Well, better late than never, I guess. Netflix, after sending me movies for my niece and nephews, movies to watch with Dad, and pretty much everything under the sun in my queue EXCEPT for my next slasher flick, finally decided to mail April Fool's Day to me. Not a remake, nor an unrelated slasher flick that shares the same name, but the actual 1986 horror-comedy. Alas, it's a DVD that has no extras, so I'll have to sum up the alternate ending after I finish watching. Ready? SPOILERS in 3....2....
All right, so AFD begins with some vacation videos, which is never entertaining. But it allows the movie to introduce us to the victims, uh I mean, characters. First up is an Irish-Catholic gal with the improbable name of Mary O'Reilly O'Toole O'Shea. Oh, bite me. Two seconds in, and I'm already starting to roll my eyes. The good news is that Mary nicely sums up the premise for us: Her friend Muffy just inherited an island with a mansion on it, and Muffy's invited her closest college friends to stay there during Spring Break.
She mentions "convent school"(is that actually the name for it? It doesn't sound right...), and mentions that she wants to work with "handicapped children". I'm going to pause the movie for a sec to go off on a rant...I hate the word "handicapped". See, it originated around the time of the Great Depression, referring to bums who would fake a disability, then hold out a cap for bystanders to put money into. A "handy cap" eventually became a "handicap". Nice. It's the disabled person's equivalent to being called the N-word...
Isn't learning fun, kids?
Anyway, Mary wants to work with disabled kids. Oh, and she reveals that she's a nymphomaniac named Nikki... Who's up next?
Ah, an alumni from the Friday the 13th franchise is up next. She plays Kit here, and her character in the Friday film she did get dressed up as Jason's mother at the end. So that one was, what, the second movie? The third one, maybe. I think it was the second one. Hey, gimme a break! I watch at least one of these a week! After awhile, they all start to blend together...
Well after all of that, Kit declines to say anything for the video. Next in line are Skip and Arch, the film's goofy comic relief characters. Arch, by the way, is portrayed by the same actor who played Biff in the Back to the Future films. Wow, so some of the cast are people who actually had movie careers. Nice. Skip is Muffy's cousin, and he seems to despise her side of the family because of their wealth. Let's keep an eye on him....Oh, and the guy behind the video camera is Chazz, a scruffy-looking slacker.
The movie briefly shifts the action to the island itself, where Muffy is hauling around some creepy props. An older woman named Clara is helping her, but looks concerned. Before Clara leaves to take a ferry to the mainland, Muffy says something rather ominous about the weekend with her friends being "bloody unforgettable".
After Clara departs, Muffy finds something from her disturbing childhood: a Jack-in-the-box toy. In a flashback, Muffy remembers the toy as a birthday gift. A sibling played a prank on her, by replacing Jack's head with a weird lizard-monster action figure head.
At the pier, we meet a few more characters. First up is Nan, a conservative student who is a more recent friend to Muffy. They met in the school's Drama department, which apparently is boring to Muffy's other friends. As a final brush-off, Arch picks up her luggage, makes a face, then drops the bags again. Kind of a dickish move, bro.
The ferry pulls in, and Chaz tells one of the dockworkers that his fly is open. When the guy checks, Chaz plants a loud kiss on him. Uhhhhh...all-righty, then. The captain of the ferry, a grizzled old man, urges them to hurry, because their group is the last one of the day. Kit tries to get him to wait a little longer for a few more people who are late, but he refuses. Luckily, the last couple of people drive up at that exact moment. They're Rob(Kit's boyfriend) and Harvey "Hal" Edison(he is in Muffy's Economics class). After the usual meet-and-greet, the ferry starts the journey to the Isle of Muff--which I do, by the way...
Skip lets his negative feelings bubble to the surface again, telling the others that if he wasn't geographically close, Muffy wouldn't have bothered to invite him on the weekend getaway. Bitter much? Chaz tries to pull the zipper prank on him, but Skip just tells him to "eat it". Then he pulls out a switchblade and challenges Arch to a game of "stretch", whatever that is. Oh, and Chaz gets a chuckle when he turns the camera on Rob, whose fly IS open.
Okay, so apparently "stretch" involves throwing a switchblade at the floor, then making your opponent "stretch" to grab it without falling. Sounds like a Redneck Olympic event. The captain of the ferry watches the "game" for a second or two, then turns his attention to Nikki, who appears to be undressing. Hubba, this chick is pretty attractive. A ferry-mate(that doesn't look or sound right, but I'll be damned if I can think of the correct term for him...) is watching the show, as is Hal, the preppy douchebag.
Hal decides to strike up a one-sided conversation with Nikki while she catches some rays in her bathing suit. His idea of an ice-breaker is to start making silly sex jokes about Muffy's name. Smooth, Don Juan. Chazz isn't having much better luck flirting with Nan. He pretends to sneeze on her, then mocks her when she attempts to tell him about the book that she's reading, Paradise Lost. He then shows her what he's been reading. I'll give you a hint: it rhymes with "shplornography". Then we get a montage of all of our couples boring each other to death with silly dialogue.
As the ferry pulls up to Muff Island *juvenile giggle*, Skip and Arch get into an argument about Stretch. Arch angrily informs Skip that he doesn't want to play anymore, then whips the knife at Skip. It lands in Skip's stomach, and he staggers backwards into the water. Nan's horrified scream gets the attention of the deckhand(HA! I thought of the word!), who dives into the cold water to rescue Skip. Then Rob jumps in as well. As they search under water for the body, Skip himself pops up, revealing that the switchblade was a fake.
As Skip and Arch celebrate their cleverness, Buck(the young deckhand) gets into trouble. He elects to moor the boat to the dock while in the water, because he was having trouble reaching the post from the deck of the ferry. As Buck continues to miss roping his target, he also misses seeing how close the ferry is getting to him. Oh, and the sheriff just happens to be nearby, in another, smaller boat.
Faster than you can say "massive head trauma", Buck gets dragged under the ferry, and becomes Harvey Dent, losing half of his face. The sheriff's boat pulls up, and a thrashing, screaming Buck is last seen speeding away toward the mainland, screaming "They did it! They did it!"
At that same instant, Muffy arrives to greet her guests. The sheriff watches the ferryman disappear in the distance, then asks Muffy if he can borrow her boat to get back to the mainland himself. Before he fetches the keys, he warns the group to stay on the island, in case he needs to question them or press charges. On the way to the mansion, Skip bitterly tells Rob and Kit that nothing bad ever happens to Muffy. Not true, Skip....you showed up!
In the entry hall, Muffy tells the group that the property won't belong to her until she turns 21. The invitees waste no time settling in, making cracks about Muffy's money, her decorating style, and so on. Nice friends.
In the kitchen, the girls prepare hot dogs, and take a sex quiz. Arch and Chazz decide to film the garden, while mocking Nikki. Hal finds a library or study, and wastes no time stealing cigars from a nearby desk.
As night falls, a very drunk Skip again whines that being poor sucks.Nan tries to talk him down from his depression, but he just sinks deeper. Inside, the rest of the group get the dining room ready for dinner. As everyone takes a seat, Nan discovers that her seat has a whoopie cushion on it, and everyone cracks up. Arch then leans back, and the legs of his chair collapse, sending him rolling onto the floor. As the group laughs even harder, Skip remains outside, drinking and howling.
Inside, Muffy's friends speculate about Buck's condition, then they talk about what they'll all be doing after graduation(short answer: not much.). Muffy makes a toast to her friends, and everyone finds that their glasses are dribble-glasses, another prank. Yay.
After the meal, Hal lights one of he cigars, and starts to rehearse the best way to ask Muffy for money. In the bedrrom next door, Arch and Chazz discover some S&M gear, and start playing with it. Hal discovers several newspaper clippings about mysterious accidents and tragedies on the island, and Chazz walks in on him reading one. After Chazz leaves, the cigar in Hal's mouth explodes.
Arch starts putting stuff away in the bathroom, and finds a buttload of drug paraphenalia in his medicine cabinet. As Nikki discovers more kinky gear, Arch pulls the doorknob off of his bedroom door, effectively trapping himself in the room. Oh, and Kit and Rob find a painting in their room has eyes that move. They remove the picture from the wall, and discover a cat-clock underneath, which explains the moving eyes. Rob puts the painting in the hall, and swiftly closes the door. In Nan's room, she hears a baby crying. It turns out to be a tape recorder playing the sound, but she looks pretty upset. Muffy is briefly seen downstairs, turning out lights and getting ready for bed.
Rob and Kit get undressed for bed, and Kit turns out to have a very curvaceous figure. Rob is angry because it turns out that his plans after college have blown up in his face, and he doesn't know what to do about it. He shuts off the light by the bed, and a lamp across the room turns on. Turning off that light turns a third one on, and so on. While Kit giggles, Rob finally resorts to unscrewing the lightbulb in the lamp by the bed, and they go to sleep.
Arch tries to seduce Muffy in the hallway and fails, then tries opening random bedroom doors. He hears moaning behind one, finds the second one either stuck or locked, then walks into the third one and sees Chazz and Nikki screwing like bunnies. He eventually settles for reading porn. I swear, this movie has a 1-track mind.
Skip is still outside and still drunk, staggering around the dock. He finds a plant that he believes to be marijuana, and uses his knife to cut off a few leaves. He heads toward the boathouse, happily sniffing at his new treasure. Okay, so the movie has a 2-track mind. I stand corrected.
In the dark boathouse, Skip does the typical slasher "Hello? Anyone in here?" routine, so his fate is pretty much sealed. Another slasher film cliche, a cat, leaps onto Skip's face from out of nowhere. (Incidentally, I saw the film Horrible Bosses this weekend, and it featured a really funny running gag about this...go see it, the movie's funny as Hell) Skip recovers from his fright, flicks open a lighter, then is snatched into the darkness by an unseen assailant. Bye, Skip.
The following morning, Hal gets a quick peek at Nikki with her shirt open. Muffy is found in the kitchen looking like she had a fight with a rabid squirrel, and she flees upstairs to get dressed. Right away, Arch notices that Skip is missing, but no one else seems concerned. As the others horse around with a soccer ball on the lawn, Nan opts to watch from the porch. I guess she's still upset by the tape recorder she found.
Nan spots Muffy heading toward a small house(looks like it was built for children to play in), and decides to confront her. The movie then decides to follow Kit and Rob instead. Geez, if I jingle my keys, d'ya think the camera crew will start filming me?
Kit and Rob enter the boathouse, and start to make out. As Rob gets Kit to the floor, Kit turns her head and sees Skip's corpse float by, underneath the boathouse. Rob runs outside and starts to yell at Skip, assuming that it's yet another prank. Here's my question: How would the killer know exactly when to release the body, if Rob and Kit spontaneously decided on that specific spot for their romantic private time? And if the killer didn't position the body to float by at that exact moment, what are the odds that a body that was killed ther previous evening would just remain in that area until someone happened upon that exact spot at that exact time???
So, Rob and Kit get back to the mansion, and tell the others about what they saw. When, as a group they realize that Skip hasn't been seen by anyone since last night, they conduct a search of the island. Chazz almost immediately finds the switchblade, which is broken, and shows it to Rob and Arch. They come up with the idea that Buck may have done something to Skip, out of a desire for revenge.
Back in the kitchen, Muffy has a run-in with Nan. Nan tearfully confronts Muffy about the tape, and Muffy denies any knowledge of it. From a stairway nearby, Hal hears the entire conversation.
Arch has somehow wandered into the woods by himself. He doesn't realize it yet, but a pretty aggressive-looking snake is lingering near his feet, waiting to pounce. As he moves around slowly, Arch steps into a trap, and is yanked off of his feet. While he swings around upside-down, the snake raises itself up to strike. Then a mystery figure walks up to Arch, kicks the snake away, and Arch suddenly looks very afraid.
Nan has also wandered off by herself, and found a stone bench to sit on. She starts crying again, and a strong wind comes out of nowhere. Hey, maybe Nan's like Carrie, and can summon, um, air to, uh....I'm just going to shut up now. Sorry.
As the searchers compare notes, they realize that Arch is now also missing. Kit and Nikki decide that it's time to call the police, and a spaced-out Muffy gives them the sheriff's extension. Unfortunately, the phones on the island seem to be malfunctioning. Surprise, surprise.
Muffy is fixated on making tea, and brings Kit every flavor she could find. Kit busies herself with the tea. hoping to snap Muffy out of her weird phase, and discovers that there's a problem with the water not flowing through the pipes. Muffy explains that when the pipes aren't working, they use a well on the property.
Hal and Nikki go off to look for the well, and find it soon enough. Hal tries to flirt with Nikki again, but she blocks him every time. He gets so flustered that he loses the water bucket. Nikki has a flashlight, but that also ends up falling into the well. When she notices small metal rungs on the interior wall of the well, Mary suggests that Hal should climb down to retrieve their stuff. After a short debate, Hal turns out to be a wimp, so Mary climbs into the well.
After descending several rungs, Nikki slips. She regains her balance before falling, but then the rung snaps off in her hand, and Nikki drops into the water. Hal starts freaking out and calling her name, but she seems fine...until Arch's severed head bobs up next to her in the water. Hal tries to rescue her by climbing into the well with Nikki, who finds another body, a female. Hmmm, I don't remember any of the women disappearing yet. Strange...
So, where was I? Oh yeah, so Nikki and Hal are now in the well. Hal reaches toward Nikki, and she grabs his hand, but then the movie goes abruptly back to the mansion. Hal and Nikki were magically transported inside, where Kit tries to convince Nikki that it's safe because they're inside the house. Oh, and Muffy freaks out Nan by bringing her a glass of water. When Muffy is asked where the guns are stored, she replies that there aren't any. Great. Maybe they can defeat the killer with joy buzzers and whoopie cushions!
The phone starts working again, and it's the cops! Rob tells the Constable(sorry, I thought earlier that they called him "Sheriff") about the dead bodies, and I guess the female one was Nan. Over the phone, Rob is informed that Buck is still hospitalized, and then says something about Muffy. Rob hangs up, and plays dumb. He tells them that the police will arrive in the morning, and that they should all stay together until he arrives. That leads into the Lock Every Door and Window Montage. This movie has more filler than the meat at Taco Bell.
In the study, Kit finds a picture of 2 children who seem to be twins. Muffy enters the room quietly, and creeps her out with a thousand-yard stare. As Kit discreetly returns the photo to its place on the table, Muffy tells her that people seem to get lost at sea on a pretty regular basis. After that, there's a brief moment where we see Hal removing a gun from his luggage. Hmmm....
Everyone except Rob and Muffy decide to wait in the living room. While sitting around, Nikki suddenly wonders out loud why Muffy is always wearing the kind of shoes a nurse would wear. Then Hal mentions the argument between Muffy and Nan.
That leads into a new discussion, where they each talk about the strange items they've been finding in their bedrooms. After Hal tells them about Nan finding items implying that she had an abortion, Nikki shows the group the kinky sex gear that was in her room. Chazz lies and says that he found nothing. Then Hal admits that he found newspaper clippings about car accidents in his room--but he also denies that it means anything to him.
As they all start to get angry with each other, Kit reminds them that Muffy is a close friend. Muffy walks in, glares at them, and announces that she's going up to her room. After she leaves, everyone else more or less agrees to do the same, figuring that they'll be safe as long as they stay put in their rooms. When only Hal, Kit and Rob remain, Rob says that he plans to find a way into the attic, to watch for the constable. Hal promises to watch the stairs.
When Muffy gets to her room, she sits on her bed and begins wringing her hands. Hal, true to his word, climbs about a third of the way up the staircase, then sits down to begin his guard duty. Chazz tries to sweet-talk Nikki into staying in his room, but she's packing her belongings at a furious pace. Her plan is to walk down to the pier and wait there for rescue, but Chazz hates the idea of her being out there alone. He resorts to donning different S&M masks to lighten the mood, and it actually does make Nikki smile and giggle. She still walks out of the room, leaving Chazz mumbling on the bed in the mask.
Hal looks up when Nikki walks by, then goes back to reading a newspaper. When Nikki walks back into the bedroom to get more stuff, she finds Chazz not moving, holding his hands over his crotch. As she makes fun of him, Chazz continues to stay in that position, so Nikki tries slapping his arm. That causes his hand to move, revealing a large bloodstain on his crotch. Ow!
As Nikki slowly backs away from the body, the closet door opens behind her. She sees the killer emerge, then the screen goes black briefly. Let me guess: we'll see her body later, instead of getting to see the actual murder.
Kit and Rob are pulling a "Scooby Doo", investigating the mansion, room by room, to turn up clues. In the dark, dusty attic Rob finally tells Kit about his phone conversation with the Constable. He was told to keep everyone together, and not to let them go off by themselves, or go anywhere with Muffy alone...
As the attic search continues, Kit sees something weird. It's the display of dolls from the dinner table, except that the "dead" ones are now in a pile away from the rest. Before they can do any more investigating, Rob hears the Constable's boat arrive. They leave the attic to round up the rest of the group.
Kit finds Nikki's door locked, so she goes to Hal's room next. The door shuts behind her, and the knob does the falling-off trick again, so Kit creeps around in the dark until she finds another door. On the other side, she meets up with Rob again.
After they compare notes and realize that everyone else has vanished, Rob decides to enter Nikki's room. Kit tells him that the door is locked up tight, but the door opens easily for him. Inside, there's blood everywhere. They run out, but Kit insists on checking on Muffy first. She feels something pushing against the door and forces it open, only to find Hal dangling by a noose right in front of the door.
They run out of the house toward the dock, but Constable Potter is nowhere in sight. Rob calls his name a few times, before deciding to look in the boathouse. Kit gets the willies, and begs him not to go in, so they check out the boat instead. The key is missing, but Kit finds a letter from a mental hospital. According to the hospital, someone with Muffy's last name recently escaped from the facility, and is a dangerous, psychotic individual.
Kit points out that Muffy has been at college, not in a hospital, for the last 3-4 years. Rob then mentions that Muffy mentioned a spare key for the boat, but it's back in the mansion. They sneak back to the house, crouching and trying to be a silent as possible. They find a basement window that's open, and get back in that way.
Right away, they find a trail of blood. The trail ends at the furnace, where they discover Muffy's clothes. Then they find a series of scrawled words on the wall--a record of height. Except that Muufy's name isn't the only one written on the wall...next to it, on the other side of the height line, is the name "Buffy". Kit remembers the picture in the study, and realizes that the letter from the psychiatric facility was about Buffy, not Muffy.
As she puts it all together for poor, dumb Rob, he seems to be distracted by something behind Kit. She spins around, and sees the painting with the eyes cut out staring at them. Rob grabs a metal bar to use as a weapon, then instructs Kit to move the painting. Behind it, they find that the eyes belong to Muffy's severed head, which rolls toward the screaming pair.
Outside, Buffy closes the basement window. They can see that she's holding a hammer, which she uses to nail the window shut. Rob and Kit jog up to the kitchen, where they see Buffy staring at them from a window. As they scurry around to look for the spare boat key, Buffy uses her knife to force the door latch to unlock.
Rob gets himself locked in a pantry, just as Buffy gets into the kitchen. She slowly approaches Kit, who backs away into the dining room. As Rob screams at Kit to run away, Kit begs Buffy to leave her alone. Buffy eventually climbs over the dining room table and corners Kit, raising the blade to deliver a fatal stab. Unable to do anything else, Kit gets the door behind her open, and runs into the next room.
She sees all of her friends, in different poses, all around the room. At first glance, no one's moving, so my first thought was that Buffy pulled a Happy Birthday To Me-style ending, or that perhaps Kit was hallucinating. But then Kit turns to stare at Buffy, turns back again, and Chazz is building a house of cards, Skip and Arch are shooting the shit, and Nan is reading a book, so...yeah, they're alive.
Kit faces Muffy/Buffy once again, and her friend demonstrates that the knife has a retractable blade. Kit screams in anger, and everyone begins laughing. April Fool's! From the pantry, Rob tearfully yells out to Kit how much he loves her, and a hand grabs him. It's Buck, still mangled up! He says, "I love you too, babe," and Rob punches him in the half-face. Then Buck kisses him on the cheek, pulls off the fake gore attached to half of his face, and sticks it to Rob's face.
Buck unlocks the pantry door, and Rob runs screaming into the library with the others. They see the fake gore hanging off of his cheek, and everyone starts laughing again. Then Muffy tells her friends how much she loves them, and reveals why she set up such an elaborate plan in the first place...
See, Muffy inherits the property on her next birthday, but the place is pretty expensive to keep up. Muffy, after doing some research, came up with the idea of opening up the mansion as a bed and breakfast, with a roleplaying/murder theme. As each person was "killed", they were told what was happening, and even helped Muffy plant clues and scare the others. Oh, and Buck is a makeup artist and the Constable is Uncle Frank, but the old man running the ferry is just a guy who runs people to and from the mainland.(Oh, and we also find out that it was the ferryman who saved Arch from the snake...and that Arch shit his pants. TMI...)
It's also revealed that Skip is actually Muffy's twin brother, and that Muffy didn't anticipate anyone bringing a gun along or having a bad reaction to her props(like Nan and the tape recorder). Then they party. A lot. Arch and Skip make the fake Arch head drink, Chazz makes the fake Muffy head go down on him, and Kit makes sure that everyone hoses Muffy down with champagne bottles. Heck, even Nan gets wasted, and finds out that the ferryman is her soulmate.
But wait! There's more! As the party winds down, a very tipsy Muffy stumbles off to bed. She passes by the noose that was used earlier, and finds a wrapped present on her bed. It's the Jack-in-the-box that was used to scare her in the first scene. She walks up to it, and sloooooooooooooowly begins to turn the crank. When a tiny harlequin pops up, Muffy sighs with relief--then a hand comes up and slits her throat, from ear to ear!
Muffy gasps and clutches her neck, only to discover that there's no wound. Nan pops up behind her, hugs her, then whispers, "April Fools" in her ear. She looks into the camera and smiles, then the little clown hanging out of the toy winks. THE END.
Except that it's not the original ending. In the original script, which the novelization was based on, Skip and a few others go back to the island after the others have left. He wants to kill Muffy becase of her wealth, but he gets killed in the ensuing fight. It makes a good surprise ending, but the other ending fits the themes of friendship and togetherness a bit better. Eh, either way I'm giving April Fool's Day 3.75 killer trees out of 5. If it had shown a little more of the attacks or the gore, I'd have given it at least a 4 out of 5, for the nostalgia.
