibits a darkly humorous streak -- for example, the hero of its first hour is a pimp who slipped into the theater with two hookers -- the film has a certain antic charm. That eccentric quality is enhanced by the movie`s freewheeling grotesqueness.
Be sure you know what you`re getting into, however -- Demons is anything but a conventional (or even coherent) foray into contemporary horror . It`s strictly a feast for eyes that aren`t easily scorched by outrageous violence.
MOVIE REVIEW
1/2 star Demons
Italian horror film about patrons in a movie theater who are attacked by monsters as a centuries-old prophecy is fulfilled.
Credits: With Natasha Hovey. Directed by Lamberto Bava. Written by Dario Argento and Lamberto Bava.
Unrated. Graphic violence including disemberment, drug abuse, profanity ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Movie Review- `Demon's is hard-core gore in Berlin
The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution - September 23, 1986
Author: CAIN, SCOTT, Scott Cain Staff Writer: STAFF
Scott Cain reviews the film "Demons."
"Demons," a monster movie set in Berlin, is suitable only for the most insatiable gore freaks.
Both director Lamberto Bava and producer Dario Argento dote on festering flesh and hideous bodily fluids. There are no maggots in "Demons," but otherwise the two moviemakers trot out their full bag of unsightly tricks.
It's useless to complain about characterization in a movie like this, but "Demons" is particularly aggravating. As the film opens, Cheryl, the heroine, is riding the subway and seems frightened of every shadow. A fellow who looks only slightly more wholesome than "The Phantom of the Opera" offers Cheryl a ticket to a movie at the Metropol theater and she takes it. In fact, she chases him down the street to ask for a ticket for a girlfriend.
That night, Cheryl and Kathy join perhaps 50 other people, including one blind man, at a showing of a slasher movie. In the slasher movie, a fellow nicks his face with a mask found inside Nostradamus' tomb and turns into a zombie. Watching in dismay in the auditorium is a young woman who nicked her face on an identical mask in the Metropol's lobby. Panicky, she retires to the restroom and begins foaming at the mouth.
Soon, the Metropol audience realizes that something is amiss, but all the exits are locked. (The front of the building has perhaps 50 windows and it's not clear why the windows are unavailable to the trapped moviegoers).
No explanation, either, why the survivors - who barricade themselves in the balcony - are unable to hear what's taking place on the main floor just a few feet below them.
When, at long last, some moviegoers escape from the theater, they find that Berlin is in flames. This smashes the previous impression that the event at the Metropol was unique.
You wonder why Italians went to Berlin to make "Demons." Is this revenge for Hitler's treatment of Mussolini? Old wounds heal slowly in Europe. The slime, ooze and gook in "Demons" make you long for the "divine decadence" that Fraulein Sally Bowles found in the Berlin of "Cabaret."
"Demons." A horror movie. Not rated, but probably would qualify for an X because of violence ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DEMONS' GOES FOR THE GROSS - BOTH AT BOX OFFICE AND ON SCREEN
Seattle Post-Intelligencer - September 12, 1986
One evening, a group of diverse people walking in a lonely Berlin subway are handed invitations to a free screening of a new horror movie in a rather spooky downtown theater.
In the lobby before the show, one of these people, a black hooker, picks up a movie prop on display (a silver mask, just like the one worn by the villain in the movie-within-the-movie), tries it on and cuts her cheek on it.
Moments later, she feels ill, goes to the restroom and promptly transforms into ''a demon - an instrument of evil,'' with red eyes, long fangs and a propensity for slobbering green slime.
When her friend comes to check on her, she gets bitten for her trouble, and she too is transformed into a demon. The two of them are soon crawling around the dark auditorium biting movie patrons and turning them into monsters.
Before long, the theater audience seems to be evenly divided between normal movie fans and monsters, the normals barricading themselves in the balcony (the doors having been inexplicably cemented shut) and the demons attacking them, ripping open their necks, gouging out their eyes, scalping them, chewing off their body parts and generally vomiting gore, exploding with pus and popping ''Alien''- like out of bodies.
This is pretty much how it goes in ''Demons,'' a new English-language, made-in-Germany, Italian horror movie that, according to its press notes, was one of the top-grossing films in Italy last year and has been called ''one of the 10 best horror films of the last decade'' by Fangora magazine (well, not exactly Time or Newsweek, but they don't review this kind of movie).
Directed by someone named Lamberto Bava, the movie tries hard to break the threshold in cinema special-effects gore, since almost every second of screen time is devoted to something totally repulsive. And ''Demons'' more or less outgrosses (and is even more boring and repetitious than) its obvious model, the George Romero zombie movie.
Memo: MOVIE REVIEW * Demons, directed by Lamberto Bava, produced by Dario Argento. Cast: Urbano Barberini, Natasha Bava, Paola Cozza, Karl Zinny. Ascot Entertainment. Several theaters. Unrated. By William Arnold P-I Film Critic ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FILM: GIVING CUTTING UP A NEW MEANING
Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA) - June 25, 1986
Author: Carrie Rickey, Inquirer Movie Critic
Demons is a Purple Rose of Cairo for the dimwitted and bloodthirsty.
Considering that Demons chronicles the literally stomach-churning metamorphosis of moviehouse patrons who turn zombie while watching a horror picture, I made a mistake buying a frankfurter on the way in. Both the movie and its movie-within-the-movie are slice-and-dicers that marinate their characters in blood before pureeing and liquefying.
Shot on location in Berlin, this movie might better be dubbed Night of the Dying Dread. A group of Berliners, mostly teenaged and pert, are given complimentary tickets to a chic new moviehouse, the Metropol, where it's hard to tell the difference between punk-rocker patrons and zombie predators. Something in the movie they're seeing reduces many in the audience into drooling, frothing, fanged and taloned vampires requiring buckets of blood for sustenance. And guess where they get it? Not the ideal place for a first date.
Directed by Lamberto Bava, son of Mario, the schlockmeister who made the not uninteresting Hatchet for a Honeymoon (1970), Demons is the movie equivalent of a fingernail on a blackboard.
Demons is effective in two ways. It makes even the hard-core gore fan too timid to put her feet on the floor (for fear a moviehouse vampire will gnaw at them). And it makes the loathsome Toxic Avenger look comparatively innocent.
Armpit-deep in blood and entrails, escaping zombies by the skin of his teeth, one patron announces to no one in particular, "This is the last complimentary ticket I'll ever accept." Wish I could say that. This piece of movie sadism cost me $4.50.
Parents take note: Though it carries a disclaimer about its graphic scenes, Demons is unrated. If I were in charge of the MPAA, I'd give it something beyond X.
Like Y.
For "Yucko."
DEMONS *
Produced by Dario Argento, directed by Lamberto Bava, written by Dario Argento, Lamberto Bava, Franco Ferrini and Dardano Sacchetti, photography by GianLorenzo Battaglia, music by Claudio Simonetti, distributed by Ascot Entertainment Group.
Running time: 1 hour, 26 mins.
Urbano Barberini - Moviehouse patron
Natasha Hovey - Moviehouse patron
Karl Zinny - Moviehouse patron
Fiore Argento - Moviehouse patron
Parent's guide: No MPAA rating (violence, drugs, sexual abuse, gore) -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
'DEMONS': AN ITALIAN HORROR
Philadelphia Daily News (PA) - June 23, 1986
Author: JOE BALTAKE, Daily News Film Critic
"Demons" ("Demoni"). A thriller starring Natasha Hovey and Urbano Barberini. Directed by Lamberto Bava from a screenplay by Dario Argento, Dardano Sacchetti, Franco Ferrini and Bava. Photographed by Gianlorenzo Battalia. Edited by Pietro Bozza. Music by Claudio Simonetti. Running time: 85 minutes. An Ascot release. In area theaters.
It was inevitable, I suppose.
"Demons" ("Demoni"), the Italian horror movie directed by Lamberto Bava, the protege of Dario Argento ("The Bird with the Crystal Plummage"), is the ultimate sick joke on its audience. This is a movie where horror -film fans deserve much worse than they get.
This anti-movie is about a theater that entraps its patrons, turning them into ranting, panting zombie-like beasts. Everything that happens in the movie-within-the-movie happens off-screen as well. Moviegoers turn crazy - and turn on each other.
With plenty of creepy music and variations of murder, no cheap shot is overlooked. Our main concern is supposed to be with young couple Cheryl and George (Natasha Hovey and Urbano Barberini) and their increasingly inane attempts to exit.
Parental guide: Not rated. Gory. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`Demons' has lots of gore in store
Houston Chronicle - June 18, 1986
Author: BRUCE WESTBROOK, Staff
The credits tell you where "Demons" is coming from, at least geographically.
Lamberto Bava is the director. Dario Argento is the producer. You guessed it - it's an Italian movie, shot in Rome as it turns out.
As for where the film is coming from stylistically, its newspaper ads tell a lot.
"It may be one of the best horror films of the last decade!" proclaims a critic's printed quote. But the source of the rave is even more revealing: Fangoria Magazine.
Fangoria is the bible of fright fans who thrive on gore. Lots of gore. Gore and more gore. Ridiculously ostentatious gore. Mind-boggling, stomachwrenching, gut-churning gore. Special-effects gross-outs as art.
