Y'know, before slasher films became self-aware parodies, they actually tried to frighten their audiences...I know, those of you who have only seen the Scream films and stuff like Saw probably think that slashers are supposed to be either ironic comedies or torture porn, but before the '90's, some slasher flicks were actually pretty scary. This week's film, Visiting Hours, is a pretty good example of this. As always, SPOILERS will apply, so read at your own risk!
The story opens up with Deborah, a reporter, interviewing a criminal defense lawyer. He's defending a serial rapist, and she gives him the 5th degree. As the interview gets more tense, her boss Gary, played by William Shatner has the station cut the segment short. Oh, and the suspected rapist, played by a rather creepy Michael Ironside, is sitting at home, getting angrier at the feminist reporter by the second.
On the way out, he tells her that her interview style is bound to piss off a number of viewers, and that he probably won't allow the segment to get on the air. Being William Shatner, he delivers every line with wild arm gestures and weird emphasis on random words. Anyway, Deborah wishes him a good night, then heads home. Angry, she decides to walk home.
Well, apparently "walking home" meant something else back in 1982, because we see her parking a car in front of her house in the very next scene. Inside, she finds wineglasses and empty bottles in several rooms. Her housekeeper, Francine, is nowhere in sight. The movie then treats us to a good ol' fashioned scary movie cliches montage: doors open loudly for no reason, lights flicker, there's even a pet parrot that leaps at Deb from out of nowhere.
Deb finally decides that it's okay to relax. She prepares to take a shower, and hears something in her bedroom. It's Colt, wearing jewelry, brandishing a knife and half-naked. He cuts Deb, and a chase around her home begins. Deb sees that the wound is gushing blood, so she locks herelf in the bedroom and tries to dial 911. As she realizes that the phone is dead, Colt removes some of the jewelry and starts to vandalize Deb's bedroom.
She opens a window, but no one outside can hear her screams for help. Deb decides to escape via a dumbwaiter, just seconds before Colt enters the bathroom. He finds her almost immediately, and they play tug-of-war with the pulley's ropes. Frustrated, the killer decides to cut the rope, and let her fall to her death. She crashes, but lives. As Deb tries to crawl to safety, she comes face-to-face with an older man, who calls 911.
At the hospital, the doctors determine that Deb has a fracture, but that the knife wound just missed being a fatal cut by a few inches. She's unconscious, but very much alive. Colt returns to his apartment, where he is accosted by a nosy neighbor who has the hots for him. Colt ignores her flirting and heads straight for his apartment.
His apartment is filled with framed letters and pictures of women he's attacked. I guess he doesn't get his decorating tips from Martha Stewart. Colt washes up and gets ready to go back out, and we see a menacing silhouette move toward Deb's hospital curtain. It's not Colt, though---it's some goofy-looking nurse who offers her a sip of juice. She tells Deb that the police need to ask her some questions, and that she's recovering from the attack rather well.
The investigators enter the room, and the nurse quietly leaves the room. At the nurses' station, we meet another potential victim, Connie, who has a VERY active social life. It's a good thing the killers in these movies don't kill oversexed young women, huh? She gets killed a few scenes later, in the room of an elderly female patient. Nurse Forehead finds the bodies, then chases Colt, who escapes via the elevator. After the police question her, our large-skulled nurse turns down a police escort and drives herself home.
Colt starts to follow her, clenching and unclenching a rubber ball. As the nurse gets home, she picks up some of her children's toys in the front yard, one of which sounds like a baby hyena having an orgasm. As she gets into the house, checks on her kids, and strips, a half-nude woman joins her. ROWR!
At a nearby coffee shop, Colt stares intently at a young blond. She ditches her friends and follows him home. Wow, that's smart! Colt's nosy neighbor tries to spy on them, but he slams her door before she can even voice a single syllable.
Inside his apartment, Colt spills a drink on the girl, themn tells her to strip. When she refuses, Colt aggressively attacks her and rapes the poor girl. He forces her onto his bed, then threatens her with a knife, but lets her live.
Deb decides to give a press conference during all of this, but finds the questions about her attack rather unnerving. Colt watches the press conference with his elderly father, and it brings back repressed memories of his father abusing him sexually.
Back in the hospital, Deb decides to visit the female patient in her old room, unaware that she was murdered. A patient named Vinnie tells her about the murder, and Deb demands to be released. Nurse Forehead tries to calm her down, which only makes her more upset. Somehow this leads to an abrupt scene where Deb is seen on a stretcher, surrounded by medical staff. Yup, it's always wise to confuse your audience.
In the next scene, we see Colt stealing a hospital uniform. An actual doctor walks in, sees that he doesn't belong, then demands that Colt leaves. The next time we see Colt, he enters the O.R. and injects something into Deb's IV. She starts freaking out, then falls asleep.
The scene abruptly changes again, and we see our favorite nurse trying to get her children off to school. One of the kids, Bridget, is sick and decides to stay home. Colt starts to photograph the mother, then returns home to make a collage. Oh, and he has more flashbacks.
Deb, awake after her surgery, tries to tell Gary that she saw her attacker in the operating room, but he refuses to take her claims seriously. Heck, he even starts eating her dessert in front of her. Then Nurse Forehead meets a patient in a clinic, the same blond who Colt beat up and raped a few scenes earlier.
Colt listens to a radio show, then sneaks back into the hospital through some tunnels underground. While Deb and the nurse bond, Colt meets a chatty patient who gives him WAY too much info about Deb and the staff. Colt nearly gets spotted, but ducks into the patient's room to hide out.
Shatner and Deb argue about her release, and she decides to try to formulate a way to capture the deranged attacker. That night, Colt enters her wing dressed as a doctor. After making sure that no one saw him, he kills the talkative male patient by stuffing the rubber ball into his mouth, then stabbing him to death. The security guard rushes in, and Colt attacks him, too.
As Colt escapes, Deb has a breakdown, and thev nurse soaks up her tears with thsat ginormous monstrosity of a forehead. Colt goes back to the underground tunnels to ditch his disguise, gets to his van, and drives away.
At his apartment, though, Colt gets a nasty surprise: someone broke in! They spraypainted the walls, they wrecked the furniture--and they found his picture room. He sees that two photos of Deb have been taken, and he rushes back out.
The hospital is in chaos, filled with cops and staff. Shatner promises to stay with Deb all night, and calms her down. Again. Nurse Forehead discovers that the girl that Colt raped earlier was the one who vandalized his home. When she swees the pictujres of Deb and herself, she tells the girl to take them to Deb's room.
A phone call from Colt makes the nurse freak out. She tries to get one of the many cops to follow her home, but they all refuse, so she races off by herself. Upstairs at the hospital, the rape victim waits to be escorted into Deb's room.
Back at the House That Forehead Built, Colt watches her drive up. She stops nat the kitchen first to grab a weapon to stab him with, then finds her kid's dolls beheaded in the living room and screams. She checks on both children next, and they seem safe. Back in the hallway, she thinks she sees movement from another room, and tries to sneak up on the intruder, but that room tourns out to be empty.
Nurse Forehead goes back downstairs to call the police, and Colt attacks her while she's on the phone, stabbing her in the stomach and taking her picture. While she cries out and writhes in pain, the kids all wake up, and call the police. As more cops arrive at the hospital, the rape victim, Deb and the Shat all stand around staring at the crowd and confusion.
Colt heads home, drinks some beer, and takes several pills from two botles. Then he smashes the beer bottle with his arm, and grinds the glass into his arm before calling 911. As both ambulances arrive at the hospital, we see the injured nurse with a breathing tube in her mouth. One of the kids glimpses Colt on a stretcher, and hides her face from him.
The SWAT team gets to his apartment, with Shatner tagging along. They find the photo collage, which shows that, without the pictures the young woman removed, it looks just lik,e a human skull. Creepy!
Colt waits for the nurse who brings him to get x-rays to leave, then sets his plan in motion. He sneaks into a handful of private hospital rooms, and fiddles around with their life-saving monitors. Then he attacks one of the security guards. Finally, he assaults Deb in her own bathroom.
She tries to grab a weapon, but he makes her drop it, so she throws a cup of clear liquid at Colt's face. It must have been acid, because he howls in pain and starts clawing at his eyes. As he starts to wash his eyes out with water, Deb runs. She makes it to an elevator, but not before he manages to get his arm in the door. She manages to hurt him with her shoes, and presses a number of random buttons.
Deb gets off after a few floors, and starts running again, and Colt starts chasing when his elevator door opens and he hears her. His kooky neighbor is in the hall outside his apartment, and she tells Shat about his trip to the hospital not long ago. As Deb lures Colt into a secluded, underground wing of the hospital, we see Nurse Forehead being treated, and a dog who barks at Deb from behind a large window. There's also a figure driving one of the staff's undrground go-karts, but it's not Colt.
Deb, thinking it IS him, hides. After the driver leaves, Colt leaps at her, and the chase resumes. Deb hides in an X-ray room, and sees Nurse Forehead on the examination table. A technician finds her and promises to get help. After a moment, Deb decides to see if the coast is clear, and finds Cole staring at her. The stupid inane chase begins yet again.
Colt chases her around a corner, and finds himself facing a series of curtainsd. Ripping down all 3 reveals nothing, sop he starts to wander a little bit. He finds another closed curtain and hesitates, just before a hands comes out, holding a scalpel. Deb stabs Colt several times, then uses the blade to push the killer to the floor. As he lays there dying, Deb sloooowly starts to leave, and Colt jumps at her one last time, grabbing her ankle with one bloody hand. Then he dies again.
As Nurse Sheila is wheeled away to b e operated on, Shatner and Deb find each other and head for the exit. The credits roolover Colt's grinning face. THE END
Well, despite being a day late and having NONE of the editing tools work,ing, I think I did pretty good this week. The movie? Eh, not so much. Thesetting was generic, and the heroine was downright pathetic. As far as hospital horror goes, I'd give this 2 out of 5 killer trees.
And what did I learn from Visiting Hours?
-Foreheads are deadly.
-Old women and drugged-out teens find killers to be sexy.
-Hospitals are death traps!!
No idea what my next slasher is, so it'll be a surprise for all of us! Hopefully, by then the editing tools will be working again!
Sunday, April 3, 2011
Saturday, March 26, 2011
Dead Tone
Have you ever seen a slasher film where, at the start of the film, a group of kids accidentally prank-call a killer? Yeah, so have I...about a thousand times. Sadly, Dead Tone(also called 7eventy-5ive, according to the IMDB) is one thousand and one. Let's see if it offers anything new in the storyline department...the usual SPOILER warning applies. Ready?
Okay, so the very first scene is some sort of nonsense involving Flavor Flav dressed in a Dracula costume. He offers up some generic evil banter, then teleports away in a small fog cloud. Um, what was the point of that? Is the movie an anthology flick? Is the killer a vampire hiding among humans?
Apparently that scene was just pointless time-filler, because the next scene involves an entirely different scenario. This group of young teens is having a slumber party, while their parents are downstairs having a drunken shindig of their own. The kids decide to make a series of prank phone calls, until one person threatens to call the police. This upsets one of the kids, a nerdy-looking boy named William, who threatens to get them all in trouble. His twin brother, Stephen, stops William from leaving, and the kids all feign sleep when one of the adults checks on them. Seeing the cordless phone on the floor, Dad picks it up, leaves the room, and puts the phone back on the charger before rejoining the party.
In the middle of the night, long after everyone has either fallen asleep or passed out drunk, the phone rings. William wakes up and answers it. It's the guy they pissed off earlier, and he sounds like he's had sufficient time to get his rage on. William apologizes and explains that he wasn't in on the prank, but the guy doesn't care. He bursts through an upstairs door, where he was hiding, and scares the holy heck out of William. Wearing a tank top, a black ski mask, and holding an axe, the maniac tries to chop up the boy, but his father gets in the way and is killed instead. The crazed killer then hacks up the remaining adults, either dismembering or beheading them as the frightened children hide under the bed upstairs.
The killer prepares to leave, then hears the children whimpering upstairs. Dragging the axe behind him the killer finds the bedroom, but William and Stephen's mother survived, and tries to tackle the guy to the floor. He strangles her to death, then exits the room. Stephen runs over to her, and he exchanges a look with his brother. The police arrive, and no sign of the killer is found. Oh, and the detective in charge of the investigation is played by the original Hitcher, Rutger Hauer! Neat!
10 years later, we find ourselves at a ramshackle dwelling in the middle of nowhere. In the middle of the squalor, a greasy-haired, chain-smoking, tattooed redneck is masturbating to bondage porn. His phone rings, and the redneck tries to get the caller to hang up. His caller taunts him though, claiming to be someone he's VERY familiar with. Oh, and the voice also implies that he's in the redneck's house, watching his every move. The redneck starts checking all of the doors and windows, then picks up a kitchen knife. The scene ends when a cat outside scares the guy, and it turns out that the phone call was a prank after all.
The pranksters are a group of college kids, and the prank call is part of a game they play called Seventy-Five. They apparently play the game for cash, and the crowd seems to think that the game is better than sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. Schmucks. The big winner, Marcus, makes his way through the crowd, until a cute little waif named Jody flirts with him. He turns her down, apparently because he thinks her parents would disapprove of them as a couple.
Next, Marcus chats up a couple, Roxy and Kareem. Through this conversation, we get to learn the rules of Seventy-Five: You make a prank call, and it has to be somebody random. Then, once they answer the phone, you have to keep them on the line for 75 seconds. Any less, and you lose the game. Supposedly, Marcus is the only player who has never lost the game. Yeah, riiiiight.
Oops, back to the redneck, I guess. Great, the dipshit's still masturbating. Couldn't we have arrived 5 minutes later??? I guess not, because someone dressed in black sneaks into his house. The stranger disconnects the guy's porno, then plants a blade in his forehead when he leans back. As blood spatters cover the monitor, the porn movie comes back on.
Back on campus, we learn that the school is called Brattman College. Sounds like the world's most annoying superhero--excluding Son of the Mask, of course. A cute blond, named Karina tells her mother during a cell phone conversation that she did well on her latest exam. A goofy-looking guy named Brandon congratulates her, and she brushes off his praise. Turns out, Karina thinks that Brandon has been cheating on her, and her friends all back that story up. Brandon's friends also arrive, as does an unseen watcher. Hmmm...The only pointless character missing from this scene is freaking Waldo!
Brandon wants some alone time with Karina, but she invites both groups of friends to tag along. Wow, Brandon looks pissed! Dude needs to work on his poker face, if you know what I mean.
Faster than you can say "abrupt scene change", we wind up at the police station. Rutger Hauer, sporting the same haircut as the Quaker Oats guy, wants to re-open the unsolved massacre from a decade ago. His boss disagrees, calling it a waste of resources. Rutger claims that the redneck who was murdered was somehow connected to that earlier slaughter, but his boss doesn't see it. He orders Rutger to drop the investigation, then throws him out of his office.
Back on campus, Karina brags that she thinks she has a 4.0 for the semester, and one of her friends, Jody, brags about acing an exam as well. Karina's gay friend, Shawn, tells everyone that Jody's grade was the result of a fling with her teacher, and everyone laughs at the idea of her sleeping around. Nice friends.
The unseen stalker from 2 scenes ago watches the group from a nearby vantage point, and sees Brandon get up to use the bathroom. While he's gone, a guy named Kareem sneaks up on one of the girls to scare her, but he seems harmless. Brandon, on the other hand, feels a weird presence in the bathroom, but shrugs it off. With headphones on, he fails to see a hooded figure walk toward him with a hunting knife raised in a threatening manner. Before the killer can make his move, another guy walks in. The killer quickly puts the knife away, and walks out of the bathroom. Damn!
The girls all get together to pick out clothes for the impromptu party and talk about boys. Kareem and Shawn more or less do the same thing. The group meets outside and everyone loads their luggage into a vehicle that pulls up. Luggage? For a party that was only thought up 2 scenes ago? In all my years of going to parties with friends, I never once needed luggage.
Back at the police station, Rutger(whose character finally gets a name, "John") talks to a very pretty Asian cop about his theory regarding the redneck murder. She gives him the idea to look up the juvie records for all of the kids. Since they all had parents murdered that night, several were put into foster homes. Inspired, John sends her to look up their various adoption records.
Back at the Body Bag party, they all pull over to pee and stretch their legs at a gas station. A werewolf boy scares them, then a zombie clerk gives them the restroom key. Swear to god....would I lie to you? (well, okay, I would...) The girl whose name I completely forget decides to use a toilet that would make Stinky McStinkbag gag a maggot. Someone enters the restroom, and she calls out every name she can think of, with no response. False alarm--it's the little bastard with the werewolf mask. Nope, wait--it was Marcus!
The gas station owner sees a news item about the killer on tv, and tries to warn the kids, but they speed away. John, by the way, gets the files he needed. He and the hot Asian detective start looking through about a gazillion files. Exciting. Every horror film needs a montage showing people reading. They find the file of the redneck, but nothing else.
Meanwhile, a cop pulls the van over. He and his partner scare the kids, and we find out that Brandon's dad is an influential politician. The cops let them go, after busting some balls. The place they're partying at turns out to be a mansion. Sweeeeet.