And what have I learned from this week's slasher?
-I like the 1980's.
-A book can be gorier than a film. Go figure.
-A guy can go underwater, apply latex to his face, then emerge from the water and act his ass off. Wow!
I've heard that one of the direct-to-DVD films bearing the same name is a remake, but I haven't heard too much about its' quality. Anybody seen it? If so, comment on the remake, and let me know if I should see it or not. My next film came in early(for once...), so the next movie will be a British thriller called The Hole. See you on the other side!
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Sunday, July 3, 2011
Final Destination
2 weeks ago-ish, I compared the Urban Legend franchise to the Final Destination films, because, really, there are quite a few similarities between them. Both have a fun, scary first film, which is followed by sequels that gradually become less and less effective as they come out; both try(with varying degrees of success) to tie the original to the sequels; and both franchises waste their potential by recycling material over and over again. But this is the first Final Destination, so it's a pretty cool movie. Watch along with me as many deaths(and SPOILERS!!!) follow...
Okay, so let's have a little background on these films first. Each movie in the series opens with a huge disaster, resulting in many, many deaths...so far, there have been 2 disasters involving automobiles, a plane crash, a rollercoaster malfunction, and a suspension bridge collapsing in the next one. So, a main character always "sees" the tragedy before it actually happens, and they convince others to escape before the accident can claim their lives. Got it? Good, then let's get started...
Okay, so as the film opens, we meet Alex, our protagonist. He's your typical teenager, about to embark on an adventure with his French class, a trip to Paris. Sweet! After the opening credits, Alex is in his bedroom packing for the trip, and his parents walk in to help. As his mother starts to rip an old airline tag from Alex's bag, he tries to stop her, citing that he thinks it's bad luck to remove the tag(some nonsense about the last flight the bag was on landing safely, so the tag would be lucky). She shrugs off his superstition, and rips the tag off anyway. Then Alex's father tells him to live it up on his trip to Paris, and Alex gets a look on his face. It seems to imply either that he's worried about the trip, or massively constipated. My money is on the latter.
That night, a strange breeze moves through his bedroom. I guess that even Death can have bad gas. A voice calling his name wakes Alex up, but he rolls over and continues to sleep. A weird glitch on his clock-radio turns the time, 1:00, briefly into 180, the flight number of the plane he's going to be aboard.
The next morning, the class arrives at the airport, and this gives us an opportunity to meet our victims...There's Tod, Alex's best friend; George, Tod's older brother; Carter, the stereotypical wiseass jock of the group; Billy Hitchcock, played by Stifler himself, as a clueless dweeby kid; Clear Rivers, a damned hot artist/free spirit type; Terry, Carter's girlfriend; and Valerie Lewton, one of 3 French teachers chaperoning the group. Oh, there are many, many others, but this is our main group.
Alex checks in his luggage, and is told that the flight information is the same as his birthday. After that, Clear drops a book, which opens on a picture of a crash. Weird. Then Alex is convinced by Tod that they should go to the bathroom together. Hey, I thought only chicks did that! While taking a dump, Alex realizes that the PA system is playing a John Denver song...not a good omen, given that Denver died in a plane crash.
Anyway, it's finally time to board the plane. On his way into the plane, Alex starts to notice more weird omens: he sees the plane from a window, as lightning flares up in the background; signs of rust and deterioration on the outer door frame; and the plastic handle holding his seat tray up snaps off in his hand. As Alex starts to get worried, the plane pulls away from the gate. Tod tries to arrange for a seat next to a lovely teen fox, but Alex screws it up for him, by agreeing to change his seat so that the girl can sit next to her equally attractive friend. Christa and Blake, are their names, I think.
Then it happens. Turbulence shakes the plane at first, giving everyone a not-so-nice jolt. The jolt settles down, then becomes a plane-quake! As people get jostled and luggage goes flying, the safety-breathing masks fall from the ceiling....it's a great movie to watch if you're about to take your first flight.
Everyone is screaming and going nuts, and that's when one of the ceiling panels starts showering electrical sparks over everyone, and a wall on one side of the plane explodes outward. People on that side of the plane literally get sucked out of the aisle, seat and all. As the plane starts a sharp descent, a ball of flame travels down the length of the plane, enveloping Alex and the rest of the passengers in a fiery ball. The flesh melts from their faces, and--
Alex wakes up, still waiting for the plane to take off. Blake and Christa are again asking Alex if he could change his seat. Alex rushes past them to where Tod is seated, and pulls off the tray handle, all the while sweating bullets. While the rest of the passengers watch, Alex loudly announces that the plane will explode.
Naturally, this declaration isn't exactly welcome news. Tod grabs Alex to try to calm him down, and while a male flight attendant tries to get him to sit again, Carter steps up to try to take a swing at Alex. As he two boys are pulled apart, a group of passengers also exit the flight:Tod, Billy, Clear, Valerie Lewton, and Terry join Carter and Alex in the exodus from Flight 180.
The other French teacher, Larry, also joins the group, and that causes a bit of a problem for the flight as well...with only 1 teacher on board, who's going to chaperone the remaining students? After reasoning with airline personnel, Val convinces Larry to get back to the flight. She reasons that she and the remaining students can always catch the next one. As the plane starts to pull away from the terminal, she sits with Alex and asks him to tell her what happened. Alex describes his vision, and Carter drags Terry over to openly mock him.
Alex decides that enough is enough, so he leaps up and attacks Carter. As security personnel try to seperate the boys again, Billy stands at the window, shakes his head, and watches as the plane blows up in mid-air. The explosion causes the airport's windows to shatter, and everyone stares at the aftermath in shock, Alex included. Then the survivors all turn to stare at Alex.
In the aftermath of the explosion, Alex and the others who walked off of Flight 180 are brought to a holding area for questioning. The others continue to stare at Alex, so he tells them that he didn't cause the crash. When Val Lewton asks him if there are any other survivors, he replies that he doesn't know. At that point, a grief counselor comes in, accompanied by Federal agents Weine and Schreck. They announce that, one by one, they want to get all of the varying accounts of what happened, and how.
Naturally, they start by questioning Alex. He tells them about his dream, but they try at first to accuse him of being on drugs. When that goes nowhere, they accuse him of doing something to the plane beforehand, but they have no proof.
What follows is a montage of all of the surviving group answering to the Feds. Each one talks about the guilt they feel about leaving loved ones behind. Clear, who had no friends among the survivors, admits that she followed the others simply because she had an instinct that Alex was telling the truth. After the interrogations end, the families of the survivors are allowed to see them. Everyone has a tearful reunion except for Clear, who is left standing alone. Alex and his parents offer her a ride home, which she accepts. She doesn't say much on the journey, and gets out of the car almost as silently, walking to her home through a path flanked by trees.
Once he's back in his own home again, Alex finally breaks down and mourns his classmates. Long after his parents fall asleep, Alex finds himself glued to the television, watching as searchers try to find other survivors or clues about what caused the explosion. Alex starts to get upset again, but a storm outside distracts him. He sees a massive bolt of lightning hit the street near his home.
The story then catches up with the survivors, 39 days after the explosion. I have to chuckle at that because none of the sequels ever attempted to give their characters that kind of time to resume their lives; in most of the sequels, the survivors start dying almost immediately. I seriously doubt we'll ever see that kind of restraint in any future installments either.
Anyway, the students of the school, their families, and the families of the deceased are attending the unveiling of a memorial statue dedicated to the tragedy, a gigantic eagle taking flight, and an area for the names of the deceased. Ugh. As Alex turns around to spot his fellow death-cheaters, he spies the 2 FBI guys watching the ceremony from behind the audience.
The ceremony winds up, and the survivors all form a line, for each to place a rose in front of the memorial. Carter and Alex have a brief conflict, followed by StifleBilly asking Alex to predict his death-date. Then Alex freaks out Miss Lewton, before sharing a nice moment with his best buddy, Tod. To top it off, Clear approaches Alex, tells him that she owes him her life, and they get caught together by a newspaper photographer.
Tod reads a little speech about how unpredictable life is(Thanks, Captain Obvious!), and it seems to worry Alex. Then we get to watch a scene that night, in which Tod pops zits and plucks out nasal hairs. Hey, remember when I complimented the movie for not jumping right into the death scenes? Well, I changed my mind. Kill Tod, movie...kill him before he reaches his anal warts!
Death enters the bathroom through a window. Funny, because I always thought Death was either Adam Carolla or Norm McDonald, but he's a breeze. Maybe Death blew a fart into the room.
Tod feels the sudden chill and turns around, but sees nothing out of the ordinary. As he shuts the window, Death's flatulence moves through the room, finally settling on closing the bathroom door. Tod, of course, hears and sees nothing, but does take a crap. Why is this movie so obsessed with crapping? Anyway, Death decides to loosen up the back of the toilet, enough for a small amount of blue water to begin leaking onto the floor.
While Tod is waiting to die, Alex is turning his own bedroom into Plane Crash HQ, with books, maps ans documents spread out everywhere. He picks up a newspaper to read about the memorial ceremony he was just attending(I guess his short-term memory is worse than my own!), then switches to a skin mag. Hey, perhaps Death will give him a masturbation-related kill-scene! Has that ever happened in a slasher flick before?
Tod prepares to shave, despite his utter lack of facial hair, and Death switches from wind form to toilet water. Ooooh, scary blue water!! It moves toward Tod's feet, and he insists on shaving. As he nicks a spot under his chin, an ominous shadow moves past the window, catching his eye.
As he faces the mirror again, The Toilet Water of Death creeps ever closer. Tod decides to shove some tweezers up his nose(a smart move in this franchise...), and then plugs in a small boombox next to the sink. When the music playing turns out to be ANOTHER John Denver song, Tod unplugs it and walks away.
Just to mock me, the movie decides to return to Alex and his porn collection. He's drooling over an "article" featuring a naked blond, and a caption reading "Tymme Has Come Today", but an owl startles him. He throws the porn mag at the owl to scare it, and his oscillating fan shreds the page he was on, flinging a small scrap of paper onto his knee. It reads "Tod"...Uh Ohhhhh...
Tod decides to take a shower, but his mother's underwear is hanging up. As he starts the task of moving the clothing aside, the Death Water makes a beeline for him, causing Tod to slip and fall forward. The clothesline wraps around his neck several times, and he accidentally turns the faucet in the tub on. Tod kicks and struggles with the tight cord around his neck, to no avail, and blood vessels in his eyes burst. Downstairs, his father is drunk and asleep, oblivious to Tod's struggle.
Tod spots a small pair of scissors just out of his reach, but tries to get them anyway. He fails, and his last few seconds of life are spent having death spasms. After Tod dies, the Blue Water of Death retreats back into the toilet again. I know they just ran the film backwards, but it's still a neat effect.
Alex is outside, trying to get to Tod's house. He sees the emergency vehicles and flashing lights from a distance, and runs to the house. He asks 2 EMT's what happened, then notices that agents Schreck and Weine are watching him very closely. He also spots Clear behind a tree, and she indicates that he should leave very fast! Before he can do that, Alex is stopped dead in his tracks by the sight of Tod's body being brought out on a stretcher. Tod's father sees him and accuses him of causing Tod's death by filling his head with guilt and remorse. Um, and who was drunk and asleep while Tod was being killed?
After watching the ambulance take the corpse of his best friend away, Alex takes a long walk and has a Forrest Gump moment with a leaf. Life is like a plane of corpses! When he looks around, Alex realizes that he's standing in front of Clear's home. Her dog approaches him, and Alex and Clear have a discussion about the events of the previous evening. She tells him that the reason she left the plane was because she had a "feeling" that he knew the plane was in danger, so she went with that instinct.
Alex puts forth the theory that Tod's death might be the first in a series, then wishes that he could see Tod one last time. Clear responds by suggesting that they break into the funeral home, which they end up doing. They do some searching, and when they discover Tod's corpse on a slab, it jumps and scares the holy crap out of them(and me!),
We then meet the coolest character in the FD franchise: Bludworth. He's a mortician who is in every FD movie except one, so far. Anyway, he tells them that Tod's body jumped because it was injected with swomething called a "vascular flush". Bludworth also informs them that Tod's death wasn't an accident, because there are no accidents.Nope, Death has a design, and everyone's a part of it. Deep, dude.
Bludworth also tells them something that you'll hear a variation of in every movie: Death's design can be changed, but Death will work on claiming any lives that were missed the first time around, by making a new design. The rules vary from movie to movie, but that's the basic gist of it.
After letting the mortician freak them out, Alex and Clear grab a coffee at an outdoor cafe. They discuss recognizing the omens and signs of their impending deaths, and Alex shows her the scrap of paper that had Tod's name on it. While Clear tells him that she doesn't think "signs" are anything but bullshit, Alex sees another one, a large bus or truck reflected in the cafe's window, but not on the actual street.
While this is going on, Carter and Terry drive by, see Alex and Clear talking, and Carter swerves to pull up to the cafe. In the process of making his illegal turn, Carter comes very close to killing Billy, who is out riding his bike. Oh, and Val steps out of the cafe to see the commotion Carter's erratic driving has caused. Hail! Hail! The gang's all here!
Alex tries to explain to the entire group the theory about Death's design, but no one--including Clear-- wants to accept the concept. In fact, Terry informs the rest of the Flight 180 survivors that as a young teen woman, she's not going to die, and certainly not any time soon. Everyone looks sort of ashamed for listening to Alex as he ranted and raved.
And then a bus kills her as she backs herself into the street. Awesome.
Alex goes home, sits on the couch, and calmly sips a glass of cold water while watching television. Clear calls him, but even though his father urges him to take the call, Alex refuses. Then the news report he's watching has an update about the explosion's cause: faulty wiring and combustible fluids may have made a "trail" through the cabin, under certain seats. Anyone wanna guess which seats were outlined in the news diagram?
Alex traces the path, then holds his trace over the seating chart he saved from earlier. Just as he expected, the key areas of the explosion were all seats that were supposed to be occupied by the survivors. Not only that, but the survivors are now dying in the same order they would have been killed on the plane. Now that he's cracked Death's new design, Alex follows the chart with his finger to discover who is next on the list: Val Lewton, the hot teacher.
Val's at home, packing her house up. She tells someone on the phone that she doesn't feel comfortable going back to teaching at the high school, and everywhere she goes in town brings her bad memories. She looks out at her front yard, and sees Alex standing there like a stalker. She says goodbye to her caller, then dials the police.
Alex drops lower to the ground, then approaches her car and examines the tires. As he's testing out how sturdy they are, Shreck and Weine drive up, and question Alex about his actions. Val watches as Alex gets in their car and is driven away. Though the window's closed, Death still makes his presence known, by moving past the curtain.
In an interrogation room, Alex shares his idea about the order in which the Flight 180 survivors will die. Neither Weine nor Shreck believe the idea(DUH!), and they start to mock him a bit. While they keep Alex squirming, Val is still getting her shit packed, and boiling water while listening to a John Denver record. Why John Denver? Why not Buddy Holly, or Richie Valens? How about Elvis, or maybe John Lennon? I mean, we already saw how Denver tied into the plane crash as an omen, but unless a plane falls on Val while she's eating, it really doesn't work....
Oh yeah. I was watching this. So Val fills a kettle with water, and sees the shadow of Death pass by. When she looks behind her, nothing's there of course, so she tries to wipe the reflective surface of the kettle to calm her nerves. She puts the kettle on the stove, lights the stove with a match, and waits to die. There's a brief scene with the investigators again, but they let Alex leave, because they can't prove that he had any involvement in the deaths of either Tod or Terry.
And now, at last, we get to watch Val die. She freaks out over a coffee mug and pulls a bottle of alcohol out of the fridge. As she drops some ice cubes into it, a cracks appears at the base of the mug, and alcohol starts to pour out. She puts her drink down to resume packing, oblivious to the fact that there is liquid now dripping into her computer, which is starting to smoke.
She finally sees the smoke and approaches the PC, only to get her throat slit when the computer starts to explode a bit. On her way to the kitchen to try to stop the bleeding, she bumps into her record player, and John Denver starts singing again.
On his way home, Alex sees an old man burning leaves, and gets another premonition. At about the same time, Val staggers into her kitchen, unaware that her spilled drink has started a fire behind her. The alcohol trail on the floor soon turns the kitchen into a fireball too, just as Alex arrives.
While Alex tries to come up with a plan to save his teacher, Val spots a dish towel hanging over her knife rack. She tries to grab it from the floor, and succeeds int getting a huge knife imbedded in her chest. Alex gets into the house and follows the trail of blood to the kitchen, but before he can attempt to remove the huge blade from his teacher, a chair is knocked over, hammering the knife all way into Val's body.
Alex removes the knife anyway, and seems shocked when it doesn't magically bring her back from the dead. Maybe he thought she was a vampire?? With his fingerprints now all over the knife, Alex runs outside again, where Billy sees him. The house explodes, sending both boys flying to the ground. Alex runs away, leaving Billy to wonder what happened.
Shreck and Weine pay a visit to Clear, to ask her what she thinks of Alex and his theories regarding Death. While she's evading their questions, Billy is trying not to get run over by Carter. Using a pocketknife, Carter tries to add Terry's name to the Flight 180 memorial. Clear meets up with Billy and Carter, and they decide to look for Alex, because he knows which one of them will die next.
In Carter's car, he shuts Billy up by telling him that he's next on the list. They decide to look for Alex at the beach(???), and Clear does find him, sitting on the sand and staring up at the stars. He wonders out loud if Flight 180 might have survived in some alternate universe. This prompts Clear to tell Alex that she used to be afraid that her parents would die....and they did. Well, her dad anyway, while disrupting a robbery at a convenience store. The mother remarried, and that sent Clear packing.
In the car, they all ask Alex what he knows about the order in which Death will claim them. Carter somehow gets the idea in his head that he'll be next, so he freaks out. After a brief conversation about fate, Carter decides to floor the gas pedal. As the car goes through red lights and speeds past stop signs, Alex tries to reason with Carter. Alex gets a brief premonition about a speeding train, then Carter stops the car on some train tracks.
Everyone gets out of the vehicle except Carter, who tries to play it cool. That works out great, until he realizes that the car won't start, his seatbelt is jammed, and the doors refuse to unlock. Oops. With the help of Alex, Carter finally exits through the window, just as the car is torn to pieces by the train. Oh, and Billy gets decapitated.
As the final 3 survivors argue about what happened, Alex realizes that his intervention is what saved Carter, which made Billy next in line to die. Police sirens can be heard in the distance, so Carter urges Clear and Alex to find a place to hide.
The hideout is a small house in the woods, which Alex tries to set up to be safer. Sharp objects get taped up, most things objects get put away, then Alex eats something that looks dog food. A breeze starts a chain reaction in the room, and Alex narrowly misses getting stabbed by something that gets stuck in a door that he shuts. He finds hooks all over the floor, then yells at Death like the lunatic that he is.
After a short scene between Clear and the investigators, Alex reads an article about Flight 180, and realizes that he's not next on the list. Since he never changed seats with the girls in his premonition, his life wasn't meant to be the next to end, Clear's was.
Clear looks out her bedroom window, just as some freak lightning hits a telephone pole. The phone gets knocked out, as does the power to the house. As Clear realizes her predicament, Alex escapes from the cops in a canoe.
Clear lights a candle, and makes her way through the dark house. her dog barks as another chain reaction is about to get underway, then the movies shifts back to Alex. He reaches the other side of the lake/pond/river/God-made bathtub, starts running again, and is nearly caught when the cops drive right up to him. He jogs through the forest, nearly gets his head ripped open by a jagged branch, the knocks himself out and falls into a puddle, face-first.
Clear isn't having much better luck. She sees the chain reaction that Death is about to set in motion, but stops long enough to try to save her dog from being killed. A flimsy pool bursts, sending water everywhere, then the live power lines snake around, getting dangerously close to the water. Clear climbs a fence just as the power line finds the water. Death's Shadow passes by once more, so Clear climbs to her house's roof, and tries to get herself to a part of the yard that isn't electrified.
Clear breaks an upstairs window, just as Death finds her. She runs through the house, and Death keeps barely missing her with the electrocution. Boy, that Death sure is one clumsy fellow! As Clear climbs her way to the roof, the power line seems to be searching for her on the ground. She jumps back down to dry ground in front of the house, and climbs into the car. Of course Death follows her, and there's a LOT of electrical action going on outside of the vehicle.
Alex finds her, and tells her not to touch anything inside the car. He sees that the cable has landed on the hood of her car, and tries to knock it away with a shovel. It goes flying, but also lands in the garage, where a gas can is knocked to the floor, so now the trail of spilled gasoline sets the area around the car on fire. Geez, Death is a pretty poor sport, huh?
Alex realizes that if he wants to save her, he has to sacrifice himself, and he tells Clear as much. Then, as Clear watches in horror, Alex grabs the snaking power cable and removes it from the hood of her car, where it's resumed its attempt to fry Clear. The amount of voltage sends Alex flying off his feet, and into the garage. Clear rushes over to Alex, and finds his body smoking, and his hands pretty wrecked with burns. Shreck and Weine just stand back and watch, like the useless boobs that they are.
The screen fades to white, the voices become softer, and it's THE E--
Nope, false ending. There's a creepy shot of an airport terminal, and the movie tells us that it's SIX MONTHS LATER...okay, thanks movie, try a whisper next time. Alex, Clear and Carter finally took their trip to Paris after all. Tres bien!
At an outdoor cafe, they discuss how they earned a second chance. They make a toast to their dead friends, then Alex drags out the seating chart, because he's worried that Death might have simply gone back to the top of the list again.
Carter mocks him, but Alex suddenly sees a number of bad omens. A guitarist is playing a John Denver song at a nearby table, a street lamp catches fire briefly, and some red wine spills on the seating chart, right on their names. Alex freaks out, and that's when the chain reaction begins.
Alex decides to leave, so that they'll be spared, and Clear sees a phantom bus in the cafe window. She screams at Alex, and he narrowly avoids a bus killing him. It crashes into a fruit stand instead, and causes a pole-like display to spin. The pole catches a neon sign and rips it in half, sending the number 180 flying around.
As the gigantic 180 swings toward Alex, Carter springs into action, knocking Alex safely to the ground. Carter teases him about being next, but Alex points out that he was skipped yet again, when Carter intervened. As Carter stands over Alex and asks who is next, the large 180 swings back down. The screen goes black as the sound of breaking metal and glass is heard. THE END.