And that is what you'll find in "Demons" - so much so that Signore Argento didn't even bother to submit his film to the Motion Picture Association of America for its ratings review.
Why bother? What he has here is a clear-cut case of X-styled excesses. Getting the MPAA to confirm that fact would only force the film out of theaters that refuse to book any X-rated material.
Instead, Argento has placed a disclaimer on his film, warning that it contains scenes "which are considered shocking!" No one under 17 is admitted, the same policy as for X-rated product.
So you've been warned. Those not greedy for gore should steer clear. This film about an audience trapped in a theater where demons on the screen become marauding demons in the flesh is not one for sensitive tastes.
But what about the fans - the horror -film aesthetes - the faithful Fangoria readers? Will they delight in this fright?
Some will, others won't. I'm not accusing the horror audience of homogeneity. But those who do like it are more likely to embrace the film for familiarity than originality.
"Demons" is formularized to death. It rips off so many movies that it's hard to know where to start. How do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways.
The film's " horror movie within a horror movie" motif has been used countless times. Its heavies are nightmarishly transformed humans with bright contact lenses, hideous claws and green bile oozing from their mouths "(The Exorcist, Abby, The Evil Dead)." These demons devour humans and contaminate their victims, who in turn become demons "(Night of the Living Dead, Day of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead)." And there's a post-apocalyptic thrust by the survivors at the end that's straight out of MadMax and the like.
Need I go on?
Even its makers may admit that the plot is predictable and the acting stinks. But so what? "Demons" doesn't try to achieve horror via mood or suggestion, but with a simpler, more direct approach - shock. And "Demons" has shocks, lots and lots of them. It's as subtle as an earthquake.
Yes, but what about those marvelous special effects? Did you see the bloody transformation scenes? And the way the nail pierced the guy's skull? "Bellissimo!"
Movie Review- `Deadly Friend' milder than most horror flicks
The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution - October 15, 1986
Author: RINGEL, ELEANOR, Eleanor Ringel Film Editor: STAFF
Movie review on "Deadly Friend," a horror spoof starring Matthew Laborteaux and Kristy Swanson, and directed by Wes Craven.
When a horror specialist like Wes ("Nightmare on Elm Street") Craven decides to bury the hatchet and go for cheap laughs, one doesn't know whether to be relieved or disappointed.
In the case of "Deadly Friend," a sort of "I Was a Teenage Dr. Frankenstein," disappointment wins out.
In a sense, "Deadly Friend" is a droll inversion of the typical teen slice-and-dice formula. This time, the busty blond cheerleader-type is not the shrieking victim-to-be but the killer. Her name is Samantha (Kristy Swanson) and she could almost be the typical girl-next-door. Only, most girls-next-door aren't quite so pretty and most don't have a drunkenly abusive daddy who, the script hints, isn't blind to his little girl's grown-up charms.
Her charms certainly aren't lost on her new neighbor, Paul (Matthew Laborteaux), who isn't exactly your typical-boy-next-door, either. He's a teenaged scientific genius whose best friend is a robot named BeeBee that he built himself. BeeBee may look like something the Jetsons would own and he may talk in guttural semi-coherent "Gremlins" babble, but he's as super-intelligent as his inventor and a good deal more physical (as in super-strong).
"I developed the basic program and he makes up his mind after that," Paul tells his refreshingly average pal, Tom (Michael Sharrett). "No telling what he's going to do next."
Unfortunately, BeeBee doesn't get the chance to do much of anything next. He's blown to smithereens by the neighborhood crackpot - a cranky old lady with a creaky but effective shotgun. Shortly thereafter, Sam is pushed down the stairs by her dad and ends up on a life-support system, with Daddy ready to pull the plug.
However, Paul has a plan - he'll steal Sam and put BeeBee's brain or microchip or whatever in her skull. The only hitch is, Dad pulls the plug a few minutes early, so there's an eight or nine hour stretch when Sam is flat-out dead. Those few hours beyond the pale wreak havoc on her complexion and her personality. When she comes to, her skin has a greenish glow and she's developed a fetish for purple eye-shadow. More crucially, she's developed a fetish for settling old scores, which isn't goo d news for drunken dads or daffy old ladies.
A few years back, Craven made a really good horror spoof called "Swamp Thing," based on the comic book. "Deadly Friend" is cast in somewhat the same mold, but while "Swamp Thing" was affectionate and unassuming, this film is slickly manipulative and a bit condescending.
It's almost as if Craven were out to prove he can do more with teens than mop up the screen with them. But his good intentions - if that is, indeed, the case - aren't backed by a good script. "Deadly Friend" simply isn't very clever.
Worse, it's backed by a misleading ad campaign that wrongly emphasizes its few scary moments. "Deadly Friend" isn't deadly viewing, but it's nothing that'll give anyone nightmares, on Elm Street or anywhere else. Nor does it intend to. But pulling an audience in with a "Carrie"-ish come-on and handing them some weak jokes about killer-blondes isn't my idea of a good way to build a word-of-mouth audience. It makes about as much sense as trying to pass "Blue Velvet" off as "Still the Beaver." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
WES CRAVEN'S 'DEADLY FRIEND' A CRUSHING BORE IN HORROR GENRE
Times Union, The (Albany, NY) - October 15, 1986
Author: Martin Moynihan, Staff writer
After making the clever horror - movie hit "A Nightmare on Elm Street" and some good television thrillers, director Wes Craven has returned to his roots.
His new movie "Deadly Friend" has some interesting pretensions, but basically it relies on whatever shock value it can find in crushing heads, necks and other human body parts. Not much.
Doing the crushing is a teenage girl named Samantha (Kristy Swnason). She has blonde hair, a nice figure, a pleasant demeanor and a menacing father, but the outstanding thing about her is that she's dead.
The Dr. Frankenstein of this tale is a familiar figure, the teenage scientific genius named Paul (Matthew Laborteaux). Midway through the film, the girl is pronounced brain-dead from a fall down a stairway. Her friend Paul takes an "artificial intelligence" microchip from his broken robot, performs some quick brain surgery on the girl and brings her back to life - sort of.
For a short time, Paul finds himself with a girl he can turn on and off with a remote-control switch. Some science project. You can imagine what this guy scored on his SATs.
But to show he's just a normal teenage kid, Paul spends the rest of the movie in a panic as Samantha starts killing people in the neighborhood who have been unkind to her or Paul. For better or worse, this is the first horror film on record in which a victim is decapitated by a thrown basketball.
One of the ironies is that while Samantha's advanced artificial intelligence keeps getting "smarter," the movie keeps getting dumber. The last shock sequence makes no sense at all, and Craven goes twice to that very shallow well of showing something grotesque, only to reveal that it was "only a dream."
"Deadly Friend" has a far-fetched but workable premise (although, does the genius have to be a teenager?), which director Craven fails to bring to life.
"Deadly Friend" is rated R for extreme violence and vulgar language. * 1/2 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TAKE ONE DEADLY HORROR FILM AND TWO JIGGLE MOVIES AND STAY HOME
Seattle Post-Intelligencer - October 14, 1986
Author: William Arnold P-I Film Critic
It used to be that movie distributors saved their lowest exploitation films for the summer audience. But with the vast number of hungry multiplex screens and an overall glut in exploitation production, the dogs of August now pop up all year long.
This week, for instance, a vacuum in the release schedule has invited a trio of summer-style exploitation pictures to hit town - a horror film, the long-delayed ''Deadly Friend''; and two beach pictures, ''Malibu Bikini Shop'' and ''Hardbodies 2.''
The first of these, Wes Craven's ''Deadly Friend,'' is a fairly routine ''teen-age Frankenstein'' movie reportedly bumped from the summer's schedule because of last-minute exhibitor anxiety over the failure of the previous summer's cycle of teen-age Frankenstein movies.
Based on a book by Diana Henstell, the film is about a teen-age genius (Matthew Laborteaux, of TV's ''Little House on the Prairie'') who implants an artificial-intelligence chip into the cortex of his brain-dead girlfriend.
In true Frankenstein tradition, the girl-monster soon runs amok and, faster than you can say Boris Karloff, is twisting off the head of her abusive, sicko father and doing in the grouchy neighbor who had earlier stolen her basketball.
Under the direction of horror veteran Wes Craven, this film treads the narrow line between satire and playing it straight rather well, and is always technically a cut or two above the level of the average exploitation horror vehicle.
But the film is so predictable and so unremarkable in every way that anyone who thought Craven's ''Nightmare on Elm Street'' heralded the advent of a daring new horror -movie talent will find ''Deadly Friend'' a considerable disappointment.
Over in the next auditorium we have something called ''Malibu Bikini Shop,'' which was filmed in Santa Monica and Venice, and has nothing at all to do with Malibu (the title on the print I saw did not even mention Malibu - it was called ''The Bikini Shop'').
In any case, the film is a jiggle comedy about two odd-couple brothers who inherit a bikini specialty shop that is in rather (you should pardon the word) shaky financial condition, and have to mount a massive bikini promotion to save the place from extinction.
In its heart of hearts, this movie is an old-fashioned late '50s ''nudie'' and exists as an excuse to show topless and scantily clad women in a variety of peekaboo, teasing poses and situations.
