Psycho Cop Returns

Well, I missed yet another week by going to the hospital, but here I am again...with a working laptop again, saints be praised! So, until my run of good(ish) luck runs out, I better watch a slasher film, and quick! This time out, I'm watching Psycho Cop Returns, which looks like a cheaper version of Maniac Cop. Where's he returning from? Let's find out! As always, prepare your eyeballs for SPOILERS!!!!

Okay, so no subtitles. Bummer. The film begins with Psycho Cop(let's just call him PC) sitting at the counter in a coffee shop, just slurping up coffee and eating a doughnut. a few stools away, 2 young guys in suits are planning a bachelor party, to be held after hours at their office. The nerdier, more nervous of the 2-- Brian-- worries about losing his job, but his pal Larry offers to take the blame if they get caught.

As they discuss strippers, booze and weed, they attract the attention of PC. He approaches them and asks if they are planning anything illegal, and they both quickly persuade him that they're as law-abiding as he is. Oops, bad example!

PC goes out out to his car, whistling and skipping along the way. Weird, As he gets into the vehicle, the interior is shown to be filthy, covered in blood and various body parts. So....like my car, but cleaner. The credits roll, but the only name I recognize is Julie Strain, who's sort of a lower-budget Jamie Lee Curtis. I have a feeling that everything in this is a lower-budget version of something else.

Anyway, the theme song degenerates into a mish-mash of annoying noises, then we return to Brian and Larry, who are now walking back to the office. Brian is still whining about how scary the cop was, and Larry is mocking him. Both are too busy chatting to notice PC's car creeping along the curb just behind them.

No, Brian just saw the car. He freaks out, so Larry makes a few more snarky remarks at his expense, then decides to confront PC directly. PC turns on his siren, then speeds away. as the two dunderheads continue to head back to the office, PC circles the block, then resumes tailing them. Sadly, neither man possesses the ability to look behind them a second time. Tragic.

Back at their office, Larry and Brian get the groom-to-be, Gary, waaaaay too excited for the bachelor festivities. Oh, and I forgot to mention it before, but their boss is named "Mr. Stonecipher". Makes him sound like he belongs in some kind of wacky cult or something. Maybe as the guy who gets unmasked at the end of every freaking case Scooby and Shaggy ever investigated. "Look, the Lighthouse Creeper was Old Man Stonecipher all along! Zoinks!"

Aw crap, I still have a movie to watch, don't I?

Okay, so let's meet the rest of the soon-to-be-dead group thus far: we already met Larry, Brian, and Gary; then we have Michael, the portly joker in charge of supplying the alcohol; the crotchety old Mr. Stonecipher(Rut roh!); oh, and Tony, a fellow employee who has been having an affair with hot co-worker Chloe. There are more, but they arrive later in the film.

Anyway, Tony and Chloe decide to sneak away for a quick tryst in the copyroom, while Brian spots a pretty employee from the accounting department, Sharon. Larry tries to use a bad pick-up line on Sharon, but she shoots him down. Then Larry surprises Tony and Chloe in the copyroom, runs over to the copier, and makes a single copy of his goofy face, presumably to send to the accounting department. I've been to backwoods carnivals with less freaks than there are in this movie.

Larry faxes the picture, along with a brief message, up to Sharon. She responds by faxing back a photo of Mr. Stonecipher, urging Larry to make his move on him. Heh. Did I rent a horror film, or a cheap knock-off of Office Space?

So eventually the workday ends, and the grumpy boss leaves. The guys watch him go, then Brian spots the police vehicle parked in front of the building. While he once again gets worked up over it, Larry tells the others about the incident at the diner. Then Larry calls the strippers, to tell them the coast is clear. Oh, and he bribes Gus the security guard to look the other way as the strippers arrive. What could possibly go wrong?

One of the strippers presses all of the elevator buttons as they all step in, and promises Larry that they can use the extra time to give him a private show. Along the way, Sharon, who decided to stay late to get some work done, hears the commotion. She decides to check it out, but the elevator door closes before she sees anything.

Back in the copyroom, Tony is still screwing Cloe. When they hear the noise from the elevator, Chloe swiftly gets dressed, and they decide to find a better area in which to make out. Hopefully it's an office with better lighting. I swear, I've seen dungeons that were illuminated better than the offices in this building.

PC bangs on the locked front door, and Gus gets up to let him in. Damn Gus! Didn't you read the script? You're too old to be making rookie mistakes like this! I bet he kills you first. You're like the guy in every cop action movie who gets paired up with the star, only to die 2 days before retirement.

While Gus is waiting to exit the film, the bachelor party gets cranked up to 11. Too bad the Fun Dial goes all the way up to 100. They put on a porn flick that consists of a guy who looks a little bit like Paul Rudd in an afro sitting in a comfy chair, while 2 strippers dance around him. While that's playing in the background, a stripper dressed as a cowgirl starts to dance in front of the guys. who are each drinking from their own bottles of booze.

The next stripper emerges, and her costume is more generic. Schoolgirl, I guess. Then the third one comes out in the usual sexy maid outfit. The cheesy 70's guy in the stag film losses his fake moustache for a moment, and tries to stick it back on. I don't know why, but that part made me laugh for a minute or two.

Back in the ground floor lobby, PC grabs a sharpened pencil. When he accuses Gus of breaking the rules by letting the guys have their bachelor party upstairs, Gus tries to explain that it's all legit. PC doesn't like his attitude, so he drives the pencil through Gus's eye socket and into his brain, killing him offscreen. Then PC gets on the elevator to begin his killing spree. Finally!

The guys all hear the elevator door open, then close again. Everyone hushes up, but no one appears. They decide that Gus is playing a prank on them and resume the party, but then hear the elevator door open again. Mike decides to go see who it is. Bye Mike.

Mike gets in the elevator, which comes to a halt between floors. He pries oipen the doors, only to realize that he needs to boost himself up to get to the floor he's stopped at. Mike hoists himself up, not realizing that PC is beneath him, watching his chunky legs kick and flail. Mike manages to pull himself up all the way before PC can grab him, though.

Mike makes his way to the front lobby, where PC pretends to be the night watchman. Uh, wouldn't Mike know it wasn't him, since they work in the same building day after day? I guess not, because Mike doesn't sense anything wrong. PC makes up some dumb story about the elevator glitching up all day, and Mike believes him.

Returning to the party, Mike tells the others what PC told him about the elevator. For some reason, Mike decides to go back down to the lobby, and he gets in the "safe" elevator. As he rides down, the elevator begins to plummet, knocking him around like a pinball. Mike gets off at the first floor the elevator stops at, and it continues down without him. Then PC comes up behind him, so Mike offers him a bottle of booze as a gift. PC thanks him, then pushes him down the elevator shaft. SPLAT!

Back at the orgy, Brian gets worried when Mike doesn't return. A fax comes in, and Brian gets even more frightened when he sees that it's just a picture of a police badge. Larry convinces him that it's just a joke perpetuated by Gus. Then a second fax comes in: a picture of Mike's face, with the lower half distorted. Before Brian can dampen the mood further, Gary announces that he and a stripper named Lisa are going off alone to "spend some quality time together. Then he says the entire thing a second time. Strange.

PC continues to send faxes of Mike's face to the guys, while Mike's corpse has been left on the copier. PC finds a pair of what are probably Chloe's panties, sniffs them, and suspects "foreplay". Get it? Foreplay instead of foul play? This movie had to be based on a Hemingway novel, with great dialogue like that.

Somebody please shoot me before I reach the closing credits.

Speaking of Chloe and Tony, Sharon walks in on them having sex. Still? You'd think they would be as dried up and shriveled as The California Raisins after losing so many bodily fluids by this point in the film.

Anyway, they try to convince Sharon that they somehow lost their clothes in a mishap involving a stapler and tripping, so Sharon just scurries out of the room as fast as she can possibly move. In the hallway, she is unaware that PC is watching her from the stairwell. Then he hears Gary and Lisa enter the stairwell on another floor above him, so he decides to go after them first.

The stag film is still going, as is Larry with his partner. I guess that was more important than keeping the audience awake with some actual scary stalking. Brilliant move. Let's go back to Gary and Lisa now, okay movie?

They've decided to take their party up to the roof. Makes all the sense in the world. PC is already up there, with his gun drawn. He mentions someone named Ingrid, then shoots Gary off-camera, for the most part. Lame. He puts cuffs on the corpse, reads him a warped version of the Miranda Rights, then picks up and throws the screaming stripper off of the roof.

Scaredy-cat Brian sees her fall past a nearby window, then her body lands in a dumpster, and the lid closes over her. Of course, that just means that no one believes Brian when he tells them that he saw a body falling off of the building. Then PC sends yet another fax, this time a pic of Gary with his driver's license covering a bullet wound in his forehead.

Brian decides to leave the party, and try to calm his nerves. He nearly has a heart attack over a statue scaring him, with its big, menacing not moving at all or doing anything. Wow. Scary. Then he enters the room with the fax and copy machines, and finds the floor littered with hundreds of pictures. He runs back to the stairs like a cartoon character, then hears PC laughing somewhere in the building.

Brian tells Larry and the strippers that something is definitely wrong, then shows them the mess he found in the copyroom. He picks up several of the pictures and points out that Mike hasn't changed his position or facial expression in a single one of them. Even the strippers agree that Mike looks dead in the copies. Larry explains it away by telling them that Mike simply took one picture, then copied it over and over again.

Meanwhile, Tony and Chloe finally manage to finish up before the movie does. Good for them. Chloe suddenly realizes that she left her panties in the copyroom, and persuades Tony to fetch them for her. Now, I want to set the scene here, just so you can appreciate the stupidity of what happens next:

Okay, so Tony is standing up, ready to open the door, right? Well, Chloe is sitting nowhere near the door, at an angle to Tony's position, no less. Yet, when he opens the door, PC rushes at him with a flagpole, and somehow(through more bad editting of all the violence) manages to impale them both in a row, as if she had been directly behind Tony. Which she wasn't, she was diagonal to him and the door. Seriously, was the screenwriter in a coma when he came up with this script? Or maybe the guy who was hired to edit the film together?

Anyway, we get to go back to Larry still demonstrating how to make a photocopy of a copy. Brian shows him and the strippers how the image in the copy is degraded, unlike the pictures that are all over the floor. Plus, he points out that the mouth s distorted because of a stain on the face. He then shows the others the blood on the copy machine, which Larry decides is jam, even though it looks like blood.

Sick of Brian's rantings, Larry asks him where the corpses are, if Gary and the others are actually dead. Brian indicates the supply cabinet. Larry opens the cabinet, only to be shocked when the corpses fall through a panel in the ceiling. For his part, Brian is jumping around, screaming "I was right! I was right!" His part should have been played by Ted Raimi. At least then he might be tolerable and funny.

They all run to the stairwell, screaming like ninnies. Somehow they manage to quiet down a bit, go to another floor, and hide in a conference room. I'm just impressed that they could alll shut up for longer than 10 seconds. Someone approaches the door, tries the knob, and....awww, it's only Sharon. Everyone screams, then Brian explains what's going on. Sort of.

Not quite believing their wild tales of murder and crazy cops, Sharon decides to call 911. Too bad the phones are dead. They all decide, as a group, to find Tony and Chloe, so that they can give them a fair warning about the crazy killer in the building. Heh, I think they know already...

They all run back to the stairs, and hike one floor up. There, they find Tony stuck to the wall like a specimen in a butterfly collection, with a huge bloody pentagram displayed on the wall behind him. So far, it's the goriest death. Oops, and when I paused it, I saw Chloe's bloddy arms behind him, so I guess this was the end result of the impalement scene that made no sense earlier.

As Brian urges the others to run for the exit, PC sneaks up behind the group. He asks if everyone's okay, then makes up a story about getting a 911 call. He then tells them his backstory....finally!

Okay, so PC has a name now: Joe Vickers. Joe was a Satan worshipper, and was bestowed with satanic-powered strength. He was apparently shot 6 times in the film that preceded this one, stabbed, impaled with a wooden stake...;you get the idea. Guy is strong.