Wow. First off, I have to apologize for the lateness of this one. In the week-and-a-half since I watched Urban Legend, my Comcast service here in the new apartment has crashed several times. I hear from a friend that he's had the same experience, so that sucks. Anyway, any week where I don't post....now you know why. Okay, so let's sum this one up...
It's a really fun horror film, with all of the creative deaths, and a great premise. While each sequel varies in quality and deja vu(counting the next one,the franchise now has 3 opening sequences that involves car wrecks), it's still fun to see how elaborate or crazy they're willing to go. Plus, it's funny to watch how far they stretch credibility to tie the sequels to the first one. I give the first Final Destination 5 killer trees out of 5.
And here's what I learned from watching Final Destination:
-Death is like that one guy you knew who liked to pull practical jokes incessantly on his friends.
-John Denver's music kills people.
-You can never put too many toilet scenes in your movie.
It looks like my next slasher is April Fool's Day, which is a lot of silly fun. I hope my internet connection stays up this week!
Okay, so let's have a little background on these films first. Each movie in the series opens with a huge disaster, resulting in many, many deaths...so far, there have been 2 disasters involving automobiles, a plane crash, a rollercoaster malfunction, and a suspension bridge collapsing in the next one. So, a main character always "sees" the tragedy before it actually happens, and they convince others to escape before the accident can claim their lives. Got it? Good, then let's get started...
Okay, so as the film opens, we meet Alex, our protagonist. He's your typical teenager, about to embark on an adventure with his French class, a trip to Paris. Sweet! After the opening credits, Alex is in his bedroom packing for the trip, and his parents walk in to help. As his mother starts to rip an old airline tag from Alex's bag, he tries to stop her, citing that he thinks it's bad luck to remove the tag(some nonsense about the last flight the bag was on landing safely, so the tag would be lucky). She shrugs off his superstition, and rips the tag off anyway. Then Alex's father tells him to live it up on his trip to Paris, and Alex gets a look on his face. It seems to imply either that he's worried about the trip, or massively constipated. My money is on the latter.
That night, a strange breeze moves through his bedroom. I guess that even Death can have bad gas. A voice calling his name wakes Alex up, but he rolls over and continues to sleep. A weird glitch on his clock-radio turns the time, 1:00, briefly into 180, the flight number of the plane he's going to be aboard.
The next morning, the class arrives at the airport, and this gives us an opportunity to meet our victims...There's Tod, Alex's best friend; George, Tod's older brother; Carter, the stereotypical wiseass jock of the group; Billy Hitchcock, played by Stifler himself, as a clueless dweeby kid; Clear Rivers, a damned hot artist/free spirit type; Terry, Carter's girlfriend; and Valerie Lewton, one of 3 French teachers chaperoning the group. Oh, there are many, many others, but this is our main group.
Alex checks in his luggage, and is told that the flight information is the same as his birthday. After that, Clear drops a book, which opens on a picture of a crash. Weird. Then Alex is convinced by Tod that they should go to the bathroom together. Hey, I thought only chicks did that! While taking a dump, Alex realizes that the PA system is playing a John Denver song...not a good omen, given that Denver died in a plane crash.
Anyway, it's finally time to board the plane. On his way into the plane, Alex starts to notice more weird omens: he sees the plane from a window, as lightning flares up in the background; signs of rust and deterioration on the outer door frame; and the plastic handle holding his seat tray up snaps off in his hand. As Alex starts to get worried, the plane pulls away from the gate. Tod tries to arrange for a seat next to a lovely teen fox, but Alex screws it up for him, by agreeing to change his seat so that the girl can sit next to her equally attractive friend. Christa and Blake, are their names, I think.
Then it happens. Turbulence shakes the plane at first, giving everyone a not-so-nice jolt. The jolt settles down, then becomes a plane-quake! As people get jostled and luggage goes flying, the safety-breathing masks fall from the ceiling....it's a great movie to watch if you're about to take your first flight.
Everyone is screaming and going nuts, and that's when one of the ceiling panels starts showering electrical sparks over everyone, and a wall on one side of the plane explodes outward. People on that side of the plane literally get sucked out of the aisle, seat and all. As the plane starts a sharp descent, a ball of flame travels down the length of the plane, enveloping Alex and the rest of the passengers in a fiery ball. The flesh melts from their faces, and--
Alex wakes up, still waiting for the plane to take off. Blake and Christa are again asking Alex if he could change his seat. Alex rushes past them to where Tod is seated, and pulls off the tray handle, all the while sweating bullets. While the rest of the passengers watch, Alex loudly announces that the plane will explode.
Naturally, this declaration isn't exactly welcome news. Tod grabs Alex to try to calm him down, and while a male flight attendant tries to get him to sit again, Carter steps up to try to take a swing at Alex. As he two boys are pulled apart, a group of passengers also exit the flight:Tod, Billy, Clear, Valerie Lewton, and Terry join Carter and Alex in the exodus from Flight 180.
The other French teacher, Larry, also joins the group, and that causes a bit of a problem for the flight as well...with only 1 teacher on board, who's going to chaperone the remaining students? After reasoning with airline personnel, Val convinces Larry to get back to the flight. She reasons that she and the remaining students can always catch the next one. As the plane starts to pull away from the terminal, she sits with Alex and asks him to tell her what happened. Alex describes his vision, and Carter drags Terry over to openly mock him.
Alex decides that enough is enough, so he leaps up and attacks Carter. As security personnel try to seperate the boys again, Billy stands at the window, shakes his head, and watches as the plane blows up in mid-air. The explosion causes the airport's windows to shatter, and everyone stares at the aftermath in shock, Alex included. Then the survivors all turn to stare at Alex.
In the aftermath of the explosion, Alex and the others who walked off of Flight 180 are brought to a holding area for questioning. The others continue to stare at Alex, so he tells them that he didn't cause the crash. When Val Lewton asks him if there are any other survivors, he replies that he doesn't know. At that point, a grief counselor comes in, accompanied by Federal agents Weine and Schreck. They announce that, one by one, they want to get all of the varying accounts of what happened, and how.
Naturally, they start by questioning Alex. He tells them about his dream, but they try at first to accuse him of being on drugs. When that goes nowhere, they accuse him of doing something to the plane beforehand, but they have no proof.
What follows is a montage of all of the surviving group answering to the Feds. Each one talks about the guilt they feel about leaving loved ones behind. Clear, who had no friends among the survivors, admits that she followed the others simply because she had an instinct that Alex was telling the truth. After the interrogations end, the families of the survivors are allowed to see them. Everyone has a tearful reunion except for Clear, who is left standing alone. Alex and his parents offer her a ride home, which she accepts. She doesn't say much on the journey, and gets out of the car almost as silently, walking to her home through a path flanked by trees.
Once he's back in his own home again, Alex finally breaks down and mourns his classmates. Long after his parents fall asleep, Alex finds himself glued to the television, watching as searchers try to find other survivors or clues about what caused the explosion. Alex starts to get upset again, but a storm outside distracts him. He sees a massive bolt of lightning hit the street near his home.
The story then catches up with the survivors, 39 days after the explosion. I have to chuckle at that because none of the sequels ever attempted to give their characters that kind of time to resume their lives; in most of the sequels, the survivors start dying almost immediately. I seriously doubt we'll ever see that kind of restraint in any future installments either.
Anyway, the students of the school, their families, and the families of the deceased are attending the unveiling of a memorial statue dedicated to the tragedy, a gigantic eagle taking flight, and an area for the names of the deceased. Ugh. As Alex turns around to spot his fellow death-cheaters, he spies the 2 FBI guys watching the ceremony from behind the audience.
The ceremony winds up, and the survivors all form a line, for each to place a rose in front of the memorial. Carter and Alex have a brief conflict, followed by StifleBilly asking Alex to predict his death-date. Then Alex freaks out Miss Lewton, before sharing a nice moment with his best buddy, Tod. To top it off, Clear approaches Alex, tells him that she owes him her life, and they get caught together by a newspaper photographer.
Tod reads a little speech about how unpredictable life is(Thanks, Captain Obvious!), and it seems to worry Alex. Then we get to watch a scene that night, in which Tod pops zits and plucks out nasal hairs. Hey, remember when I complimented the movie for not jumping right into the death scenes? Well, I changed my mind. Kill Tod, movie...kill him before he reaches his anal warts!
Death enters the bathroom through a window. Funny, because I always thought Death was either Adam Carolla or Norm McDonald, but he's a breeze. Maybe Death blew a fart into the room.
Tod feels the sudden chill and turns around, but sees nothing out of the ordinary. As he shuts the window, Death's flatulence moves through the room, finally settling on closing the bathroom door. Tod, of course, hears and sees nothing, but does take a crap. Why is this movie so obsessed with crapping? Anyway, Death decides to loosen up the back of the toilet, enough for a small amount of blue water to begin leaking onto the floor.
While Tod is waiting to die, Alex is turning his own bedroom into Plane Crash HQ, with books, maps ans documents spread out everywhere. He picks up a newspaper to read about the memorial ceremony he was just attending(I guess his short-term memory is worse than my own!), then switches to a skin mag. Hey, perhaps Death will give him a masturbation-related kill-scene! Has that ever happened in a slasher flick before?
Tod prepares to shave, despite his utter lack of facial hair, and Death switches from wind form to toilet water. Ooooh, scary blue water!! It moves toward Tod's feet, and he insists on shaving. As he nicks a spot under his chin, an ominous shadow moves past the window, catching his eye.
As he faces the mirror again, The Toilet Water of Death creeps ever closer. Tod decides to shove some tweezers up his nose(a smart move in this franchise...), and then plugs in a small boombox next to the sink. When the music playing turns out to be ANOTHER John Denver song, Tod unplugs it and walks away.
Just to mock me, the movie decides to return to Alex and his porn collection. He's drooling over an "article" featuring a naked blond, and a caption reading "Tymme Has Come Today", but an owl startles him. He throws the porn mag at the owl to scare it, and his oscillating fan shreds the page he was on, flinging a small scrap of paper onto his knee. It reads "Tod"...Uh Ohhhhh...
Tod decides to take a shower, but his mother's underwear is hanging up. As he starts the task of moving the clothing aside, the Death Water makes a beeline for him, causing Tod to slip and fall forward. The clothesline wraps around his neck several times, and he accidentally turns the faucet in the tub on. Tod kicks and struggles with the tight cord around his neck, to no avail, and blood vessels in his eyes burst. Downstairs, his father is drunk and asleep, oblivious to Tod's struggle.
Tod spots a small pair of scissors just out of his reach, but tries to get them anyway. He fails, and his last few seconds of life are spent having death spasms. After Tod dies, the Blue Water of Death retreats back into the toilet again. I know they just ran the film backwards, but it's still a neat effect.
Alex is outside, trying to get to Tod's house. He sees the emergency vehicles and flashing lights from a distance, and runs to the house. He asks 2 EMT's what happened, then notices that agents Schreck and Weine are watching him very closely. He also spots Clear behind a tree, and she indicates that he should leave very fast! Before he can do that, Alex is stopped dead in his tracks by the sight of Tod's body being brought out on a stretcher. Tod's father sees him and accuses him of causing Tod's death by filling his head with guilt and remorse. Um, and who was drunk and asleep while Tod was being killed?
After watching the ambulance take the corpse of his best friend away, Alex takes a long walk and has a Forrest Gump moment with a leaf. Life is like a plane of corpses! When he looks around, Alex realizes that he's standing in front of Clear's home. Her dog approaches him, and Alex and Clear have a discussion about the events of the previous evening. She tells him that the reason she left the plane was because she had a "feeling" that he knew the plane was in danger, so she went with that instinct.
Alex puts forth the theory that Tod's death might be the first in a series, then wishes that he could see Tod one last time. Clear responds by suggesting that they break into the funeral home, which they end up doing. They do some searching, and when they discover Tod's corpse on a slab, it jumps and scares the holy crap out of them(and me!),
We then meet the coolest character in the FD franchise: Bludworth. He's a mortician who is in every FD movie except one, so far. Anyway, he tells them that Tod's body jumped because it was injected with swomething called a "vascular flush". Bludworth also informs them that Tod's death wasn't an accident, because there are no accidents.Nope, Death has a design, and everyone's a part of it. Deep, dude.
Bludworth also tells them something that you'll hear a variation of in every movie: Death's design can be changed, but Death will work on claiming any lives that were missed the first time around, by making a new design. The rules vary from movie to movie, but that's the basic gist of it.
After letting the mortician freak them out, Alex and Clear grab a coffee at an outdoor cafe. They discuss recognizing the omens and signs of their impending deaths, and Alex shows her the scrap of paper that had Tod's name on it. While Clear tells him that she doesn't think "signs" are anything but bullshit, Alex sees another one, a large bus or truck reflected in the cafe's window, but not on the actual street.
While this is going on, Carter and Terry drive by, see Alex and Clear talking, and Carter swerves to pull up to the cafe. In the process of making his illegal turn, Carter comes very close to killing Billy, who is out riding his bike. Oh, and Val steps out of the cafe to see the commotion Carter's erratic driving has caused. Hail! Hail! The gang's all here!
Alex tries to explain to the entire group the theory about Death's design, but no one--including Clear-- wants to accept the concept. In fact, Terry informs the rest of the Flight 180 survivors that as a young teen woman, she's not going to die, and certainly not any time soon. Everyone looks sort of ashamed for listening to Alex as he ranted and raved.
And then a bus kills her as she backs herself into the street. Awesome.
Alex goes home, sits on the couch, and calmly sips a glass of cold water while watching television. Clear calls him, but even though his father urges him to take the call, Alex refuses. Then the news report he's watching has an update about the explosion's cause: faulty wiring and combustible fluids may have made a "trail" through the cabin, under certain seats. Anyone wanna guess which seats were outlined in the news diagram?
Alex traces the path, then holds his trace over the seating chart he saved from earlier. Just as he expected, the key areas of the explosion were all seats that were supposed to be occupied by the survivors. Not only that, but the survivors are now dying in the same order they would have been killed on the plane. Now that he's cracked Death's new design, Alex follows the chart with his finger to discover who is next on the list: Val Lewton, the hot teacher.
Val's at home, packing her house up. She tells someone on the phone that she doesn't feel comfortable going back to teaching at the high school, and everywhere she goes in town brings her bad memories. She looks out at her front yard, and sees Alex standing there like a stalker. She says goodbye to her caller, then dials the police.
Alex drops lower to the ground, then approaches her car and examines the tires. As he's testing out how sturdy they are, Shreck and Weine drive up, and question Alex about his actions. Val watches as Alex gets in their car and is driven away. Though the window's closed, Death still makes his presence known, by moving past the curtain.
In an interrogation room, Alex shares his idea about the order in which the Flight 180 survivors will die. Neither Weine nor Shreck believe the idea(DUH!), and they start to mock him a bit. While they keep Alex squirming, Val is still getting her shit packed, and boiling water while listening to a John Denver record. Why John Denver? Why not Buddy Holly, or Richie Valens? How about Elvis, or maybe John Lennon? I mean, we already saw how Denver tied into the plane crash as an omen, but unless a plane falls on Val while she's eating, it really doesn't work....
Oh yeah. I was watching this. So Val fills a kettle with water, and sees the shadow of Death pass by. When she looks behind her, nothing's there of course, so she tries to wipe the reflective surface of the kettle to calm her nerves. She puts the kettle on the stove, lights the stove with a match, and waits to die. There's a brief scene with the investigators again, but they let Alex leave, because they can't prove that he had any involvement in the deaths of either Tod or Terry.
And now, at last, we get to watch Val die. She freaks out over a coffee mug and pulls a bottle of alcohol out of the fridge. As she drops some ice cubes into it, a cracks appears at the base of the mug, and alcohol starts to pour out. She puts her drink down to resume packing, oblivious to the fact that there is liquid now dripping into her computer, which is starting to smoke.
She finally sees the smoke and approaches the PC, only to get her throat slit when the computer starts to explode a bit. On her way to the kitchen to try to stop the bleeding, she bumps into her record player, and John Denver starts singing again.
On his way home, Alex sees an old man burning leaves, and gets another premonition. At about the same time, Val staggers into her kitchen, unaware that her spilled drink has started a fire behind her. The alcohol trail on the floor soon turns the kitchen into a fireball too, just as Alex arrives.
While Alex tries to come up with a plan to save his teacher, Val spots a dish towel hanging over her knife rack. She tries to grab it from the floor, and succeeds int getting a huge knife imbedded in her chest. Alex gets into the house and follows the trail of blood to the kitchen, but before he can attempt to remove the huge blade from his teacher, a chair is knocked over, hammering the knife all way into Val's body.
Alex removes the knife anyway, and seems shocked when it doesn't magically bring her back from the dead. Maybe he thought she was a vampire?? With his fingerprints now all over the knife, Alex runs outside again, where Billy sees him. The house explodes, sending both boys flying to the ground. Alex runs away, leaving Billy to wonder what happened.
Shreck and Weine pay a visit to Clear, to ask her what she thinks of Alex and his theories regarding Death. While she's evading their questions, Billy is trying not to get run over by Carter. Using a pocketknife, Carter tries to add Terry's name to the Flight 180 memorial. Clear meets up with Billy and Carter, and they decide to look for Alex, because he knows which one of them will die next.
In Carter's car, he shuts Billy up by telling him that he's next on the list. They decide to look for Alex at the beach(???), and Clear does find him, sitting on the sand and staring up at the stars. He wonders out loud if Flight 180 might have survived in some alternate universe. This prompts Clear to tell Alex that she used to be afraid that her parents would die....and they did. Well, her dad anyway, while disrupting a robbery at a convenience store. The mother remarried, and that sent Clear packing.
In the car, they all ask Alex what he knows about the order in which Death will claim them. Carter somehow gets the idea in his head that he'll be next, so he freaks out. After a brief conversation about fate, Carter decides to floor the gas pedal. As the car goes through red lights and speeds past stop signs, Alex tries to reason with Carter. Alex gets a brief premonition about a speeding train, then Carter stops the car on some train tracks.
Everyone gets out of the vehicle except Carter, who tries to play it cool. That works out great, until he realizes that the car won't start, his seatbelt is jammed, and the doors refuse to unlock. Oops. With the help of Alex, Carter finally exits through the window, just as the car is torn to pieces by the train. Oh, and Billy gets decapitated.
As the final 3 survivors argue about what happened, Alex realizes that his intervention is what saved Carter, which made Billy next in line to die. Police sirens can be heard in the distance, so Carter urges Clear and Alex to find a place to hide.
The hideout is a small house in the woods, which Alex tries to set up to be safer. Sharp objects get taped up, most things objects get put away, then Alex eats something that looks dog food. A breeze starts a chain reaction in the room, and Alex narrowly misses getting stabbed by something that gets stuck in a door that he shuts. He finds hooks all over the floor, then yells at Death like the lunatic that he is.
After a short scene between Clear and the investigators, Alex reads an article about Flight 180, and realizes that he's not next on the list. Since he never changed seats with the girls in his premonition, his life wasn't meant to be the next to end, Clear's was.
Clear looks out her bedroom window, just as some freak lightning hits a telephone pole. The phone gets knocked out, as does the power to the house. As Clear realizes her predicament, Alex escapes from the cops in a canoe.
Clear lights a candle, and makes her way through the dark house. her dog barks as another chain reaction is about to get underway, then the movies shifts back to Alex. He reaches the other side of the lake/pond/river/God-made bathtub, starts running again, and is nearly caught when the cops drive right up to him. He jogs through the forest, nearly gets his head ripped open by a jagged branch, the knocks himself out and falls into a puddle, face-first.
Clear isn't having much better luck. She sees the chain reaction that Death is about to set in motion, but stops long enough to try to save her dog from being killed. A flimsy pool bursts, sending water everywhere, then the live power lines snake around, getting dangerously close to the water. Clear climbs a fence just as the power line finds the water. Death's Shadow passes by once more, so Clear climbs to her house's roof, and tries to get herself to a part of the yard that isn't electrified.
Clear breaks an upstairs window, just as Death finds her. She runs through the house, and Death keeps barely missing her with the electrocution. Boy, that Death sure is one clumsy fellow! As Clear climbs her way to the roof, the power line seems to be searching for her on the ground. She jumps back down to dry ground in front of the house, and climbs into the car. Of course Death follows her, and there's a LOT of electrical action going on outside of the vehicle.
Alex finds her, and tells her not to touch anything inside the car. He sees that the cable has landed on the hood of her car, and tries to knock it away with a shovel. It goes flying, but also lands in the garage, where a gas can is knocked to the floor, so now the trail of spilled gasoline sets the area around the car on fire. Geez, Death is a pretty poor sport, huh?
Alex realizes that if he wants to save her, he has to sacrifice himself, and he tells Clear as much. Then, as Clear watches in horror, Alex grabs the snaking power cable and removes it from the hood of her car, where it's resumed its attempt to fry Clear. The amount of voltage sends Alex flying off his feet, and into the garage. Clear rushes over to Alex, and finds his body smoking, and his hands pretty wrecked with burns. Shreck and Weine just stand back and watch, like the useless boobs that they are.
The screen fades to white, the voices become softer, and it's THE E--
Nope, false ending. There's a creepy shot of an airport terminal, and the movie tells us that it's SIX MONTHS LATER...okay, thanks movie, try a whisper next time. Alex, Clear and Carter finally took their trip to Paris after all. Tres bien!
At an outdoor cafe, they discuss how they earned a second chance. They make a toast to their dead friends, then Alex drags out the seating chart, because he's worried that Death might have simply gone back to the top of the list again.
Carter mocks him, but Alex suddenly sees a number of bad omens. A guitarist is playing a John Denver song at a nearby table, a street lamp catches fire briefly, and some red wine spills on the seating chart, right on their names. Alex freaks out, and that's when the chain reaction begins.
Alex decides to leave, so that they'll be spared, and Clear sees a phantom bus in the cafe window. She screams at Alex, and he narrowly avoids a bus killing him. It crashes into a fruit stand instead, and causes a pole-like display to spin. The pole catches a neon sign and rips it in half, sending the number 180 flying around.
As the gigantic 180 swings toward Alex, Carter springs into action, knocking Alex safely to the ground. Carter teases him about being next, but Alex points out that he was skipped yet again, when Carter intervened. As Carter stands over Alex and asks who is next, the large 180 swings back down. The screen goes black as the sound of breaking metal and glass is heard. THE END.
Wow. First off, I have to apologize for the lateness of this one. In the week-and-a-half since I watched Urban Legend, my Comcast service here in the new apartment has crashed several times. I hear from a friend that he's had the same experience, so that sucks. Anyway, any week where I don't post....now you know why. Okay, so let's sum this one up...