But the young cast is surprisingly appealing; the script is never really vulgar. Director David Wechter has worked in a couple of very stylish video- style fantasy sequences. And a good supporting cast of Hollywood veterans (among them Frank Nelson, Kathleen Freeman and Jay Robinson) all help make this innocuous little movie a lot more tolerable than its title and premise might imply.
There are, however, no such redeeming features to ''Hardbodies 2,'' a sequel to last year's ''Hardbodies'' and the second summer T&A movie of the week.
Loosely a comedy about an American movie company filming on location in the Mediterranean, this one is straight, soft-core pornography that goes out of its way to be crude and vulgar every chance it gets.
Like ''Malibu,'' the dominant visual motif is the bare breast, but instead of teasing his audience, director Mark Griffiths absolutely overwhelms it with breast montages.
Indeed, his movie is virtually a documentary on the mammary organ - and one that is so overdone and thoroughly unimaginative that even the most dedicated connoisseurs of skin will probably be bored by it. Memo: MOVIE REVIEW (1) ** Deadly Friend, directed by Wes Craven. Written by Bruce Joel Rubin. Cast: Matthew Laborteaux, Kristy Swanson, Michael Sharrett. Warner Bros. Several theaters. Rated R. (2) ** Malibu Bikini Beach, directed and written by David Wechter. Cast: Michael David Wright, Bruce Greenwood, Barbra Horan, Jay Robinson, Frank Nelson. International Cinema. Several theaters. Rated R. (3) * Hardbodies 2, directed by Mark Griffiths. Written by Mark Griffiths and Curtis Scott Wilmot. Cast: Brad Zutaut, James Karen, Alba Francesca, Roberta Collins. Cinetel Films. Several theaters. Rated R. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Disneyesque `Deadly Friend' Craven's latest effort in horror
Houston Chronicle - October 13, 1986
Author: BRUCE WESTBROOK, Staff
Let's see. Director Wes Craven's "Deadly Friend" is "his most terrifying creation" - even counting "A Nightmare on Elm Street." It says so right here in the newspaper ads.
And that is a lot like saying "The Color Purple" is "Steven Spielberg's most spectacular film since "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." It's called misrepresentation based on reputation.
Don't be fooled. Granted, "Deadly Friend" hovers in the horror genre for which Craven is best known (and for which "The Hills Have Eyes" should be his standard, not "Elm Street)." But for "Deadly Friend's" first hour, it isn't a horror film at all.
Instead of shocks and jolts, or even the development of a foreboding mood, Craven tells a low-key, Disneyesque story about clean-cut Paul - an impossibly brainy type played by Matthew Laborteaux - who moves with his single mom into a quaint, handsome neighborhood of two-story houses and white picket fences.
He quickly makes friends with the paper-route boy and with Samantha, the girl next door. She's a sweet but scared blonde (played by Kristy Swanson) who is violently victimized by her crazily possessive father.
Sam sneaks out enough to pal around with Paul and his pet robot, BB, a corny rip-off of the humanized machines in "Short Circuit" and "Star Wars." BB's mechanical mutterings sound like a cross between the latter film's Jawas and R2-D2, and its appearance has the uncomfortably cartoonish anthropomorphism of Disney's dopey droids in "The Black Hole."
Starting with the film's first scene, BB steals the show and actually becomes the focus, even though the robot has no role to play in the story's latter half. By then, the only thing haunting this picture is the promise with which its ads primed the audience. Like the ghost of box-office past, it moans in our minds: "His most ter-ri-fy-ing creation."
Wooooooooo.
Say what?
Except for one sudden, nightmarish nightmare sequence (which has become Craven's forte), there isn't a scare until the latter half. Then, the catalyst is Samantha's brain-dead beating by her dad and a Frankensteinian revival by boy-genius Paul and his magic microchips.
Yes, Sam is alive again - but hardly well. She's also superstrong and remembers enough about her tormentors to wreak gory retribution.
That's a lot of plot to be giving, but the film's selling and buildup demanded some kind of clarification.
So, there you have it: "Deadly Friend" does, in fact, finally turn horrific. And when it does, it delivers a fair dose of the title's deadliness. But the real shock is reconciling that change in tone and style with all that came before.
Craven certainly shows an affinity for Disney - note that he directed the TV film "Crimebusters" for Disney's Sunday series. Perhaps with "Deadly Friend" he simply craved some rare softness and sweetness and wanted to tell a tale with more to it than a body count.
If so, that is a commendable enough ambition, but it's a goal he hasn't achieved yet in a workable whole. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FILM: SCI-FI, HORROR IN 'DEADLY FRIEND'
Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA) - October 13, 1986
Author: Desmond Ryan, Inquirer Movie Critic
Among the many pleasures afforded by Francis Coppola's Peggy Sue Got Married is the way in which a master director takes battered old cliches and time-travel formulas and turns them into something refreshingly original and surprisingly deep.
Wes Craven's muddled Deadly Friend reminds us that such feats of filmmaking are rare indeed. Craven has amassed a considerable following among horror fans, beginning with the repulsive cult favorite The Hills Have Eyes and culminating with the hit A Nightmare on Elm Street. Craven, a veteran of the gore wars that have seen the genre degenerate into a competition to create ever more gruesome death scenes, clearly did some thinking before he chose to make Deadly Friend. That, in itself, is a highly unusual departure for a director in the field.
In the event, he chose to graft a variation on the Frankenstein theme and some standard horror ingredients onto a tried formula from another field - bright kids versus the scientists and authority and an experiment gone wrong. The idea has yielded movies as entertaining and provocative as WarGames and The Manhattan Project - pictures that worked because they were about some pressing technological issue.
The first part of Deadly Friend plays like a halfhearted reprise of Short Circuit with Matthew Laborteaux as a super-bright 15-year-old who is fascinated with artificial intelligence. He has developed his own robot, and his precocity has won him a place beyond his years in a graduate school. Craven's film is a modest pleasantry until he remembers who he is.
His movie promptly turns into I Was a Teenage Brain Surgeon with a clinically specific operation that brought a nauseated groan from many in the audience. Restoring a dead girl to life in this league merely entails shoving what looks like a cheap digital watch into her cranium and sewing up the scalp. Beneath all this is a rather shrewd fantasy for teenage boys about taking absolute control of a girl's body.
Developments thereafter are predictable and of the sort the customers expect from a director who clearly doesn't wish to depart too drastically from his Craven image.
DEADLY FRIEND *
Produced by Robert M. Sherman, directed by Wes Craven, written by Bruce Joel Rubin, photography by Philip Lathrop, music by Charles Bernstein, distributed by Warner Brothers.
Running time: 1 hour, 29 mins.
Paul Conway - Matthew Laborteaux
Samantha - Kristy Swanson
Jeanne Conway - Anne Twomey
Tom - Michael Sharrett
Parent's guide: R (violence)
Showing: At area theaters ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
HORROR AND HILARITY
The Record (New Jersey) - October 13, 1986
Author: By Will Joyner, Staff Writer: The Record
MOVIE REVIEW @@ DEADLY FRIEND: Directed by Wes Craven. Written by Bruce Rubin. Photography, Philip Lathrop. With Matthew Laborteaux (Paul Conway), Kristy Swanson (Samantha), Michael Sharrett (Tom), Anne Twomey (Jeanne Conway), and others. Produced by Robert M. Sherman. Released by Warner Bros. Opened Friday locally. Running time: 92 minutes. Rated R: explicit violence, gore.
"Deadly Friend" is a horror movie all right, but the scary stuff's so entwined with nasty, nostalgic humor that even the skittish can have fun watching it.
Director Wes Craven, who made the gore classic "A Nightmare on Elm Street," has eased up a bit to poke fun at the old-time Hardy Boys brand of small-town hijinks and at two contemporary genres computer-whiz adventure and social-issue docudrama.
When 15-year-old Paul Conway (Matthew Laborteaux of "Little House on the Prairie") and his mom (Anne Twomey) move into town, they at first find a Norman Rockwell tableau: leafy streets, quaint houses, a spunky paperboy named Tom (Michael Sharrett).
But Samantha (Kristy Swanson), the girl next door, has bruises all over her body. It doesn't take long to learn that her bug-eyed, beer-besotted father (Richard Marcus) beats her, and that she refuses to squeal. ("Sometimes I want to roll a truck over his face, but he's still my father," she explains.)
The real weirdo in "Deadly Friend," though, turns out to be Paul himself, a genius doing artificial-intelligence research at the local university. When, in quick succession, his pet robot Bee Bee gets blown away by an eccentric old lady (Anne Ramsey) and Samantha is killed by her dad, the geek goes haywire.
With the incredulous (and hilarious) help of Tom, he steals Samantha's body and brings her back to life by implanting Bee Bee's old circuitry in her brain. Needless to say, she has revenge on her modified mind, and Paul can't keep her in the attic.
There's a tawdry, TV-land feel to "Deadly Friend," but it works to the movie's advantage. Paul's mother is a latter-day Donna Reed, the houses are straight out of "Ozzie and Harriet," and there are intentional references to "Bewitched" (like Elizabeth Montgomery, this Samantha is called "Sam"). We're suckered into thinking that we're watching one of those comfortable old sitcoms and then arrrgghh!! see this cheerleader of a Frankenstein do her ghastly routine.