Inside, the party's already started. We meet "Crazy Cal", an obnoxious fat guy who better die next. He takes them on a tour of the estate, and interrupts a couple mid-coitus. Please kill Cal. Please. NOW.
Outside, at the pool, 2 of the guys ogle a babe, while Karina and her friends gossip over the alcohol. Blah, blah, blah...is this a slasher flick or a CW show? Detective John and Jacklyn Chan interrupt with a scene of their own, where they corner a scary guy in a chair. Oooooh, he might sit you to death! SCARY!!! They discover that the guy is a corpse, right before stumbling into his girlfriend's body. Turns out that she was one of the kids.
Back at the party, everyone's playing a drinking game. Marcus calls their game stupid, then introduces the party goers to Seventy-Five. He explains the rules(AGAIN...?), then lets Cal start. He's followed by Jody, then the rest of the main characters. They all make successful calls,then Spazzy Jazzy gets a turn. He accidentally calls the killer. What are the odds? Oh, and the killer calls back, so they can hear him kill a girl!
After the call ends, Scott and Marcus have an argument. Then the killer calls again, and talks to Marcus, who loses his cool. The killer suggests that he's coming after them, then the party resumes. Yeah, you heard me....after a killer they pissed off a decade ago finds them, these idiots decide to ignore the danger they're in. Sheesh.
Everyone then pairs off. The phone keeps ringing, but everyone at the party ignores it. As the crowd dwindles down to about a dozen or so people, a ditzy blond answers the phone. It's the killer, so being blond, she basically gives him the address, directions, and a 40-page description of everyone he wants to kill. Dumbass. Everyone freaks out, but no one else leaves.
John and Jacklyn Chan drive up to a murder scene. It's another one of the kids, the dorky kid who made the first call. The partiers dim the lights, and the dumb blond wanders off alone. Yay! The killer made my wish come true! She goes to the front door, and the killer knocks her head off with an ax.
The killer crashes through a glass wall next, while chasing a girl who saw him, Julie. Instead of getting her, though, he kills 2 drunken idiots. One gets the axe in the chest, while the other guy hides. The killer hears him, and finds him hiding behind some barrels. The doofus trips,and the killer pins his head down with his foot, before snapping his neck with the heel. Then he slams him onto a counter top and dismembers the corpse.
The scared girl who was being chased in the first place makes a noise, and the killer tracks her down as well. He slams the axe through the door of the cabinet where she hid, and her dead, bloody body falls at his feet. A couple screwing in the pool are next: He gets decapitated while she's underwater going down on him, then she dies after seeing his bloody neck-stump. The killer dunks her head under the water until she drowns.
Okay, so now that most of the generic characters are gone, Kareem sees the corpse of the girl in the jacuzzi. He and his girlfriend find Marcus and Anna, and even though her body is gone, Marcus agrees to help him search the house for the rest of their friends. They find 2 naked partiers while looking for Jody, then step in some blood. Anna somehow vanishes, and the nimrods start whispering her name. Her corpse is flung at them by the killer, and a chase ensues.
Marcus, Jody and Cal all run down the hall, screaming like rabid jackals, and the hallway dead-ends at a locked door. As the killer finds them, he start throwing a fit. and Karina opens the door from the other side, just in time. they lock the door, which is metal, and the killer leaves after failing to get in.
Trapped, Cal finds Brandon brandishing a baseball bat. He gets the bat, then they let in 3 more survivors. Everyone decides to blame each other for the predicament that they're in, and Karina makes them all see that they need to work together to survive.
After half an hour passes with no further attacks, they asks Brandon to find the keys and see if Shawn is still alive somewhere in in the mansion. Brandon steps quietly into the hall and finds the hiding spot where the keys are kept, but misses them.As he reaches again, Karina sneaks up on the poor guy, and he nearly has a heart attack. As he finally grabs the keys, the killer arrives, and Brandon gets an axe to the back. Karina tries to escape over a balcony, and the killer sends her plunging into the bushes, alive but injured.
The remaining survivors start bickering again, and Cal tries to calm them all down. He decides to exit the room to see if he can hot wire a car. Good riddance, Fat Boy. Kareem and Marcus hear someone screaming for help, and come running down the stairs at the same time that Jody finds a hiding place. Karina finds a wall of security monitors and watches everyone move around the mansion.
Kareem, Marcus and someone whose name I already forgot find Roxy dead, just as Cal gets a car started. From the backseat, the killer punches Cal so hard that his head hits the windshield, sending blood flying. The killer repeatedly bashes him in the head, while an operator at OnStar offers to help. Comedy gold!
Marcus fights the killer. As the killer starts to get the upper hand, Kareem attacks the maniac from behind. The killer drops his weapon, which Scott picks up. He swings it, and kills Kareem! While Marcus asks"What the fuck did you do?" 5000 times in a row, it becomes clearer that the killer and Scott are working together.
Marcus makes his way back to Karina, and tells her what Scott did. As they watch the monitors, they see Scott kill Shawn. Then he finds them, and they demand to know why he did it. He reveals that he and the killer are actually Stephen and the weirdo gas station guy. They met as children in a place called Farley, where both were either in a mental hospital or a foster home. They made a pact to kill all of the other kids who had survived the massacre 10 years ago. Stephen then kills the gas station guy, and he and Marcus start to brawl. Karina tries to fight Stephen as well, but he throws her off. She stabs his hand, pinning him to the floor, and he manages to pry the blade off of his hand.
Before he can finish Marcus off, John bursts in and shoots Marcus. Karina dies too, and Stephen manages to fool them into thinking he was a victim, not the killer. As they tell him to take it easy, the gas station guy rises up behind the cops and kills them as the scene fades to black. THE END
Boy, this one was all over the place! I mean, most of these newer slashers suffer from a lack of kills, but this one seemed to kill a 10-page section of the freakin' phonebook! Despite the stupidity of some of it, I'd give it 4 killer trees outta 5.
And what did Dead Tone teach me about the genre?
-Don't EVER make prank calls! If you tell me my fridge is running, it better be wearing Nikes!
-All guys named Cal deserve bad, gory deaths.
-Guys who run gas stations always want to harm their customers. It's great for business.
Okay, so next up is a classic slasher oldie, Visiting Hours. Later, fellow Slasher fans!
Okay, so the very first scene is some sort of nonsense involving Flavor Flav dressed in a Dracula costume. He offers up some generic evil banter, then teleports away in a small fog cloud. Um, what was the point of that? Is the movie an anthology flick? Is the killer a vampire hiding among humans?
Apparently that scene was just pointless time-filler, because the next scene involves an entirely different scenario. This group of young teens is having a slumber party, while their parents are downstairs having a drunken shindig of their own. The kids decide to make a series of prank phone calls, until one person threatens to call the police. This upsets one of the kids, a nerdy-looking boy named William, who threatens to get them all in trouble. His twin brother, Stephen, stops William from leaving, and the kids all feign sleep when one of the adults checks on them. Seeing the cordless phone on the floor, Dad picks it up, leaves the room, and puts the phone back on the charger before rejoining the party.
In the middle of the night, long after everyone has either fallen asleep or passed out drunk, the phone rings. William wakes up and answers it. It's the guy they pissed off earlier, and he sounds like he's had sufficient time to get his rage on. William apologizes and explains that he wasn't in on the prank, but the guy doesn't care. He bursts through an upstairs door, where he was hiding, and scares the holy heck out of William. Wearing a tank top, a black ski mask, and holding an axe, the maniac tries to chop up the boy, but his father gets in the way and is killed instead. The crazed killer then hacks up the remaining adults, either dismembering or beheading them as the frightened children hide under the bed upstairs.
The killer prepares to leave, then hears the children whimpering upstairs. Dragging the axe behind him the killer finds the bedroom, but William and Stephen's mother survived, and tries to tackle the guy to the floor. He strangles her to death, then exits the room. Stephen runs over to her, and he exchanges a look with his brother. The police arrive, and no sign of the killer is found. Oh, and the detective in charge of the investigation is played by the original Hitcher, Rutger Hauer! Neat!
10 years later, we find ourselves at a ramshackle dwelling in the middle of nowhere. In the middle of the squalor, a greasy-haired, chain-smoking, tattooed redneck is masturbating to bondage porn. His phone rings, and the redneck tries to get the caller to hang up. His caller taunts him though, claiming to be someone he's VERY familiar with. Oh, and the voice also implies that he's in the redneck's house, watching his every move. The redneck starts checking all of the doors and windows, then picks up a kitchen knife. The scene ends when a cat outside scares the guy, and it turns out that the phone call was a prank after all.
The pranksters are a group of college kids, and the prank call is part of a game they play called Seventy-Five. They apparently play the game for cash, and the crowd seems to think that the game is better than sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. Schmucks. The big winner, Marcus, makes his way through the crowd, until a cute little waif named Jody flirts with him. He turns her down, apparently because he thinks her parents would disapprove of them as a couple.
Next, Marcus chats up a couple, Roxy and Kareem. Through this conversation, we get to learn the rules of Seventy-Five: You make a prank call, and it has to be somebody random. Then, once they answer the phone, you have to keep them on the line for 75 seconds. Any less, and you lose the game. Supposedly, Marcus is the only player who has never lost the game. Yeah, riiiiight.
Oops, back to the redneck, I guess. Great, the dipshit's still masturbating. Couldn't we have arrived 5 minutes later??? I guess not, because someone dressed in black sneaks into his house. The stranger disconnects the guy's porno, then plants a blade in his forehead when he leans back. As blood spatters cover the monitor, the porn movie comes back on.
Back on campus, we learn that the school is called Brattman College. Sounds like the world's most annoying superhero--excluding Son of the Mask, of course. A cute blond, named Karina tells her mother during a cell phone conversation that she did well on her latest exam. A goofy-looking guy named Brandon congratulates her, and she brushes off his praise. Turns out, Karina thinks that Brandon has been cheating on her, and her friends all back that story up. Brandon's friends also arrive, as does an unseen watcher. Hmmm...The only pointless character missing from this scene is freaking Waldo!
Brandon wants some alone time with Karina, but she invites both groups of friends to tag along. Wow, Brandon looks pissed! Dude needs to work on his poker face, if you know what I mean.
Faster than you can say "abrupt scene change", we wind up at the police station. Rutger Hauer, sporting the same haircut as the Quaker Oats guy, wants to re-open the unsolved massacre from a decade ago. His boss disagrees, calling it a waste of resources. Rutger claims that the redneck who was murdered was somehow connected to that earlier slaughter, but his boss doesn't see it. He orders Rutger to drop the investigation, then throws him out of his office.
Back on campus, Karina brags that she thinks she has a 4.0 for the semester, and one of her friends, Jody, brags about acing an exam as well. Karina's gay friend, Shawn, tells everyone that Jody's grade was the result of a fling with her teacher, and everyone laughs at the idea of her sleeping around. Nice friends.
The unseen stalker from 2 scenes ago watches the group from a nearby vantage point, and sees Brandon get up to use the bathroom. While he's gone, a guy named Kareem sneaks up on one of the girls to scare her, but he seems harmless. Brandon, on the other hand, feels a weird presence in the bathroom, but shrugs it off. With headphones on, he fails to see a hooded figure walk toward him with a hunting knife raised in a threatening manner. Before the killer can make his move, another guy walks in. The killer quickly puts the knife away, and walks out of the bathroom. Damn!
The girls all get together to pick out clothes for the impromptu party and talk about boys. Kareem and Shawn more or less do the same thing. The group meets outside and everyone loads their luggage into a vehicle that pulls up. Luggage? For a party that was only thought up 2 scenes ago? In all my years of going to parties with friends, I never once needed luggage.
Back at the police station, Rutger(whose character finally gets a name, "John") talks to a very pretty Asian cop about his theory regarding the redneck murder. She gives him the idea to look up the juvie records for all of the kids. Since they all had parents murdered that night, several were put into foster homes. Inspired, John sends her to look up their various adoption records.
Back at the Body Bag party, they all pull over to pee and stretch their legs at a gas station. A werewolf boy scares them, then a zombie clerk gives them the restroom key. Swear to god....would I lie to you? (well, okay, I would...) The girl whose name I completely forget decides to use a toilet that would make Stinky McStinkbag gag a maggot. Someone enters the restroom, and she calls out every name she can think of, with no response. False alarm--it's the little bastard with the werewolf mask. Nope, wait--it was Marcus!
The gas station owner sees a news item about the killer on tv, and tries to warn the kids, but they speed away. John, by the way, gets the files he needed. He and the hot Asian detective start looking through about a gazillion files. Exciting. Every horror film needs a montage showing people reading. They find the file of the redneck, but nothing else.
Meanwhile, a cop pulls the van over. He and his partner scare the kids, and we find out that Brandon's dad is an influential politician. The cops let them go, after busting some balls. The place they're partying at turns out to be a mansion. Sweeeeet.
Inside, the party's already started. We meet "Crazy Cal", an obnoxious fat guy who better die next. He takes them on a tour of the estate, and interrupts a couple mid-coitus. Please kill Cal. Please. NOW.
Outside, at the pool, 2 of the guys ogle a babe, while Karina and her friends gossip over the alcohol. Blah, blah, blah...is this a slasher flick or a CW show? Detective John and Jacklyn Chan interrupt with a scene of their own, where they corner a scary guy in a chair. Oooooh, he might sit you to death! SCARY!!! They discover that the guy is a corpse, right before stumbling into his girlfriend's body. Turns out that she was one of the kids.
Back at the party, everyone's playing a drinking game. Marcus calls their game stupid, then introduces the party goers to Seventy-Five. He explains the rules(AGAIN...?), then lets Cal start. He's followed by Jody, then the rest of the main characters. They all make successful calls,then Spazzy Jazzy gets a turn. He accidentally calls the killer. What are the odds? Oh, and the killer calls back, so they can hear him kill a girl!
After the call ends, Scott and Marcus have an argument. Then the killer calls again, and talks to Marcus, who loses his cool. The killer suggests that he's coming after them, then the party resumes. Yeah, you heard me....after a killer they pissed off a decade ago finds them, these idiots decide to ignore the danger they're in. Sheesh.
Everyone then pairs off. The phone keeps ringing, but everyone at the party ignores it. As the crowd dwindles down to about a dozen or so people, a ditzy blond answers the phone. It's the killer, so being blond, she basically gives him the address, directions, and a 40-page description of everyone he wants to kill. Dumbass. Everyone freaks out, but no one else leaves.
John and Jacklyn Chan drive up to a murder scene. It's another one of the kids, the dorky kid who made the first call. The partiers dim the lights, and the dumb blond wanders off alone. Yay! The killer made my wish come true! She goes to the front door, and the killer knocks her head off with an ax.
The killer crashes through a glass wall next, while chasing a girl who saw him, Julie. Instead of getting her, though, he kills 2 drunken idiots. One gets the axe in the chest, while the other guy hides. The killer hears him, and finds him hiding behind some barrels. The doofus trips,and the killer pins his head down with his foot, before snapping his neck with the heel. Then he slams him onto a counter top and dismembers the corpse.
The scared girl who was being chased in the first place makes a noise, and the killer tracks her down as well. He slams the axe through the door of the cabinet where she hid, and her dead, bloody body falls at his feet. A couple screwing in the pool are next: He gets decapitated while she's underwater going down on him, then she dies after seeing his bloody neck-stump. The killer dunks her head under the water until she drowns.
Okay, so now that most of the generic characters are gone, Kareem sees the corpse of the girl in the jacuzzi. He and his girlfriend find Marcus and Anna, and even though her body is gone, Marcus agrees to help him search the house for the rest of their friends. They find 2 naked partiers while looking for Jody, then step in some blood. Anna somehow vanishes, and the nimrods start whispering her name. Her corpse is flung at them by the killer, and a chase ensues.
Marcus, Jody and Cal all run down the hall, screaming like rabid jackals, and the hallway dead-ends at a locked door. As the killer finds them, he start throwing a fit. and Karina opens the door from the other side, just in time. they lock the door, which is metal, and the killer leaves after failing to get in.
Trapped, Cal finds Brandon brandishing a baseball bat. He gets the bat, then they let in 3 more survivors. Everyone decides to blame each other for the predicament that they're in, and Karina makes them all see that they need to work together to survive.
After half an hour passes with no further attacks, they asks Brandon to find the keys and see if Shawn is still alive somewhere in in the mansion. Brandon steps quietly into the hall and finds the hiding spot where the keys are kept, but misses them.As he reaches again, Karina sneaks up on the poor guy, and he nearly has a heart attack. As he finally grabs the keys, the killer arrives, and Brandon gets an axe to the back. Karina tries to escape over a balcony, and the killer sends her plunging into the bushes, alive but injured.
The remaining survivors start bickering again, and Cal tries to calm them all down. He decides to exit the room to see if he can hot wire a car. Good riddance, Fat Boy. Kareem and Marcus hear someone screaming for help, and come running down the stairs at the same time that Jody finds a hiding place. Karina finds a wall of security monitors and watches everyone move around the mansion.