It's a really fun horror film, with all of the creative deaths, and a great premise. While each sequel varies in quality and deja vu(counting the next one,the franchise now has 3 opening sequences that involves car wrecks), it's still fun to see how elaborate or crazy they're willing to go. Plus, it's funny to watch how far they stretch credibility to tie the sequels to the first one. I give the first Final Destination 5 killer trees out of 5.
And here's what I learned from watching Final Destination:
-Death is like that one guy you knew who liked to pull practical jokes incessantly on his friends.
-John Denver's music kills people.
-You can never put too many toilet scenes in your movie.
It looks like my next slasher is April Fool's Day, which is a lot of silly fun. I hope my internet connection stays up this week!
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Urban Legend
It's difficult to remain a fan of slasher flicks in the post-Scream era, as most of the slashers now are pretty much self-aware parodies and/or remakes. So it's refreshing to watch a film like Urban Legend, where the story is mostly played straight, and the kills are somewhat creative. Sadly, the UL franchise and the IKWYDLS films have pretty much died off with sub-par sequels and direct-to-DVD cheapness, so it's a pretty good bet that we won't see a good one any time soon in either franchise. Anyway, on with the movie, and the pretty much non-stop SPOILERS...
Okay, so the films starts out with a pretty girl driving at night during a downpour. Her name is Michelle Mancini, though we won't find that out officially until a later on. Anyway, it's pouring out, she's driving, and there's a college radio program being hosted by Tara Reid, so I'm assuming it's about substance abuse...The radio station is at a school called Pendleton, where the majority of the movie takes place.
As Michelle listens to the radio program(it's a funny bit about a caller asking Tara Reid if it was wrong to replace her roommate's birth control pills with baby aspirin, lol), and Michelle turns around to fetch something in the back seat. Her car swerves into the wrong lane, and Michelle narrowly avoids becoming roadkill.
After she calms down, Michelle pops a cassette into the tape deck, and tries singing along to Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart". It's good that she's cute, because Michelle can't sing very well, or remember the lyrics. Let's hope that looks can get her far in life...at least, until her looks fade.
As Michelle continues to mangle a classic ballad, she notices that her gas tank is nearly empty. Oh, and the rain picks up, right on cue. She finds a gas station and pulls in. You know how old this movie is? Gas is $1.14...THAT's how old this movie is! I don't care if there's a murderous psychopath somewhere in the plot, I want to live in this film's world.
The gas station attendant leaves his nice, warm store behind, and comes out to pump Michelle's gas. He's played by one of the genre greats, Brad Dourif, much to my delight. I wonder if he'll get to kill any rats or possess any dolls in this one?
He scares Michelle half to death, then asks her(with a terrible stutter, just like his character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) if she ran out of gas. No Numbnuts, she's there because she wants a booty call. While filling her tank, he glances into the backseat of her car, and looks pretty damned upset. He runs back into the gas station, disappears for a moment, then rushes back out again. He tells Michelle that the credit card company is on the phone, and that they want to talk to her.
Michelle puts on a jacket, then discreetly slips a can of mace into her pocket. When they get inside the gas station, the attendant locks the door, and Michelle discovers that there's nobody on the phone. The attendant pleads with her not to leave, but she thinks he's threatening her, so she maces him in the eyes, knocks out the glass in the door with the telephone, then jogs back to her car.
Gas Guy tries to grab her on the way out, but narrowly misses. Michelle accidentally sets off her car alarm, jumps into the front seat, and plows down the stutterer as she floors the gas pedal. As her car screeches away, Gas Guy finally manages to scream out, "SOMEONE'S IN THE BACK SEEEEAT!!!" Gosh, a classic urban legend....who'd a-thunk it?
As Michelle speeds off into the night, a hooded figure emerges from the backseat between flashes of lightning. She glances into her rearview mirror, just in time to see the killer raise an axe. She barely manages a gasp, then the axe presumably flies through(probably) her neck, and breaks through her side window. Cool way to begin the film, but it would have been nice to see the attack itself. I mean, I'm not exactly watching this for award-worthy dialogue, right?
So anyway, we move right along to Pendleton University, where most of the film takes place. There, we meet our main characters: First, there's Natalie, a ridiculously sexy redhead; Sasha, played by Tara Reid, and spends most of the film at the campus radio station; Brenda, Natalie's incredibly hot friend; Paul, a journalism major who puts reporting before anything else in his life; Parker, a sarcastic frat boy; and Damon, who has a reputation on campus for being a ladies' man.
Okay, so as we arrive at P.U.(hold your noses!), Sasha is talking to a caller at the radio station, a girl who thinks that she might be pregnant after oral sex. Yup, you read that right...let it sink in for a second. Ready? Oh, and for some reason, Sasha is using both a headset and a studio microphone to take calls. Maybe she likes the way the voices echo and bounce around in that cavernous space between her ears...
At an on-campus coffee shop, Parker, Natalie, and Brenda are listening to the radio program, when Paul walks in. They listen as Parker tells a story about a grisly killing spree that took place in one of the dorms. Stanley Hall, 25 years earlier. Apparently, the killer was a deranged professor who went door-to-door, hacking up anyone unfortunate enough to answer his knock. After allegedly killing an entire floor of students, the professor supposedly took the knife and stabbed himself in the chest.
What was the point of the story? Well, for some reason, Parker's fraternity holds an annual kegger to commemorate the anniversary of the massacre. Then Paul breaks into the chat to point out all of the flaws in the story. Killjoy. Annoyed by the interruption, Parker insists that the story is true, and that it was all covered up by the administration. Paul leaves, and Brenda reveals that she wants to ask Paul out.
After leaving the coffee shop, Brenda and Natalie decide to test out another urban legend, the one about Bloody Mary. Sure, why not...I mean, it's not like there haven't already been 14,000 Bloody Mary movies since this came out, right? (including the 3rd movie in this very franchise) They stand in front of the boarded-up door to Stanley Hall and say "Bloody Mary" 5 times. They hear a faint shout or scream. As they lean closer to listen for any ghosts, Damon(played by Joshua Jackson) pops up behind the girls to frighten them.
Back inside her own dorm building, Natalie gets scared a second time by the janitor, who she nearly collides with at the front entrance. Natalie rushes upstairs to her dorm room, only to get an eyeful of her Goth roommate having sex with her equally Goth boyfriend, Goth-darnit! After getting bitched out for intruding on Goth Sex 101, Natalie scurries over to her side of the room, puts on some headphones, and tries to get some sleep.
The next morning, Natalie and her friends attend a class on folklore being taught by Freddy Krueger, now going by the name Wexler. He introduces them to the concept of urban legends(Really? They need to be told what an urban legend is??), then tells them a classic example: A babysitter gets menacing phone calls, only to realize that the calls are coming from an upstairs phone. Brenda tells Professor Wexler that it actually happened in her hometown, and gets laughed at.
Wexler returns to his lecture, until Natalie and Brenda start giggling about something. Wexler asks Brenda to come to the front of the lecture hall, and tells her that he wants her to participate in an experiment. He hands her a package of Pop Rocks and asks her to eat a few. Then he hands her a can of soda, which she refuses to drink.
This leads into another urban legend: Mikey, the kid from the old Life cereal ads in the '80's, supposedly mixed Pop Rocks with Coke, and his stomach exploded. When the teacher shows the class a picture of Mikey as an adult, Damon steps forward to mix the candy and soda together. He downs an entire package of Pop Rocks, then takes a huge swig of the soda that the professor hands him. Awwww, Pacey's still alive!
As the professor continues with his lecture, Damon starts convulsing and gagging. He falls to the floor as everyone screams and panics, then goes limp. As the stunned classmates look on in horror, Damon eventually grins and stands back up. Damn.
After class, Brenda and Natalie see a gathering of students outside reading the school newspaper. Reese, a member of the security staff, is trying to confiscate the papers, with little success. On the front page is a story about Michelle Mancini, the girl who died in the opening scene. As Brenda reads the article out loud, Natalie looks stunned.
Then Paul shows up. He demands to know why Dean Adams and Reese are trying to keep students from reading the article, and the dean tells him that his article is untrue. Reese then adds that an article named Pendleton University the safest university in the country. Uh, not anymore, Reese. As Paul tries to obtain a quote from Brenda about her reaction to his article, Natalie tells him off. Then she and Brenda leave.
At the coffeehouse, Brenda, Natalie, Damon, Sasha and Parker discuss the murder. A television in the background shows a picture of the dead girl and the gas station attendant, because now he's also missing. When they discuss who she was, Sasha tells them that she heard that Michelle was listening to her radio show when she was murdered. Uhhhh, no she wasn't, she had turned it off to listen to Bonnie Tyler again. Hmmmm, did we just find our killer?
Nahhhhh, Tara Reid can't spell "homicide", much less commit it.
Now, where were we? Oh right, the scene ended, and now we're back in the dorm, watching Tosh and Natalie as Nat tries to be nice. When that fails, Tosh storms away. Alone at last, Natalie checks the phone for messages. A brief one from her mother reveals that Natalie DID know the girl who was murdered, and that they were best friends. Hmmmm...
After this big revelation, Natalie meets up with Damon. He offers her a shoulder to cry on, but talking is the LAST thing on his mind. In his car, the theme from Dawson's Creek comes blaring out of the speakers, as a sly reference to him playing Pacey on that show. Nice.
Once they get to a secluded area, Pacey--Uh, I mean Damon--pretends to care about Natalie's dead friend, even going so far as to hand her some bullshit about losing someone himself. When he starts showing her the fake tears, Natalie realizes how superficial Damon is. Before taking her back to the campus, Damon gets out of the car to pee.
While Natalie checks herself out in the mirror, Damon gets attacked from behind. The killer wraps a rope around Damon's throat. Natalie gets tired of waiting, so she steps out of the car, and comes face-to-hood with the killer. Screaming, Nat rushes back to the car, locks all of the doors, and watches the killer move around to the back of the vehicle, where he ties the other end of the rope he used on Damon.
Natalie doesn't know that, of course, so she keeps trying to get the vehicle started, even when the killer tries to stab her through the roof. From above, Damon is seen struggling to free himself from the deadly noose, but Natalie doesn't hear him begging her not to start the car. His shoe flying at the windshield startles Natalie, and she puts the pedal to the metal, sending Damon flying into the treetops. The killer darts into her path, so Natalie tries to kill him, then makes the car go in reverse. The lack of tension on the rope sends Damon plummeting back down, where he smacks into the hood. Bye, Pacey!
Natalie drives back to campus, where she finds Reese watching an old blaxploitation flick. Reese and Natalie hurry back to the clearing, but Damon has vanished. Reese accuses Natalie of being high, then informs her that the gas station attendant was arrested before Damon was allegedly killed. Yikes! Or, as the gas station guy would say, "Y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-ikes!"
Back in their usual hangout,Brenda, Sasha and Parker chalk up Natalie's story as a prank Damon was pulling. Then Parker realizes that the manner of Damon's death was a recreation of an urban legend. At the same time, Natalie realizes that Michelle's murder was also similar to an urban legend. Parker tells her to call Killington, the ski resort Damon was going to for the weekend, which she does. The receptionist at the resort remembers a blond guy checking in, but can't verify that it was actually Damon.
Natalie takes a walk, and decides to stop by the school library to research more urban legends, and literally bumps into Sasha, who decided to grab a copy of the Kamasutra. Together, they start reading through the urban legends book and find several familiar stories: there's the story of the person who came home late at night, unaware that there was a killer in the house murdering family members in the dark; the legend that was recreated for Damon's murder; the legend of the gang member deciding to kill the teenagers who flashed their headlights at him...you get the idea.
Back at the dorm, Tosh is chatting online, trying to find a sex partner. The killer replies with an instant message, and they start flirting online. As Tosh leaves the room to get ready for her "date", the killer tells her in the IM that he's already in her room. When she sees the response, he throws her onto the bed, and begins to suffocate Tosh to death. Natalie enters the room, hears the muffled cries, and assumes that Tosh is just having sex, so she leaves the light off. After Tosh is killed, the murderer passes by Natalie's bed, and leaves a message in blood that mimics the urban legend she learned about from the book: AREN'T YOU GLAD YOU DIDN'T TURN ON THE LIGHT? She calls 911, and is questioned by both the dean and Reese. Nearby, Brenda and Paul watch as the dean asks Natalie about the incident. Both the dean and Reese try to convince her that Tosh committed suicide, but Nat doesn't buy it.
Paul waits until Natalie is alone, then tells her that he knows that she and Michelle were friends in high school. Natalie tells him that she thinks a killer is on the loose, and he replies that they should sit down somewhere else and talk about what's happening on the campus. They head to the newspaper office, where Natalie shares her theory that someone is using urban legends to murder people. Paul is skeptical, and asks her to give him a reasonable explanation as to why the killer is striking now. Natalie thinks it might have something to do with the massacre at Stanley Hall, since a party is being held on the 25th anniversary of the supposed incident.
To prove Nat wrong, Paul takes her to the newspaper "morgue", where they find the school files from 1973 are missing. The creepy janitor pops up again, and tells them to start by questioning Professor Wexler. Instead of questioning the teacher, they break into his office. As they go through every drawer, shelf and bookcase, Natalie nearly jumps out of her skin when she finds a jacket similar to the one worn by the killer. (on a side-note, pause the movie as the camera pans around the room....you can clearly see a Freddy Krueger doll among Wexler's items in the room...) Oh, and there's also a shiny new ax in the room as well. I used to polish my ax every day, until I needed glasses...
Natalie calls Paul over, and shows him the items she found. Before they can discuss their next move, Wexler returns and enters the office, leaving the couple trapped in the hidden room. As they listen to him leave, Paul and Natalie try to escape, only to find Wexler waiting for them.
Wexler takes them to the dean, who bitches them both out in front of him and Reese. Paul tries to tell the dean about the ax,but Wexler explains that he uses it as a prop in his urban legend class. When Paul asks Wexler directly about the massacre in Stanley Hall, the dean asks Reese and the professor to leave, so that he can speak to them in private.
Once he's alone with Paul and Natalie, the dean drops a bombshell on them: he discovered that Natalie had a criminal record. He then informs Paul that he no longer works for the school newspaper, then kicks them both out of his office. Outside, Paul demands that Natalie tell him the truth about her "record", and why she was put on probation. She remains silent, and Paul tells her that he doesn't trust her anymore, before walking away.
Natalie heads to the gym, and finds herself watching someone swimming in the pool. As Natalie continues to observe, she sees a figure dressed like the killer approach the swimmer. She screams and uses a chair to break the observation window, only to discover that Brenda was the one swimming, and some anonymous chick was in the jacket, getting ready to swim as well.
In the locker room, Natalie tells Brenda that she knew Michelle, but that they hadn't spoken in 2 years. She then decides to tell Brenda the whole story of the incident in her past. See, she and Michelle were out in Nat's car one night, when Michelle decided to try out the "high beams" initiation urban legend for herself. She waited for a car to come along and flash the headlights at them, then she began to chase the other driver. The other driver freaked out and crashed by the side of the road, which killed him. The court decided that their role in the accident wasn't enough proof to charge them, so Nat and Michelle were given probation instead.
Natalie tells Brenda that, even though she wasn't driving, she stills feels responsible for the man's death. Brenda, seeing how fragile Natalie is, invites her to the party that night at Stanley Hall. Gee, a party celebrating a killing spree....sounds safe to me!
Later that night, as Paul is clearing out his desk at the newspaper office, he comes across a newspaper article about the legendary massacre at Stanley Hall. Not only is the story true, but it turns out that the sole survivor was none other than Professor Wexler, back when he was just Student Wexler. Oh, and apparently the janitor knows more about it, because he lingers in the doorway to watch Paul as he reads the article. Hmmm...
Dean Adams is then seen getting ready to go home as well. He pauses at the car door to look into the back seat, then smiles at how much the urban legends have started to get on his nerves. A hand grabs his shoulder, but it turns out to be Reese. She starts to list all of the students who have either died or gone missing, and the dean tells her not to worry or call the police. Weird.
After Reese leaves, Dean Adams is attacked by the killer, who was hiding under the car the entire time. The dean falls to the ground, sees how much blood is pouring out of his achilles heel, and tries to crawl to safety. The killer opens the car door, releases the brake, and starts to roll the car toward Dean Adams, who makes the mistake of turning around to look. The car hits him right at the exit, knocking him into the spikes that they always tell you not to back up over, and he gets both impaled and run over.
At the massacre party, the frat boys are trying to get the dog drunk. A geeky guy tells Sasha that the sound of someone screaming in the song "Roller Coaster of Love" is the actual scream of someone being murdered. Sasha quickly finds somewhere else to be. Paul finds Natalie and shows her the newspaper article about Wexler's part in the Stanley Hall Massacre. Paul promises Natalie that he will protect her and they kiss, just as Brenda returns. She accuses Natalie of trying to steal Paul from her, then stomps away to go find somewhere to cry.
Reese patrols the halls of the deserted college at night, and the janitor nearly scares her shitless. She yells at him, but he just keeps walking like he didn't hear her. After Reese starts to calm down, she hears something break in one of the offices and decides to investigate. She finds the office(I think it's Wexler's) trashed, and she starts sweeping the room with the beam of her flashlight. She slips on the floor, and we discover that the floor was slippery because it was covered in blood.
Back at the party, Paul finds Parker and tells him that the party should end early. Parker responds by turning off the music and telling the party-goers that he believes that Paul is the killer, using the murders to help him get a career in journalism. He tells Paul to leave, then Sasha calls Parker a jerk.
Immediately following the confrontation, Parker gets a phone call from the killer. Parker sees that the call is coming from Damon's phone, and he decides to taunt the caller by mocking he urban legends a bit. He tells the killer that he knows the one about the babysitter getting scary calls from inside the house, while going from room to room to find the guy. The killer then responds that he has the wrong legend in mind: the one being recreated is the legend abou the old lady who dried off her pet by putting it in the microwave. Ewwwww!
Parker rushes back downstairs, just as the microwave beeps. Sure enough, he finds the dog inside...or the dog's insides at least. Parker runs upstairs to puke into the toilet, and the killer grabs his hair, plunging Parker's head into the toilet. He doesn't drown Parker, though. No, instead Parker wakes up and finds himself tied to the toilet. The killer shoves a funnel into Parker's mouth, then pours drain cleaner down his throat.
Reese calls the police, but they just put her on hold. At the same time, Natalie tries to call Paul, but his voicemail picks up. To complete the trifecta of phone scenes, Sasha is back at the radio station, making fun of students calling her about dumb sex stuff. Sasha doesn't realize it, but her producer is murdered while she's taking the call. She approaches his booth, and when lightning strikes, sees the killer swinging an axe at the window.
Natalie hears her scream on the radio, and rushes over to the stereo equipment, to turn down the music. Sasha rushes out of the radio booth and down the hall, and somehow the killer gets ahead of her, barely missing chopping her face in half. Natalie gets frustrated when her cdall to campus security gets a busy signal, so she decides to try to save Sasha herself.
Sasha gets relatively close to the exit, blocked only by numerous stairs. She makes a run for it, and the killer grabs and tries to fling her over the stairs. Sasha grabs the railing before she falls, so the killer retrieves his axe. As he prepares to chop off her fingers, Sasha lets go, and falls pretty far. Gee, that must have smarted.
Sasha limps toward an elevator, and the killer follows. the doors shut before he can kill her, and Sasha rides it to the 3rd floor. She limps down a dark hallway, while Natalie hurries to get to the building. Reese also hears Sasha screaming on the radio, and decides to check it out for herself.
Just as Natalie gets inside the building, Sasha sees her and bangs on a window to get her attention. Ther killer also finds Sasha, and corners her, while Natalie can only watch. The killer swings the axe several times at Sasha, though we don't get to see any part of her death. When he's done, he looks through the window at Natalie and waves.
Natalie runs back outside, and makes her way to Paul's room. She tells him about Sasha, and Paul scolds her about leaving the party. That makes Natalie a little suspicious, and she asks him where he's been all night. Paul tells her that he's been trying to find help, but that the dean and Reese have gone missing. He picks up a phone and tells Natalie that the line is dead, but she decides to check it for herself, which pisses him off.
Back in the rain, Paul and Natalie run into Brenda. She heard what happened on the radio show, and decided to seek help, much like they did. As the three of them take off, Reese stumbles upon sasha's corpse, which we still don't get to see. Reese tries to call the dean, but gets no response...duh!
As Natalie, Brenda and Paul drive away from the campus, Natalie declares that she smells something strange. Paul pulls over at a nearby gas station to see if the phones work, and leaves the girls in the car. While he's gone, Brenda apologizes to Natalie for getting jealous earlier, and they decide to find the source of the weird smell, which is getting stronger. They open up the trunk, and find Wexler's corpse there, covered in blood. They both make eye contact with Paul, and take off running.
He chases them into the woods, where Natalie and Brenda somehow get split up. When Natalie realizes that Brenda is no longer with her, she stops running and hears her screaming somewhere in the distance. Natalie hears Paul getting closer, and manages to flag down a pickup truck, which happens to be driven by the creepy janitor. Despite her unease around the guy, Natalie accepts a ride from him.
The janitor asks if Natalie is okay, and offers her his jacket. When she turns around to fetch it, she sees that it's the same style of jacket that the killer wears. Geez, this is the 3rd or 4th character in this thing that wears that jacket! Was there a sale or something at Burlington Coat Factory???
Natalie starts getting scared, and asks the janitor to let her out of the truck. The door won't open from the inside(???), and Natalie's demeanor starts to annoy him. At that point a car comes from the other direction with its headlights off, so the janitor flashes his on and off at the driver. D'oh! Just like the urban legend, the other driver swerves and starts to chase them. As Natalie urges the janitor to accelerate, the other car pulls up beside them, and both get a good look at the killer's hooded jacket, but no details of his face.
Up ahead, there's a curve in the road, and the killer rams into their vehicle. The impact sends the pickup sailing through the guardrail, and the truck comes to a stop after sailing a short distance. Natalie sees the janitor slumped over the steering wheel with blood on his face, so she rolls down her window and opens the outside handle to escape. She starts running again, as the rain picks up.
Reese gets back to her office, and retrieves a pretty nice handgun she keeps locked away for special occasions. She looks at a movie poster of her favorite female blaxploitation star, and shoves a clip into the gun. Go ahead, make her day!