The ghastly part does draw too much blood, but Craven almost always cleans up his act with a humorous touch including death by basketball. The straight scenes are poorly edited, but it's all patched together by the fact that the entire cast strikes the right note of innocence gone awry.
For all its exploitative trappings, "Deadly Friend" somehow turns so many tables so quickly the most appealing characters take turns being plenty unappealing that you're left feeling sympathy for just about everybody. These days, that's not such a horrible thing to say about a horror movie.
DEAD HEAVY-METAL ROCK STAR HAUNTS 'TRICK OR TREAT' IN ALMOST GENIAL - WAY
Seattle Post-Intelligencer - October 28, 1986
Author: Janet Maslin The New York Times
Haunted houses, demonic pumpkins, spirits from the great beyond - so what else is new this Halloween?
Haunted rock stars, that's what. ''Trick or Treat,'' which opened in Seattle last weekend, is about a deceased heavy-metal star who returns to wreak havoc at a small-town high school. The rock star is played most energetically by Tony Fields, who stomps through the film in studs and low-cut black leather, scaring everyone he sees. Ozzy Osbourne, who does this kind of thing in real life, appears in the film briefly (and none too convincingly) as a minister.
''Trick or Treat'' was directed by Charles Martin Smith, who played the likable nerd in ''American Graffiti'' and has given his own film something of a likable nerd quality. It's genial, not too frightening and even rather sweet.
Its main character is a teen-age heavy-metal fan named Eddie (Mark Price) who's so ardent a follower of the dead rock star that he discovers a hidden message by playing the star's last record backward.
This becomes the latter-day equivalent of rubbing a magic lantern. Soon the star is appearing to anyone who makes the mistake of playing his tapes or records - even to Eddie's mother, who is one day tidying up the metal-studded dog collars in his room when she accidentally turns the stereo on. One teen- age girl, who is inadvertently exposed to the music, actually melts.
''Trick or Treat,'' which also has a cameo by Gene Simmons of the rock group Kiss, is knowing and sometimes even funny about heavy-metal music, its attendant paraphernalia and its adolescent mystique.
As a horror film, though, it's very tame, with slow pacing and a dark look interrupted by frequent bursts of lightning. The mildest thing in the film, paradoxically, is its music, which is mostly by a group called Fastway. The terrible rock star is at his least imposing when he starts to sing. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MOVIE REVIEW- `Trick or Treat' is a feeble attempt at horror
The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution - October 28, 1986
Author: CAIN, SCOTT, Scott Cain Staff Writer: STAFF
"Trick or Treat," a feeble imitation of "Carrie," will play into the hands of fundamentalists who believe that rock 'n' roll music is satanic. Record burners will love this movie for its propaganda value.
The notion that vile messages are dubbed onto recordings in reverse so that they can be understood by playing the record backwards - a process called back-masking - is accepted at face value. This is an allegation that the music industry has been trying to refute for years.
The story takes place at a high school which has even more cliques, more meanness and more nasty pranks than the school in "Pretty in Pink." Eddie, the nerdiest and loneliest student (played by Marc Price), is tormented by gangs of muscle-bound preppies. (In the real world, don't snobs ignore "creeps?" Far from spending their days thinking of ways to humiliate Eddie, real preppies would studiously avoid taking notice of him.)
Eddie is deep into heavy-metal music and is distraught when his hero, Sammi Curr, is killed in a fire. From a sympathetic disc jockey, Eddie acquires the master copy of Sammi's final album. He takes this home and, by back-masking, summons forth the spirit of his idol, who exacts a terrible revenge against Eddie's enemies. Eddie attempts to stop Sammi's maraudings, but Sammi's power steadily increases. In a scene stolen straight from "Carrie," Sammi causes mayhem at a dance held in the sch ool gym.
"Trick or Treat" marks the directorial debut of Charles Martin Smith, an actor who usually plays homely and wimpish supporting characters, notably "Terry the Toad" in "American Graffiti." Smith is a nice guy, but movies, especially horror movies, require a director with bite. Smith doesn't have any. He is no more suited to being a director than he is to being a leading man, as the expensive failure of "Never Cry Wolf" demonstrated.
Smith can't be accused of going for glamour casting. Marc Price, who plays Ed die, is best known as Skippy on "Family Ties." Price looks like a boy who can't get a date for Saturday night. He is colorless beyond the requirements of the role. When the prettiest girl in school takes an interest in him, you can't believe it.
Tony Fields, who was in the movie of "A Chorus Line," plays Sammi Curr with enough makeup and leather paraphernalia to make Ozzy Osbourne seem tidy. The real Osbourne, who is unrecognizable with his hair slicked back and wearing business clothes, makes a cameo appearance as a right-wing preacher denouncing rock 'n' roll on television. Hundreds of professional actors could have played this role with more zip - remember what Paul Sorvino did as the windy evangelist in "Oh, God!".
"Trick or Treat." A horror movie. Directed by Charles Martin Smith. Rated R for profanity, violence and nudity --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Teen's fiendish idol lends a hand in `Trick or Treat'
Houston Chronicle - October 27, 1986
Author: JEFF MILLAR, Staff
From the newspaper ad, you have every reason to believe - geeze, I did - that "Trick or Treat" (rated R) wouldn't be worth paying Federal Express to send it to the Crab Nebula. And, son of a gun, if that hummer wasn't pretty good.
"Trick or Treat" is a teen-market horror film, but it's got intelligence and a lot of malicious humor.
Eddie is a head-banger, which is argot for an admirer of heavy-metal rock. You see them in malls: Sallow adolescent males who wear black T-shirts with death's heads or "AC/DC World Tour" logos, chrome-studded leather wristlets and hair that's been six days since washing.
No matter where you encounter them, they walk as though they expect to be told to leave. So, they try to claim their space with a dip in their shoulders as they stride a little longer than seems natural.
It's paltry and unconvincing arrogance, but it's all they can come up with. You seldom see them with anybody else, and you almost never see them with girls.
At his high school, Eddie is regularly hazed by a cadre of blond jock types and is available on an as-needed basis to most anybody else who needs someone to torment. One of Eddie's female torturers - in what, to her, is mercy - tells Eddie that he might have more friends if he weren't so creepy. She's right.
He wants friends, but he "is" creepy. And he's so committed to the lifestyle codified by his choice of music (among adolescents, you ar e what you listen to) and has retreated so far into it for nurture and remedy of his loneliness, that he doesn't know any way out.
The narrative and most of "Trick or Treat's" set pieces are basted together from bits of other movies, hijacking Stephen King most blatantly. The film makers have pulled off a very neat trick. They make the galaxy of rip-offs appear as though we aren't supposed to notice they're rip-offs and then acknowledge, as subtext, that they "are" rip-offs.
Eddie's idol is Sammi Curr, a cutting-edge head-banger of the demonic school who kills and eats snakes onstage. Sammi is supposed to play a concert at Eddie's high school, which is also Sammi's alma mater, but that's nixed by Moral Majority types. Then Sammi dies in a hotel fire.
Eddie is devastated by Sammi's death; then he's put through a period of especially cruel hazing by the blond jock types. And a quasi-sympatico girl to whom he's attracted appears to have set him up for a hazing session.
Then Eddie comes into possession of a
unique studio acetate copy of an unreleased Sammi album. Eddie discovers that by playing certain cuts of the record backward, Sammi talks directly to him.
Soon, Eddie has tapped into enough of Sammi's demonic power to have gained satisfactory revenge against the blond jocks. But he can't cut Sammi off. Sammi soon materializes and bursts out of Eddie's stereo speakers.
Sammi can travel anywhere he wishes via electric wires or radio signals and, like Janis Joplin felt about her high school, he's got grudges.
It is not a good idea to hack off a dead, demonic, heavy-metal singer who can reach into TV screens and yank the images out of them, which is dreadfully upsetting to talk-show guests back in the studio.
One of the better in-jokes: The Moral Majority preacher in a talk-show scene is played by rocker Ozzy Osbourne, stuffed into double-knits and complaining about Ozzy Osbourne. Sammi reaches into the screen and rips the preacher's head off.
The finale to "Carrie" isn't the finale of this film, but it's in there.
"Trick or Treat" was written by Michael F. Murphy, Joel Soisson and Rhet Topham, from Topham's story, and directed by Charles Martin Smith. It's the first time out as a director for Smith, the actor who played the nerd in "American Graffiti" and the naturalist in "Never Cry Wolf." He's got tools. There's wit in the screenplay, but it's Smith's sense of pitch that maximizes the cleverness. Smith is past the beginner stage; it takes a veteran's panache to know when to go deadpan.
"Trick or Treat" is very well-acted by Marc Price as Eddie and Tony Fields as Sammi.
Again, again, the old caveat. People who have to go to the movies fall like a parched Arab upon a oasis when given the gift of movies that aren't - thank you, lord - as bad as they could be.
Note the subject matter of the film. It ain't Lubitsch ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- `TRICK OR TREAT` HAS STYLE, WIT WITH HORROR
Sun-Sentinel - October 30, 1986
Author: BILL KELLEY, Staff Writer
Here`s something we haven`t seen in a while -- a horror film that isn`t loaded with blood and gore. What`s more, it`s even a pretty good movie.