Kareem, Marcus and someone whose name I already forgot find Roxy dead, just as Cal gets a car started. From the backseat, the killer punches Cal so hard that his head hits the windshield, sending blood flying. The killer repeatedly bashes him in the head, while an operator at OnStar offers to help. Comedy gold!
Marcus fights the killer. As the killer starts to get the upper hand, Kareem attacks the maniac from behind. The killer drops his weapon, which Scott picks up. He swings it, and kills Kareem! While Marcus asks"What the fuck did you do?" 5000 times in a row, it becomes clearer that the killer and Scott are working together.
Marcus makes his way back to Karina, and tells her what Scott did. As they watch the monitors, they see Scott kill Shawn. Then he finds them, and they demand to know why he did it. He reveals that he and the killer are actually Stephen and the weirdo gas station guy. They met as children in a place called Farley, where both were either in a mental hospital or a foster home. They made a pact to kill all of the other kids who had survived the massacre 10 years ago. Stephen then kills the gas station guy, and he and Marcus start to brawl. Karina tries to fight Stephen as well, but he throws her off. She stabs his hand, pinning him to the floor, and he manages to pry the blade off of his hand.
Before he can finish Marcus off, John bursts in and shoots Marcus. Karina dies too, and Stephen manages to fool them into thinking he was a victim, not the killer. As they tell him to take it easy, the gas station guy rises up behind the cops and kills them as the scene fades to black. THE END
Boy, this one was all over the place! I mean, most of these newer slashers suffer from a lack of kills, but this one seemed to kill a 10-page section of the freakin' phonebook! Despite the stupidity of some of it, I'd give it 4 killer trees outta 5.
And what did Dead Tone teach me about the genre?
-Don't EVER make prank calls! If you tell me my fridge is running, it better be wearing Nikes!
-All guys named Cal deserve bad, gory deaths.
-Guys who run gas stations always want to harm their customers. It's great for business.
Okay, so next up is a classic slasher oldie, Visiting Hours. Later, fellow Slasher fans!
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Strangeland
I don't know why, but Netflix really, REALLY doesn't want me to see Splatter University or Blood Song. So, while they make me wait another week, this week I'm watching Strangeland, a strange film starring(and written by) Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider. Did it make me scream, "We're not gonna take it!"? Find out in SPOILER-Land!
The story begins in that magical, mysterious time the historians call "The Late Nineties". So right off the bat, you can assume that the film's version of technology is already outdated and ill-informed. This wouldn't be so bad, except that the film's killer uses the Internet to lure his victims to his lair. And no offense to Hollywood, but their view of things like the Internet is usually pretty damn stupid. Lawnmower Man, anyone?
Okay, enough editorializing. As the film begins, we see lots of chains, hooks and handcuffs during the opening credits. After they end, we hear something that actually made me nostalgic: a noisy modem hissing and beeping at a sluggish speed(probably 14.4 bps, given that this came out in 1998. Yeesh!). 2 girls log into a forum simply called Teen Chat, which means that everyone there besides them is probably a middle-aged man in stained underwear, with a massively receding hairline.
The girl typing, Genevieve, calls her friend Tiana over to her desktop. Together, they watch as a lobbyful of idiots all try to cyber with each other. Tiana sees that Gen is chatting up someone named Captain Howdy, and asks a number of questions about the chat that lead me to believe that she could very well have been raised Amish. Or maybe feral. Oh, and Gen's screenname is "MissXXX151"...REALLY? A high school girl wants anonymous guys to think that she's into triple-x rated porn? Okay, quick poll: who thinks I should shut this off and just wait a few days for a (hopefully) less-stupid movie?
Dammit, why was I the only vote in favor of that? Fine. But you guys have to chip in for my eventual mental healthcare costs. Geez, Tiana just asked what an "IM" was. Shoot me. The 2 girls arrange a private chat with Captain Howdy, then make plans to go meet him. Good. Masybe this'll turn out to be a 5-minute movie.
The next scene finds us in the presence of Mike, a hard-working detective on the trail of a serial killer. Gee, I wonder if it's Captain Howdy? His wife, Toni, points out that their daughter Genevieve didn't come home after going out the previous night with Tiana. Toni leaves to answer the phone, while Mike sits at his daughter's desk and accidentally boots up her computer, which is the size of a T-Rex, and even more of a dinosaur than the T-Rex ever was. Man, that rig is bigger than my last apartment!
Toni returns to report that the phone call was from Tiana's worried parents. She never came home either, which means that Mike now has some actual police work to do. Yay for him.
At Captain Howdy's house, night has fallen. He's working out in his own private gym as the camera sloooooowly pans to the front door. We see him chasing one of the girls, Genevieve, as she tries to leave, but then he knocks her down. When she regains consciousness, Gen discovers that Howdy has stitched her lips together, and filed his teeth down to fangs. Fun guy.
The very next day, Detective Mike reveals how limited his sleuthing skills are, as he repeatedly fails to solve the conundrum of how to feed a dollar bill into a vending machine. Boy, if Captain Howdy morphs into a vending machine, Genevieve is pretty much dead meat. A co-worker helps Mike solve The Case of the Dullard's Dollar and gets him his coffeea. Case solved! Now maybe Mike can find his daughter and her friend...
Mike bitches out the helpful cop, then goes home. There, he mopes around like a puppy, until relatives stop by to lend moral support. His niece Angela, played by Amy Smart, shows him how his daughter's computer works. Then she makes things worse by telling him that she sometimes uses it to meet strange men under aliases. Nice.
Captain Howdy rambles on about "rites of passage", then pierces his arm with a steel rod. This somehow segues to a scene where the cops find a car in a pond. Examining the car reveals Tiana's corpse in the trunk, also with her lips sewn shut. The helpful cop from earlier also discovers some evidence: a nosering that a paramedic identifies as being much larger than a normal one would be. He tells the detectives that the spike is part of the "body art" community, which includes tattoos, piercings and other forms of self-mutilation. He then tells them to check out a club called Xibalba, which is a hangout for the body art patrons.
At the club, Detectives Mike and Christian wander through a crowd of Marilyn Manson wanna-bes, while Captain Howdy is in a backroom, dying. He's hanging from hooks in his chest, suspended from the ceiling. A group of Goths revive him, and he tells them that he wanted to die, briefly, because he believed it would somehow transform him. Well, THAT makes sense.
So, Mike returns home and looks through his daughter's computer desk some more. At work, his superior tells him that the post mortem examination of Tiana revealed that Captain Howdy had performed numerous piercings and mutilations all over her body, while she had still been alive. Her cause of death was a heart attack, brought on by the torture.
Captain Howdy goes online, at the same time that Mike does. Mike can't figure out how the Internet works(again, a sign of how old this movie's concepts are, lol), so he calls his niece. She gets him into a chatroom, and tells him to type stuff like "Tinsel, buttmunch", which makes NO sense to me, and I've been online since 1995 or so.
While navigating omnline chat, the detectives get a call from a tech geek. He informs them that the online name and profile for Captain Howdy are both fake. The niece does an online search for Catain Howdy's screen name, and finds him in seconds. The detectives immediately start to plan how to lure him out into the open.
Captain Howdy ain't exactly a slouch, though. He's looking at each profile himself, to find his next victim. Using his profile, the detectives start asking the lobby about things he listed among his interests. He takes the bait, and the niece tells them what to type. Eventually, he invites them to his lair.
The cops quickly assemble a SWAT team to assault the address he lists, while Captain Howdy tortures a boy with a penile mutilation. OUCH! the cops march into the house, only to find that the owners are an elderly couple. Captain Howdy won again.
After the failed raid, Mike sits in his car pouting. As the rest of the officers clear out, Mike falls asleep in the car, waking the next morning because of a barking dog. He opens a laptop to see if he can find Captain Howdy again, and Howdy starts taunting him about the raid. Then Howdy makes his first mistake, by sending an audio file. Mike realizes that the audio file contains the sound of the barking dog that woke him up, and starts to scan the houses.
After replying to the message, Captain Howdy sends another audio file. This time, Mike is able to pinpoint the killer's location. Drawing his weapon, Mike finds trash bags filled with needles and other implements of torture. He enters Captain Howdy's home via the basement, and starts to look around.
On the main floor of the house, the sound of heavy metal music gets louder. Mike finds a door unlocked, and sees numerous teenagers, in various states of torture. One girl is bound in wire, another is hogtied on the floor, yet another is trapped in a stockade, etc. At the end of the room, his daughter Genevieve is trapped in a cage.
Excited to find her, Mike starts to work on freeing his daughter. When Gen sees Captain Howdy sneak in, she tries to warn her father, but with her lips still stitched shut, the most she can do is whimper. Captain Howdy strikes Mike on the back of the head, and he crumples to the floor.
Captain Howdy turns toward Gen, and Mike opens his eyes. As he tries to crawl in the direction of his gun, Captain Howdy hears him and turns. Howdy tries to drag Mike away, but he manages to get the gun, and shoots the psychopath in the leg. As Mike frees Gen from her cage, the killer tells them that he fears nothing. He rants and raves about death, until Mike stuffs a candle into his mouth to shut him up.
After freeing Gen, Mike manages to rescue 5 other teens. We learn through a montage that Captain Howdy went with an insanity plea, and that his real name is Carlton Hendricks. He went thnrough counseling and a lot of pills, and is a changed man. Oh, and he removed most of the piercings and covered his extensively tattooed face and body with makeup.
Not everyone buys his metamorphosis, of course. Mike and his cop buddies think it's all an act. And a mob of angry parents, led by Freddy Krueger himself, Robert Englund(as Jack), want to destroy him. And then there's Genevieve, who is plagued by nightmares in which Captain Howdy stalks her.
When he comes home, Howdy is greeted by the angry parents, and a reporter. He tells theem that he's changed, but no one believes him. Later that night, Jack and his buddies decide to attack Captain Howdy directly. His daughter, who stayed out late, is mistakenly thought to be Howdy's latest victim, but she's been screwing around with her boyfriend all night. Oops.
The parents drag Howdy out of his house, while Mike sits in his car and watches. Then they drive him to a secluded location, tie a noose to a tree,and hang him. As he chokes, the limb starts to snap, then a thunderstorm starts up, making the lynch mob beat a hasty retreat, and running over the bottle of pills. As the rain reveals Howdy's tatto art once more, he wakes up and snaps back into his former persona.
The next night, Jack is watching porn and waiting for his wife to join him. Captain Howdy murders her in the bathroom, then walks her corpse out and lets Jack see that he slit her throat. Ow!
At the precinct, Mike gets an IM from Howdy, who then calls as well. He taunts the cops and dares them to find him, then hangs up before they can trace the call. He then pierces Jack's chest with large hooks, and sews his eyes and lips shut. The wife gets speared throughout her body, while Howdy describes the process to her. The agony makes her tear the stitches open on her lips, and she screams.
Mike gets a call from his wife, who asks him why he took Gen out of school. When he tells her he didn't, Mike rushes home and finds her staring at Captain Howdy's face on their PC monitor. Howdy makes them watch as he inserts one of his hooks into Gen's belly, and Mike vows to kill him. Then Howdy disconnects from the chat before it can be traced.
2 newbie-looking cops stumble upon Captain Howdy's lair. Inside, they find several torture victims: A crucified man; another bare-chested man hanging upside-down by shackled ankles; a naked girl who I can't exactly identify; Jack, hanging suspended by body-piercing hooks all over his torso; his wife, with wires and rods pulling at her skin so that she's standing upright in one spot while writhing; and Gen, who has numerous needles piercing her, as well as clamps and dangerous-looking wires wrapped around her.
EMT's arrive, as well as other cops. Mike and Christian find a matchbook from Club Xibalba, and Mike decides to take down Captain Howdy permanently. At the empty club, Captain Howdy teases Mike from the shadows, then emerges after Mike drops his gun. As the 2 men brawl, Christian arrives and tries to find an entrance.
Captain Howdy strangles Mike, then threatens him with a hook on a chain. Mike gets away by pulling out Howdy's nosering, then tries to use the candles in the room as a weapon. He eventually distracts Howdy enough to shove a chained hook into his shoulder, which makes Howdy start to swing back and forth. As Howdy watches, Mike douses him with candle wax, then lights him on fire. Captain Howdy goes up in flames, and Christian comes in to tell Mike that it's over. No shit, Sherlock! As the cops rush away, the room starts to become an inferno, and we get a nasty eyeful of the hunk of flesh that got torn from Howdy's shoulder when his body fell off of the hook.
Outside, Mike tells his buddy that he needs to see his family. As he walks away, a final shot of the burning house is shown, superimposed over an image of Captain Howdy. THE END, I guess...
Boy, this movie had so much potential, but it was kind of a dud. Very few characters actually died, which really doesn't make it much of a slasher film, and the pace was very uneven. Heck, even having a fun horror icon like Robert Englund in the film didn't really have much of a point. I hear there's a sequel coming out this year, so maybe it'll improve on the first one a bit. More storyline and carnage, less watching the killer make nonsensical speeches. 2 killer trees out of 5, mostly for the look of the film and the soundtrack.
And what did I get out of watching Strangeland?
-Well, there was some nudity...
-I learned that Dee Snider is even MORE psychotic when he's not in drag!
-There are still people(teens, no less!) who need to be told what "IM" means!
Next week? Well, I'd like to hope that it'll be Splatter University, but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for it. The next slasher flick on the list after that is something called Dead Tone, so they might send that instead, like what they pulled last week. We'll see....
The story begins in that magical, mysterious time the historians call "The Late Nineties". So right off the bat, you can assume that the film's version of technology is already outdated and ill-informed. This wouldn't be so bad, except that the film's killer uses the Internet to lure his victims to his lair. And no offense to Hollywood, but their view of things like the Internet is usually pretty damn stupid. Lawnmower Man, anyone?
Okay, enough editorializing. As the film begins, we see lots of chains, hooks and handcuffs during the opening credits. After they end, we hear something that actually made me nostalgic: a noisy modem hissing and beeping at a sluggish speed(probably 14.4 bps, given that this came out in 1998. Yeesh!). 2 girls log into a forum simply called Teen Chat, which means that everyone there besides them is probably a middle-aged man in stained underwear, with a massively receding hairline.
The girl typing, Genevieve, calls her friend Tiana over to her desktop. Together, they watch as a lobbyful of idiots all try to cyber with each other. Tiana sees that Gen is chatting up someone named Captain Howdy, and asks a number of questions about the chat that lead me to believe that she could very well have been raised Amish. Or maybe feral. Oh, and Gen's screenname is "MissXXX151"...REALLY? A high school girl wants anonymous guys to think that she's into triple-x rated porn? Okay, quick poll: who thinks I should shut this off and just wait a few days for a (hopefully) less-stupid movie?
Dammit, why was I the only vote in favor of that? Fine. But you guys have to chip in for my eventual mental healthcare costs. Geez, Tiana just asked what an "IM" was. Shoot me. The 2 girls arrange a private chat with Captain Howdy, then make plans to go meet him. Good. Masybe this'll turn out to be a 5-minute movie.
The next scene finds us in the presence of Mike, a hard-working detective on the trail of a serial killer. Gee, I wonder if it's Captain Howdy? His wife, Toni, points out that their daughter Genevieve didn't come home after going out the previous night with Tiana. Toni leaves to answer the phone, while Mike sits at his daughter's desk and accidentally boots up her computer, which is the size of a T-Rex, and even more of a dinosaur than the T-Rex ever was. Man, that rig is bigger than my last apartment!
Toni returns to report that the phone call was from Tiana's worried parents. She never came home either, which means that Mike now has some actual police work to do. Yay for him.
At Captain Howdy's house, night has fallen. He's working out in his own private gym as the camera sloooooowly pans to the front door. We see him chasing one of the girls, Genevieve, as she tries to leave, but then he knocks her down. When she regains consciousness, Gen discovers that Howdy has stitched her lips together, and filed his teeth down to fangs. Fun guy.
The very next day, Detective Mike reveals how limited his sleuthing skills are, as he repeatedly fails to solve the conundrum of how to feed a dollar bill into a vending machine. Boy, if Captain Howdy morphs into a vending machine, Genevieve is pretty much dead meat. A co-worker helps Mike solve The Case of the Dullard's Dollar and gets him his coffeea. Case solved! Now maybe Mike can find his daughter and her friend...
Mike bitches out the helpful cop, then goes home. There, he mopes around like a puppy, until relatives stop by to lend moral support. His niece Angela, played by Amy Smart, shows him how his daughter's computer works. Then she makes things worse by telling him that she sometimes uses it to meet strange men under aliases. Nice.
Captain Howdy rambles on about "rites of passage", then pierces his arm with a steel rod. This somehow segues to a scene where the cops find a car in a pond. Examining the car reveals Tiana's corpse in the trunk, also with her lips sewn shut. The helpful cop from earlier also discovers some evidence: a nosering that a paramedic identifies as being much larger than a normal one would be. He tells the detectives that the spike is part of the "body art" community, which includes tattoos, piercings and other forms of self-mutilation. He then tells them to check out a club called Xibalba, which is a hangout for the body art patrons.