Natalie gets back to the campus, and finds an emergency phone. As she keeps hitting the speaker and calling for help, Natalie hears Brenda screaming somewhere near her location. She sees a light on at the abandoned Stanley Hall, hears more screaming, and decides to see if she can help. Oh, so it's okay to take the time to investigate some anonymous screamer, but you can't be bothered to try to rescue the guy whose pickup you caused to crash? I'm stating to think that maybe Natalie deserves to die at the killer's hands.
Natalie manages to loosen some of the boards over a window, and she climbs in. The screams get louder as she makes her way to the stairs, and Natalie creeps into a bedroom. The door shuts behind her and jams, so she tries other doors in the room. One reveals the corpse of Parker, covered in blood and something foamy(??)-looking. Stepping away from Parker's body, Natalie collides with the corpse of Dean Adams, and she screams upon seeing him. Opening another door finds her face-to-face with Damon, who is still swinging by a noose, but also has deep gouges across his face.
Natalie finally gets through the right door, and finds herself in a room filled with candles. There she sees Brenda on a bed, laid out in a ritualistic pose. Natalie sits on the edge of the bed and starts to cry, and Brenda sits up. Before Natalie can react, Brenda punches her in the head, then smiles.
When Natalie comes to her senses, she has duct tape over her mouth. Brenda taunts her, then yanks the tape off so that Natalie can respond. Natalie calls her crazy, then asks Brenda why she murdered so many people. Brenda shows Natalie a slideshow, and explains her mad plan. *cue Scooby-Doo music*
Remember the guy who Natalie and Michelle ran off the road? Well, Natalie doesn't, not at first. It turns out that the guy was Brenda's boyfriend in high school. Brenda tells her that she and the boyfriend were going to get married right after they graduated, and Brenda swore vengeance after the car wreck.
When Brenda realized that the death was the result of an urban legend, she decided to kill Natalie and her friends with re-enactments of those very legends. Now, I have to stop here to rant a little bit. Doesn't it just seem a little out of whack? I mean,yes Natalie was in the car, but Michelle was the driver, right? Wouldn't the story have made more sense if Brenda had saved Michelle for last instead of Natalie? And why kill all of the others on campus? None of them had any ties to the incident in any way. Seriously, is it just me, or is Brenda's plan filled with more holes than a chunk of Swiss cheese?
Anyway, Brenda decided to save Natalie for the urban legend about a person waking up in a tub of ice with their kidney missing. She grabs a scalpel, explains the legend to Natalie, and cackles with glee.
Thbe movie switches over to Reese, who is rushing through the campus, trying to piece the whole mystery together. She sees the light on at Stanley Hall, and decides to investigate further. While we wait for Reese to catch up to the killer, Brenda explains the rest of her kooky plan. She murdered Wexler so that she could frame him for the killings. Natalie begs for her life, but Brenda tells her that soon she and her dead friends will all be legendary. Urban Legend...ary.
Natalie tries to bite Brenda, but Brenda manages to tape her mouth shut again, then stabs her in the side. Natalie cries out in pain, and Reese enters the room with her gun drawn before Brenda can do any more damage to Natalie. Reese unties one of Natalie's hands, then forces Brenda to stand against a window. Before she can finish frisking the killer, Brenda turns around and stabs Reese too. The two women struggle with each other, then Brenda gets the gun and shoots Reese.
By this time Natalie has freed herself, but Brenda points the gun at her too. When Natalie tells her that the murders won't bring back Brenda's fiance, Brenda responds that she plans to woo Paul after Natalie is gone. Then Paul shows up, and displays his sarcastic clapping skills. He tries to convince Brenda that he wants Natalie dead too, for getting him expelled. Paul tells Brenda that he'll need to get the details of each murder from her, for his article, then he asks for the gun.
Brenda isn't as crazy-dumb as she looks though. She points the gun at Paul, forces him to stand next to Natalie, then does an eenie-meanie-minie-moe to decide which one will get shot first. Before she can pull the trigger, Reese pops up again and stabs her in the arm. Natalie gets the gun, and Brenda taunts her so she shoots Brenda, who crashes through a window. This movie has a serious window fetish.
After making sure that Reese is still alive, Natalie and Paul leave to get help. In the car, Paul tells Natalie that he called paramedics to rescue Reese. Natalie then waxes philosophical, telling Paul that what happened will become an urban legend too, and will change as each new person tells the story. As Paul asks what the plot twist will be at the end of the urban legend, Brenda pops up in the back seat, holding onto her ax. Paul glimpses her in the rearview mirror, and the car swerves all over the slick road as they try to avoid Brenda's attacks.
The car gets to a bridge, and Paul tries careening from side to side, to make Brenda miss her swings with the weapon. He slams on the brakes, and Brenda goes flying through the windshield. See? Another window! She sails over the bridge and plunges into the water, where she presumably dies.
Paul checks Nataliefor any injuries, and they both get out of the car to see if Brenda survived or not. They see her lifeless corpse floating away on the water, and the scene fades out, as a narrator describes how the storm washed the body down the river, never to be seen again.
Huh? So the whole movie was an urban legend too? Was any of it real? I guess not, becauswe the college students hearing the tale laugh it off, even when the guy telling it insists that it really happened. One girl even makes a joke that Brenda was actually a chick in a Noxema commercial, which is an inside joke about the actress playing Brenda, who really was in a series of those commercials years ago.
As the storyteller asks if anyone believes him, one girl says that she does. It's Brenda, with a different hairstyle, and she tells the group that he didn't tell it right. Brenda leans forward, and promises to tell them the "real" story. THE END
Pretty good, especially in the post-Scream era of self-aware hipsters who sarcastically deconstruct the movies they star in. I still think the story would have made more sense if he Natalie and Michelle characters had switched roles, but most of the kills were creatively staged and fun. Oh, and many of the kills needed to be
SHOWN...otherwise, what's the point? Urban Legends gets 3 and 3-quarter killer trees out of five from me. Oh, and this week I learned:
-That I have a serious fetish for redheads...but not nearly as bad as the fetish this film's creators had for windows.
-Sex and murder sound pretty much the same on the radio.
-After a massacre occurs, it's common practice to leave the site of the murders standing, but boarded up.
I'm only partially moved into my new apartment, but I don't anticipate any more delays that wouldd prevent me from watching these things. Keeping that in mind, my next film is Final Destination, which is a goofy, fun movie that doesn't skimp on the violence in the least. Oh, and I just bought a brand-spankin'-new DVD/Blu-Ray player, which I'm looking forward to breaking in, so if any of you have any suggestions for a good slasher flick to watch on BR, let me know in the Suggestion Box post. See you next week!
Okay, so the films starts out with a pretty girl driving at night during a downpour. Her name is Michelle Mancini, though we won't find that out officially until a later on. Anyway, it's pouring out, she's driving, and there's a college radio program being hosted by Tara Reid, so I'm assuming it's about substance abuse...The radio station is at a school called Pendleton, where the majority of the movie takes place.
As Michelle listens to the radio program(it's a funny bit about a caller asking Tara Reid if it was wrong to replace her roommate's birth control pills with baby aspirin, lol), and Michelle turns around to fetch something in the back seat. Her car swerves into the wrong lane, and Michelle narrowly avoids becoming roadkill.
After she calms down, Michelle pops a cassette into the tape deck, and tries singing along to Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart". It's good that she's cute, because Michelle can't sing very well, or remember the lyrics. Let's hope that looks can get her far in life...at least, until her looks fade.
As Michelle continues to mangle a classic ballad, she notices that her gas tank is nearly empty. Oh, and the rain picks up, right on cue. She finds a gas station and pulls in. You know how old this movie is? Gas is $1.14...THAT's how old this movie is! I don't care if there's a murderous psychopath somewhere in the plot, I want to live in this film's world.
The gas station attendant leaves his nice, warm store behind, and comes out to pump Michelle's gas. He's played by one of the genre greats, Brad Dourif, much to my delight. I wonder if he'll get to kill any rats or possess any dolls in this one?
He scares Michelle half to death, then asks her(with a terrible stutter, just like his character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) if she ran out of gas. No Numbnuts, she's there because she wants a booty call. While filling her tank, he glances into the backseat of her car, and looks pretty damned upset. He runs back into the gas station, disappears for a moment, then rushes back out again. He tells Michelle that the credit card company is on the phone, and that they want to talk to her.
Michelle puts on a jacket, then discreetly slips a can of mace into her pocket. When they get inside the gas station, the attendant locks the door, and Michelle discovers that there's nobody on the phone. The attendant pleads with her not to leave, but she thinks he's threatening her, so she maces him in the eyes, knocks out the glass in the door with the telephone, then jogs back to her car.
Gas Guy tries to grab her on the way out, but narrowly misses. Michelle accidentally sets off her car alarm, jumps into the front seat, and plows down the stutterer as she floors the gas pedal. As her car screeches away, Gas Guy finally manages to scream out, "SOMEONE'S IN THE BACK SEEEEAT!!!" Gosh, a classic urban legend....who'd a-thunk it?
As Michelle speeds off into the night, a hooded figure emerges from the backseat between flashes of lightning. She glances into her rearview mirror, just in time to see the killer raise an axe. She barely manages a gasp, then the axe presumably flies through(probably) her neck, and breaks through her side window. Cool way to begin the film, but it would have been nice to see the attack itself. I mean, I'm not exactly watching this for award-worthy dialogue, right?
So anyway, we move right along to Pendleton University, where most of the film takes place. There, we meet our main characters: First, there's Natalie, a ridiculously sexy redhead; Sasha, played by Tara Reid, and spends most of the film at the campus radio station; Brenda, Natalie's incredibly hot friend; Paul, a journalism major who puts reporting before anything else in his life; Parker, a sarcastic frat boy; and Damon, who has a reputation on campus for being a ladies' man.
Okay, so as we arrive at P.U.(hold your noses!), Sasha is talking to a caller at the radio station, a girl who thinks that she might be pregnant after oral sex. Yup, you read that right...let it sink in for a second. Ready? Oh, and for some reason, Sasha is using both a headset and a studio microphone to take calls. Maybe she likes the way the voices echo and bounce around in that cavernous space between her ears...
At an on-campus coffee shop, Parker, Natalie, and Brenda are listening to the radio program, when Paul walks in. They listen as Parker tells a story about a grisly killing spree that took place in one of the dorms. Stanley Hall, 25 years earlier. Apparently, the killer was a deranged professor who went door-to-door, hacking up anyone unfortunate enough to answer his knock. After allegedly killing an entire floor of students, the professor supposedly took the knife and stabbed himself in the chest.
What was the point of the story? Well, for some reason, Parker's fraternity holds an annual kegger to commemorate the anniversary of the massacre. Then Paul breaks into the chat to point out all of the flaws in the story. Killjoy. Annoyed by the interruption, Parker insists that the story is true, and that it was all covered up by the administration. Paul leaves, and Brenda reveals that she wants to ask Paul out.
After leaving the coffee shop, Brenda and Natalie decide to test out another urban legend, the one about Bloody Mary. Sure, why not...I mean, it's not like there haven't already been 14,000 Bloody Mary movies since this came out, right? (including the 3rd movie in this very franchise) They stand in front of the boarded-up door to Stanley Hall and say "Bloody Mary" 5 times. They hear a faint shout or scream. As they lean closer to listen for any ghosts, Damon(played by Joshua Jackson) pops up behind the girls to frighten them.
Back inside her own dorm building, Natalie gets scared a second time by the janitor, who she nearly collides with at the front entrance. Natalie rushes upstairs to her dorm room, only to get an eyeful of her Goth roommate having sex with her equally Goth boyfriend, Goth-darnit! After getting bitched out for intruding on Goth Sex 101, Natalie scurries over to her side of the room, puts on some headphones, and tries to get some sleep.
The next morning, Natalie and her friends attend a class on folklore being taught by Freddy Krueger, now going by the name Wexler. He introduces them to the concept of urban legends(Really? They need to be told what an urban legend is??), then tells them a classic example: A babysitter gets menacing phone calls, only to realize that the calls are coming from an upstairs phone. Brenda tells Professor Wexler that it actually happened in her hometown, and gets laughed at.
Wexler returns to his lecture, until Natalie and Brenda start giggling about something. Wexler asks Brenda to come to the front of the lecture hall, and tells her that he wants her to participate in an experiment. He hands her a package of Pop Rocks and asks her to eat a few. Then he hands her a can of soda, which she refuses to drink.
This leads into another urban legend: Mikey, the kid from the old Life cereal ads in the '80's, supposedly mixed Pop Rocks with Coke, and his stomach exploded. When the teacher shows the class a picture of Mikey as an adult, Damon steps forward to mix the candy and soda together. He downs an entire package of Pop Rocks, then takes a huge swig of the soda that the professor hands him. Awwww, Pacey's still alive!
As the professor continues with his lecture, Damon starts convulsing and gagging. He falls to the floor as everyone screams and panics, then goes limp. As the stunned classmates look on in horror, Damon eventually grins and stands back up. Damn.
After class, Brenda and Natalie see a gathering of students outside reading the school newspaper. Reese, a member of the security staff, is trying to confiscate the papers, with little success. On the front page is a story about Michelle Mancini, the girl who died in the opening scene. As Brenda reads the article out loud, Natalie looks stunned.
Then Paul shows up. He demands to know why Dean Adams and Reese are trying to keep students from reading the article, and the dean tells him that his article is untrue. Reese then adds that an article named Pendleton University the safest university in the country. Uh, not anymore, Reese. As Paul tries to obtain a quote from Brenda about her reaction to his article, Natalie tells him off. Then she and Brenda leave.
At the coffeehouse, Brenda, Natalie, Damon, Sasha and Parker discuss the murder. A television in the background shows a picture of the dead girl and the gas station attendant, because now he's also missing. When they discuss who she was, Sasha tells them that she heard that Michelle was listening to her radio show when she was murdered. Uhhhh, no she wasn't, she had turned it off to listen to Bonnie Tyler again. Hmmmm, did we just find our killer?
Nahhhhh, Tara Reid can't spell "homicide", much less commit it.
Now, where were we? Oh right, the scene ended, and now we're back in the dorm, watching Tosh and Natalie as Nat tries to be nice. When that fails, Tosh storms away. Alone at last, Natalie checks the phone for messages. A brief one from her mother reveals that Natalie DID know the girl who was murdered, and that they were best friends. Hmmmm...
After this big revelation, Natalie meets up with Damon. He offers her a shoulder to cry on, but talking is the LAST thing on his mind. In his car, the theme from Dawson's Creek comes blaring out of the speakers, as a sly reference to him playing Pacey on that show. Nice.
Once they get to a secluded area, Pacey--Uh, I mean Damon--pretends to care about Natalie's dead friend, even going so far as to hand her some bullshit about losing someone himself. When he starts showing her the fake tears, Natalie realizes how superficial Damon is. Before taking her back to the campus, Damon gets out of the car to pee.
While Natalie checks herself out in the mirror, Damon gets attacked from behind. The killer wraps a rope around Damon's throat. Natalie gets tired of waiting, so she steps out of the car, and comes face-to-hood with the killer. Screaming, Nat rushes back to the car, locks all of the doors, and watches the killer move around to the back of the vehicle, where he ties the other end of the rope he used on Damon.
Natalie doesn't know that, of course, so she keeps trying to get the vehicle started, even when the killer tries to stab her through the roof. From above, Damon is seen struggling to free himself from the deadly noose, but Natalie doesn't hear him begging her not to start the car. His shoe flying at the windshield startles Natalie, and she puts the pedal to the metal, sending Damon flying into the treetops. The killer darts into her path, so Natalie tries to kill him, then makes the car go in reverse. The lack of tension on the rope sends Damon plummeting back down, where he smacks into the hood. Bye, Pacey!
Natalie drives back to campus, where she finds Reese watching an old blaxploitation flick. Reese and Natalie hurry back to the clearing, but Damon has vanished. Reese accuses Natalie of being high, then informs her that the gas station attendant was arrested before Damon was allegedly killed. Yikes! Or, as the gas station guy would say, "Y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-ikes!"
Back in their usual hangout,Brenda, Sasha and Parker chalk up Natalie's story as a prank Damon was pulling. Then Parker realizes that the manner of Damon's death was a recreation of an urban legend. At the same time, Natalie realizes that Michelle's murder was also similar to an urban legend. Parker tells her to call Killington, the ski resort Damon was going to for the weekend, which she does. The receptionist at the resort remembers a blond guy checking in, but can't verify that it was actually Damon.
Natalie takes a walk, and decides to stop by the school library to research more urban legends, and literally bumps into Sasha, who decided to grab a copy of the Kamasutra. Together, they start reading through the urban legends book and find several familiar stories: there's the story of the person who came home late at night, unaware that there was a killer in the house murdering family members in the dark; the legend that was recreated for Damon's murder; the legend of the gang member deciding to kill the teenagers who flashed their headlights at him...you get the idea.
Back at the dorm, Tosh is chatting online, trying to find a sex partner. The killer replies with an instant message, and they start flirting online. As Tosh leaves the room to get ready for her "date", the killer tells her in the IM that he's already in her room. When she sees the response, he throws her onto the bed, and begins to suffocate Tosh to death. Natalie enters the room, hears the muffled cries, and assumes that Tosh is just having sex, so she leaves the light off. After Tosh is killed, the murderer passes by Natalie's bed, and leaves a message in blood that mimics the urban legend she learned about from the book: AREN'T YOU GLAD YOU DIDN'T TURN ON THE LIGHT? She calls 911, and is questioned by both the dean and Reese. Nearby, Brenda and Paul watch as the dean asks Natalie about the incident. Both the dean and Reese try to convince her that Tosh committed suicide, but Nat doesn't buy it.
Paul waits until Natalie is alone, then tells her that he knows that she and Michelle were friends in high school. Natalie tells him that she thinks a killer is on the loose, and he replies that they should sit down somewhere else and talk about what's happening on the campus. They head to the newspaper office, where Natalie shares her theory that someone is using urban legends to murder people. Paul is skeptical, and asks her to give him a reasonable explanation as to why the killer is striking now. Natalie thinks it might have something to do with the massacre at Stanley Hall, since a party is being held on the 25th anniversary of the supposed incident.
To prove Nat wrong, Paul takes her to the newspaper "morgue", where they find the school files from 1973 are missing. The creepy janitor pops up again, and tells them to start by questioning Professor Wexler. Instead of questioning the teacher, they break into his office. As they go through every drawer, shelf and bookcase, Natalie nearly jumps out of her skin when she finds a jacket similar to the one worn by the killer. (on a side-note, pause the movie as the camera pans around the room....you can clearly see a Freddy Krueger doll among Wexler's items in the room...) Oh, and there's also a shiny new ax in the room as well. I used to polish my ax every day, until I needed glasses...
Natalie calls Paul over, and shows him the items she found. Before they can discuss their next move, Wexler returns and enters the office, leaving the couple trapped in the hidden room. As they listen to him leave, Paul and Natalie try to escape, only to find Wexler waiting for them.
Wexler takes them to the dean, who bitches them both out in front of him and Reese. Paul tries to tell the dean about the ax,but Wexler explains that he uses it as a prop in his urban legend class. When Paul asks Wexler directly about the massacre in Stanley Hall, the dean asks Reese and the professor to leave, so that he can speak to them in private.
Once he's alone with Paul and Natalie, the dean drops a bombshell on them: he discovered that Natalie had a criminal record. He then informs Paul that he no longer works for the school newspaper, then kicks them both out of his office. Outside, Paul demands that Natalie tell him the truth about her "record", and why she was put on probation. She remains silent, and Paul tells her that he doesn't trust her anymore, before walking away.
Natalie heads to the gym, and finds herself watching someone swimming in the pool. As Natalie continues to observe, she sees a figure dressed like the killer approach the swimmer. She screams and uses a chair to break the observation window, only to discover that Brenda was the one swimming, and some anonymous chick was in the jacket, getting ready to swim as well.
In the locker room, Natalie tells Brenda that she knew Michelle, but that they hadn't spoken in 2 years. She then decides to tell Brenda the whole story of the incident in her past. See, she and Michelle were out in Nat's car one night, when Michelle decided to try out the "high beams" initiation urban legend for herself. She waited for a car to come along and flash the headlights at them, then she began to chase the other driver. The other driver freaked out and crashed by the side of the road, which killed him. The court decided that their role in the accident wasn't enough proof to charge them, so Nat and Michelle were given probation instead.
Natalie tells Brenda that, even though she wasn't driving, she stills feels responsible for the man's death. Brenda, seeing how fragile Natalie is, invites her to the party that night at Stanley Hall. Gee, a party celebrating a killing spree....sounds safe to me!
Later that night, as Paul is clearing out his desk at the newspaper office, he comes across a newspaper article about the legendary massacre at Stanley Hall. Not only is the story true, but it turns out that the sole survivor was none other than Professor Wexler, back when he was just Student Wexler. Oh, and apparently the janitor knows more about it, because he lingers in the doorway to watch Paul as he reads the article. Hmmm...
Dean Adams is then seen getting ready to go home as well. He pauses at the car door to look into the back seat, then smiles at how much the urban legends have started to get on his nerves. A hand grabs his shoulder, but it turns out to be Reese. She starts to list all of the students who have either died or gone missing, and the dean tells her not to worry or call the police. Weird.
After Reese leaves, Dean Adams is attacked by the killer, who was hiding under the car the entire time. The dean falls to the ground, sees how much blood is pouring out of his achilles heel, and tries to crawl to safety. The killer opens the car door, releases the brake, and starts to roll the car toward Dean Adams, who makes the mistake of turning around to look. The car hits him right at the exit, knocking him into the spikes that they always tell you not to back up over, and he gets both impaled and run over.
At the massacre party, the frat boys are trying to get the dog drunk. A geeky guy tells Sasha that the sound of someone screaming in the song "Roller Coaster of Love" is the actual scream of someone being murdered. Sasha quickly finds somewhere else to be. Paul finds Natalie and shows her the newspaper article about Wexler's part in the Stanley Hall Massacre. Paul promises Natalie that he will protect her and they kiss, just as Brenda returns. She accuses Natalie of trying to steal Paul from her, then stomps away to go find somewhere to cry.
Reese patrols the halls of the deserted college at night, and the janitor nearly scares her shitless. She yells at him, but he just keeps walking like he didn't hear her. After Reese starts to calm down, she hears something break in one of the offices and decides to investigate. She finds the office(I think it's Wexler's) trashed, and she starts sweeping the room with the beam of her flashlight. She slips on the floor, and we discover that the floor was slippery because it was covered in blood.