Brian and Larry both notice that the badge in one of the faxes, as well as the one Joe is wearing are one and the same. While he tells his origin story, they start to shuffle away toward the exit. Then Joe slips up by revealing that the third stripper was killed, but he calls her "your friend". Since he technically wouldn't know that there were 3 of them if he was just arriving on the scene, this makes the women suspicious of him as well...especially since he earlier told them that she was the one who had called 911. D'oh!

Their questions get Joe agitated, and he starts to lose his grip again. Larry and Brian shove a desk at Vickers, pinning him against the wall for a few seconds, enough time for almost everyone to escape the conference room. Except Larry. Joe shoves the desk back in his direction, then puts the barrel of his gun in Larry's mouth, and pulls the trigger. Again, it was offscreen. This movie is so tame, I'm surprised it doesn't have a Disney logo on it. I've seen more violence on episodes of Barney and Friends.

So Brian sees Larry get shot and screams, which draws Joe's attention. Brian waits for Vickers to get within touching distance, THEN decides that it might be a good idea to run away. As expected, he gets shot in the back. Hey, at least we don't have to hear his incessant whining anymore!

Sharon and the strippers try running away, but stumble into each other on the stairs. They finally figure out how to run down the stairs at the same time without bumping into each other, but by that time, Officer Vickers in in hot pursuit.

Despite earlier showing them several floors above the ground(high enough to barely make out the police car parked in front of the building), the women reach the lobby in mere seconds. Must have been all the adrenaline. Sharon takes the gun she finds on Gus, then she and the strippers wait for Vickers to appear. Then they realize that he has managed to lock the exit, so they need to go upstairs again, to look for an alternate way out. Uh, ever heard of breaking a window?

They haven't. Joe surprises them in the stairwell, and holds one of the strippers at gunpoint. When Sharon refuses to drop her gun, he surprises her by shooting the OTHER stripper in the head. He tells Sharon that he promises not to shoot his hostage if she drops her gun, then strangles her instead. Hey, he kept his promise!

Sharon starts running up the stairs again, while Joe grabs his gun and fires wildly into the air. As he moves back into the main hallway of the building again, he tries to get Sharon to reveal herself with a few taunts. She pops up at the end of the hall, and plants an emergency hatchet into his stomach. Sharon then tries to finish him off with the gun, but it turns out to be unloaded. She escapes again, while Vickers casually removes the axe from his abdomen and goes after her.

Sharon finds herself in the Stonecipher offices, and she grabs a couple of heavy liquor bottles to use as makeshift weapons. Then Vickers faxes her a picture of himself grinning like a loon. Unable to find any unlocked offices, Sharon runs down another hallway, right before Vickers enters the cubicle area.

He makes his way around the cubicles, using the axe to smash and destroy most of the objects near him. As he reaches one of the doors Sharon found locked, he uses the axe to rip the door to shreds. Of course, Sharon is still running away, down a completely different hallway, so she may have bought herself some time. She finds a restroom unlocked, and ducks in there to hide from him.

Vickers checks the elevator shaft next, which seems kind of stupid. While he's still investigating, Sharon finds several flammable sprays in the bathroom, and formulates an idea. Or maybe she has gas, the expression on her face could go either way.

Vickers passes by about a dozen or so doors, and now he seems to magically know where she is hiding. Where was this instinct in the last few scenes? Anyway, he marches through the bathroom door, only to get a faceful of spray and a long trail of fire that seems to have found a comfy place to rest on his face.

When Vickers screams and falls to the ground, Sharon grabs the axe from him....and promptly throws it down the elevatyor shaft. Does this dumbass have a deathwish, or what??? Hold on, it gets even better: she then pushes Joe Vickers down the elevator shaft as well. Yup, the same one she threw the axe down into. Do I need to draw you a picture? I'm not Nostradamus, but I'm willing to wager that:
A) Vickers ain't dead, and
B) He's about to get his axe back.

I haven't seen anything that obvious and contrived since Tommy Jarvis basically gave Jason back his mask, weapon AND his life at the start of Friday the 13th 6. I'm almost nat the point where I'm rooting for Psycho Cop instead of his victims.

So Sharon makes her way slowly down the stairs, and finds Brian. Yup, the annoying wimp still lives, dammit! Together, they get all the way to the lobby, before Sharon remembers that Vickers locked the doors by cuffing them together. In yet another botched kill scene, Brian gets over to the elevator doors, where Vickers is waiting for him inside with the axe.

Even though they're facing each other, this somehow results in Vickers imbedding the weapon in Brian's back. There is one sort of cool detail, though...One half of the sunglasses Vickers has had on throughout the move is now fused over his eye, like a makeshift eyepatch.

Sharon start to run back up the stairs again. Please, God, no....I've seen these stairs so may times tonight, I feel like I live in this damned stairwell. Sharon and Vickers have a long, pointless chase sequence down a bunch of corridors that all look exactly the same. Did I die, and wind up in some kind of Movie Hell, where the same scene is now in an eternal loop?

Sharon finally finds an unlocked door, and steps through it. Vickers does likewise, and then it's more of the same. Eventually, Sharon sees a sign showing the exit to the parking garage, so she exits there. And now they're both running.

Sharon manages nto get out onto the street, and starts to scream for help. As she runs, Vickers keeps gaining distance on her, until he's mere feet behind her. He does catch Sharon, right outside a crowded bar. The many patrons and employees of the bar hear her screams, and go outside to see what's happening.

In what I guess is supposed to be a spoof of the Rodney King incident, everyone in the bar grabs a bat or other blunt instrument, and they save Sharon by beating Joe Vickers within an inch of his life/undeath/whatever. Oh, and did I mention that someone was recording the beating as well? It's very subtle, like a sledgehammer to the balls.

Anyway, the tape makes news, and both Sharon and Vickers are brought to the same hospital. Oh, and Brian too...I guess he's as unkillable as Psycho Cop seems to be. While they watch the news together, Brian wonders if their injuries are covered by worker's comp, and both he and Sharon start to laugh like loons. Literally, Brian starts flailing around on the bed and contorting. Who the heck laughs like that???

Just a few doors away, Vickers is in his room, which is being guarded by a pair of cops. They hear some kind of growling from inside his room, and run in to check on Vickers. They're even joined by a nurse and possibly a doctor. after more growling noises and several screams, Vickers emerges from the room, dressed in hospital scrubs. He faces the camers, rips off the bandage covering his left eye, and reveals that it has completely healed, as have all of his burn wounds. As the credits roll, there are snippets of the porno film from the bachelor party shown. THE END

Boy, this one was a major stinker. What's the point of making an over-the-top slasher flick, if you're just going to release it with huge portions of the action missing? And why isn't the first one on DVD yet? 2 out of 5, mostly for the silly jokes and nudity.

And what did I learn from Psycho Cop Returns?

-Some treasures are better left buried.

-People in danger often decide to wait for dangerous killers to get close to them before deciding to run away.

-Bars are always filled with weapons, and crowds of people who want to use them.

Next up is Whisper, the film I was going to watch this time out. Wish me luck....I need it.

Cheerleader Camp

I'm baaaack!

Yeah, so I was in the hospital one week, had my laptop out of commission for 2-3 weeks, but I think we're ready to roll again. This week, I'm watching Cheerleader Camp, a wonderfully daffy movie about a cheerleading camp. Who knew? Oh yeah, and I nearly forgot...blah blah SPOILER WARNING, blah blah blah.

Okay, so first of all, you should probably watch the trailer on the DVD before watching the film. They give you a nice little cheat-sheet of each characters' name, which is helpful. The stars include Mrs. Jigsaw herself, Betsy Russell; Leif Garrett as her boyfriend; and Lucinda Dickey, whose name I remember from those silly breakdancing films in the '80's.

It begins in a locker room, where the main character, Alison, is trying to find her locker and change into her cheerleading outfit. Out in the stadium, a bored-sounding announcer is taunting her by announcing how late she is. She hurries out, waving her pom-poms as cheerfully as is humanly possible.

She needn't have bothered to rush...the stands and field are both deserted. This school's in dire need for some school spirit! To make matters worse, she trips and falls in some mud. I'm guessing that this is not going to be a cherished memory for her, when she looks back on her teen years.

Alison's family showed up, but they wave their hands in disgust at her performance, and just walk out. Ouch! She tries to resume her cheer, but her pom-poms actually slash her skin open! She tries to ignore the wound, but cheering again only injures her further. Then, as Alison begins to panic, a wall of pom-poms surrounds her...

Phew! It was only a nightmare. She's in the back of her boyfriend Brent's van, on the way to CHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERLEADING CAAAAAAAMP!!!!!! Ooh, I think I just scared myself for a second there! Also along for the ride are Cory, the cute team mascot; Timmy, the obnoxious fat comic relief character; and Bonnie, Pam and Terry, the other generic cheerleaders who will most likely be the first to die.

Along the way, they discuss how going to this camp will be a great way to get into state finals. Really? So is it a camp, or is it a competition? Why not just call the film Cheerleading Competition? "Camp" makes it sound more like a fun morale-booster kind of thing. Or is that a real thing? Anyone know?

Well, while I was putting probably 150% more thought into this movie than the people who wrote it did, they arrived. Yay! They drive past a group of cheerleaders doing what looks a lot like the dance from "Achy Breaky Heart". Weird. Timmy, being the brain trust of the group decides to aim his epic ass cheeks out the car window at all of the other cheerleaders they pass. It figures that the first bare butt they show is his. Oh, and he's supposedly "stuck" in the window, despite the fact that you can see that he isn't.

One of the people running the camp, Miss Tipton, strides over to the van to check them in. She does a roll call, and even gets Timmy loose by swatting his ass with her clipboard. I hope she plans to burn it after that. I don't want to imply that his ass is huge, but I'm pretty sure I saw Timmy do a cameo in James and the Giant Peach....and he wasn't James.

Alison misses hearing her own name being called, because she was busy watching Brent flirt with the girls on another squad. Oh, and Cory gets all sad because her name wasn't called. Geez, doesn't she have some boogaloo to electrify or something? Anyway, Alison gets a brief scare when a hick gets behind her, and introduces himself. He calls himself Pop, but he looks like the guy who'll be filling the "Crazy Ralph" role in this one. (Ralph, for those of you who apparently don't read my other articles, is a character in the first couple of Friday the 13th films.)

Then we see a cook, some grungy-looking hobo with a loud cough. Yeesh. I'm glad I didn't eat during this one. Then the Jane Doe characters are seen unpacking their crap and saying bitchy comments about Alison.

We get treated to several more scenes of these idiots unpacking, then Timmy decides to watch some of the women sunbathe, while he tries to hide in the grass. Yeah, I'm sure a guy the size of John Candy's left ass-cheek won't have any trouble hiding.

But wait, it gets even dumber. As some of the women go topless, Timmy sneezes, drawing their attention. He stands up, revealing that he's in drag, in a pitiful attempt to "blend in" with the hot female group. He tries to pass himself off as a birdwatcher, but they tear off his "disguise". and surround him. In a frantic bid to escape, Timmy does a belly-flop into the lake, and swims away.

Then we catch up with another peeper, the sheriff. He's so busy staring at the best breasts early 1980's money can buy, he fails to see Pop sneak up on him. They mumble some vague insults back and forth, until Pop inexplicably vanishes.

Moving from one random scene to the next, Miss Tipton is berating a group of cheerleaders as they rehearse. The screen turns red, then Alison is seen back in her group's cabin, having another nightmare.

She dreams about stuff that happened 2 minutes ago, then decides to leave the cabin. She enters the cabin next to hers, and finds a blond cheerleader dead in a bed. Fred. The 2 hobo-guys take care of the body, while Miss Tipton tries to calm down the rest of the cheerleaders.

After she delivers a less-than-inspirational speech, the Jane Does all get together to discuss the mysterious death. None of them buy Tipton's explanation that it was a suicide, but none of them seem smart enough to take the idea any further than that.

Then we wind up with Timmy and Brent. Timmy has somehow managed to get a video of his earlier peepshow, so they start watching. Then Alison gets a pep talk from Cory, who leaves. Alison washes her face in the sink, then hallucinates that her face is covered in blood.

At a pep rally-type performance, we get treated to that rap song from the trailer again. Yay. Pop gets so excited by the show that he wets himself with a garden hose. As the rap goes on and on(and on and on and...), Pop nearly drowns himself with the damned hose. Boy, these '80's movies sure are hilarious. What's next, a pie fight?