At the club, Detectives Mike and Christian wander through a crowd of Marilyn Manson wanna-bes, while Captain Howdy is in a backroom, dying. He's hanging from hooks in his chest, suspended from the ceiling. A group of Goths revive him, and he tells them that he wanted to die, briefly, because he believed it would somehow transform him. Well, THAT makes sense.
So, Mike returns home and looks through his daughter's computer desk some more. At work, his superior tells him that the post mortem examination of Tiana revealed that Captain Howdy had performed numerous piercings and mutilations all over her body, while she had still been alive. Her cause of death was a heart attack, brought on by the torture.
Captain Howdy goes online, at the same time that Mike does. Mike can't figure out how the Internet works(again, a sign of how old this movie's concepts are, lol), so he calls his niece. She gets him into a chatroom, and tells him to type stuff like "Tinsel, buttmunch", which makes NO sense to me, and I've been online since 1995 or so.
While navigating omnline chat, the detectives get a call from a tech geek. He informs them that the online name and profile for Captain Howdy are both fake. The niece does an online search for Catain Howdy's screen name, and finds him in seconds. The detectives immediately start to plan how to lure him out into the open.
Captain Howdy ain't exactly a slouch, though. He's looking at each profile himself, to find his next victim. Using his profile, the detectives start asking the lobby about things he listed among his interests. He takes the bait, and the niece tells them what to type. Eventually, he invites them to his lair.
The cops quickly assemble a SWAT team to assault the address he lists, while Captain Howdy tortures a boy with a penile mutilation. OUCH! the cops march into the house, only to find that the owners are an elderly couple. Captain Howdy won again.
After the failed raid, Mike sits in his car pouting. As the rest of the officers clear out, Mike falls asleep in the car, waking the next morning because of a barking dog. He opens a laptop to see if he can find Captain Howdy again, and Howdy starts taunting him about the raid. Then Howdy makes his first mistake, by sending an audio file. Mike realizes that the audio file contains the sound of the barking dog that woke him up, and starts to scan the houses.
After replying to the message, Captain Howdy sends another audio file. This time, Mike is able to pinpoint the killer's location. Drawing his weapon, Mike finds trash bags filled with needles and other implements of torture. He enters Captain Howdy's home via the basement, and starts to look around.
On the main floor of the house, the sound of heavy metal music gets louder. Mike finds a door unlocked, and sees numerous teenagers, in various states of torture. One girl is bound in wire, another is hogtied on the floor, yet another is trapped in a stockade, etc. At the end of the room, his daughter Genevieve is trapped in a cage.
Excited to find her, Mike starts to work on freeing his daughter. When Gen sees Captain Howdy sneak in, she tries to warn her father, but with her lips still stitched shut, the most she can do is whimper. Captain Howdy strikes Mike on the back of the head, and he crumples to the floor.
Captain Howdy turns toward Gen, and Mike opens his eyes. As he tries to crawl in the direction of his gun, Captain Howdy hears him and turns. Howdy tries to drag Mike away, but he manages to get the gun, and shoots the psychopath in the leg. As Mike frees Gen from her cage, the killer tells them that he fears nothing. He rants and raves about death, until Mike stuffs a candle into his mouth to shut him up.
After freeing Gen, Mike manages to rescue 5 other teens. We learn through a montage that Captain Howdy went with an insanity plea, and that his real name is Carlton Hendricks. He went thnrough counseling and a lot of pills, and is a changed man. Oh, and he removed most of the piercings and covered his extensively tattooed face and body with makeup.
Not everyone buys his metamorphosis, of course. Mike and his cop buddies think it's all an act. And a mob of angry parents, led by Freddy Krueger himself, Robert Englund(as Jack), want to destroy him. And then there's Genevieve, who is plagued by nightmares in which Captain Howdy stalks her.
When he comes home, Howdy is greeted by the angry parents, and a reporter. He tells theem that he's changed, but no one believes him. Later that night, Jack and his buddies decide to attack Captain Howdy directly. His daughter, who stayed out late, is mistakenly thought to be Howdy's latest victim, but she's been screwing around with her boyfriend all night. Oops.
The parents drag Howdy out of his house, while Mike sits in his car and watches. Then they drive him to a secluded location, tie a noose to a tree,and hang him. As he chokes, the limb starts to snap, then a thunderstorm starts up, making the lynch mob beat a hasty retreat, and running over the bottle of pills. As the rain reveals Howdy's tatto art once more, he wakes up and snaps back into his former persona.
The next night, Jack is watching porn and waiting for his wife to join him. Captain Howdy murders her in the bathroom, then walks her corpse out and lets Jack see that he slit her throat. Ow!
At the precinct, Mike gets an IM from Howdy, who then calls as well. He taunts the cops and dares them to find him, then hangs up before they can trace the call. He then pierces Jack's chest with large hooks, and sews his eyes and lips shut. The wife gets speared throughout her body, while Howdy describes the process to her. The agony makes her tear the stitches open on her lips, and she screams.
Mike gets a call from his wife, who asks him why he took Gen out of school. When he tells her he didn't, Mike rushes home and finds her staring at Captain Howdy's face on their PC monitor. Howdy makes them watch as he inserts one of his hooks into Gen's belly, and Mike vows to kill him. Then Howdy disconnects from the chat before it can be traced.
2 newbie-looking cops stumble upon Captain Howdy's lair. Inside, they find several torture victims: A crucified man; another bare-chested man hanging upside-down by shackled ankles; a naked girl who I can't exactly identify; Jack, hanging suspended by body-piercing hooks all over his torso; his wife, with wires and rods pulling at her skin so that she's standing upright in one spot while writhing; and Gen, who has numerous needles piercing her, as well as clamps and dangerous-looking wires wrapped around her.
EMT's arrive, as well as other cops. Mike and Christian find a matchbook from Club Xibalba, and Mike decides to take down Captain Howdy permanently. At the empty club, Captain Howdy teases Mike from the shadows, then emerges after Mike drops his gun. As the 2 men brawl, Christian arrives and tries to find an entrance.
Captain Howdy strangles Mike, then threatens him with a hook on a chain. Mike gets away by pulling out Howdy's nosering, then tries to use the candles in the room as a weapon. He eventually distracts Howdy enough to shove a chained hook into his shoulder, which makes Howdy start to swing back and forth. As Howdy watches, Mike douses him with candle wax, then lights him on fire. Captain Howdy goes up in flames, and Christian comes in to tell Mike that it's over. No shit, Sherlock! As the cops rush away, the room starts to become an inferno, and we get a nasty eyeful of the hunk of flesh that got torn from Howdy's shoulder when his body fell off of the hook.
Outside, Mike tells his buddy that he needs to see his family. As he walks away, a final shot of the burning house is shown, superimposed over an image of Captain Howdy. THE END, I guess...
Boy, this movie had so much potential, but it was kind of a dud. Very few characters actually died, which really doesn't make it much of a slasher film, and the pace was very uneven. Heck, even having a fun horror icon like Robert Englund in the film didn't really have much of a point. I hear there's a sequel coming out this year, so maybe it'll improve on the first one a bit. More storyline and carnage, less watching the killer make nonsensical speeches. 2 killer trees out of 5, mostly for the look of the film and the soundtrack.
And what did I get out of watching Strangeland?
-Well, there was some nudity...
-I learned that Dee Snider is even MORE psychotic when he's not in drag!
-There are still people(teens, no less!) who need to be told what "IM" means!
Next week? Well, I'd like to hope that it'll be Splatter University, but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for it. The next slasher flick on the list after that is something called Dead Tone, so they might send that instead, like what they pulled last week. We'll see....
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Another week, another glitch
Well, apparently Netflix doesn't want me to see the 2 slasher movies I moved up to the top of the list, because they didn't send either one. So, instead of watching Blood Song or the other film that was next in line, they're sending me Dee Snyder's Strangeland. It's one of the few slashers I haven't seen before, so here's hoping that it's a good one! I'll try to get the post up as soon as it arrives...
Friday, March 4, 2011
Blood Harvest
How often can you say, "Hey, I just watched a slasher flick starring that goofy musician Tiny Tim? In my case, only once. The film is called Blood Harvest, and also has "Six Feet Under" star Peter Krause in a small role. Did it make me tiptoe through the tulips? Read my SPOILER-heavy experience to find out!
The film starts out with Tiny Tim's character, The Marvelous Mervo, singing in his high falsetto voice about Jack and Jill. Except that his version is about "Gary and Jill", and he is dressed as a clown. Great, another psycho-clown film. Fate, why do you hate me? As Mervo keeps singing, we see a dead guy getting hung upside down in what may be a barn of some sort.
In the rain, an ambulance arrives to take away the body. The next scene features an angry mob of farmers at a foreclosed home auction, then cuts back to the hung body, back when he was alive. A hand holding a knife draws the blade across the upside-down man's throat, and he dies. Y'know, showing these scenes in order might save some time...
Okay, so our story so far is largely nonexistent. That's always a good sign. The next random scene shows a woman walking along a lonely road. As she walks, we hear her have a phone conversation with her mother, concerning her returning from college to visit her hometown. She stops off at the bank to find her dad(apparently, he's a banker...gee, I wonder if he was the guy we saw getting killed earlier?), but is told that he hasn't been in. She then decides to walk to a nearby diner.
After another random change of scenery, we see Mervo watching the local news. As he hears about all of the local foreclosures, he puts his hands up to his face. At the diner, Jill sees an old friend, and gets spit on by a local who blames her father for the town's financial troubles. She wisely decides to head home.
The house she grew up in is covered in red graffiti("BITCH", "SCUM", stuff like that). Jill runs to the front door, but is greeted at the door by a scarecrow that resembles a charred corpse. She creeps around to look for intruders, and finds Merv in her kitchen, grinning creepily and holding flowers for her. Jill tries to question him, but he just blathers on and on about the friggin' flowers.
At that point, we meet Gary. Gary is Merv's brother, and he immediately tries to calm Jill by telling her that he spoke to her father earlier in the week. Merv interrupts to sing to Jill, shove the flowers at her, then make his grand exit. Gary tells Jill that Mervo is getting crazier every day, then he also leaves. Wait, wasn't Gary the other name in the song Pervy Mervy was singing when the film started? Hope he has his life insurance paid up...
Jill unpacks in her old bedroom, and gets a threatening phone call, followed by a brick thrown through her window. When she goes outside to investigate, Merv peeks out at her from a nearby barn. Others are watching her as well, presumably angry farmers who are hiding in the woods to frighten her. She sees one of them ahead of her, and tries to hide in the trees, and gets shot in the forehead!
Aw, it's only a paint gun. The people hiding in the woods turn out to be local teens playing military games, and one of them offers her a ride into town to have her head looked at by the town doctor. He asks Jill out, and when she refuses, he offers to settle for a one night stand instead. What a charmer.
At Sheriff Buckley's office, Jill tries to lodge a complaint against the teens, and also reports the phone call, brick and spray paint since she'd been home. Buckley has a softball game he'd rather be at, but Jill won't back down. He leaves the office with her to begin his investigation. He even straps his gun on over his softball uniform, making him the most lethal baseball player since Lou Gehrig(Oh, lighten up! You expect a guy who watches slasher flicks for fun to be politically correct?).
Mervo steps into a crudely built room, where we see a woman tied to a chair with a noose around her neck. Merv talks to her, and his hand begins shaking. At the same time, Jill brings Sheriff Buckley to her family's home. The spray paint on the outside of the house is entirely gone, and all of the vandalism inside is cleaned up as well, including the dummy that had frightened her. The sheriff laughs, and accuses her of making her story up for attention. Uh, who the heck was the lady Mervo was with in the previous scene?
Mervo goes into the local church to sing and pray while no one's around. Once again, he's crying his eyes out. He probably read the script. Hell, we're only 17 minutes in, and I'M bored to the brink of tears! I should watch something like Dr. Giggles or Blood Diner, just to have something batshit crazy to comment on. (Note to self: add those to my queue....)
Okay, so back at Jill's childhood home, she's putting some clothes away in a bureau. Opening the drawer gives us the cheapest of cheap thrills: a cat-scare. Seriously, someday I'm going to build a time machine, find the screenwriter who wrote the first horror movie cat-scare scene, and obliterate him 5 minutes after his birth.
After the random cat runs away, Gary shows up. He hugs Jill, then tells her that he was the person who cleaned up the house. He then tells her that it was the farmers who did it. Then he drags her outside to run through a field. While Gary and Jill are filming a feminine hygiene commercial, Mervo is crying to a priest in a way that looks an awful lot like a confession.
Gary takes Jill to a treehouse, apparently one that they shared as children. I hope they'll be very happy up in that tree, because I'm starting to think that this isn't a slasher film at all. The dialogue is like this:
GARY: Whose idea was it to build this treehouse anyway?
JILL: Oh yeah? Well who found the tree?
GARY: Who brought the wood?
JILL: Who brought the hammer?
ME: Who hid the gun? I really want to shoot myself, before I see another pointless minute of this soul-sucking, mediocre, crap-filled snoozefest!
(That last part wasn't in the film...in case you were wondering. But the other stuff was almost verbatim, I shit you not.)
Gary tells Jill that he always had feelings for her. Then they discuss the fact that his parents died under strange circumstances. Oh, and they run through the freakin' flowers again. Jill tells Gary that she's engaged to her college boyfriend, and Gary leaves. As the scene ends, Mervo sings the "Gary and Jill" song again, twice. Yay. He starts talking to himself and singing, and none of it makes a damn bit of sense whatsoever. Man, why didn't I do drugs when I was younger? Killing a few thousand brain cells might have made this movie watchable.
Jill calls her aunt, but no one seems to know why her parents disappeared. She then gets naked, and something happens that shocks me: I actually start to pay attention to this terrible movie. In the basement, a mysterious figure tampers with the water, and makes it dangerously hot. Jill emerges from the scalding shower and reveals that women 25 years ago didn't believe in trimming, if you know what I mean.
She runs to the kitchen, and discovers that there's no water coming to the sink. The mystery stalker then fixes the pipes, so that a loud gush of water in the faucet startles her. Mervo watches Jill from outside the house, then enters her kitchen unannounced. She offers him some coffee, but Merv insists on making it for her.
He starts cackling, then tries to grope her. When Jill tries to refuse his advances, Mervo tells her that he has needs, just like any man. Then he leaves. We then see some random chair. Of course we do. And still no one dies a horrible death, unless you count my inner child.
That night, Jill wakes up due to strange noises coming from outside. She sees what looks like Mervo sitting on a swing on her front porch. She calls Sheriff Buckley, and he promises to stop by her house. The phone rings immediately after Jill hangs up, but it's not the stalker or Buckley: it's Scott, Jill's boyfriend. She begs Scott to help her, then panics when she thinks someone is trying to get in the house.
It's Buckley. I have no idea how he got there so fast, he must have the same teleportation technology that Jason Voorhees uses. Sheriff Buckley drags Mervo into view, and Jill doesn't press charges. Dumbass.
Later still, ANOTHER intruder shows up. He slips in through her bedroom window, and chloroforms her in her sleep. He starts to undress Jill and ties her to the bedposts, before photographing her body. He brings the photos to his "lair", and puts them on the wall.
The next morning, Jill is woken up by some dweeb in dark shades. she throws him to the floor, then realizes it's Scott. Really, movie? Scott, her boyfriend, is Max Headroom's stunt double? Seriously???
Apparently so. She and Scott start speaking the language of love, which sounds an awful lot like---well, whatever it sounds like, it's awful. Jill makes Scott chase her into the living room. Oh, by the way, we're 35 minutes into the movie at this point. In 35 minutes, we've seen 1(maybe 2) death scenes, several scenes of Tiny Tim being his usual weird self, a Massengill moment, and 2 scenes of partial nudity. If this thing doesn't start having a point soon, I'm mailing it back unfinished.
Jill lets Scott undress her on the living room floor, while Gary watches from a nearby window. It plays out like a cheesy porno(wait, isn't that redundant?), until the phone rings. It's me, asking where the killing scenes are.
Nope, it's not me, it's Jill's friend Sarah. Oh, and Scott turns out to be Peter Krause. He leaves after her phone call, and Jill starts dirty dancing by herself. Before Scott leaves, though, he spots someone running through the backyard. Scott gets out of the car and chases the figure into a barn. The killer whacks Scott in the face with a baseball bat, and Jill continues to do the world's most unchoreographed dancing scene.
Gary shows up at her front door. She tells him about her relationship with Scott over a cup of coffee. Why does every scene these 2 share end up looking like a commercial??? Mervo disrupts the conversation, and Gary drags him inside to apologize for scaring Jill. Another person shows up at the front door: Jill's friend, Sarah, who arrives to pad the film's running time a little more. God, this movie is annoying!