Back at the party, Paul finds Parker and tells him that the party should end early. Parker responds by turning off the music and telling the party-goers that he believes that Paul is the killer, using the murders to help him get a career in journalism. He tells Paul to leave, then Sasha calls Parker a jerk.
Immediately following the confrontation, Parker gets a phone call from the killer. Parker sees that the call is coming from Damon's phone, and he decides to taunt the caller by mocking he urban legends a bit. He tells the killer that he knows the one about the babysitter getting scary calls from inside the house, while going from room to room to find the guy. The killer then responds that he has the wrong legend in mind: the one being recreated is the legend abou the old lady who dried off her pet by putting it in the microwave. Ewwwww!
Parker rushes back downstairs, just as the microwave beeps. Sure enough, he finds the dog inside...or the dog's insides at least. Parker runs upstairs to puke into the toilet, and the killer grabs his hair, plunging Parker's head into the toilet. He doesn't drown Parker, though. No, instead Parker wakes up and finds himself tied to the toilet. The killer shoves a funnel into Parker's mouth, then pours drain cleaner down his throat.
Reese calls the police, but they just put her on hold. At the same time, Natalie tries to call Paul, but his voicemail picks up. To complete the trifecta of phone scenes, Sasha is back at the radio station, making fun of students calling her about dumb sex stuff. Sasha doesn't realize it, but her producer is murdered while she's taking the call. She approaches his booth, and when lightning strikes, sees the killer swinging an axe at the window.
Natalie hears her scream on the radio, and rushes over to the stereo equipment, to turn down the music. Sasha rushes out of the radio booth and down the hall, and somehow the killer gets ahead of her, barely missing chopping her face in half. Natalie gets frustrated when her cdall to campus security gets a busy signal, so she decides to try to save Sasha herself.
Sasha gets relatively close to the exit, blocked only by numerous stairs. She makes a run for it, and the killer grabs and tries to fling her over the stairs. Sasha grabs the railing before she falls, so the killer retrieves his axe. As he prepares to chop off her fingers, Sasha lets go, and falls pretty far. Gee, that must have smarted.
Sasha limps toward an elevator, and the killer follows. the doors shut before he can kill her, and Sasha rides it to the 3rd floor. She limps down a dark hallway, while Natalie hurries to get to the building. Reese also hears Sasha screaming on the radio, and decides to check it out for herself.
Just as Natalie gets inside the building, Sasha sees her and bangs on a window to get her attention. Ther killer also finds Sasha, and corners her, while Natalie can only watch. The killer swings the axe several times at Sasha, though we don't get to see any part of her death. When he's done, he looks through the window at Natalie and waves.
Natalie runs back outside, and makes her way to Paul's room. She tells him about Sasha, and Paul scolds her about leaving the party. That makes Natalie a little suspicious, and she asks him where he's been all night. Paul tells her that he's been trying to find help, but that the dean and Reese have gone missing. He picks up a phone and tells Natalie that the line is dead, but she decides to check it for herself, which pisses him off.
Back in the rain, Paul and Natalie run into Brenda. She heard what happened on the radio show, and decided to seek help, much like they did. As the three of them take off, Reese stumbles upon sasha's corpse, which we still don't get to see. Reese tries to call the dean, but gets no response...duh!
As Natalie, Brenda and Paul drive away from the campus, Natalie declares that she smells something strange. Paul pulls over at a nearby gas station to see if the phones work, and leaves the girls in the car. While he's gone, Brenda apologizes to Natalie for getting jealous earlier, and they decide to find the source of the weird smell, which is getting stronger. They open up the trunk, and find Wexler's corpse there, covered in blood. They both make eye contact with Paul, and take off running.
He chases them into the woods, where Natalie and Brenda somehow get split up. When Natalie realizes that Brenda is no longer with her, she stops running and hears her screaming somewhere in the distance. Natalie hears Paul getting closer, and manages to flag down a pickup truck, which happens to be driven by the creepy janitor. Despite her unease around the guy, Natalie accepts a ride from him.
The janitor asks if Natalie is okay, and offers her his jacket. When she turns around to fetch it, she sees that it's the same style of jacket that the killer wears. Geez, this is the 3rd or 4th character in this thing that wears that jacket! Was there a sale or something at Burlington Coat Factory???
Natalie starts getting scared, and asks the janitor to let her out of the truck. The door won't open from the inside(???), and Natalie's demeanor starts to annoy him. At that point a car comes from the other direction with its headlights off, so the janitor flashes his on and off at the driver. D'oh! Just like the urban legend, the other driver swerves and starts to chase them. As Natalie urges the janitor to accelerate, the other car pulls up beside them, and both get a good look at the killer's hooded jacket, but no details of his face.
Up ahead, there's a curve in the road, and the killer rams into their vehicle. The impact sends the pickup sailing through the guardrail, and the truck comes to a stop after sailing a short distance. Natalie sees the janitor slumped over the steering wheel with blood on his face, so she rolls down her window and opens the outside handle to escape. She starts running again, as the rain picks up.
Reese gets back to her office, and retrieves a pretty nice handgun she keeps locked away for special occasions. She looks at a movie poster of her favorite female blaxploitation star, and shoves a clip into the gun. Go ahead, make her day!
Natalie gets back to the campus, and finds an emergency phone. As she keeps hitting the speaker and calling for help, Natalie hears Brenda screaming somewhere near her location. She sees a light on at the abandoned Stanley Hall, hears more screaming, and decides to see if she can help. Oh, so it's okay to take the time to investigate some anonymous screamer, but you can't be bothered to try to rescue the guy whose pickup you caused to crash? I'm stating to think that maybe Natalie deserves to die at the killer's hands.
Natalie manages to loosen some of the boards over a window, and she climbs in. The screams get louder as she makes her way to the stairs, and Natalie creeps into a bedroom. The door shuts behind her and jams, so she tries other doors in the room. One reveals the corpse of Parker, covered in blood and something foamy(??)-looking. Stepping away from Parker's body, Natalie collides with the corpse of Dean Adams, and she screams upon seeing him. Opening another door finds her face-to-face with Damon, who is still swinging by a noose, but also has deep gouges across his face.
Natalie finally gets through the right door, and finds herself in a room filled with candles. There she sees Brenda on a bed, laid out in a ritualistic pose. Natalie sits on the edge of the bed and starts to cry, and Brenda sits up. Before Natalie can react, Brenda punches her in the head, then smiles.
When Natalie comes to her senses, she has duct tape over her mouth. Brenda taunts her, then yanks the tape off so that Natalie can respond. Natalie calls her crazy, then asks Brenda why she murdered so many people. Brenda shows Natalie a slideshow, and explains her mad plan. *cue Scooby-Doo music*
Remember the guy who Natalie and Michelle ran off the road? Well, Natalie doesn't, not at first. It turns out that the guy was Brenda's boyfriend in high school. Brenda tells her that she and the boyfriend were going to get married right after they graduated, and Brenda swore vengeance after the car wreck.
When Brenda realized that the death was the result of an urban legend, she decided to kill Natalie and her friends with re-enactments of those very legends. Now, I have to stop here to rant a little bit. Doesn't it just seem a little out of whack? I mean,yes Natalie was in the car, but Michelle was the driver, right? Wouldn't the story have made more sense if Brenda had saved Michelle for last instead of Natalie? And why kill all of the others on campus? None of them had any ties to the incident in any way. Seriously, is it just me, or is Brenda's plan filled with more holes than a chunk of Swiss cheese?
Anyway, Brenda decided to save Natalie for the urban legend about a person waking up in a tub of ice with their kidney missing. She grabs a scalpel, explains the legend to Natalie, and cackles with glee.
Thbe movie switches over to Reese, who is rushing through the campus, trying to piece the whole mystery together. She sees the light on at Stanley Hall, and decides to investigate further. While we wait for Reese to catch up to the killer, Brenda explains the rest of her kooky plan. She murdered Wexler so that she could frame him for the killings. Natalie begs for her life, but Brenda tells her that soon she and her dead friends will all be legendary. Urban Legend...ary.
Natalie tries to bite Brenda, but Brenda manages to tape her mouth shut again, then stabs her in the side. Natalie cries out in pain, and Reese enters the room with her gun drawn before Brenda can do any more damage to Natalie. Reese unties one of Natalie's hands, then forces Brenda to stand against a window. Before she can finish frisking the killer, Brenda turns around and stabs Reese too. The two women struggle with each other, then Brenda gets the gun and shoots Reese.
By this time Natalie has freed herself, but Brenda points the gun at her too. When Natalie tells her that the murders won't bring back Brenda's fiance, Brenda responds that she plans to woo Paul after Natalie is gone. Then Paul shows up, and displays his sarcastic clapping skills. He tries to convince Brenda that he wants Natalie dead too, for getting him expelled. Paul tells Brenda that he'll need to get the details of each murder from her, for his article, then he asks for the gun.
Brenda isn't as crazy-dumb as she looks though. She points the gun at Paul, forces him to stand next to Natalie, then does an eenie-meanie-minie-moe to decide which one will get shot first. Before she can pull the trigger, Reese pops up again and stabs her in the arm. Natalie gets the gun, and Brenda taunts her so she shoots Brenda, who crashes through a window. This movie has a serious window fetish.
After making sure that Reese is still alive, Natalie and Paul leave to get help. In the car, Paul tells Natalie that he called paramedics to rescue Reese. Natalie then waxes philosophical, telling Paul that what happened will become an urban legend too, and will change as each new person tells the story. As Paul asks what the plot twist will be at the end of the urban legend, Brenda pops up in the back seat, holding onto her ax. Paul glimpses her in the rearview mirror, and the car swerves all over the slick road as they try to avoid Brenda's attacks.
The car gets to a bridge, and Paul tries careening from side to side, to make Brenda miss her swings with the weapon. He slams on the brakes, and Brenda goes flying through the windshield. See? Another window! She sails over the bridge and plunges into the water, where she presumably dies.
Paul checks Nataliefor any injuries, and they both get out of the car to see if Brenda survived or not. They see her lifeless corpse floating away on the water, and the scene fades out, as a narrator describes how the storm washed the body down the river, never to be seen again.
Huh? So the whole movie was an urban legend too? Was any of it real? I guess not, becauswe the college students hearing the tale laugh it off, even when the guy telling it insists that it really happened. One girl even makes a joke that Brenda was actually a chick in a Noxema commercial, which is an inside joke about the actress playing Brenda, who really was in a series of those commercials years ago.
As the storyteller asks if anyone believes him, one girl says that she does. It's Brenda, with a different hairstyle, and she tells the group that he didn't tell it right. Brenda leans forward, and promises to tell them the "real" story. THE END
Pretty good, especially in the post-Scream era of self-aware hipsters who sarcastically deconstruct the movies they star in. I still think the story would have made more sense if he Natalie and Michelle characters had switched roles, but most of the kills were creatively staged and fun. Oh, and many of the kills needed to be
SHOWN...otherwise, what's the point? Urban Legends gets 3 and 3-quarter killer trees out of five from me. Oh, and this week I learned:
-That I have a serious fetish for redheads...but not nearly as bad as the fetish this film's creators had for windows.
-Sex and murder sound pretty much the same on the radio.
-After a massacre occurs, it's common practice to leave the site of the murders standing, but boarded up.
I'm only partially moved into my new apartment, but I don't anticipate any more delays that wouldd prevent me from watching these things. Keeping that in mind, my next film is Final Destination, which is a goofy, fun movie that doesn't skimp on the violence in the least. Oh, and I just bought a brand-spankin'-new DVD/Blu-Ray player, which I'm looking forward to breaking in, so if any of you have any suggestions for a good slasher flick to watch on BR, let me know in the Suggestion Box post. See you next week!
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Terror Train
Well, after last week's clunker, I'm hoping that Terror Train is a more professional effort. It's kind of a clever concept: a killer is on board a train with a group of partying college graduates, and everyone's in costume. As the killer walks among them, he kills a victim, then dons their costume as a sort of camouflage. Let's hope that the movie is as interesting as the premise makes it sound. SPOILERS apply, as always...
Our story begins at a bonfire. It's an outdoor kegger being held by a fraternity, or every guy there just decided to wear the same beanie cap. Oh, and it's New Year's Eve. Geez, how many reasons do they need for an excuse to start the film at a party? Is it someone's birthday too?
Anyway, the guys are pledging a fraternity called Sigma Phi Omega. A scrawny guy in glasses named Kenny is being pushed by his frat brothers to see if a cute sorority girl named Alana(played by a young, incredibly cute Jamie Lee Curtis) will have sex with him. Of course it's the set-up for a prank, and one of the planners of said prank is Mitchy, Alana's close friend(also female, despite the name).
Alana is shown into the bedroom where the prank will take place, just as Kenny ascends the stairs. There's something in the bed already, but the audience doesn't know yet what it might be. Mitchy waits outside the bedroom door, and shows Kenny in, where Alana is hiding behind a curtain. Kenny undresses while Alana tries not to laugh, and she whispers to him that she wants him to approach the bed and kiss "her".
Kenny does as he's told, and the dummy in the bed turns out to be a corpse stolen from the anatomy department. Kenny freaks out in the most melodramatic way possible, by standing on the bed and getting tangled up in the curtains around it. As the jerkoffs from the frat enter the room to enjoy Kenny's misery, Alana sees that the thing in the bed was a corpse and looks horrified for Kenny. Oh, and Kenny looks like a drag queen in this sequence. Yeesh.
And that's all pre-credits!!
The movie then picks up the story 4 years later. The members of the fraternity, as well as their girlfriends and closest friends, are celebrating their graduation from college by throwing a huge shindig on a train. Besides Jamie Lee, probably the biggest celebrity in the film is illusionist David Copperfield, who plays "The Magician". Boy, he's really stretching his acting muscles! Anyone want to bet that the guy with no actual name is the killer? The movie also has Hart Bochner, who was in the first sequel to Urban Legend; Sandee Currie, who was in the underrated slasher film Curtains; and Vanity, a singer-actress probably best known as the love interest in a 1980's action film, The Last Dragon.
Anyway, the train passes by under the credits, which nearly get swallowed up by all of the smoke coming from the train itself. Man, this looks like a sequel to The Fog! The movie helpfully tells us that it's 3 years later, then we see a busload of grads getting off of the bus to get on the train. Hey, why not just party on the bus, then go to Florida, dumbasses?
As I mentioned in the first paragraph, this is a combination graduation/costume party, but the majority of the "costumes" are pretty damn sad. You can more or less pick out who's going to be killed by the very fact that they have an elaborate costume or a mask big enough to cover their entire face. Everyone else is wearing simple "Lone Ranger"-style half-masks, with a few token feather boas or glittery clothes. Lame.
The one black guy in the film, Jackson, is the last to leave the bus. Their are so many offensive things in that last sentence, I'm not even sure where to start. Please tell me they didn't make him ride in the back. He opens a beer and proposes a toast to his classmates, and the crowd laughs and cheers when someone yanks a lizard mask over his head. Well, I guess he'll die too. Real creative, guys. Let me guess, did someone bring a cat along for the ride, just so it could leap out of a dark room at some point, or did the writers miss a few slasher film cliches?
The bus driver, or maybe he's a guy working as a train porter, helps the students to load their baggage onto the train, and falls for a few dumb pranks. A character named Ed (the class clown of the group) is dressed up as Groucho Marx, and cracks several jokes older than the Marx Brothers themselves(the only one I found moderately funny so far was made after he stepped off the bus and saw the train: "Has anyone seen my girlfriend? She's the one with the big caboose!" Since all of the promotional stuff for Terror Train shows the killer in Ed's costume, I think it's safe to say that we won't have to put up with his jokes for very long.)
Doc, dressed as a monk, starts throwing confetti and party favors around, while Ed keeps making asinine quips for anyone who'll listen. Then we get introduced to...The Magician! Ed tries to make a wisecrack at his expense, and The Magician just goes back to lugging his trunk of props onto the train.
The conductor, nicknamed "Winnebago", gets a weather report from an elderly woman named Maggie. They seem to be old flames, but she has a face like a foot and he looks like he might have graduated from high school with Moses and Noah. I hope they don't kiss...I had a big meal earlier.
The graduates finally start to board the train, with Ed staggering behind them. He's clutching a sword that seems to be stuck in his gut, and everyone assumes that he's just being goofy. Uh, how about saying, "Hey, the killer stabbed me! I need a doctor!" Ed? But no, he just staggers around with a sword sticking out of him, and then dies as the last few students climb aboard the train. The killer strips his costume off of poor Ed, quickly puts it on, then gets on the train as we see Ed's corpse roll directly in the path of one of the train's wheels. Man, if Ed were still alive, he'd be in a world of pain. We get to see and hear one of his arms get crushed by the train, and then I guess no one at the station notices his bloody corpse just sitting there on the tracks. Nice.
Alana and Mitchy are across the hall from each other, and a drunk girl in a bunny costume begs Mitchy to be her roommate at school before staggering away. So wait...this is a graduation trip/costume party...but only for some of the students? Then why the heck are the others going? The killer observes from a hiding place, while Mitchy and Alana get all weepy about going their seperate ways. Mitchy decides to find a bathroom so she can adjust her tear-stained makeup, and the killer decides to hide once more.
In the dining car, a girl named "Pet" asks a guy named "Prez"(who is dressed like Uncle Sam, just to be even more confusing) if he has seen Ed. He tells her to check the next car down, and off she goes. Then there's a short scene where the engineer, "Shovels", and Winnebago engage in a debate over whether or not trains are obsolete. *yawn*
As the students/graduates/whatevers dance to some cheesy disco music, The Magician watches them. He tells his female assistant how much he resents them, and she tries to lighten the mood. When she encourages him to mingle and show them some sleight-of-hand tricks, he just says ominously, "I'm not ready."
Okay, I finally have this whole party thing figured out. It's specific to members of Sigma Phi Omega and whatever sorority they're affiliated with, so that's why it's not just seniors in attendance. Doc and the other seniors have a private train car set up to party in, and one guy asks about the "legend" of the prank from 3 years earlier. Doc tells the story, and Alana interrupts by revealing that Kenny was hospitalized after the "prank" went wrong.
Doc asks the younger frat guys to leave, and gives them a few bottles of alcohol as compensation. When he, Alana and the remaining frat boys reveal that they have champagne to drink, Kenny stands outside the closed door in the Groucho disguise and gets himself into a nice, simmering rage.
As Shovels and Winnebago continue their debate about the decline of train travel, Kenny prepares to take his next victim. I think it's Mitchy, she's wearing a dress that looks like it might be the witch outfit. Anyway, Kenny shows her Ed's severed finger in a box, and she laughs, assuming it's just a gag like Ed pulled earlier. Kenny follows her as she walks down the narrow corridor, but Jackson interrupts the murder plan. Kenny gets annoyed by Jackson, so he decides to kill him instead.
Jackson offers Kenny a drink, so they sneak into the restroom together. A bathroom??? Seriously??? Ummmm, okay...As Jackson pours 2 drinks, Kenny yanks him up by his mask, and lets him have a good, close look at his face. Jackson panics when he realizes that "Ed" is really Kenny, then Kenny smashes the bathroom mirror to pieces with Jackson's face.
Alana, Doc, Mitchy and Doc's buddy Moe(who looks like Bill Maher....probably not, though, since I didn't see his name in the credits), in a parrot costume, are all smoking and drinking in the senior car. Doc pisses off Alana when he reveals that he lied about how the party was paid for. As if that's not bad enough, he also tells his friends that he spiked the alcohol that he gave to the younger frat boys. Doc just gets her madder when he says(in the most menacing way possible) that this is one party that she can't walk out on. Doc's a bit of a psycho himself, hmmm? Moe follows Alana, but first threatens Doc with revenge for being such a dick. Boy, wouldn't it be funny if one of these guys was the killer, instead of Kenny?
Alana and Moe hug and make up, then Alana sees something wrong outside the bathroom where Jackson was just killed, and assumes that a wine bottle was broken. After she and Moe leave, Kenny emerges from the cramped toilet and locks it from the outside with a key. Wait, where did he get a key for the train?
Winnebago's co-worker asks him if they should patrol a bit to check on the party, but Winnebago doesn't want to intrude on their celebration. That goes nowhere, so we switch back to the dining car, where the party is still going. They talk to a few of the guests, then decide to watch The Magician...
The Magician asks for a coin from Alana, and makes a cigarette stick to it. Then he twistsd the cigarette, and makes it pass through the quarter. Alana lights the cigarette, and The Magician smokles it for a second to show that it's still intact. He feeds the cigarette back through the quarter, shows that both are completely intact, then makes the quarter vanish.
The magic continues at the snack bar, where The Magician waves his hand over a coin-operated vending machine, and a handful of peanuts fall into Alana's open palm. He grins at the crowd, then walks away. I bet he kept the quarter, too. Winnebago tries to show the other conductor a card trick of his own, but the other man refuses to take part, saying that playing cards are sinful.
Pet complains about Ed disappearing. Then a girl named Merry(the one played by Vanity) adds that Jackson has also abandoned her. After they leave, Alana and Moe continue their earlier squabble. Alana tells him that he should stay far away from Doc, and that she still resents Doc for the prank that was played on Kenny 3 years ago.
Speaking of Doc, Winnebago meets him and his girlfriend outside of their berth, and shows them a card trick. He tells Doc to think of a card and concentrate on the deck. After counting down from 5, Winnebago asks them what card they thought of. The female says that she was thinking of the jack of clubs. Winnebago tells them that not only has it risen to the top of the deck, but that it became a jack of spades. Ha ha. They all notice the locked bathroom, but no one does anything about it.
The Magician is finally ready to put on his stage act. He does some playing card illusions, then brings out his assistant. They do a little dance number, then he levitates her. Doc finds Moe sitting in a room by himself, and when Moe says that everyone else is watching the magic show, Doc reveals that they never hired a magician. Oops. Did we just reveal the murderer? Doc finds out that Moe and Alana are still fighting, and Doc tells his friend that if he loses Alana, he could always fall back on Doc. Wait, what? So Doc is gay, and has a thing for Moe now?
The Magician is still levitating his assistant, and passes a hoop around her body to prove that there are no wires. He covers her in a red sheet, then pulls it away, and she's now gone. As the magic show ends, Alana asks Winnebago about Ed's disappearance, and he plants the idea in her head about the costume switching.