Nope, something worse...a mascot party. When Cory refuses to keep the alligator head on while trying to eat, Miss Tipton yells at her. Just to recap: there has been only 1 murder so far, and it was offscreen. But we have had 2 scenes of Timmy partially nude, and now a scene with people dressed as animals trying to drink soda and eat potato chips through their gigantic heads. Is this movie for real?

Brent tries flirting with Alison, who wanders away toward the mess hall. Inside, she finds the cook chopping up meat in a threatening manner, so she enters the walk-in freezer to get something cold to drink. There, Alison finds the corpse from a few scenes ago, and she scurries away.

She uses the pay phone at the camp to call for help, and the sheriff arrives. He demands answers from the staff, but Miss Tipton tries to brand Alison as a troublemaker. Tipton uses her feminine wiles on the sheriff to keep the murder quiet.

Alas, then we get more Timmy. He gets to see Tipton and the sheriff roleplay a kinky cheerleader/quarterback scenario, which is even more terrible than it sounds.

Alison wanders into another empty cabin as the others practice their cheers. She spies on one of the hobos, and nearly gets caught. Seriously, someone had better die soon, and it better not be me, from sheer boredom.

Brent has his hands on some chick's ass, and is lifting her over his head. That's it, that's an actual scene in this movie. Nothing else happens. Seriously. Alison has another chat with Cory, which also goes nowhere.

Okay, let's start skipping ahead here. At another group meeting, Miss Tiptomn gets humiliated when her tryst with the sheriff is shown on a projection screen. Everyone walks out laughing, then Brent kisses Alison, then they have a spat. Blah, blah, blah.

The screen goes red yet again, and Alison enters a cabin that she hears shouting coming from. Inside, Brent is having sex with another girl, while the camp staff stand around the cot, doing a cheer. Then the mascots somehow get involved. Geez, I wish I was a drinker...this is one movie that deserves to be forgotten in a drunken blackout.

The next day, Alison falls during a rehearsal, and lashes out at the girl Brent was screwing in the nightmare. That somehow leads into a scene with Timmy swimming with 2 of the girls, while Brent makes out with his new main squeeze.

Brent abruptly leaves, and the brunette tries to follow him into the woods. She gets lost, and an unseen assailant shoves some pruning shears through the back of her head. Yay, something actually happened!

As Brent is briefly seen running through the woods, the screen goes red yet again. Alison is having another dream sequence. In this one, she finds Brent and Pam, the girl who was just killed, making love e against a tree, and so she decides to slice the girl up with her pom-poms.

Alison screams, and is woken up by Cory. When Alison tries to take a sedative to sleep, Cory stops her. Then we get more bullshit mascot dancing footage. It's supposed to be some stupid mascot dancing contest, I guess. The audience votes for Cory to win, but Miss Tipton pisses her off by handing the award to another mascot instead, just out of spite.

As the cheerleading teams get up to dance for the judges, Alison asks Brent if he's been sleeping with Pam. The team decides to perform without Pam, but Timmy nearly kills Pop when he stumbles into him during the routine. Timmy seems to think it's hysterical, but Pop is pretty angry at him.

Miss Tipton's pissed too, even after they explain that Pam is missing. As the next squad prepares to do their performance, one of the other Jane Does(who looks sort of like one of the girls Prince used to sleep with 20 years ago) tearfully leaves the room, too upset about Pam's vanishing to continue.

As Miss Tipton makes all of the various teams do a dorky little parade around the stage, she gets visibly annoyed by the popularity of Alison's team. Despite this, the award for the most popular(or whatever...I tuned out about 20 minutes ago) cheerleader goes to the country gal. I forgot her name, so let's call her Ellie May.

Anyway, Ellie May beams with pride as the tiara is placed on her head, and this somehow leads into another fight between Alison and Brent. He leaves to see if he can find the other girls, and Alison follows him after having a quick flashback to one of her 900 dreams.

Then there's a "let's see where each of our isolated characters is" montage: Brent is lost in the woods, calling out random names; the girl who was upset earlier(whose name,I think, is either Lisa or Kim) is stumbling around in the dark; Pop is drunkenly lurching around in one of the cabins; and Cory is also out looking for Lisa/Kim/Whoever she is.

Anyway, Whatsherface finds Pam's body, just as the killer shows up to try and run her over in a vehicle. Alison and Brent find each other in the woods, and then Pop and Cory also arrive. What the Hell? Weren't we about to see that other girl get run over? Why are we bothering with these idiots?

Then we get randomly transported back to the dance competition. Timmy meets a cute girl from another squad, and tries to fumble his way through a pick-up line. In what may be the film's only truly funny moment, he gives up, says, "Ah, what the fuck!", then grabs the girl and kisses her. Because it's a movie, she's into it. This one scene actually made me crack a smile.

Okay. Back to the dreary rest of the film.

Brent gathers the rest of the team together, and they panic when they realize that the others have vanished. As they try to come up with a plan, Miss Tipton staggers away into the forest, drunk as a skunk. She gets killed seconds later, from behind.

The sheriff gets a call on his radio, then our main group discovers one of the dead cheerleaders in the woods. At the same time, Alison sees Miss Tipton staggering toward her, and mistakenly thinks that she's drunk. Then she sees the blood on the woman's back, and screams.

Cory finds her, and they leave the body behind. At the same time, Brent and the others reach the dance, where they announce that a killer is on the loose. As expected, the other cheerleaders all go nuts, and leave in a frenzy.

With only Brent, Timmy, Pop, and the rest of the squad left, Brent stumbles across Miss Tipton's body. He finds Alison and Cory together, and brings them back to the main group, only to find that the van has been sabotaged.

The group stick together, and start hiking through the woods. They get frightened when Pop shows up with a shotgun, then Timmy is abandoned by Ellie May, because he's too busy fooling around with his camera to try to survive the night.

Brent finds the camera, but there's no sign of Timmy. They bring the camera back to their cabin, where they watch the last video that was recorded...a tape of Timmy being murdered, as it turns out. He was disemboweled in front of the camera, and it's probably the bloodiest death so far.

Brent sets a trap for the killer, but ends up killing the sheriff instead. Oops. He runs off into the woods, where he has a standoff with Pop, who ends up being killed by Cory. Does any of this make any damned sense? I know I was complaining about it being too slow before, but this isn't exactly an improvement.

Cory breaks down and tells Brent that she only shot Pop because she thought he was trying to kill Brent. Then Pop staggers to his feet, so she shoots him a second time. Maybe they decided to make a spoof of slasher films, and gave up on the horror angle?

Alone with a corpse, Alison starts to lose her grip on reality again. Brent arrives to calm her down, then he, Ellie May, Alison and Cory celebrate being alive. When they get some alone time, Brent tries to put the moves on Alison.

Cory interrupts, and announces that another member of the group is now missing. As soon as Brent leaves to go searching, Cory convinces Alison that they have to escape together. She gives Alison a gun, then scares her into thinking that Brent is the killer. Not thinking clearly, Alison shoots Brent.

The authorities arrive, and Cory makes it look like Alison went crazy when she shot Brent. Alison is loaded into an ambulance, where she suddenly realizes that Cory was the killer. As she figures it out, Cory is seen is a cheerleading uniform, acting all gonzo. THE END.


Man, this was horrible. The plot was terrible, the acting was poor, the kills were almost non-existent...this is like a case study in how not to make a slasher film. This gets 1 killer tree out of 5, just for wasting so much of my time.

And what did this crapfest teach me?

-Jigsaw's wife was one hot mama!

-Obese perverts get all the girls.

-You can make a movie about anything, even if it makes no sense.

Next up is a movie called Whisper, about a creepy little kid. Hopefully, it'll be a little bit more coherent than this last movie was. See you then!

Happy Hell Night

So, this time around, I'm getting a serious deja vu vibe.The movie, Happy Hell Night, sounds very similar to another movie I saw for this blog, Prom Night 4: Deliver Us From Evil. Both films involve a mental patient going after a quartet of teens, and both mental patients happen to be evil holy men. Weird, huh? Get ready for plenty of SPOILERS, and let's see if this one's an original or not....

The movie begins on your typical dark and stormy night, inside an insane asylum. A guy who looks like the missing link is peering out of his cell through some bars, as a pretty female walks down the middle of the hospital corridor. She peeks in on the neanderthal, and he screams at her. I guess they aren't a couple.

As she runs down the hallway, we see several shots of random doors, which makes all the sense in the world. Hell, it's probably the same door, shot at different angles. Anyway, she stops and meets a co-worker, an angry black guy with a flashlight. He tells her about a patient that most of the staff avoid like the plague, then orders her to look through the window at him.

She nervously complies, then breaks down in hysterics. The black guy glances inside the room, and sees a pretty big insect crawling on the hand of the patient. Through their conversation, the coworkers reveal that the patient has been institutionalized for the past 25 years, and has been mostly catatonic during that time.

That leads to a dreaded flashback, specifically to 25 years ago. A young man(played by Sam Rockwell) holding a sharpened crucifix wakes up a priest, begging for his help. Then a perky deejay is heard playing a song dedicated to a group of fraternity and sorority pledges. Then we get back to the priest, who now has a flashlight, and is looking for....I don't know, some sort of plot? A coherent script?

The priest sees a pentagram drawn on a wall during his exploration, and on the floor beneath it are a few dismembered corpses. As the frightened priest continues to use his flashlight to look around, he finds a bald, albino priest staring at him, and showing that his hands are drenched in blood.

The albino priest, Father Malius, says something that sounds like "No teeth", and the other priest runs outside. And that ends the incredibly uninformative flashback. Thanks, movie...that really helped to clear things up.

Then we see a guy in a bandanna invite a girl to a fraternity Halloween party. It's now 1991, at a place known as Winfield College. Anyway, the guy explains that the party is for "Halloween Hell Night", which probably would have made a better title for this thing.

Bandanna Guy meets up with Denim Outfit Guy, in what is easily the worst superhero league EVER! Denim guy is named Rob, and he apparently wants the other guy, Jay, to let him pledge his fraternity. Jay doesn't want to let him, but eventually agrees to let him come to the party to prove himself to the other frat brothers. Then Jay gets Rob to buy him a beer.

At a local hangout, 2 women are having a discussion about something that sounds serious, but neither actress seems to know how to make a "serious" face. While they work on their acting techniques, 2 guys playing darts are shouting back and forth to each other about how one guy's brother, Sonny, is supposed to be arriving back in town soon.

The guys ask the bartender to turn on the television, and a guy who looks like Weird Al is "reporting" on the Hell Night festivities. The bar is a hangout for the fraternity that was mentioned earlier, and Sonny seems to be the one person they want at their stupid-sounding party.

The girls leave, and the guys all discuss what sort of initiation activity they want to make Sonny perform that night. The general consensus seems to be that they want to have Sonny ride his motorcycle around the campus, sans clothes.

Then Barry, the "reporter" from TV, walks in and announces that he's thought up the best possible Halloween stunt to win the Hell Night competition. He reads a newspaper clipping about the murders that happened in 1966, and proposes that they have their pledges spend the night at the asylum where the albino killer is reportedly still locked up. Barry convinces the frat boys that, if one of the pledges can take a picture of the killer priest, then the frat is a shoo-in to win the contest.

At a motel one of the women with the hard-to-control facial expressions, Liz, meets up with the Sonny, who just pulled in on his bike. It seems that Liz and Sonny were having a clandestine relationship, even while Liz was seeing his brother. Yeesh. For a slasher film, this sure seems more like something out of a soap opera.

The sheriff arrives at the frat house, which looks like a hotel. He asks 2 of them if they've seen someone named Ned. It figures that a character with an actual name in this thing isn't even onscreen. Thanks for the help, movie.

Anyway, Ned's in trouble for stealing the files relating to the murder spree. Wait, wasn't that guy named Barry? Is he Ned now, or is Ned a new character? You know, watching a moronic movie like this shouldn't be this difficult. I tried Wikipedia for a better plot synopsis and character list, but there isn't one. Okay, new rule: after this week, any movie without a subtitles option or a webpage with info like the cast/character names is going back to Netflix unfinished. I shouldn't have to jump through hoops to simply be able to tell who's who in a movie like this.