Jill and Sarah discuss boys, then Sarah realizes that she needs to go to work. Jill cranks up the radio, for the sole purpose of not hearing her friend getting attacked by the stalker. He chases her away from her car, then into the same barn that Scott was killed in earlier in the film. Sarah leans against a post to catch her breath, and the killer shoots an arrow at her, pinning her hand to the post. As Sarah screams, the killer rips her blouse open, hangs her upside down, then removes her pants. The killer then slits Sarah's throat while Jill plays with a stuffed animal.
After yet another brief scene where Mervo acts like a loon, Gary stops by to visit Jill. He tells her that Mervo has vanished, and she decides to call Sarah, who recently passed away. The film cuts to Nervy Mervy, who is feeling sorry for himself. Jill has no luck finding either Sarah or Scott, and Gary jokingly suggests that they ran off together. The he finally leaves. Alone at last, Jill cries herself to sleep.
Once Jill's finally asleep again, the stalker chloroforms her once more. Hey, I have an idea: how about, every time someone in the movie does something they already did in a previous scene, we take a drink! The killer brings Jill to the barn, and begins to undress her in front of Scott, who's dangling upside down about a foot above where she's sleeping. The sheriff's deputy arrives, and the killer quickly brings Jill back to the house. While the deputy looks around the yard to see if anything looks suspicious, the killer sneaks back to the barn and slits Scott's throat.
The following morning, Jill wakes up on the sofa, and staggers into the kitchen. She opens the fridge, and a bucket of blood spills on both her and the kitchen floor. Gary pops up in her kitchen to calm her down, and he carries Jill to the shower. Stripping Jill naked, Gary cleans her then begins rubbing her in other ways. He brings her back to the couch, where he proceeds to kiss every square inch of Jill's chest. Then he covers her with a blanket and watches her fall sleep. Oh, and he decides to remove his clothes while watching her, before eventually raping her in her. If you look up "sleazy" in the dictionary, I'll bet you'd find a picture of this movie.
Jill wakes up, and she immediately asks Gary to stop. He walks away, still naked as a jailbird. Then we see Mervo mumbling to himself, "I gotta do it, gotta do it...", while Gary sits in the dark and sobs like the bitch that we all know him to be. That's right Gary: yer a bitch. Deal with it.
Mervo enters Jill's house and asks her to go someplace with him. When she presses him for details, he merely tells Jill that he has something important to show her, and she actually goes with him. I think it's safe to say that my suspension of disbelief is long gone. Outside, Mervo takes Jill to a small house in the middle of nowhere. She reads a suicide note that her mother wrote, then finds several pictures of dead people. Mervo tells the horrified girl that his brother did all of the killing and stalking, and blackmailed him into silence by threatening to send him to a mental hospital for the rest of his life. When they both hear someone outside, Mervo covers Jill's mouth to keep her quiet.
It's Gary. He asks Mervo to release Jill, and the brothers start to fight. As Jill tries to find a weapon, Mervo gains the upper hand, so Jill finds a pistol and shoots him. Then Gary reveals that Mervo was telling the truth, and he reveals that his plan was to eliminate everyone she depended on, until he was the only person left for her to turn to. She pretends to want to be with Gary, but she gets upset and runs away when he doesn't seem to be buying it.
There's a brief chase, then Gary puts a stocking over his head and starts to go after Jill with a knife. He corners her in the barn, and Jill sees all of her dead friends and family hanging from the rafters like sides of beef. Gary corners Jill and reveals that he blames her for his feelings of loneliness and isolation. She tries to make him believe that she wants to run away with him, but when she starts to run away again, he kinda figures out that she was lying. She buys some time by pinning Gary to the floor with a pitchfork through his arm and starts to run away yet again. Isn't this like, what, the 3rd chase in as many minutes?
The chase is stupid. He manages to keep getting ahead of her, she screams and runs away, he pops up again. This happens several times, until he traps her in his lair. Jill gets cornered beneath a slaughtered pig, and it bleeds all over her face while Gary drones on and on. He holds his knife in his good hand, slowly circling her. then he leaps at Jill. They tussle in the hay, until Gary ties Jill up and brings her back to the corpses of those she loves.
He prepares to kill her, but Jill is rescued at the last second by Mervo, who shoots Gary with a shotgun. Mervo staggers over to Jill to untie her, and the pair leave the crime scene together to report the murders to the authorities. As the camera shows Gary one last time in the hay, his eyes open wide. THE END?
Eh. As painful as it was, I've seen worse. I guess. Still, every kill was more or less botched, and the pace was verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry draggy. Plus, we never saw all of the bodies: did the writers forget to add a scene showing what happened to Jill's mother? This movie could be improved a thousand times over by a gorier remake, with 99.999% less goofy musical numbers, so somebody who has experience writing scripts, get working!
And what did Blood Harvest teach me?
-It's impossible to create a good slasher flick involving a scary clown. Can't be done.
-If your former flame still has a treehouse, RUN! And don't have some twithead conversation about how the friggin' thing was built!
-Small-town lawmen take softball games very seriously. Crime can wait 'til after the game.
Next week, hopefully, either Blood Song or Splatter University will arrive in the mail. I had surgery Tuesday, so I'm still kind of playing my schedule by ear, until I can figure out how I'm really feeling. Hopefully, I keep feeling as good as I do today! Happy slashing!
The film starts out with Tiny Tim's character, The Marvelous Mervo, singing in his high falsetto voice about Jack and Jill. Except that his version is about "Gary and Jill", and he is dressed as a clown. Great, another psycho-clown film. Fate, why do you hate me? As Mervo keeps singing, we see a dead guy getting hung upside down in what may be a barn of some sort.
In the rain, an ambulance arrives to take away the body. The next scene features an angry mob of farmers at a foreclosed home auction, then cuts back to the hung body, back when he was alive. A hand holding a knife draws the blade across the upside-down man's throat, and he dies. Y'know, showing these scenes in order might save some time...
Okay, so our story so far is largely nonexistent. That's always a good sign. The next random scene shows a woman walking along a lonely road. As she walks, we hear her have a phone conversation with her mother, concerning her returning from college to visit her hometown. She stops off at the bank to find her dad(apparently, he's a banker...gee, I wonder if he was the guy we saw getting killed earlier?), but is told that he hasn't been in. She then decides to walk to a nearby diner.
After another random change of scenery, we see Mervo watching the local news. As he hears about all of the local foreclosures, he puts his hands up to his face. At the diner, Jill sees an old friend, and gets spit on by a local who blames her father for the town's financial troubles. She wisely decides to head home.
The house she grew up in is covered in red graffiti("BITCH", "SCUM", stuff like that). Jill runs to the front door, but is greeted at the door by a scarecrow that resembles a charred corpse. She creeps around to look for intruders, and finds Merv in her kitchen, grinning creepily and holding flowers for her. Jill tries to question him, but he just blathers on and on about the friggin' flowers.
At that point, we meet Gary. Gary is Merv's brother, and he immediately tries to calm Jill by telling her that he spoke to her father earlier in the week. Merv interrupts to sing to Jill, shove the flowers at her, then make his grand exit. Gary tells Jill that Mervo is getting crazier every day, then he also leaves. Wait, wasn't Gary the other name in the song Pervy Mervy was singing when the film started? Hope he has his life insurance paid up...
Jill unpacks in her old bedroom, and gets a threatening phone call, followed by a brick thrown through her window. When she goes outside to investigate, Merv peeks out at her from a nearby barn. Others are watching her as well, presumably angry farmers who are hiding in the woods to frighten her. She sees one of them ahead of her, and tries to hide in the trees, and gets shot in the forehead!
Aw, it's only a paint gun. The people hiding in the woods turn out to be local teens playing military games, and one of them offers her a ride into town to have her head looked at by the town doctor. He asks Jill out, and when she refuses, he offers to settle for a one night stand instead. What a charmer.
At Sheriff Buckley's office, Jill tries to lodge a complaint against the teens, and also reports the phone call, brick and spray paint since she'd been home. Buckley has a softball game he'd rather be at, but Jill won't back down. He leaves the office with her to begin his investigation. He even straps his gun on over his softball uniform, making him the most lethal baseball player since Lou Gehrig(Oh, lighten up! You expect a guy who watches slasher flicks for fun to be politically correct?).
Mervo steps into a crudely built room, where we see a woman tied to a chair with a noose around her neck. Merv talks to her, and his hand begins shaking. At the same time, Jill brings Sheriff Buckley to her family's home. The spray paint on the outside of the house is entirely gone, and all of the vandalism inside is cleaned up as well, including the dummy that had frightened her. The sheriff laughs, and accuses her of making her story up for attention. Uh, who the heck was the lady Mervo was with in the previous scene?
Mervo goes into the local church to sing and pray while no one's around. Once again, he's crying his eyes out. He probably read the script. Hell, we're only 17 minutes in, and I'M bored to the brink of tears! I should watch something like Dr. Giggles or Blood Diner, just to have something batshit crazy to comment on. (Note to self: add those to my queue....)
Okay, so back at Jill's childhood home, she's putting some clothes away in a bureau. Opening the drawer gives us the cheapest of cheap thrills: a cat-scare. Seriously, someday I'm going to build a time machine, find the screenwriter who wrote the first horror movie cat-scare scene, and obliterate him 5 minutes after his birth.
After the random cat runs away, Gary shows up. He hugs Jill, then tells her that he was the person who cleaned up the house. He then tells her that it was the farmers who did it. Then he drags her outside to run through a field. While Gary and Jill are filming a feminine hygiene commercial, Mervo is crying to a priest in a way that looks an awful lot like a confession.
Gary takes Jill to a treehouse, apparently one that they shared as children. I hope they'll be very happy up in that tree, because I'm starting to think that this isn't a slasher film at all. The dialogue is like this:
GARY: Whose idea was it to build this treehouse anyway?
JILL: Oh yeah? Well who found the tree?
GARY: Who brought the wood?
JILL: Who brought the hammer?
ME: Who hid the gun? I really want to shoot myself, before I see another pointless minute of this soul-sucking, mediocre, crap-filled snoozefest!
(That last part wasn't in the film...in case you were wondering. But the other stuff was almost verbatim, I shit you not.)
Gary tells Jill that he always had feelings for her. Then they discuss the fact that his parents died under strange circumstances. Oh, and they run through the freakin' flowers again. Jill tells Gary that she's engaged to her college boyfriend, and Gary leaves. As the scene ends, Mervo sings the "Gary and Jill" song again, twice. Yay. He starts talking to himself and singing, and none of it makes a damn bit of sense whatsoever. Man, why didn't I do drugs when I was younger? Killing a few thousand brain cells might have made this movie watchable.
Jill calls her aunt, but no one seems to know why her parents disappeared. She then gets naked, and something happens that shocks me: I actually start to pay attention to this terrible movie. In the basement, a mysterious figure tampers with the water, and makes it dangerously hot. Jill emerges from the scalding shower and reveals that women 25 years ago didn't believe in trimming, if you know what I mean.
She runs to the kitchen, and discovers that there's no water coming to the sink. The mystery stalker then fixes the pipes, so that a loud gush of water in the faucet startles her. Mervo watches Jill from outside the house, then enters her kitchen unannounced. She offers him some coffee, but Merv insists on making it for her.
He starts cackling, then tries to grope her. When Jill tries to refuse his advances, Mervo tells her that he has needs, just like any man. Then he leaves. We then see some random chair. Of course we do. And still no one dies a horrible death, unless you count my inner child.
That night, Jill wakes up due to strange noises coming from outside. She sees what looks like Mervo sitting on a swing on her front porch. She calls Sheriff Buckley, and he promises to stop by her house. The phone rings immediately after Jill hangs up, but it's not the stalker or Buckley: it's Scott, Jill's boyfriend. She begs Scott to help her, then panics when she thinks someone is trying to get in the house.
It's Buckley. I have no idea how he got there so fast, he must have the same teleportation technology that Jason Voorhees uses. Sheriff Buckley drags Mervo into view, and Jill doesn't press charges. Dumbass.
Later still, ANOTHER intruder shows up. He slips in through her bedroom window, and chloroforms her in her sleep. He starts to undress Jill and ties her to the bedposts, before photographing her body. He brings the photos to his "lair", and puts them on the wall.
The next morning, Jill is woken up by some dweeb in dark shades. she throws him to the floor, then realizes it's Scott. Really, movie? Scott, her boyfriend, is Max Headroom's stunt double? Seriously???
Apparently so. She and Scott start speaking the language of love, which sounds an awful lot like---well, whatever it sounds like, it's awful. Jill makes Scott chase her into the living room. Oh, by the way, we're 35 minutes into the movie at this point. In 35 minutes, we've seen 1(maybe 2) death scenes, several scenes of Tiny Tim being his usual weird self, a Massengill moment, and 2 scenes of partial nudity. If this thing doesn't start having a point soon, I'm mailing it back unfinished.
Jill lets Scott undress her on the living room floor, while Gary watches from a nearby window. It plays out like a cheesy porno(wait, isn't that redundant?), until the phone rings. It's me, asking where the killing scenes are.
Nope, it's not me, it's Jill's friend Sarah. Oh, and Scott turns out to be Peter Krause. He leaves after her phone call, and Jill starts dirty dancing by herself. Before Scott leaves, though, he spots someone running through the backyard. Scott gets out of the car and chases the figure into a barn. The killer whacks Scott in the face with a baseball bat, and Jill continues to do the world's most unchoreographed dancing scene.
Gary shows up at her front door. She tells him about her relationship with Scott over a cup of coffee. Why does every scene these 2 share end up looking like a commercial??? Mervo disrupts the conversation, and Gary drags him inside to apologize for scaring Jill. Another person shows up at the front door: Jill's friend, Sarah, who arrives to pad the film's running time a little more. God, this movie is annoying!
Jill and Sarah discuss boys, then Sarah realizes that she needs to go to work. Jill cranks up the radio, for the sole purpose of not hearing her friend getting attacked by the stalker. He chases her away from her car, then into the same barn that Scott was killed in earlier in the film. Sarah leans against a post to catch her breath, and the killer shoots an arrow at her, pinning her hand to the post. As Sarah screams, the killer rips her blouse open, hangs her upside down, then removes her pants. The killer then slits Sarah's throat while Jill plays with a stuffed animal.
After yet another brief scene where Mervo acts like a loon, Gary stops by to visit Jill. He tells her that Mervo has vanished, and she decides to call Sarah, who recently passed away. The film cuts to Nervy Mervy, who is feeling sorry for himself. Jill has no luck finding either Sarah or Scott, and Gary jokingly suggests that they ran off together. The he finally leaves. Alone at last, Jill cries herself to sleep.
Once Jill's finally asleep again, the stalker chloroforms her once more. Hey, I have an idea: how about, every time someone in the movie does something they already did in a previous scene, we take a drink! The killer brings Jill to the barn, and begins to undress her in front of Scott, who's dangling upside down about a foot above where she's sleeping. The sheriff's deputy arrives, and the killer quickly brings Jill back to the house. While the deputy looks around the yard to see if anything looks suspicious, the killer sneaks back to the barn and slits Scott's throat.
The following morning, Jill wakes up on the sofa, and staggers into the kitchen. She opens the fridge, and a bucket of blood spills on both her and the kitchen floor. Gary pops up in her kitchen to calm her down, and he carries Jill to the shower. Stripping Jill naked, Gary cleans her then begins rubbing her in other ways. He brings her back to the couch, where he proceeds to kiss every square inch of Jill's chest. Then he covers her with a blanket and watches her fall sleep. Oh, and he decides to remove his clothes while watching her, before eventually raping her in her. If you look up "sleazy" in the dictionary, I'll bet you'd find a picture of this movie.
Jill wakes up, and she immediately asks Gary to stop. He walks away, still naked as a jailbird. Then we see Mervo mumbling to himself, "I gotta do it, gotta do it...", while Gary sits in the dark and sobs like the bitch that we all know him to be. That's right Gary: yer a bitch. Deal with it.
Mervo enters Jill's house and asks her to go someplace with him. When she presses him for details, he merely tells Jill that he has something important to show her, and she actually goes with him. I think it's safe to say that my suspension of disbelief is long gone. Outside, Mervo takes Jill to a small house in the middle of nowhere. She reads a suicide note that her mother wrote, then finds several pictures of dead people. Mervo tells the horrified girl that his brother did all of the killing and stalking, and blackmailed him into silence by threatening to send him to a mental hospital for the rest of his life. When they both hear someone outside, Mervo covers Jill's mouth to keep her quiet.
It's Gary. He asks Mervo to release Jill, and the brothers start to fight. As Jill tries to find a weapon, Mervo gains the upper hand, so Jill finds a pistol and shoots him. Then Gary reveals that Mervo was telling the truth, and he reveals that his plan was to eliminate everyone she depended on, until he was the only person left for her to turn to. She pretends to want to be with Gary, but she gets upset and runs away when he doesn't seem to be buying it.
There's a brief chase, then Gary puts a stocking over his head and starts to go after Jill with a knife. He corners her in the barn, and Jill sees all of her dead friends and family hanging from the rafters like sides of beef. Gary corners Jill and reveals that he blames her for his feelings of loneliness and isolation. She tries to make him believe that she wants to run away with him, but when she starts to run away again, he kinda figures out that she was lying. She buys some time by pinning Gary to the floor with a pitchfork through his arm and starts to run away yet again. Isn't this like, what, the 3rd chase in as many minutes?