Trick or Treat ponders, with wit and a fair amount of style, what would happen if one of those heavy-metal rock stars who are supposedly corrupting our youth really did have links to Satan, somehow perished in a fire, and was brought back to life by a teen-age fan whose loyalty knows no bounds. The rock star is one Sammi Curr (Tony Fields), whose Halloween appearance at his own high school alma mater has been banned by the town fathers; the fire is caused by a black ritual performed in Sammi `s hotel room; and the fan is Eddie Weinbauer (Marc Price), a withdrawn teen-ager who constantly is terrorized by a popular gang of yuppie roughnecks.
Out of this not-so-original premise, actor Charles Martin Smith (seen in Never Cry Wolf and as the nerdy Terry the Toad in American Graffiti), making his debut as a director, has fashioned a lively, intermittently suspenseful horror thriller. Smith is no James Whale (Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein) or even Terence Fisher (the Hammer horror series), but he shares their knack for having fun with the genre without thumbing his nose at it.
Smith also manages to get some effective, credible performances from his cast, all of whom look at home in their roles -- particularly Price and Fields, who demolishes everything in sight as the satanic rock star. Smith even makes us accept the device by which Sammi is revived -- playing a demo copy of his latest record backwards. And he has cast two rock musicians in appropriate cameos -- Gene Simmons as a disc jockey and Ozzy Osbourne, in a suit and with hair slicked back, as a right-wing anti-rock crusader.
But the most refreshing quality of Trick or Treat is that, notwithstanding a substantial body count, Sammi`s victims are dispensed with a minimum of bloodletting. You`ll remember that distinction long after the movie, which fizzles after about an hour, is over.
MOVIE REVIEW
2 stars 1/2 Trick or Treat
A withdrawn teen-age boy brings the dead leader of a satanic rock music band to life.
Credits: With Marc Price, Tony Fields, Lisa Orgolini, Doug Savant. Directed by Charles Martin Smith. Written by Michael S. Murphey, Joel Soisson, Rhet Topham. rated r Nudity, violence, profanity.
MOVIE REVIEW @ 1/2 TRICK OR TREAT: Directed by Charles Martin Smith. Written by Michael Murphey, Joel Soisson, and Rhet Topham. Musical score, Christopher Young; performed by Fastway. With Marc Price (Eddie Weinbauer), Tony Fields (Sammi Curr), Lisa Orgolini (Leslie), Glen Morgan (Roger), and others. Produced by Michael Murphey and Joel Soisson. Released by De Laurentiis. Opened Friday locally. Running time: 97 minutes. Rated R: nudity, profanity.
"Trick or Treat" is like a large bag of candy collected on Halloween. It's plenty tantalizing at first, but loses most of its appeal long before you've finished with it.
Charles Martin Smith, who in "American Graffiti" played a classic teen-age geek of the Sixties, here debuts as a director with a promising story that features a teen geek of the Eighties. Despite a lot of supernatural shenanigans, though, the inspired spirit of Terry "the Toad" Fields never enters the body of one Eddie "Ragman" Weinbauer, a nerd looking for revenge on Lakeridge (read "Anywhere"), U.S.A.
Eddie played with misplaced seriousness by Marc Price, best known as Skippy, the butt of Michael J. Fox's barbs on TV's "Family Ties" is a pasty-faced guy who shuffles through school with hair down in his eyes, a skull on his T-shirt, and heavy-metal sounds pulsing into his head. The popular types call him "creepy. "
At home he inhabits a dark lair complete with pet rodent, fine stereo equipment, and posters of rocksters who sing about death and the Devil. His top hero is the scandalous Sammi Curr (Tony Fields), who also endured a tortured adolescence in Lakeridge.
When adultdom bars Sammi from returning to his alma mater to play for the Halloween dance, Eddie gets angry. When Sammi then dies in a fire, Eddie gets angrier. When a local deejay gives him the sole copy of an unreleased Sammi Curr record, Eddie gets truly twisted. As his shockingly normal friend Roger (Glen Morgan) says, the kid is "one quart low. "
"Trick or Treat" becomes a low-budget marriage of "Faust" and "Frankenstein" when Eddie makes and breaks a pact with Sammi Curr's ghost, which inhabits the rare recording and occasionally emerges to murder in an electronic fury.
The movie is initially interesting because Price carefully proves Eddie to be a sweet fellow whose heavy-metal habit has more to do with insecurity than psychosis. But the make-believe horror element, when it finally comes, runs counter to this characterization, turning the teen-ager into a manic goof. The pacing is uneven, and the content is an unsettling mixture of laughs, pale special effects, bad rock and roll, and stagy deaths.
One on level "Trick or Treat" is intended as a statement about the effect of questionable rock lyrics on young people, and about freedom of speech. (Heavy-metal superstar Ozzy Osbourne makes an ironic, if odd, appearance as a fundamentalist calling for censorship.) The screenplay, though, makes this statement almost as incomprehensible as many of the lyrics themselves ROCKERS' 'TRICK OR TREAT' BLAND HALLOWEEN FARE Boston Globe - October 25, 1986 Author: Tom Long, Globe Staff "Trick or Treat" is a remarkably bloodless horror flick with a heavy- metal soundtrack and a plot as predictable as the seasonal appearance of low-budget "shockers."
First we meet rock star Sammi Curr, a fundamentalists' nightmare in heavy mascara, leather and chains. His gig at Pender High is canceled because of his predilection for biting the heads off snakes during his show. Curr is not without his fans. When he isn't being humiliated, sworn at or stomped on, high-schooler Eddie Milbauer, a real nerd, turns the stereo up loud and worships the ground Curr walks on.
Curr meets his earthly reward in a hotel fire. Eddie is beside himself with grief -- until he starts playing Curr's record backward and receives a message from beyond. The message is spelled r-e-v-e-n-g-e.
The resulting mayhem is more boring than frightening. Action sequences are telegraphed, and victims are bloodlessly dispatched in a puff of electrical smoke. The film is devoid of both suspense and horror , and unremarkable except for a brief cameo appearance by shock rocker Ozzy Osbourne, a performer purported to be no stranger to biting the heads off animals as part of his act. Osbourne plays Rev. Aaron Gilstom, a fundamentalist preacher who rails against pornographic rock.
Predictably, Eddie the nerd and Curr the zombie converge on Pender High just in time for a Halloween costume party and a rock concert that really knocks 'em dead but wouldn't scare a fly.
AS every satirist from Swift to Garry Trudeau has demonstrated, the best way to defuse the ranting moralists in our midst is to take their finger-waving to an absurd extreme.
The new horror entry, "Trick or Treat" (now playing), does just this by showing rock music as not only an unhealthy influence on the young, but, as long suspected by the Jerry Falwell flock, a devious tool of the devil as well.
That's right, Mom and Pop's worst fears of coded satanic messages and sadomasochistic dust covers come true here. The hero, an anti-social weirdo named Eddie (Marc Price), takes sweet revenge on school bullies by following the orders of the late great Sammi Curr (Tony Fields), a rabid rocker in the Ozzy Osbourne and Alice Cooper mold who perished in a fire but has been reincarnated on an acetate demo left with the town deejay (KISS' Gene Simmons in a change-of-pace nice-guy role).
By playing said record in reverse, Eddie is able to communicate with Curr, who, like his young fan, was treated shabbily by classmates at Lakeridge High. The more Eddie spins the magic record, the stronger Curr gets -- until he's reborn in a shower of sparks from the kid's stereo speakers.
Mom, meanwhile, shakes her head in disapproval. Eddie, now the last word in leather and spikes, should have been weaned from AC/DC and Black Sabbath long ago, she frets.
A perfect gimmick idea with more than a passing salute to the possessed youngsters of Stephen King, "Trick or Treat" should have been one of the funniest scares of the year. Unfortunately, it isn't. Actor-turned-director Charles Martin Smith (the nerds of "American Graffiti" and "Never Cry Wolf") has turned this timely play on adult paranoia into a run-of-the-mill shocker with subpar demons and lame special effects.
This film needed someone as crafty and demonic as the music itself. Smith, who obviously doesn't have his heart in exploitation horror , plays down the fright elements and (thankfully) the gore, and delivers a plodding variation on some of the teen comedies by John ("Breakfast Club") Hughes.
Still, there are some fun in-jokes. Like the casting of rock's premier bad boy Osbourne as a TV evangelist railing against the suggestive lyrics of "pornographic music." Striking his most uptight, judgmental pose, he whines, "Whatever happened to the good old-fashioned love song?"
TRICK OR TREAT. STARRING GENE SIMMONS AND OZZY OSBOURNE. DIRECTED BY CHARLES MARTIN SMITH; SCRIPTED BY MICHAEL S. MURPHEY, JOEL SOISSON, RHET TOPHAM. R (PROFANITY, NUDITY). (star) 1/2
Author: David Elliot, Movie Critic "One day I'd like to make a movie that my kids can see," said director Stuart Gordon. His tongue must be firmly in cheek, assuming he hasn't ripped it out as a prop for one of his films.
Gordon, a leading stage director in Chicago who moved to Los Angeles in 1984, became something of an instant cult figure to horror film addicts with "Re-Animator," which provided such jollies as a man being wrapped and crushed, python-like, in his own squirming entrails. Now Gordon is back on screen with another adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story, "From Beyond."