Okay, done venting. The sheriff takes a huge icepick off of a trophy wall, then advises the frat boys to re-think pulling any crazy pranks this year. Then one of the guys, Eric, gets a call from his father. Through their chat, it is revealed that Eric is Sonny's brother. So this guy is the one that Liz has been cheating on...Nice.

Darren McGavin plays Eric and Sonny's dad. He calls Eric, and asks him for details about Hell Night. Eric doesn't reveal anything, but when he asks his father if he knew anything about the old murders, dear ol' dad has a major flashback. Or he crapped himself.

He was apparently the Sam Rockwell character seen during the flashback. Dad tells Eric that he'll call him right back, then places a call to arrange for a driver to pick him up. Then the scene just wheezes to a stop.

Okay, so the guy I thought was named Barry is named Ned BARA. Glad that got cleared up. The driver, Eric, sees his brother's bike at the motel, and decides to surprise him with a visit. He sees Liz and Sonny making the beast with two backs through a motel window, and Liz sees him as well. As usual, nothing else happens, the scene just cuts off abruptly at that point. They should have called this Happy Nothing Ever Goes Anywhere Interesting Night.

So that random event somehow brings us to "STV", the dorky little studio where Ned Bara does his annoyingly expositional broadcasts. Nothing happens, of course...nother ever does. Instead, we get whisked away to the Hell Night party, in full, disinterested swing. Nerdy Ned arrives, Sonny walks in. He starts to drink a beer, until Eric confronts him about Liz, then punches Sonny in the face.

After the punch is delivered, Eric announces that Sonny needs to break into the asylum to get a picture of our favorite sunlight-challenged monk, Malius. He brings along a guy named Ralph, who seems like he's there just to be a clumsy, loud oaf as they sneak around.

They find a door that leads to a security station, where a bored-looking nurse has obviously been watching the movie along with us. A patient wanders in, and starts rambling about a television, so the nurse makes him bend over in front of her TV(!), then shoves a syringe into his butt cheek. As the patient drifts off to La-La Land, Sonny and Ralph sneak into the main hall of the psych ward.

They wander around for a bit, until they find themselves in a section that looks like it belongs in a sewer tunnel in the 18th century. Sonny uses a match to see by, which is like fighting a fire with a drop of water. Then they find a door marked "AA 19", and has a heavy crucifix shoved through the latch to bar it from being opened. Dumb and Dumbest, of course, remove the cross from the locking mechanism. Idiots.

They hear a noise behind them then, and both turn around to look. When they turn back to the door, Brother Malius waves a hand at them that looks like it belongs to E.T. Then the boneheads open the door to enter the cell. As Sonny checks to make sure the nurse is still distracted(she's actually asleep now...), Ralph enters the cell to take the picture.

Ralph then starts screaming when he sees the face of the monk, so Sonny goes back in to quiet him down. He finds Ralph on the floor, minus his right hand. Malius stares at Sonny, then says something that sounds like, "No pity."

Then we switch over to The Bobbsey Twins, Liz and Whats-Her-Face. They almost run over another priest(how many different priests and monks live in this town???), and they talk about how creepy it is that he lives next to a cemetery. Boy, I sure am glad that they interrupted a key scene in the movie to tell me that!

After the crazy holy man presumably finishes killing Ralph and Sonny, he decides to kill the sleeping nurse next. He turns up the volume on her stupid wrestling/boxing/whatever show, then stabs her through the hand when she reaches for the remote. While she screams like a ninny, Malius slasher her throat, then says, "No TV."

Somehow Sonny got away, because we see him racing on his motorcycle to warn the frat brothers. Then he does what any person who has a maniacal monk after him does...he pulls over, gets off the bike, and decides to collect his thoughts. A female cop finds him, and asks him why he stopped. Sonny makes up something about a fight with his girlfriend, and the cop decides to ask for his license.

Back at the party, Liz finds out where they sent Sonny, then abandons her friend to go find him. Eric then hooks up with a cute brunette at the party who looks a bit like Sarah Sidle on CSI. Liz pays a visit to yet another priest, named Father Cain. When she tells him about Sonny's "assignment", the elderly man goes apeshit. He tells her to hide, then he has a flashback, revealing that he was the young priest who Eric's father woke up on the night of the original killing spree.

Father Cain goes to the church to pray, then sees the crucifixion statue above the altar come to life. Jesus writhes and moans on the cross until he forces his hands free of the nails, then his body falls to the floor of the church, shattering. Uhhhhh.....okay....

Ned is still watching porn at the frat house, which is a completely appropriate way to follow the previous scene, I'm sure. Ned hears someone in the hall, but no one appears when he calls out, so he returns to his viewing.

Sonny finally gets his license back, and decides to continue to the fraternity. Meanwhile, A bondage chick seduces a student named Jake, while Eric finishes literally screwing around. Then bondage chick winds up handcuffed to a bed, Sonny continues to race home, and one of Ned's cameras is discovered.

As Ned watches a woman taking a shower on one of the cams, Eric finishes having sex. I'm positive now that this girl is Jorja Fox from CSI, but damn, she sure looks young in this. And hot.

The second that he leaves, she starts to quickly get dressed. Then the handcuffed woman hears someone, and assumes that it must be Jake. Jorja Fox leaves a note with her phone number on it, then rushes out to her car. She gets into her car, where Malius drives a pick axe through the roof, right into her skull. He then says something that sounds like, "No botching." Would it have killed the casting director to look for an actor who could speak clearly?

Malius shows up at the shower-girl's room, but her bathroom mirror is cracked, so she thinks that the albino is just her boyfriend, possibly wearing a mask. He actually manages to speak clearly, says, "No sex!", then murders her too.

Ned, never the sharpest knife in the drawer, somehow misses seeing the girl in the shower get killed. The power goes out, so Ned gets up to see what the problem might be. If Ned lives, I'll lose all faith in humanity.

Bondage girl sees the albino monk--actually SEES him!--and still doesn't think that anything might be wrong. Did they all take their stupid pills that day? She thinks he might be Jake for some reason, but when he stabs her through the foot, she guesses that he might not be a good guy after all. Her screams are heard by everyone in the house, but no one comes to her aid. Of course. Malius then holds up her bloody earring and says something that sounds like, "No war." More? Whore? Bore? Beats the shit out of me.

Liz returns, and finds the main floor in shambles. She then discovers her first corpse, and runs away shrieking. At the same time, Darren McGavin enters the church, and finds Father Cain up on the cross. Then Liz is seen following a trail of sticky gore and blood, which ends at a blood-filled sink, and several body parts thrown into some kind of netting.

She finds someone alive, then kills him with her voice. Poor fella. Ned is assaulted by Sonny, who informs him that Ralph was also killed. Ned wriggles out of his grasp, and tells Sonny that he needs to get the power back on before the big lug can finish choking him to death.

When the power is restored, both men see the killer on the monitor. Sonny rushes off to rescue Liz, after warning Ned not to leave the building. Liz, of course, has already come face-to-face with Malius, but she ran away before he could get her. Then she is found by Eric, who tries to calm her down. Sonny walks in as they are hugging, shoves the picture of Malius at his brother, then informs him that Ralph was murdered.

Ned interrupts to call in on a walkie-talkie that he sees someone moving around on the floor above them on his monitor, so they decide to get in gear. They find "Susan"(hey, at least she now has a freakin' name!) in the attic, and tell Ned to continue watching the monitor to find more survivors. Despite his whiny grumbling, Ned stays where he is and complies.

Liz then complains that Sue is holding onto her hand too tightly, before she sees that Sue in not even next to her. Somehow Sue got to a rocking chair, where Malius beheaded her, all without the other 3 hearing or seeing a single thing. Yeah, riiiiiiiiiight. The trio scurry back downstairs, so that Ned can guide them out of the house.

Ned sees the crazy killer walking the halls, but when he warns them, nothing is there. They step into another room, where a mannequin nearly frightens them to death. Then Ned claims that he sees someone in the room with them. Of course, they assume that he sees the dummy, but Malius pops up behind the mannequin, stabs Sonny in the hand, then grabs Liz.

Somehow, Malius gets propelled through a window and someone off to the side pushes Liz to safety. Now, since the two brothers were together looking at Sonny's hand, I have no idea how any of that happened. Who pushed Liz? Malius is seen on the ground below, apparently dead. Then Darren McGavin shows up, to explain the entire plot.

Apparently, when he was young, Dad made a satanic deal for great wealth, power, and happiness. As he explains how it all went down, Ned decides to start a live recording, and turns on the video equipment. As he begins to speak to his "audience", Malius drives the pick into his eye, then says, "No STV."

Then dad says that Malius was possessed by a demon, which is why he went on his killing spree back in the 1960's. As the story wraps up, Malius shoves the pick through the door, into the back of their father, who dies in such a dramatic way, it would make Bill Shatner blush. They cover him with a sheet, then start the demonic ritual again, in an attempt to exorcise the demon from Malius.

As they prepare to escape through the window, Darren McGavin's hand is seen trying to reach up toward them. Sonny, the last to exit, turns and realizes that his father's body is missing. He goes deeper into the house to find his father, which makes him the dumbest character by default.

He eventually sees a figure in a nother room, moving under a sheet, with the pick axe on top. Sonny slowly picks up the weapon, then plunges the blade into the body under the blanket. The body sits up, revealing that it's Dad, who has now been stabbed in both the front AND back. Matching scars, nice.

Then Eric and Liz begin the ritual to send the demon back to Hell. Sonny gets caught up in a snare, where he is dangling by his ankle upside-down, as Malius sees him from a window. Malius tries to kill Sonny with his pick axe, but then the possessed priest starts to feel his essence being ripped apart.

Eric and Liz hear a howl of pain, and Eric leaves the protective circle they drew on the floor to check on his brother. Malius, in the meantime, falls backward on a ladder(picture the same scene in Animal House, with Belushi watching the girls undress), while Sonny cuts the rope with his knife. Oh, and Eric falls in a graveyard, where the possessed monk finds him.

Liz hears the screams get closer, only to find Malius behind her, holding Eric by his side with a long, spear-like weapon. Liz turns back to the altar to resume the ritual, but then Eric vanishes. When the scared girl tries to start up the ritual yet again, Malius creeps up behind her and holds a knife to her throat.

Sonny saves the day on his motorcycle, and knocks Malius to the floor, where he gets caught in a bear trap. With Sonny's help, Liz finds Eric, and all 3 escape to the graveyard. Then Liz and Sonny go back to the altar to finish the spell, while Malius tries to reach a scalpel he spotted on the floor.

He must be a master at surgery, because when Liz and Sonny look back again, he's gone, minus his newly severed arm. The demonic holy man attacks Sonny, and now the 2 are handcuffed together. They grapple for a minute, then Sonny stabs Malius with the cross, and a blast of holy light breaks a hole in the ceiling. Another hole opens up under the priest, and he howls in pain again as he sinks into the ground.

Liz leaves the church as police and paramedics arrive, and sees them load up everyone in the ambulances. As she climbs into one to reassure Sonny that he's going to be fine, the driver turns out to be Malius, who says, "No problem..." THE END

Geez, what a stinker. A killer whose kill lines were mostly botched, a rather tame series of murders(although the statue that came to life was at least a surprise), and the few people who were recognizable were under-utilized. 2 killer trees out of 5for this one, and it still feels generous.

And what did I learn after seeing Happy Hell Night?

-Bald, albino priests are bad news.

-If you look like a cross between Weird Al and Jeff Foxworthy....you should die first in a slasher film.

-Darren McGavin is one tough hombre to kill, man.

Some of the movies I have coming up on my queue: Pieces, which I still need to finish watching for the blog; Cheerleader Camp, which looks like a cheesy good time; and Whisper, about a kid who compels people to hurt themselves, according to what folks have told me. Yay!

Oh, and Happy New Year!!!!

Return To Horror High

Well, as you've probably noticed, I've been gone for about a month or so. My laptop crashed, was "fixed", then crashed again. I shipped it off to Dell, and am now back in business. Unfortunately, the memory, hard drive and motherboard were all replaced, so I no longer have any remnants of the movie I was originally going to watch and write about, a film called Pieces.