The chase is stupid. He manages to keep getting ahead of her, she screams and runs away, he pops up again. This happens several times, until he traps her in his lair. Jill gets cornered beneath a slaughtered pig, and it bleeds all over her face while Gary drones on and on. He holds his knife in his good hand, slowly circling her. then he leaps at Jill. They tussle in the hay, until Gary ties Jill up and brings her back to the corpses of those she loves.
He prepares to kill her, but Jill is rescued at the last second by Mervo, who shoots Gary with a shotgun. Mervo staggers over to Jill to untie her, and the pair leave the crime scene together to report the murders to the authorities. As the camera shows Gary one last time in the hay, his eyes open wide. THE END?
Eh. As painful as it was, I've seen worse. I guess. Still, every kill was more or less botched, and the pace was verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrry draggy. Plus, we never saw all of the bodies: did the writers forget to add a scene showing what happened to Jill's mother? This movie could be improved a thousand times over by a gorier remake, with 99.999% less goofy musical numbers, so somebody who has experience writing scripts, get working!
And what did Blood Harvest teach me?
-It's impossible to create a good slasher flick involving a scary clown. Can't be done.
-If your former flame still has a treehouse, RUN! And don't have some twithead conversation about how the friggin' thing was built!
-Small-town lawmen take softball games very seriously. Crime can wait 'til after the game.
Next week, hopefully, either Blood Song or Splatter University will arrive in the mail. I had surgery Tuesday, so I'm still kind of playing my schedule by ear, until I can figure out how I'm really feeling. Hopefully, I keep feeling as good as I do today! Happy slashing!
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Jason X
Phew! There's finally a light at the end of the tunnel...this week, I finish off the Friday the 13th franchise with one of the more interesting ones, Jason X. I know there's still Freddy vs. Jason to watch, but it's really just a Freddy movie with Jason in a supporting role, so don't hold your breath waiting for me to get to it. Anyway, SPOILERS ahoy, so let's get started!
Our tale this time begins INSIDE Jason. During the credits, we take a journey through Jason's body and bloodstream. Every now and then, the camera pans back enough to show that Jason's being poked and prodded by a team of government-funded scientists. They take blood samples, skin scrapes, hair follicles...you name it, they study it. Oh, and did I mention that Jason in this one is back to being a Mongoloid, and has healthy flesh? When did he find time to come back to life... after his trip in the New York(Canadian, heh) sewers, maybe?
Well, at least it's a pretty great visual treat to sit through these credits. When they end, we discover that the year is 2010(wait, they captured Jason LAST YEAR?), and Jason has somehow been defeated again, and is being kept at a facility at Crystal Lake. The military apparently wants to exploit his rapid healing ability in their own soldiers. As the movie begins, a lone soldier is keeping vigil in front of Jason. The killer is bound by several chains and shackles, still dressed in his usual hockey mask and uniform. After making a few nervous attempts at engaging Jason in a chat, the soldier grabs a nearby tarp and throws it over the killer to cover him up.
There's an abrupt scene change, and we meet a team of doctors and soldiers, commanded by Dr. Wimmer(played by creepy film director David Cronenberg) as well as an attractive young woman named Rowan. Rowan wants to convince the military to destroy Jason, but they think that his inability to die or suffer permanent injuries is worth studying further. At the very least, Rowan wants to have Jason frozen, but Wimmer refuses. He and the soldiers plan to transport Jason to another government facility, for more in-depth experiments.
They approach Jason, who is still covered by the sheet. Wimmer asks the soldiers to remove the sheet, and doing so reveals that the soldier who had been guarding Jason was strung up in his place, chained and bleeding. Caught off-guard, the men fail to see Jason attacking from behind. He takes out the first 3 soldiers with brute force, then uses his chain to strangle the fourth one before the guy can shoot him. He beats the last soldier with a rod to the face, then notices Dr. Wimmer escaping. Jason throws a metal rod at the doctor, impaling him from across the chamber.
From the corridor, Rowan hears all of the screaming and shooting. She decides to take a quick peek, but one of the soldiers is thrown at the door, knocking it off its hinges as his body slides to a stop at Rowan's feet. She stares at the pile of corpses inside Jason's cell, then sees Jason looming in the hallway behind her. Great. This movie has an alive, teleporting Jason. Why not have him talk, too? Then it can hit the trifecta of stupidity.
Rowan grabs the military rifle off of the dead guy on the floor, and starts running. She gets to the basement level, where she lures Jason into a cryogenic storage chamber. When he gets to the middle of the small room, Rowan fires at him with her rifle. After several hits, one knocks Jason off of his feet, and he sails into a cryogenic chamber. Rowan swiftly locks him in, then starts the freezing process, but Jason stabs her in the abdomen with his machete before the process completes. As the cryogenic area self-locks, both Rowan and Jason freeze and die.
The story then picks up 455 years later. A class of science/archeology students, led by their teacher Professor Brandon Lowe is taking a field trip to what was once Earth. Due to overpopulation, pollution and several other factors, humans learned to colonize other habitable worlds and abandoned ours. So much for Earth Day.
So why was this intergalactic field trip done at the Crystal Lake research facility? Who knows. The students in Lowe's class include Tsunaron, a goofy-looking surfer dude-type; Azrael, an even GOOFIER dude who is accident-prone and lazy; Janessa, a cute brunette who seems to be channeling Allyson Hannigan's quirkiness; and KM-14, a female android built by Tsunaron as a "companion". There's also a black dude along for the class, but in this scene he has no dialogue, and no one calls him by name. Nice that even in the future, horror cliches still exist.
As the students look around, Azrael gets his hand frozen to a coffee mug while examining it. They quickly find the chamber Jason was trapped in, but can't figure out his appearance or the machete frozen in his upraised arm(and I can't figure out why the equipment would still work after more than 400 years...and wasn't the army supposed to be moving him? Wouldn't there have been an investigation when the soldiers never returned???).
Azrael pokes at him a bit after the cryogenic chamber is opened and Jason's thawed-out arm lowers, severing Azrael's arm. KM uses some kind of quick-sealing bond to cover the stump, then gives Azrael a dose of painkiller to calm him down. Lowe uses a communicator to call Lou, the ship's pilot, and tells him to prepare for lift-off as soon as they get back.
Once aboard the shuttle pod(which is shaped like a giant hockey mask on legs), we meet the rest of the crew in the larger ship that they're taking the trip with: Brodsky, the tough-as-nails Marine in charge of a small squad of soldiers; Crutch, a scruffy engineer; a cute doctor named Adrienne(and her students, Stoney and Kinsa)...and that's about it. So, let me see, we've got the students, the Marines, carry the one....about a dozen or so people for Jason to kill. Cool.
In the medical bay, Azrael lays down on a table and his arm is placed directly beneath his stump. Using nanobots called "ants", the stump and the arm are fused back together, then the ants retreat. Azrael staggers to the corridor, where a friend gives him a high-five, causing Az to stumble in pain again.
At the same time, Professor Lowe is analyzing Rowan's DNA to see how much damage the freezing did to her body, and Adrienne is analyzing Jason's body with her two horny helpers, Stoney and Kinsa. Adrienne eventually throws them out, and examines Jason alone, with a remote linkup to Professor Lowe's lab station. It's always a good idea to be in a room alone with Jason. Yup. Move along, nothing to see here...
Rowan has suffered damage from the prolonged freezing process all over her body, so the ants cover her completely to begin their repairs. In Adrienne's lab, she begins an autopsy of Jason, starting with a scan of his skull, which shows an abnormally small brain. Ha ha! She then gently removes his deformed eyeball, while he stares up at her with his good eye. She examines the mangled eyeball and drops it into a sink filled with liquid nitrogen. Yum, who wants eye-sicles?
In Lowe's lab, the repair job was a success. Rowan wakes up and immediately attacks Professor Lowe with a hard punch to the jaw. When she gets her bearings, the first thing Rowan asks about is whether or not Jason is dead. They only tell her that he was frozen along with her, then they inform her that it's been over 455 years since the day she was frozen. Talk about sleeping in...
Professor Lowe gets to his private quarters as soon as he can, and calls a frail man named Dieter Perez. Dieter's asleep, but he agrees to take the call when he sees the caller. Dieter is sort of a fencer of artifacts, but he remains skeptical of the value of Lowe's latest "treasures". Apparently, re-animated people are a dime a dozen, even if they've been frozen for as long as Rowan was.
Dieter perks up when he sees the name Voorhees. Apparently, even 455 years later, Jason's legend still gets around. He strikes a deal with Lowe to pay a ridiculous amount of money for Jason's remains, and the two agree on the terms. As soon as the online chat ends, Janessa shows up, ready for some kinkiness. Rowwwwwwwr.
Adrienne cuts Jason's mask off to examine his face, and we get our only really good look at him unmasked in this movie. His skin is soft and lumpy-looking, and his teeth are a bit crooked, but other than that he looks like a troll from your average Grimm Brothers tale. Except for the first couple of movies, I don't think I've ever seen this much skin on his face. Grimacing, Adrienne drops his mask back into place.
In Lowe's quarters, Janessa is using a pair of tongs to twist his nipples. Believe me, it's as weird to watch as it is to read. I feel sleazy just typing it. She rides him like Seabiscuit, until he agrees to let her pass his course. Yeesh. I wonder which end got the bottle....on second thought: No. I don't wonder.
Jason's blood begins to ooze out from under his mask, dripping onto the floor of the lab. Adrienne fails to notice it, because she's at her desk, studying the various samples of blood and tissue that she took from him. At the same time, KM is showing off some metal nipples to Tsunaron. He doesn't realize it, but KM has grown beyond her programming, and loves him. Awwwwww! Kiss her, ya lug!
Okay, so back to Stoney and Kinsa...briefly. They're making out, so apparently "horniness" hasn't found a cure in the future. We switch back to Adrienne so fast, it gives me whiplash. She hears something, but when she turns around, Jason has resumed playing dead-ish. She looks around a bit, then goes back to her analysis. Jason flexes an ice-covered hand, and Adrienne looks up again. He lays still. When she goes back to her study of his DNA, Jason stands up, then glances over at the cute scientist.
Adrienne remains oblivious, until she sees the examination table is now deserted. Jason grabs her ponytail, presses his arms around her, then throws Adrienne against a wall. The anonymous black dude from the field trip is on the other side of the wall, but he fails to notice her struggle through the frosted glass wall. Jason drags Adrienne over to the liquid nitrogen, dunking her head into it until her face is frozen solid, then he smashes her face against the table, shattering her head. Before he leaves the lab, Jason grabs a particularly nasty surgical saw to replace the machete that Professor Lowe took out of his frozen hand.
Lowe, meanwhile, has brought Rowan a tray of food. He tells her that they're heading for Earth Two, then relates the story of how "her" Earth was depleted of all resources, destroyed with pollution, and eventually abandoned. Rowan tells Lowe that she was one of the heads of the project researching Jason's invulnerability. She says that they tried to kill him in numerous ways--gas, electrocution, hanging, firing squad--but he never died.
Meanwhile, Janessa is trying to make a move on Tsunaron, but he shoots her down. They get introduced to Rowan, then Brodsky and KM come in as well. Rowan accidentally discovers that Jason is on the ship, and she insists on proof that he is dead. Can't say that I blame her.
They find Adrienne's body, and put the ship on a high-security lockdown, until Brodsky's squad can find and kill Jason. Hearing the security alert, Stoney and Kinsa decide to stop making out, and join the others. Jason has other ideas. He meets Stoney at the door, impaling him, then dragging him away, as Kinsa goes hysterical.
She gets to the lab with the others, and informs them of Stoney's death. Brodsky tells his squad to be on alert, and to shoot to kill. When Lowe tries to bribe the Sarge not to kill Jason, Brodsky agrees, but then tells his squad to kill Jason anyway. The Marine grunts all have names like Dallas, Sven, Geko and Kicker, but they might as well be named "Body 1", Body 2", and so on.
We then find Azrael in a virtual reality game with Stone Cold Steve Austin's Canadian-actor equivalent, Lukewarm. They're shooting imaginary aliens when Jason steps in and starts killing the aliens as well. Lukewarm stops the program after Jason kills his and Azrael's "avatars", and then watches Jason pick Azrael up by the neck. Lukewarm shoots at Jason, who drops the kid and goes after Lukewarm, but Az tries to help by jumping on Jason's back. Jason pries the kid off, snaps his spine, then shoves Lukewarm's face into a wall.
Next, Crutch is being stalked. He hears someone in the general vicinity, but can't tell who it is. Crutch then sees Jason's reflection in a monitor, but before Jason can slash him, Brodsky and his squad blast away at the killer, and destroy Crutch's little "garden" in the process. Jason disappears in the smoke and barrage of bullets, and Crutch escapes while the trio look for Jason.
The first one to die, Sven, is snatched up by Jason as he walks by the killer's hiding place. Jason snaps his neck. The next to die, Condor, is trying to spot Jason by climbing a landing and seeing the room from above. Sadly, Jason is already up there to meet him(More teleporting!), and hurls Condor onto a giant drill. The drill impales Condor as his body spins, sending gore everywhere.
Brodsky fails to reach them on his headset, and gets nervous. The 2 female Marines find Condor, and report that he's "screwed". Ha-ha. Jason goes after the first woman, Geko , when she backs into him in the darkness. Jason cuts her throat and lets her stagger into one of her squadmates, Kicker. He fires several rounds at Jason, and watches the big guy stumble backwards onto a giant hook. Kicker then hoists Jason into the air by the chain that the hook is attached to, and reports that he killed Jason.
Nope. Jason lifts himself off of the hook and kills Kicker buy cutting him in half. The top half tries to crawl away(should we call him Crawler now?) and radio for any survivors to escape, but the only one left seems to be Brodsky. Brodsky finds one of the dead girls on a hook, and tries to sneak up on Jason. Jason grabs him by punching through a steel container, and stabs him twice through the stomach. Before he dies, though, Brodsky gets some funny dying words, saying that one stab in the ribs won't kill him, then admitting that the second stab did the trick.
Back in the lab, Professor Lowe and his surviving students,along with KM and Rowan realize that Jason has massacred all of the Marines. A loud pounding on the door frightens them, but it's only Crutch. He finds out about the dead Marines, then Lowe talks to the pilot, Lou, who is just about ready to begin docking with Solaris, the space station they were trying to reach. He prepares for docking, then Jason kills him from behind. Pilotless, the Grendel crashes through Solaris, killing everyone on the station in one fell swoop, as well as damaging the ship. The black kid, who finally has a name(Waylander), puts the damaged space station on the viewscreen just before it explodes. Whoops!
After the explosion, Tsunaron does one of the few SMART things in the film, by sending a distress beacon out into space. After Professor Lowe assures the survivors that this particular region of space is heavily travelled, Jason begins pounding on the heavy metal door. When he stops for a few moments, Rowan hopes out loud that he went away, leading Janessa to deliver a classic wiseass comeback: "Why don't you stick your head out and have a peek?" God help me, I think I'm in love.
While everyone's staring at the metal door, Jason crashes through a glass wall. They all sprint back into the corridor, stop when they realize they're alone again, then have another realization strike them like a sack of hammers: they left Professor Lowe with Jason. D'oh! Say goodbye to your GPA, kids!
Lowe tries to bargain with Jason for his life. Sure, that always works with unstoppable zombies! He offers Jason money, power, influential connections...but Jason only looms closer. Finally, Jason moves in for the kill, and...ignores Lowe, in favor of the ancient machete he had been holding when frozen. Lowe proudly yells out to his students in the next room, "Guys it's okay...He just wanted his machete back!" Ay yi yi, what a lunkhead Lowe is.
In the next room, Rowan tries to come up with an escape plan. She asks Waylander if they can "beam off" of Grendel, and he looks at her like she's Anna Nicole Smith's dumber cousin. They decide it might be possible to relaunch the shuttle, and Crutch agrees to get to his console and start the launch sequence. Waylander tells Crutch that he'll assist him, while the others try to get to the shuttle. Rowan picks up the rifle-cannon off of one of the dead Marines, and assures everyone that she can use it.
KM and Tsunaron move off in a different direction to arm KM with more weapons. When he asks KM to assess their chances of escaping the ship, she calculates that they're almost definitely going to die. He kisses her, and she responds that their odds just got much better. Gotta love how horny these guys in the future are, huh?
Rowan, Janessa and Kinsa make their way to the cargo bay, where most of the Marines were picked off. Curiously, they find the spike Brodsky was impaled on, but no sign of the Sarge anywhere. Kinsa starts to lose it at the sight of all the blood, and Rowan threatens to kill her before Jason can, if she doesn't shut up. Then they spot a surviving Marine across the room. Rowan decides to help the survivor, and orders the other two women to get to the shuttle bay.
Back at the flight deck console, Crutch and Waylander find Lou, sans skin. They move his body(what's left of it...) out of the way, and start to prepare for the shuttle launch.