Pet and Merry tell Doc and Moe about the magic act, but Doc could care less. Moe tries to argue that Doc loves tricks, but his counter-argument is that he loves jokes, not tricks. Then he and Moe get the girls to go somewhere private with them. Mitchy sees them, and looks pretty upset. She doesn't tell Alana, but instead distracts her to keep her from finding the deceitful boyfriends.
As Kenny skulks around watching everyone, the movie catches up with Doc, Moe, Pet and Merry. Winnebago shows up just as one of the girls nearly pukes, so the foursome quickly beat a hasty retreat. Seeing that the bathroom is still locked, the conductor uses his passkey to investigate. He finds Jackson's corpse, checks for a pulse, then wipes the blood from his hand.
Alana dances with Prez(the guy in the Uncle Sam outfit), and sees Mitchy leave. Prez offers Alana an ear if she wants to talk, but she declines. Then The Magician comes to the dance floor, and gives Alana a strange glance. Meanwhile, Winnebago tells the other conductor about the dead body. They both agree that the best course of action is to notify the station, and see if they can turn back...oh, and Winnebago tells the other conductor to keep the death hush-hush around the passengers. After a quick chat with the engineer, they decide to continue on their current journey, because it's slightly closer.
Winnebago takes a walk, and finds himself alone in one of the party compartments. He walks through decorations and trash to take a seat, and eyes another door with suspicion. He meets up with the other conductor at the door to the crime scene, but they find it cleaned up, and the killer is on the floor pretending to be Jackson. Then Mitchy shows up, assumes that the person under the mask is Jackson, and walks away with him.
Doc and Moe continue to ply their dates with booze, and they find a yearbook. As the foursome read through it, they find a photo of Kenny, and quickly change the subject. Doc takes off then with Merry, leaving Moe with a very drunk and oversexed Pet to contend with.
In one of the berths, Mitchy flirts with the person she still assumes to be Jackson. They hear someone coming, so Mitchy and Kenny climb into an upper berth to hide behind the curtain. They hear Merry and Doc pass by, then Mitchy sets about trying to seduce "Jackson". Kenny removes one of his green gloves to fondle her, and reveals that it contained Jackson's severed hand. When Mitchy starts to scream, Kenny suffocates her.
Back in the still-crowded dining car, Alana has another encounter with The Magician. He gives her a rose by levitating it to her, then things get even weirder. He knows who she is. Before she can talk to him any further, he seems to vanish. Then Doc walks in. He apologizes to her, then asks if she has seen Mitchy. He also encourages Alana to find Moe, knowing that she'll walk in on him with Pet. This guy really is a dick.
In the very next scene Pet gets naked, even though Moe is trying to be faithful to his girlfriend. The conductors are alone, trying to figure out how the crime scene was cleaned up so fast. Good question. Better question: why did we leave Moe and Pet in the middle of a scene?
We jump right back to The Magician, who is performing yet another card trick for Doc, Prez, and a crowd of onlookers. His trick involves finding a specific card that Doc picked, even though the cards are all over the floor and covered by a sheet of paper. Doc calls it a trick for children, so The Magician pulls out a switchblade, and lets it land blade-down on the pile. The card that it stabbedby the knife is not only the correct card, but it also says "DOC" in bold letters. Everyone cheers and claps except Doc, who just sits there and looks pissed off.
Winnebago finds Mitchy's shoe, then her dead body. It's odd, because we saw her get strangled, yet there's a good amount of blood on her face. Winnebago closes and seals up the curtain again, then nearly has a heart attack when he runs into Alana. She identifies Mitchy's shoe, and after Winnebago checks the bathroom again for blood, he asks Alana to come with him.
Along the way, she stops to knock at Moe's door, but he's hiding with Pet. After Alana and the conductor move on, Moe leaves. Once they get to a deserted section of the train, Winnebago tells Alana that Mitchy is dead. She doesn't buy it, but she sees the corpse up close and breaks down in the conductor's arms.
Alas, there's another magic trick to watch. Wasn't this supposed to be a slasher flick? I mean, if they added Charo and Harvey Korman to this scene, it'd pass as a scene from "Love Boat". And where the Hell is the gore? Oops, I kinda forgot I was watching a magic trick! I better rewind a bit.
Okay, so The Magician gets covered in a cloth. Then he asks the girl covering him to hold up any number of fingers behind him, pull up the cloth, and supposedly he'll be holding the same amount. When she pulls off the cloth, the chair is empty, and The Magician is behind his audience, shouting out the correct number.
Alana and Winnebago try to reconstruct the events that ended with Mitchy's murder. That's when Winnebago realizes that the killer is switching costumes with his victims. Alas, we have to sit through more magic tricks. Boy, this movie has more filler than a guy named Filler McFillersteen. This trick also involves a sheet, as The Magician holds it over his head, then lowers it, only to reveal his assistant is now holding the curtain.
The conductor examines the bathroom thoroughly, finding a single towel with a bloody handprint on it. We zoom right back to the magic act's finale, where Doc discovers that Moe has died. He screams at the clapping audience for help, but everyone ignores him. He does what any intelligent med student would do...he drags Moe's corpse out of the room, screaming like a ninny as people laugh at him.
Doc encounters Alana and Winnebago, and together they work to get Moe lying down. They discover a bleeding chest wound, then a group of students ssee the body and get scared. Doc asks Alana where Mitchy is, and learns that she was also killed. That REALLY freaks him out, so he pulls the emergency brake, but nothing happens. That sends the conductor to see who might be operating the controls.
Turns out that no one is driving the train. Winnebago leaps into the driver's seat and slams on the brakes manually, sending every passenger careening off their feet. The other conductor stumbles in, and they work together to keep from derailing. When they come to a complete stop, Winnebago gives his co-worker a fire axe, and tells him to be wary. He finds a couple of porters and tells them to find weapons as well.
The 2 porters investigate the sleeping car, while the conductor evacuates the passengers, then tries to keep them calm as they stand around in the snow. One of the porters then finds another dead body. Alana and Doc find each other in the crowd, and Alana tells him that the killer is Kenny. Then we get some cool twists in the story.
It turns out that Alana tried to visit Kenny in the psych ward after the stunt that drove him batshit, but she wasn't allowed to see him. He went insane because the stunt with the corpse brought him flashbacks, from an incident in his teens that resulted in him killing someone ELSE. Doc grabs Alana's hand, and they take off running.
The conductor tells the frightened college kids that they all need to get back on the train, and that they will all be placed in a single passenger car, so as to discourage anyone from wandering off somewhere alone. Doc is already on the train again, and he has dragged Alana into an empty room with him. He even busted the lock, to ensure that the killer couldn't get in.
As Alana tries to reason with Doc, he shows her why he got so scared...a yearbook. To be specific, a page in the yearbook reveals that Kenny had a taste for...magic tricks. Doc smugly tells Alana thsat he plans to wait for Kenny to show up, then finish him off. I REALLY can't wait for Doc to die.
Alana forces her way out of the room, only to see Kenny marching toward her wearing a porter's outfit. As she starts to escape through a window, the person chasing her turns out to be an actual porter. Oops!! She asks him for help, and Doc relaxes when he overhears the conversation from the other side of the door. He sees another door that he forgot to check. It's a closet, and Doc gets scared when he stands in front of it.
He braces himself, then yanks the door open. It's an empty closet. He gets ready to open another door, and survives that one too. As Doc sits back down on the floor, he sees another potential hiding spot for the killer and gets up. That's when a hand under his seat darts out, grabbing his ankle. Doc shakes loose and pounds on the door, but a female-looking hand rests on his shoulder. When he assumes it to belong to Mitchy, Kenny takes the opportunity to yank his head backward and cut Doc's throat. Yay!
Alana finds Prez, and they go off to look for the conductor. Then we see The Magician running knives or swords through a box. He is disrupted by his assistant, who seems to have come out of the shower. She grabs a sword and playfully starts swinging it around, which seems to piss off The Magician.
While Prez and Alana look for Doc, they run into Winnebago, who happens to be on the phone. They telll him about their idea that The Magician is Kenny, and all 3 try to find him. Rut-roh, Raggy!! They get back to Doc's room to show Winnebago the yearbook page. Winnebago gets the door open, sees the blood and debris, and makes Prez and Alana wait outside with a porter while he searches the room for any signs of life.
He gets a faceful of corpse when he opens a closed berth, because Doc's body fall out. He comes face to face with Doc's severed head, then Alana bursts into the room and screams. But where did Kenny go, hmmmm?
With everyone back on the train, the journey resumes. The survivors all sit in the nightclub/lounge car, and Winnebago suggests that they all grab some food and coffee. The Magician's assistant comes out from behind the stage, and the conductor invites her to come with them. When she's right next to him, he asks her discreetly where The Magician is, and she tells him that The Magician(who finally has a name, Ken) is backstage. She calls out to Ken that she'll bring him a cup of coffee, but there's no response.
Between cars, Winnebago uses a chain to close up the lounge car. When the assistant asks for information, he only tells her that he's trying to keep her safe. Then a porter finds a deserted room for Alana to rest in. He supplies her with pillows and blankets, and promises to stand in the hallway to guard her. Once she's alone, Alana closes all of the shades on the windows, turns on all of the lights, opens the closets, and even checks out the ceiling. Satisfied that she is alone at last, Alana sits back down and clutches a pillow.
The other passengers form an angry mob, and a dumb jock demands to be let out, so that he can go after the killer by himself. Winnebago hands him an ax, then asks him to look at all of the dead bodies before he goes. They stare at each other, until the jock finally backs down. Winnebago makes it up to the kid by offering to go take a look himself.
Bad idea. The porter who was guarding Alana is now dead too. He has one of Ken's swords in his chest, and the killer reaches down next to the body to get the dead man's ax. Winnebago and a couple of porters re-enter the lounge, and ask Ken to step out and talk to them. When he still won't answer, Winnebago decides to look backstage for himself. He and the 2 porters find the dressing room deserted. Ken either jumped off the train, was killed, or is now somewhere else on the train. Yikes!
The killer is seen moving around the train, dragging the weapon at his side. Alana, still sleeping, has no idea that he's standing right outside the room she's in. He opens the door quietly, and this time he's wearing the "old" mask that Mitchy had earlier(I think...with so many costume changes, this one's tough to follow!), along with Doc's "monk" robe. He gets right next to the sleeping woman, then brings his ax down, and there's a squeak.
Ah, a decoy. As the killer keeps swinging, Alana bursts out of a closet behind him and stabs him in the back with a sword. Where the heck did Alana get her hands on one of the swords from the magic act??? Well, however she got her hands on the sword, she had it. As the killer tries to recover, Alana runs out of the room. As she breathlessly starts movind down the corridor, the killer blocks her from another door by thrusting his arm out in front of the frightened damsel. How the heck did he get ahead of her so damn fast?
Alana then runs into a small booth with a glass window and shuts it. The killer breaks the glass with his ax, and Alana runs through another door, into what looks like a maintenance compartment. The killer gets in too, and closes the door behind him as Alana struggles to open yet another door. He casually strolls toward her, grabs her head, then starts to strangle the poor girl. There's a brief struggle, until Alana manages to bite one of the killer's bloody hands.
He rips off her blouse, so Alana grabs a fire extinguisher off the floor and sprays his eyes with it. Then she runs again, back the way theyv came, and manages to jam it shut with what look like handcuffs. After the killer wastes some seconds hitting the mesh walls around Alana to scare her, he finds a sharp pole. Using the pole to smash the overhead light, the killer then shoves the pole through the wire at Alana, nearly impaling her with it.
As he destroys another light, Alana calls out his name. Kenny ignores her, so Alana looks around again for a weapon, and finds a large nail holding Post-It notes. She aims for Kenny's face, and the nail hits the skin underneath where the mask's ear is. Kenny clutches his face in agony, while Alana kicks the door open to escape.
Yet another chase sequence begins. I'm willing to bet that whoever invented Pac-Man was probably a big fan of slasher flicks, because that's what most of them are. You chase him, he chases you, blah blah blah. Anyway, Kenny catches up to Alana as she's trying to get a red gate opened, and she delivers several rough kicks to his midsection. He seemingly falls off of the train, then Winnebago and Prez find Alana and bring her back to the occupied sections of the train.
It's not quite over, though....a pair of bloody hands are clinging to the outside railing. The conductor checks on both Alana and Merry, but Alana is finally asleep again. After the conductor leaves, Merry also steps out to get some air. Behind Alana, outside a window, Kenny can be seen putting on his best Spider-Man imitation, and watching her from above the window. The killer creeps backward, and then we get a shot of an empty hallway.
The door opens, and Alana wakes up with a start, but it's only Merry again. She convinces Alana to go back with her into the lounge with all of the other survivors. As Alana gets out of bed, she hears a strange sound nearby. She moves quickly down some narrow, dark corridors and jumps when she sees a witch hat and broom. Then a figure moves out of the shadows and approaches her at a pretty good clip. AAAAAH!!! Oh, it's only Prez. He grabs her hand and they go to the lounge together.
The 2 conductors are driving the train, and they can see the lights of the station in the distance. Winnebago sends the other one back to tell everyone the good news, and he handles the controls by himself. At the same time, Alana is standing on an outer platform, freezing her butt off to watch scenery fly by. When she decides to head back inside, Alana starts looking through the luggage and props from The Magician's act. She finds a scrapbook, and starts flipping through it.
You'd think that this would be a scene where she starts reading scary newspaper clips about murders happening everywhere he performed, but you would be wrong. Instead, a box falls open, revealing the corpse of....The Magician! Dun Dun DUNNNNNNNNN!!! Yep, he was stabbed several times by his own swords. Ironic.
Alana screams her head off and starts running again. I'd love to watch a montage of her chase scenes done to the theme of "Benny Hill". So, where were we? Oh yeah. Alana. Running. Again. So, yeah, she runs out of the dressing room, she runs past concerned passengers, she runs out of the semi-crowded lounge. See Alana run. Run Alana, run.
She runs through a door with a big "N" on it(Nintendo? Nirvana? Ned Flanders?), and finds herself in a room belonging to someone named "Carne". Who the heck was Carne? Is she that chick who had the horrible talk show? Well, whoever she is(or was), Alana is in her room now. Alana leans wearily against a table and lowers her head, and a pair of hands hold hers. Uh oh...
It's the killer, dressed as a porter, in yet another mask. Kenny removes the mask to show her what we pretty knew already, then removes the porter hat, to reveal another surprise twist: Kenny was ALSO The Magician's assistant! Wow.
Alana tries to tell Kenny how sorry she is, but he doesn't buy it. He tells her that he was watching her flirt with The Magician, but she wants him to believe that she knew he was the better magician. Kenny forces Alana to kiss him, but then he recreates the night 3 years ago by freaking out in exactly the same way. What're the odds?
Kenny howls and twirls around the room, wrapping himself up in blankets and curtains and sheets, oh my. Winnebago then walks in with a shovel, which he uses to bash Kenny in the head with....yay, conductor! Winnebago hits him again, and Kenny goes flying out of the train, landing in a semi-frozen body of water many, many, many feet below. His body floats through the cold water, then disappears forever...or, until someone decides to remake this movie(and don't write to me about the recent movie Train...that started out as a Terror Train remake, yes, but then they changed it into an entirely different story.)or do a sequel.
The train keeps going, even though I should now be typing THE END...oops, no, that was it. THE END
Weird. And pretty abrupt. If any movie needed an extra surprise after or during the credits, it was Terror Train. I mean, the concept was a cool one, but there were more magic tricks than murders! Hell, they even botched the switching costumes idea, by giving only the main characters and victims full costumes. Geez, it was like Slasher Flicks For Dummies or something.
Still, there was some stuff to like here, too. I mean, there was a Young Jamie Lee Curtis. That was pretty sweet. The body was somewhat high, all things considered. And the concept of not knowing who was really who under the masks was also a good idea, at least in theory. Like I said earlier, this is one of the few times I'd LIKE too see a remake done. And the film did a good job of presenting a number of characters who could have been killers(Moe, Doc, The Magician, Alana herself)...the characters were pretty dark in this one!
Oh, and if you do a little looking on the internet, there's an interesting theory about this movie, that pretty much everything after the prank backfires is a dream that Alana has, because she feels remorse and guilt for being a part of Doc's scheme. The "clues" are in details like the way the bathroom and mirror were cleaned up after the conductor tried to show someone else the dead body; or the way that Kenny attacked Alana in one room, yet attacked her again by emerging from a door in front of her; or in the scene where Kenny appeared at Alana's window toward the end, but at an implausible position. Kind of far-fetched, but still fun to think about if you re-watch it.
Well, whatever the truth is, the film was better than most of the ones from the last decade or so, so I'm going to give it 3 and a half killer trees, out of 5 Oh, and what were this week's lessons learned from Terror Train?
-If you go to college, avoid fraternities and sororities like a plague, as well as guys named "Doc".
-Don't ever have sex with a magician's assistant...that ain't a wand in her pocket, but she IS happy to see you!
-Magic is fun...until you see 40 card tricks in a row.
No movie next week, and maybe not the week after either. I'm in the process of moving, and I'm not entirely sure how long packing, unpacking, and getting settled will take. I'm still watching at least 1 slasher a week though, so I'm watching Urban Legend next week, as well as Final Destination the following week, and maybe a few online. Next time we see each other, I'll be in my new apartment!
Our story begins at a bonfire. It's an outdoor kegger being held by a fraternity, or every guy there just decided to wear the same beanie cap. Oh, and it's New Year's Eve. Geez, how many reasons do they need for an excuse to start the film at a party? Is it someone's birthday too?
Anyway, the guys are pledging a fraternity called Sigma Phi Omega. A scrawny guy in glasses named Kenny is being pushed by his frat brothers to see if a cute sorority girl named Alana(played by a young, incredibly cute Jamie Lee Curtis) will have sex with him. Of course it's the set-up for a prank, and one of the planners of said prank is Mitchy, Alana's close friend(also female, despite the name).
Alana is shown into the bedroom where the prank will take place, just as Kenny ascends the stairs. There's something in the bed already, but the audience doesn't know yet what it might be. Mitchy waits outside the bedroom door, and shows Kenny in, where Alana is hiding behind a curtain. Kenny undresses while Alana tries not to laugh, and she whispers to him that she wants him to approach the bed and kiss "her".
Kenny does as he's told, and the dummy in the bed turns out to be a corpse stolen from the anatomy department. Kenny freaks out in the most melodramatic way possible, by standing on the bed and getting tangled up in the curtains around it. As the jerkoffs from the frat enter the room to enjoy Kenny's misery, Alana sees that the thing in the bed was a corpse and looks horrified for Kenny. Oh, and Kenny looks like a drag queen in this sequence. Yeesh.
And that's all pre-credits!!
The movie then picks up the story 4 years later. The members of the fraternity, as well as their girlfriends and closest friends, are celebrating their graduation from college by throwing a huge shindig on a train. Besides Jamie Lee, probably the biggest celebrity in the film is illusionist David Copperfield, who plays "The Magician". Boy, he's really stretching his acting muscles! Anyone want to bet that the guy with no actual name is the killer? The movie also has Hart Bochner, who was in the first sequel to Urban Legend; Sandee Currie, who was in the underrated slasher film Curtains; and Vanity, a singer-actress probably best known as the love interest in a 1980's action film, The Last Dragon.
Anyway, the train passes by under the credits, which nearly get swallowed up by all of the smoke coming from the train itself. Man, this looks like a sequel to The Fog! The movie helpfully tells us that it's 3 years later, then we see a busload of grads getting off of the bus to get on the train. Hey, why not just party on the bus, then go to Florida, dumbasses?
As I mentioned in the first paragraph, this is a combination graduation/costume party, but the majority of the "costumes" are pretty damn sad. You can more or less pick out who's going to be killed by the very fact that they have an elaborate costume or a mask big enough to cover their entire face. Everyone else is wearing simple "Lone Ranger"-style half-masks, with a few token feather boas or glittery clothes. Lame.
The one black guy in the film, Jackson, is the last to leave the bus. Their are so many offensive things in that last sentence, I'm not even sure where to start. Please tell me they didn't make him ride in the back. He opens a beer and proposes a toast to his classmates, and the crowd laughs and cheers when someone yanks a lizard mask over his head. Well, I guess he'll die too. Real creative, guys. Let me guess, did someone bring a cat along for the ride, just so it could leap out of a dark room at some point, or did the writers miss a few slasher film cliches?
The bus driver, or maybe he's a guy working as a train porter, helps the students to load their baggage onto the train, and falls for a few dumb pranks. A character named Ed (the class clown of the group) is dressed up as Groucho Marx, and cracks several jokes older than the Marx Brothers themselves(the only one I found moderately funny so far was made after he stepped off the bus and saw the train: "Has anyone seen my girlfriend? She's the one with the big caboose!" Since all of the promotional stuff for Terror Train shows the killer in Ed's costume, I think it's safe to say that we won't have to put up with his jokes for very long.)
Doc, dressed as a monk, starts throwing confetti and party favors around, while Ed keeps making asinine quips for anyone who'll listen. Then we get introduced to...The Magician! Ed tries to make a wisecrack at his expense, and The Magician just goes back to lugging his trunk of props onto the train.
The conductor, nicknamed "Winnebago", gets a weather report from an elderly woman named Maggie. They seem to be old flames, but she has a face like a foot and he looks like he might have graduated from high school with Moses and Noah. I hope they don't kiss...I had a big meal earlier.
The graduates finally start to board the train, with Ed staggering behind them. He's clutching a sword that seems to be stuck in his gut, and everyone assumes that he's just being goofy. Uh, how about saying, "Hey, the killer stabbed me! I need a doctor!" Ed? But no, he just staggers around with a sword sticking out of him, and then dies as the last few students climb aboard the train. The killer strips his costume off of poor Ed, quickly puts it on, then gets on the train as we see Ed's corpse roll directly in the path of one of the train's wheels. Man, if Ed were still alive, he'd be in a world of pain. We get to see and hear one of his arms get crushed by the train, and then I guess no one at the station notices his bloody corpse just sitting there on the tracks. Nice.
Alana and Mitchy are across the hall from each other, and a drunk girl in a bunny costume begs Mitchy to be her roommate at school before staggering away. So wait...this is a graduation trip/costume party...but only for some of the students? Then why the heck are the others going? The killer observes from a hiding place, while Mitchy and Alana get all weepy about going their seperate ways. Mitchy decides to find a bathroom so she can adjust her tear-stained makeup, and the killer decides to hide once more.