However, considering that most computer makers take 2 months or more to do repairs, I think it's safe to say that I'm a big fan of Dell and Alienware! Anyway, the movie this week is Return To Horror High, so let's get to it...and remember, there will be plenty of SPOILERS beyond this point. Man, I've missed saying that...

Okay, first off, the cast of this one is pretty cool...you have Alex Rocco, of The Godfather franchise; Maureen McCormack(Marcia Brady!) as a cute rookie cop; and some guy named George Clooney, who just might be a popular actor someday. Oh, and the child actor from the old sitcom Alice, all grown up. Heck, throw in Charo, and this could be an episode of Love Boat.

The movie begins with a wall of text: "In 1982, a series of brutal murders rocked Crippen High School. The killer was never apprehended.

Three months ago, Cosmic Pictures went to the town of Crippen to film the story of what actually happened--making the movie in the very halls of the now abandoned school.

They were not alone."

So, after that and the credits, we meet a weary detective asking a perky rookie cop(Marcia! Marcia! Marcia!) about a grisly crime scene. She admits to him that they don't yet know how many victims there actually were, as body parts were found in a pretty wide perimeter. Then she introduces the detective to the sole survivor, a screenwriter named Lyman. Oh, and the female cop is named Officer Tyler, and the lead detective is Birnbaum.

Lyman starts to tell them that a movie was being made, then we see an anonymous male cop walking the halls of the high school-turned-crime scene. He keeps hearing a noise, but nothing ever reveals itself as the source of the noise when he turns around to look. He finds himself in a darker section of the corridor, where a man with an extensive eye injury grabs him. They have a brief struggle, as the cop gets dragged into a classroom, only to reveal that it's all just a movie set.

Okay, so everything from this point onward is a flashback to the movie set? Or is this a different movie? Would've been nice if they had put a subtitle or something up on the screen, to give us some context.

Anyway, they have to film the scene again, because the guy in the injury makeup attacked the wrong guy. It turns out that he was supposed to jump out at Oliver, played by George Clooney, who plays the lead role in the movie-within-the-movie. By the way, Clooney looks like Chachi in this movie...he was seriously young when he did this one.

The other cop, as it turns out, is actually a cop, named Blake. He's there to make sure that the set is secure, and meets all safety standards. Heh. They set up to film the scene again, but Oliver gets an important call from his agent, so they take 5. Oh, and Lyman makes an appearance with some new script pages, as well as a first name now: Arthur.

Anyway, next we meet Alex Rocco's character, Harry. This film is so old, mobile phones are basic telephones, cord included, that are attached to briefcase units. Bizarre. Anyway, he plays Harry the producer, and spends most of his introductory scene schmoozing with a woman on his phone, while defacing a portrait of George Washington.

Then we see a special effects guy arguing with Josh the director over an exploding breast he created. How many characters are in this thing? The director doesn't like it, so he tears it off of the poor starlet wearing it, and flings the fake boob across the room, where it explodes. Hey, I guess she was booby-trapped!

Josh then discovers that Harry cancelled all of the crews' reservations at a nearby hotel, and that they're all going to be sleeping inside the school after filming each day. As he stomps away, the director gets more bad news: Oliver's agent has landed him a starring role in a television series, and he needs to be on the set the very next day. When the director threatens to sue him over his contract, Oliver smugly replies that he doubts that the small movie studio can afford to hire the lawyers needed for such a dispute.

After a brief, amusing scene with Harry doing a phone interview and ordering a lackey around, Oliver says his goodbyes and prepares to head to Hollywood. He walks upstairs to change back into his "regular" clothes, then sees some fog and weird lighting at the end of the hall. Being a dumbass in a slasher flick, he decides to check it out. Heck, he even calls out a greeting a few times, to give the killer time to locate him. Y'know, whenever I see Clooney in stuff like this(or that Killer Tomatoes movie he starred in), I'm amazed that he went on to fame and fortune. Really amazed. Bamboozled, even.

Anyway, Oliver asks the killer for directions to the exit, and the killer responds by apparently vanishing. This doesn't strike Oliver as strange at all, so he continues to investigate the fog and lights, which lead him to a door with a tiny window in it. He opens the door, and finds blood dripping from the ceiling. Then the door closes on him, and we see Oliver's face get pressed against the tiny window a few times, each time showing him bleeding from some sort of head wound.

Harry is inspired to convince the real cop. Steven Blake, to take Oliver's role in the movie, as they chat in the bathroom. He even introduces the cop to Josh, and leads him to believe that he's an actor. Blake winds up peeing on himself, then meets his leading lady. He tells her that he's not an actor, prompting her to make a joke that he doesn't get. The scene ends with the killer bringing over a janitorial bucket, so he can clean up the blood left behind by Oliver's murder. Hey, here's a great idea for a drinking game: every time you see or hear that squeaky bucket in a scene, take a drink.

That leads us abruptly back to the present, as Lyman tells Officer Tyler that the school never felt safe to him. Even before the first murder, he could sense a presence lurking nearby as they filmed their movie. There's a growling sound then, which turns out to be Tyler noisily slurping down a drink. Detective Birnbaum and Lyman both give her a withering look, then the screenwriter resumes his tale, by talking about this strange squeaking noise he often heard in the abandoned school. Drink up, me hearties! Arrrrrr!

As Lyman gets more intense, Tyler claims that she spotted one of the dead bodies moving slightly. They check the pulse, only to find that the arm is severed. Then Tyler reveals that the body is female, but the arm was male, because they eventually just threw random parts with random bodies. Very professional, Marcia. You better not make any more mistakes like that, or I'm liable to throw a football at your nose.

Anyway, back in the past, the director is looking over possible ideas for murder weapons to use in the film. The janitor, a perverted old black guy, tells Steven that he plans to break into the porno business after the film wraps up. Classy.

That leads directly into a scene where Kastleman, an older gentleman, is trying to catch a fly. He was the principal of the school during the era of the massacre, and the leading lady asks him for some intimate details. He responds by telling the starlet that the events from the massacre keep replaying in his mind, then he creeps her out by pointing out areas in the classroom where bodies were laying and eyeballs were dangling. What a fun guy.

Kastleman finishes up by leading her to a supply closet, then telling her to imagine the most horrific thing possible before opening the door. When she opens it, there's a rotting severed head sitting on a shelf, grinning at her. Not real, it's just a movie prop, but it was set to "rot" on cue, when the door was opened. Oh well, she can't be blamed, since no one told her...\

The effects guy tells her that he spent hours preparing the head, but she just leaves the room. When he tries to get some sympathy from the retired principal, the old man tells him about the hours it took for students to be slaughtered. Boy, these guys are a load of fun, aren't they?

Anyway, this leads into a flashback within the flashback, showing what the students were like in happier times. A cheerleader named Sherry is being bothered by some tough kids, until her boyfriend shows up. The leader of the bullies bets the jock, Richard Farley, that he can't get a date with a new girl at the school. He takes the bet, then walks up and introduces himself to the girl, who is Sarah Walker. As fascinating at pocket lint, this scene is.

Richard offers Sarah a free pass to that day's football game, but she refuses, then heads into the locker room. He follows her, which leads to a lot of shrieks and partial nudity. When he asks her out again she refuses again, so he tells her that he will drag one of the half-naked girls out into the corridor if she refuses to go out with him that night. In a stunning twist, that boneheaded plan actually works.

Wait, wasn't there supposed to be a massacre in here at some point?

That night, he takes Sarah out into the middle of nowhere in his convertible. She asks Richard to take her home, but he refuses. When Sarah tries to open the car door, Richard attempts to rape her. Don't worry...it's another scene being filmed in the abandoned school. Sheesh. When they finish filming, the pretty actress storms off the set, telling the producer that she wants to quit, just like Oliver did.

As she continues to rant and rave about how slasher films humiliate and degrade women, Harry just decides to wander away to take a break himself. While he cools his jets, a young member of the film crew tells Harry that no one has been given a paycheck yet but Harry tries to buy some time to avoid paying him and the rest of the crew.. After Harry leaves, the killer grabs the anonymous crew member and drags him into a classroom to be killed.

As Lyman wanders down the hall next, Harry waits around the corner to ambush him. They argue once more about the script. Harry leaves. Exciting, huh? It almost looks like Lyman might be the next person to bite the bullet, but the scene just ends instead. Oh, and there's a quick gag involving Lyman just barely missing seeing a beheading.

Then the rookie cop and the starlet decide to flirt some more. He shows her where his locker was, and she laughs when she sees a rough etching of a heart inside the locker. It seems goofy and charming to her, but he tells her that he never put the message in there. In fact, he claims that when he examined his old locker the previous day, the carved heart wasn't there. The starlet wonders out loud if maybe the film is cursed. After having to sit through all of these lame expository scenes, it better be cursed!

Up next, the killer corners a stagehand in the special effects/props area. Well, when I say "corner", I mean that the killer makes the lunkhead chase an object on a string like a common house cat. To complete the metaphor, he even leads the guy to a sandbox, where the killer then grabs him by the neck from underneath, and drags him into the sand. Meow!

Then another guy enters the very same room, somehow misses seeing the victim's feet kicking as he is pulled under the sand, and decides to stick his OWN face as close to the sand as possible. It's like watching an army of lobotomized chimps actually trying to get themselves killed.

Much to my surprise, this guy doesn't get killed in the same manner as the previous one. No, he just backs away, gets his feet caught in a snare, then gets shredded by a massive fan as he dangles upside down. His death scene transitions to the next scene, as Josh and Harry argue about the amount of blood being used in the film. The director tries to get Lyman and the rest of the crew to agree with him, but it backfires. Josh seemingly has a nervous breakdown and exits.

Great, another scene of exposition between Steve and the actress. He starts telling her about the time he lost his virginity, and the scene is thankfully brief. Up next: the janitor, who walks in on them. They see his mop and bucket looking bloody, and he nervously claims that he was cleaning up a set that was drenched in stage-blood. I guess that we're supposed to find him suspicious, but I honestly couldn't give a shit at this point. This movie needs to get rid of about a dozen characters, and find some kind of plot to focus on. Quick.

*sigh* Instead, we follow the loopy director into the restroom, which is filled with a hazy fog. Maybe Cheech and Chong paid a visit to the set. As Josh asks a member of the crew about the status of another person, about a dozen or so people walk out of one of the stalls. Again, a pretty funny sight gag. If they had spent a little time polishing up this turd of a script, this movie might've been a pretty sharp spoof of slashers. But left as is, it's way too talky so far.

Back in the present day, cops are seen carrying random body parts away to be identified. Birnbaum asks Lyman to explain how so many people could have been killed, without anyone noticing. Lyman explains that, in the world of low-budget movies, it's not uncommon for cast and crew to abruptly quit, as better opportunities come up. He even claims that the screams of victims could have been mistaken for rehearsals or scenes being filmed. Supposedly, even the ridiculous amount of blood wouldn't have raised any eyebrows.

And that's when Officer Tyler approaches them, covered in blood. When Birnbaum asks her about it, she starts to describe slipping in the halls, and she starts touching herself. Marcia, I love you. As it turns out, she also found a pair of hands, somewhere in a biology class, so we get another flashback. Hooray.

A class is falling into a catatonic state in a biology class, so the teacher demonstrates how strong the smell of formaldehyde is by putting an open jar of it next to the head of a student(played by Lyman, so I'm going to make the bold prediction that this scene is another movie scenario) named Donny Porter.

The teacher tells him off, but is interrupted by the arrival of a new student named Susan being played by the pretty starlet. She sits next to Porter...yup, it's a scene being filmed for the B-movie. The teacher insults "Porter" several more times, until the class ends. The teacher tries to come on to Susan, until a slutty-looking girl enters the class to speak with the teacher. The bimbo asks him why her grades are dropping, and he implies that it's because he no longer finds her attractive. Yeesh, what a putz this guy is. Susan scurries out when the other girl leaves.

Then the principal brings in Officer Blake, who questions him, then stops the scene to tell the director that the dialogue is inaccurate. Josh informs him that the scene will be filmed as is, to wrap that day's filming at a reasonable hour. He seems to be getting loonier by the second, so maybe we should keep an eye on him.