Rowan discovers that the survivor is none other than Brodsky. She examines his wounds and tries to get him on his feet,but he can't do it. She promises to bring back some others to help move him, then resumes looking around.
Crutch uses Waylander's vest to wipe Lou's blood of of the equipment, much to the young man's chagrin. Then Crutch delivers another really funny line about a war he survived, the "Microsoft conflict", where "We were beating each other with our own severed limbs." I gotta say, as cheesy as some of this movie is, I love the dialogue.
Anyway, at her console, Kinsa meets up with Rowan, who asks for assistance in moving the injured Sarge. Crutch tells Waylander to go, but when Waylander meets Rowan at the spot where she found Brodsky, he is no longer there. Left alone at his console, Crutch is shown Lowe's severed head, right before Jason smashes Crutch face-first into an electronic panel, killing him.
Frightened, Kinsa seals herself inside the escape pod. Rowan tries to talk her down, but Kinsa tries to launch the pod before it's properly unclamped from the Grendel. The clamps tear the pod apart when it starts to take off, and the explosion knocks everyone to the ground.
Janessa, Rowan and Waylander stand up just as Jason finds them. The weapon in Waylander's hands jams, and Jason moves in to finish the trio off...until Tsunaron enters the room. Trailing behind him is the new, improved KM. She's dressed like a dominatrix and armed with what the Marines earlier referred to as a "BFG", which should be familiar to anyone who's a fan of classic shoot'em ups. Everyone else: look it up. You'll probably laugh yer asses off afterwards.
Also funny, in a stupid way, is Tsunaron proudly proclaiming that he gave KM "an upload", when I'm pretty sure he meant to say "upgrade". KM grins and promises to hurt Jason, and he throws his machete into her stomach before she even gets to fire a single shot. Awesome. She jitters around a bit, then goes limp. When Jason goes to retrieve his weapon, she looks up at him, grins, then fires her BFG right into his face at point-blank range. Jason flies off of his feet across the room, and KM somersaults after him. Yay! Finally, a proper showdown.
KM pulls out 2 handguns and continues to assault Jason. Then she uses martial arts to knock him around, finishing him off with dozens of more gunshots and even more karate. KM proudly stands over the killer, but he knocks her off of her feet and gains the upper hand. Before he finishes the android off, Sarge comes out of nowhere to stab Jason from behind.
Back on her feet again, KM backs Jason against a wall, then shoots around him, creating a hole-y outline. When he raises his machete, she responds by shooting his arm off, then kicking him through the wall. She further damages Jason by shooting his left leg off, then blowing two-thirds of his head apart. Uh, I think you got him, honey. Still not finished, KM flings Jason's machete across the room, planting it in his crotch. Owwwwwwwwwwwww!
KM kisses Tsunaron, and everyone celebrates. The survivors get to Lab Two, where they patch up Brodsky. The Grendel shakes some more, and Waylander announces that, according to the computer, the hull is damaged and Grendel is losing oxygen. Luckily, another ship, the Tiamat, has responded to their distress beacon. Unluckily, Tiamat is 45 minutes away, which means that everyone on board the Grendel will run out of air long before the Tiamat reaches them.
Rowan has an idea, though. She points out a flimsy walkway connecting the part of the ship they're on to another, less-damaged section. She proposes that they make their way to the intact section, disconnect the damaged area from the end of the walkway with explosives, then wait there for the rescue ship to arrive. Everyone agrees that it might work, and they tell the Tiamat to continue on their rescue course. Quickly, the group leaves the sick bay to begin the trek to the undamaged section of the ship.
Jason, by the way, landed on the repair table when KM shot him up. A malfunction restarts the medical console, and the nano ants analyze Jason's injuries and begin the task of repairing him. There's not enough healthy tissue on him to complete the job, so the computer replaces the missing areas with synthetic tissue, essentially giving his DNA an even better upgrade than it already had...or "upload", to use Tsunaron's dumbspeak. The ants even improve Jason's clothing and mask, making them into literal armor, and give him both of his eyes back, which is pretty nifty, considering that one was completely removed earlier in the film. Nice ants.
While Jason's being repaired, the survivors are setting up the explosive charges, planning to detonate the damaged part of Grendel, to separate it from the section they're going to. When they finish setting the charges, Jason(or, as he's referred to in the credits, "Uber-Jason") makes his big debut. The only thing I don't like about the new look is the mask: it's bulky and lumpy, and looks like something from the "Mighty Ducks" cartoon from several years ago. But everything else is pretty sweet, including his new, demon-red eyes.(And again, I ask...how did the ants replace the eye that wasn't there to fix up? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?)
KM tries to kill Uber-Jason again, but this time, the bullets all just bounce off of him. KM decides to try martial arts again, but warns everyone to run away first. Unfortunately for her,Uber- Jason uses her distraction to knock her robotic head off of her robotic body. Rowan tries to step in to help, but Uber-Jason starts to choke her.
Waylander distracts Uber-Jason long enough for him to drop Rowan and join the others in their frantic escape, but Uber-Jason just throws him around like a rag doll. Brodsky shows up to find out what all the commotion is, and Rowan tells him that Waylander has the detonator for the explosives. Before he dies, Waylander shows Uber-Jason the detonator, then presses the button.
Everyone gets knocked around by the explosions, and the intact portion of Grendel eventually stabilizes, just as the rescue ship arrives. Everyone sighs with relief...then Uber-Jason punches a hole in the outer hull of the chamber they're in. As they struggle to avoid the vacum of space, Janessa starts to lose her grip on the metal floor. She delivers the immortal line, "This sucks on SO many levels," just before being sucked into space and crushed into a blob of goo. Damn. I liked her.
The only survivors now are Tsunaron, Sarge, Rowan, and KM's head. They seal off the destroyed room, just as Uber-Jason breaks through the outer wall. They run through door after door, sealing off each one as they go. Tiamat docks with Grendel, and a flimsy-looking tunnel opens up and connects the two ships. Too bad the escape hatch won't open. The power to the door is cut off.
Brodsky volunteers to do a space-walk to open the hatch manually from outside. As he climbs out, Uber-Jason breaks through most of the doors they sealed on their journey to the hatch, and Tsunaron and Rowan try to think of a way to impede his progress. Rowan tells Tsunaron that they need to create a diversion, which Tsunaron begins programming while Rowan (guided by Sarge's audio input) tries to repair the panel needed to get the escape hatch opened.
The diversion is funny as heck: Using the virtual reality tech we saw earlier in the film, Tsunaron and KM transform the room next door into Camp Crystal Lake. It doesn't fool Uber-Jason for very long, so they add in a pair of nubile female campers in tights shirts and short-shorts. The virtual campers tell Jason that they plan to drink, smoke and have oodles of sex, then they go topless and climb into sleeping bags.
His reaction is awesomely funny. Uber-Jason picks up one of the girls, seals her into her sleeping bag, then uses her as a club to bash the other virtual girl. The whole time, both girls are saying things like, "Ow, that hurts!" When Uber-Jason finishes the fake girls off, he resumes trying to reach the remaining people on the Grendel.
Just as that happens, Rowan gets the escape hatch working. Sarge uses a rocket pack to get to them from outside, as the remaining section of the ship that Uber-Jason demolished starts to explode in a chain reaction. Rowan and Tsunaron run through the space-tunnel, until Tsunaron realizes that KM's head was left behind. Against all logic, Rowan goes back to the Grendel to snatch up the robot head.
Rowan sees Uber-Jason striding in her direction as the virtual campground explodes and burns around him. Before he reaches Rowan, Uber-Jason is stopped in his tracks by Brodsky, and the two start brawling as the Grendel gets destroyed around them. As Rowan watches through a small porthole, the blast propels Uber-Jason toward the escape pod. Before he gets to them, Uber-Jason gets sideswiped by Sarge, and the two hurtle in the direction of Earth 2.
Tsunaron, KM and Rowan marvel at the fact that they survived, and we see Sarge and Uber-Jason start to burn up as they enter Earth 2's atmosphere. As the movie comes to a close, a young couple on the planet mistake the burning astronauts for a falling star. They make a wish, kiss, then realize that the "star" landed in a nearby lake, and decide to go check it out. Uber-Jason's banged-up mask lands at the bottom of the lake. Here we go again...THE END
Y'know, that was a fun one to watch. The jokes were funnier than expected, the effects were well-done, and the look of the film was sleek. Also, the cast was pretty likable and the women in particular were gorgeous. On the downside, the story was weak, and riddled with plotholes: How did Jason get into the hallway at the start, without Rowan seeing him? How was the lab still operational over 400 years after the facility closed? How did the ants repair Jason's malformed eye, after we saw Adrienne remove it? Well, in spite of the inconsistencies, I still found myself loving the movie as much as I did when I first saw it in theaters, so it gets 4 and a half killer trees out of 5.
And what did I learn from Jason X?
-In the future, all women are attractive.
-Computers 455 years from now will have extensive information about summer camps from the 20th century.
-Canada has their own Stone Cold Steve Austin, and he's easy to kill.
Next week, no movie. I'm going in for surgery Tuesday, so I'm taking at least a week off for the operation and recovery. When I'm feeling up to it(hopefully the following week, maybe the next), I'll pick up right where I left off. The next slasher film on my queue is Blood Harvest, starring Tiny Tim, so it sounds hilarious right off the bat! See you soon(I hope...)!
Our tale this time begins INSIDE Jason. During the credits, we take a journey through Jason's body and bloodstream. Every now and then, the camera pans back enough to show that Jason's being poked and prodded by a team of government-funded scientists. They take blood samples, skin scrapes, hair follicles...you name it, they study it. Oh, and did I mention that Jason in this one is back to being a Mongoloid, and has healthy flesh? When did he find time to come back to life... after his trip in the New York(Canadian, heh) sewers, maybe?
Well, at least it's a pretty great visual treat to sit through these credits. When they end, we discover that the year is 2010(wait, they captured Jason LAST YEAR?), and Jason has somehow been defeated again, and is being kept at a facility at Crystal Lake. The military apparently wants to exploit his rapid healing ability in their own soldiers. As the movie begins, a lone soldier is keeping vigil in front of Jason. The killer is bound by several chains and shackles, still dressed in his usual hockey mask and uniform. After making a few nervous attempts at engaging Jason in a chat, the soldier grabs a nearby tarp and throws it over the killer to cover him up.
There's an abrupt scene change, and we meet a team of doctors and soldiers, commanded by Dr. Wimmer(played by creepy film director David Cronenberg) as well as an attractive young woman named Rowan. Rowan wants to convince the military to destroy Jason, but they think that his inability to die or suffer permanent injuries is worth studying further. At the very least, Rowan wants to have Jason frozen, but Wimmer refuses. He and the soldiers plan to transport Jason to another government facility, for more in-depth experiments.
They approach Jason, who is still covered by the sheet. Wimmer asks the soldiers to remove the sheet, and doing so reveals that the soldier who had been guarding Jason was strung up in his place, chained and bleeding. Caught off-guard, the men fail to see Jason attacking from behind. He takes out the first 3 soldiers with brute force, then uses his chain to strangle the fourth one before the guy can shoot him. He beats the last soldier with a rod to the face, then notices Dr. Wimmer escaping. Jason throws a metal rod at the doctor, impaling him from across the chamber.
From the corridor, Rowan hears all of the screaming and shooting. She decides to take a quick peek, but one of the soldiers is thrown at the door, knocking it off its hinges as his body slides to a stop at Rowan's feet. She stares at the pile of corpses inside Jason's cell, then sees Jason looming in the hallway behind her. Great. This movie has an alive, teleporting Jason. Why not have him talk, too? Then it can hit the trifecta of stupidity.
Rowan grabs the military rifle off of the dead guy on the floor, and starts running. She gets to the basement level, where she lures Jason into a cryogenic storage chamber. When he gets to the middle of the small room, Rowan fires at him with her rifle. After several hits, one knocks Jason off of his feet, and he sails into a cryogenic chamber. Rowan swiftly locks him in, then starts the freezing process, but Jason stabs her in the abdomen with his machete before the process completes. As the cryogenic area self-locks, both Rowan and Jason freeze and die.
The story then picks up 455 years later. A class of science/archeology students, led by their teacher Professor Brandon Lowe is taking a field trip to what was once Earth. Due to overpopulation, pollution and several other factors, humans learned to colonize other habitable worlds and abandoned ours. So much for Earth Day.
So why was this intergalactic field trip done at the Crystal Lake research facility? Who knows. The students in Lowe's class include Tsunaron, a goofy-looking surfer dude-type; Azrael, an even GOOFIER dude who is accident-prone and lazy; Janessa, a cute brunette who seems to be channeling Allyson Hannigan's quirkiness; and KM-14, a female android built by Tsunaron as a "companion". There's also a black dude along for the class, but in this scene he has no dialogue, and no one calls him by name. Nice that even in the future, horror cliches still exist.
As the students look around, Azrael gets his hand frozen to a coffee mug while examining it. They quickly find the chamber Jason was trapped in, but can't figure out his appearance or the machete frozen in his upraised arm(and I can't figure out why the equipment would still work after more than 400 years...and wasn't the army supposed to be moving him? Wouldn't there have been an investigation when the soldiers never returned???).
Azrael pokes at him a bit after the cryogenic chamber is opened and Jason's thawed-out arm lowers, severing Azrael's arm. KM uses some kind of quick-sealing bond to cover the stump, then gives Azrael a dose of painkiller to calm him down. Lowe uses a communicator to call Lou, the ship's pilot, and tells him to prepare for lift-off as soon as they get back.
Once aboard the shuttle pod(which is shaped like a giant hockey mask on legs), we meet the rest of the crew in the larger ship that they're taking the trip with: Brodsky, the tough-as-nails Marine in charge of a small squad of soldiers; Crutch, a scruffy engineer; a cute doctor named Adrienne(and her students, Stoney and Kinsa)...and that's about it. So, let me see, we've got the students, the Marines, carry the one....about a dozen or so people for Jason to kill. Cool.
In the medical bay, Azrael lays down on a table and his arm is placed directly beneath his stump. Using nanobots called "ants", the stump and the arm are fused back together, then the ants retreat. Azrael staggers to the corridor, where a friend gives him a high-five, causing Az to stumble in pain again.
At the same time, Professor Lowe is analyzing Rowan's DNA to see how much damage the freezing did to her body, and Adrienne is analyzing Jason's body with her two horny helpers, Stoney and Kinsa. Adrienne eventually throws them out, and examines Jason alone, with a remote linkup to Professor Lowe's lab station. It's always a good idea to be in a room alone with Jason. Yup. Move along, nothing to see here...
Rowan has suffered damage from the prolonged freezing process all over her body, so the ants cover her completely to begin their repairs. In Adrienne's lab, she begins an autopsy of Jason, starting with a scan of his skull, which shows an abnormally small brain. Ha ha! She then gently removes his deformed eyeball, while he stares up at her with his good eye. She examines the mangled eyeball and drops it into a sink filled with liquid nitrogen. Yum, who wants eye-sicles?
In Lowe's lab, the repair job was a success. Rowan wakes up and immediately attacks Professor Lowe with a hard punch to the jaw. When she gets her bearings, the first thing Rowan asks about is whether or not Jason is dead. They only tell her that he was frozen along with her, then they inform her that it's been over 455 years since the day she was frozen. Talk about sleeping in...
Professor Lowe gets to his private quarters as soon as he can, and calls a frail man named Dieter Perez. Dieter's asleep, but he agrees to take the call when he sees the caller. Dieter is sort of a fencer of artifacts, but he remains skeptical of the value of Lowe's latest "treasures". Apparently, re-animated people are a dime a dozen, even if they've been frozen for as long as Rowan was.
Dieter perks up when he sees the name Voorhees. Apparently, even 455 years later, Jason's legend still gets around. He strikes a deal with Lowe to pay a ridiculous amount of money for Jason's remains, and the two agree on the terms. As soon as the online chat ends, Janessa shows up, ready for some kinkiness. Rowwwwwwwr.
Adrienne cuts Jason's mask off to examine his face, and we get our only really good look at him unmasked in this movie. His skin is soft and lumpy-looking, and his teeth are a bit crooked, but other than that he looks like a troll from your average Grimm Brothers tale. Except for the first couple of movies, I don't think I've ever seen this much skin on his face. Grimacing, Adrienne drops his mask back into place.
In Lowe's quarters, Janessa is using a pair of tongs to twist his nipples. Believe me, it's as weird to watch as it is to read. I feel sleazy just typing it. She rides him like Seabiscuit, until he agrees to let her pass his course. Yeesh. I wonder which end got the bottle....on second thought: No. I don't wonder.
Jason's blood begins to ooze out from under his mask, dripping onto the floor of the lab. Adrienne fails to notice it, because she's at her desk, studying the various samples of blood and tissue that she took from him. At the same time, KM is showing off some metal nipples to Tsunaron. He doesn't realize it, but KM has grown beyond her programming, and loves him. Awwwwww! Kiss her, ya lug!