Camp is the spirit on tap here. A character named Dr. Pretorius -- the name famously used by Ernest Thesiger in "The Bride of Frankenstein" -- gazes upon his wonderful new toy, The Resonator, and pronounces fervently, "I want to see more -- more than any man has ever seen!"
Well, a movie that suggests such superlatives is hard put to deliver, in 1986. Years ago you could hang bones in cobwebs, move Halloween lights through the sockets of skulls, and give people the shivers. Now they "want to see more," which really loads the pressure on Gordon and other wizards of ooze.
Right away, we feel Gordon trying to top his first film and satisfy the in-group ghouls. He has Dr. Pretorius (Ted Sorel) turn into a slab of slime as his Resonator sets up vibes that bring forth the monsters from his pineal gland -- the little neighbor of the brain that became briefly famous when Descartes called it the likely seat of the soul. Before long the gland, looking distinctly phallic, is popping out of foreheads.
Jeffrey Combs, boyish hero of "Re-Animator," returns here as a scientist who goes round the bend when Pretorius beckons from the Pineal Beyond. That interests a psychiatrist (Barbara Crampton), who is sexually haunted by the astoundingly gross Pretorius, and before long she is showing a novel interest in leather bondage gear. Inhibitions fall, and guts pile up.
Gordon has masterful makeup specialists to filigree the ick, but as a director he's barely a starter. Long shots look like crudely lighted theater sets, and close-ups like bulging photo booth specials. Some of the shock touches are amazingly sophomoric, such as a cut from a man vomiting to an egg being cracked over a frying pan.
And the tone is cold, compulsive, remotely aloof from story values or characterization. Cheap-shot horror with no intent except comical nausea was pioneered years ago by another Chicagoan, Herschell Gordon Lewis, whose work had titles like "Two Thousand Maniacs!" Stuart Gordon is Lewis' inheritor, slicked up for the '80s and offering the same kind of visceral pornography, but with a new in-on-the-party cachet that comes from 20 years of grinding exploitation. Geekery has graduated to this.
The horror movie, driven to the ghoulie pits by so many obvious effects (including mainstream films such as "The Fly" and "Aliens"), could be going the way of the western. This is how genres die. And nothing in "From Beyond" is as funny as the effect a local theater is causing by preceding the film at intermission with -- just imagine -- Strauss waltzes.
"From Beyond" (Zero stars) An Empire release. Directed by Stuart Gordon. Written by Dennis Paoli, from the novel by H.P. Lovecraft. Produced by Brian Yuzna. Photography by Mac Ahlberg. Music by Richard Band. Rated R. In local theaters. The Cast Jeffrey Combs..........Crawford Tillinghast Barbara Crampton.............Dr. McMichaels Ken Foree.............................Bubba Ted Sorel.....................Dr. Pretorius Carolyn Purdy-Gordon...............Dr. Bloch
Tobe Hooper's sequel to his 1974 splatter- horror movie, ''Texas Chainsaw Massacre,'' was supposed to be the summer's big horror movie, and its distributor, Cannon Films, reportedly spent a small fortune on pre-publicity.
But after a brief, spectacularly unsuccessful opening in Los Angeles and New York, the film was suddenly and unceremoniously jerked from the August release schedule, with, Cannon said at the time, ''very little possibility of a future release.''
There are several theories as to exactly what happened (Cannon itself is not talking), but the most likely is that the film was too gross even for the drive-in crowd, and certainly too gross for the motion picture rating board. Had the film been submitted, the board would probably have given it an X rating, meaning that most newspapers would refuse to accept advertising for it. Now that the film has finally made it to town for a three-day curiosity run at the Neptune Theater, this explanation seems even more credible. The film is so stomach-turningly gruesome that it's impossible to imagine what kind of subcretin would sit through it, and an X rating seems positively kind.
Hooper's story line this time out has a demented ex-Texas Ranger (the ubiquitous Dennis Hopper) and a rock 'n' roll disc jockey (Caroline Williams) joining forces to capture a family of serial killers who have been wiping out half of North Texas with chain saws for the past 14 years.
The expositional violence gets out of the way very quickly, and the movie soon settles down to an hour-long climax sequence in an abandoned amusement park that the killers have turned into a death camp so horrific it makes Auschwitz look like Disneyland.
From the very beginning, it is obvious that Hooper and his scriptwriter, L.M. Kit Carson, are trying for a tone somewhere between horror and farce. The film gets more slapstick as it gets more ugly, until it ends with a chain-saw sword fight between hero and villain that burlesques Errol Flynn.
The problem is that the movie is so brutal and realistic that it never plays as farce. It's very hard to laugh at the sight of a man being skinned alive or beaten to death with a hammer. And when the movie shows almost 40 continuous minutes of the heroine being brutalized and tortured, sliced with a straight razor, raped with a chain saw and beaten in the head with a hammer while being held in a kneeling position, it's hard not to feel outraged by the idea that you're supposed to be laughing.
All told, this movie is so irresponsible and morally corrupt that it may be the single best argument for censorship I've seen in years. And the fact that the horror audience rejected it so strongly on their own gives me some slim hope that the end of the world may not be completely upon us.
Cannon Films Dennis Hopper, as one of the good guys, hefts a saw in ''Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2.'' Memo: Review (No stars) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2, directed by Tobe Hooper, written by L.M. Kit Carson. Cast: Dennis Hopper, Caroline Williams, Bill Johnson, Bill Mosley. Cannon Films. Neptune. Unrated. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
'CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2' SHOULD DIE ITS OWN DEATH
Times Union, The (Albany, NY) - August 31, 1986
Author: Martin Moynihan, Staff writer
No, "Texas Chainsaw Massacre - Part 2" is not the worst movie ever made, but it certainly does have some of the worst scenes.
They would include:
*Actor Dennis Hopper calling down Biblical wrath ("I am the lord of the harvest!") as he chainsaws through the wooden supports of a human abattoir.
*The ugly "Leatherface" on the verge of indulging his sexual chainsaw fetishes, and a woman cooing encouragement in an effort to escape.
*A character called "Cook" Sawyer lamenting the plight of the small businessman as he supervises cutting up of corpses for meat to sell in his prize-winning Texas chili, along with "eyeball pate" and other menu items.
Yes, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - Part 2" is meant as a comedy. If you squint, you can see it as a corpse- strewn satire of some grotesque kind of Americana.
It is unusually bloody and gory, and has not been rated to head off a dreaded X. But what's really disturbing about this movie is that its makers expect an audience of real people to see this as humor or entertainment.
History: Back in 1974 the title "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" probably scared and revolted many more people than ever saw the movie. Such is the power of the imagination. The movie itself also played on that power to frighten through suggestion by presenting a taut horror film, with much shrieking and running but only a relatively small amount of violence. The original "Chainsaw" helped launch a huge collection of movies that generally became gorier and more stupid.
The present: The wave of "slasher" movies has long passed, lapsed in popularity, and has been superceded by a few wretchedly shopworn movies for a specialized audience. As bizarre as it may seem, "slasher" movies have turned into baroque bloodbaths done as comedy, exploiting the bizarre fame of crazed movie killers to squeeze out a few more bucks. Anthony Perkins (this time the romantic lead) in "Psycho III," masked Jason Voorhees in "Friday the 13th - Part VI" were the stars not the villains.
That continues with this woebegotten movie, directed by Tobe Hooper, who did the original, but seems to have lost all sense of perspective. A hero/ victim of sorts this time is poor, frustrated cannibal-butcher Leatherface, who is told by Sawyer "You got to choose, boy! Sex, or the saw."
The ridiculous premise is that chainsaw murders have continued over the past dozen years, but have been covered up by authoritiies as accidents. In the story, an attractive rock 'n' roll disc jockey (Caroline Williams) becomes involved with the killers through Hopper, who is looking to avenge the death of his family.
She follows the suspects to a a strange underground lair where Sawyer cuts up bodies for his chili stand. In fairness, theaters should offer blindfolds to patrons.
"The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - Part 2" is not rated. It goes beyond R- rated movies in violence. It also contains much vulgar language and scenes of sexual fetishism. (0 stars.) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"CHAINSAW' IS TEXAS-SIZED STUPIDITY
Patriot-News, The (Harrisburg, PA) - August 29, 1986
Author: SHARON JOHNSON
Good news, fans of gore galore. Those good ol' boys are back.
Yes, the merry crew that captured America's heart and disturbed America's collective digestive system in "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" has returned in a new dramatic triumph, cleverly titled "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre II."
And what jolly family entertainment it is.
Young people can satisfy their natural scientific curiosity to know what happens when the head is sliced apart with a chainsaw. [Hint: It's not a pretty sight.]
Viewers can be edified by the sight of one of the resident cretins crushing a man's skull with repeated blows from a hammer.
While he's pursuing his hobby, his brother is in a nearby room caressing a woman's crotch with his chainsaw.
In fact the movie offered such a wealth of cultural enrichment that, sated, I departed after 47 minutes and several gallons of prop blood.
Not because the movie was grotesquely gross. It was, of course, but what would you expect from a movie called "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre II"? Obviously it's not going to be an adaptation of a Tolstoy short story.