The biology teacher then introduces the class to the concept of dissecting frogs. He sees that the topic makes Donny nervous, so he decides to force him to do the first dissection. The first incision turns out to be too much for Porter to handle, so the teacher forces his hand down to cut the poor frog.

Later that night, the teacher hears someone enter his class. Assuming it to be Susan, he walks through the dark classroom, and sees a mystery figure. The killer raises a weapon, and knocks the science teacher out cold.

When the professor wakes up, he is on top of one of the tables. The masked killer reveals a multitude of weapons, and settles on a long nail. He nails the man's hands to the table, rips open his sirt, then uses a chainsaw to rip the man's heart out of his chest, before stuffing it into the corpse's mouth.

It's all a story, being told to the actress by Steven. They both agree that someone on the set is trying to sabotage the film, so they decide to work together to find the demented killer. Great. We went from Psycho to "The Hardy Boys".

Harry is next heard calling someone in Hollywood from a bathroom stall. He's discussing all of the disappearances, as the actress is seen eavesdropping. Oh, and she's listed by 3 names on IMDB, in case you were wondering why I was simply calling her "the actress"...she's Callie, Sarah and Susan. So, yeah...The Actress.

Next, Steven sees a picture of hos old high school girlfriend on the principal's desk. The principal informs him that the girl also happens to be his own daughter, and she's currently in grad school. Then he gets nervous when Steven presses him for details, and walks away.

Back on set, Josh mocks an actor who has a fake tool stuck in his forehead, because the actor wanted to know what his "motivation" as a dead body was. Then Lyman talks to a crew member about wanting to revise the script. The other guy tells him it would "be like polishing a turd", and walks away.

The starlet hears Lyman say that he used to be a student at the school, and decides to add him to her list of suspects. She then shows Steven the notes that she's been writing, and he tells her that to be a good detective, you have to suspect everyone, even him. Then they kiss, and begin making love as 2 technicians weld a section of the set a few feet away from their spot. Kinky.

The happy couple fall asleep after the act(of course), until Steven is woken by the sound of the old janitor's squeaky mop bucket rolling nearby. He quietly leaves the room to investigate, and the actress wakes up soon after, wondering where he went. Then she hears the squeaky bucket. When she tiptoes to the door, Steven leaps toward her, nearly giving us both a heart attack. I realllllly hate cheap scares.

Steven searches for his gun, and orders her to shut and lock the door. When she decides to peek through the small window in the door, the masked killer suddenly appears. The young couple approach the locked door together, and Officer Butthead turns his back to the window, allowing the killer to break the window, and get an arm around Steven's neck. Then Steven slumps forward, possibly dead.

The killer breaks through the door finally, just as the actress breaks a window leading outside. He tries to snatch her back in, but she jumps before he can get a good grip on her. She runs to the parking lot, and finds a set of keys in the first car she checks out.

She gets the key in the ignition, and another killer emerges from the back seat. Then, to my dissmay, Josh yells "Cut!", which means that, yet again, what would have made a cool sequence for the "real" characters was wasted on the movie within the friggin' movie.

When Josh tells them to get ready for the next scene, the killer beheads the actress. Josh screams, and it turns out to be a dream. Steven and the actress decide to go for a stroll outside, then the actress sees a trail of blood leading down the hall, and Steven admits that it looks like a body was being dragged in that direction.

Following the trail, they kick open the restrrom door. Then Steven checks out each bathroom stall. Of course, since it's just a set, the doors go flying when he kicks them, which makes for another somewhat amusing sight gag.

In the third stall, they find more blood, as well as a clue left by the killer: a piece of jewelry that the actress recognizes as belonging to somebody named Freddie. Damned if I know who that is...the janitor, maybe? One of the prop guys? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Back again to the present...Lyman identifies Freddie as the first assistant director. Officer Sexy shows up again, still covered in blood and eating something. Oh, Marcia, something suddenly came up!

Back in flashback land, Steven and the actress investigate one of the classrooms, the one where the effects crew were creating all of the blood and murder props. Turning on a light reveals the severed heads of Harry and Josh. The blood is still wet, which implies that the bodies were put there not long ago.

Another blood trail leads to the sandbox, where Steven and the actress find a tunnel underneath the sand. That was one determined cat! As Steven raises his pistol and announces his intention to descend into the tunnel, the actress points out that the heroes in slasher flicks always decide to explore dark places without getting a flashlight. Heh.

They go together, with her holding a flashlight, and him with the gun. She ruins any chance to surprise the killer, by screaming when she sees a tiny spider.Dumb-da-dmb-dumb-DUMMMMB! Oh, and the flashlight goes out, prompting her to whack it a few times. It goes flying out of her hand, and she trips into Steven, making him drop the gun. Both items go sailing across the room, where they get swallowed up by the shadows. Dumbasses.

To further cement her status as the dumbest Final Girl in slasher history, the actress explores her surroundings by walking backwards into the shadows. Instead of finding the killer, she finds another body part, dangling in front of her by a rope. I hope it's her brain.

They find another exit, which leads them to a room full of skeletal corpses, all dressed up and sitting around the room on chairs. The old perverted janitor then walks in, claiming that he found the room as well, but that he wasn't the killer.

So what happens in the very next instant? Well, the janitor attacks Steven, because he really IS the killer after all. At this point, does anyone really care? He killed them, he didn't...let's just wrap this thing up, so we can go back to enjoying our lives again!

The janitor laughs like a loon during his brawl with Steven, and it swiftly deteriorates into a slap fight. Yeah, you heard me. A slap fight. Steven scratches at the janitor's face then, revealing that his face was merely a mask. The real killer was...Principal Kastleman?

Yup, apparently he blamed Steven for the death of his daughter, who left after high school, because Steven got her pregnant. The girl then gave herself an abortion, which killed her. The capper comes when he shows them her corpse, and announces that he will force Steven to "marry" her. None of this makes any kind of sense.

Steven responds by standing up and announcing that he's going to go home and watch a football game. He gets Kastleman to follow him to the door, where the principal asks, "Are you crazy???"

Steven waits until the principal is standing against a wall, then pins him down like a bug, by chucking a javelin through his abdomen. After Kastleman dies, Steven then rescues the actress of a thousand names(and none of them memorable...). They quickly leave, then Lyman is seen finishing up his story. Birnbaum tells him that they need him to show them to the basement, where the cops are prepared to burst in with guns blazing.

They get to the basement, and Lyman is seen rushing out of the building. He calls out that they're "all clear", and the corpses get off the ground, revealing that they were still filming the movie. They grab all of the apparently-fake body parts, then rush to their vehicles to get away.

Harry reveals that most of it was a stunt to get publicity for the film, and that the crazed principal's death will only gain more attention for them, when it finally gets released. Well, I guess that wraps up the film then, because...

Oh wait. There's more. The principal's not quite dead, and somehow manages to wake up with none of the cops noticing. He pulls the spear out of his body, then rushes at Birnbaum. The cops all fire at him, twice. When he finally dies, they discover the lack of evidence outside. Birnbaum then decides that the killer must have had a partner, and that he won't stop until the case is solved. Yikes.

The last scene sees Lyman sneaking back into the school. He sits at a desk, and reveals that the principal was his father. As he begins to type out his own script about the massacre, he sees a few drops of blood falling on his manuscript, and looks up at his father with a big grin on his face. After the end credits, there's an implication that there could be a sequel(there wasn't), followed by the sound of the squeaky bucket rolling around. THE END

Despite all my sarcasm, this one sort of grew on me, with all of the goofy charm. The effects were rather gory, and I think that the folks who were behind the Scream franchise probably saw this one, as they seem to borrow heavily from the concept. Like I said, if the plot had decided to put emphasis on either the horror or the comedy, it would have made the film more consistent. And maybe delete about 10 pages of dialogue anywhere in the script.

Well, despite all of the hassles with my laptop, I'm finally back in business. My next movie is Happy Hell Night, which I hope is a fun one. Oh, and does anyone recall a slasher flick that starred Linda Blair? I think it was set at a costume party, but I'm not sure what it was, or if it's available on Netflix. If someone could point me in the right direction, I'd appreciate it...this one's been bugging me since I started doing this, because I never seem to be able to get my hands on it. I think the title was similar to next week's movie, but I'm not 100% sure.

Oops, almost forgot...I rate Return to Horror High about 3-and-a-quarter killer trees out of 5. It was above average, and I certainly enjoyed many of the kills and gags throughout.

And what did Return to Horror High teach me this week?

-I have a dangerous attraction to Marcia Brady....I should probably seek help for that.

-Emergency personnel lack any way at all of spotting the difference between an actual dead body, an actor in makeup, and a rubber prop. Details, details, details...

-If you don't plan to make a sequel to your horror film, DON'T END IT ON A COOL CLIFFHANGER, DUMBASSES!!! (seriously, that just pissed me off, when I discovered that there was no sequel. The father-son killers concept would have been sweet.)

See you next week! Happy holidays!

The Final Terror

Okay, so I was going to watch a movie called Dead Wood using On Demand(thanks to NetFlix not sending me my next slasher yet), but I was having trouble with my digital box. So instead, I'm watching a movie on YouTube called The Final Terror. I saw this movie waaaaay back in my mid-teens, and all I really remember about it is that there are a number of people in it who were VERY early in their film careers when they made it. So, sit back and enjoy, as I SPOIL the heck out of this one....as usual.

Okay, so the movie starts out in a forest. Big help. Bambi is drinking from a stream with his cousin, Bambette, when they hear something. "Something" turns out to be a motorcycle, driven by what may actually be the world's worst driver. He and his girlfriend crash, and his leg is injured. His name is Jimmy, hers hasn't been mentioned yet.

She helps Jimmy to hop over to a tree that he can rest against, then runs off into the forest to get help. Wait, do woodland creatures have medical training? As Jimmy continues to be useless, the music turns scary, then....nothing happens! Sheer genius. I hope Bambi eats him.

Jane Doe finds a house with a gigantic "6" on it. Hey, maybe it was painted by that British guy who used to paint enormous numbers on things on Sesame Street. You know, the guy who later became a neighbor of The Jeffersons? No? I'm the only person who remembers shit like that? Damn.

Wait, this movie is still on. Oops. Jane Doe knocks, then starts to jog away. Again...sheer genius. She runs back in the direction she started from, while we watch a deer drinking more water. Hey, wouldn't it be sort of awesome if the animals started cranking up chainsaws? Somebody write that movie, so I can watch it.

Jim has vanished. She calls his name about a dozen or so times, then walks around in the clearing. When she's standing still again, Jim's body falls out of a tree, hanging upside down. For a guy with a busted leg, Jim sure is acrobatic! Oh, nope...he's dead. Being upside down was Jim's kryptonite, I guess. I'm thinking it was a suicide.

Jane Doe starts screaming her head off, because that's a surefire way to keep hillbillies in the woods from finding you. As she starts running again, she triggers a tripwire on the ground, and gets 2 branches to the face. Roll opening credits.

As mentioned before, this movie has a handful of people in it who went on to bigger and better things. For example, there's Rachel Ward, who gained recognition in The Thorn Birds; Daryl Hannah, star of such diverse films as Splash and Kill Bill; Joe Pantoliano, who was in both of the Fugitive movies, as well as numerous roles in other crime dramas...

And Adrian Zmed, star of....uh....well, he's in this!

Oh, and another thing I noticed: the movie has a different title. On YouTube, it's called Carnivore. Weird. Maybe the movie killed someone, and needed an alias. Wait, did I get distracted again?

Okay, so the credits finally wrap up, and we see Adrian Zmed's character, Marco, planning how he's going to spend all of his immense wealth after TJ Hooker becomes a smash hit. Wait, no, he's reading a magazine. Probably "Highlights for Children".

A weird redneck pops up behind him, and puts Marco in a headlock. He's some kind of authority figure or co-worker, and no one likes him. One guy goes so far as to pull a switchblade on the a-hole, and even Marco threatens him with a baseball bat.

Then we get a random scene in a dining hall. There's a group of forest rangers discussing a weekend party, then the scene switches back to the guy no one likes, now known as Eggar. He's listening to a radio news report about the couple we saw earlier, who are listed as "missing". If this guy could figure out how to rewind the film, he'd be a hero!