Okay, so back to Stoney and Kinsa...briefly. They're making out, so apparently "horniness" hasn't found a cure in the future. We switch back to Adrienne so fast, it gives me whiplash. She hears something, but when she turns around, Jason has resumed playing dead-ish. She looks around a bit, then goes back to her analysis. Jason flexes an ice-covered hand, and Adrienne looks up again. He lays still. When she goes back to her study of his DNA, Jason stands up, then glances over at the cute scientist.
Adrienne remains oblivious, until she sees the examination table is now deserted. Jason grabs her ponytail, presses his arms around her, then throws Adrienne against a wall. The anonymous black dude from the field trip is on the other side of the wall, but he fails to notice her struggle through the frosted glass wall. Jason drags Adrienne over to the liquid nitrogen, dunking her head into it until her face is frozen solid, then he smashes her face against the table, shattering her head. Before he leaves the lab, Jason grabs a particularly nasty surgical saw to replace the machete that Professor Lowe took out of his frozen hand.
Lowe, meanwhile, has brought Rowan a tray of food. He tells her that they're heading for Earth Two, then relates the story of how "her" Earth was depleted of all resources, destroyed with pollution, and eventually abandoned. Rowan tells Lowe that she was one of the heads of the project researching Jason's invulnerability. She says that they tried to kill him in numerous ways--gas, electrocution, hanging, firing squad--but he never died.
Meanwhile, Janessa is trying to make a move on Tsunaron, but he shoots her down. They get introduced to Rowan, then Brodsky and KM come in as well. Rowan accidentally discovers that Jason is on the ship, and she insists on proof that he is dead. Can't say that I blame her.
They find Adrienne's body, and put the ship on a high-security lockdown, until Brodsky's squad can find and kill Jason. Hearing the security alert, Stoney and Kinsa decide to stop making out, and join the others. Jason has other ideas. He meets Stoney at the door, impaling him, then dragging him away, as Kinsa goes hysterical.
She gets to the lab with the others, and informs them of Stoney's death. Brodsky tells his squad to be on alert, and to shoot to kill. When Lowe tries to bribe the Sarge not to kill Jason, Brodsky agrees, but then tells his squad to kill Jason anyway. The Marine grunts all have names like Dallas, Sven, Geko and Kicker, but they might as well be named "Body 1", Body 2", and so on.
We then find Azrael in a virtual reality game with Stone Cold Steve Austin's Canadian-actor equivalent, Lukewarm. They're shooting imaginary aliens when Jason steps in and starts killing the aliens as well. Lukewarm stops the program after Jason kills his and Azrael's "avatars", and then watches Jason pick Azrael up by the neck. Lukewarm shoots at Jason, who drops the kid and goes after Lukewarm, but Az tries to help by jumping on Jason's back. Jason pries the kid off, snaps his spine, then shoves Lukewarm's face into a wall.
Next, Crutch is being stalked. He hears someone in the general vicinity, but can't tell who it is. Crutch then sees Jason's reflection in a monitor, but before Jason can slash him, Brodsky and his squad blast away at the killer, and destroy Crutch's little "garden" in the process. Jason disappears in the smoke and barrage of bullets, and Crutch escapes while the trio look for Jason.
The first one to die, Sven, is snatched up by Jason as he walks by the killer's hiding place. Jason snaps his neck. The next to die, Condor, is trying to spot Jason by climbing a landing and seeing the room from above. Sadly, Jason is already up there to meet him(More teleporting!), and hurls Condor onto a giant drill. The drill impales Condor as his body spins, sending gore everywhere.
Brodsky fails to reach them on his headset, and gets nervous. The 2 female Marines find Condor, and report that he's "screwed". Ha-ha. Jason goes after the first woman, Geko , when she backs into him in the darkness. Jason cuts her throat and lets her stagger into one of her squadmates, Kicker. He fires several rounds at Jason, and watches the big guy stumble backwards onto a giant hook. Kicker then hoists Jason into the air by the chain that the hook is attached to, and reports that he killed Jason.
Nope. Jason lifts himself off of the hook and kills Kicker buy cutting him in half. The top half tries to crawl away(should we call him Crawler now?) and radio for any survivors to escape, but the only one left seems to be Brodsky. Brodsky finds one of the dead girls on a hook, and tries to sneak up on Jason. Jason grabs him by punching through a steel container, and stabs him twice through the stomach. Before he dies, though, Brodsky gets some funny dying words, saying that one stab in the ribs won't kill him, then admitting that the second stab did the trick.
Back in the lab, Professor Lowe and his surviving students,along with KM and Rowan realize that Jason has massacred all of the Marines. A loud pounding on the door frightens them, but it's only Crutch. He finds out about the dead Marines, then Lowe talks to the pilot, Lou, who is just about ready to begin docking with Solaris, the space station they were trying to reach. He prepares for docking, then Jason kills him from behind. Pilotless, the Grendel crashes through Solaris, killing everyone on the station in one fell swoop, as well as damaging the ship. The black kid, who finally has a name(Waylander), puts the damaged space station on the viewscreen just before it explodes. Whoops!
After the explosion, Tsunaron does one of the few SMART things in the film, by sending a distress beacon out into space. After Professor Lowe assures the survivors that this particular region of space is heavily travelled, Jason begins pounding on the heavy metal door. When he stops for a few moments, Rowan hopes out loud that he went away, leading Janessa to deliver a classic wiseass comeback: "Why don't you stick your head out and have a peek?" God help me, I think I'm in love.
While everyone's staring at the metal door, Jason crashes through a glass wall. They all sprint back into the corridor, stop when they realize they're alone again, then have another realization strike them like a sack of hammers: they left Professor Lowe with Jason. D'oh! Say goodbye to your GPA, kids!
Lowe tries to bargain with Jason for his life. Sure, that always works with unstoppable zombies! He offers Jason money, power, influential connections...but Jason only looms closer. Finally, Jason moves in for the kill, and...ignores Lowe, in favor of the ancient machete he had been holding when frozen. Lowe proudly yells out to his students in the next room, "Guys it's okay...He just wanted his machete back!" Ay yi yi, what a lunkhead Lowe is.
In the next room, Rowan tries to come up with an escape plan. She asks Waylander if they can "beam off" of Grendel, and he looks at her like she's Anna Nicole Smith's dumber cousin. They decide it might be possible to relaunch the shuttle, and Crutch agrees to get to his console and start the launch sequence. Waylander tells Crutch that he'll assist him, while the others try to get to the shuttle. Rowan picks up the rifle-cannon off of one of the dead Marines, and assures everyone that she can use it.
KM and Tsunaron move off in a different direction to arm KM with more weapons. When he asks KM to assess their chances of escaping the ship, she calculates that they're almost definitely going to die. He kisses her, and she responds that their odds just got much better. Gotta love how horny these guys in the future are, huh?
Rowan, Janessa and Kinsa make their way to the cargo bay, where most of the Marines were picked off. Curiously, they find the spike Brodsky was impaled on, but no sign of the Sarge anywhere. Kinsa starts to lose it at the sight of all the blood, and Rowan threatens to kill her before Jason can, if she doesn't shut up. Then they spot a surviving Marine across the room. Rowan decides to help the survivor, and orders the other two women to get to the shuttle bay.
Back at the flight deck console, Crutch and Waylander find Lou, sans skin. They move his body(what's left of it...) out of the way, and start to prepare for the shuttle launch.
Rowan discovers that the survivor is none other than Brodsky. She examines his wounds and tries to get him on his feet,but he can't do it. She promises to bring back some others to help move him, then resumes looking around.
Crutch uses Waylander's vest to wipe Lou's blood of of the equipment, much to the young man's chagrin. Then Crutch delivers another really funny line about a war he survived, the "Microsoft conflict", where "We were beating each other with our own severed limbs." I gotta say, as cheesy as some of this movie is, I love the dialogue.
Anyway, at her console, Kinsa meets up with Rowan, who asks for assistance in moving the injured Sarge. Crutch tells Waylander to go, but when Waylander meets Rowan at the spot where she found Brodsky, he is no longer there. Left alone at his console, Crutch is shown Lowe's severed head, right before Jason smashes Crutch face-first into an electronic panel, killing him.
Frightened, Kinsa seals herself inside the escape pod. Rowan tries to talk her down, but Kinsa tries to launch the pod before it's properly unclamped from the Grendel. The clamps tear the pod apart when it starts to take off, and the explosion knocks everyone to the ground.
Janessa, Rowan and Waylander stand up just as Jason finds them. The weapon in Waylander's hands jams, and Jason moves in to finish the trio off...until Tsunaron enters the room. Trailing behind him is the new, improved KM. She's dressed like a dominatrix and armed with what the Marines earlier referred to as a "BFG", which should be familiar to anyone who's a fan of classic shoot'em ups. Everyone else: look it up. You'll probably laugh yer asses off afterwards.
Also funny, in a stupid way, is Tsunaron proudly proclaiming that he gave KM "an upload", when I'm pretty sure he meant to say "upgrade". KM grins and promises to hurt Jason, and he throws his machete into her stomach before she even gets to fire a single shot. Awesome. She jitters around a bit, then goes limp. When Jason goes to retrieve his weapon, she looks up at him, grins, then fires her BFG right into his face at point-blank range. Jason flies off of his feet across the room, and KM somersaults after him. Yay! Finally, a proper showdown.
KM pulls out 2 handguns and continues to assault Jason. Then she uses martial arts to knock him around, finishing him off with dozens of more gunshots and even more karate. KM proudly stands over the killer, but he knocks her off of her feet and gains the upper hand. Before he finishes the android off, Sarge comes out of nowhere to stab Jason from behind.
Back on her feet again, KM backs Jason against a wall, then shoots around him, creating a hole-y outline. When he raises his machete, she responds by shooting his arm off, then kicking him through the wall. She further damages Jason by shooting his left leg off, then blowing two-thirds of his head apart. Uh, I think you got him, honey. Still not finished, KM flings Jason's machete across the room, planting it in his crotch. Owwwwwwwwwwwww!
KM kisses Tsunaron, and everyone celebrates. The survivors get to Lab Two, where they patch up Brodsky. The Grendel shakes some more, and Waylander announces that, according to the computer, the hull is damaged and Grendel is losing oxygen. Luckily, another ship, the Tiamat, has responded to their distress beacon. Unluckily, Tiamat is 45 minutes away, which means that everyone on board the Grendel will run out of air long before the Tiamat reaches them.
Rowan has an idea, though. She points out a flimsy walkway connecting the part of the ship they're on to another, less-damaged section. She proposes that they make their way to the intact section, disconnect the damaged area from the end of the walkway with explosives, then wait there for the rescue ship to arrive. Everyone agrees that it might work, and they tell the Tiamat to continue on their rescue course. Quickly, the group leaves the sick bay to begin the trek to the undamaged section of the ship.
Jason, by the way, landed on the repair table when KM shot him up. A malfunction restarts the medical console, and the nano ants analyze Jason's injuries and begin the task of repairing him. There's not enough healthy tissue on him to complete the job, so the computer replaces the missing areas with synthetic tissue, essentially giving his DNA an even better upgrade than it already had...or "upload", to use Tsunaron's dumbspeak. The ants even improve Jason's clothing and mask, making them into literal armor, and give him both of his eyes back, which is pretty nifty, considering that one was completely removed earlier in the film. Nice ants.
While Jason's being repaired, the survivors are setting up the explosive charges, planning to detonate the damaged part of Grendel, to separate it from the section they're going to. When they finish setting the charges, Jason(or, as he's referred to in the credits, "Uber-Jason") makes his big debut. The only thing I don't like about the new look is the mask: it's bulky and lumpy, and looks like something from the "Mighty Ducks" cartoon from several years ago. But everything else is pretty sweet, including his new, demon-red eyes.(And again, I ask...how did the ants replace the eye that wasn't there to fix up? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?)
KM tries to kill Uber-Jason again, but this time, the bullets all just bounce off of him. KM decides to try martial arts again, but warns everyone to run away first. Unfortunately for her,Uber- Jason uses her distraction to knock her robotic head off of her robotic body. Rowan tries to step in to help, but Uber-Jason starts to choke her.
Waylander distracts Uber-Jason long enough for him to drop Rowan and join the others in their frantic escape, but Uber-Jason just throws him around like a rag doll. Brodsky shows up to find out what all the commotion is, and Rowan tells him that Waylander has the detonator for the explosives. Before he dies, Waylander shows Uber-Jason the detonator, then presses the button.
Everyone gets knocked around by the explosions, and the intact portion of Grendel eventually stabilizes, just as the rescue ship arrives. Everyone sighs with relief...then Uber-Jason punches a hole in the outer hull of the chamber they're in. As they struggle to avoid the vacum of space, Janessa starts to lose her grip on the metal floor. She delivers the immortal line, "This sucks on SO many levels," just before being sucked into space and crushed into a blob of goo. Damn. I liked her.
The only survivors now are Tsunaron, Sarge, Rowan, and KM's head. They seal off the destroyed room, just as Uber-Jason breaks through the outer wall. They run through door after door, sealing off each one as they go. Tiamat docks with Grendel, and a flimsy-looking tunnel opens up and connects the two ships. Too bad the escape hatch won't open. The power to the door is cut off.
Brodsky volunteers to do a space-walk to open the hatch manually from outside. As he climbs out, Uber-Jason breaks through most of the doors they sealed on their journey to the hatch, and Tsunaron and Rowan try to think of a way to impede his progress. Rowan tells Tsunaron that they need to create a diversion, which Tsunaron begins programming while Rowan (guided by Sarge's audio input) tries to repair the panel needed to get the escape hatch opened.
The diversion is funny as heck: Using the virtual reality tech we saw earlier in the film, Tsunaron and KM transform the room next door into Camp Crystal Lake. It doesn't fool Uber-Jason for very long, so they add in a pair of nubile female campers in tights shirts and short-shorts. The virtual campers tell Jason that they plan to drink, smoke and have oodles of sex, then they go topless and climb into sleeping bags.
His reaction is awesomely funny. Uber-Jason picks up one of the girls, seals her into her sleeping bag, then uses her as a club to bash the other virtual girl. The whole time, both girls are saying things like, "Ow, that hurts!" When Uber-Jason finishes the fake girls off, he resumes trying to reach the remaining people on the Grendel.
Just as that happens, Rowan gets the escape hatch working. Sarge uses a rocket pack to get to them from outside, as the remaining section of the ship that Uber-Jason demolished starts to explode in a chain reaction. Rowan and Tsunaron run through the space-tunnel, until Tsunaron realizes that KM's head was left behind. Against all logic, Rowan goes back to the Grendel to snatch up the robot head.
Rowan sees Uber-Jason striding in her direction as the virtual campground explodes and burns around him. Before he reaches Rowan, Uber-Jason is stopped in his tracks by Brodsky, and the two start brawling as the Grendel gets destroyed around them. As Rowan watches through a small porthole, the blast propels Uber-Jason toward the escape pod. Before he gets to them, Uber-Jason gets sideswiped by Sarge, and the two hurtle in the direction of Earth 2.
Tsunaron, KM and Rowan marvel at the fact that they survived, and we see Sarge and Uber-Jason start to burn up as they enter Earth 2's atmosphere. As the movie comes to a close, a young couple on the planet mistake the burning astronauts for a falling star. They make a wish, kiss, then realize that the "star" landed in a nearby lake, and decide to go check it out. Uber-Jason's banged-up mask lands at the bottom of the lake. Here we go again...THE END
Y'know, that was a fun one to watch. The jokes were funnier than expected, the effects were well-done, and the look of the film was sleek. Also, the cast was pretty likable and the women in particular were gorgeous. On the downside, the story was weak, and riddled with plotholes: How did Jason get into the hallway at the start, without Rowan seeing him? How was the lab still operational over 400 years after the facility closed? How did the ants repair Jason's malformed eye, after we saw Adrienne remove it? Well, in spite of the inconsistencies, I still found myself loving the movie as much as I did when I first saw it in theaters, so it gets 4 and a half killer trees out of 5.
And what did I learn from Jason X?
-In the future, all women are attractive.
-Computers 455 years from now will have extensive information about summer camps from the 20th century.
-Canada has their own Stone Cold Steve Austin, and he's easy to kill.
Next week, no movie. I'm going in for surgery Tuesday, so I'm taking at least a week off for the operation and recovery. When I'm feeling up to it(hopefully the following week, maybe the next), I'll pick up right where I left off. The next slasher film on my queue is Blood Harvest, starring Tiny Tim, so it sounds hilarious right off the bat! See you soon(I hope...)!
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Slight correction...thanks, Netflix!
Netflix sent Jason X as my next slasher film, and listed Splatter University as a "short wait". I moved it down the list a little, in the hope that watching some other slashers in the meantime would give it time to become available. Some of the other ones I moved up the list look fun, though...they include a movie featuring Frankie Avalon as a killer and Tiny Tim as a crazy clown.
Remember, the Suggestion Box post is sitting there, waiting for ideas...if nothing else, at least let me know that SOMEBODY reads this! lol
Remember, the Suggestion Box post is sitting there, waiting for ideas...if nothing else, at least let me know that SOMEBODY reads this! lol
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