What makes this movie so unbearable is that it's so derivative and so DUMB! It borrows less from its predecessor than from the old English horror tale "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street." [Todd gave the finishing touch to his customers, who then furnished the meat for his partner's famous meat pies. The chainsaw crew is in search of the secret ingredient for their family's prize-winning chili.]
As for the stupidity factor, consider this basic premise: Dennis Hopper stars as a former Texas Ranger who lost his family to the chainsaw gang 14 years ago. He's been on the killers' trail for all that time. He's become an expert on their brutal crimes, knows every move they've made.
A disc jockey [Caroline Williams] with a call-in show just happened to be talking to the latest victims at the time of their demise. She has the tape, complete with screams, moans and chainsaw buzzing.
Hopper urges her to play the tape on the air. At night. When she's alone and unprotected in her remote studio. Guess who comes to visit? Guess what expert on their crimes never expected they might? Guess what disgusted reviewer couldn't take any more?
Tobe Hooper directed with his usual lack of finesse. L.M. Kit Carson's screenplay is one that even cultists are unlikely to regard as a classic. Most of the performers are heavily disguised. A smart career move. [Hopper tries to hide under a 10-gallon hat but eagle-eyed viewers will spot him easily.]
With their usual sensitivity to cinematic art, movie bookers have scheduled this for indoor theaters. Not a smart move.
"Texas Chainsaw Massacre II" is a drive-in movie if ever there was one. Other considerations aside, while being exposed to this garbage, you'll need all the fresh air you can get. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
'TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE' BARELY CUTS IT SECOND GO ROUND
THE ORLANDO SENTINEL - August 28, 1986
Author: By Jay Boyar, Sentinel Movie Critic
On rare occasions a bad movie comes along that's intriguing in ways much better movies are not. This happened in 1974 with a now-legendary horror film called The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And, to a lesser extent, it has happened again with the sequel, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2.
Ugly, gross, exploitative: All the adjectives used to dismiss the 1974 film also apply to its successor. In fact, so revolting is Chainsaw 2 on a ''gut'' level that to delve into the stupidities and banalities of its narrative almost seems beside the point. But what makes this mostly unwatchable picture worth considering is that it intermittently unearths a vein of madness that good movies generally don't dare to approach.
In Chainsaw 2 we meet Lefty Enright (Dennis Hopper), a retired Texas Ranger in a ten-gallon hat, and Stretch Brock (Caroline Williams), a young, female disc jockey in (you should excuse the expression) cutoffs. After some initial friction, they join forces to track down the gang of psychopaths that was featured in the original Chainsaw movie.
What the psychopaths are up to this time is killing innocent people, slicing them up with a chainsaw and using their flesh and blood as ingredients in chili. Horror -movie buffs won't need to be reminded that the gang includes the chainsaw-wielding Leatherface (Bill Johnson), the plate-headed Chop-Top (Bill Moseley) and the leader of the group, Drayton ''Cook'' Sawyer (Jim Siedow). These creepy characters are brothers who defer in some matters to the withered lunatic they call Grandpa (Ken Evert).
Tobe Hooper, who directed the first Chainsaw picture, is director once again. As his lackluster work in such recent movies as Invaders From Mars and Lifeforce goes to show, Hooper doesn't have a great deal of what is ordinarily thought of as moviemaking talent. Mainly, he places static characters in static situations.
But in the Chainsaw pictures, bad though they are, Hooper finds that psychic location where insanity, playfulness and familial idiosyncrasy meet. The result is enough to send enormous shivers up your spine.
In Chainsaw 2, his bizarre inspiration is most clearly on display during a scene in which the ghoul brothers and Grandpa terrorize the disc jockey. The games they play with her -- and with each other -- get to you largely because they are nightmare versions of the hideous emotional games in which more normal people engage. But the biggest problem with the film is that, having tapped into the viewer's secret fears, it proceeds to abuse its audience.
This is a movie that deserves to be dismissed, but it's not a movie to dismiss casually. Like the stench of death, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 has a tendency to stay with you.
Memo: Movie review 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2' Cast: Caroline Williams, Dennis Hopper, Bill Johnson, Bill Moseley, Jim Siedow, Ken Evert Director: Tobe Hooper Screenwriter: L.M. Kit Carson Cinematographer: Richard Kooris Music: Tobe Hooper, Jerry Lambert Theaters: Northgate 4, Orange Blossom 2, Fashion Village 8, University 8 Cinema, Prairie Lake Drive-In Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes Industry rating: Unrated Reviewer's evaluation: * Reviewing key ***** excellent, **** good, *** average, ** poor, * awful -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Movie Review- `Chainsaw II' doesn't cut the mustard
The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution - August 26, 1986
Author: RINGEL, ELEANOR: STAFF
Eleanor Ringel Film Editor
Before Jason was a gleam in the eye of greedy "Friday the 13th" filmmakers, there was Leatherface, the star of Tobe Hooper's 1974 legendary low-budget chiller "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." And Leatherface didn't waste his time on hokey hockey masks; his face-covering was made from human skin.
Fans of the original - a film whose crude sensibilities and slice-and-dice tactics prefigured the entire slasher-movie syndrome - have waited 12 years for a worthy sequel. What they've gotten instead is "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre II" - the Howard the Duck of horror flicks.
"Chainsaw II" is the product of the the unholy alliance of Hooper and screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson, whose previous credits include the useless remake of "Breathless" and half (the unwatchable half) of "Paris, Texas." Together they've created a sequel that's part pointless gross-out, part clumsy spoof.
As the movie opens, the cannibalistically inclined Sawyer family -Leatherface (Bill Johnson), Chop-Top (Bill Mosley) and Cook (Jim Siedow) - have gone the Sweeney Todd route. Their special chili-con-carnage barbecue, with its - ho-ho - secret ingredient - is prize-winning stuff, and the Sawyers are preparing for a big weekend of feeding Dallas football fans.
That's why two obnoxious yuppies who've chosen the wrong pick-up to pick on are soon minced meat. However, the yups' last yelps - along with an ominous buzzing sound - happened to have been recorded by Stretch (Caroline Williams), a local DJ whose request line they were prankishly tying up.
Enter Dennis Hopper in a 10-gallon hat (arguably the most frightening sight in the movie). He's retired Texas Ranger Lefty Enright, the uncle of some of the kids the Sawyers buzz-sawed back in '74.
Lefty's been riding the vengeance trail ever since, and now he and Stretch join forces to track the Sawyers down, even if it means entering their charnel-house chamber of horrors where sides of human beef hang from the rafters and skel etons lounge in chairs.
Hooper's original film was a primitive artifact a la "Night of the Living Dead." The shoestring budget only added to its shock-appeal. The sequel is in color and has all the entrails that money can buy. But it has absolutely none of its predecessor's nightmarish residue. Poor Tobe Hooper has literally fouled his own nest, making a mockery of the one movie for which he may be remembered, while Carson seems to have envisioned the film as a dumping ground for the Texas jokes he couldn't cr am into "Paris, Texas."
Granted, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" is hardly an inviolate classic. But turning the soul-less Sawyers into fun-loving cutups is the sort of thing one expects from a college comedy troupe, not from the man who first made these monsters come alive.
On its own unpolished terms, the original made an impact - even on those who knew it only by reputation. The sequel is a smirking travesty whose heroine delivers the movie's own best one-line review. Confronted with a slavering Leatherface, whose phallic connection to his chainsaw is made clunkily obvious (more Carson "humor"), Stretch screams over and over, "No good! No good!" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TOO BAD IT'S NOT THE SAME OLD GRIND
San Jose Mercury News (CA) - August 25, 1986
Author: GLENN LOVELL, Mercury News Film Writer
HAIL, hail, the gang's all here.
It's just like homecoming week down at the local grind house. There, big as you please -- in murky, underlit color -- is Holly-weird's most infamous family, the Sawyers of just outside of Austin, Texas.
We met the Sawyers in Tobe Hooper's 1974 fright classic, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre." That's the one about five dumb hippie types being terrorized by Pa Sawyer and his hard- workin' boys.
You remember the boys. One was crazy as a coot. Jabbered a lot about slaughterhouses and head cheese. The other, Leatherface, wore a mask of human flesh and liked to chase pretty young things with a humongous chain saw.
Well, not much has changed since the Sawyers first consented to a group portrait. They're still sawin' up unlucky wayfarers in "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2" and turning the cured parts into the best gol'darn barbecue west of the Pecos.
Actually, a few things have changed: The Sawyers now run the Last Roundup Rolling Grill, known for its award-winning chili (The secret? "It's the meat -- don't skimp on the meat," grins Daddy Sawyer). And Hooper has risen to superstar status with the let-'er-rip drive-in crowd. His post-" Chainsaw" attractions have included "Poltergeist," the unwatchable "Lifeforce," and this year's good-natured "Invaders from Mars" remake.
Though none of these films has come close to the grisly genius of "Saw 1," Hooper is something of a folk hero on the horror circuit. Which is why it's not enough for him to just make scary, entertaining movies anymore. He now has to make horror satires, just to prove he's a whole lot smarter than the run-of-the-mill slasher director.
Bring on the footnotes
''Saw 2," scripted by L.M. Kit Carson ("Paris, Texas"), is so self-analytical it ought to come with footnotes, or at least a special glossary to explain the political allusions and references to "Saw 1." It's a cold-blooded, pretentious, uninspired exercise -- inspired more by Beckett, Stanley Kubrick and "Sweeney Todd" than the genuinely horrific first installment.