Eggar tries to warn one of the rangers not to take the newer recruits up to their intended destination, a place called Mill Creek. It's also where that couple died. He gets angry when the ranger refuses to listen to his warnings, but it leads to nothing.

A bus picks up the rangers, then they also get the girls. We then have to suffer through an awful, tone-deaf version of "3 Blind Mice". As they settle down to discuss the route of their camping hike, Eggar keeps taking his eyes off of the road to turn and stare at the group. Uh, maybe someone else should drive?

Sure enough, Eggar gets riled up. He tells them that he knows of several people who have been hurt in the region, then nearly crashes the bus into another motorist. The bus drives past a mental health facility, and some of the rangers imply that Eggar used to live there. Hmmm...

They park and unload the bus, and Eggar freaks out when several canned goods fall out of the back of the bus. So now Eggar's stealing food as well? Why? And if he's the main antagonist of this film, are they revealing it way too early? Probably.

At a stream, the group stops to collect firewood and fresh water. Marco asks Eggar if he knows of any marijuana fields growing in the woods, and Eggar finally snaps. He tells the group that he once brought another one of his antagonists up to the woods, tied the person down, and left him there. Then he lashes out at 2 of the rangers, before cackling like a loon and running away to parts unknown. That Eggar's a wacky guy!

Later that night, around a campfire, a guy named either Reg or Rich tells a scary story. In his tale, a logging business was in the area. A young teen girl, 14, was abused by her uncle, who ran the logging business after her father(the original owner) passed away. Anyway, the uncle supposedly got shitfaced one night, and raped his niece, which drove her insane. She was put into that mental institution that was seen earlier, where she had a baby.

She was deemed unfit to care for a child, so the baby was taken away. Then, nearly 2 decades later, her son showed up to take her home. They went home together, but she proved to be too crazy for him to properly take care of her, so he eventually let her loose in the forest, to roam as she pleased. Of course, the story ends with a jump-scare, then Eggar shows up again.

He lectures the group against discussing things they know nothing about, then stomps away again. Then the group beds down for the night, and Eggar is seen driving the bus somewhere. Marco has gone off with 2 other guys, Nate and Boone, to look for marijuana, and they need him to be their lookout. They offer him a 20% profit on anything they find, then up it to a full third of the profits. Marco agrees, then they tell him to howl like a wolf until they return. They don't plan to come back, of course, and he's dumb enough to fall for their lies.

The next day, a girl named Melanie wakes up the rest of the group in the main campsite. They notice that Marco is missing, and it's revealed that the other 2 guys were pranking him. They form search parties to look for him, with the leader of the camp, Mike, forcing Boone and Nate to lead him to the spot where they abandoned Marco.

They don't find him there, but they do uncover something that looks like a bloody animal carcass. Mike tells the other 2 to report back to camp, then he lingers behind to search for Marco some more. As he wanders deeper into the woods, it looks as if something might be following him. Or maybe the camera crew were just complete tools.

Next up, we get a montage of random characters yelling yelling out Marco's name in various parts of the forest. Pretty thrilling stuff, I know. It would be awesome if some random character shouted "Polo!" at some point during the scene. Mike spots a stream, and decides that it would be the perfect time to remove his clothes and take a dip. There's a dip all right, but it seems to be in charge.

A group of searchers take a break, and Rachel Ward's character, Margaret, tells one of the pranksters that he's pretty much a dipshit for losing Marco. After he yells at her to mind her own business, then tries to start a brawl with Nate, one of the women notes, "I think that guy's psychotic." Gee, ya think so? I forgot, did this one win the Oscar for Best Screenplay?

Back to Skinnydipping Guy. He's leaning under a tree trunk, just sitting there like the useless lump that he is, when a menacing bare foot appears over his head. It belongs to a cute female whose name I didn't catch(surprise, surprise....), and they start making out, upside-down-Spider-Man style. Except that she's Spider-Man in this context. Okay, so my analogies suck. Sue me.

Wake me when the killing starts, okay?

Hey-hey, the couple decide to have sex! As they both "arrive", a figure standing behind them is seen, and he's holding a hooked blade up over his head. He repeatedly plants the blade into Mike's back, then he drags the girl out from under the corpse. Finally, something actually happened!

Nate and Boone find a cabin and a raft, as well as a makeshift grave. They poke around the property, with Nate looking outside and Boone investigating inside the cabin. Nate hears something, and goes inside to look for Boone, only to be attacked by a hillbilly in drag! Oh wait, it's just Boone, horsing around. As they both resume checking out the cabin, they find several cans just like the ones Eggar was trying to hide earlier.

As they continue to search, they find Eggar's cap, along with numerous items that had been stolen from the ranger school. They congratulate each other for cracking the case, then discover that he keeps an animal's severed head in one of his supply cabinets. That find helps them to decide to leave the premises.

Outside, they both break into a sprint to find the others. They must run pretty slowly, because the next scene takes place at night. The remaining members of the group note that Mike and Melanie, haven't returned yet. I'm going to assume that they were the ones killed during sex at the stream.

They decide to pair up, and take turns guarding the camp. Almost immediately after they fall asleep, a mysterious figure dressed in animal skins approaches the camp. He hovers over Marge and strokes her face, which causes her to wake up. She screams, and everyone else comes running to the rescue. It's revealed that no one saw the stranger, including the idiot who was supposed to be guarding the group.

Unable to sleep, they all sit by the fire. A noise at the edge of their site causes everyone to freak out yet again, and they all see a figure approaching the camp. A flashlight beam reveals Marco, alive and well, still howling. He reveals that he's been busy looking for the mythical marijuana plants, and has brought several back with him. He also claims that he's been exploring the forest, unaware of the search for him that the others undertook.

The black chick, who is named Vanessa(I think), gets pissed off that they all worried about Marco for nothing. She stomps off toward the outhouse, shrugging off the suggestion of bringing someone with her. Odds seem pretty good that Vanessa's days are numbered.

At the outhouse, she covers the toilet seat with paper(like Finch in American Pie), then finds what's left of Mike keeping her company. She goes hysterical, and the others arrive to see the body for themselves. Then they decide to start playing Eggar's game against him, by camouflaging themselves and trying to use stealth to hunt him instead. Yeah, I'm sure that'll work out just great.

They creep over to the cabin that was discovered earlier, and loudly demand that Eggar faces them. When there's no response, they break in, and find a frightened bird in a closet. They also find body parts in jars, as well as torn-up clothes that are covered in blood. Oh, and Daryl Hannah's character finally gets a name: Windy. Not Wendy. I actually looked it up, to verify what I was hearing. Windy. Yeesh.

Melanie, who has been kept alive, can hear them, but her captor has her in the basement, with his hand over her mouth. As the group leaves and prepares a raft to make their escape, Melanie is shown being terrorized and tortured by her assailant. Sucks to be her, huh?

As the raft makes fairly good progress, the killer drops Melanie's mangled body onto them from the trees. They continue down the stream, until it gets too shallow for them to paddle anymore, and resume hiking. Oh, and they bury Melanie. Screw the eventual investigation, let's sabotage a crime scene!

They finally discover the bus again, but agree to wait until night falls to approach it, in case there's a trap. When they finally check the bus out, they find that the engine is sabotaged, so they decide to sleep on the bus, after eating some food that they found in a cooler. They even make smores. So much for caution...

During the night, the bus is attacked. As they all scurry to escape, it looks as if Vanessa is the next one to bite it. They rush back into the woods, and Windy somehow gets separated from the rest. She calls out their names, but no one answers her. The group even looks for her, and only locate Windy when she begins to scream.

She's injured, so Marco and Nate run back to the bus for a first aid kit. Windy gets stitched up, and it starts to rain. As the group continues their journey, Boone becomes unstable. He's stoned out of his gourd, and decides to leave the group to stalk Eggar by himself. He even makes spears and traps. Then he climbs a thick tree, to look for his prey.

Marco tries to draw Eggar out, by promising to hurt him badly when they find him. Eggar springs up behind Marco, and chokes him with a rope. As Marco gasps and tries to poke out Eggar's eyes, the rest of the group leap up from camouflaged hiding places, and begin to retaliate against him.

Boone climbs down from his tree, and finds the group attacking Eggar like savages. They beat him, kick him, bash his face into the ground....it's not pretty. Then Boone gets stabbed from behind by someone else! He screams, and the hikers stop hurting Eggar to face the new threat.

It's Eggar's mother, presumably the rape victim from the campfire story. She runs forward with the curved blade that was used earlier raised over her head, howling like a cavewoman, and sets off one of the traps, a log suspended by ropes, covered in sharp spears. Her body is impaled and pushed through the air, as the survivors watch in stunned silence. As we see some random shots of the forest, the credits start rolling. THE END

Wow, talk about an abrupt conclusion. There were some pretty good kills though, and more suspense than these things usually have, so that was kind of a treat. But it's funny how much films like Wrong Turn and Cabin Fever(among many others) seemed to be "inspired" by many of the plot elements and set pieces in this one. Maybe it's just coincidence, but they sure do have a lot in common with The Final Terror. I'm giving this one 3.75 killer trees out of 5, mostly for the nostalgia of seeing it again after so many years.

And what did I l learn from The Final Terror?

-There was a period of time when the name "Adrian Zmed" was given top billing in a movie. Who knew?

-When you find out that someone you care about has been murdered, you should always tamper with the evidence and bury the body in the middle of nowhere. Screw the next of kin and investigators!

-When you decide to go out in a strange forest in the middle of the night to take a dump, bring along a friend. Otherwise, you get what you deserve!

Up next, hopefully, is Pieces. It looks pretty insane, so this should be a fun week. See you soon, if my luck with movies doesn't fizzle!

HellBent

Well, this week I'm watching a movie an old friend suggested. It's a gay-themed slasher flick called HellBent, and all my friend would say about it was that it would definitely qualify as a cheesy slasher flick, so there ya go. SPOILERS ahead!

The movie begins with a drunk guy carrying balloons through a forest at night. Riiiiiiight. Balloon Boy trips and falls, then starts calling out the name George. He hears someone nearby, gets himself worked up, then has a panic attack when someone(George, apparently) leaps at him from the darkness. Then they pop most of the balloons. Yup, this all seems perfectly logical.

Back in their car, the couple start going at it, and again, there's a noise outside. While George remains in the car, the other guy decides to hoist himself out the window to look around. From a distance, a shadowy figure watches them. As George starts to take advantage of his lover's awkward position(by, and this is not a joke, tickling his feet), the killer passes by the windshield unseen by either of the men. Then the dude hanging out the window gets decapitated.

George doesn't realize it at first, so he tugs on his friend to get him inside the car, then sees the bloody stump where a human head used to ne attached. He also spots the killer, and tries to start the car. The killer smashes his window with a scythe, then the credits start up.

When the movie resumes, we see a cop named Eddie going through mugshots on his computer. He prints them out, then a cute female cop drops some graphic crime scene pictures on his desk. The other guy who was killed was named Mike, according to her. She sees his printouts, and starts to tease him, then their boss asks Eddie to step into his office. The lieutenant asks Eddie to pass out flyers about the murders when he goes out that evening. Oh, and the female cop is Eddie's sister.

Back home, Eddie decides to use his dad's old cop uniform as his Halloween costume. He even goes to a costume shop to purchase a plastic badge. When he leaves the shop, a transvestite who resembles Shrek compliments his uniform. Yeesh.

What follows is a "handing out flyers" montage. Then Eddie stops at a tattoo parlor. He watches a guy get a tattoo on his shoulders, and sees a trail of blood dripping down the guy's back. Flustered, he drops his papers, gathers them up again, and quickly leaves.

Bored, Eddie finds a trash can, and practices tossing crushed cans into it. He stops when he realizes that a guy on a motorcycle is watching him. They discuss the murders, then the guy on the bike takes off. Eddie then interrupts his roommate, Chaz, having a three-way in a car. They discuss the murders, then go to lunch.

At their favorite diner, they meet up with Toby, another friend who happens to be another unconvincing transvestite.. They go looking for yet ANOTHER friend, named Joey. He's in the employee area of the diner, trapped in some kind of leather outfit. Apparently, he got "stuck" in the leather. Um, not that I'm homophobic or anything, but wasn't this supposed to be a slasher film? What happened with that?