In the dining car, a girl named "Pet" asks a guy named "Prez"(who is dressed like Uncle Sam, just to be even more confusing) if he has seen Ed. He tells her to check the next car down, and off she goes. Then there's a short scene where the engineer, "Shovels", and Winnebago engage in a debate over whether or not trains are obsolete. *yawn*
As the students/graduates/whatevers dance to some cheesy disco music, The Magician watches them. He tells his female assistant how much he resents them, and she tries to lighten the mood. When she encourages him to mingle and show them some sleight-of-hand tricks, he just says ominously, "I'm not ready."
Okay, I finally have this whole party thing figured out. It's specific to members of Sigma Phi Omega and whatever sorority they're affiliated with, so that's why it's not just seniors in attendance. Doc and the other seniors have a private train car set up to party in, and one guy asks about the "legend" of the prank from 3 years earlier. Doc tells the story, and Alana interrupts by revealing that Kenny was hospitalized after the "prank" went wrong.
Doc asks the younger frat guys to leave, and gives them a few bottles of alcohol as compensation. When he, Alana and the remaining frat boys reveal that they have champagne to drink, Kenny stands outside the closed door in the Groucho disguise and gets himself into a nice, simmering rage.
As Shovels and Winnebago continue their debate about the decline of train travel, Kenny prepares to take his next victim. I think it's Mitchy, she's wearing a dress that looks like it might be the witch outfit. Anyway, Kenny shows her Ed's severed finger in a box, and she laughs, assuming it's just a gag like Ed pulled earlier. Kenny follows her as she walks down the narrow corridor, but Jackson interrupts the murder plan. Kenny gets annoyed by Jackson, so he decides to kill him instead.
Jackson offers Kenny a drink, so they sneak into the restroom together. A bathroom??? Seriously??? Ummmm, okay...As Jackson pours 2 drinks, Kenny yanks him up by his mask, and lets him have a good, close look at his face. Jackson panics when he realizes that "Ed" is really Kenny, then Kenny smashes the bathroom mirror to pieces with Jackson's face.
Alana, Doc, Mitchy and Doc's buddy Moe(who looks like Bill Maher....probably not, though, since I didn't see his name in the credits), in a parrot costume, are all smoking and drinking in the senior car. Doc pisses off Alana when he reveals that he lied about how the party was paid for. As if that's not bad enough, he also tells his friends that he spiked the alcohol that he gave to the younger frat boys. Doc just gets her madder when he says(in the most menacing way possible) that this is one party that she can't walk out on. Doc's a bit of a psycho himself, hmmm? Moe follows Alana, but first threatens Doc with revenge for being such a dick. Boy, wouldn't it be funny if one of these guys was the killer, instead of Kenny?
Alana and Moe hug and make up, then Alana sees something wrong outside the bathroom where Jackson was just killed, and assumes that a wine bottle was broken. After she and Moe leave, Kenny emerges from the cramped toilet and locks it from the outside with a key. Wait, where did he get a key for the train?
Winnebago's co-worker asks him if they should patrol a bit to check on the party, but Winnebago doesn't want to intrude on their celebration. That goes nowhere, so we switch back to the dining car, where the party is still going. They talk to a few of the guests, then decide to watch The Magician...
The Magician asks for a coin from Alana, and makes a cigarette stick to it. Then he twistsd the cigarette, and makes it pass through the quarter. Alana lights the cigarette, and The Magician smokles it for a second to show that it's still intact. He feeds the cigarette back through the quarter, shows that both are completely intact, then makes the quarter vanish.
The magic continues at the snack bar, where The Magician waves his hand over a coin-operated vending machine, and a handful of peanuts fall into Alana's open palm. He grins at the crowd, then walks away. I bet he kept the quarter, too. Winnebago tries to show the other conductor a card trick of his own, but the other man refuses to take part, saying that playing cards are sinful.
Pet complains about Ed disappearing. Then a girl named Merry(the one played by Vanity) adds that Jackson has also abandoned her. After they leave, Alana and Moe continue their earlier squabble. Alana tells him that he should stay far away from Doc, and that she still resents Doc for the prank that was played on Kenny 3 years ago.
Speaking of Doc, Winnebago meets him and his girlfriend outside of their berth, and shows them a card trick. He tells Doc to think of a card and concentrate on the deck. After counting down from 5, Winnebago asks them what card they thought of. The female says that she was thinking of the jack of clubs. Winnebago tells them that not only has it risen to the top of the deck, but that it became a jack of spades. Ha ha. They all notice the locked bathroom, but no one does anything about it.
The Magician is finally ready to put on his stage act. He does some playing card illusions, then brings out his assistant. They do a little dance number, then he levitates her. Doc finds Moe sitting in a room by himself, and when Moe says that everyone else is watching the magic show, Doc reveals that they never hired a magician. Oops. Did we just reveal the murderer? Doc finds out that Moe and Alana are still fighting, and Doc tells his friend that if he loses Alana, he could always fall back on Doc. Wait, what? So Doc is gay, and has a thing for Moe now?
The Magician is still levitating his assistant, and passes a hoop around her body to prove that there are no wires. He covers her in a red sheet, then pulls it away, and she's now gone. As the magic show ends, Alana asks Winnebago about Ed's disappearance, and he plants the idea in her head about the costume switching.
Pet and Merry tell Doc and Moe about the magic act, but Doc could care less. Moe tries to argue that Doc loves tricks, but his counter-argument is that he loves jokes, not tricks. Then he and Moe get the girls to go somewhere private with them. Mitchy sees them, and looks pretty upset. She doesn't tell Alana, but instead distracts her to keep her from finding the deceitful boyfriends.
As Kenny skulks around watching everyone, the movie catches up with Doc, Moe, Pet and Merry. Winnebago shows up just as one of the girls nearly pukes, so the foursome quickly beat a hasty retreat. Seeing that the bathroom is still locked, the conductor uses his passkey to investigate. He finds Jackson's corpse, checks for a pulse, then wipes the blood from his hand.
Alana dances with Prez(the guy in the Uncle Sam outfit), and sees Mitchy leave. Prez offers Alana an ear if she wants to talk, but she declines. Then The Magician comes to the dance floor, and gives Alana a strange glance. Meanwhile, Winnebago tells the other conductor about the dead body. They both agree that the best course of action is to notify the station, and see if they can turn back...oh, and Winnebago tells the other conductor to keep the death hush-hush around the passengers. After a quick chat with the engineer, they decide to continue on their current journey, because it's slightly closer.
Winnebago takes a walk, and finds himself alone in one of the party compartments. He walks through decorations and trash to take a seat, and eyes another door with suspicion. He meets up with the other conductor at the door to the crime scene, but they find it cleaned up, and the killer is on the floor pretending to be Jackson. Then Mitchy shows up, assumes that the person under the mask is Jackson, and walks away with him.
Doc and Moe continue to ply their dates with booze, and they find a yearbook. As the foursome read through it, they find a photo of Kenny, and quickly change the subject. Doc takes off then with Merry, leaving Moe with a very drunk and oversexed Pet to contend with.
In one of the berths, Mitchy flirts with the person she still assumes to be Jackson. They hear someone coming, so Mitchy and Kenny climb into an upper berth to hide behind the curtain. They hear Merry and Doc pass by, then Mitchy sets about trying to seduce "Jackson". Kenny removes one of his green gloves to fondle her, and reveals that it contained Jackson's severed hand. When Mitchy starts to scream, Kenny suffocates her.
Back in the still-crowded dining car, Alana has another encounter with The Magician. He gives her a rose by levitating it to her, then things get even weirder. He knows who she is. Before she can talk to him any further, he seems to vanish. Then Doc walks in. He apologizes to her, then asks if she has seen Mitchy. He also encourages Alana to find Moe, knowing that she'll walk in on him with Pet. This guy really is a dick.
In the very next scene Pet gets naked, even though Moe is trying to be faithful to his girlfriend. The conductors are alone, trying to figure out how the crime scene was cleaned up so fast. Good question. Better question: why did we leave Moe and Pet in the middle of a scene?
We jump right back to The Magician, who is performing yet another card trick for Doc, Prez, and a crowd of onlookers. His trick involves finding a specific card that Doc picked, even though the cards are all over the floor and covered by a sheet of paper. Doc calls it a trick for children, so The Magician pulls out a switchblade, and lets it land blade-down on the pile. The card that it stabbedby the knife is not only the correct card, but it also says "DOC" in bold letters. Everyone cheers and claps except Doc, who just sits there and looks pissed off.
Winnebago finds Mitchy's shoe, then her dead body. It's odd, because we saw her get strangled, yet there's a good amount of blood on her face. Winnebago closes and seals up the curtain again, then nearly has a heart attack when he runs into Alana. She identifies Mitchy's shoe, and after Winnebago checks the bathroom again for blood, he asks Alana to come with him.
Along the way, she stops to knock at Moe's door, but he's hiding with Pet. After Alana and the conductor move on, Moe leaves. Once they get to a deserted section of the train, Winnebago tells Alana that Mitchy is dead. She doesn't buy it, but she sees the corpse up close and breaks down in the conductor's arms.
Alas, there's another magic trick to watch. Wasn't this supposed to be a slasher flick? I mean, if they added Charo and Harvey Korman to this scene, it'd pass as a scene from "Love Boat". And where the Hell is the gore? Oops, I kinda forgot I was watching a magic trick! I better rewind a bit.
Okay, so The Magician gets covered in a cloth. Then he asks the girl covering him to hold up any number of fingers behind him, pull up the cloth, and supposedly he'll be holding the same amount. When she pulls off the cloth, the chair is empty, and The Magician is behind his audience, shouting out the correct number.
Alana and Winnebago try to reconstruct the events that ended with Mitchy's murder. That's when Winnebago realizes that the killer is switching costumes with his victims. Alas, we have to sit through more magic tricks. Boy, this movie has more filler than a guy named Filler McFillersteen. This trick also involves a sheet, as The Magician holds it over his head, then lowers it, only to reveal his assistant is now holding the curtain.
The conductor examines the bathroom thoroughly, finding a single towel with a bloody handprint on it. We zoom right back to the magic act's finale, where Doc discovers that Moe has died. He screams at the clapping audience for help, but everyone ignores him. He does what any intelligent med student would do...he drags Moe's corpse out of the room, screaming like a ninny as people laugh at him.
Doc encounters Alana and Winnebago, and together they work to get Moe lying down. They discover a bleeding chest wound, then a group of students ssee the body and get scared. Doc asks Alana where Mitchy is, and learns that she was also killed. That REALLY freaks him out, so he pulls the emergency brake, but nothing happens. That sends the conductor to see who might be operating the controls.
Turns out that no one is driving the train. Winnebago leaps into the driver's seat and slams on the brakes manually, sending every passenger careening off their feet. The other conductor stumbles in, and they work together to keep from derailing. When they come to a complete stop, Winnebago gives his co-worker a fire axe, and tells him to be wary. He finds a couple of porters and tells them to find weapons as well.
The 2 porters investigate the sleeping car, while the conductor evacuates the passengers, then tries to keep them calm as they stand around in the snow. One of the porters then finds another dead body. Alana and Doc find each other in the crowd, and Alana tells him that the killer is Kenny. Then we get some cool twists in the story.
It turns out that Alana tried to visit Kenny in the psych ward after the stunt that drove him batshit, but she wasn't allowed to see him. He went insane because the stunt with the corpse brought him flashbacks, from an incident in his teens that resulted in him killing someone ELSE. Doc grabs Alana's hand, and they take off running.
The conductor tells the frightened college kids that they all need to get back on the train, and that they will all be placed in a single passenger car, so as to discourage anyone from wandering off somewhere alone. Doc is already on the train again, and he has dragged Alana into an empty room with him. He even busted the lock, to ensure that the killer couldn't get in.
As Alana tries to reason with Doc, he shows her why he got so scared...a yearbook. To be specific, a page in the yearbook reveals that Kenny had a taste for...magic tricks. Doc smugly tells Alana thsat he plans to wait for Kenny to show up, then finish him off. I REALLY can't wait for Doc to die.
Alana forces her way out of the room, only to see Kenny marching toward her wearing a porter's outfit. As she starts to escape through a window, the person chasing her turns out to be an actual porter. Oops!! She asks him for help, and Doc relaxes when he overhears the conversation from the other side of the door. He sees another door that he forgot to check. It's a closet, and Doc gets scared when he stands in front of it.
He braces himself, then yanks the door open. It's an empty closet. He gets ready to open another door, and survives that one too. As Doc sits back down on the floor, he sees another potential hiding spot for the killer and gets up. That's when a hand under his seat darts out, grabbing his ankle. Doc shakes loose and pounds on the door, but a female-looking hand rests on his shoulder. When he assumes it to belong to Mitchy, Kenny takes the opportunity to yank his head backward and cut Doc's throat. Yay!
Alana finds Prez, and they go off to look for the conductor. Then we see The Magician running knives or swords through a box. He is disrupted by his assistant, who seems to have come out of the shower. She grabs a sword and playfully starts swinging it around, which seems to piss off The Magician.
While Prez and Alana look for Doc, they run into Winnebago, who happens to be on the phone. They telll him about their idea that The Magician is Kenny, and all 3 try to find him. Rut-roh, Raggy!! They get back to Doc's room to show Winnebago the yearbook page. Winnebago gets the door open, sees the blood and debris, and makes Prez and Alana wait outside with a porter while he searches the room for any signs of life.
He gets a faceful of corpse when he opens a closed berth, because Doc's body fall out. He comes face to face with Doc's severed head, then Alana bursts into the room and screams. But where did Kenny go, hmmmm?
With everyone back on the train, the journey resumes. The survivors all sit in the nightclub/lounge car, and Winnebago suggests that they all grab some food and coffee. The Magician's assistant comes out from behind the stage, and the conductor invites her to come with them. When she's right next to him, he asks her discreetly where The Magician is, and she tells him that The Magician(who finally has a name, Ken) is backstage. She calls out to Ken that she'll bring him a cup of coffee, but there's no response.
Between cars, Winnebago uses a chain to close up the lounge car. When the assistant asks for information, he only tells her that he's trying to keep her safe. Then a porter finds a deserted room for Alana to rest in. He supplies her with pillows and blankets, and promises to stand in the hallway to guard her. Once she's alone, Alana closes all of the shades on the windows, turns on all of the lights, opens the closets, and even checks out the ceiling. Satisfied that she is alone at last, Alana sits back down and clutches a pillow.
The other passengers form an angry mob, and a dumb jock demands to be let out, so that he can go after the killer by himself. Winnebago hands him an ax, then asks him to look at all of the dead bodies before he goes. They stare at each other, until the jock finally backs down. Winnebago makes it up to the kid by offering to go take a look himself.
Bad idea. The porter who was guarding Alana is now dead too. He has one of Ken's swords in his chest, and the killer reaches down next to the body to get the dead man's ax. Winnebago and a couple of porters re-enter the lounge, and ask Ken to step out and talk to them. When he still won't answer, Winnebago decides to look backstage for himself. He and the 2 porters find the dressing room deserted. Ken either jumped off the train, was killed, or is now somewhere else on the train. Yikes!
The killer is seen moving around the train, dragging the weapon at his side. Alana, still sleeping, has no idea that he's standing right outside the room she's in. He opens the door quietly, and this time he's wearing the "old" mask that Mitchy had earlier(I think...with so many costume changes, this one's tough to follow!), along with Doc's "monk" robe. He gets right next to the sleeping woman, then brings his ax down, and there's a squeak.
Ah, a decoy. As the killer keeps swinging, Alana bursts out of a closet behind him and stabs him in the back with a sword. Where the heck did Alana get her hands on one of the swords from the magic act??? Well, however she got her hands on the sword, she had it. As the killer tries to recover, Alana runs out of the room. As she breathlessly starts movind down the corridor, the killer blocks her from another door by thrusting his arm out in front of the frightened damsel. How the heck did he get ahead of her so damn fast?
Alana then runs into a small booth with a glass window and shuts it. The killer breaks the glass with his ax, and Alana runs through another door, into what looks like a maintenance compartment. The killer gets in too, and closes the door behind him as Alana struggles to open yet another door. He casually strolls toward her, grabs her head, then starts to strangle the poor girl. There's a brief struggle, until Alana manages to bite one of the killer's bloody hands.
He rips off her blouse, so Alana grabs a fire extinguisher off the floor and sprays his eyes with it. Then she runs again, back the way theyv came, and manages to jam it shut with what look like handcuffs. After the killer wastes some seconds hitting the mesh walls around Alana to scare her, he finds a sharp pole. Using the pole to smash the overhead light, the killer then shoves the pole through the wire at Alana, nearly impaling her with it.
As he destroys another light, Alana calls out his name. Kenny ignores her, so Alana looks around again for a weapon, and finds a large nail holding Post-It notes. She aims for Kenny's face, and the nail hits the skin underneath where the mask's ear is. Kenny clutches his face in agony, while Alana kicks the door open to escape.
Yet another chase sequence begins. I'm willing to bet that whoever invented Pac-Man was probably a big fan of slasher flicks, because that's what most of them are. You chase him, he chases you, blah blah blah. Anyway, Kenny catches up to Alana as she's trying to get a red gate opened, and she delivers several rough kicks to his midsection. He seemingly falls off of the train, then Winnebago and Prez find Alana and bring her back to the occupied sections of the train.
It's not quite over, though....a pair of bloody hands are clinging to the outside railing. The conductor checks on both Alana and Merry, but Alana is finally asleep again. After the conductor leaves, Merry also steps out to get some air. Behind Alana, outside a window, Kenny can be seen putting on his best Spider-Man imitation, and watching her from above the window. The killer creeps backward, and then we get a shot of an empty hallway.
The door opens, and Alana wakes up with a start, but it's only Merry again. She convinces Alana to go back with her into the lounge with all of the other survivors. As Alana gets out of bed, she hears a strange sound nearby. She moves quickly down some narrow, dark corridors and jumps when she sees a witch hat and broom. Then a figure moves out of the shadows and approaches her at a pretty good clip. AAAAAH!!! Oh, it's only Prez. He grabs her hand and they go to the lounge together.
The 2 conductors are driving the train, and they can see the lights of the station in the distance. Winnebago sends the other one back to tell everyone the good news, and he handles the controls by himself. At the same time, Alana is standing on an outer platform, freezing her butt off to watch scenery fly by. When she decides to head back inside, Alana starts looking through the luggage and props from The Magician's act. She finds a scrapbook, and starts flipping through it.
You'd think that this would be a scene where she starts reading scary newspaper clips about murders happening everywhere he performed, but you would be wrong. Instead, a box falls open, revealing the corpse of....The Magician! Dun Dun DUNNNNNNNNN!!! Yep, he was stabbed several times by his own swords. Ironic.
Alana screams her head off and starts running again. I'd love to watch a montage of her chase scenes done to the theme of "Benny Hill". So, where were we? Oh yeah. Alana. Running. Again. So, yeah, she runs out of the dressing room, she runs past concerned passengers, she runs out of the semi-crowded lounge. See Alana run. Run Alana, run.
She runs through a door with a big "N" on it(Nintendo? Nirvana? Ned Flanders?), and finds herself in a room belonging to someone named "Carne". Who the heck was Carne? Is she that chick who had the horrible talk show? Well, whoever she is(or was), Alana is in her room now. Alana leans wearily against a table and lowers her head, and a pair of hands hold hers. Uh oh...
It's the killer, dressed as a porter, in yet another mask. Kenny removes the mask to show her what we pretty knew already, then removes the porter hat, to reveal another surprise twist: Kenny was ALSO The Magician's assistant! Wow.
Alana tries to tell Kenny how sorry she is, but he doesn't buy it. He tells her that he was watching her flirt with The Magician, but she wants him to believe that she knew he was the better magician. Kenny forces Alana to kiss him, but then he recreates the night 3 years ago by freaking out in exactly the same way. What're the odds?
Kenny howls and twirls around the room, wrapping himself up in blankets and curtains and sheets, oh my. Winnebago then walks in with a shovel, which he uses to bash Kenny in the head with....yay, conductor! Winnebago hits him again, and Kenny goes flying out of the train, landing in a semi-frozen body of water many, many, many feet below. His body floats through the cold water, then disappears forever...or, until someone decides to remake this movie(and don't write to me about the recent movie Train...that started out as a Terror Train remake, yes, but then they changed it into an entirely different story.)or do a sequel.
The train keeps going, even though I should now be typing THE END...oops, no, that was it. THE END
Weird. And pretty abrupt. If any movie needed an extra surprise after or during the credits, it was Terror Train. I mean, the concept was a cool one, but there were more magic tricks than murders! Hell, they even botched the switching costumes idea, by giving only the main characters and victims full costumes. Geez, it was like Slasher Flicks For Dummies or something.
Still, there was some stuff to like here, too. I mean, there was a Young Jamie Lee Curtis. That was pretty sweet. The body was somewhat high, all things considered. And the concept of not knowing who was really who under the masks was also a good idea, at least in theory. Like I said earlier, this is one of the few times I'd LIKE too see a remake done. And the film did a good job of presenting a number of characters who could have been killers(Moe, Doc, The Magician, Alana herself)...the characters were pretty dark in this one!
Oh, and if you do a little looking on the internet, there's an interesting theory about this movie, that pretty much everything after the prank backfires is a dream that Alana has, because she feels remorse and guilt for being a part of Doc's scheme. The "clues" are in details like the way the bathroom and mirror were cleaned up after the conductor tried to show someone else the dead body; or the way that Kenny attacked Alana in one room, yet attacked her again by emerging from a door in front of her; or in the scene where Kenny appeared at Alana's window toward the end, but at an implausible position. Kind of far-fetched, but still fun to think about if you re-watch it.
Well, whatever the truth is, the film was better than most of the ones from the last decade or so, so I'm going to give it 3 and a half killer trees, out of 5 Oh, and what were this week's lessons learned from Terror Train?
-If you go to college, avoid fraternities and sororities like a plague, as well as guys named "Doc".
-Don't ever have sex with a magician's assistant...that ain't a wand in her pocket, but she IS happy to see you!
-Magic is fun...until you see 40 card tricks in a row.
No movie next week, and maybe not the week after either. I'm in the process of moving, and I'm not entirely sure how long packing, unpacking, and getting settled will take. I'm still watching at least 1 slasher a week though, so I'm watching Urban Legend next week, as well as Final Destination the following week, and maybe a few online. Next time we see each other, I'll be in my new apartment!
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