The press kit thoughtfully labels it "Grand Guignol with a social conscience . . . the first Chainsaw comedy . . . the 'Duck Soup' of slasher films." (Hey, the press kit could stand some footnotes.)
Veteran nut case Dennis Hopper rambles on as a chainsaw- packin,' Scripture-quoting ex-Texas Ranger obsessed with meting out poetic justice to the "blood crazy" family that messed with his niece and nephew 12 years back. Caroline Williams plays a foxy deejay who throws in with Hopper, and soon finds herself being wooed, Black & Decker style, by the love-smitten Leatherface.
Rubbery-faced Jim Siedow is back as the eternally fretting Daddy Sawyer, and Bill Mosely plays the Vietnam-vet son with Creature Feature makeup and a Sonny Bono wig (to hide the metal plate in his head). Both are hilariously demented, and then some.
For those who like to intellectualize about this kind of thing, Hooper has designed "Saw 2" as a pitch-black commentary on the pitfalls of private enterprise in corporate America. Cornered in his subterranean charnel house, Daddy Sawyer sees the writing on the wall. "The small businessman always gets it in the a--," he laments as Hopper closes in.
Hooper and script writer Carson are themselves off-the-wall mavericks who have had similar bad luck with the big boys. Is "Saw 2" their elaborate way of getting even? If so, they've failed. Few horror fans will want to waste money on a scare show this convoluted and confused.
MOVIE REVIEW @ TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE PART 2: Directed by Tobe Hooper. Written by L. M. Kit Carson. Music, Tobe Hooper and Jerry Lambert. With Dennis Hopper (Lt. Lefty Enright), Caroline Williams (Stretch Brock), Bill Johnson (Leatherface), Jim Siedow (Drayton "Cook" Sawyer), Bill Moseley (Chop-Top), and others. Produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. Released by Cannon. Opened Friday locally. Running time: 95 minutes. Unrated: crude language, excessive violence, and gore.
Let's face it, slasher-flick aficionados aren't going to tune in here for the word on "Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2." So this one's going out to other poor souls who believe they've reason to subject themselves to the blood and body-parting.
To all you art-film fans who thought "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" was a camp classic that transcended its genre into the sphere of worthwhile culture:
True, Tobe Hooper's 1974 movie about the slaughter of a group of Texas hippies was inventive. Its low-budget, documentarylike trappings gave the horror a disconcerting immediacy, an extra dimension that could easily be labeled ironic. It poked shrewd, if deranged, fun at the Age of Aquarius.
Hooper who went on to direct big-money successes such as "Poltergeist" (under the supervision of Steven Spielberg) has tried to give the sequel the same more-than-it-seems aura.
The script, written by the talented L. M. Kit Carson ("Paris, Texas"), brings back the saw-wielding psychopath Leatherface (Bill Johnson), his brother, the demented Vietnam veteran Chop-Top (Bill Moseley), and their elder relative Drayton "Cook" Sawyer (Jim Siedow). But it also pretends to have a 1980's social conscience.
These days, the odd family's victims aren't hippies, but rich yuppies from the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The human flesh is used in an award-winning chili that's peddled from the Last Roundup Rolling Grill. The peddler, Cook, regularly rants about the near-extinction of the small businessman in the shadow of Sun Belt corporatism.
(Hooper and Carson are native Texans, and there's also some authentic Lone Star State self-mockery. The story, for instance, takes place on the weekend of the Texas-Oklahoma football game and chili cook-off.)
Most important, the legendary Dennis Hopper was cast as Lt. Lefty Enright, a retired Texas Ranger who has been tracking the murderers for 12 years. (One of the original victims was his nephew.)
Hopper, who has been in several great films ("Easy Rider," "Apocalypse Now," "The American Friend"), is always mesmerizing, no matter what else is happening on the screen. Here he's not only a lawman with a long-overdue score to settle, but a religious fanatic to boot. He has some good surrealistic moments, babbling about Hell, fear, and the Devil, and singing the hymn "Bringing in the Sheaves. "
Enright and his accomplice, a pretty rock-and-roll deejay named Stretch (played in a bright, high-pitched, B-movie way by Caroline Williams), discover the ghoulish trio's kitchen in the bowels of an abandoned amusement park. The set for this final buzz-down is an operatic and macabre complex of tunnels, filled with skeletons and cobwebs and a wide selection of lamps.
But none of this is enough to make up for the gratuitous, truly gruesome head-hammering, skin-slicing, and entrail-spilling. The social satire isn't pointed enough. The humor isn't funny enough. The staging isn't imaginative enough.
For all its hip subtext, "Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2" is no more responsibly made than the worst slice-and-dice drive-in shocker. The pretense to a larger meaning is just a cynical rationalization. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FILM: GRAPHIC GORE SPLATTERS 'CHAINSAW'
Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA) - August 23, 1986
Author: Carrie Rickey, Inquirer Movie Critic
I'm not averse to splatter movies. This is a fan of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre talking. But the sequel to the 1974 classic is as unoriginal as sin and as unappetizing as chili con carnage. I say this realizing that to slam The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 is as pointless as debating just how many devils can dance on the blade of a buzzsaw.
Tobe Hooper's original (and influentially amoral) Chainsaw Massacre was a compelling, if primitive, artifact. This movie about a crazed South Texas cannibal family of butchers had a crude documentary style and cruder humor. For all its gory reputation, it relied mostly on the sound of a chainsaw and the images of cobwebbed skeletons to induce its horror , which was as economical as its budget. Wryly, it warned pleasure-loving hippies that work- ethic wahoos were out to punish them.
In the unredeemably disgusting sequel, nothing is left to the imagination. A deranged Dennis Hopper stars as Lefty, a vigilante sheriff out to destroy the bloodthirsty Sawyer family because they drove his niece mad and killed his wheelchair-bound nephew. Giving aid and comfort to the sheriff is Stretch (Caroline Williams), a pretty DJ terrorized by call-ins from the Sawyers.
For most of the movie, Lefty and Stretch are hostages in the Sawyer butcher caverns - a cluttered inferno of entrails located somewhere in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. The Sawyers' idea of a good time is to skin humans alive and to sharpen their chainsaws on trembling female flesh. Their specialty is eyeball pate. You don't want the recipe.
If this cluttered, ugly movie is good for anything, it must be for making omnivores into strict vegetarians. But the ugliest feature of Part 2 is not its explicitness, but its moral: that you have to become a bloodthirsty psychopath to kill a bloodthirsty psychopath. Part 2 is the Rambo of splatter.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2 was not submitted to the MPAA for a rating. But if this rotten carcass of a movie were submitted to the FDA, it would be rated unfit for human consumption.
THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE PART 2 *
Produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, directed by Tobe Hooper, written by L.M. Kit Carson, distributed by Cannon Films.
Running time: 1 hour, 35 mins.
Stretch - Caroline Williams
Lefty - Dennis Hopper
Leatherface - Bill Johnson
Choptop - Bill Moseley
Cook - Jim Siedow
Parent's guide: No MPAA rating (extreme violence, sexual violence, blood, obscenity).
Showing: At area theaters. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
LEATHERFACE RETURNS WITH HIS CHAIN SAW
Richmond Times-Dispatch - August 23, 1986
Author: Carole Kass ; Times-Dispatch staff writer
"Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2" is a sick joke. A very sick joke. A terminally ill movie. Though it won't kill you with its frequent bloodletting (right after the opening the top of someone's head is sliced off and the blood drips out of the remaining "bowl") or drop you with laughter for its juvenile dialogue, it could easily make your last meal insecure.
Somehow its tawdry, schlocky predecessor became a cult film: It was the first slice-and-dice slasher movie. As such, it was considered a comic horror film. Indeed, a copy resides in the archives of the Modern Museum of Art in New York. That one was so horrible, you laughed in self-defense.
Tobe Hooper, who made his name and found fame with that original, has made the not-so-eagerly-awaited sequel. Macerated Leatherface is back, waving his chain saw, using it as a sexual extension as well as a deadly weapon slicing through groins and gizzards. And so is Chop-Top, his brother with the rotting teeth and the itchy metal plate in his head. He uses a sharpened coat hanger to scratch his head and dig out dead eyes. He is handy with the dipper when it looks like some blood might spill.
The bossy chief cook of the Last Roundup Rolling Grill is back too. Barbecue has been replaced by chili. It looks like bloody entrails anyway, and this chili wins contests because of the prime meat it contains.
The story has something to do with Dennis Hopper -- who started the new wave of films in the 1960s -- sinking to this appearance as a Texas Ranger obsessed to the point of possession with finding the chain-saw gang. Then there is Stretch (Caroline Williams) who starts out as a fearless disc jockey. But when she finds herself straddling an ice cooler with Leatherface pointing the chain saw at her shorts, she starts to scream and she never stops. She becomes a blithering scream machine.
She is led to the underground slaughterhouse-kitchen decorated with skeletons, Christmas lights, human haunches hanging on hooks and such. She makes her exit climbing a ladder with the knife-wielding Chop-Top slicing at her calves with a deer knife. What a bloody mess.
Unrated, it is playing at the West Tower and Chesterfield theaters