Well, the killer must have heard me, because we see him next, sharpening his blade while recalling his previous murders. Then the 4 friends pile into a jeep and head out for some Halloween fun. Along the way, they tell Toby that they won't be going to a tranny bar, because none of the others are into it. Then they spot a couple in masks on a motorcycle and wave. Yeah, this is SO much better than getting to the point. They could have at least thrown in some lipstick lesbians to keep me interested, dagnabbit.

They pull off at the crime scene, where Eddie tells them about the gruesome crime scene pics he saw earlier. He goes into graphic detail, and Toby asks if he can open a window. As he goes on a rant about how he would kick the killer's ass, a hand grabs his throat. It turns out to be Joey, who grabbed him from the back seat. Then they decide to walk to the party, through the forest.

Everyone decides that they need to pee, so they each pick a different tree. Some noises in the woods startle them, then Eddie sees something moving around in the bushes nearby. He alerts the others, all of whom come back, except Joey. When Eddie catches a glimpse of a guy in a devil costume, he insists that Joey should join them.

They see Devil Guy darting behind trees, and theorize that perhaps he's disfigured, and ashamed of his appearance. Or that perhaps he's just shy. They try to lure him out by calling over to him, and see that he looks like a bodybuilder. Devil Guy then starts to move his hand back and forth, and they assume that he's jerking off, but he reveals that he's getting his murder weapon ready to use. Finally!

Assuming that he's joking, they all moon Devil Guy. Then he vanishes. While they wonder where he went, he pops up next to the quartet, and raises his arms above his head, scaring them strai--um, well, just really scaring them, at any rate. In the distance, they can see the lights from the Halloween celebration, so they keep moving.

When they arrive for the festivities, they notice Devil Guy again, watching them. Toby approaches him and tries flirting, but gets no response. They all go "trick or treating", and then complain that the candies they were given are all the same flavor: pineapple. Eddie reveals that he was also given a green condom. Uh, good for him? I guess? Seriously, is this even a horror film? NOTHING IS HAPPENING...

They decide to get drunk. Yay for them. Wish I was. Then 2 guys dressed as firefighters try to pick up Eddie, but Chaz scares them off. Eddie sees the guy he was talking to earlier in the day, the dude on the motorcycle. When the biker walks into a club, Eddie hesitates to follow him, so the others decide to go with him. As they walk in, Devil Guy watches.

Then we get a nightclub dancers montage, because, obviously, this movie needs more padding. The denizens fall into 2 categories: those who look like they belong in boy bands, and those who look like they belong in a Marilyn Manson video. Great choice....is there a Door #3?

Anyway, Eddie decides to try talking to Gay Fonzie. Despite Eddie's attempt to be friendly, the guy shoots him down. Speaking of shooting, Eddie reveals that the reason he got stuck behind a desk was because of an injury to one of his eyes. Wow, that's much more interesting than watching a suspense-filled sequence where a killer stalks his prey. Thank you, movie.

Then we switch over to Joey, the younger friend. Chaz saves him from an uncomfortable encounter, as the killer watches. They wander over to the main stage, where a guy is singing some unintelligible song. He pulls Joey onto the stage, but Joey gets dragged away by 2 security guys. Then he is pushed onto a table, while they pretend to use chainsaws on him. Well, I guess a fake killing is better than none.

After the song, Eddie introduces his buddies to the biker, who is named Jake. Everyone starts to leave the club, but Joey spots someone he likes and wants to stay. Chaz decides to stay as well, to keep an eye on him. Joey tries to talk to the guy, but he's not interested. Chaz asks Joey how it went, and Joey announces that he needs to puke.

In the bathroom, Chaz waits until everyone else leaves, then asks Joey if he's okay. He gives Joey some privacy then, and waits outside. Unfortunately, a guy catches his eye, so he follows him instead of waiting for Joey. Want to guess who shows up?

Joey tries to wash the stage blood off, and Devil Guy is right behind him. He disappears again when Joey stands up, but Joey hears him. He checks 2 bathroom stalls, then is scared by the jock he wanted to meet earlier. They start to make up, then make out. The jock leaves, and Devil Guy shoves a treat bag over Joey's head, before slashing his throat open. He drags Joey into a stall, and shoves the corpse onto the floor, revealing that he actually decapitated him. As Devil Guy leaves, 2 other partygoers find the body. Yay, something happened!

Outside at the Halloween Carnival, Eddie, Jake and Toby are just aimlessly walking around. It's like a metaphor for the script. Toby eventually decides to mingle, and tells the others he'll meet up with them later. He ends up at a bar, ordering a cocktail and chatting up another cross-dresser.

Eddie and Jake try their hands at a shooting gallery carnival game. Jake turns out to be a virtual gunslinger, while Eddie has all the depth perception of Mr. Magoo. They catch up to Toby, who is drunkenly trying to win another game. Then they also see Chaz, who reveals that he ditched Joey. Chaz tells Eddie to lighten up, then leaves with his "date". Devil Guy bumps into Chaz, but Chaz fails to realize the danger he might be in.

Eddie and Jake leave to go find Joey, and Toby decides to stagger around for awhile. A couple of straight guys try to pick him up, until they see that he's a he. Toby then convinces a guy to take his picture, only to realize just how ridiculous he looks in his costume.

At the club, Toby is spotted by Chaz, who gets his attention. As Chaz tries to reach him, Devil Guy looms nearby. The lights begin to strobe, and Chaz gets high off of a pill he took earlier that night. Devil Guy appears behind him, then stabs him several times, without anyone noticing. As he feels the blade slice him up, Chaz looks at the long cuts all over his body, then the killer decapitates him, and leaves his body on the dance floor. Y'know, as bad as this movie is, the kills are actually pretty gruesome. I could almost not hate this one, if it weren't so damned cheesy.

Anyway, back to Toby. He's in the alley behind the nightclub, puking his guts out, when Devil Guy appears. I think Devil Guy missed his true calling...he should be a ninja. A big, homosexual, horn-wearing, scythe-carrying ninja. Or not.

Toby tries to stand up straight, and finds Devil Guy observing him. Oddly enough, Devil Guy makes no move to kill Toby. He just leaves him alone. Toby, being the Mayor of Stupidville, follows the maniac. He also tries to ascertain what Devil Guy's motives are, but Devil Guy is a man of few(or no) words.

Toby switches tactics, and starts to undress. The killer exits the area, so Toby follows him. Finally, Toby thinks of one last way to get Devil Guy's attention: he tosses over his driver's license. When Devil Guy sees that Toby is a guy, he finally turns around. He drops his severed head collection, stands before Toby and then chops his head off to add to the collection. Uh, couldn't you figure out he was a guy before now?

Back at Club Meat(wow, that was subtle), Eddie and Jake see a lot of cops, as well as crime scene tape. The cop at the entrance turns them away, so they try to find an alternate route. Both men climb over a high chain-link fence, then sneak into the building. As he wanders around in the empty building, Eddie realizes that Jake now seems to be among the missing.

He goes back outside, where he sees Jake getting ready to leave on his bike. As Jake tries to convince Eddie to go with him, he sees Devil Guy sneaking up on the young cop. He tries to warn Eddie, but Devil Guy manages to cut Eddie's face before he can dodge out of the way. In an attempt to save his new friend, Jake begins to climb the fence again, but the killer gets in one quick cut, and Jake falls back to the ground.

Eddie gets back on his feet, then heads into the club again. He runs into a dead end, and finds a hiding spot just as Devil Guy appears. He sees the hulking killer searching for him, so Eddie locks himself into a cage that barely keeps him out of Devil Guy's reach. Frustrated by this turn of events, Devil Guy takes another swipe with his weapon, and the tip of the blade scratches Eddie's eyeball. Ouch! The cops hear the commotion and show up, just after Devil Guy etches his scythe across the eyeball.

Back at the police station, Eddie gives his statement, then asks his sister to make sure that the facts in the case aren't altered for sensationalism. Before she leaves, she spots Jake, and gives her brother a high-five about as discreet as an explosion at a dynamite factory.

Eddie goes into the nearest restroom, and fixes his glass eye's position. Unfortunately, Jake walks in, and sees the eyeball out of whack. Eddie explains about the accident that caused him to lose the eye. When Eddie talks about ending the night early and finding his friends, Jake talks him into a ride on the motorcycle. They return to Eddie's apartment building at warp speed.

Eddie finds the building he and his friends live in empty, so he heads to his own apartment last. Jake has already let himself in, and the two start to undress. When Eddie finally gets a look at the tattoo Jake was getting earlier, he is told only that it has something to do with the ending of a relationship.

Then Jake starts acting weird. He shies away from Eddie's advances, then tries to get Eddie to share a cigarette with him. When Eddie does it wrong somehow, Jake takes another puff, and blows the smoke into Eddie's mouth. Then he asks where the bedroom is. Could he possibly be the killer? Do I care at this point?

Once they get to their destination, Eddie asks Jake to turn around while he undresses. Jake complies, looking at other areas of the room instead. He notes a drop of blood on Eddie's license, then gets distracted by noise from outside. He looks out of the window, but nothing seems unusual. When he turns around again, he sees that Eddie has taken his shirt off.

Jake handcuffs Eddie to the bed, then Eddie asks him to use a condom. Jake heads toward the bathroom to look for one. In the hallway, he turns to look at Eddie. Then he enters the bathroom to find the condoms. Once there, he seems to be putting off his return to the bedroom, exploring the room.

As Eddie begins to lose his patience, Jake spots an open door. Inside that room, he sees numerous trophies, pictures and sports memorabilia throughout the room. He decides to return to the bedroom, but a loud banging sound catches his attention. Jake sees that it came from a partially open window, and nearly walks into Devil Guy. Devil Guy then stabs him.

Eddie hears Jake being butchered, and gets frightened. Then he sees Devil Guy, and REALLY gets frightened. As Devil Guy prepares to decapitate the young cop, Jake manages to stab the killer from behind. Then Jake collapses to the floor, right next to you-know-who. Ha!

Eddie finally manages to get himself free, and runs to the living room to find his phone. When he locates the damned thing, Eddie calls 911. Unfortunately, Devil Guy gets up once more, and Eddie hears him go after Jake yet again. Gee, Jake really pisses this guy off, huh?

Eddie then rushes to the kitchen, and grabs something from a drawer to use as a weapon. Oh, and he finds the severed heads of his friends right after that. Y'know, normally this is where I'd make a joke about "giving head", but with this film, that just seems a little too on the nose.

Devil Guy then bursts in unannounced, and the chase resumes. After much effort, Eddie manages to run into the bedroom, shut the door, and lock it. Of course, Devil Guy tears through the door like cardboard. Eddie gets himself and Jake onto the fire escape, and then he and Devil Guy fight over his gun. Desk cops get guns? Well, I guess so.

The gun falls to another part of the fire escape, and Devil Guy licks Eddie's fake eye. Yeesh. Devil Guy then flings him over the fire escape, but Eddie manages not to fall the entire way to the ground. He gets the gun again while dangling from a railing, and shoots Devil Guy in the forehead. While he climbs back up to check on Jake, Eddie gets a bystander to call for an ambulance.

Eddie watches the ambulance take Jake to the hospital, then sees his sister taunting Devil Guy, who is being loaded into another ambulance. When Eddie realizes that the killer is still alive, Devil Guy opens his eyes, then reveals that he has Eddie's glass eye in his mouth. THE END

Man oh man, where to begin...first off, the slow pace killed this thing long before the killings started to ramp up. And while the deaths themselves were fairly graphic, they were also monotonous. I mean, did he really have to decapitate every victim? But the biggest missed opportunity was not fleshing out the killer a bit. A cool background story or motive would have gone a long way toward making this one less painful to sit through. 1 and a half killer trees out of 5, and even that feels generous.

And what did I learn from HellBent?

-Well, if you ever get attacked by a maniac, be sure you bring along a glass eye.

-Transvestites NEVER look like women. Except to other transvestites. And crazy killers.

-A killer being taken away on a stretcher is allowed to keep his mask on. I mean, hey, identifying criminals is waaaaay over-rated, right?

Next up is a pretty old one called Pieces. Please God, let it not suck...